Book-to-Movie Adaptations Should Be Split Into Two Parts: Part One

Spoilers for “The Hunger Games” books and movie within. Proceed at your own risk.

I know I was late to the party, but I finally finished “The Hunger Games” trilogy early last week, and I loved every page. The writing was fast-paced and engrossing and the end of each chapter made me want to read just one more before I put the book away for the night. Bravo, Suzanne Collins.

(Quick side note: I have absolutely no idea how these books garnered a “Twilight”-esque, 12-year-old-girl-ish reputation. The body count in those 1000 pages rivaled Operation Barbarossa in World War II. The amount of blood and gore surprised me, especially for a book that’s supposedly aimed at the young adult audience. I get that there’s a love triangle in there, the main character is female and the author is female, but still. How many 12-year-old girls want to read about people getting flayed alive?)

Something funny happened as I read the third and final book, “Mockingjay.” I played a game with myself. I tried to pinpoint where the third movie would stop and the fourth movie would begin (the plan is for a four-movie series).

It’s becoming commonplace for book-to-movie adaptations to split their final acts into two parts. The reason, as with everything else in our world, is money. Why make one movie and charge $15 per ticket when you can make two movies and double your profit?

But let’s get past the obvious money grab for a moment and focus on the creative positives of this method. I’m actually okay with the “Last Book in the Series: Part 1” approach because it allows the director to put much more detail into the film than would be possible otherwise.

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Funny Friday: Trailer Edition

The trailer that is sweeping the nation.  There is nothing funnier than talking animals and/or talking stuffed animals.

Tyler Perry’s The Untitled Jeremy Lin Project: A Spike Lee Joint

If there’s one thing Hollywood loves to do, it’s take stories that people no longer care about and beat them to death with a $100 million hammer.

Linsanity, for all intents and purposes, ended a few weeks ago when the Knicks started losing games left and right. But we all know it’s inevitable that the Jeremy Lin story will be made into a movie sooner or later. There’s already a book about him on the way, so why not a feature film?

Which got us thinking. Who would play the various characters in The Untitled Jeremy Lin Project? (We don’t have a better name for it than that yet, so feel free to leave your ideas in the comments.) So we’ve compiled a list of the characters in this film and the actors who we think are best suited to play them. As always, we invite you to agree or disagree and tell us who you think should be in this film that is sure to sweep the Academy Awards.

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Movie Review- Project X

Last night two of my buddies and I decided to go watch Project X. We all went in with different expectations. One of us expected it to be awesome, one of us expected it to be just another terrible movie with a great trailer, and one of us expected it to be hilarious.

We were all wrong.

Lets get it straight right off the bat. Project X is not an awesome movie, nor is it terrible or hilarious. Project X is best described as pure fun.

The movie is about two losers throwing a 17^th birthday party for their other loser friend, Thomas. They decide to chronicle the events of the party by videotaping the whole thing. After about ten minutes of some so-so acting, story, and camera work, the party finally begins.

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Kevin Reviews Things: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Was this written before the Acadamy Awards? Yes. Are we still posting it and presenting it as new content? Also yes. But we're not just lazy, I just watched this movie and felt the EXACT same way as our resident reviewer so enjoy a nice rant about this awful movie.

I was going to review the Academy Award nominations today, but two things have stopped me.  Number One: I realized that by reviewing the Oscar nominations, I would basically have to fill in my own alternatives as a solution – otherwise, I’d be attacking things without evidence of a better idea.  Number Two, and the more important of the two things: I watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last night, and I am ready to rant.  It was, and pardon the pun, but I can’t stop myself from doing this so I’m just going to go ahead and do it now, extremely manipulative and incredibly atrocious.  Let’s review, shall we?

The Oscar nominations for Best Picture are hardly, if ever, perfect.  This year’s nine nominations are no different – but ultimately it’s a fairly understandable roster.  Statistically speaking, most of the nominees score well over the 70% threshold on Rotten Tomatoes.  Two of them which are close to the mark are big-time crowd-pleasers in The Help and War Horse – you can certainly understand, if not necessarily agree with, their selections.

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