As much as I'd like to rave about Battle Royale, that book/manga/movie is a tragic horror strait through. The Hunger Games is an entirely different direction and tone when it comes to its story.

That and I'm told its street ahead of Twilight, but the latter could be put to shame by 90% of all children's books before moving into other adult novels.

I don't buy the argument that Neeson suddenly diverged his career into the action genre, namely because with a trip over to IMDB and when you bring up his older movies people forget this is the same man that did Excalibur, Krull, The Delta Force, Darkman, Rob Roy, Star Wars (which has arguably heavy choreographed action as silly as it is) and Batman before Taken came around. I think he's always been around the flashy brainless stuff before, people just now have this contrast of framing him as Oscar Schindler before anything else.

I have a different theory for his recent explosion of pulpy action, and that was the death of his wife back in 09' I believe. In that I think this is a man who just threw himself into working taking any project that wasn't too retarded and at the same time seem to be selling. Which I think he admitted at some point, and I'm too lazy to track down the citation.

But anyway if I could bring this all around back to the article, here's the real reason why an action film casting Neeson pushes better numbers and much better audience reception, they're better made movies. Even the super silly stuff like the A-Team cash in was better constructed then any action movie put out in the past three years staring some twenty-seven year old playing a high school senior. It's what I like to call the Michael Mann approach, an action movie by definition doesn't have to have a cancerous script or fainting sensational casting, if you put a smart script in the hands of capable people a studio will get its money back and then some.

They may have not been said, but I'm sure you can find such an exact thing if you were to plop that into Google Image search with the filters turned off.

Having gender neutral characters isn't a problem for me. A good story has its strengths regardless of its cast, unless said casting is atrocious but then its the performance problem and not the role. Say something like a video game like Mass Effect, where you have strong writing and compelling characters through the game, all the hero's interactions with that world and story have to be gender neutral to allow the player's choice at the beginning of the game to be male or female aside from little pronoun changes and latter romantic options.

I suppose a point of contrast about an action role written for a women that you couldn't change the gender on is the go to scifi nerd choice Ellen Ripley. Excluding her being the established character from Alien to Aliens, her motivation in the sequel is centered around a theme of motherhood and materialistic compulsions to protect her stand in child ala Newt, whom she arguably holds as a stand in for her own now dead daughter. Underneath the horror themes and bloody action the difference between Ripley and the Marines that got chopped up earlier in the movie is their motivations and you're shown that contrast first hand. This idea is even further cemented in the character of Pvt. Vasquez, whom as a women, is one of the more headstrong and confident action archetypes in storytelling, and she doesn't make it to the end of the movie. Now outside screenwriters tricks, one could argue the reason Ripley lived where Vasquez dies is because the former had a different motivation to jump into blender.

Speaking of which there was a video analysis of female characters in video games down by the Extra Credtis crew now on PATV. Now you could extrapolate that idea into all female characters in all media;
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/true-fem...

For the sake of making the fools argument; couldn't you then argue Trinity's entire existence in the Matrix is defined by her relationship to her man Neo?

Let's start out under the pretext that both Haywire and Dragon Tattoo are pulpy action thrillers. Anyone trying to argue the elegant subtleties of either film is just playing to their own tastes rather then any actual substance in the movies themselves. At the end of the day both films are the equivalent of a McD Big-Mac, extremely well crafted Big-Mac's with nice little tasty touches but each movie isn't really swinging for poignancy.

In fact I'd argue either movie is a mirror of the other through slightly different means, and lest we forget both are ultimately flawed.Both are pseudo author insertion fantasies based around female characters and we're supposed to identify the strength of these women through their perseverance. However It's also worth mentioning both films fail the Bechdel Test for female characters; a coin refereed by the pop culture nerds over at TVTropes. In order to pass, the film or show must meet the following criteria:

1. it includes at least two women* ...
2. who have at least one conversation...
3. about something other than a man or men.

Keep in mind this isn't something to argue pro vs anti feminism, it's just something to keep in mind.

It's also worth mentioning either movie could have their female leads flipped to male's and the fundamentals of their stories and narrative mechanics wouldn't have to change. So in either case the characters are gender neutral as apposed to favoring one over the other.

Here's the thing about funny people and award shows, you can't be funny. Not because of lack of edge of comedic talent, but those bleed the heart of any performance anyway. Namely because comedy as a function does work in that environment.

Think of it this way do you really think a bunch of actors, the self entitled self interested masses who reward themselves for pretending to be other more interesting people, pay attention to the stage? Short answer no. Everyone's talking to the people at their tables, or across the room for that matter, sweating over who gets to take home this years set of golden phallus's, scratching at their plates for that last piece of free range chicken etc. There's virtually no audience feedback in that room, an analogy would be a comic on stage where the audience does absolutely nothing for the entire show. Unless you're doing a show with other people, ala a play or something, a single person on stage who doesn't have that connection with an audience and thus will inevitably blow by some measures even if the material is funny because their no energy in that room from the crowd.

It doesn't help that the stage is horrifically stacked against comedy, from a stand ups perspective. There's no smoke to build ambiance and atmosphere, which a smack ton of filmed or theater comedy events will d for such reasons. It's brightly lit and twenty camera's pointed every which way to get audience reactions, which again works against the established rules of stand up where you want an audience hidden in the dark so they feel safe about laughing at things they think their neighbors wouldn't like, not to mention most anyone on camera puts on a pretty strait faced facade just because they know this video goes strait to the internet these days.

I can't go on record saying this will gargle goat testicles, but that odds aren't stacked in the favor of funny.

Okay I can't take this seriously; did no one get the irony with Apatow? Admittedly I've only like a handful of the movies he's been attached to, but even I can see the joke wasn't so much about Jerry Lewis but the perception that women aren't funny, which I'll still say is around 95%true anyway.

I will say its a fair argument to say why isn't Cross being lambasted for his words like say Morgan was lat year. You can't hold a morality standard if you don't fallow through with it in all cases. Either that of the lack of "outrage" at cross highlights the somewhat emotional volcano that GLAD is/becoming.

It's worth noting no comedian ever should be lambasted for their comedy, funny people should just be left alone to try to be funny.

The problem with that logic is you can't separate taste from craft, even inside things considered widely as hack. Comedy and by an easy extension comedians have their respective audiences which clouds the greater v lesser arguments, and as far as what's widely regarded as classic comedy isn't really an industry driven battle. Any good comic may take favorites but they won't talk down to the older class of say Pryor, Allen or Carlin; it's namely bellowing tards like ourselves that proclaim the greatest hits whilst simultaneously smashing everything else.

At the end of the day, funny people should just be left alone to try to be funny.