(musical tones)

(train whistle)

Here's what I don't like about

the new movie, Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

The fact that it's about a clash

between preppy angels and demons,

The fact that it forces me to use the phrase urban fantasy,

and the punctuation mark in the title.

Here's what almost every modern movie title consists of:

the name of the overarching property,

then a colon, and then the name

of the specific episode of the series.

This acute colonitis does many things to me.

It gives me indigestion, it fills me with fury,

it forces me to adopt a facial expression

that looks like a colon followed by an open bracket,

but it also makes me question the legacy of Star Wars

even more than Jar Jar Binks did,

because Star Wars is the root cause of many things including

excessive marketing tie-ins,

the mainstreaming of the science fiction genre,

the resurgence of the wipe as a scene transition technique,

and worst of all, the cult of the trilogy.

Nowadays, every Hollywood producer and author

of young-adult fiction seems to think that their stories

simply can't be contained in one movie or one book.

There's a word for this: greed.

I don't care where this trend came from,

semicolon,

I just implore the perpetrators

to please stop immediately.

Exclamation point.

We'd all really appreciate it. Period.

Oh, hell, did I leave the coffee machine on?

Question mark.

(musical tones)

What do you think is the most ludicrous movie title?

Let me know in the comments.