Mr. Brown Versus

"Will you follow me, one last time?" That's the question Thorin Oakenshield poses to his company at the end of the trailer to Peter Jackson's finale to his Hobbit  trilogy, dubbed The Battle of the Five Armies (due out December 17th). Although the question is posed to his accompaniment after everything they've undergone, via the evens of An Unexpected Journey  in 2012, and last years The Desolation of Smaug , I can't help but feel said Q has two meanings to it. The second almost feels like the New Zealand-bred director is asking us, the audience, if we will stick with him, at the end of his prequel trilogy, and the end of this Middle Earth saga. It's a fair question to ask. Both installments - An Unexpected Journey  and Desolation  haven't received the same critical acclaim as The Lord of the Rings trilogy did during its 2001-03 run, as the first two have received a 64% and 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for both parts I and II respectively. In m

Holy crap, Lars von Trier added another volume to  Nymphomaniac ! Yes! - Charlotte Gainsborough is back as Joe, the unrepentant nymphomaniac who's appetite for sex returns...with a vengeance! I can't wait to see how von Trier outdoes himself with pretentious and artful mundane things like fly fishing and the Fibernache sequence will be used as a metaphor for Joe and her numerous partners... Oh wait, it's just the anticipated first look at the erotic drama Fifty Shades of Grey (due out in theaters February 13, 2015). Nevermind. First off, I have never read the original source material by E.L. James. The premise - a young girl and a mysterious entrepreneur falling in love, but quickly realizing his past is much darker than previously imagined, including a thing for bondage and dom-submissive fetishes - feels something ripped from a cheesy erotic romantic novel that didn't sell with readers until present day. That, and I have a little something called Cinemax Afte

I've seen bad movies. I've seen dull movies. I've seen incoherent movies. I've seen movies that felt like pure torture to sit through because they're so damn boring to sit through. I haven't encountered anything like Transformers: Age of Extinction . Confession: once I read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I knew what I was in for, so really, I have only myself to blame for putting myself through sheer hell. When they said that Michael Bay, maestro of destruction, had managed to top Revenge of the Fallen  as the worst installment of the series, I didn't believe it. How could he top that clunky, incoherent mess of a movie?  In just 2 hours and 45 minutes (yes, it's that bloody long), I found my answer. In ways I never could have imagined. It's been five years since the events of the last movie, where Optimus Prime (voiced one again by Peter Cullen) and his band of Autobots stopped the Decipticons from terraforming our world