Mr. Brown Versus

Perhaps the best aspect about writer-directors Joel & Ethan Coen when it comes to making screwball and dark comedies is that despite the fact some of their characters are hopelessly stupid, the duo never looks down on their poor fools with malice or cruelty, rather, with sympathy and some degree of likability. In Fargo , we don't fully shame Jerry Lundegaard for turning to two professional criminals as a way to make a quick payday - he's desperate to make ends meet, and to show to his asshole father-in-law that he's a mistake her daughter never should have made. How was he to know that Gaear Grimsrud was a sociopathic murderer; that his partner, Carl Showalter, was inept; and that the whole plan of kidnapping his wife to force a ransom of $80,000.00 would go so tits up? In Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? , Ulysses, Pete and Delmar are dim-witted criminals who escape the chain gang, but there's an earnestness to why they're escaping: the leader (Ulysses) is looki...

I'm about to do something I never thought I would do: I'm going to (somewhat) defend Jeffrey Wells. Given all the things I've said about the man on this site and through social media, I'm just as surprised that I'm coming to this douchebag's defense on anything , but I do need to step in here. Last week, the "spiritual successor" to the 2008 hit monster movie, Cloverfield , was released in the form of 10 Cloverfield Lane , which has become a hit with critics and did fairly well at the box office (given that Disney's animated feature Zootopia  is still making a killing domestically and overseas), doing $25.2 million over the weekend on a $15 million budget. Of the many things Mr. Wells has said, from wanting to kick a child with down syndrome out of a theater, to making nasty, sexist comments about a woman's shape , going after the dickhead for simply not liking an actress in a movie for x,y and z reasons isn't one of them. @M_...

There's action movie logic, there's dumb action movie logic and then there's preposterous bullshit. Care to guess which category London Has Fallen  falls under? To be fair, film critic and managing editor for Baltimore Magazine Max Weiss pretty much warned me this sequel to the surprise 2013 hit, Olympus Has Fallen  was going to be shit, both in review form  & via Twitter. @MisterBrown_23 I TRIED TO WARN YOU!!! — Max Weiss (@maxthegirl) March 11, 2016 Before I continue, I need to briefly set up the first movie in order to talk about this absurdly stupid sequel: second-rate John McClain ripoff  ex-Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is the only man on the inside who can save President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and the rest of his cabinet from North Korean terrorists who have blown up half the White House and taken control of seemingly the most secure and heavily guarded avenues on the planet, all the while, Speaker of the House...