Mr. Brown Versus

I think it's fair to assume that a lot of us were very skeptical upon hearing that Masmure Shinrow's cyberpunk manga Ghost in the Shell  was being updated for mainstream audiences, in the form of a live-action film. We've seen how this business has handled manga/Anime properties in the past, and the track record, outside of the Wachowskis' Speed Racer , has been dismal, to say the least. When it was revealed that Scarlett Johansson was chosen to play Major Motoko Kusanagi, the Internet went ablaze, the cries that studio suits were whitewashing a beloved Anime character, as well as petitions making the rounds to remove the actress from the role in favor of an Asian actress to carry the role. When the first trailer dropped in mid-November of last year, I think most of us were blown away with just how, on a surface level, it looked like the live-action version might do the original source material justice. Then, the actual film was released. It's hard to talk about...

I can't very well talk about some of the most rewarding films of the year without putting my $0.02 cents on the ones which rewarded the least; the ones that left a bitter taste in the mouth, months after first watching them on the big screen. Transformers: The Last Knight  - I was going to review Bay's latest toy commercial during a week-long retrospective on each of the installments of the Transformers  franchise (and I will end up finishing said retrospective soon, I promise...), but here's the cliffnotes version on what I've got to say for movie no.5: It's still the same mindless junk he's put out since the surprise 2007 hit, just even more tedious and uninteresting than before. I'm tired of Optimus Prime and his cohorts, the Autobots, in yet another attempt to tell us stupid humans that the Decipticons are bad news and that they'll never leave our world alone unless they work together to stop them; I'm tired of the unrelenting obnoxious comi...