Mr. Brown Vs. Sparkly Vampires

Denzel Washington's career-best performance as an alcoholic pilot who's life is in a nose dive in Flight. The sheer madness of Seven Psychopaths. The best coming-of-age movie since Garden State in The Perks of Being A Wallflower. A James Bond film that feels nostalgic, yet completely new in Skyfall. Paul Thomas Anderson's unique and beautifully shot character drama The Master. And the Wachowski's.....Cloud Atlas.

What do all these movies have in common? They're all movies i've been promising to review, but put them off due to a severe case of procrastination. I will get to each one of these movies in due time, and as of this week, none of those movies matter. Not even Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which has gotten serious Oscar buzz surrounding it, in particular, Daniel Day Lewis as the title character matters this week. For the next week, one film will hold American audiences in it's vice-grip. The finale to a worldwide phenomenon that has captured the attention span of every teen girl, from the books turned movies themselves, to the off-screen romance between it's stars (and their 'devastating' breakup over the summer). The movie that normal,sane audiences and critics regard as the most insufferable and worst film series to come along in decades.

Yep. The Twilight Saga. I guess this was something that can't be swept under the rug. I can't avoid it, I can't go 2 minutes without seeing a TV spot for the last installment, Breaking Dawn: Part II, and I can't go to a grocery store without seeing Robert Pattinson's mug plastered on nearly every magazine cover. So what better way to celebrate the release of the last installment by revisiting the shittiness of the the previous films that came before it? I start Tomorrow.

Brace yourselves, folks.

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Lost in Translation

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...

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Great Movies: The 10 Best Films of 2014 - Part II

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Mr. Brown Versus

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