Mr. Brown Versus

Despite the title, this series is, at its core, just a list of great and not so great movies I feel like talking about. And despite Halloween being a night to hang out with friends and watching slasher flicks, ghost stories, zombies and creatures & things that go bump in the night (at least for me sometimes), not all movies are like that. Sometimes the best movies to watch on Halloween are the ones that you remember as a kid growing up. Films like The Nightmare Before Christmas , Hocus Pocus and the Halloweentown series are probably some of the most fun flicks I remember seeing during this time of year, before I found Ju-On: The Grudge , The Ring and other creepy movies from Japan - both the original and American counterparts. Today's installment has to do with the man who probably loves the twisted side of life - Tim Burton. To me, Mr. Burton really doesn't need much of an introduction: if you're a child of the 80's or the 90's (like yours truly), then y...

 I had high hopes for Sam Raimi's prequel to the beloved 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz . After the letdown that was Raimi's last outing with a block buster-type budget with Spider-Man 3 in 2007, I was hoping this update on the fabled land of Oz before Judy Garland followed the yellow brick road would be a return to form for the mufti-talented genre director. What the audience got was a slightly-better version of Tim Burton's fiasco Alice in Wonderland , minus the shitty 3D conversion rush job. That's not to say Oz the Great and Powerful was a carbon copy of that poorly-executed madhouse. The tile sequence and the opening 10 minutes, shot completely in black and white, is a terrific use of the 3D format and pays a nice tribute to how the '39 film opened, before the filmmakers break new ground and shoot the majority of the film in Technicolor. On a technical level, Raimi delivers a visual knockout: the size, scope, colors, look and feel of the film is tailor made...