Mr. Brown Versus

............You know what? I'm just going to throw this line out there for everyone to hear: Anastasia: "Here I am, trying to be all romantic and you're distracting me with your kinky fuckery." In the five years that I've been reviewing movies for this site, I've never come across any line in any movie this jaw-droppingly stupid. This line came out of Anastasia Steele's mouth post-coitus when Christian Grey began probing her belly button with his tongue. There was no reason for her, or the writers, to commit to that sentence! And yet, somehow, Fifty Shades Darker  seems to sink lower from there. This sequel to 2015's snorefest picks up....I don't know, days after Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) leaves Mr. Grey (Jamie Dornam) for being "fifty shades of fucked up"? Being the creepy, abusive and aggressive stalker he is, our rich prick wants her back, but this time, he wants a normal, vanilla relationship. Okay, not really because he st...

WARNING!!!! This review will contain spoilers regarding the show's twist ending, as well as most of the plot. You have been warned. I'm exhausted with the last few posts where I went political, so here's me taking a break from all that shit and making another venture into the land of the small screen. Unfortunately, I'm not recommending about a good show - no, this is me ranting about one of the worst Anime programs I've ever encountered in the form of School Days , a romantic drama/teen soap opera in cartoon form. Yes: in addition to film and TV, I like the realm of Japanese Animation, primary because of the various sub-genres and avenues it covers, from science fiction/dystopian settings like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Outlaw Star , to slice-of-life comedies/harems such as Tenchi Muyo!  and Love Hina . There's a genre for every sort of taste, and it's interesting to dive in and see what's there. However, in the case of School Days ,...

As I said yesterday, if Tim Burton's Corpse Bride were realized in live-action form, it might look like Guillermero del Toro's Crimson Peak , with the Gothic undertones, the themes of death and the supernatural and the semi Victorian-era setting. That's where the similarities would end, though. Whereas the former is a family-friendly fantasy musical/comedy, the latter is a dark, sinister and haunting picture that's gorgeous to watch in every regard. Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), like Haley Joel Osmet in The Sixth Sense , can see dead people. Kidding, but she did experience some paranormal activity when she was a little girl, as she witnesses her mother's ghost, warning her of a place called Crimson Peak, and yes, that will be the last time I make a lame horror pun in this review. Years later, she's still fascinated with the supernatural, as she's writing a ghost story, in addition to being married to the charming and mysterious Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hidd...

To say that Fifty Shades of Grey  is a lighting rod of controversy is putting it mildly.   There have been articles and counter-articles about E.L. James' best-selling novel about a young woman who begins an explicit sadomasochistic affair with a young and mysterious businessman, with some like Katie Roiphe of Newsweek  criticizing  the book for it's depictions of BDSM sex, and Amy Bonomi, Nicole Walton and Lauren Altenburger of the Journal of Woman's Health arguing that the author's tale of bondage and kinky sex has little to nothing to do with the sexual lifestyle and everything to do  with highlighting and glorifying  an abusive relationship; while others, like Sonya Sorich of the Ledger-Enquirer  calling it  guilty fun and escapism and Laura Barnett of The Telegraph  praising James' exploration  of sexual politics and her boldness to show and talk about frank sequences of sex between two consenting adults. I haven't read the book, so...

New Year's Eve is a time for looking back on the moments which made the previous year great or challenging, etc, and the promise of a new year being better and more fulfilling than the last. New Year's Eve will make you regret watching this dull and vapid piece of crap, no matter when you saw it during the year. So many subplots....so don't care. From Gary Marshall, the man behind Pretty Woman and A League of Their Own , this already forgotten star-studded turkey from 2011 follows the same formula from 2010's Valentine's Day: a series of vignettes which either serve as comedic set pieces, or dramatic ones, depending on the script. Some characters are looking for love. Some are looking for second chances. Some of these stories connect and collide with one another. Some are just purely stand alones. Here are just a few of the stories from this film: Hillary Swank plays the VP of the Times Square Alliance, a group dedicated to the planning of the big ball d...

A few weeks back, a heinous crime was committed at the AMC Fashion Valley 18. At 4:20 pacific time, a small audience, myself included, witnessed the brutal slaughter of a beloved literary author and playwright and his most famous work. The victim's name was William Shakespeare and the work was Romeo & Juliet, the world-famous romantic drama about a pair of star-crossed lovers from feuding families who fall in love and vow to be together, but violent and disastrous events threaten to destroy both the lovebirds, but both families as well. The culprits are director Carlo Carlei and Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellows ( Godsford Park ), and Relativity Media, the independent film studio that released this piece of crap. Where do I even begin with this one!? Let's start with comparing lines from the original text, to the dialogue in the film adaptation. Take Romeo as he engages with his cousin, Benvolio, in a conversation about how lovesick the poor bastard is (Act I, S...

LOL  is shit. Just absolute, moronic, irritating shit. I talked about this movie in January back when I was reviewing my 10 worst list, but I really haven't gone into full detail about why this piece of shit landed the no.3 spot on my list of the most infuriatingly bad movies of the past year. By the way, you are reading the title correctly, that's the name of the movie. I fear that LMFAO, OMG!, and WTF?! aren't that far behind, as it goes to naming movies. It isn't just the name that I think is a lazy name for a movie title, it's everything else about this shallow, vacuous, obnoxious and pretentious coming of age teen drama that managed to piss me off, but i'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Before I talk about this movie, I have to mention that LOL  (God, that's annoying to say) is actually a remake of the 2008 French comedy called.... LOL (Laughing Out Loud) . I don't know anything else about that movie, but on IMDB, the film holds a fairly decent ...

This maybe the most infuriating review i've written on my blog thusfar, and considering that i've written about Sandler's astronomically spiteful and mean spirited That's My Boy and the Twilight sequels New Moon and Eclipse (and coming in the near future, the conclusion with Breaking Dawn Part I and Part II ) that's saying something, so apologies if I start dropping F-bombs left, right and center. You're probably wondering,  'What brought me to this level of frustration?' Well, let me tell you the story about a novelist who's books would become a hot commodity in the Hollywood: Nicholas Sparks. It all started with the 1999 romantic drama, Message in a Bottle , the first of the author's novels that would be later adapted to film. The movie was a modest hit domestically, bringing in $52 million and additional $66 million abroad, combining for a worldwide gross of $118 million. Warner Bros, the studio that distributed the film, saw the movie...

I'll be honest: after watching the horrendous and pretentious second installment of   The Twilight Saga: New Moon  in cinemas, I avoided it's third installment, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse like a man with leper. I honestly believed that the next installment of the series couldn't get any worse than it already did with the previous two. I thought I was tapped out; I didn't think I could watch one more movie in which Stephanie Meyer continues her march of destroying the vampire mythology with glittering bloodsuckers moping around, doing fuck all that makes a vampire a vampire. I didn't think I could endure one more minute of the love triangle that's been formed, with Edward Cullen (the ever bland and charmless Robert Pattinson) and Jacob Black (the horrendous Taylor Lautner) fighting over Bella Swan's (Kristen Stewart) affections. I didn't think I could stomach Bella and her bullshit for another two hours, or watching semi-interesting supporting...

A few days ago in my review of Twilight , I forgot to mention the plot of the film, and this was done intentionally for two reasons: First - there's no real plot to the first movie because all it was dealing with was the courtship between Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), and meeting the rest of the Cullen clan: Dr. Carlisle Cullen (Peter Facinelli), mind reader Alice (Ashley Greene), Southern charmer Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), Debbie Downer Rosaline ( Thirteen star Nikki Reed), and other people who really aren't that important to the story. Second - it was the least important part of why the first movie was such an incredible bore of an opener to a film series. New Moon , by contrast, has more going on in the sequel this time, and I will be talking about it because it actually pays a big part into why the second installment is by far, one of the worst sequels that I have ever seen. There are some sequels that get better with each viewing, muc...

Here's the thing with the vampire genre: when done right, they're great horror tales who don't rely on cheap scares to leave a mark on the audience. The best example of this is Ann Rice's Interview with the Vampire , the popular Gothic horror tale chronicling the life of one Louis de Pointe du Lac, an ordinary man who is turned into a vampire by Lestat, the torrid love-hate relationship between the two men, and Claudia, the little girl which becomes Louis' only reason for staying with Lestat. That was a tale full of life in the shadows and the tragedy of living forever and the characters were engaging, tormented people who each learn that immortality is a fate far worse than death itself. For a few seasons, the HBO series True Blood brought simmering sexuality and gory violence to the cable screen, along with interesting characters and...vampire politics? And most recently, the genre gave us two terrific movies, 2008's Sweedish thriller Let The Right One I...

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 T he 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 phenomen...