Mr. Brown Versus

A bit of backstory here: I was at a bar last Saturday night, chatting with fellow film fan Mason Daniel via social media when an ad for Michael Bay's latest Transformers  flick, The Last Knight , appeared on television, in which I had said that I would talk about each of the last four films before I (eventually) pay to see the fifth installment of the franchise. Also, I need to get back into writing and reviewing movies, because given everything that's happened in the world, and everything that has yet come to pass, I could use the distraction and escape. What better way to do that than to revisit the site's original whipping boy (before Jimmy Dore took the crown recently) and his soul-crushing franchise of noise and destruction? Oh, Michael Bay. You and I have had a long, contentious relationship - most of it (extremely) negative. However, I do think his talent, purely from a visual aspect, is to be commended: every last one of his films has a slick Hollywood feel and ...

Ok, let's be honest -- the calendar year for 2016 has been kinda shit, hasn't it? Sequels to cult hits that gave us secondary slop....superhero movies that failed to deliver on the super....studios still trying to cram the awfulness of Kevin Hart down our throats....and this season's offering of summer popcorn flicks did nothing to buck the trend. Does it get better as we turn to fall and the Awards race? Maybe, but for now, here's my compiled list of the worst this calendar year had to offer us thus far. London Has Fallen  - Baltimore movie critic Max Weiss warned me about this abhorrent, xenophobic, racist and profoundly idiotic picture and gave it one star in her review. I felt that was waaaaaaay too kind after sitting through one of the worst action films I've seen in the last 15 years. Gerard Butler is doing his second rate John McClain thing, Aaron Eckhart is still the President with a target on his back, and fine performers like Angela Basset, Melissa ...

There are many things to say about the Bourne  series - namely they were exciting and thrilling to watch. But going a bit deeper than just the two hours of intense fight scenes, betrayal and hidden, ugly truths behind the past of our amnesiac-riddled protagonist, the series (more so Supremacy  and  Ultimatum  when Paul Greengrass took over the reigns from Doug Liman) is a product of its time and place with the War on Terrorism seemingly never-ending, headlines and reports of the U.S. Government engaging in torturing enemy combatants under the guise of protecting American lives and collecting intel, and unchecked powers that have been granted after the attacks in New York and the nation's capitol. The character of Jason Bourne is perhaps an apt metaphor of our mindset at the time - unsure and never fully trusting the powers-that-be. But most of all, the one thing we could never say about the series is this: it was never boring and uninteresting. Jason Bourne , the...

I've said this several times, and I'll repeat myself again: there's not a worse experience at the cinema than sitting through bad comedy. To me, it is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, or getting a filling at the dentists office. It's painful, torturous and near-exhausting to sit in a dark room, unamused by the jokes and hi jinks on-screen, praying to yourself that this movie ends quickly before you just decide to walk out and do something more productive with your time. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is one of those times where bad comedy drives me up the wall and groan incisively thought the 85 minute run time. For those who didn't religiously watch AbFab during its run during the early to mid-90's on BBC, PBS or re-runs on Comedy Central (or when it was revived from 2001-2004), here's the gist of it: two middle-aged women, Edina (Jennifer Saunders, who is also producer and co-creator of the series) and Patsy (Joanna Lumley), spend their days cha...

From 20th Century Fox, the studio that brought you Wolverine & the  X-Men ;  Hugh Jackman & the X-Men Too ; That One X-Men Movie Everyone and Their Mother Hated ; Hugh Jackman & The Shitty Wolverine Origin Story That Fucked Up Deadpool So We Had to Reboot It Again ; The Better, Darker Wolverine Movie ; The Reboot X-Men Movie Where Logan Told James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender to Fuck Off ; Wolverine Goes Back In Time To Save the Future ; Ryan Reynolds: The Second Coming of Hugh Jackman When He Hangs Up the Claws ; and this year's Academy Award-winning feature, Fucked By a Bear: Leo DiCaprio Wants an Oscar Really, Really Bad , comes this summer's anticipated superhero team... X-Men: The Greatest Hits! Yeah, there's some new stuff with some blue guy named Apocalypse who wants to destroy the world because the script says so, but who wants new stuff when we can rehash all the best bits from around the course of the half-dozen or so movies from the franc...

It's been 23 years since Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park was released and was hailed as another crowning achievement from the master storyteller, and another 8 years since Joe Johnson milked dry the udders of what was left of the franchise with Jurassic Park III . It was rumored that Universal and Spielberg have been in talks for years about making a fourth installment of the series, but I didn't think by this point, that people would care enough to go see another JP film, much less be any good. Imagine my surprise: Jurassic World  was a monster hit for the studio, beating Marvel's The Avengers  record for the highest grossing 3-day weekend of all time with $208 million, became the third-highest grossing film in the U.S. with $648 million and is now the third highest grossing film worldwide. But, of course, numbers don't mean jack to me if the picture is basically another Michael Bay-style soulless spectacle. Again, Imagine my surprise: Enter Colin Treverrow, th...

If Avengers: Age of Ultron constantly flirts with falling back on old blockbuster tricks, then Pitch Perfect 2  announces, within seconds of the Universal logo being unveiled, that yes, you have, indeed paid to watch the same movie twice. The Barden Bellas are back, and four years after their triumphant victory in the national a capella competition, the all-female singing squad have become a national hit, as they invited to perform at the birthday gala for President Obama. If you guessed that this performance goes to shit, then congratulations, you saw the first movie! Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) has a wardrobe malfunction in front of Pres-O, and the girls are banned from every a capella showcase across the nation, as well as disbanded by their university as a result. Becca (Anna Kendrick), the group's leader, make a deal with John Smith (John Michael Higgens) and Gail Abernathy-McKadden-Feinberger (Elizabeth Banks), the two a capella commentators to reinstate the Bellas if they win at ...

For the next two weeks, I won't be going to the movies. Sort of. I'm taking an extended hiatus from watching the last bits of late summer movies or the early fall flicks due up on the docket, and instead, I'll be holding off until mid-September for the crime drama Black Mass , due out on the 18th, and (maybe) for the second installment in the Maze Runner  series, The Scorch Trials . Don't worry - I'll still be writing; in fact, I have a backlot of stuff of summer movies I've been meaning to review, but never got around to them, so what better time, with the fall and Awards season looming around the corner, than now to start talking about what I thought about this season's mix of summer offerings? In 2012, I called Marvel's The Avengers  the best film of the year - yes, better than Zero Dark Thirty , Lincoln , Life of Pi  and Django Unchained . I still stand by my choice, because, as I stated before , I saw Joss Whedon's superhero team-up as the...

Dumbasses In Space! When we last left our foolishly stupid twats  heroes, Reed Richards, Johnny Storm and Victor von Doom were convincing Reed's nonexistent friend for most of the 1st Act Ben Grimm to take a little joyride through another dimension, break every protocol in the book and possibly get themselves killed because they want to stick it to 'the Man' and not get left behind in history, despite the fact that engineers are just as renowned in the scientific community as the explorers who launch off into space. Of course Ben agrees and they set off for Tacky CGI Effect #573....I mean, the Negative Zone. Victor sees a terrible green slime effect and attempt to collect it for future study, but this causes the ground beneath them to collapse, as Victor falls into said terrible slime effect, presumably to his death. The remaining trio have to hi-tail it out of there with the help of Sue Storm, and return to Earth, but not before the machine blows up and destroys the la...

When we think of bad movies, infamous names such as Howard the Duck,   Catwoman  and Battlefield Earth   come to mind. We remember the loathsome lows that made us want to hurl our collective buckets of popcorn at the screen, like John Tuturro coming face to face with robot testicles in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen , or Bruce Willis's non-stop, furious mugging in Hudson Hawk , or simply sitting through any Adam Sandler movie after 2000; or we remember the moments that made an-otherwise terrible movie transcend into cult-status, like James Woods making a pen bomb and threatening to blow a police station to hell in The Specialist , or Tommy Wiseau's can't look away performance as Johnny, a man coming to grips with his partner's lies and infidelity with The Room , etc. The list of cinematic dreck goes on and on, and, in a way, they shape us as moviegoers and as hardcore film geeks. In a way, we treasure the bad almost as much we do the good, built up as as a testamen...

"I'm old, not obsolete,"  Arnold Schwarzenegger says to Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) as he's curious to know why a Terminator model, class 800 is working alongside Sarah Connor ( Game of Thrones ' star Emilia Clarke), the one true enemy of mankind, and of future resistance leader John Connor. The official word is a rift in the time-space continuum which now has created a new chain of events that will drastically alter the future or some nonsense, but allow me to put this in Lamen's terms for you: 1984's The Terminator  never happened. 1991's sequel, T2: Judgement Day  didn't happen either. And both Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines  in 2003 and Terminator: Salvation  in 2009 have now been wiped away from existence. What's left is a convoluted popcorn summer movie that makes less sense as it goes along at best, and at worst, it's an insulting blight on the series that makes me pine for  T3  & Salvation . Terminator Genysis  hits the rese...

Let's be honest about the film-version of Entourage , the hit HBO comedy series about a rising movie star and his three friends who've followed him from Queens to Tinsel Town: It's the 100th episode of the premium cable's most popular show since Sex and the City , which both works in favor of the film and to it's detriment. While it's great to see Vince (Adrian Grenier) and his pals Eric "E" Murphy (Kevin Connolly), Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) and Johnny "Drama" Chase (Kevin Dillon), along with lovable douchebag super agent-now head honcho of a studio company Ari Gold (the reliable Jeremy Piven) back traversing Hollywood and the spoils of fame, those who disliked the show's eight-year run or those who got tied of the same shtick past season 5 will feel vindicated in their continued frustration as the film does feel like one huge circle jerk of A-list actors making fun of the hand that feeds them, along with having athletes making cameo appeara...

First, I want to start off by saying that I really enjoyed watching Mad Max: Fury Road  during the Memorial Day holiday. Before entering George Miller's dystopian car chase through a barren wasteland, I had not seen the original Mad Max films, so I was coming in as a newbie and therefore, judged the film on its own merits. The image of a man hanging from the front of a moving vehicle, playing an electric guitar that spits fucking fire is an image that will stay with me as long as I'm a fan of the medium. The cinematography by John Seale, who had come out of retirement to help make this movie, is breathtaking from first frame to last. The technical aspects of the film - Visual Effects, Sound Mixing and Editing, etc. - are all first-rate, and are worthy of celebration come Awards season. It's almost something of a revelation to watch female characters contribute to the story and to the main protagonists, rather than be the traditional damsels in distress who only serve as res...