Mr. Brown Versus

Marvel's The Avengers. Yes, you read that correctly. My no.1 surprised me as well, but the more I thought about it and the more I watched it (which was about six times in total), the more this fit. Is The Avengers  a majestic and life-affirming piece of cinema like Life of Pi ? No. Does it encourage its viewers to debate the themes and overall message of the movie, a la The Master & Zero Dark Thirty ? Of course not. Does writer/director Joss Whedon bring gritty realism to the comic book universe of Marvel, like Christopher Nola did with his Dark Knight  trilogy? No way in hell. So why does a superhero movie tower over the most critically acclaimed movies that I have seen this year? Simple:  Marvel's The Avengers  represents blockbuster movies at their best, and sadly, what the genre itself has lost. To understand where i'm going with this, let me take you back to 1998. I've already talked about how Michael Bay has had a poisonous...

Now that I've bitched about the worst movies of 2012, let me praise the best that came out this year, and there was plenty of good: young love, historical figures, black cowboys, and a gathering of superheroes, to name a few. These are the movies which stayed with me thought the course of the year, and mean a great deal to me in 2012. 10. The Raid: Redemption - Holy shit! I don't think i've ever seen an action picture that's balls to the walls exciting since 2003 when I was inducted to the Church of Tarantino with Kill Bill: Vol. 1 . This is the type of non-stop action film that I remember seeing in theaters and on VHS when I was a kid: no-holds-barred thrills, relentless action scenes, and glee in seeing the hero kicking every manner of ass, taking names, and brushing off the battle scars. Sure, it's a foreign language film, but it speaks volumes when the country of Indonesia can produce the best action movie in decades and leave it's American counterparts...

Tomorrow morning Oscar host Seth McFarlane, along with Emma Stone from The Amazing Spider-Man will announce the nominees for the 85th annual Academy Awards. I haven't given any real comments on the Oscar race thus far, and the big reason for this is that there are people out there who know this game better than I do, and I'll leave it to the professionals, like Kris Tapley of In Contention and the dynamic duo of Sasha Stone and Ryan Adams of Awards Daily.com and the like. But that doesn't mean I can't personally place my bets and say who's getting nominated for what come 5:30 tomorrow morning, so here are my picks, surprises and who's going to get screwed by the old foggies. Best Picture: There's only going to be 8 nominees in this year's race, and just about most of them are locks at this point: Argo , Les Miserables , Lincoln ,  Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook , Life of Pi , and Django Unchained . The last slot, I think, comes down to ...

Sure, it's been less than 3 months since I've started this blog, and I've only reviewed a handful of movies since then, but that doesn't mean I haven't seen my share of unbearable dreck as I look back on the year that was 2012. this year in movies, I feel, we've seen more good movies than I have bad. Hell, Les Miserables , a movie I had pegged would be the most overrated film to come out of the holiday season, was surprisingly good, despite its flaws, but i'm getting ahead of myself and will talk about the musical later this week. Today, as most of us are looking foreword to a new year, I'm going to spend this week looking back on the best and the worst last year had to offer. Today, I take aim at the movies that pissed me off last year; the movies that deserve nothing but the one-finger salute. 10. The Amazing Spider-Man  - Of all the movies that are on my worst list. this one I had a hard time putting on my list because I didn't think the re...

Well, that' it: I thought I could do it but honestly, i've run out of sentences, adjectives, verbs, putdowns, and grievances to finish reviewing the last of the Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn - Part I and the newly released Part II . That, and i've been busy with classes and work to actually post anything - a review, thoughts about the circle jerk that is Awards season and upcoming movies i'm just damn excited to watch in 2013. In the last month though, i've seen a bunch of movies: some that are the best of the year and deserve to be serious contenders come Oscar time and one that I still can't wrap my head around. Flight - I've long been a fan of Denzel Washington's body of work, but for the lat several years he's been resigned to easily marketable action fare like Unstoppable (the last collaboration between him and director Tony Scott, who went on to commit suicide in August), The Taking of Pelham 123 , Out of Time , Deja Vu , Man on F...

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...