Mr. Brown Versus

"Will you follow me, one last time?" That's the question Thorin Oakenshield poses to his company at the end of the trailer to Peter Jackson's finale to his Hobbit  trilogy, dubbed The Battle of the Five Armies (due out December 17th). Although the question is posed to his accompaniment after everything they've undergone, via the evens of An Unexpected Journey  in 2012, and last years The Desolation of Smaug , I can't help but feel said Q has two meanings to it. The second almost feels like the New Zealand-bred director is asking us, the audience, if we will stick with him, at the end of his prequel trilogy, and the end of this Middle Earth saga. It's a fair question to ask. Both installments - An Unexpected Journey  and Desolation  haven't received the same critical acclaim as The Lord of the Rings trilogy did during its 2001-03 run, as the first two have received a 64% and 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for both parts I and II respectively....

Holy crap, Lars von Trier added another volume to  Nymphomaniac ! Yes! - Charlotte Gainsborough is back as Joe, the unrepentant nymphomaniac who's appetite for sex returns...with a vengeance! I can't wait to see how von Trier outdoes himself with pretentious and artful mundane things like fly fishing and the Fibernache sequence will be used as a metaphor for Joe and her numerous partners... Oh wait, it's just the anticipated first look at the erotic drama Fifty Shades of Grey (due out in theaters February 13, 2015). Nevermind. First off, I have never read the original source material by E.L. James. The premise - a young girl and a mysterious entrepreneur falling in love, but quickly realizing his past is much darker than previously imagined, including a thing for bondage and dom-submissive fetishes - feels something ripped from a cheesy erotic romantic novel that didn't sell with readers until present day. That, and I have a little something called Cinemax Afte...

I've seen bad movies. I've seen dull movies. I've seen incoherent movies. I've seen movies that felt like pure torture to sit through because they're so damn boring to sit through. I haven't encountered anything like Transformers: Age of Extinction . Confession: once I read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I knew what I was in for, so really, I have only myself to blame for putting myself through sheer hell. When they said that Michael Bay, maestro of destruction, had managed to top Revenge of the Fallen  as the worst installment of the series, I didn't believe it. How could he top that clunky, incoherent mess of a movie?  In just 2 hours and 45 minutes (yes, it's that bloody long), I found my answer. In ways I never could have imagined. It's been five years since the events of the last movie, where Optimus Prime (voiced one again by Peter Cullen) and his band of Autobots stopped the Decipticons from terraforming our world ...

With Transformers: Age of Extinction  hitting theaters tonight at 9 p.m. and because I haven't done this segment in ages I present to you the latest installment of The Netflix Files! Today, I'm looking back at the last chapter in Michael Bay's bloated Hasbro commercial, Transformers: Dark of the Moon , but in order to tell this story, I'll need to touch back on 2009's infamous Revenge of the Fallen . See, despite the first Trasnformers  sequel making over $400 million in the U.S., the film received a thrashing by the critics: a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a score of 35 on Metacritic, winning top honors at the Razzies , and a few publications naming the sequel as one of the worst ever made. Even star Shia LeBeouf and Bay himself admitted the second Trasnformers outing wasn't particularly good and promised that the next one would be better.  Well, they did keep their promise. Dark of the Moon  is better than the hideous Revenge of the Fallen . For...

Todd in the Shadows once said that he defined the worst hit song of the calendar year as a song being the absence of good. At the time, I didn't really understood what he meant when he chose "Tonight Tonight", by Hot Chelle Rae in 2011 and "Roar", by Katy Perry in 2013. Last night, I finally understood what he meant. Because, I, too, have seen a movie that's the absence of good. Todd meant that a song could make you angry, the beat could drive you insane, the lyrics could be insulting and simply lazy, but, in his eyes, those two aforementioned songs had nothing  going for them. Nothing lyrically, nothing catchy, nothing offensive, nothing that could make you feel insulted, angry or simply seeing red, because there's literally nothing  about it that can make you feel anything. That movie belongs to Bland, Weepy Teen Melodrama , the  latest attempt to suck money out of teen girls ....I mean, young adult novel by Second Rate Nicholas Sparks that became ...

Who knew this would be the best movie I've seen so far this summer? I was wary of Disney's attempt to reboot Sleeping Beauty fairly tale from the perspective of the film's titular villianess after how they botched up Oz the Great and Powerful  and Alice in Wonderland , but neither retelling had emotional depth to match the stunning visuals put on-screen. Maleficent  has both, largely thanks to Angelina Jolie, in her best performance in years, as the title character, a fairy who transforms the magical woods where she calls home, into a thorny no-man's land - literally. She wants revenge for Stefan (Sharlto Copley) drugging her and hacking off her wings to please a dying king and take his place at the throne. On the surface, it's Jolie howling over her loss, but it's a much deeper betrayal - her closest friend, whom she trusted and loved, robbed her of her innocence and her identity. In a moment of extreme vulnerability, her darker nature takes shape, and the ...

The film that comes out the first Friday in May is, in my eyes, the kickoff to the summer movie season. The one movie that sets the tone for the rest of the season, in a sense. It's usually big, it's hyped to all hell, and it's meant to make a studio a ton of money. Oh, and it's usually a superhero movie: since Sam Rami's Spider-Man in 2002, just about every movie to open the season of popcorn entertainment has been a comic book movie. Last year, Marvel Studios started the season off with a solid bang with Iron Man 3 , and while there were some fun popcorn movies that added plenty of excitement and genuine fun ( Pacific Rim , The Wolverine, This Is the End , The World's End ) by the end, I was exhausted of seeing computer-generated destruction and studios showing off their budget at the expense of telling a story and developing their characters (I'm looking at you, Man of Steel ). This year, it's Marc Webb's reboot of our friendly neighbor Spi...