Mr. Brown Versus

In October of 2012, I heard Adele's contribution to the latest 007 picture  Skyfall , and I thought the title track of the same name would go on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song, which tuned out to be spot on. So far, I have a perfect 1-1 track record in predicting what will win the Academy Award in music, so I'm going to make another accurate prediction: not only will the theme song to this new James Bond film, Spectre , will not only miss a Best Original Song nomination, but it will also go down as one of the worst 007 tracks in the franchise's storied history. I hate to do this, because, in general, I do think Sam Smith is a very good singer-songwriter. I love that he goes for a mix of soul, lush melodies and emphasis on production value. I think tracks like "Stay With Me" & "Not The Only One" are solid pop tunes. The problem is that his soft falsetto voice does not mix with the theme of a Bond song; and furthermore, the track comes off...

Geez, Hunger Games  franchise: I know Mockingjay - Part II  is the last movie in your sci-fi YA series, but there's no excuse to all but announce that Prim (Willow Shields), Katniss Everdeen's younger sister, is going to end up biting the dust! Basically, the latest trailer is an extend montage between Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and her younger sister, from the first movie in the series, to the clip of the two of them dancing at Finnick's wedding. All thought this is the two of them conversing from previous exchanges of dialogue from various moments in the series, which, along with the music attached to it, makes it even more obvious that the younger Everdeen is going to die. And why would the Lion Gate's PR team spoil such an important plot point in the first place? I get they're playing on fans who have already read the book, but for those who haven't read Mockingjay, this trailer is just a big, fat announcement that a major character isn't making it ...

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...