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Tag: Team Grumpy (1-3 of 3)

Jan 31 2012 05:30 PM ET

Contrarian Corner: Let's talk about 'The Grey'

Tags: Animals, Contrarian Corner, Dude, THAT's Your Plot?, Liam Neeson, Middle-Aged Butt-Kicking, Team Grumpy, Wolves? Where?

The Grey, Liam Neeson‘s latest January release that features the gruff 59-year-old Irishman screaming at and fighting with every living creature around him, may have gotten a middling review from EW critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, but it still managed to debut with $19.6 million over the weekend, and earned many positive reviews from critics across America. (Audiences issued the film a “B–” CinemaScore grade, with 76 percent giving it an “A” or “B”.) A lot of people, it’s safe to say, were very much on board with the man vs. wolf film.

Here’s the thing, though: The Grey was the most depressing film I’ve seen in years. I disliked every single character in the film. Heck, I was rooting for the wolves to prevail, just so the movie would end! (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD) READ FULL STORY »

Dec 16 2011 02:45 PM ET

The Best and Worst Movie Posters of 2011

by Darren Franich

Tags: Advertising, Team Grumpy, This Would Never Fly In Sweden

No, that image above is not a real Larry Crowne poster. But don’t you wish it were? The Hollywood Movie Poster has been on life support for a few decades now. Criterion Collection DVD covers are more creative. Amateur practitioners like Mondo have crossed over into the mainstream. And it turns out that freaking Poland makes better movie posters than we do. By comparison, the typical Hollywood poster can’t help but look bland…which makes it all the more impressive when something sticks out from the pack. In the video below, I round up the two best and two worst posters of the year. (Click here for more of our favorites, and click here for more of our least favorites.) Hint: Larry Crowne is not one of the best. READ FULL STORY »

Dec 6 2011 06:00 PM ET

Contrarian Corner: The '90s were horrible, nostalgia be damned

by Darren Franich

Tags: Contrarian Corner, Nostalgia, Team Grumpy, Music, TV

The opening credits sequence of Dec. 9′s Young Adult is suffused with ’90s nostalgia. Charlize Theron plays a writer of a young-adult literary franchise that sounds quite a bit like Sweet Valley High. She finds a mix tape created for her by her high school boyfriend — and is there anything that more precisely defines everything we are supposed to love about the pre-digital era than The Mix Tape? Because she apparently lives in a bizarro universe, Theron’s car still has a tape deck. So she puts in the mix tape and starts singing along to Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept,” which I’m sure is a song beloved by anyone who was precisely 17 in October 1991. While the credits roll, the camera fetishistically zooms into the cassette, the tape going round and round and round. It feels a little bit like we’re being set up for an extended trip down memory lane to Nostalgia Town, with a brief stopover in Twee Village and a hearty lunch at the Gosh-Wasn’t-Generation-X-Secretly-AWESOME Café. But as the credits continue, Theron continues rewinding the tape to the beginning, and listening to “The Concept,” and rewinding and listening, rewinding and listening. It’s no longer a nostalgic vision; it’s a vision of nostalgia steadily approaching madness.