Embrace the bitter and post your own reviews!

SoundCloud is hosting 6 tracks from Trent Reznor's score for the US remake of "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Enjoy!

Dragon Tattoo Sampler by ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

As we slowly test the new spam guards we've put in place we will be turning features back on as they prove to be dealing with spam as well as we can hope.

Sorry Russia and Ukraine, but you are now completely banned from viewing this site.

Thanks to Russian Spambots we are shutting down user posts and comments for a short while until we figure out a way to get this under control. In the past 24 hours we have received thousands of spam in both sections and can no longer manually control it. In fact, we deleted some unposted actual content thanks to the insanity.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope to be back to normal soon!

If you have any suggestions on how to control this using a Drupal module please email me at jas [at] bitterbalcony [dot] com.

Thanks again for your patience!

-JAS

“The Rum Diary,” is the pseudo-biographical film based on the “lost” novel by the papa of gonzo journalism himself, the late Hunter S. Thompson. The book, finally published in 1998, chronicles the early days of the iconic writer’s career, following the misadventures of American journalists in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The misleading advertising showcased “The Rum Diary” as another wild ride à la Terry Gilliam’s LSD-fueled opus “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” However, this adaptation of Thompson’s inebriated hi-jinks, directed by the semi-retired Bruce Robinson (“Withnail and I”) strives to present the idealistic, noble side of the White Buffalo. Here, Thompson (under the pseudonym Paul Kemp) is revealed not only for his enticement of booze and hallucinogens, but as a harsh critic of corporate greed and social injustice in the Flower Power generation.

Yup, you read right! "Where's Waldo" that book we al know that has absolutely NO story is getting a feature film. Hollywood, in this case MGM, proving once again that they refuse to have the balls to shoot original stories have purchased the rights to the book and probably expect us to point at the screen filled with people and find out where this white and red wearing two dimensional character is.

Call us when Hollywood grows a pair, so we can actually look forward to Hollywood movies again.

In the meantime, file this under pathetic.

Sock ‘em Rock ‘em Robots, er, “Real Steel” starts off in the worse possible way. A man pits a giant robot against a bull. For the entertainment of the crowd this robot attempts to beat the crap out of a bull. It was great to think, “Where is PETA?” at the start of a movie we never thought could get any worse than the premise. Bull fighting aside this movie shows us once again that Hugh Jackman really needs to pick and choose a bit more.

“Real Steel” follows Charlie Kenton, a crappy robot fighter and equally crappy father, while he is forced to take care of his son and fight more robots. Thankfully, the fights are robot and robot and don’t sicken us further with animal abuse. Somehow, magically, he finds a robot under mud and filth and it turns him into a pro… unlike a refurbished $50,000 robot couldn’t do.

Instead of going over all that is wrong with this film let us cut it short and say that everyone seems to be trying, but that’s it. When it ended I thanked my lucky stars that I have the fortitude to ingest this much crap and live then I walked away.

“The Thing” is a prequel to the ‘80s movie by the same title. This time around we get to see what happened to the “Sweeds” as Mack called them, which were really Norwegians, as Dr. Cooper would correct him. Unfortunately, we couldn’t keep this as a subtitled movie and focus on the Nords and their struggle into paranoid social decay. Instead, we are forced to swallow the fact that the Nords, who this author thought were as stranded in solitude as the Americans, would call some lady from the US to investigate what they had found. Are their no Nordic specialists in ancient artifacts/paleontology? Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is that graduate student/specialist in ancient artifacts/paleontologist that is brought on to help investigate the discovery of an alien ship that was discovered in the Antarctic. That’s right, this time there is a woman, NAY two, involved in dealing with the human copying menace.