Archive for the ‘Comic strips/Super heroes’ Category
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
DONALD WESTLAKE DOUBLE FEATURE:
THE HOT ROCK and THE STEPFATHER
Most of you fuckers probaly think Donald E. Westlake is just the creator of your precious Father Dowling Mysteries*, but actually he’s got a whole big resume behind him. In fact, in these parts he’s more famous as Richard Stark. I’m not sure which one is the real guy and which one is the alter ego but Richard Stark is the hard motherfucker who wrote the Parker books I love so much. Twenty Parker novels so far and also four about Parker’s part-time actor, part-time thief associate Grofield. Stark’s books inspired POINT BLANK, PAYBACK and several not as memorable but pretty good movies.
[*I'm just jerkin your chain there bud, I never watched that show either]
And then Donald E. Westlake writes funnier ones, they say. Richard Stark is his dark side, they say. (Stephen King even named the dark half character in The Dark Half George Stark.) But I am here to tell you that Westlake has two sides to him regardless of Stark. And the proof is right here with THE HOT ROCK, a goofy light-hearted heist comedy based on one of his books, and THE STEPFATHER, a fucked up horror/suspense/family values satire that he actually wrote the script for.
THE HOT ROCK is from one of the Dortmunder novels, I never read em but judging from this movie he’s the opposite of Parker: a thief with a sense of humor that has fun with what he’s doing. Robert Redford plays John Dortmunder. Fresh out of the joint and George Segal (his brother in law, no relation to Steven Seagal) already has him on a job trying to steal a jewel from some museum.
Basically the plot is they gotta steal this rock, but every time they do they fuck up and then have to go steal it from somewhere else. Like the first time they almost get away except the guy with the stone gets caught. So he runs around the corner and swallows it first. Then Dortmunder and the gang gotta break him out – not sure if it’s for his sake, or for the rock only. Anyway it turns out he doesn’t have it anymore, he hid it in a cell at the police station before he got transferred. So now they gotta break into the police station. Etc. (more…)
Tags: Brian Garfield, Donald Westlake, George Segal, Joseph Ruben, Moses Gunn, Peter Yates, Robert Redford, Terry O'Quinn
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
Anybody seen this movie. its probaly pretty old but – I just got out so I haven’t seen that many movies, but i just saw men in black at a girl’s house and it wasn’t that bad. personally i thought it was pretty stupid but there was some funny shit at times. she liked it i think i will ask her if i see her again (probly well, wink).
a couple a comments – number one, the black guy is okay i guess, but i don’t think he would last long inside. number two, i guess it was pretty funny at times. the woman, whatserfuck, she looked pretty good.
sorry if this has already been cover – first timer here
–vern
Tags: Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 2 Comments »
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
(Written for The Ain’t It Cool News, but they never put it up.)
Dear Harry and Moriarty,
I saw a new movie you guys might be interested in, called HELLBOY. It’s about this guy with a giant hand. He is red but he works for the government. Then he fights monsters because he’s in love with the girl from STORYTELLING, but she catches on fire. etc.
Actually come to think of it it’s based on a comic strip so I would not be surprised at all if you boys heard of it already. This is NOT the Punishing guy, this is a different guy, named Hellboy.
What I liked about this movie was the character of Hellboy, who is played by Ron Perlman (BLADE II). He is a guy from Hell who decides he’s not into being evil. So he does other stuff. I always thought Perlman was funny when he was on that Beauty and the Beast show with the gal from TERMINATOR. Because he is this scary lion man and the women loved him because he was sensitive and wore a blouse and because it was only a TV show so they didn’t have to face the reality of what a guy smells like if he lives in the sewer. Believe me man, you ever spend more than two days in a sewer, hiding out or whatever, it’s curtains for your love life for at least a year. Not to brag or nothin. I guess that is not a brag though. Just my 2 cents.
Anyway the point I was getting at was that when he took the makeup off, he still looked like a fuckin beast. This is a grizzled looking dude. He plays in makeup all the time so I guess it’s no big deal for him to be painted red and have a tail and horns and a giant hand and whatever other shit they pasted onto the dude. He doesn’t even notice, to him it’s just like wearing pants. So he is able to give a real acting performance and make this a great character. (more…)
4 people like this post.
Tags: Guillermo Del Toro, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt, Ron Perlman, Selma Blair
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
Man I tell you, I wish it was possible for lightning to strike 3 times in the same spot. It would be useful for many things including meteorological research and movie trilogies. But it’s not possible. Never happened. Not once. Only once has it hit the same exact place twice. And that place was the exact spot where Blade was standing at the time. Both times.
What I’m saying obviously is that BLADE III – and I will not call it BLADE TRINITY because what the hell kind of name for Blade III is BLADE TRINITY – is no BLADE or BLADE II. And there are many reasons why. The most immediate thing you notice: it just doesn’t look as good. Steve Norrington and Guillermo Del Toro were both so careful and artful. BLADE felt so exact and carefully composed, II was so spooky atmospheric with shiny gold tinted edges. III (directed by the guy Dave Goyer who wrote all the other ones but only directed the small indy drama ZIG ZAG) tries hard to imitate some of both of those looks. It has the same cinematagraphist as the last one, and I mean it’s not an ugly movie. But you can tell it’s not quite real. Not it’s own look, not quite capturing the previous looks. I think I read this was more expensive than the others but to me it feels cheaper. Almost like a really damn impressive TV version of the Blade universe. But not quite the real Blade universe.
And then you notice the villains. Parker Posey is real cool as a bitchy vampire ex-girlfriend of a young wisecracking white dude who saves Blade from the FBI (long story). But her crew are just not up to BLADE standards. In the first one the vampires were all exotic and interesting looking, plus Donal Logue. The second one raised the bar, making the villains weirder, scarier and more sympathetic. Here you just got a couple cheeseballs, one of them a big wrestler guy with bad hair. Like Tyler Mane in X-MAN but not as appealing. They work out of some fancy hipster office building, like they are the well paid staff of some smarmy vampire magazine. I don’t really understand what they are doing there, but there are lots of good catwalks to tumble from and windows to break through. (more…)
6 people like this post.
Tags: David S. Goyer, Dominic Purcell, Dracula, Jessica Biel, Parker Posey, Patton Oswalt, Ryan Reynolds, Wesley Snipes
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 10 Comments »
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
Well from what they tell me “The Punisher” is a Marvel Comics type super hero character. In the comic strip he’s a sadistic bastard that goes around “punishing” people. What this means I guess is not spidermanning them with webs or hulking them or whatever, what he does is kill them in horrible painful ways. He does not wear a cape or fly but he wears black spandex and a picture of a skull on his chest. Basically he is the guy from Rolling Thunder as a super hero. Without super powers or a hook hand. Superman’s morally questionable co-worker.
Guys who like The Punisher are not guys I can relate to. They like the violence and sadism and revenge aspects. They have a lot of anger in them and they enjoy getting it out. So far so good. But for some reason their idea of a bad motherfucker is a super hero in a comic strip. They think the right guy to get the rage out is a guy who wears a super hero costume. They can’t just watch Charles Bronson movies like everybody else, they gotta put the guy in a fucking uniform. That was one of the reasons they hated the earlier PUNISHER movie starring Dolph Lundgren. He didn’t wear the uniform. He doesn’t count as the Punisher because he wears different clothes. (maybe the movie takes place on laundry day. Huh? Ever thoughta that, asswipes?)
Another thing, they got John Travolta as the villain in this movie. Now obviously Travolta has been good before. I liked him in BLOWOUT, I liked him in PULP FICTION, etc. But these days the only surer sign of a bad movie is if Sean Connery is in it. I mean I could see Sean Connery being in SWORDFISH, I could see Travolta being in LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN. But without one of those two, movies like that would not exist. They just wouldn’t happen. (more…)
4 people like this post.
Tags: John Travolta, Jonathan Hensleigh, Rebecca Romijn, Thomas Jane
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
Maybe I mentioned that I’ve been on a documentary kick. I mean I’ve been watching the works of documentationists left and right. Not just BIGGIE AND TUPAC, but all the Maysles brothers direct cinema shit, Pumping Iron, Hoop Dreams, you name it. If it’s a documentary, and I’ve seen it, then I’ve seen it lately. But as great as some of these movies are, only some of them are greater than 2000’s Outlaw Award Winning picture AMERICAN PIMP by the Hughes Brothers. This is the definitive pimpumentary, I don’t care what you say about PIMPS UP, HOES DOWN it’s no AMERICAN PIMP.
The Hughes brothers are identical twin brothers who look the same. Because they are identical twins. Other than that, they seem very down to earth. They got alot of attention very fast with the huge success of their first picture, MENACE II SOCIETY which basically started the whole “young black director makes first low budget movie about life in the hood” thing back in the ’90s. They followed that up with the underrated heist/Vietnam movie DEAD PRESIDENTS, which got bad reviews and which they disavow on every subsequent dvd release. (more…)
Only 1 person likes this post. Kinda sad.
Tags: Heather Graham, Hughes Brothers, Ian Holm, Jack the Ripper, Johnny Depp
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
Spider-man, Spider-man. Sam Raimi, Spider-Man. Bruce Campbell cameos. Spider-man. Spider-man. That is a song I Wrote.
Anyway. This is a picture by Mr. Sam Raimi only it is based on the popular children’s comic strip, “SPIDER-MAN”. If I remember right what that was about was a nerdy kid who gets bit by a magic spider so he puts on a red and blue bodysuit and swings around on webs saving people. This works on account of he now has magic spider powers to climb up buildings, make wisecracks, etc. My internet research indicates that the webs actually did not shoot out of his wrists, as any logical person might assume, in fact they were shot by mechanical laser watches or some stupid shit that Peter Parker invented and this apparently is the building block on which all Marvel Comics are built and should never be altered if Sam Raimi doesn’t want to face a fate similar to that of Salman Rushdie (i.e. years of fear and hiding, followed by a cameo in Bridget Jones’s Diary).
There is a dash between Spider and Man apparently, you gotta be careful with that one on the internet. Again, Salman Rushdie.
Other than changing the web lasers this one appears to be very faithful to the juvenile picture books it is based on and that is where the charm is. It seems to me that most of these funny books are based around outlandish costumes, and at the same time the outlandish costumes cause the biggest dilemmas when adapting to the legitimate artistic medium of Film. I mean do you really want to have a guy wearing that kind of shit or not, that is the big question. In the case of Super-Man they said yes, he’ll wear the exact same thing that he wears in the drawings. And America loved it.
But that was the 1970s or 80s, a simpler time. Then there was Viet-Nam. Well, Viet-Nam had already happened but then there was a series of movies about Viet-Nam. So America was changed forever. I don’t know. (more…)
Tags: James Franco, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Saturday, January 1st, 2005
Well I picked this one up ’cause there was alot of hype, it just won a bunch of awards recently and they were making a big deal about Halle Berry showing up and making a tearful speech. Somebody warned me though, turns out “the razzies” are some kind of sarcastic or ironical type award where they give it to the WORST movies, or at least the ones that are not really the worst but that got a bad time in the media and they probaly haven’t even watched them but they pretend it’s the worst and everybody has a good time pretending that they have seen it and that they were surprised how bad it was.
So I realized this was actually a notorious movie, a legendarily bad movie, and I started to worry. What if I like this one? What if I’m the one guy? You know how I am, I tell it like it is. I say what’s what. I kind of liked The Punisher and I shouted it to and from the god damn roof tops. To this day I would die for the two Charlie’s Angels movies, or if not die, then at least admit that I enjoyed both of them alot. What if this is actually a misunderstood work of camp genius? Am I really ready to go to bat for Halle Berry wearing a big leather football with ears on top of her head?
The expectations killed this movie though because it’s not misunderstood and it’s not bad in any kind of interesting way. It’s just your usual unimaginative movie but one with the unusual topic of a gal dressing up as a cat and getting super powers.
The plot is this. Halle Berry is an awkward shy person working in the art department at a makeup company run by Sharon Stone and her openly evil husband, played by some guy with an evil British accent. They are about to unveil their new product Beauline, an amazing new anti-aging cream. It actually “reverses the process of aging,” but also has the side effect of rotting your face away like a zombie or turning your skin into super powered rock skin. Unfortunately, the former side effect is only shown in tests and the latter only on Sharon Stone, and then she doesn’t really use it for much. (more…)
3 people like this post.
Tags: Halle Berry, Pitof, Sharon Stone
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | No Comments »
Sunday, November 7th, 2004
the asshole cat
Man, what a fuckin week. On Tuesday Bush got either “re”-elected or re-”elected,” and I’ve been stumbling around muttering to myself ever since. Stabbing at my porridge with my spoon, staring blankly out the window, mouthing the word “why” to myself over and over again. One thing I know, there are some things in this world that just cannot be explained. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes people vote for a president that couldn’t be trusted to put on his own pants. And sometimes a guy gets the blue state blues, walks around town in a daze, suddenly finds himself at home having rented the movie “GARFIELD,” not really knowing how or why. I know for a fact this happens because you’re lookin at the guy who it happened to. Me. It was weird.
What this is is a movie based on the popular comic strip from the 1980s called Garfield. Like all comic strips it is not funny and about a talking animal. This is a cat called Garfield who is orange. The thing about Garfield, he is real fucking fat, he eats lasagna. That’s funny because real cats eat cat food, but this one also eats lasagna. Also he says “I hate Mondays” at the beginning although this does not turn out to be important. But it is that sort of detailed characterization that makes him, you know, Garfield. I guess.
I mean, think about it. Why the fuck is a cat gonna hate mondays. Especially this particular cat, this Garfield. What he does, he sleeps, he eats, etc. For a cat, even a talking, dancing asshole cat like this, he is not gonna give a fuck if it’s Tuesday, Thursday, the 12th of February, anything. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to work. He doesn’t have to get out of bed. Every day of the year is the weekend to him. There is no beginning of the week for a cat with that particular lazy asshole cat type of lifestyle. Even when he is expected to eat a mouse, he just fakes it. There is no fuckin reason this cat even knows what Monday is, let alone hates it. And yet he says it explicitly that he hates Mondays. You see. That is why it is funny. Because why would he hate Mondays. Oh, that Garfield the asshole cat. He hates Mondays. (more…)
4 people like this post.
Tags: Bill Murray
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Family | 12 Comments »
Friday, May 2nd, 2003
Dear Mystique,
Hey sugar it’s me Vern. Remember me I reviewed your first movie “the x-men” and even though I don’t read that comic strip shit, I enjoyed the picture. Well I gotta say although the title “x part 2 x-men united” is pretty terrible I also enjoyed your part 2. It doesn’t have the same “I can’t believe this isn’t total shit” surprise factor but instead it has these characters that I enjoyed in the first picture and it tries to add more depth and drama and convolutedness to their adventures and what not. like a comic strip book.
But the reason I’m Writing to you mystique is because you are my favorite mutant now. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Young Clint Eastwood is great as Professor Logan Wolverine, the art teacher at X-Men Community College. There is another X-Man called Rogue but she’s not really a Rogue, she always sits at the same table as Iceman and Fireman. Professor Wolverine is the real rogue, he wanders around in the snow by himself uncovering his past and going on adventures and shit. Who knows what happened between part 1 and part 2, he could’ve saved an injured baby polar bear, or he could’ve gotten in a fight with a yeti, or got buried under an avalanche and had to melt his way out by banging his metal freddy krueger claws against each other to create heat. I mean anything could’ve happened, as long as it is snow related. Anyway he’s the real rogue, so when he goes to the X-Man school to try to find beer, all the kids follow him around because he’s cool. I liked when he said “You picked the wrong house, bub.” That was pretty tough.
Most improved X-Man goes to Storm, played by Halle Berry. Her wig looks alot better and I guess the oscar made her try harder. She’s actually kind of scary this time when she gets the weather control going. (more…)
2 people like this post.
Tags: Bryan Singer, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | No Comments »
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