Okay, so at the Oscars Jerry Seinfeld pissed off the documentarians, the theater owners, and if I were one of those minimum wagers who have to clean up theaters I don’t think I’d be too happy with him either. We know you’re a millionaire bud, if the popcorn is too expensive just bring some caviar from home. But pick up your own garbage, asshole.

Me, I’m thinking bad thoughts about a different set of awards. Every year around Oscar season you see articles and discussions popping up about “when Oscar got it wrong,” usually pointing to The Unfortunate Dances With Wolves Over Goodfellas Affair as well as the career-long snubs of Hitchcock and Kubrick (please remember to delete references to Scorsese not having an Oscar before recycling that essay next year). Coinciding with those writings are the annual blurbs on the Golden Raspberries, which can be summed up as “ha ha, that crazy bitch Sharon Stone made a bad movie, ha ha.” You don’t usually see complaints about the Razzie people getting it wrong, but they do it all the time. I know it’s all supposed to be in fun and nobody really thinks about it too much, but still – these people have been getting attention this way for 25 years. Either we hold them to a certain standard or maybe it’s time we gave this smarmy tradition the gong.

I enjoy a good bad movie as much as the next guy. Probaly more than the next guy. I’m sure I’ve seen Road House more times than many of you, and I guarantee you I’ve seen On Deadly Ground (1995 Razzie winner, Worst Director, Steven Seagal) more than you have. Now maybe I’m laughing at these movies in places where it wasn’t intended, but I still have to admit that I am genuinely enjoying them. You’d think if bad movies was gonna be your thing for a quarter century you’d want to really love watching them, but that doesn’t seem to be the approach here. Instead it’s a much less clever version of the smug, superior attitude those wiseass puppets used to have on that show Making Jokes Over Old Movies Theater. My feeling is that if you’re enjoying the movie you oughta respect it at least a little bit. Who gives a shit what they were trying to do with Road House, the point is they ended up with a crazy over-the-top tone that nobody else has quite captured. I say give them credit, don’t point at them and call them retards. (more…)

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First, a little about James Brown dying on Christmas.

God damn, JB. That one took me by surprise. I gotta figure he’s one of the great geniuses of our time. Nobody could ever deny him as a performer, a singer, a dancer, a songwriter. But to me it’s the music that gets me high – all those tight as hell, stop-in-the-exact-center-of-a-dime bands he had over the years. One time in 1969, James had a sold out show in Georgia, but most of his band quit. So Bobby Byrd took a Lear jet to Cincinatti, picked up a young band he’d seen called the Pacemakers from an empty bar gig they were getting paid $15 for. They flew directly to Georgia, came out onto stage with their hero who they’d never met, and still were the baddest band ever. That’s how 17 year old Bootsy Collins got in James Brown’s band.

Giving James credit as the producer of all that music, obviously you gotta keep in mind he’s not playing those instruments (although I saw him do a smokin organ solo one time) and he’s got hundreds of amazing musicians playing with him over the years that need to share that credit. But if it didn’t take genius to put all those people together and make that type of funk then how come nobody else did it? And if you ask me nobody to this day has matched the JBs. You wanna be blown away, pick up Pass the Peas: The Best of the JBs. I have had it in my head for years that if Skander Halim ever makes that Vern Tells It Like It Is movie the opening credits have to use “Hot Pants Road,” because I want that to be my theme music. I guess you can’t go wrong having theme music from the same people who did Black Caesar and Slaughter’s Big Ripoff.

I know it’s a cliche but you can’t get around the fact that if you took away the existence of James Brown, you’d have no hip hop. Or at least, half the songs would have no beats. Public Enemy wouldn’t have that blaring horn on “Night of the Living Baseheads.” They wouldn’t even have their first song, “Public Enemy #1,” because that’s all “Blow Your Head,” James going nuts on that weird synthesizer. Think about the “Funky Drummer” beat, man. Or the “Papa Don’t Take No Mess” beat. And they were sampled from James and then resampled from other samples and then other people added different samples but used the same rhythm from the Funky Drummer. Those beats have more children than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. (more…)

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If you grew up in America like I did, you probaly grew up fearing some dictator or despot from somewhere trampling on freedom. You had your nightmares of Hitler and Mussolini if you grew up during World War 2, the spread of communism during the Vietnam era or what Reagan called the Evil Empire during the ’80s. Or our younger folks are growing up hearing about Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and all the various oppressive Islamic regimes. Maybe you read 1984, Animal Farm, V For Vendetta, the Handmaid’s Tale, Star Wars the official novelization. For life-long Americans, living under an oppressive regime is the stuff of cautionary tales. Thank God it’s hard for us to imagine living in a country or a planet where you have to fear the police coming and taking you away at night for your political beliefs, for a misunderstanding, for a vendetta, because your neighbor accused you of being a traitor, or for no reason at all.

But with the continually snowballing monumental incompetence and belligerence of the Bush administration, with the Patriot Act parts 1 and 2 still on the books, with the Iraq war still spiraling out of control, Afghanistan still falling from our grip, Osama bin Laden still on the loose, bodies still rotting in the streets of New Orleans, North Korea going nuclear thanks to our Conan the Barbarian approach to diplomacy, and the republicans facing the task of convincingly rigging the mid-term election when the whole world expects them to be crushed into oblivion by the angry populace, it’s easy to get paranoid about what these assholes might want to pull next.

What if, during all this craziness, the president decided he had the right to just lock up anybody he chose, for any reason, without a charge or a jury, and have them tortured while he sits in the corner jerking off? And what if Congress, in all their befuddling lack of wisdom, decided to pass that into law?

Well, there’s no point worrying about WHAT IF because this actually happened last month. In case you missed it, the MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT was actually debated and passed in Congress, and Bush signed it into law two weeks later. It’s for real. The part about him jerking off is not specified in the legislation, but is implied. (more…)

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This column used to be about movies, not Bush, so what the hell. I’ll do an oscar column. If you don’t give a shit about the oscars no problem, go read something else by me, such as my book. thanks.

I like to watch the oscars but I got a sixth sense for not being able to guess what’s gonna win. Every once in a while it fucks up on me and I guess one of the dark horses. I knew Polanski was gonna win for THE PIANIST, to name the one example. But for the most part, I am not an individual to be betting on any oscar pools. This year, I really thought BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was a lock. My feeling was, this is not only widely acclaimed and award winning, its also a great movie that everybody seems to like. I can’t tell you how many people I know who were just like me, surprised how much they liked a movie about gay shepherds. It’s just one of those things like ice cream or root beer or something. Who likes movies but doesn’t like BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN?

People tried to turn it into a gay thing, like “oh, Hollywood is trying to prove they’re enlightened so they’ll vote for a gay movie.” But I don’t think that’s even it. It’s just a good movie. And I should point out, Larry McMurtry wrote this movie. The guy wore jeans and cowboy boots to the Oscars. He wrote LONESOME DOVE. He doesn’t have a computer and still writes on a typewriter. If this guy is okay with the gays then maybe it’s time to figure this type of tolerance is normal and not something you need to brag about in 2006. BROKEBACK deserved it not because we gotta prove a point about a shepherd’s right to love another shepherd, but because it’s a real good movie.

I mean if it was up to me it woulda been A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, but that wasn’t nominated. And of course alot of people didn’t like KING KONG as much as I did. But this is the first time in my life when I’d seen all the best picture nominees when they announced them, so I can truly say it’s a good lineup. You got BROKEBACK. You got CAPOTE, which was another one that surprised me. It was real creepy and tense and managed to paint Capote (or CUH-POE-TAY as both me and Jack Nicholson pronounce it) as a complete scumbag without making you hate him. Even Gore Vidal, who despised the real Capoté, said it was a pretty good movie. (more…)

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So Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face with a shotgun. Big fuckin deal. I know it sounds like some cold blooded badass shit for a guy to do but keep in mind it was AN ACCIDENT. So it doesn’t make him tough. Being clumsy is nothing to brag about.

I know this is last week’s scandal but I want to spend a couple paragraphs on it because you can’t help but draw parallels between Cheney’s flurry of buckshot and every other colossal mess these morons have created. Have you heard the details of the hunting setup at this place? They were hunting domesticated, flightless, penned in quail. And even still, they had to DRIVE UP to the place where the domesticated, flightless, penned in quail are. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Actually not even that. It’s like driving up to a barrel full of fish that can’t swim and shooting them. That’s not hunting, real hunters don’t do that kind of shit. It’s just animal cruelty. What I’m saying is this is classic Bush administration: set out to do something that is morally wrong, then do such a bad fuckin job of it that it turns out way worse than anyone could’ve imagined it would.

As you know I have personally flipped off Dick Cheney from less than ten feet away, so I’ve looked into the eyes of the abyss. I know the type of individual we are dealing with here. We are talking a HARD TARGET type of individual. I have no doubt in my mind that Dick Cheney would like to let loose some homeless vets or hurricane refugees on his private compound and go hunting for the Most Dangerous Game. Fortunately this is a rare case where the guy realizes the limits of his capabilities. He would not be able to hunt Ice-T or Jean-Claude Van Damme, because he can’t shoot for shit. I am positive – though I don’t want to test this out because it would be too dangerous – that any child, even a child without fingers, could be handed a gun and would get closer to hitting the quail than this bald bastard did. If it was ethical to do, this would be scientifically proven. (more…)

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What is it about the Super Bowl that can drive men to madness? Look, I’m not really a sports guy, and especially not a football guy. By football I mean the American kind with the bigass helmets and giant shoulder pads to make everybody look like monsters, not the European kind where there’s less pads and people bite each other on the balls and shit. In this american type of football the whole season is leading up to the big day, zero hour, Men’s Christmas. The Super Bowl. See, I’m a man and I can prove it, but the fact is I don’t always watch the Super Bowl. I really don’t give a shit about football. That’s just how the Lord made me.

But a couple weeks ago the Seattle Seahawks were in their first playoffs in more than twenty years. Early afternoon the day of the last playoff game I was still waking up when I looked out the window and I saw a dude walk past my apartment with full head-to-toe Seahawks gear and a giant Seahawks flag over his shoulder. I almost spit out my non-alcoholic beverage because you don’t usually see that in this town. We’re used to our teams losing and those types of extremists usually have to be shipped in from the suburbs. I mean yeah the Mariners had a good season a couple years ago, the Sonics had a championship back before you were born and the Storm got the title recently. (That doesn’t count to these type of dudes because men don’t paint their bodies and set things on fire to celebrate women’s accomplishments. Maybe some day.) And the Seahawks have usually been the worst of all our teams. But there they were winning their first playoffs since 1984 which means they get their first Super Bowl since God made Adam, Eve and Steve.

As they won their game I looked out the same window where I saw the maniac with the flag and this time I could see fireworks launching off the top of Corporate Product Placement Field on the other side of the city. I went downtown to watch MATCH POINT (oh jesus, I’m sounding less and less masculine every paragraph) and everywhere you went people would come up to you and yell GO HAWKS! or high five you, or a car would drive past with the driver not watching the road but instead sticking his head out the window like a dog howling at the moon. I didn’t see any flames or rolling cars but there were firecrackers echoing from the hills and even after the movie there were carloads of dudes driving around yelling GO HAWKS at you, still circling the city high as a fuckin kite off the game that ended three or four hours ago. (more…)

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Dear Hercules T. Strong,

My name is Vern and I am a fellow writer here at The Ain’t It Cool News. I usually write over on the “movie” side though, because that’s my thing. You would have seen some of my Writings however at the time you were busy watching VERONICA OF MARS or some show like that. But they were pretty good reviews, you would’ve liked them in my opinion.

The truth is bud, and please don’t take offense to this, but I don’t watch a whole hell of alot of the TV these days. There’s just not alot there that floats my boat. In fact sometimes I read your articles and I don’t even understand your crazy TV slang. Teleplay? Colorcast? Hourlongs? Skein? Simulblogged? HBO? I’m even more out of my element when you make those little in-references. Take a look at these three items:

1. Boy of my flag and boy of your flag! ! Today Eko Eko! ! The beginning ever since November it is new, it was gone! ! Nay of Jockomo Feena! !
2. Hosting plans information -Sensattional revolution in meedicine! -E-nlarge your p-enis up to 10 cm or up to 4 inches! -It’s herbal solution what hasn’t side effect, but has 100% guaranteed results! -Don’t loose your chance and but know wihtout doubts, you will be impressed with results!
3. My Flag Boy And Your Flag Boy!! Eko Eko Today!! The First New LOST Since November!! Jockomo Feena Nay!!

One is a friendly email I recently received, one is a recent Coaxial headline, and one is a coaxial headline translated into Japanese and then back into English. You can probaly tell which is which because you speak both English and Herc. Me, they all look exactly the same. The idea here is not to take potshots at your jargon, but to establish that I am not a with-it TV type of dude. But it just so happens there is exactly one TV show I really do like that I don’t think you’ve ever written about or done a talkback for. So I have no choice but to send you a long essay about the first season so far (9 episodes I think). (more…)

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