I’m sure most of you have heard about the retirement of the one and only Bruce Motherfuckin Willis – a.k.a. Bruno, a.k.a. Walter B – due to a diagnosis of aphasia, a disorder which interferes with the ability to comprehend speech. I saw a tabloid story quite a while ago which claimed he was struggling with early onset dementia, and it’s unclear to me whether that was a misunderstanding about this, or whether that was true and this is a further development. Either way, it explains some of what has been going on with him in recent years, which honestly people have been pretty unkind about. But now they know.
I don’t need to tell you what Bruce means to me and everything we do here, but here’s a brief summary: I idolized him as a kid because of Moonlighting, DIE HARD is kinda my favorite movie, my first Usenet post was about DIE HARD, many people are kind enough to associate me with DIE HARD and refer all DIE HARD related news items to me, Titan Books associated me enough with him that they got me to name my review collection after him, also there was a famous incident in the Ain’t It Cool days when Bruce himself unexpectedly logged in as a talkbacker to respond to my concerns about LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD being rated PG-13. To my left as I write I have a beautiful framed Thai DIE HARD poster that I look to for inspiration. Three days ago I bought The Return of Bruno on vinyl.
One of my favorite things I’ve written was the piece about DIE HARD from a little after my dad died. If you’ve read that you know how much my feelings about DIE HARD and Bruce are tied in with memories of my dad, who I lost to Alzheimers. I see alot of my dad in myself and fear inheriting his fate; also I have always looked up to aspects of Bruce and aspired to be like him. So obviously it hit me hard on a number of different levels when I first heard about this. Since I always believed the story it didn’t come as a shock to read the confirmation today, but the emotions came at me like a flood. And I know it’s the same for many of you.
I just feel for him and his family and I hope they’re able to enjoy their time together. Let’s all celebrate Bruce and send good thoughts to him and his family and friends. Also, which Bruce movies is it a shame I haven’t reviewed? I’ve done the big action ones, but surely there are some gaps.
Ah shit, here we go again. Another Oscar Sunday coming up. As I’ve been doing for some years now, I scrambled to watch all of the best picture nominees that I hadn’t already seen anyway, plus as many as I could from other major categories. This year, for various reasons, I did not write reviews of most of the movies that were nominated, so I’ll kinda-sorta do that here.
You may know Mark Palermo as the screenwriter of DETENTION (Joseph Kahn one, not Dolph one) or as a thoughtful commenter around here for many years. It turns out he’s also a podcaster. Mark and actress/filmmaker Loretta Yu host The ’00s Zone (pronounced like “ozone”), looking back at movies from the ’00s. And they were kind enough to invite me for their episode looking back at 
Happy Halloween everybody! (Or I suppose Devil’s Night Eve, as of this posting.) I hope you have enjoyed my super-sized 5-day-a-week horror reviewing this month. But if you need even more review content to put into your container or whatever and you happen to be a Patreon contributor (or want to start) I took a look at two episodes of the short-lived 1998 syndicated action series based on THE CROW and starring Mark Dacascos. And if you missed it I still have 
I’m the guest on the new episode of the podcast 30 Years Later, which is of course a podcast where they revisit movies from 30 years ago. They saw me tweeting about summer of ’91 and invited me on, so of course I offered to do the episode on 
Thank you for joining me and/or being patient with me during these last few months of S91: JUDGMENT SUMMER, my look back at most of the summer movie releases of 30 years ago. (If you actually didn’t join me, you can scroll down and click on the links to all the reviews). According to my calculations I reviewed 46 movies for this series, not including the non-1991 ones (like the part 1s for some of these part 2s). And now here are my judgments.
Hey friends,
Do you all listen to ADKINS UNDISPUTED? It’s a podcast done by a guy named Mike Scott, who goes through the Scott Adkins filmography in chronological order. I can imagine a version of that concept that’s fun to listen to, but not as good as what Mike does. He takes the job seriously, with heavily researched scripted intros, followed by a more free-wheeling discussion with the week’s guest (or “champion”). And very early in the run of the show Mr. Adkins himself caught on to it and has provided interviews for each episode. I’ve learned many things about the movies from Adkins, plus the side discussions have led me to all kinds of Hong Kong movies I hadn’t seen, and the rotating guests have introduced me to some cool people from the world of action movie fandom. It is fun to listen to, but also a genuine work of action movie scholarship. I love it.
Well, it’s that time of year again. The end of April, that fabled time when the Oscars were 2 1/2 months ago unless there was a pandemic. Okay, obviously the big event this week is MORTAL KOMBAT coming out on Friday. But I’m still gonna enjoy watching the Oscars on Sunday.
