Archive for the ‘Bruce’ Category
Wednesday, April 13th, 2005
In this one Bruce plays a cop from a long line of cops. Which of course means his uncle is played by Dennis Farina. You also got John Mahoney as his dad and Tom Sizemore and Robert Pastorelli as his knucklehead cousins. All cops. Sarah Jessica Parker is the love interest, also a cop but not related, so they can fuck in one part. The movie takes place in Pittsburgh and I guess they even got local people to work on the movie, because I recognized the editor’s name, Pasquale Buba, from watching DAWN OF THE DEAD a thousand times. The director also has a familiar name, Mr. Rowdy Herrington of ROADHOUSE fame.
Unfortunately the bad guy is a serial killer – always a bummer. Terrorists and robbers and CIA agents are a good time a the movies, but some asshole that gets a boner tying up women? Not really as fun, in my opinion. Anyway they keep getting real close to catching the fucker, even chase him in a good over-the-top car chase at the beginning. I mean there’s a pretty serious maneuver the killer pulls when completely surrounded. Excellent use of the extreme Y-turn.(The new rule is, always put the best action scene at the very beginning.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Joe Pantoliano, Rowdy Herrington, Sarah Jessica Parker
Posted in Action, Bruce, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 3 Comments »
Friday, April 1st, 2005
There’s alot of comic strip books turned into movies but usually they Hollywood em up alot. They change the story and the super hero clothes and turn brits into americans and alot of the fans are fundamentalists so they get pretty upset. Batman doesn’t have nipples because bats don’t have nipples, Super-man isn’t supposed to wear that shade of blue it is actually a different shade of blue, that kind of thing.
So what Robert Rodriguez did for this comic strip SIN CITY, he actually brought in the writer/cartoonist from the comic, made him co-director, and apparently pretty much used the comic as storyboards and script. He used his cool digital movie cameras and convinced a great cast to come in and fuck around in front of green screens and used computers for almost all the backgrounds. According to my team of expert nerds, there are scenes and lines from the funny pages that they cut out here and there and they mixed things together a little bit at the beginning in order to combine three stories into one. But for the most part the shots are based on the drawings and everything written on the page is said out loud in the movie. An obsessive level of faithfulness never thought possible even by Harry Knowles himself. Maybe the most faithful movie adaptation of anything ever, including plays, novels and trading cards. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Benicio Del Toro, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Carla Gugino, Clive Owen, Frank Miller, green screen, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Robert Rodriguez
Posted in Action, Bruce, Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005
starring Bruce Willis
So let’s say instead of being John McClane or somebody, Bruce was Joe Hallenbeck, a washed up, slightly overweight, cigarette loving, booze-sucking, wife-and-daughter-arguing, disgraced secret service agent turned low-life asshole private detective. Also, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Damon Wayans is Hallenbeck’s one-time favorite football player but his career was ruined in a gambling scandal and now he’s a drug addict dating a stripper (Academy Award winner Halle Berry, in a step up from her role as a crack ho in JUNGLE FEVER) who Hallenbeck was hired to protect by his former friend who he just found out was screwing his wife then saw get blown up by a car bomb and now Halle Berry has been murdered because she knew too much about a football team owner trying to blackmail a senator that Hallenbeck used to protect but punched out because he was torturing women and now they’re trying to legalize gambling. Also I forgot to mention that Hallenbeck once saved the president’s life, and some dudes are gonna set off a bomb at the football game, and there was this fucked up part at the beginning where an NFL player pulled out a gun on the field and started shooting everybody then said “Ain’t life a bitch?” (to be or not to be, that is the question) and blew his brains out. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Damon Wayans, Shane Black, Tony Scott
Posted in Action, Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 14 Comments »
Monday, March 14th, 2005
Legend has it that the times we’re in create the movies we watch. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes subconsciously. I mean who the fuck knows how it happens but the fears and the turbulence and the shittiness of troubled times somehow soaks into the celluloid and poisons the screen. So Vietnam and racial unrest soaked into the PLANET OF THE APES pictures, for example. The atomic age bred giant crabs, Hiroshima gave birth to Godzilla, Ronald Reagan caused ROCKY 4 and RED DAWN, AIDS made THE FLY.
Well, HOSTAGE is not a political movie but it is a Bruce Willis action thriller for the fucked up age we are currently being sat on by. In the DIE HARD pictures he fought terrorists, so now that terrorism is more of a realistic threat, he’s going back to fighting criminals again. But because it’s the Bush era, this is a dark, ugly, sometimes gorey thriller. A story about a bunch of psychotic, sadistic, greedy assholes terrorizing each other, and all the rest of us who get caught in the middle. A movie that wears a mask and has your wife and daughter tied and gagged in the back of a van and forces you to break your moral code and risk your life to get what it wants. It’s a real intense, well made thriller but what I’m saying is, this is 2005. Don’t expect to get blown through the back wall of the theater and have a good time and all that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Foster, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Florent Emilio Siri, Kevin Pollak, Rumer Willis
Posted in Action, Bruce, Crime, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 12 Comments »
Friday, December 10th, 2004
OCEAN’S 12 is a sequel to OCEAN’S 11 (the 2001 version [not the movie 2001, I am referring to the year 2001, the year the movie OCEAN’S 11 was made {the remake, not the original, that is why I brought up this year thing originally}]) so this will be the sequel to my review of that movie.
It turns out that the eleven do NOT die horribly as I predicted. But their past (the other movie) does catch up with them, and the sequel is all about them doing various heists in order to pay back the money, plus interest, that they stole the first time around. So that means that Ocean’s 11 actually have a net loss across the two pictures. I mean, think about that. That’s terrible! What does that say about the current state of doing a job right? You want to do the impossible, so you bring in 11 of the greatest experts from around the world, you pull it off, you win back your ex-wife, and you have a fun time doing it. And your reward is horrendous debt and threat of life and limb. That’s how this world rewards you for ambition, talent and dedication. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, heists, Matt Damon, Steven Soderbergh
Posted in Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
The Fifth Element is your usual Bruce Willis movie that starts out in Egypt in 1934 and ends up in some fancy space hotel in 2334 with this blue skinned space opera lady singing opera and then busting off dance moves. Bruce is introduced down on his luck, pretty much like in the Die Hards – his wife left him, he’s trying to quit smoking, his mom won’t stop hassling him and he’s “5 points away” from losing his job as a flying cab driver in space age New York.
In fact this is a lot like a Die Hard movie except in a cartoony comic book space world instead of a building. Instead of talking to a cop on a walkie talkie, he just talks to his mom on the phone, and instead of terrorists there’s this big ball of fire hurtling toward the earth that turns light to dark, life to death, sometimes has a giant skull for a face, eats missiles and sattelites, and calls himself Mr. Shadow during phone calls. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brion James, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Luc Besson, Luke Perry, Milla Jovovich, Tiny Lister
Posted in Action, Bruce, Reviews, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 78 Comments »
Monday, January 1st, 2001
Shit man I really can’t believe nobody told me about this movie! I’m out of the picture for most of the ’90s and all the sudden Bruce is in a classic film that is NOT a Die Hard!
This is the story of Butch Coolidge, a boxer who gets mixed up with a crime boss named Marcellus Wallace. Marcellus pays Bruce to throw a fight. Word spreads that the fix is on and the odds get out of control. Butch and his buddy in Tennessee make huge bets on the fight and then instead of throwing it, he beats the other dude to death.
He flees to a hotel to hook up with his lady friend Fabian who is French I believe. This scene is a study in contrasts because we see that this bad motherfucker who beats a man to death comes home to his lady and gets all cute on us. They’re all baby talking, rolling around on the bed snuggling and talking about “give me oral pleasure,” “will you kiss it,” etc., It’s so true to life it’s embarrassing to watch. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames
Posted in Bruce, Crime, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2000
BRUCE WILLIS’S UNBREAKABLE
Starring Bruce Willis
If you know Vern then you know I am not the kind of Film Writer who avoids giving away surprises or “spoilings” in movie reviews. The dude from Felicity is the killer in Scream 3 to name only one example. Apparently the girl in the Crying Game has a dick but I haven’t seen that one. I can verify that it does happen in one of the Sleepaway Camp pictures though so keep your eyes peeled for that one as well. Anyway point is if you want to go into a movie fresh you shouldn’t read my review first is the point. Especially when it comes to the films of Bruce Willis. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, M. Night Shyamalan, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Bruce, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 8 Comments »
Monday, September 25th, 2000
I remember there used to be women who read my column. I won’t say their names but there was a nice gal from the newsgroups who was an early supporter of my works. Nother one from the web sight for the director of Running Time, that Bruce Campbell movie all done up in one shot like Rope. She used to write me all the time, very encouraging, very supportive.
I haven’t heard from any women in a while, and I wonder if I’m scaring them away with all this man talk. All this Badass Cinema, all this Bruce and Clint and breaking people’s legs and bending punks over and smoking motherfuckers. Balls and dicks. Man stuff.
Well I hope some day my sensitive side will return, I’ll lay off of the macho for a little while and I’ll get a little more genderifical diversity in my readership. I mean who the fuck knows, even Clint Eastwood directed The Bridges of Madison County one time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posted in Bruce, Vern Tells It Like It Is | 15 Comments »
Monday, June 19th, 2000
Well, tomorrow is the first official, scientific day of summer, and you know what that means – time to go to the beach, and it will be sunny, and you go on a vacation, and all that crap. Well in between all those summer activities, you can go to the movies as well, as far as I’m concerned anyway. I know if you go to a matinee you will come out of the movie and it’s all sunny and your eyes hurt like fuck, but sometimes it is worth it. Let’s face it gang being a movie watcher is a year round job and who the fuck likes sand castles that much anyway.
So in honor of that notion here is the first ever annual Vern’s Summer Movie Preview column, a guide to what movies come out and my asinine predictions about which ones will be good and what not. I know this is a weird idea for a column but you will get the hang of it after a few paragraphs. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posted in Bruce, Vern Tells It Like It Is | No Comments »
