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Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category

Vern Has Studied THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP!!

Monday, June 19th, 2006

Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…

What a collision. Vern and Michel Gondry. Can’t wait to see how this goes:

Hey fellas,

I saw THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP which is the new Michel Gondry picture that comes out in September. It was the closing movie at the Seattle International Film Festival here. Michel Gondry was there to briefly introduce the movie, but didn’t do a question and answer session. Which is good because the first question probaly would’ve been, “what was that all about?”

Here’s the “where I’m coming from” paragraph, I’ll keep it brief. If you’re not into Michel Gondry then throw a grain of salt on this one, because I like every movie the guy has made. Yes, including HUMAN NATURE. I was the guy in the theater who was embarrassed because he couldn’t stop laughing and nobody else could start. To this day I think people didn’t give it a fair shake because they only had BEING JOHN MALKOVICH to compare it to. I honestly believe there will soon be a mass re-evaluation around the world where people decide they like HUMAN NATURE after all, now that they like Michel Gondry. If this does indeed happen then everybody has to buy me a Pepsi or something. (read the rest of this shit…)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

As part of my striving for excellence I’m trying to strengthen my background in the filmatic arts. I’m always trying to catch up on the Badass Cinema that I’ve missed, but it’s also important to watch some of the regular folk movies that are considered classics. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER is no THE GODFATHER or nothin but if you talk to film buffs alot of times they have a boner for Robert Altman, and this is one of the movies they all mention. Before POPEYE. (read the rest of this shit…)

Code of Silence

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

In 1985, a couple years before director Andrew Davis introduced the world to Steven Seagal in the classic ABOVE THE LAW, he did another, similar movie, sort of a rough draft, starring Chuck Norris.

They have the same setting (Chicago), the same villain (Henry Silva) and alot of the same supporting actors playing cops and criminals. They have the same type of cheesy ’80s scores by David M. Frank. (Get ready for cheesy slap bass and the whitest horn section you ever heard.) ABOVE THE LAW is about CIA corruption (inspired by the Iran-Contra affair) but CODE OF SILENCE sticks with corrupt cops. (read the rest of this shit…)

Art School Confidential

Monday, May 15th, 2006

A while back I wanted to get a copy of the book Cockfighter by Charles Willeford. The one the Monte Hellman movie is based on. I found it in a collection with two other Willeford books, so I read those first. I knew what Cockfighter was about obviously, but the other two I had no idea, so from page 1 on the books had me guessing where the hell they were going, and usually being wrong.

The Pickup starts out with this guy spending his days drinking in bars and finding jobs at diners, who seems to have real bad luck and get in fights everywhere he goes. And he meets this rich girl. Of course you assume she’s gonna be a femme fatale, she’s gonna lead him on and trick him into killing somebody or stealing her father’s money or some shit, but it never happens. Instead they fall in love for real but they have this fucked up Sid and Nancy love. They are tormented and depressed and they bring the book spiraling down into the abyss with them. Before you know it they decide to slit their wrists, and end up in an insane asylum, and it keeps going from there. Even the very last sentence of the book makes you say, “Whuh?” and have to go back and reconsider everything that happened before. I like that. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Godfather Part II

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

aka GODFATHER: RESURRECTION

When last we saw The Godfather part II (Al Pacino, DICK TRACY), he was in a room, closing a door. Nobody knows what happened inside that room, probaly some gangster shit. But THE GODFATHER PART II picks up years later with Michael Corleone now living in Las Vegas. Remember, he sent poor Robert Duvall there to stake out some territory, well apparently that went well. It seems there is some mafia roots in modern day Las Vegas. Huh, go figure.

Now, part 2 is even more epic than part 1. This one actually has time travel in it. It skips back and forth between The New Adventures of Michael Corleone and The Young Vito Corleone Chronicles. Hell it goes all the way back to the motherland. Remember that villa where Michael hid out in part one, then he married a girl with no nipples and watched her get blown up? Turns out that’s Vito’s childhood hood, and that place Michael lived is where the OG Godfather lived, and killed Vito’s mom. (read the rest of this shit…)

Road to Perdition

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

ROAD TO PERDITION is that gangster movie that came out to pretty good reviews a couple years ago that we all forgot about already, but I never saw it until now so I’m late to the party I guess. Please disregard.

This movie is modeled after old fashioned gangsters movies. But it’s based on a comic book by Max Allan Collins. The comic book itself is modeled after LONE WOLF AND CUB, either the Japanese comic books or the great movies based on the comic books, I’m not sure which. Also I’m guessing it’s a little bit based on some real life historical type business since it’s got Al Capone and whatsisdick Nitti in there and I think somebody said Elliot Ness is in the comic book, and maybe some other historical figures like Thomas Jefferson or Voltaire or one of those guys. As you know I don’t read comic strips, but I have read a good book by Collins called TWO FOR THE MONEY. Actually it’s two books reprinted as one by Hardcase Crime, taken from the Nolan series, which is modeled after Richard Stark’s Parker series. (read the rest of this shit…)

Vern Ponders Seagal’s MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE Linguistics!!

Monday, April 17th, 2006

SPOILER ALERT !!

Merrick actually looked up how to spell “shittiness”…

Vern just sent in this review of Steven Seagal’s new MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE.

Wow…what a sad title. Ever notice how the shittiness of titles seems commensurate with a project’s budgetary considerations, release plans, etc.? Someone should develop a “Historical Scale of Titular Shittiness” to see if this theory holds.

Seagal once broke Sean Connery’s wrist while training him for NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN. Let’s see if he now breaks Vern’s heart…

Hello, my name is Vern and I am currently rated one of North America’s top three or four practicing Seagalogists, as well as one of the top two Verns on google. I am the man to come to for the inside dope on every new Seagal picture. However for the last one, BLACK DAWN, the guy who gets me the early screeners fell through and I had to rent it after it hit the shelves just like anybody else. No big deal, I can take my lumps, but there’s a few guys out there – I remember Fat Paul was one of them, and a few others – they’re asking me if I can hook them up with the early review. And as someone who strives for excellence, I got no choice but to come through.

I missed my screener for MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE too but I managed to score the actual DVD just 48 hours before they hit the streets, and I’m here to share my preliminary findings. It’s an Easter miracle. (read the rest of this shit…)

Brick

Friday, April 14th, 2006

BRICK sounds like a good name for a blaxploitation movie about a dude named Brick, but that’s not what it is. It’s actually a detective movie starring all teenagers. There are only two grown ups in the whole movie, and one of them, incidentally, is Shaft.

At first I thought it was like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: THE ADAPTATION where a bunch of kids made the movie but they didn’t know very many grownups who would hang out in the backyward with them so they just got their friends from class to play adults. But then I realized no, it’s just a gimmick. It’s kind of like those movies like BUGSY MALONE and HAWK JONES where it’s kids playing adult type characters. Or like that episode of M.A.S.H. where a magic genie turns them all into kids but they have little kid-sized army uniforms and they build a tree house and do combat surgery in there. Or what about Veggie Tales, it’s like that only instead of vegetables as the Bible it’s teens as hard boiled noir type characters. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Godfather

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

That’s right, the god damn GODFATHER. I mean, what is there even left to say about THE GODFATHER? Well, I’ll tell you.

Bear with me though, I’m about to mention Steven Seagal again. Yesterday I was reading Seagal’s entry on wikipedia when I came across a section talking about the field of Seagalogy, mentioning me as the inventor and linking to a separate entry just about me. I couldn’t believe it. After all I’ve been through – getting rejected from the Online Film Critics Society, being hated by the newsies on Ain’t It Cool for years, failing to stop the Iraq war and even, as you can see above, watching GARFIELD – after all that struggle, here I am, acknowledged in reference material, and described as a “noted internet film critic.”

Can you believe that? Noted. (read the rest of this shit…)

Inside Man

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

INSIDE MAN has gotta be Spike Lee’s most mainstream joint ever. It’s a gimmicky bank robber thriller, not the type of story and characters he as a jointmaker is known for. You can go down his entire jointography and he’s never done this type of movie – it’s not as gritty and realistic as CLOCKERS, it’s not as meandering and novelistic as THE 25TH HOUR or SUMMER OF SAM, it’s not something he seems to be as passionate about as say MALCOLM X or the Jackie Robinson movie he’s been talking about doing for about 500 years that now is gonna be a Robert Redford Joint. (Yeah right Robert Redford, you had no idea Spike Lee wanted to do a Jackie Robinson movie. Who would’ve ever known Spike was interested in that sort of thing?)

So it’s not pure 100% grade A Spike Lee Joint which accounts for its lack of greatness, but I think it’s also kind of a good thing for Spike. He’s never made a movie completely lacking in merit (well, I haven’t seen SHE HATE ME yet) but he seems to get less and less focused as he gets older. Maybe doing one mainstream thriller will get him back in the mode of telling a somewhat concise story. I don’t know. (read the rest of this shit…)