Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
First of all I gotta thank my man with a plan Jeremiah for sending me a screener of this movie. Unfortunately Jeremiah is no longer able to send me free porno dvds, but he has more than made up for that unfortunate situation by sending me this very enjoyable obscurity in Badass Cinema.
Now some of you may know, but I sure didn’t, that Tom Laughlin made one non-Billy Jack movie after the success of BILLY JACK. And it was this. He wrote it under a pseudonym and apparently the director is his son Frank. It’s a western, but with much of the cornball liberal action movie tone I loved about the BILLY JACK pictures. It is about to come out on video and I think dvd for the first time ever. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ron O'Neal, Tom Laughlin
Posted in Reviews, Western | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
Alot of you know that I am a big fan of the surrealist movement. Well actually I do not know a whole lot about the history of the movement but among respected film Writers I’m pretty damn sure I am the biggest supporter of Jean Claude Van Damme’s surrealist period, which is best represented by his collaboration with Tsui Hark and Dennis Rodman, Double Team. Well someone pointed me towards Louie Bunuel the famous surrealist and I was able to catch one of his later works, the discreet charm blah blah blah, on the Bravo network.
Most of you sickos probaly know Louie from that old porno The Andalusian Dog where some sick fuck cuts a lady right in the eyeball (but it’s actually a cow’s eyeball which is almost as bad, I mean jesus). He did that one with Salvador Dali and in his later solo work he still loved the dream logic of the surrealism but he used it to make comedies making fun of dumb rich people. And this my friends is a good fucking use for a movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Luis Bunuel
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
You talk about striving for excellence – to a guy like me, Sergio Leone is just about the highest level of excellence any director could aspire to. He took the western genre, which had grown stale and conservative, and injected it full of his Leone brand cinematic steroid and turned it into an unstoppable super soldier version of the old beast, one so powerful it became its own genre that is still worshipped and studied by cult movie watchers to this day. All he did was five westerns bookended by a gladiator picture and a gangster epic. But those westerns contributed so much to the Badass Cinema I worship to this day that they might as well be considered its legal guardians.
Think about it: the stoic Clint Eastwood persona of A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, which he parlayed into an entire brilliant career and which spun off into a hundred bastard sons in the action genre, from Steven Seagal to Daniel Craig. The epic cinemascope wide shots showing the vastness of the desert, cutting to the extreme closeups on some ugly bastard’s squinty eyes, surrounded by wrinkles and lines of sweat. The ingenious use of sound – buzzing flies, some piece of metal somewhere clanging in the wind, the clicking of guns, and of course the legendary Ennio Morricone scores that are forever glued to any memory anybody ever had of these movies. Leone’s style is like a drug, it heightens all your senses. You feel like a blind man whose hearing becomes more powerful to balance out the loss of the eye sight, but then you get the eye sight back for some reason and the super-hearing stays so you go watch some westerns. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: James Coburn, Sergio Leone, spaghetti westerns
Posted in Reviews, War, Western | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
This is the story of Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican modernist known for her great painting and sexy monobrow. This is a gal who means many things to many people. An important artist, but also a feminist, a revolutionary, an unashamed bisexual. And you could probaly guess, since there’s a biography movie made out of her, that the poor gal had to be either alcoholic or disabled. In this case she was disabled, unpleasantly impaled in a bus accident, sporadically confined to a full body cast. But since she’s an artist she paints pretty butterflies on it.
You know Salma Hayek will get an oscar nomination for this, mainly because of the bodycast. I gotta be honest though, ’cause that’s my job. I don’t think she’s necessarily doing great work here. She’s just doing pretty good in a role that she is good for, that happens to be real Important because it’s a real person, who was a brilliant artist, who was disabled, and had some kind of political context to her life that can be simplified into movie form. I’m not saying Salma is bad, especially not compared to her embarassing improv role in TIMECODE. And I can’t think of anyone better for the role. But she didn’t exactly blow my mind either, especially not during the scenes where she wears a schoolgirl uniform and tries to pass for a teen. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Molina, Julie Taymor, Salma Hayek
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Romance | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
There are about three kinds of Jean-Claude Van Damme pictures in my opinion. There are the real experimental, artsy type like Double Team and Knock Off (the best kind), the real cheap and crappy ones like Cyborg and Double Impact (the worst kind), and the more expensive ones where he’s trying to become a more respectable mainstream action star (the kind that Sudden Death is).
I have a hard time reviewing this picture since it is an unofficial sequel to Die Hard. For those of you who don’t know I am a HUGE fan of the Die Hard pictures (starring Bruce Willis, look it up if you haven’t seen it) because, as a fan do I want to support this as part of the die hard mythos or should I not support it since it is unofficial, it is hard to say. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Die Hard on a ____, JCVD, Peter Hyams, Powers Boothe
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 46 Comments »
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
First of all I want to thank this news group for the way you guys are pretty nice to me. To be frankly honest a lot of the people I’ve bumped into since getting out have NOT been exactly COOL about it. Although not everyone especially people that don’t know about it, they are nice. But point is you guys have not given me too much shit as far as I’m concerned. Quite honestly it means a lot to old vern. It really is a fucking beautiful world out there in my opinion but a lot of people are too wrapped up in evil and especially negativity to really breathe it in
Thanks especially to my bud who gave me some writing tips and movie ideas to rent. Tonight I rented fly away home on account of the “posting” here about it. Yes, it was a good movie although it is about geese. In fact in my opinion the movie is god damned beautiful both as far as the look and as far the story plot. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Paquin, Carroll Ballard, Jeff Daniels
Posted in Drama, Family, Reviews | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
Some video association recently named Sylvester Stallone “Action Star of the Millennium.” Well nobody knows where the fuck that’s coming from, mainly because there are about 999 years left on this millennium and about 900 on the previously millennium where nobody had figured out how to make action movies yet. But also there’s the sorry state of Sylvester Stallone’s career.
Now by that I do not mean that Entertainment Weekly shit that he is not making hits. There are many actors who are not making hits who are still completely respectable, such as our friend Mr. Eastwood. But Stallone is in the Arnold category, he’s done so much worse than making less money. His good days are so far behind him you almost don’t even associate him with them. First he turned Rambo into an icon and became the symbol of everything that is wrong with our country, our culture, our movies, and our clothes. (I mean that headband looked fuckin ridiculous.) Then he started makin shit like COBRA and DEMOLITION MAN and etc. etc. He fell so hard that even HE started noticing it after a while. So he went through a stage where he was fighting for critical respectability. He tried to go the Travolta route and lobbied for the role of Max Cherry in JACKIE BROWN. When that didn’t pan out he got fat for the role in COPLAND and america was under his spell until, you know, the movie came out. Soon he became so desperate he tried to revive both the Rocky and Rambo series, but luckily that hasn’t worked out yet. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Dennehy, David Caruso, David Morrell, Jack Starrett, Richard Crenna, Sylvester Stallone, Ted Kotcheff
Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 26 Comments »
Sunday, December 22nd, 2002
For some reason I didn’t expect all that much from Martin Scorsese’s new picture GANGS OF NEW YORK. I’m not really a big fan of period pieces, I’m just as ignorant of history as anybody else who is ignorant of history and I don’t have any opinion one way or the other on “Leo” who plays the protagonist Amsterdam or “Danny” who plays Robert Deniro playing an early gang leader named Bill the Butcher. (You know, the same way Roddy Piper played Kurt Russel in THEY LIVE).
But I guess I forgot about that Scorsese, he knows how to make a fuckin movie. GANGS OF NEW YORK is an archetypal type story of some guy whose dad was killed in a gang battle, he escaped and hid away for many years and then came back for revenge. But you know he’s a cowboy or a samurai or a wizard or some shit so he plans for the perfect time to murder Bill in front of everybody at a big celebration of the anniversary of killing his dad. And in the meanwhile he befriends him, to make it all the easier and all the worse. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Daniel Day-Lewis, Edward Norton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese, Spike Lee
Posted in Drama, Reviews | No Comments »
Thursday, December 19th, 2002
Well I got my wish, they made a part 2. When last we left Merlin, Frodo, Viggo, Sam, Dwarf, and Elf, they were all split up. Merlin fell down a hole and there was no giant talking bird to save him this time. Everybody was separated or something. Frodo and Sam were going to go throw the ring in the volcano. I can’t remember what else.
Well part 2 picks up right in the middle of part 1, not where it left off. We find that when Merlin fell down that hole actually he did it on purpose to fight a demon in mid-air. It was awesome. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, Peter Jackson, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Action, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | No Comments »
Saturday, December 14th, 2002
I don’t know what the deal is with this movie but I gotta admit I kinda liked it. Basically it is your formula movie about young kids competing in something, like LOVE AND BASKETBALL or KARATE KID or WORLD’S BIGGEST GANG BANG or that kind of thing. But in this case instead of sports they are competing at marching band.
The main kid is Nick Cannon who I just looked up on IMDb. I guess he was on the “nickelodeon” kids channel and even had a show named after him. So basically he is an unknown. He is real good as a prodigy on the drum. Not the drums, just one drum that you carry around. This kid is real good, especially good at memorizing and picking things up fast, but you find out later that he can’t read music. Still, he gets a scholarship to this college and goes to this marching band and finds out it’s alot more strict than he expected. They got a curfew, they got a drum major that hates him, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charles Stone III, Nick Cannon, Orlando Jones, Zoe Saldana
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews, Romance | No Comments »
