"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford

I saw KILLING THEM SOFTLY today and I’m working on the review right now, and that made me realize that when I finally caught up with the director’s previous movie earlier in the year I didn’t ever post a review of it. But it turns out I did write some stuff in my notebook, so I dug that up and I don’t mean to brag but I am a pretty good typist so here is a quickie review for you, friends.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD has gotta be the longest title to a movie that I’ve ever reviewed. What’s that, 17 syllables? THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS is only 11, LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GAHOOLE is 12 or 13 (depending on your pronunciation of “owls”), and both of those have colons I think, so that softens the blow. This has no colons. This title is amazing.
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Silent Night

SILENT NIGHT is the latest killer Santa movie, directed by Steven C. Miller (AUTOMATON TRANSFUSION, THE AGGRESSION SCALE) and written by Jayson Rothwell (Van Damme’s SECOND IN COMMAND). I hear it’s supposed to be a remake of SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT, although I didn’t notice it in the credits. There are only two things I spotted that identify it as such:

1. they redo the unforgettable impaled-on-hunting-trophy death of Linnea Quigley’s character from the original

2. the end credits have a punk version of “Silent Night” where they changed the “holy night” lyric to “deadly night”
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Hey friends, why not browse the review archive?

I’m trying to decide if Clubside Chris is my Q, or my Lucius Fox. I would say he’s the janitor from DIE HARD 2, but he’s too high tech for that. And it wouldn’t be nice to say he’s Kevin Smith from DIE HARD 4.

Anyway he’s been striving the shit out of the excellence and is programming in his computers and everything and honestly I got no clue what he’s doing with most of this but he keeps coming up with great features for outlawvern.com. What he’s really been sweating over for a while is this database that creates new and better ways to browse the review archive. If you look above there’s a “Reviews” button you can click on that goes to a dropdown menu with the different options. You can look at all my reviews in traditional alphabetical order, you can look at them in chronological order by release date, you can flip through the fancy timeline version…

The options I’m really excited about are the ones that are sorted by category: all my DTV reviews in chronological order, all my slasher reviews. There’s a new one called “Icons” where you can access all my Nicolas Cages, all my Dolphs, stuff like that, with all the movie posters of the reviewed titles, in release order.

I love these because I’m jumping around watching and writing about all different movies and they’re slowly forming into this history, so I can look at them in context. I can look at the DTV list and see that the earliest one I’ve reviewed is VIDEO VIOLENCE from ’87 and the next is SILENT NIGHT, DEAD NIGHT 3 in ’89, so that encourages me to look into what else came out before and around that time and see what’s up. It takes these scattershot writings and forms them together into a body of research that I’m building for the betterment of mankind or whatever.

Anyway when you feel like reading some reviews please try these features out and let Chris know what you think or any suggestions you have for how it could be even better.

thanks everybody and thanks Chris

Wu Dang

WU DANG is not only an alternate spelling of “Wu Tang” and an excellent new exclamation to use, but also a nice period martial arts picture that just came to the region 1 DVD. The director is Patrick Leung (THE TWINS EFFECT II), the action choreographer is the great Corey Yuen.

Vincent Zhao, star of TRUE LEGEND, plays Dr. Tang Yunlong, a sort of more buttoned down Indiana Jones type of treasure hunter. In the opening he goes to appraise a legendary ancient sword, like Steven Seagal does on the weekends. He identifies it as a fraud, but the carrying case is apparently real because he breaks it open and pulls out a map to 7 treasures on the Wu Dang Mountain. Then it’s “well, gotta be going now fellas” as he tries to walk away with the map, which means he has to fight his way out. This is great because he’s wearing a pinstrip suit, a bow tie, round glasses and white gloves and he’s leaping through the air, punching through walls, crushing guys’ legs in doors. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Paperboy

“If anyone’s gonna pee on him, it’s gonna be me!”

THE PAPERBOY is the new one from Academy Award nominee for Best Director Lee Daniels. That’s the guy that did PRECIOUS, BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE as well as SHADOWBOXER, BASED ON THE IDEA THAT HELEN MIRREN AND CUBA GOODING JR. ARE ASSASSINS AND SHE RAISED HIM BUT ALSO THEY’RE FUCKING AND SHE HAS CANCER. I feel like the critical community embraced PRECIOUS without really picking up on how nutty it was, or doing a background check on Mr. Daniels’s previous work. So they did cartoony “wh-wh-whUHHH?” double-takes when THE PAPERBOY played at Cannes and had a part where Nicole Kidman territorially pisses on Zac Efron from HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. Because it’s a Lee Daniels movie.
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Lawless

Remember after THE ROAD director John Hillcoat had this movie called THE WETTEST COUNTY IN THE WORLD that was written by his THE PROPOSITION writer (and famed singer) Nick Cave, he had at-that-time-hot-stuff Shia LaBeouf signed on and everything but nobody would fund the fuckin thing. Then suddenly a mysterious benefactor named Megan Ellison comes into Hollywood and gives him money and gives P.T. Anderson money to make THE MASTER and Andrew Dominik to do KILLING THEM SOFTLY and a bunch of other guys like this. So the legends were true, there are some good rich people out there.
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Stolen

From the director of THE EXPENDABLES 2 and a synonym for the word “TAKEN” comes this mediocre Cager about a “master thief” whose disgruntled ex-partner kidnaps his daughter.

Mr. Cage plays Will “Gum” Montgomery, the leader of a crew of thieves about to heist $10 million in cash from a bank vault. The FBI (Danny Huston and Mark Valley) are hot on their trail, staking the place out, SWAT team at the ready. But when I say “the place” I mean some diamond place that the crew decoy-cased to throw the man off their scent. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tightrope

After some family related emotional exhaustion this Thanksgiving I thought it would be a good time to seek the comfort of the ol’ Clint Eastwood box set. Clint and his movies are always there for us, even if we chose not to follow his political advice. He forgives us, that’s why his movies are still there.

Unfortunately when I flipped through the set the first one I came to that I didn’t remember seeing was TIGHTROPE. And it’s a pretty good movie but let’s just say it’s not the most wholesome and thankful one. It’s pretty nasty. This is about him exploring the sexual underworld to catch a serial killer-rapist. Pre-CSI sex crimes shit, with a not so pleasant view of humanity, in my opinion. And that’s including the good guys.
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Life of Pi

LIFE OF PI is the story of an Indian guy (Irrfan Khan) who for some reason has a white author guy (Rafe Spall) he doesn’t know come over to his house to interview him about his life. It’s kind of unclear what the situation is here, but apparently the writer guy is not in the book the movie is based on, so I guess this is a dramatization of what the making of the book would’ve been like if it was a true story that a a real guy told to the author instead of something that he made up and wrote using his imagination and talents. I don’t get it, but it kind of reminds me of BIG FISH. Sophomore year imagination class. That’s at least a huge step forward for screenwriter David Magee, considering he wrote FINDING NEVERLAND.

[UPDATE: Okay, never mind, I’m told the writer is in the book. It would be cooler if in the book it was Ang Lee that comes over to his house.]
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Do you guys know about ‘Dracula 2013: Breed of Darkness’?

I just found out about this and I thought you guys had the right to know. According to this cheesy official websight, the makeup effects artist/FRIDAY THE 13TH VII: THE NEW BLOOD director John Carl Buechler will be helming a martial arts movie about mercenaries recovering Dracula’s casket from a sunken Nazi submarine. I mean, I generally assume a movie about that is gonna be shitty, but if they really have this cast I’m intrigued. The sight lists:

Robin Shou (Liu Kang from MORTAL KOMBAT)
Michael Madsen
Matthias Hues (NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER 2, KICKBOXER 2, MISSION OF JUSTICE)
Cynthia Rothrock (read the rest of this shit…)