"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Potnah

In these, the last days of movies that come in boxes, we still face the allure of a mysterious DVD cover. You’re in the video store and you come across some obscure movie you never heard of before, and you can’t stop wondering what the fuck it is. And eventually you have to watch it.

Or at least I do. I’ve been doing this thing lately, partly thanks to feedback from you guys, of submitting links to my reviews to the “external reviews” section of the corresponding entries on IMDb. I stopped doing that years ago so I’ve been trying to catch up, going through all the old reviews and sending them in. It forces me to see how many reviews are already linked for all kinds of movies.
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September 12th, 2012 | 16 Comments »

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning trailer #2

A better trailer. Looks like a totally different movie than REGENERATION. Devereaux really is the bad guy now? Should be interesting.

thanks to Stu for the heads up

September 12th, 2012 | 31 Comments »

Snow White and the Huntsman

In the story of Snow White, if you remember, the huntsman is the guy who the evil queen sends to bring Snow White out into the woods and murder her. He’s gonna do it, ’cause work is work, but then he looks at her and falls in love with her beauty or is touched by her innocence or what have you and he just doesn’t have the stomach to, you know, cut open her stomach. (If she was ugly this would be a shorter tale). The Queen wants to know for sure the girl is dead but probly thinks it would be rude to make this guy haul back the whole body, so as a compromise she asks him to bring back some organs  (lungs and liver in the original, heart in the Disney version) so he carves up a pig and brings her impostor parts.

In this new movie-fication of the story the huntsman (Chris THOR Hemsworth) has to go find Snow White (Kristen PANIC ROOM Stewart) in the woods and bring the heart back to the Queen (Charlize Theron) because she needs it to magically stay young forever. He doesn’t know who the girl is and there’s not much tension like he’s really gonna kill her, he just doesn’t do it and then they travel on one of those slow, boring fantasy journeys occasionally enlivened by monster appearances. No pigs are harmed.
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September 12th, 2012 | 95 Comments »

Revenge

REVENGE is a 1990 film directed by the late Tony Scott. REVENGE is called REVENGE because it’s based on a novella called Revenge (by Jim Harrison) and because both are partly about revenge. But don’t let the stripped down title lead you to expect a pure revenge tale. Or at least not one that’s in a hurry to get to the revenge part.
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September 11th, 2012 | 35 Comments »

Takers

TAKERS is a heist movie that features Paul Walker (THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS 1,2,4-present) and Hayden Christensen (STAR WARS 2-3) as thieves, Jay Hernandez (HOSTEL, CARLITO’S WAY: RISE TO POWER) as one of the cops that’s out to get them, and Johnathon Schaech as their fence. Holy shit, this is like the EXPENDABLES of likable but bland, inarticulate would-be leading men! I bet they’re looking at Chris Klein for part 2. Maybe Scott Speedman.

Nah, that’s a cheap shot. The truth is I sort of like all those guys, or at least root for them to prove everybody wrong. Walker seems too nice to hate, and he’s been in a bunch of movies that I’ve enjoyed, and even been good in some of them. Hernandez – I liked the HOSTEL movies. Schaech channeled Swayze well in ROAD HOUSE 2. Christensen is all right, he’s just going down a path I cannot follow.
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September 10th, 2012 | 36 Comments »

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate 3D Imax

Wait a minute, you’re telling me that a Tsui Hark/Jet Li movie is showing in 3D Imax in my town? Shit, that’s something I gotta experience, something I gotta support. I managed to squeak it in on the next-to-last day of the 2 week limited engagement, so I’m sorry that I failed to give some of you a heads up.

Apparently this is a remake of DRAGON GATE INN (1966) which was already remade as NEW DRAGON GATE INN/DRAGON INN (1992), neither of which I’ve seen. It is not a remake of DRAGON TIGER GATE, which I have seen. Donnie Yen was offered the lead in this, but he turned it down because he was already in the ’92 version and thought that would be weird to do another one. Or maybe he was confusing it with DRAGON TIGER GATE and didn’t want to revisit the goofy hair style he had in that.
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September 6th, 2012 | 19 Comments »

Vern Tells It Like It Is: Forgiven

Go ahead, break my heart.

Clint Eastwood at the 2012 Republican National Convention

Now that it’s been a week since Clint Eastwood spoke at the Republican National Convention, and the rest of society has moved on to the Democratic National Convention and the great speeches by Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama, I’m psychologically and spiritually prepared to comment.

Man, you can imagine how crushed I felt when a buddy told me Clint was gonna speak at the RNC. You probly felt it too. They’d been making a big deal about some “Mystery Speaker” and I was actually looking forward to finding out which clown was gonna have to go up there and try to talk up Mitt Romney. Could be funny, I thought. I never guessed the dirty motherfuckers would give the job to one of my heroes.
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September 6th, 2012 | 191 Comments »

Sonny Boy

Sonny Boy (Michael Griffin) is a young man who lives in a metal shed, raised by a small town crime lord named Slue (Paul L. Smith, Bluto from POPEYE) and his lady Pearl (David Carradine – I think he’s playing a transvestite but maybe it’s gender-blind casting). Pearl has been protective of Sonny Boy ever since he was a baby. But obviously not protective enough, since they cut his tongue out (as a birthday present, they say), torture him with fire to give him tough skin, and train him to bite the necks of their enemies.
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September 4th, 2012 | 31 Comments »

Test out the timeline for us

Our ridiculously dedicated outlawvern.com programmer, Clubside Chris, has been working on a new way to browse my old reviews: the Timeline. You can access it through that link there or you can find it by clicking Home>All Reviews>Reviews (Timeline) in the menu bar at the top there. Check it out – it lets you flip through all the reviews in order by release date, so if you’re interested in a specific time period you can see how well I’ve covered it. I’m amazed to have anything this slick on here. It’s pretty cool.

It’s still a work in progress, but he has the reviews of ’99-’01 and ’12 sewn up. There are more than 500 reviews in there and Chris would appreciate some feedback on performance. So let him know in the comments here what you think and if you have any problems using it.

Meanwhile, Chris says he’s located 16 Ain’t It Cool reviews of mine that were missing from the archive. I had no idea. If you happen to remember any others that you read on there but could never find on here, please let us know.

Also I’d like to point out that at Home>All Reviews>DTV Reviews (Years) Chris has put my reviews of DTV movies in chronological order. I love it because it’s helping me to see the bigger picture of the history of DTV.

thanks as always to Chris and thanks to anybody who helps him out with feedback

September 4th, 2012 | 51 Comments »

Samsara

You know how some of these prestige pictures, especially around Oscar season, you’re waiting for the release date and then you find out it’s “New York and L.A.,” and if you’re anywhere else you gotta wait another couple weeks or a month or something? Well, for its first week SAMSARA was only playing two theaters: the Landmark Sunshine in New York and the Cinerama in Seattle. TAKE THAT LOS ANGELES. YOU CHUMPS HAD TO WAIT A WEEK.

I thought Cinerama got the exclusive because they’re one of the few places that can project 70 mm, which is what this was filmed in (Panavision Super 70 if you want to know the name brand) but then it ended up being released only in digital computer file form anyway, by request of the filmatists. “SCREENED IN 4K” they call it. I would complain except it looked great, so I’m sure they knew what they were doing. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 3rd, 2012 | 17 Comments »

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