I was proud to do another piece for the Village Voice this week, but that’s not the only place I’m in print. I also got interviewed for a new zine called Kill You Last, which is all about action movies. Check out the logo there. Can anyone tell me where the ‘YOU’ comes from? I know the other two.
I never got interviewed by a zine before – also, I didn’t know that people still made them – but this guy Wil explained to me what he wanted to do and I knew it was up my alley. He writes passionately about action movie topics such as going to the EXPENDABLES 2 premiere, mediocre Bruce Willis movies, ’80s VHS covers, some asshole that wrote a book about Seagal, etc. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, and I strongly disagree with his take on HAYWIRE, but I like what he’s doing. The best topic in there is an interview with somebody who’s working on a documentary called CHUCK NORRIS VS. COMMUNISM about an underground network that smuggled bootlegs of American action movies into communist Romania.
Hey friends, somehow I have another piece in the ol’ Village Voice. 
THE BOURNE LEGACY is a sequel with the uphill task of replacing its title character. Not recasting, like James Bond, but creating a new hero, like when Valerie Harper got fired from Valerie and they brought in Sandy Duncan as her sister-in-law. I actually think that’s more interesting than if they just made another Matt Damon BOURNE. I liked those movies but I think they’re pretty repetitive, and they wrapped up that storyline anyway. Enough of that, I say. But I’m surprised the studio thought there were enough people like me to justify making this movie.
I don’t know if this is true but I heard it’s good luck for movie critics to start a year with a Clint Eastwood review. So I saved TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE for the occasion.
Remember those LORDS OF RINGS movies and books they used to have, about the magic ring that a bunch of little people had to throw into a volcano because it was so powerful it would warp the mind of even a good man, and dessicate him into a freaky, fish-munching Gollum? I always thought that story was supposed to be about the arms race, but it turns out the ring was actually a metaphor for The Lord of the Rings itself. The power of this thing has turned director Peter Jackson skinny and made him jones for his precious so bad that he’s adapted the first third of J.R.R. Tolkein’s 320 page children’s book The Hobbit into a 169 minute part 1-of-3 that’s somehow gonna have an additional 20-25 minutes added for video, meaning the full movie will likely end up being around 9 1/2 hours by the time the third blu-ray comes out around Christmas 2015. See, Jackson found a bunch of appendixes and supplemental materials, some recipes, golf score cards and a doodle of boobs that Tolkien drew on the back of an Arby’s menu, and he felt it was important to include all that. And in order to pack even more in he developed new technology to shoot at double the standard number of frames so that certain theaters willing to shell out the dough to upgrade their digital projectors can project it to look like a shitty shot-on-video mini-series or an HDTV somebody set up wrong because they didn’t know any better.
A couple weeks ago the studio “lifted the embargo” as they say, and all the online critics unchained their DJANGO reviews even though non-critics wouldn’t see the thing until Christmas. I think that’s a silly ritual because I wasn’t gonna read that shit! This is the new Quentin Tarantino movie, you go in fresh. I already know I want to see any movie he makes, I don’t gotta read everything about it first. In case you’re different I’ve tried to mark the biggest spoilers in this review, but as usual I recommend seeing the movie first.
I skipped BLACK X-MAS for six years ’cause everybody told me it was bottom-of-the-barrel, but after I heard Brian Collins and some guys discuss it on some podcast about their favorite horror remakes I decided to try it out this year. Of course it’s a disgrace to the pioneering original Bob Clark BLACK CHRISTMAS from 1974. But it’s a fun disgrace.
Finally the truth can be told. Because you know what? We have the right to know.
