"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Vern Predicts: Jeremy Renner

vernpredictsMe on Jeremy Renner in my HURT LOCKER review last July:

I think he’ll get an Oscar nomination and a bunch of big roles that hopefully don’t waste his talent too much. In fact I’m gonna go ahead and predict that they’ll give him one of the big comic book roles. We can have Chopper as Hulk, Patrick Bateman as Batman and Jeffrey Dahmer as Captain America.

Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision Blog, today:

Jeremy Renner is in final negotiations to join “The Avengers,” Marvel Studios’ big-screen take on its superhero team that’s being directed by Joss Whedon.

Renner will play the bow-and-arrow-carrying hero Hawkeye, who, while not one of the initial members of the team when it was created in the 1960s, became an integral member soon after when the misguided villain switched sides.

So he won’t be playing Captain America, but they’ll at least be co-workers. Not a bullseye for me, but not a bad shot, huh?

Yippee Ki Yay contest winners

tn_wombtotombThe Ain’t It Cool News has posted the winners for that Yippee Ki Yay Youtube video contest that Titan Books put on. I think you guys will get a kick out of some of these. The top winner was Patrick Newman who will hopefully continue being creative and making videos although he could just spend all his time playing his new Playstation part 3.

Vern’s Yippee Ki Yay, Moviegoer contest winners!!

Hey friends, Vern here to update you on the winners of the video-making contest that Titan Books had to promote my new review collection, Yippee Ki Yay, Moviegoer: Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics. (Just to warn you, some of the “other important topics” include Mary Poppins, the movie “Garfield” and a painful medical procedure I once had. But it’s a pretty good book. You should read it.) To be frankly honest it looks like there was a little less elbow grease put into this contest than into the similar one we had for Seagalogy. Most of the videos were obviously things people had already made and decided to enter. Fair enough though, because the book is a collection of pre-existing reviews. (read the rest of this shit…)

Scanners II: The New Order

tn_scanners2Of all David Cronenberg’s movies the one that lends itself the most to sequels is SCANNERS. I mean I guess they could’ve easily done M. BUTTERFLY: APOCALYPSE or DEAD RINGERS: THE CRACKDOWN, but in my opinion extending the SCANNERS story makes a little more sense, so that’s the one they made a bunch of sequels to. It’s funny though – I think looking back we have an understanding of Cronenberg as a soft-spoken genius with half his brain devoted to insane perversion. We’ve seen his chest vaginas, gristle guns and everything. We’ve seen him stay true to his vision for 30 years, and once he got bored with the New Flesh and hooked up with Viggo it was just as good and not much more mainstream. He’s a true Canadian original. (read the rest of this shit…)

Scanners

tn_scannersSCANNERS is a story about mutants with psychic powers, a generation of babies messed up by a medicine their mothers took, now grown and finding their brains too powerful, causing them to hear other people’s thoughts, and giving them dangerous powers like they can drop you to the ground with a nose bleed just by thinking about you too hard. If you get a greeting card from a scanner that says “Thinking of you,” take that as a threat. (read the rest of this shit…)

SONOFABITCH!

theyliveIt seems the novelist Jonathan Lethem is writing a book-length essay about THEY LIVE (a fact I learned from this post on the blog of Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger). This is good news for the world. Bad news for me, though, since I’ve long been planning on doing exactly fucking that for my next Lulu book. (read the rest of this shit…)

Where Eagles Dare

tn_whereeaglesdareIn Act I, Scene III of Richard III, Shakespeare wrote that there are places up so high that only eagles got the balls to go up there (exact quote). Schloβ Adler up in the Alps is not one of those places. It’s all Nazis and undercover MI-6 operatives in this joint. No birds at all as far as I noticed.

Loosely based on Disneyland’s Skyway and Matterhorn rides, WHERE EAGLES DARE is the story of a team of British commandos (Richard Burton, others) and one American (Clint) sent on a mission to infiltrate the Nazi-infested castle and rescue a captured general before he’s enhanced-interrogationed into giving up the Allied war plans or something. So they have to skydive, go on a snow trek, mountain climb, sneak in wearing Nazi uniforms, fit in, drink German beer (which Clint was against in THE ROOKIE, saying it has no aftertaste), and all kinds of dangerous shit. (read the rest of this shit…)

TV review: LOST – “The End”

tn_lostI’ve been hearing about this TV show “Lost” for a long time now, everybody loves it, lotta hype and what not. So I decided to check it out last Sunday when they had a special 2 1/2 hour episode called “The End.”

Lost is the story of some people trapped on an island that as far as I can tell is made out of 50% soil and rock, 25 percent foliage, 10% magic and 15% metaphor. The guy from “Party of 5” is their leader and he’s trying to stop THE STEPFATHER himself, Terry O’Quinn, from “destroying the island” and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean. In this episode they do not explain why or how or what the fuck. But these two guys see each other and run at each other and then jump up in the air and it cuts to a commercial. (read the rest of this shit…)

Vern recommends the shit out of UNDISPUTED III: REDEMPTION!!!

tn_undisputed3Walter Hill’s original UNDISPUTED was an exaggerated look at the classic concept of the prison boxing league. UNDISPUTED II showed that the same thing is going on in Russia, but with full-on mixed martial arts. Naturally UNDISPUTED III: REDEMPTION takes it to the next level by creating an international tournament for the champions from all different prisons. Part 4 might have to send them into space.

But the true genius of director Isaac Florentine’s two DTV UNDISPUTED sequels is that each one stars the villain of the previous chapter. In UNDISPUTED II: LAST MAN STANDING Michael Jai White took over for Ving Rhames as the asshole accused rapist heavyweight champ George “The Iceman” Chambers. He was the last man standing of the title. Part III, which comes out on DVD Tuesday, is about the next-to-last man standing. Scott Adkins returns as the man whose knee the Iceman crushed, disgraced Russian prison champion and convicted double-murderer Uri Boyka. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tony Jaa rides his elephant off into the sunset?

ongbak2Well, if you haven’t heard already, it’s being reported that a couple days ago Tony Jaa literally shaved his head, rode an elephant up to a Buddhist temple and took his vows to become a monk. The most complete article on the matter is at twitch.

(read the rest of this shit…)