I always enjoy Elmore Leonard, and I got no excuse for why I haven’t read his book Pronto . But I did just check out Jim McBride’s Showtime TV movie version of this book that introduced Raylan Givens, the cowboy-hat-wearing U.S. marshal that Tim Olyphant plays on the show ‘Justified.’ It’s a very different take on the character and feels very TV-movie, but I thought it was an enjoyable one with a funny, laid back Leonard feel. (read the rest of this shit…)
Pronto
Jaws: The Revenge
Let’s say you’re a huge great white shark. I mean, just enormous. You’re gonna need to eat, right? Sometimes you can eat orcas, but you try to avoid those because sometimes they’ll eat you back. And little tiny fish won’t do it. A guy your size, it’s hard to find a meal that’s filling.
So you come across this nice little joint called Amity Island. Wide open, not much competition from other sharks or orcas. (There was one smaller shark, but some people killed it, mistaking it for you. Suckers!) So it’s a good set up. Just little pink morsels wiggling around, as far as the eye can see. Which is not that far actually, because sharks don’t have very good vision. But they do have a weird thing where they can sense the electromagnetic pulse of even a heartbeat. And these heartbeats feel delicious. (read the rest of this shit…)
a little clarification about UNIVERSAL SOLDIER “4”
(an outlawvern.com fucking exclusive)
The other day the internet was set on fire and punched in the face with reports from Cannes that John Hyams (UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION) would probly be returning with Van Damme and Lundgren for another UNISOL picture, and in 3-D. This is of course great news for people like us who have seen REGENERATION (currently my pick for best DTV movie ever made) and are anxious to see Hyams direct something else, anything else. And of course we’re happy to see more of Van Damme and Lundgren, especially if they can be as great as they were in that movie.
But 3-D? Does that mean they expect to release it theatrically? Couldn’t Variety have explained this more? I’m not trying to be a journalist but since I’m more interested in this than the journalists and I happened to have contact info for John Hyams I decided I had to ask him about it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Jaws 3-D
Okay, good. If you’re gonna be an asshole and make a sequel to JAWS, I figure this is more how you should do it. You’re never gonna match the achievement of the first one, so you should zig where that one zags.
First you acknowledge that the directors you hired won’t have the skills to fill Spielberg’s filmatic shoes. You put director Joe Alves into the shoes and fill the extra toe-space with credit-flying, severed-limb-and-head-floating, dolphin-and-orca-jumping, water-splashing-in-the-camera, slow-motion-water-ski-jumping, harpoon-firing-just-like-FRIDAY-THE-13TH-3D-but-what’re-you-gonna-do-you’re-fighting-a-shark, fake-dragons-and-snakes-popping-out, shark-exploding-and-spraying-goo-all-over-the-audience 3-D. I mean, not on video, but that’s what it was originally, and I would’ve enjoyed that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Jaws 2
Watching JAWS 2 for the first time I was thinking maybe man is actually worse than shark. Because would shark make a sequel to JAWS? I don’t think shark would. I think they’d know to leave it well enough alone. But then I thought well, the shark in this one, Jaws 2 we’ll call him, is pretty much sequelizing what Bruce “Jaws” Shark did in part 1. He sees that Bruce caused a splash (get it?) eating people at Amity Island and he thought you know what, I will do the same thing but not as good and with a higher body count.
So I guess man and shark are the same. Sharks swarm when there’s blood in the water, men when there’s money to be made. We’re creatures of pure instinct. (read the rest of this shit…)
ON DEADLY GROUND: Still ahead of its time
I’m sure I’m not the only one this has occurred to. In the end of his directorial debut ON DEADLY GROUND, Steven Seagal did a speech and slide presentation about the environment that seemed to predict Al Gore’s Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize winning AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Seagal was mocked and ridiculed (admittedly partly because the movie is hilariously absurd) but the essential truth contained in the movie can’t be denied. And now, with this disastrous oil spill, his points seems more relevant than ever.
I was thinking about that when I came across this article from the Huffington Post about a whistleblower in the Alaskan oil industry who talks about oil workers faking test results for “preventers” similar to ones that failed to do their job of preventing the explosion in the BP spill. This whistleblower could almost be Seagal’s late, lamented buddy in the movie. He told Forrest Taft about the “faulty preventers” that were being used despite the danger of causing something like this. In the movie, Taft snuck onto the rig and heroically imploded it. We weren’t so lucky in real life.
http://youtu.be/X94EcTZBg_8
Jaws
With IRON MAN 2 in theaters and on Slurpee cups I’d say Summer Movie Season 2010 is officially underway. And I thought a good way to welcome the season would be by watching some movies I haven’t seen before: the JAWS sequels. Only thing is, as much as I love it I never actually wrote a review of JAWS. And I’d feel like an asshole reviewing the (I’m gonna guess possibly crappy) sequels and ignoring the original masterpiece.
But wait! There may be an answer contained within the Outlaw Vault. I knew I had written something about it, I just hadn’t posted it before. Back when I was considering a book about summer movies I wrote a rough draft for part of the ’75 chapter. So even though I’m still alive I’m gonna clean it up a little and package it as new material, like a posthumous B.I.G. guest appearance. (read the rest of this shit…)
Legion
I thought DAYBREAKERS was much better than the dumb B-movie I expected, but if I needed one of those in my diet it’s a good thing LEGION also came out on DVD this week. It’s a cheesy but sort of interesting movie about a group of stock characters trapped at one of those old timey diners that if you’re a character in a movie you will drive out into the middle of nowhere and happen to be at when some shit goes down. In this case it happens to be ground zero in God’s plan to wipe out humanity because, according to the narrator, “He got tired of all the bullshit.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Daybreakers
Man, DAYBREAKERS was not what I expected. I heard some good things (all of it from commenters here) and I had high hopes for a dumb-but-fun B movie. But I’d also seen pictures of Willem Dafoe with a crossbow so I thought maybe it had a pretty cool concept of a world populated by civilized vampires, but that it would then go into a familiar vampire hunting drill that hopefully wouldn’t pale too bad in comparison to BLADE and VAMPIRES.
But it’s not that type of movie at all. The crossbow is strictly for self defense. I was even wrong about who the main character in the movie would be. (read the rest of this shit…)
Iron Man 2
I never reviewed IRON MAN, because I just didn’t feel like I had anything new to say about it. I enjoyed it just like everybody else did, for the same reasons, and every websight I read had examined the shit out of it, so I just let it go.
Now part 2 is out and I almost did the same thing (tradition is very important to me) but as I was thinking about writing up an explanation of why I wasn’t writing up the movie I realized I did have a couple things to say, so what the hell. Review time. (read the rest of this shit…)
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