My buddy Telf tipped me off to this one. E! Online is reporting that Wu-Tang Clan abbot/GHOST DOG scorer the RZA is claiming that Russell Crowe is in his long-in-development kung fu movie THE MAN WITH THE IRON FIST. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, man, but we live in a world where Steven Seagal co-stars with Robert DeNiro and Jessica Alba, where Dolph Lundgren fights Jet Li on the big screen, and where the guy from THE INSIDER and GLADIATOR is hanging out with Bobby Digital. These are some pretty good times, in my opinion. (read the rest of this shit…)
Albert Johnson (Charles Motherfuckin Bronson) is a trapper drifting through snowy 1931 Canada when he happens to come across some assholes betting on dog fights. One of the dogs is injured and apparently Albert loves animals (when he’s not trapping them) so he takes the dog at gunpoint. In order to smooth things over he gives the owner $200, but just to be clear he’s not negotiating. He’s taking the dog. It’s just like a convenience charge or a dogfight interruption processing fee or something like that. The owner of the dog is Ed Lauter, so this whole incident must be why they don’t seem to like each other in 
THE FOUNTAINHEAD is the weirdest, most deranged movie I’ve seen in a while. I know you’re thinking wait a minute, that old Gary Cooper movie? He must mean ERASERHEAD or something. No, man, have you seen this thing? I guess to most people it doesn’t make sense to say that a beautiful 1949 drama from the director of DUEL IN THE SUN is more fucked up than 
I’ve never been much of a Chuck Norris fan, but maybe some day I could be if I fill in that gap in my badass cinema knowledge. I’ll always give a guy a shot. So I figured I couldn’t go wrong with THE DELTA FORCE. Not only is it about an elite counter-terrorist special ops team (same one as on 
George Clooney is… THE AMERICAN. In Anton Corbijn’s Americanized remake of Soderbergh’s THE LIMEY, Clooney plays–
MACHETE is the story of Machete, a man with alot of machetes. That is why he is named Machete. Danny Trejo (MARKED FOR DEATH, URBAN JUSTICE) stars alongside Steven Seagal, Robert DeNiro, etc.
I didn’t have time to do a countdown for 
FACE/OFF is a crazy one-time-only deal, a strange collision of people and movements that could only really exist in that specific place and time. Not before, and definitely not since. On that day the wave of late ’80s Hong Kong action cinema crashed and exploded against the rocky shores of Hollywood, spraying sideways and soaking Nic Cage and John Travolta, who happened to be standing there. It’s not the only American John Woo movie I like (we’ll always have HARD TARGET and BLACKJACK), but it’s the only one that seems like The Real John Woo. It takes that old Hong Kong John Woo we loved, with all his emotional sincerity and unhinged sense of stylized action, and combines him organically with big budget Hollywood, achieving a smooth balance where the Hollywood bullshit side doesn’t overpower the other one. 
I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW is an hour long documentary following Jeff and Kelly, two fans of the ’80s teen pop singer Tiffany. While most of us forgot Tiffany existed until we read that she was teaming with Debbie Gibson for MEGA PYTHON VS. GATOROID, these two remained dedicated fans the whole time. Jeff continued to follow her career long after she fell off the map. He went to all her shows around Santa Cruz, went to every autograph show she did, collected magazine articles, wrote her letters, etc. And by etc. I mean that in ’88 he got arrested at a courthouse trying to give Tiffany some flowers and a samurai sword, and the year after that she got a restraining order against him. In the opening scene he sarcastically reads an old magazine article about it and laughs when they use his full name and call him a “stalker.” He thinks the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. But, you know, most of us don’t end up in any situations that could be blown into those particular proportions. 
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is the buzzed about “dude it’s the most fucked up ever” horror movie of the moment. I had heard it mentioned about ten thousand times but honestly managed to never see a poster, a trailer or a still from it or even really know much about its plot or origins other than the fucked up thing that happens in it. I guess there’s probly not much overlap between people who haven’t heard of this yet and people who are into crazy fucked up shit, but if you somehow manage to be in both camps I say stop reading this, cover your ears and go watch it immediately, and you will be surprised. I kind of wish I could’ve done that, but of course if I hadn’t heard about this madness I wouldn’t have made the effort to see it. It’s like that old zen coan, does crazy fucked up shit really happen in a movie if nobody ever watches it? 
