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new reviews coming soon, don’t worry
Command Performance
Note: I sent this in to Ain’t It Cool last night but they didn’t post it, so what the hell, outlawvern.com exclusive. I’d kind of feel bad posting it there anyway because it’s not a very positive review and I don’t want to bum everybody out. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do I guess.
In COMMAND PERFORMANCE, director/co-writer Mr. Dolph Lundgren also steps out from behind the camera to star as the hero Joe. He’s just a regular guy, your usual American biker who hates guns and lives in Moscow and plays drums for a band called CMF who are opening for an American pop singer performing for the Russian president and his daughters when they’re taken hostage by vengeful terrorists and has to save the day. In other words, DIE HARD in a rock concert, with Dolph Lundgren on drums.
I know there are a contingent of you out there who are as excited for this one as I was. It’s the most anticipated DTV movie of the year besides the Scott Adkins/Isaac Florentine joint NINJA. So it kills me to say this but I don’t think COMMAND PERFORMANCE is one of Dolph’s better efforts. (read the rest of this shit…)
Looks like it’s official
A column in Variety off-handedly mentions Seagal being in MACHETE:
“It began production this week on `Machete,’ the film that Robert Rodriguez is co-directing with protege Ethan Maniquis. Danny Trejo is playing the title character and Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson and Jeff Fahey play supporting roles.”
I don’t think this needs an all-star cast, and I think Jessica Alba should have to get a real job by now, but this should be a crazy combination of people. See, Jeff Fahey’s on the list everybody, let’s stay calm. This is the first time I’ve seen Don Johnson mentioned too, that’s a good one.
I’m sure they rewrote the script since the draft I read, but I seriously have no idea who half of these people could be playing, especially Seagal.
Funny People
As a producer and an influence, Judd Apatow dominates the current comedy movie scene. His movies re-popularized the R-rated, filthy-mouthed comedy, they started a much-imitated improvised approach to comedy scenes, his TV shows and movies started or kickstarted the careers of Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Siegel, Jonah Hill and others. In a few years he’s completely changed comedy movies, started a few cliches, and gained the inexplicable antagonism of talkbackers.
But just a couple years ago he was a hard-working, mostly ignored writer and producer whose name you’d see on stuff like The Larry Sanders Show, ZERO EFFECT and ANCHORMAN. He was a behind-the-scenes guy for Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey. He rewrote THE CABLE GUY from Chris Farley vehicle to the weird stalker comedy it became. Apparently he wrote Jim Carrey some jokes for the AFI Salute to Clint Eastwood. Nobody hated him back then. He was just another joke writer who had been roommates with Adam Sandler. (read the rest of this shit…)
It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive
Part 3 is from 1987 (nine years after part 2) and it ups the ante even more. This is a great series because each is inventive and doesn’t just follow the formula of the previous one. This one opens with an outstanding standalone scene about a woman giving birth in the back of a cab. A cop is trying to help but as soon as he sees the baby he pulls out his piece and starts firing. Next we see police investigating a church where the baby crawled to die. They talk about the off screen corpse at the end of the trail of blood – more of the expertly staged unseen-mutant-baby that’s the trademark of the series. “It took four bullets to put this thing down,” one of them says. (read the rest of this shit…)
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
CLEOPATRA JONES AND THE CASINO OF GOLD is the second and unfortunately last Cleopatra Jones adventure. In the first one she was a glamorous globe-trotting secret agent who came back to the hood to clean up the streets. In this one she’s on a mission in Hong Kong, so it’s the type of shit she was used to dealing with before coming home. A typical couple days in the life of Cleopatra Jones. (read the rest of this shit…)
Orphan
If you had told me a week ago that I would bother to see ORPHAN, even on DVD, I would’ve thought you had the wrong guy. But then somebody told me the plot twist and it was SEVEN POUNDS all over again, it suddenly seemed more interesting and I went and paid money to see it.
And I’m happy to report that ORPHAN is a surprisingly smart and enjoyable evil-child suspense thriller. It’s about a couple played by Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard who adopt a 9-year old Russian girl named Esther, and they should’ve kept the receipt because they got a lemon. At first she seems like a smart and incredibly talented kid, but actually she’s a fuckin lunatic who ends up terrorizing them all, mommy seems crazy because she says her daughter is a maniac, etc. You pretty much know the drill. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Hurt Locker
THE HURT LOCKER is the best movie of 2009 so far excluding all movies about old men who fly around using balloons. It’s a tightly constructed action-suspense movie, but also a character piece and an acting showcase. It takes place in Iraq 2004 and it says something about war, but it’s not especially political. It’s more about a place and a time and a mindset. Nobody in the movie talks about why the Americans are in Iraq or whether they should be. They’re just there. It’s their job, they gotta survive until the end of their rotation (the days are counted down onscreen).
This is the story of a 3-man bomb disposal unit. They get a new team leader at the beginning, and he’s played by Jeremy Renner. I don’t know if his team recognizes him from DAHMER like I did, but shit man, look out. From the beginning he seems a little unstable and alot reckless, and they gotta worry if this will prevent them from getting safely to the end of that countdown. (read the rest of this shit…)
Watchmen
COMIC CON EXCLUSIVE:
VERN HAS SEEN THE WATCHMEN DVD
(that came out last week)
My fellow Watchmaniacs: People like me and you, being huge comics book “geeks” and true fans for life, we could tell each other exactly where we were the first time we saw those historic Watchman comic strips in 1986, when they exploded onto the scene just like the explosion that happens at the end that Doctor Manhattan was blamed for or whatever it was that happened at the end. I remember LA Law had just debuted on TV, and Pinochet had escaped assassination in Chile. CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD was capturing the national consciousness. I was wearing an anti-Khadafi novelty t-shirt, listening to Falco on my Walkman tape and solving a Rubik’s cube when my eyes first fell upon its graphic novel cover at the graphic novel stand. And remember you were there too and we looked at each other like “uh huh” and we nodded because after seeing all those adventures that the Watchmen were having and everything, you knew this was history, this was the motherfuckin Hindenburg exploding into the moon on top of JFK’s motorcade. (read the rest of this shit…)
It Lives Again
After seeing the surprisingly-good-although-probaly-still-shouldn’t-have-been-made remake of IT’S ALIVE, I got to thinking that I’d never seen the sequels to the original. And I was wondering about this ISLAND OF THE ALIVE concept in part 3, so I figured I better get part 2 out of the way first. I wasn’t really sure how you make an exciting sequel to a movie about a killer baby, it’s probaly just gonna be more of the same for the first sequel. Even the title, IT LIVES AGAIN, seems to indicate it’s gonna be a rehash. (read the rest of this shit…)
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