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The Gingerdead Man

get it, gingerDEAD instead of gingerBREAD

For hundreds of years, gingerbread has been a delicious and vibrant European treat. It was used to make soft cakes that would be drenched in hot lemon sauce and whipped cream, or for ornate candy-covered houses like the “witch’s house” from the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, or to form the shape of a small man, a reflection of its creator. As man is to God, gingerbread man is to man. And therefore also to God.

No one knows the origin of gingerbread, because how do you pin down something like that? I’m sure they could figure out who invented the McRib Sandwich, but not gingerbread. Some believe it came from the Eastern Mediterranean, and spread across Europe as soldiers came home from the Crusades. At least something good would’ve come out of the Crusades then. Wherever it came from, its ginger packs a powerful punch, so much so that throughout the 17th century you needed a license to bake gingerbread except at Christmas and Easter. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 6th, 2006 | 9 Comments »

Vern Reviews TURISTAS!!

Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

As I sit here putting together today’s updates, it is always a bonus pleasure when Vern sends me something to post. Today is no exception.

Trust no one. Anywhere. Except Vern.

This week’s horror movie is called TURISTAS (Portuguese for ‘Hostel’). It’s another story of young good looking backpackers whose vacations go badly due to bodily mutilation, etc. A crowded bus swerves to miss some asshole kids with surfboards and falls off a cliff. Luckily everybody gets out in time. The next bus won’t be for ten hours so some of the English-speakers band together and find a cool beachfront bar where they dance, make new friends, meet women and have such a good time they decide to ditch the bus. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 29th, 2006 | 4 Comments »

Shut Up & Sing

This is a documentary about the Dixie Chicks. Now, you probaly won’t be surprised to hear that I got no interest in the music of the Dixie Chicks. But you may or may not be surprised to hear that I liked the movie alot.

Of course the title refers to the main subject of the movie, the controversy that came in 2003 after Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines ad-libbed the dangerous sentence, “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States comes from Texas,” during a concert in London. Because of that one sentence (and some mild anti-war, pro-human life comments on the eve of the invasion) right wing web sights organized call-in campaigns to country music stations across the country, causing the corporation that runs the computer that programs every radio station to not play Dixie Chicks songs anymore. Meanwhile, idiots with bad handwriting made signs and stood outside of Dixie Chicks concerts reinforcing all the worst stereotypes about lower class white southerners. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 27th, 2006 | No Comments »

Crank

No, this is not the one where Adam Sandler has a magic remote control that he uses to conquer the world, that’s CLICK. This is CRANK, this is the one where Jason Statham (the Transporter himself) is a hitman who gets injected by high concept poison. It’s gonna kill him, but he figures out that it won’t finish until his adrenaline rate goes down. So he tries to run around, have sex, do coke and get in shootouts until he is able to get revenge on the poisoner. So it’s SPEED in a guy, with a side order of revenge.

An inventive thrill ride full of imagination and wit that keeps you constantly involved as it builds to an unbelievable climax… would be a good way to do this movie. Instead they went the DOMINO route of “if you throw every stupid show-offy technique you ever saw in a commercial at the screen, technically it counts as entertainment.” I think I know what they were thinking: he has to keep his adrenaline up, so the movie has to keep its adrenaline up too. But it’s flawed logic. THE JERK is about a moron, but the movie doesn’t have to be moronic. I don’t think SPEED had cameras flying around constantly to convince you that it’s about speed. If you show a guy in hospital gown zooming around on a motorcycle pursued by police, that is by definition somewhat exciting. But when you throw in unnecessary zooms and split screen and do a jokey flashback on one side and then freeze on a guy’s goofy expression and then switch it to black and white and then zoom into Statham’s chest to show an x-ray of his heart beating (a nod to the Furious Movement) AND you gotta throw in “exciting” guitar music made by a guy who used to be in Tangerine Dream who is now trying to rock out, it seems like you’re overcompensating. It isn’t exciting anymore, it’s just annoying. To me it’s another movie that has no build or rhythm at all, just the same frantic shit for 87 minutes straight. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 27th, 2006 | 4 Comments »

Mr. No Legs

This is a movie that’s not on video as far as I know. In order to see it you either gotta travel through time, or you gotta deal with those seemy individuals who sail the seven seas putting the stuntmen out of work. Or at least the non-copyright holding movie transferers at 5minutestolive.com.

MR. NO LEGS is a badly acted low budget movie about two cops (one with mustache) investigating the death of one cop (the one with the mustache)’s sister. They don’t know what we the audience know, that she was accidentally killed by her no-good-drug-dealing boyfriend who they will not be able to bring to justice because his sloppiness earned his face an intimate date with a shotgun shell, chaperoned by the gang’s toughest enforcer, Lou.

That does not sound exciting, but what if I were to tell you that Lou HAS NO LEGS? And in fact, I had to check IMDb to find out his name was Lou because he is mostly referred to as “No Legs”? What would you do then, smart guy? You would watch the movie is what you would do. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 27th, 2006 | 1 Comment »

Vern hearts Daniel Craig and CASINO ROYALE… read his love letter here!!!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here to quickly introduce Vern’s review of CASINO ROYALE… and his admission of the huge mancrush he has for Daniel Craig. I saw the movie last night myself and you can add my name onto the “loved it” lists… Eva Green is the pretty and Daniel Craig could kill Cancer. Good stuff… but you didn’t click on this headline to hear me talk. Here’s the main man, Vern!

Fellas –

I liked CASINO ROYALE too. (review ends here if you’re one of those dicks who always complains that my reviews are too long) (read the rest of this shit…)

November 17th, 2006 | 58 Comments »

Vern’s Best Review Ever! Vern Vs BOBBY (The Movie, Not The Guy)!!

SPOILER ALERT !!

Hey, “Moriarty” here. Just wanted to drop in to present a review that made me stand up and applaud. I am not a mean man when I write about film. I don’t think I take cheap shots at people. At least, I try not to. I think we all bubble over on occasion and… well…

… you remember when Vern fought and conquered the CHAOS DVD back in August?

Well, this is a better review.

Unless you are Paul Haggis. Or Emilio Estevez. Or pretty much the entire cast of BOBBY. In which case, you might want to go enjoy something over in Coax for a while, cause this… this gets ugly:

Question for you fellas:

Why is Emilio Estevez famous again? I can’t think of many legitimately good movies he’s in besides REPO MAN. People love their BREAKFAST CLUB, I think I liked STAKEOUT at the time, can’t remember. I think now he mostly just directs TV shows, but that’s not enough Gatorade to quench the artistic thirst for this guy. With his new all star ensemble BOBBY he’s going serious. He’s wearing two hearts, one on each sleeve, maybe even has his targets set on the Academy’s notorious weakness for actors turned directors. Who knows what those chumps will fall for these days? (read the rest of this shit…)

November 8th, 2006 | No Comments »

Tool Time with George Bush

If you grew up in America like I did, you probaly grew up fearing some dictator or despot from somewhere trampling on freedom. You had your nightmares of Hitler and Mussolini if you grew up during World War 2, the spread of communism during the Vietnam era or what Reagan called the Evil Empire during the ’80s. Or our younger folks are growing up hearing about Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and all the various oppressive Islamic regimes. Maybe you read 1984, Animal Farm, V For Vendetta, the Handmaid’s Tale, Star Wars the official novelization. For life-long Americans, living under an oppressive regime is the stuff of cautionary tales. Thank God it’s hard for us to imagine living in a country or a planet where you have to fear the police coming and taking you away at night for your political beliefs, for a misunderstanding, for a vendetta, because your neighbor accused you of being a traitor, or for no reason at all.

But with the continually snowballing monumental incompetence and belligerence of the Bush administration, with the Patriot Act parts 1 and 2 still on the books, with the Iraq war still spiraling out of control, Afghanistan still falling from our grip, Osama bin Laden still on the loose, bodies still rotting in the streets of New Orleans, North Korea going nuclear thanks to our Conan the Barbarian approach to diplomacy, and the republicans facing the task of convincingly rigging the mid-term election when the whole world expects them to be crushed into oblivion by the angry populace, it’s easy to get paranoid about what these assholes might want to pull next. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 3rd, 2006 | 1 Comment »

Marie Antoinette and The Prestige

THE PRESTIGE and MARIE ANTOINETTE double feature

This week was one of those ones that start coming up toward the end of the year where there’s just too many movies you want to see all coming out on the same day. And me being an obsessive motherfucker I try to tackle them all at once. We got three reliable directors all hitting the same day here. #1 priority for me was Clint’s FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, but I already saw that at an early screening. So that left Chris Nolan’s THE PRESTIGE and Sofia Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE. So I watched them both in a row, liked both, also fell asleep during both. (You gotta go to sleep the night before one of these double-headers, it turns out.)

To be honest I wasn’t even gonna review MARIE because, let’s face it, I am not a girl. This is not only a girl movie but a long, arty, low on plot girl movie. I think some of you cinemasters are gonna love the shit out of it but alot of my readers would probaly never be able to sit through it. Still, I’ve read so many reviews that clearly didn’t fucking GET this movie that I decided I had to comment. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 24th, 2006 | No Comments »

Running Scared (2006)

I really don’t have a problem with America’s team captain, Paul Walker. Alot of people seem to hate this guy, but I think he’s pretty good at playing these straight laced hunky characters in movies like THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and EIGHT BELOW. But I gotta admit, when I saw the trailer for RUNNING SCARED I thought it looked like the worst shit ever. Paul Walker doing an accent, playing a mob guy? I wasn’t buying it. It didn’t help that the trailer ended with mobsters trying to hit a glowing hockey puck into Walker’s mouth. Like it’s not enough to hit the guy in the face, they gotta make it visually appealing and EXTREME.

But there are two things that the trailer didn’t get across. One, that Paul Walker actually does a pretty good job playing this type of character. I was hoping that Clint’s FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS would be the movie that shows Walker is a little better than people thought, but his part in that one turned out to be minimal. Instead it was this one that makes you think huh, maybe he could play other types of characters. Hard to say. The second thing the trailer didn’t get across about RUNNING SCARED is that it’s a crazed, ridiculous movie where the day-glo hockey rink fits right in. And I guess the third thing is that Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines are not in this one, it’s Paul Walker. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 24th, 2006 | 8 Comments »

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