"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer

You know, there are alot of really spectacular documentary type pictures out there and it seems like a common feature to almost all of them is a really strange cast of characters that you couldn’t make up. Pictures like AMERICAN MOVIE, AMERICAN PIMP, GREY GARDENS, CRUMB, SALESMAN, DERBY, BIGGIE AND TUPAC, PARADISE LOST, WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS, BROTHER’S KEEPER, BEYOND THE MAT… these are full of these people that are too real to be in a fictional movie and yet somehow more interesting and bizarre than most of the people I ever end up hanging out with. Not that I’d want to hang out with that maniac with the lopsided head in PARADISE LOST, or Jake “The Snake” Roberts. The american movie dude seems kinds of cool, though.

But I mean how do they know it’s gonna happen that way? What if they zero in on a topic that in itself is fascinating but then it turns out all the people involved are pretty regular and don’t have anything funny to say about it? How is it that guys like the Maysles and this Nick Broomfield can have such high batting averages in this department? (read the rest of this shit…)

October 1st, 2002 | 2 Comments »

Vern’s LOVE AND A BULLET review!!!

Hey folks, Harry here with that damn Outlaw Vern chiming in on LOVE AND A BULLET, which is… I believe an inane Reese Witherspoon Romantic Comedy that will make you weep, laugh and cheer. Awwwww, it’s an Outlaw Vern sort of film, he gets touchy feely like that. And he’s dead right about the coming civil wars of Comic Traditionalists and Revisionists and the deaths upon the fields of dishonor! I tell ya, TWO TOWERS has nothing on it! hehehe

Boys –

Did you notice how Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie was really controversial in the talkbacks until you mentioned Superman? Man I don’t think I’ve ever seen the newsies so worked up. I think in about 20 years when this generation of “geeks” is in power we will see comic book fundamentalists controlling governments around the world the way religious fundamentalists do today. Trying to force their Superfriends morals on everybody else. Some nutty congressman from the Utility Belt will get them to hang up the X-Men letters page in schools and courthouses. It’ll be an interesting time. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 30th, 2002 | 1 Comment »

A Good Month For the DVDs of Badass Cinema

Yeah I know, this Iraq deal is getting even worse but let’s just take one fuckin column to talk about what I used to talk about, the movies.

This month has been hard on the wallet not just because of the economy but also because of numerous high quality dvd releases of important films of Badass Cinema. Today I will take some time to review a few of those dvds.

First of all we got my pick for the best movie of the year so far, BLADE II. I feel I have already written enough about the many fine qualities of this picture so I will focus this review only on the many fine dvd extras brought to you by one of our best directors, Mr. Guillermo del Toro. This is a part of the “New Line Platinum Series” which I have come to know and trust as a series of dvds with extra material above and beyond your “theatrical trailer” or your “chapter stops” or even your “weblinks.” (Does anybody really have a DVD-ROM drive? And if so, do they really need a dvd to figure out how to find the web site for BONES?) BLADE II is no exception, in fact it has even better extras than BLADE I. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 24th, 2002 | 2 Comments »

Barbershop

Well ol’ Ice Cube has put out some clunkers lately, even when he teamed up with one of my favorites, Mr. John Carpenter, for GHOSTS ON MARS. When he’s not making mediocre action movies he’s trying to recapture the magic of FRIDAY, or trying to do a mediocre action movie that also recaptures the magic of FRIDAY. And even when he’s taking a break from recapturing the magic of FRIDAY, you got DJ Pooh out there trying to recapture it with movies like THREE STRIKES and THE WASH. But he recaptures even less of the magic than Ice Cube manages to recapture during his recapturing. With all the attempted recapturing going on you start to wonder whether the magic is even available to be recaptured anymore. It’s probaly busy.

BUT, in my opinion Mr. Cube has some new magic now, some THE BARBERSHOP magic. This magic is not as powerful as FRIDAY magic but it’s still fairly magic, in my opinion. In a way. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 14th, 2002 | No Comments »

A Year Ago, Some Shit Went Down

REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 11TH. NEVER FORGET.

Yeah, I forgot about september 11th for like, 22 minutes there. Good thing every tv station, magazine and newspaper was there to catch me.

I on the other hand am confident that you all remember what happened that morning a year ago, and where you were when you found out, and what your first thought was. And you remember watching all that TV and reading all those articles and trying to decipher what exactly happened and what it all meant. And all the people full of hot air, including me, tried to take it all and boil it all down into words and concepts. Why do they hate us? What now? blah blah fucking blah.

Now it’s a year later and you see it kind of differently. For those of us lucky enough to avoid losing anyone close, the pain starts to fade. We’ve gotten desensitized to it. We can sit back and see how wrong people were about certain things. Like, of course, “irony is dead.” Some people just really hate irony, it turns out, and they tried to use September 11th as a good cutoff point. But then John Ashcroft put a drape over the blind justice statue and irony was hotter than ever. (read the rest of this shit…)

September 11th, 2002 | No Comments »

Undisputed

I decided a long time ago to stop reviewing prison movies. People always ask me what I thought of this prison movie or that. They recommended ANIMAL FACTORY and that was a real good one, but I don’t want people to take me more seriously about prison than they would other film writers like the guy from Entertainment Weekly or the guy from People Magazine and etc. Plus, why would I want to sit around and watch movies about a place like that anyway.

I made an exception for UNDISPUTED though because I been looking forward to this ever since I saw the trailer before BLADE II. The BLADE pictures made me love Wesley Snipes and I try to see any movie he does now, even if it looks like some asinine remake of ROCKY, but in prison. (read the rest of this shit…)

August 23rd, 2002 | 10 Comments »

Vern Takes In COMIC BOOK VILLAINS!!!

Hey folks, Harry here… I’m not allowed to say anything further about Vern, under penalty and threat of death… Knowing the rumors I’ve read about what Vern can do and organize to be done, I have great fear for the man known as Vern. Beware of Vern. Be Afraid… He’ll hurt you with laughter sometimes… sometimes with sledgehammers… You’ll see…

Dearest Harry and Moriarty,

I thought for a second there I discovered a movie you didn’t know about. But after a thorough study of your “search engine” device I found out that some other individual reviewed COMIC BOOK VILLAINS once when it played at Cannes (a popular french film festival). I read over the review though and I disagreed with almost every point he made. I’m not saying it’s BLADE 2 or even CITIZEN KANE, but it is a surprisingly good small straight to video type picture and I have reason to believe that Harry and others would enjoy it when it comes out September 3rd on the video and dvd type mediums. By others I mainly mean Moriarty, I guess. But I will get to the movie after this next paragraph which is just rambling and bullshit, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)

August 19th, 2002 | No Comments »

The Strange Case of the White Executive Jet, Iraq Attack 2, The Good News, More Bad News Though, The Nerdy Shit – Digital Projection and Video

PART 1: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE WHITE EXECUTIVE JET

Well we had our fun last column with “Jason vs. Predator” and etc. but this time, before we get to the nerdy shit, we gotta talk about Iraq. And before we even get to that I gotta bring up something I bet most of you haven’t even heard about: the mysterious “white executive jet” that the press casually connected yesterday to Flight 93, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I don’t know the significance of this jet but I think it’s a good example of the big pile of lies we americans keep getting buried under, without much complaint.

It all begins with an article in Newsday and other sources about “Moussaoui Jury to Get Sept. 11 ‘Replay’ – Videos, airliner cockpit recordings to be offered.” The story is basically a press release rewrite about prosecutors’ plans for the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the nutball who they want to execute in connection with the hijackings even though he was in jail at the time. (read the rest of this shit…)

August 11th, 2002 | No Comments »

Blood Work

This latest directorial work by our greatest Badass Laureate, Mr. Clint Eastwood, didn’t go over too well in theaters. It was barely advertised and it disappeared about as fast as Mr. De Palma’s great FEMME FATALE. I figured how could you go wrong – starring Clint, directed by Clint, written by Brian Helgeland who wrote the Outlaw Award winning picture PAYBACK. But everyone told me it wasn’t too hot, kind of boring, with a predictable plot twist.

Well now I’ve finally caught up with it and although it’s not an outstanding new high for Clint like FEMME FATALE is for Brian DePalma, there is nothing wrong with it at all. In fact any fan of Badass Cinema owes it to themselves to see it as one of the only american pictures relevant to our genre this year. It’s an old school cop thriller but for some reason it reminded me most of IN THE LINE OF FIRE. I think one reason Clint has stayed relevant (well, up until now I guess since nobody saw this one) is because he acts his age. He doesn’t pretend to be a young man even if he’s kissing gals who are younger than him. He is very conscious of being an old man. (read the rest of this shit…)

August 10th, 2002 | 11 Comments »

xXx

Well you know me, I’ve been talking about the badass presence of Vin Diesel just as long as anyone has, anyone except for him. I’ve been looking forward to this moronic concept of a Vin Diesel star vehicle, figuring anything this stupid starring Vin Diesel would have to be a good time. You saw my epic dissertation on THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS so you know how I enjoy Vin’s egomaniacal charisma combined with Rob Cohen’s pathetic zeitgeist-chasing high conceptualism.

XXX is completely asinine. And I loved that about it. For about half an hour. Then it just got boring in the exact same way all the modern James Bond movies are boring. It takes a special type of standard lowering to enjoy ANYBODY driving around dreary european villages on motorcycles shooting machine guns and blowing things up in the usual ways. You can only watch a henchman shot into the air by an explosion so many times before you start to ask for more from your badass cinematists. I don’t care if you had a young Clint Eastwood riding piggyback on Steve McQueen, you’d still get bored with this movie before it got to the climax. (read the rest of this shit…)

August 9th, 2002 | 4 Comments »

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