"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

VERN Sees THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE!!

SPOILER ALERT !!

Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

All my favorite muthas are hanging out tonight. Quint and Beaks and Vern, our man in Seattle, all 7 foot 5 inches of bad-assedness of him. He’s here tonight with a look at a film that I am hearing basically nothing good about so far. I hope all the buzz is wrong. I hope Jonathan Demme has made a great, breezy entertainment that manages to have fun with the classic CHARADE. I hope because I like Demme. I hope because the alternative is tears.

Fellas –

It’s me Vern again. Last week I sent you a review of the unneccessary remake of THE RING, which if I remember right, I believe I liked that one. This week I got another review of an uneccessary remake. This one wasn’t quite so hot.

The movie is THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE and if you know your shit, you know it’s a remake of Stan Donen’s CHARADE, an undeniably great movie starring Carey Grant and Audrey Hepburn. I mean you can’t beat that. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 8th, 2002 | No Comments »

Vern attends an anti-war march – a photojournalistic type adventure

Well I told everybody you should go to one of these notinourname anti-war rallies this weekend, but you probaly thought I was just blowing smoke signals up your ass or whatever the saying is in Oklahoma and Texas. So just to show you that ol’ Vern is a man of his convictions, here is the photographical type evidence that I went to the main one they had here in Seattle. The big news here is that this rally was alot of fun and I am going to show all you motherfuckers why you are required to go to and/or organize some more of these.

I am only a novice photojournalist, so my pictures don’t really do it justice, but let’s get to the visuals here people.

This was my best try at capturing the scope of this thing. I mean this was alot of fuckin people. You listen to these people on tv, they explain to you that the only people against this war really are a handful of fringe Democrats and “peaceniks.” Maybe occasionally they’ll mention that UN arms inspectors, hardline republican maniacs from the first Bush administration, Pat Buchanan, pretty much every other country in the world, and even fugitive war criminal Henry Kissinger think this war is a bad, bad idea. But the average americans, according to their polls, most of them are all for it. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 7th, 2002 | No Comments »

Vern checks out the remake of THE RING!

Hey folks, Harry here… Vern wants Daddy (me) to start talking with Mommy (Moriarty), but he’s has got to stop telling me he has a headache and turning that oh so soft shoulder to chilly ice. Daddy needs some loving, and Mommy has been oh so cruel. Sadness, for sure. Anyways… Here’s another look at the Dreamworks RING remake from a bloke that is very very familiar with the originals! Here ya go…

Boys –

First of all, you gotta start talking to each other again. I don’t like it when mommy and daddy fight.

Second of all, I know you already have an assload of THE RING (american remake) reviews. But I think you need to use mine also, as a sign of gratitude toward me, the man who first told you about the japanese RINGU series and the impending remake back in July of 2000. So look at this as the highly anticipated sequel to the article “Vern Steals A Look At THE RING Part I and II!!” CLICK HERE

Of course, I got one thing wrong back then. I said it was New Line Cinema doing the remake, turned out to be Dreamworks. I think the rights might’ve been passed around though, I remember Moriarty told me at the time that he talked to somebody at New Line and they swore they were gonna re-release it and not remake it. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 4th, 2002 | 9 Comments »

Brotherhood of the Wolf

The box’ll get you expecting some weird french version of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, but I say it’s a 2000s Hammer movie. So you got a period piece with a mysterious beast eating people in a village, and the townspeople are trying to hunt it but they’re on the wrong track, and some colorful experts come to town to get the job done FOR REAL.

All that, but it’s the 2000s so they all do karate. Just like Charlie’s Angels, Mission: Impossible, X-Men, Superman, Charles In Charge, anybody that’s resurrected in the 2000s, they’re gonna do karate. Why? The Matrix. When? The 2000s. Where? A big screen near you. This includes not just americans, but also the French. The Musketeer did karate and Vidocq did detective style kung fu, and this movie introduces until-now-unknown traditions of French and Native American martial arts. Those scenes are kind of tossed in there, but it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. If you like the movie like I did, it will probaly be due to the classic story of the monster eating the villagers, and the dudes trying to track the monster. Not the karate. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 2nd, 2002 | 8 Comments »

Full Frontal

First of all you gotta realize, this is one of them movies where a well known director decides to do a loose, low budget experimental quickie type picture. For example, while making his “real” movie, the chinese water torture of an animated feature that is WAKING LIFE, Richard Linklater also spent like a day or two doing a minimalistic three-character-play-on-digital-video called TAPE that was a little easier to stomach.

In this case the director is Steven Soderbergh, and in my book he’s earned the right to do whatever the fuck he wants with a digital camera and Julia Roberts on the weekends. Not because he made two movies in the same year and was nominated best director for both (although that’s probaly something worth bragging about) but because before that he was on even more of a roll, doing OUT OF SIGHT and the 1999 Outlaw Award winner THE LIMEY right in a row. This year Soderbergh is doing a remake of SOLARIS, that russian space movie that is famous for being really long, boring and good. But first to cleanse his pallet he whipped out this little fucker that is kind of an homage (french word) to the DOGMA of ’95 movement and the new wave that the french had a while back. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 2nd, 2002 | No Comments »

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 »

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