"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Bitch Session (Requiem For a Dream, Charlie’s Angels)

This week friends ol’ Vern has a few things he has to get off his chest. A little bitchin and moanin is what I gotta do. So let me run through a few of these points about how, you know, everything is all a bunch of horse shit, etc.

1. HALLOWEEN

First off, last Tuesday was Halloween. And I want to know why you motherfuckers decided it was cancelled. I’m driving along at 7:45 pm, it’s been dark for more than hour and I don’t see a jack o’lantern, I don’t see a trick or treater. I don’t even see those little fuckers smashing my pumpkins. All I see is churches and schools with signs that say “Harvest Festival. Games and Food. October 31st.” (read the rest of this shit…)

Burn the Witch (Blair Witch Part II)

Well here it is Halloween already and fuck if I’ve got into the spirit of the thing. I tried buying a compact disc of John Carpenter’s score to the movie Halloween and I put it on driving around in the pouring rain. And I try to picture that white masked bastard jumping out of nowhere onto my car right when the keyboards do their little electric BYYYOOOOOOO sound and okay, I’m halfway there. But other than that, I mean I got no pumpkins, I got no costume, I got shit.

So what do you do. You follow the halloween traditions our nation and culture have set forth for us. You go to the theater to see the one half assed horror movie that they decided to release right before Halloween. In this case, Book of Shadows: Revenge of the Blair Witch Project Part 2, Return to the Dark Woods of the Burkitsville Horror. (can’t remember the exact title actually so I made that one up, hope the boys at artisan like it.) (read the rest of this shit…)

Cherry Falls

big spoiler in this old review

Well there might be some individuals out there wondering, wouldn’t it be cool if you took a director like the dude who did Romper Stomper, and had him do a slasher movie. Well those individuals it turns out are wrong. Sorry boys.

Cherry Falls is the story of a killer in a small town who kills only virgins. In a small town called Cherry Falls.

You know what I mean? Virgins. In Cherry Falls. (read the rest of this shit…)

Divided (Dancer in the Dark and Bamboozled)

INTRODUCTION

Well this week it’s nothing but controversy in the world of arthouse type Cinema. Discussion and debate riddles the lobbies of select theaters nationwide. Limited releases bring unlimited disagreement in a platform type pattern across the great land of america.

Audiences are divided over which movie is more divisive, Dancer in the Dark or Bamboozled? Many love Dancer in the Dark, many hate it. Bamboozled has been called both a career destroying debacle and the year’s best film. However some feel that Bamboozled is really more provocative than divisive. Maybe Dancer in the Dark is dividing audiences, but is it provoking them? No matter how divisive it is, can it be as outrageous as Bamboozled? As explosive?

Well shit I don’t know. Personally I’m divided on both of these. I love ’em and I hate ’em. I think I love Dancer in the Dark a little more than I hate it and hate Bamboozled a little more than I love it. But I mean who knows I am so divided and provoked and outraged at their explosiveness that I don’t even know up from down anyway. (read the rest of this shit…)

If These Walls Could Talk 2

Sometimes at my age a fella has to admit he’s not exactly up on things. Not exactly with it. Specially when it seems like every other weekend I’m writing a review for a sequel to some movie where I never even saw the first one. Hell I never even HEARD of the first one half the time how the fuck I’m supposed to seen it already. Cut me some slack buddy.

But I picked up the dvd for this one because of a certain powerful force – the force of young Chloe Sevigny’s eyes staring out at me from the cover. I think most of you know how I feel about this gal, ever since I first spied her in the Last Days of Disco picture where her eyes were able to cut through seven layers of postmodern bullshit spewing out of the mouths of the pretentious yuppies in the movie. This girl is a hell of an actor but the main thing I’m talking about here is the presence. She has the presence of a real movie star. In my opinion. So I’ll see any movie she’s in even if it has her with her hair slicked back, wearing a tie, like in this one. (read the rest of this shit…)

Meet the Parents

Well chances are by now you motherfuckers’ve heard about the new hit comedy Meet the Parents. This movie is sweeping the nation. All the sudden everybody loves to laugh. It is the new big thing. People are telling their friends about it. “This is a picture where you laugh.” There is already talk of a sequel even though, I mean how in fuck do you do a sequel to this picture. You can’t.

So let me give you my take on it. The Vern take. In case you’ve been in the can or something and haven’t fallen into Parentmania, what this is is the type of picture where Ben Stiller has to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. In fact he wants to propose to the gal but first he has to ask the father’s permission. Only problem is the father is the King of Comedy himself, Robert DeNiro. Robert’s character is a crazy ex-CIA maniac obsessed with surveillance. So Ben tries his damndest to make a good impression, but every fucking thing possible goes wrong.

Okay so you’ve probaly seen the ads and think, yeah okay we know everything that happens. Truth is out of context that stuff may not seem funny but I would argue that in the movie, yes, it is funny. Because this Ben Stiller is a very special individual. He is the world’s only Human Humiliation Sponge. He will soak up any indignity known to man. And make it funny. (read the rest of this shit…)

Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy

Well the votes are in. We got like 11 or so experts on the films of Badass Cinema rating over 300 quality Badass pictures. We got these points all added up and averaged and what not to determine their true Badass quality levels. The mathematicals are all calculated and tabulated something fierce. And what better way to celebrate the 50th VERN TELL’S IT LIKE IT IS column than with the long awaited list of the 100 Most Badass Movies of All Fucking Time?

Only thing is boys I gotta mold them all into a presentable type format. Only then will they be available to the public, or anyone else not including me. Doesn’t matter if this is a round number or not. (read the rest of this shit…)

Almost Famous (revenge of the Ain’t It Cool Newsies)

So the big movie right now is Almost Famous. A nicely crafted ’70s epic about a 15 year old kid named William who writes music reviews, and ends up having Rolling Stone magazine foot the bill for him to go on tour with a major rock band, to write an article. Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, for whom most of this shit REALLY went down, it is obviously a movie that is very close to his heart.

In a way it’s kind of a pisser that THIS would be the cherished personal project for a director. This guy is saying hey everybody, when I was fifteen I fell in love with one of the many beautiful groupies I had sex with on the national tour I went on with a famous rock band. But then we didn’t get together. Bummer, eh?

It’s kind of like on that radio talk show Loveline, when they get what they call a “my dick is too big to ride my bicycle” call. Where it is really more bragging than questioning. (read the rest of this shit…)

Walking with Dinosaurs

This was my final destination for VERN’S DOCUMENTARY WEEK, the BBC series that got so much attention a few months back when it played on the discovery channel. But who the fuck watches discovery channel, how was I supposed to know.

Anyway you may be thinking, “This is not a documentary you asswipe,” in which case you’d be right. But it IS stylistically based on the documentary type form and “thus” is appropriate to discuss in context with other fine discovery channel type works such as American Pimp and Hated: GG Allin Wiping Shit On Himself.

Now I know there’s gonna be some tightass out there yanking his hair out at the very thought of me lumping this in with documentaries. There are some people who are very sensitive about the line between documentary and fiction being blurred. If we can’t trust the movies to reflect life exactly as it is without interjecting a point of view or entertainment factor, who CAN we trust? Obviously not the news! I guess there are many ethics involved in the documentarian code of honor, so some morons were even trying to make it a controversy when they found out that the Hughes brothers had paid money to be able to film the Player’s Ball Pimp Awards for their fine aforementioned pimpumentary.

WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THINK, asshole. They’re pimps! That’s what they do, they pimp. Jesus fucking christ you fucking backseat documentarians.  (read the rest of this shit…)

Man stuff

I remember there used to be women who read my column. I won’t say their names but there was a nice gal from the newsgroups who was an early supporter of my works. Nother one from the web sight for the director of Running Time, that Bruce Campbell movie all done up in one shot like Rope. She used to write me all the time, very encouraging, very supportive.

I haven’t heard from any women in a while, and I wonder if I’m scaring them away with all this man talk. All this Badass Cinema, all this Bruce and Clint and breaking people’s legs and bending punks over and smoking motherfuckers. Balls and dicks. Man stuff.

Well I hope some day my sensitive side will return, I’ll lay off of the macho for a little while and I’ll get a little more genderifical diversity in my readership. I mean who the fuck knows, even Clint Eastwood directed The Bridges of Madison County one time. (read the rest of this shit…)