Posts Tagged ‘Bruce’
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
With IRON MAN 2 in theaters and on Slurpee cups I’d say Summer Movie Season 2010 is officially underway. And I thought a good way to welcome the season would be by watching some movies I haven’t seen before: the JAWS sequels. Only thing is, as much as I love it I never actually wrote a review of JAWS. And I’d feel like an asshole reviewing the (I’m gonna guess possibly crappy) sequels and ignoring the original masterpiece.
But wait! There may be an answer contained within the Outlaw Vault. I knew I had written something about it, I just hadn’t posted it before. Back when I was considering a book about summer movies I wrote a rough draft for part of the ’75 chapter. So even though I’m still alive I’m gonna clean it up a little and package it as new material, like a posthumous B.I.G. guest appearance. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, Steven Spielberg
Posted in Monster, Reviews | 103 Comments »
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
To celebrate the release of my new review book that’s named after Bruce Willis it’s only appropriate that I review a Bruce movie I never reviewed before. And by far the most requested title in that category is the notorious-flop-turned-minor-cult-movie HUDSON HAWK.
I’ll start by laying out the three basic schools of thought about why HUDSON HAWK crashed and burned. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Daniel Waters, Danny Aiello, James Coburn, Michael Lehmann, Steven E. de Souza
Posted in Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 111 Comments »
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
TEARS OF THE SUN is a Bruce Willis picture I missed until now. It’s about Nigerian refugees fleeing for Cameroon after anti-democratic military guys assassinate the president and his family and go around “ethnic cleansing” innocent people. I know, sounds kind of racist, but the secret is Bruce doesn’t play a Nigerian, he is not in blackface. He plays the lieutenant of an elite Navy SEALS unit sent in by Tom Skerritt (playing the twin brother of his character from TOP GUN, in my opinion) to rescue a Christian aid worker played by Monica Belluci. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antoine Fuqua, Bruce, Bruce Willis
Posted in Action, Bruce, Drama, Reviews, War | 59 Comments »
Friday, April 16th, 2010
THE BIG BOSS would be a good one to watch on Labor Day, because it’s a scathing indictment of corruption within the Chinese ice industry. About time somebody blew the lid off that shit. Cheng (Bruce M.F. Lee) gets a job loading big blocks of ice, which the workers don’t realize have bags of coke inside (even though they saw one of the bags when one of the blocks broke open. But this was a more naive time). The foremen are extra-abusive, slapping people around and shit. To be frankly honest I think these particular workers are a bunch of whiners who don’t seem to work very hard, but they’re right to stand up for their rights when a co-worker gets hit or goes missing.
Unfortunately Cheng can’t really do anything because you know how it is when you wear one of those medallions that reminds you you promised your late mother never to fight again. In one frustrating scene Cheng just stands around watching while a whole bunch of union-smasher types beat the hell out of his colleagues. They all think he’s an asshole for not helping, but luckily some dumb sucker accidentally tears off his medallion, and Cheng is unleashed. There’s a real good overhead shot showing him kicking out a circle of thugs that surround him. One guy he kicks so fast I had to rewind it to make sure the guy didn’t just keel over from unrelated health issues. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Lee
Posted in Martial Arts, Reviews | 79 Comments »
Monday, April 5th, 2010
It might be hard for some of you youths to believe, but there was a time when our boy Bruce
1. could never be thought of as an action star and
2. had some hair.
In those pre-DIE HARD, mid-MOONLIGHTING days it made more sense than anything for Bruce to star in a Blake Edwards comedy. He was kind of thought of as a hip young smartass comedy star, instead of a smoldering veteran action star who can also be funny. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Blake Edwards, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Kim Basinger
Posted in Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 36 Comments »
Friday, April 2nd, 2010
My new review collection YIPPEE-KY YAY MOVIEGOER comes out at the end of this month, and since it’s named after Bruce Willis I figured I should celebrate by digging out some of the Bruce movies I’ve never seen or don’t remember much and write reviews of them. And what better place to start than his hour long 1987 HBO music special THE RETURN OF BRUNO? Well, I’m sure there are better places. But this is one possible place.
I believe in something called Karaoke Syndrome. It’s something that many famous actors suffer from. Everybody dreams of being a rock star, even if they’re already a movie star, so they try to use their projects as excuses to get on stage and fuck around with a guitar or microphone. One famous victim of KS is Mike Meyers, whose characters in WAYNE’S WORLD, AUSTIN POWERS and THE LOVE GURU all had to be in bands. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi also suffered from KS (did the Blues Brothers and bee people things on SNL even count as comedy?) but luckily they channeled it into one of the best comedies of all time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, fakumentary
Posted in Bruce, Music, Reviews | 49 Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Jimbolo kindly put this link in some comments, but it was cool enough I thought I should give it its own post. The cartoon band “Gorillaz” (who once named a song after Clint) have yet another cool video, this one a tribute to muscle cars and car chase movies, and guest starring a favorite actor of mine, I will not say who other than that I gave it away in the subject line and he is pictured to the left and to the right. Another hint: this is the first time he has chased after cartoon characters trying to kill them since BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA. Unless you count SIN CITY.
Speaking of (SPOILER) Bruce, I also want to call attention to the new banner to the right, advertising my new book YIPPEE KI-YAY MOVIEGOER: WRITINGS ON BRUCE WILLIS, BADASS CINEMA AND OTHER IMPORTANT TOPICS. It’s a collection of some of my (and your) favorite reviews and it comes out– well, I thought at the end of this month, but Amazon says April 27th now. I’ll have to ask my publisher. Anyway, please help me spread the word on this one, I’m not sure how the hell I’m gonna convince people to buy it, but I think we all agree that if they do buy it it will change their lives forever and make their children smarter and possibly even work as some sort of a renewable fuel source. Also it smells like Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler.
You give up? Okay, it’s Bruce Willis in the video.
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog), Bruce | 89 Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
In ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT Bruce plays Kirkpatrick, a grizzled Gulf War vet turned private high school principal who must use his elite combat skills and overcome great odds to retake the school when it comes under siege by an army of guerillas intent on murdering the student body president because they don’t like the theme for the homecoming dance.
That’s not true. I made up everything after the word “principal.” Bruce does play the principal and he does always talk about Iraq. He could almost be the same character from PLANET TERROR. He’s a hostile disciplinarian who’s driven into a fury when students chew gum. He also leads the school in a singalong of a patriotic song he wrote. But it’s not an action movie and he’s not the star. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: back to school, Bruce, Bruce Willis
Posted in Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
SURROGATES is TERMINATOR 3 director Jon Mostow (plus the writers of TERMINATOR 3-4) doing another robot movie, this time free of the expectations and mythology (and budget, from the looks of it) of the TERMINATOR series. The only thing they’re chained to is the “graphic novel” the ads say it’s based on, which means a comic book. Luckily they don’t have to be too careful about adapting it because nobody ever heard of it until it was being made into a movie. You show me someone who has read it and I’ll show you the guy that did the copy editing. I was gonna say the mom of the guy who wrote it but I doubt she read it either. This is not some iconic one everybody knows like Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Garfield’s Big Fat Hairy Deal. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Jonathan Mostow, robots, Ving Rhames
Posted in Bruce, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 68 Comments »
Monday, November 19th, 2007
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD: 2-DISC ALLOWED TO SAY ‘MOTHERFUCKER’ EDITION
“YIPPEE KI YAY, MOVIE FANS!” That’s what some dipshit wrote on the back of the new LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD dvd. But in the new unrated cut of the movie itself John McClane is allowed to live free and say the whole legendary, maybe-shouldn’t-have-become-part-of-the-DIE-HARD-formula catch phrase. Say goodbye to “Yippee ki yay mother(gunshot).” It’s out the window like Hans Gruber.
The new cut is not drastically, hugely or monumentally different. If you hated the theatrical version you’ll still hate this one. The story is the same, I didn’t notice any scenes removed or added, there’s no new narration or a corny shot of a unicorn that’s supposed to make you see the whole movie in a new light. McClane still doesn’t make good on his threat to beat Kevin Smith’s character to death – not even in a deleted scene, unless it’s one a them “easter eggs” and I just didn’t find it. I’ll keep looking. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Cyril Raffaelli, Len Wiseman, Maggie Q
Posted in Action, AICN, Bruce, Reviews, Thriller | 8 Comments »
