"I have money, it's trust and character I need around me. You know, who you choose to be around you lets you know who you are. One car in exchange for knowing what a man's made of? That's a price I can live with."
Hey friends, somehow I have another piece in the ol’ Village Voice. This one is about Quentin Tarantino and why I hate when people say that his movies are just rip offs of other movies. I want to sincerely thank C.J. Holden for setting me off on a rant about that topic in a comment thread a while back, some of which was adapted into this more concise and polished version.
Let me know what you think.
I always want a picture of Bruce Lee or somebody at a New Year’s party but I can’t usually find a good one. So instead here’s a beautiful rendition of Auld Lang Syne by one of the local Seattle musicians. Happy New Year everybody and let’s do less bad things and more good things in this one.
As I mentioned a month or two ago, frequent outlawvern.com commenter Franchise Fred Topel hooked me up to write some posts for this thing called Fanhattan. It’s… something to do with streaming movies, but their blog/interface/thing has lots of movie news and features and stuff. And their official editorial policy is against “snark,” so I like that.
Today I have a piece introducing people to my beloved subgenre of Christmas crime. Also I contributed one to their worst holiday movies of all time, but it’s a movie I really enjoy. I just can’t claim it’s not terrible. You’ll see.
Check it out, and maybe if you’re so inclined write some comments with your own Christmas crime recommendations or whatever. It would make me look good.
This year, for the first (and last?) time ever, I was invited to take part in the 2012 Village Voice Film Poll, a survey of 85 critics about the best movies and performances and shit of the year. Hopefully I did not bring too much shame or dishonor upon the institution. My lowbrow tastes did not seem to affect the final tally too much, but it is funny to see that me and one other critic caused John Hyams to be tied with Ang Lee, Bela Tarr & Agnes Hranitzky, Jafar Panahi, Richard Linklater, Steven Spielberg and Ben Affleck for 6th place in the Best Director category.
I struggled with alot of my answers, especially in the actress categories, since I clearly haven’t seen enough movies with good roles for women. I mean, I love Rachel Weisz, but you guys know which movie called DEEP BLUE SEA I’ve seen, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t in it. I’m kind of embarrassed of some of those votes. I feel pretty good about honoring Jessica Biel for THE TALL MAN, though, and definitely Salma Hayek for SAVAGES. I’m not taking that one back. One category where I thought I would agree with the consensus was Daniel Day Lewis for best actor (he played Lincoln), but he ended up #3. #1 went to Joaquin (Popeye), who was my second place vote. (read the rest of this shit…)
Hey fellas, you know how you like comic strips and all that? And you know how you are also a huge fan of Lance Henriksen from ALIENS, STONE COLD, HARD TARGET, THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, PISTOL WHIPPED, the TV show Millennium, and others? Well that’s interesting because Joseph Maddrey, co-writer of the Henriksen autobiography Not Bad For a Human, dropped me a line to let me know that he and Henriksen have written To Hell You Ride, a 5-issue comic series for Dark Horse Comics. The first issue comes out December 12th. (read the rest of this shit…)
I’m trying to decide if Clubside Chris is my Q, or my Lucius Fox. I would say he’s the janitor from DIE HARD 2, but he’s too high tech for that. And it wouldn’t be nice to say he’s Kevin Smith from DIE HARD 4.
Anyway he’s been striving the shit out of the excellence and is programming in his computers and everything and honestly I got no clue what he’s doing with most of this but he keeps coming up with great features for outlawvern.com. What he’s really been sweating over for a while is this database that creates new and better ways to browse the review archive. If you look above there’s a “Reviews” button you can click on that goes to a dropdown menu with the different options. You can look at all my reviews in traditional alphabetical order, you can look at them in chronological order by release date, you can flip through the fancy timeline version…
The options I’m really excited about are the ones that are sorted by category: all my DTV reviews in chronological order, all my slasher reviews. There’s a new one called “Icons” where you can access all my Nicolas Cages, all my Dolphs, stuff like that, with all the movie posters of the reviewed titles, in release order.
I love these because I’m jumping around watching and writing about all different movies and they’re slowly forming into this history, so I can look at them in context. I can look at the DTV list and see that the earliest one I’ve reviewed is VIDEO VIOLENCE from ’87 and the next is SILENT NIGHT, DEAD NIGHT 3 in ’89, so that encourages me to look into what else came out before and around that time and see what’s up. It takes these scattershot writings and forms them together into a body of research that I’m building for the betterment of mankind or whatever.
Anyway when you feel like reading some reviews please try these features out and let Chris know what you think or any suggestions you have for how it could be even better.
thanks everybody and thanks Chris
I just found out about this and I thought you guys had the right to know. According to this cheesy official websight, the makeup effects artist/FRIDAY THE 13TH VII: THE NEW BLOOD director John Carl Buechler will be helming a martial arts movie about mercenaries recovering Dracula’s casket from a sunken Nazi submarine. I mean, I generally assume a movie about that is gonna be shitty, but if they really have this cast I’m intrigued. The sight lists:
Robin Shou (Liu Kang from MORTAL KOMBAT)
Michael Madsen
Matthias Hues (NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER 2, KICKBOXER 2, MISSION OF JUSTICE)
Cynthia Rothrock
(read the rest of this shit…)
Well everybody, Christmas is saved. We just got this design in for the t-shirts as well as the mugs. Fully customizable and what not. Probly the best thing that has ever been made. Appeals to a wide audience, an important message we can all get behind, etc.
In further capitalism news I got a note for UK readers, I have signed up for the Amazon UK associate account, so if you happen to shop with them consider going through my search box on the sidebar to support the sight. Or for Americans with region free players I made an ad highlighting some of the things they got that aren’t available in region 1.
thanks everybody
I’m optimistic about tomorrow, but nervous. Let’s not think about it. Here are some trailers.
First up: Wong Kar Wai’s THE GRANDMASTERS, the other movie about Ip Man. (Sorry, no English subtitles.)
I’m kinda hesitant to write about this on Halloween, but holy shit, that’s crazy news that George Lucas sold off all his shit to Disney for $4 billion plus and that they’re gonna make STAR WARS 7, 8 and 9 and (if people are reading this right) 1o and 11 and 12 and 13 and more every two to three years until the superstorms swallow us up.
My initial thoughts:
1. I can’t help but see this as the Nerd Empire celebrating the expression of an individual artist making the official switch to a Franchise, a Property, a Trademark. I think I read something on the internet a while back about how some people only like the earlier Star Warses, but still. It was clearly the vision of one particular guy, who took independent film far beyond what anybody else ever did. There is something about even those prequels that you hate so much that is clearly him. Nobody else could or would make movies like that, both the good parts and the bad parts. And that’s why Star Wars is special. Not because of the pajamas that you remember you had. Although I’m sure they were great. (read the rest of this shit…)
THANKS EVERYBODY. YOUR FRIEND, VERN
