Archive for the ‘Bruce’ Category

Unbreakable

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2000

BRUCE WILLIS’S UNBREAKABLE

Starring Bruce Willis

If you know Vern then you know I am not the kind of Film Writer who avoids giving away surprises or “spoilings” in movie reviews. The dude from Felicity is the killer in Scream 3 to name only one example. Apparently the girl in the Crying Game has a dick but I haven’t seen that one. I can verify that it does happen in one of the Sleepaway Camp pictures though so keep your eyes peeled for that one as well. Anyway point is if you want to go into a movie fresh you shouldn’t read my review first is the point. Especially when it comes to the films of Bruce Willis. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Bruce, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »

Man stuff

Monday, September 25th, 2000

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…)

Posted in Bruce, Vern Tells It Like It Is | 6 Comments »

Vern’s summer preview

Monday, June 19th, 2000

Well, tomorrow is the first official, scientific day of summer, and you know what that means – time to go to the beach, and it will be sunny, and you go on a vacation, and all that crap. Well in between all those summer activities, you can go to the movies as well, as far as I’m concerned anyway. I know if you go to a matinee you will come out of the movie and it’s all sunny and your eyes hurt like fuck, but sometimes it is worth it. Let’s face it gang being a movie watcher is a year round job and who the fuck likes sand castles that much anyway.

So in honor of that notion here is the first ever annual Vern’s Summer Movie Preview column, a guide to what movies come out and my asinine predictions about which ones will be good and what not. I know this is a weird idea for a column but you will get the hang of it after a few paragraphs. (read the rest of this shit…)

Posted in Bruce, Vern Tells It Like It Is | No Comments »

Nothing Lasts Forever: The Birth of Die Hard

Monday, January 10th, 2000

If you’re like me, you’ve wondered for years how much Bruce Willis’s DIE HARD (1988) owes to the book it was based on, NOTHING LASTS FOREVER by Roderick Thorp. And then you bought the book on e-bay but didn’t get around to reading it for a while because of an addiction to Richard Stark novels. But now you finally read the whole thing, rewatched DIE HARD and are ready to share with the world a comparison of the movie to the novel. Me and you, we’re in this together, like Bruce and Sam in part 3. We’re gonna do this.

The “ultimate Die Hard dvd” has little mention of the original novel, other than director John McTiernan admitting he never read it. And a quick internet search (a research technique I expect to see in DIE HARD 4.0 if they ever really make it) brings up no detailed comparisons between the movie and the bool. But I’m sure there must be one out there somewhere. Fortunately, I am a fuckin pro at this shit. I done this for myself with MILLION DOLLAR BABY, POINT BLANK/PAYBACK, THE OUTFIT, two Seagal movies, and others. Also I have a commitment to excellence. So I guarantee this will be the #1 DIE HARD/NOTHING LASTS FOREVER comparison on the internet.

ENTER JOE LELAND

The book is about Joe Leland, not John McClane, a retired (not vacationing) cop going to visit his daughter (not wife) in L.A. at Christmas time. In the movie he’s estranged from his wife, in the book he was divorced from his wife and she later died. His daughter used to be married to a chump he didn’t like and has taken his name, Generro (in the movie that’s his wife’s maiden name that she uses at work).

Like in the movie, Leland is on the outskirts of an office party with his shoes off (washing his feet though, because he was told it keeps you from being tired at the end of a day) when he hears gun shots, because terrorists have taken the office hostage. He spends the rest of the book as a fly in the terrorist’s ointment, picking them off one by one, blowing shit up, communicating with them and police on the outside using a CB. Like in the movie, the terrorists are German, and sometimes talk in German so he won’t understand. One major difference is that the book always follows Leland, it doesn’t cut away for scenes on other floors of the building. So unless he’s spying on them, we don’t know what the terrorists are up to. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: ,
Posted in Bruce, Vern Tells It Like It Is | 15 Comments »

Die Hard: With a Vengeance

Wednesday, January 5th, 2000

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE

My first time

Well I have found that a lot of my readers have also come to love the films of the Bruce Willis Die Hard series. But I wonder how many of you are in the same situation as me. Die Hard comes out in 1988, you love it. Die Hard 2 comes out a couple years later, pretty fucking good. Die Hard part 3 comes out but wait a minute, you are incapacitated and/or incarcerated at the time and are not able to ever get around to seeing the thing until letterbox video in the year 2000.

So yes, this is my first time for Die Hard With a Vengeance which is what they call part 3 for whatever reason, not sure about that one get back to me on that one later.

The other Die Hards took place in a limited setting – part 1, they take over a building. Part 2, they took over an airport. Part 3 opens by montaging New York city to the tune of “Summer in the City” by the Lovin Spoonful. You got the cars, you got the people, you got the stores and then oh yeah you got a big explosion. So right away you say wait a minute, these terrorists, these motherfuckers are working on a bigger canvas this time. That canvas, in my opinion, is called New York city. So it’s a whole different thing we’re dealing with here McClane.

Now the second difference here is that McClane doesn’t just happen to be there by coincidence. In fact he’s on suspension and he’s out drinking and they have to find him, because the mastermind who calls himself Simon asks for McClane specifically. (Not to give anything away but he is Hans Grueber’s brother out for revenge.)

In my opinion the opening is the best part of this piece. This one harkens way the fuck back to Bruce Willis’s Die Hard 1 (1988) in which John McClane was introduced as Hollywood’s most fucked up action hero. He’s separated from his wife, he fucks up bad and starts arguing with her, I mean the guy’s falling apart so much he’s walking around without shoes on. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Action, Bruce, Reviews, Thriller | 16 Comments »

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America

Saturday, January 1st, 2000

This is a cartoon but its not for kids and its not Japanese. If you don’t know in japan the cartoons are not only for kids, there is also demon raping, etc.

Bruce plays Muddy Grimes, a scruffly dude not unlike myself who tries to con two dumb heavy metal kids into smuggling a powerful weapon for him. Bruce does not have as much screen time as you would like but the story of these two little pricks Butthead and Beavis is pretty funny. Kind of reminds me of the old pink panthers how they go around and get chased by the FBI and then save the day and have no clue any of this shit went down. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: ,
Posted in Bruce, Cartoons and Shit, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | No Comments »

Armageddon

Saturday, January 1st, 2000

Well this is not a good movie in my opinion. In fact WHAT the fuck is my man Bruce doing in this piece of garbage. I bet when he watched the premiere for this shitpile he started feeling nostalgic for those baby movies.

Now right away I knew something was a-fucking-miss when it opens with a picture of the earth and you got Charlton Heston talking about the dinosaurs. Is there a stupider way to start a movie about astronauts? I mean make up your mind is it dinosaurs or astronauts. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. WHAT THE FUCK in my opinion.

What this movie is about is not dinosaurs but a group of tough, sweaty oil drillers who like to run around and shoot at each other, or go on motorcycle chases or whatever. Okay so far so good. Then the government says look you oil drillers, we’re teaching you how to be astronauts so we can send you up on a space shuttle to land on an asteroid and drill a hole in it because to save the world from asteroids, yunnerstand. The oil drillers say only if we never have to pay taxes again, ha ha ha, see, everyone can relate because you hate to pay taxes. Funny.

Now I think personally the asteroid part is enough to know this movie is nonsense but just in case. We got aerosmith songs with people playing with animal crackers on a gal’s belly. We got a singalong before they take off into space. We got this magic boots that make convenient to help them walk on asteroids instead of float. We got motherfuckers driving around in moon cars going off jumps like the dukes of hazzard, with an iron skull on the stickshift. I mean in my opinion that’s cool but NASA should not be wasting money on this shit. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: ,
Posted in Action, Bruce, Reviews, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 4 Comments »

Four Rooms

Saturday, January 1st, 2000

tn_bruce2In this movie Bruce plays Leo, a drunk rich dude calling his wife on a cell phone. It’s a small part but this is Bruce we’re talking about and he makes it fucking SOAR. He’s hanging out in a hotel room with this spoiled celebrity jerry lewis fan and they decide to re-enact a bet from an alfred hitchcock episode and if they lose the bet a man loses his finger which is kind of a dumbass bet to make in my opinion but hey man, free country.

Well Bruce doesn’t have a whole lot to do with all that, he mainly has this conversation with his wife he’s going to be home late and it’s funny. But this is only the last of four “rooms,” little stories about what goes on in this hotel even when Bruce is not there. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | No Comments »

Die Hard 2

Tuesday, December 21st, 1999

MCCLANE. JOHN MCCLANE. THE WORKING MAN’S JAMES BOND

BRUCE WILLIS’S DIE HARD 2

Well hell man I guess for those of you who read the title there’s no point in explaining my premise here. You see I just watched Die Hard part 2 for the first time since you know what and I realized that John McClane is a James bond for OUR people. The people who AREN’T rich and who don’t always get the breaks this motherfucker james gets.

Bond is the ultimate secret agent, who the government agencies go to for help. McClane is just a badass that happens to be there when the shit goes down, and the government agencies try to STOP him from helping but they can’t do it cause like the title says this mother fucker is HARD.

Bond has connections everywhere and can go anywhere and do just about anything he wants, but McClane has to save the whole fucking airport just to get these motherfuckers to let him out of a parking ticket. Bond drives snowmobiles and sports cars provided by the government and jumps off of them and blows them up. McClane steals the snowmobiles he uses but also jumps off of them and blows them up. Even when he drives a car at the beginning, its a piece of shit borrowed from his mother in law, and that one gets impounded.

Bond wears expensive suits and dapper uniforms. McClane wears a dirty maintenance man snow jacket he BORROWS from somebody else. If McClane was EVER in a casino, he’d be wearing a sleeveless undershirt, it would be on the Indian reservation, and he’d be losing. My man john doesn’t know the MEANING of the word dapper. He’s a rough and tumble type dude, and if I didn’t know he was a cop i’d swear he done time, cause this is the type of motherfucker that knows how to bite a guys hand during a fight. thumbs up for that one mcclane. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Action, Bruce, Reviews | 7 Comments »

Die Hard

Thursday, December 2nd, 1999

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MOTHERFUCKER: MY REUNION WITH BRUCE WILLIS’S DIE HARD

All across the world, in many different nations and cultures, families and individuals have many cherished traditions that they follow every winter holiday season. For some its the eggnog or candy canes, a special angel ornament they pass on through the family to put on top of the christmas tree, or everyone opens one present on christmas eve or who knows, ANYTHING.

Well in my opinion if I had been able to celebrate the holiday outside of the limits of the correctional facilities in recent years i’m PRETTY fucking sure my first tradition would be to read “junkies christmas” from william s. burroughs Interzone. This is the story of a fucking low life like many I know however he is able to learn the spirit of christmas and help others who need his knowledge and posession of certain illegal medicines. if its not already this should be on tv every year like the charlie brown cartoons.

Of course my second and more important tradition would be to watch my all time favorite christmas movie – the one starring Bruce Willis as Mr. John McClane. Bruce singlehandedly takes down a moneygrubbing so called terrorist operation that takes over his estranged wife’s office building on Christmas eve. Although with a strong action movie feel and taking place indoors instead of the snowy wilderness, this picture is fucking PENETRATED with the sounds of christmas, from the run dmc rap tune to i believe handels messiah.

That movie is the one and only Bruce Willis’s Die hard (1988).

So this year as the holiday season approaches I was able to rewatch Die fucking Hard as some of my buds in the guestbook call it for the first full viewing since the late 80s. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Action, Bruce, Reviews, Thriller | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »