Movies

The Hitman has a long lineage in Hollywood. Of course, because the Hitman’s primary occupation is the extinction of human life by violent means – be it shooting, knifing, or other more extreme methods – this precludes him from adhering to standard Hollywood Code which stipulates that film protagonists must be likable and/or sympathetic. There are two typical remedies to this quandary – 1.) Make the Hitman a side character or 2.) If choosing to make the Hitman your principal character, romanticize the situation, play it for comedy’s sake or make him “empathetic” within his own context. And this brings us to the main character of the just-released Iceman, Richard Kuklinski, bewilderingly based on a real person. After seeing The Iceman I did a little research on the real-life Kuklinski and learned he was considered as much a serial killer as a contract killer – a man who killed somewhere between 100 and 250 people, partly for varying crime families who sought his employment and partly for the sheer thrill it provided him. Shudder. Director Ariel Vromen, however, who wrote the script with Morgan Land which they based on Anthony Bruno’s non-fiction book, choose to essentially make Kuklinski a full-time family man and part-time hitman. Consider the opening scene. It is not, crucially, of Kuklinski killing someone, though that turns up quickly in the second scene. No, it is a scene of Kuklinski taking his future wife Deborah (Winona Ryder) out on their first date, where she fiddles with the teensy cross around her neck as if trying to get the okay from above about this guy across the table. The scene establishes him as being genuinely caring (he opens the door for her), a stingy conversationalist and a liar – he tells her he puts together movie reels for Disney when, in fact, he puts them together for porn films as part of a mob run outfit. The latter is how he comes into contact with mob moss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta) who shuts down the porn film ring but senses potential in this Kuklinski as a thug when he shoves a gun in his face and he does not react. So, to make ends meet, considering he has his wife and now two daughters at home, Kuklinksi begins taking human lives to make a living, though with a caveat – he does not kill women and children. This leads directly to his undoing and eventually an uneasy alliance with another skeezy hitman (Chris Evans) who drives an ice cream truck which gives him a convenient place to tuck away dead bodies. Kuklinski is played by Michael Shannon in another of his seemingly ceaseless string of virtuoso performances. I can only imagine there are few things in this life more frightening than Ray Liotta thrusting a gun in your face – film fakery or not. Thus, you have to hire a actor capable of not flinching when it happens. Clearly this is why Vromen and his producers hired Shannon. He stares down Ray Liotta and wins. If that isn’t Academy Award worthy, nothing is. This might lead the reader to suspect that Shannon parades about this decade-jumping crime story (from the sixties to the seventies to the eighties, his suits and facial hair getting louder) like a preeminent badass, but Shannon wisely retreats from playing to convention or caricature. Although the film makes it clear that Kuklinski’s family is what drives him to this untraditional vocation, it also attempts to make no apologies (even though Kuklinski makes a sort-of apology in the film’s last scene) for the character nor ask the audience to put on rose-colored classes and view him with empathy. That is daring. Shannon, miraculously, lets us in behind the hard-boiled veneer while simultaneously not granting us much access to the inner-workings of what makes him tic. A key scene late as events around him are piling up and spiraling out of control takes place on an elevator where, in a way I struggle to describe, we can see – very nearly literally

Re-enforcing the growing film axis between Chile and France, Paris-based Rezo has re-upped with Chilean director Cristian Jimenez and producer Bruno Bettati, tying down international rights to their upcoming “Voiceover.” Laurent Danielou’s Rezo, a Gallic producer-distributor-sales agent that has just boarded Ralph Fiennes starrer “Two Women” will handle international sales. Rezo distributed Jimenez’s “Bonsai,” which... Read more »

From its booth at the Riviera, IM Global is shopping mob biopic “Gotti” with Anthony Hopkins set to join the cast. John Travolta and Kelly Preston already star in the pic, which focuses on the teflon don’s career as a gangster boss and his son, who decides to leave the crime world in order to... Read more »

Today is the perfect day to watch DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE! Don’t be too scared to read a full review HERE!

It wouldn’t be a “Saturday Night Live” season finale without the bittersweet moment that comes when a veteran cast member makes a final appearance. Last night it was Bill Hader’s turn to say goodbye, just as Kristen Wiig had done the previous season. WATCH: Kanye West Performs New Songs on ‘SNL’ (Video) Given the revolving... Read more »

With a softer-than-expected $84.1 million four-day Stateside tally, Paramount’s “Star Trek Into Darkness” reinforced this weekend where the franchise’s strengths lie — with fanboys — and with whom the series needs to improve — most everyone else. Let’s be clear, however: The film’s domestic opening weekend (actually 6% better than its predecessor), added with an... Read more »

Even before “Man of Steel” helps set up a “Justice League” movie at Warner Bros., the studio’s consumer products division is already getting consumers — especially kids and families — used to seeing the match up of the superheroes in the retail aisle. Starting today, Target will exclusively start selling a summer collection of Justice League-themed... Read more »

Feature trailer for The Land of Hope. From award-winning Sono Sion (Guilty of Romance, Himizu) comes a powerful drama depicting the struggle of a family in Japan facing the harsh consequences of disasters both natural and unnatural. The events of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami serve as source material for this work of fiction. The Ono family live a frugal but happy life as dairy farmers in a peaceful village. One day the worst earthquake in history strikes, causing a nearby nuclear-power station to explode. Their neighbours, who live within the range of the station, are forcibly ordered to evacuate by the government. But the Ono family have only half of their property designated as within range. They then have to make a difficult decision whether to leave or to stay. Extremely moving, sometimes angry, and always empathetic, The Land of Hope is an unforgettable dramatic account of a great tragedy. Filed Under: The Land of Hope (Kib? no kuni) Tags: Sydney Film Festival, Foreign / Foreign Language, Drama

Trailer for La Maison de la Radio. Nicolas Philibert, the award-winning director of To Be and to Have, has turned his affectionate yet acute gaze on France's national broadcaster - a Continental combination of the BBC, ABC Radio National and America's National Public Radio. This beautifully crafted documentary, shot in Radio France's bagel-shaped home on the Seine, follows the station's dawn-to-dusk schedule. Philibert masterfully intercuts between the numerous and delightfully quirky characters. We meet a playful news editor; a presenter learning the art of a newsflash; a charmingly dedicated producer who, with a knowing glance, gets just the performance she wants; and an archetypal archivist, gnomically peering out from tottering piles of CDs. Philibert, whose work frequently covers the complexities of institutions and their staff (e.g. Nenette, SFF 2010), portrays a dedicated and extremely likeable bunch who, like a ripe Brie, positively ooze with appealing Frenchness. Filed Under: La Maison de la Radio Tags: Sydney Film Festival, Documentary, Foreign / Foreign Language

Any British film fan of a certain age will have fond memories of Moviedrome. For those who don’t, it was a film series shown on BBC2 between 1988 and 2000 dedicated to cult movies. More than just series of films, Moviedrome featured an introduction originally by director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker) and later by Mark Cousins. In the first two years, as an impressionable 12/13 year old I had my first experience of: The Wicker Man, Big Wednesday, The Last Picture Show, Barbarella, Johnny Guitar, The Parallax View, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Fly (1958), The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, D.O.A. (1950), The Thing From Another World, The Incredible Shrinking Man, THX 1138, Night of the Comet, The Big Carnival aka Ace in the Hole, Alphaville, Two-Lane Blacktop, Trancers, Five Easy Pieces, Sweet Smell of Success, Sunset Boulevard. Then in the third year something interesting happened. Alongside movies I had never seen – Yojimbo (my first Kurosawa movie), Something Wild, Carnival of Souls, Manhunter (the first and still the best Hannibal Lecktor movie), Badlands (my first Terrence Malick movie) and Performance – they started showing movies I had already seen and loved such as: Assault on Precinct 13, Brazil, Get Carter, The Terminator, An American Werewolf in London, The Beguiled, Rumble Fish and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Many of the films shown are well known if not that well seen. But then others really blindsided me: despite being 27 years old at the time, Sergio Corbucci’s spaghetti western Django had never been shown in UK cinema’s or on UK network television until its premier on Moviedrome in 1993.  This continued into the fourth season with one of my all time favourite genre/B movies Mad Max II shared a double bill with Orson Welles’ bizarre documentary about fraud and fakery, F for Fake. It was around this time that they started showing more themed double bills including The Day of the Locust / The Big Knife, Alligator / Q – The Winged Serpent, Wise Blood / The Witchfinder General, but the one that stood out for me was the David Cronenberg double feature Dead Ringers and Rabid. To the best of my memory, this was the first time I had seen a Cronenberg movie, I quickly looked out all the other s and have been a fan ever since. The real appeal of the series isn’t just the movies I got to see, it was the introductions by Cox. A man passionate and knowledgeable about movies, particularly genre movies. This you must remember was at a time before the internet as we know it. A time when information about older movies wasn’t as freely available and copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide was as close to IMDB as existed at the time. Listening to Cox talk about Cronenberg’s body of work and in comparison to other horror directors and revelling in its wideness and the “vicious horror lurking behind the most mundane things” certainly gave me a greater understanding of what made certain horror movies disturbing. Alex Cox’s final season of Moviedrome came in 1994 after a seventeen week run, many of them including double features, Cox ended with Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s seminal noir thriller adapted from Mickey Spillane’s novel of the same name. the movie features an interesting maguffin that Cox borrowed for his 1984 movie Repo Man. The interesting thing about the timing of this movie on Moviedrome, was that it was still fresh in my memory a few months later when I saw another movie that also borrowed the idea, Pulp Fiction. It was around this time that I started studying film at university as part of my degree course, many of the films on the watch list had been movidrome films.  The series seemed to have come to an end in 1994 but was resurrected in 1997 with Mark Cousins introducing and choosing the movies. His choices often seemed more recognisable or mainstream, or was it that I was so immersed in film by this time a had alre