“Here, you be Killing Them Softly and I’ll be the audience.”

This week in humanity disappointing me, Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 held the top spot at the North American box office, while Killing Them Softly (my review) opened softer than a panda bear’s dong. Softly, which (luckily) cost just $15 million to make, was one of Brad Pitt’s worst openings ever, worse than Fight Club, Meet Joe Black, and The Devil’s Own, though still twice as much as The Assassination of Jesse James‘s entire run, which was Pitt and director Andrew Dominik’s last collaboration. Aw, poor Andrew Dominik. Aussie can’t catch a break.

To make matters worse, Killing Them Softly’s audiences gave it an “F” cinemascore, and keep in mind that these same audiences gave “A”s to Alex Cross (Laremy’s review) and Here Comes the Boom (my review). My simplistic response to this would be “this is why we can’t have nice things,” but I’d also point out that audiences for Alex Cross and Boom are going to be self-selecting groups (read: dipshits) for movies that give you exactly what you’d expect (i.e., crap). And as much as I enjoyed Killing Them Softly, it was basically one big, oppressively cynical F-you to America and everything you stand for. It’s a heavy-handed, angry, snot-nosed movie meant to piss people off – that’s what it did, and that’s a big part of why I enjoyed it. Argo (my review) was just as good, but it portrays America as we like to think of ourselves, and it got an A+ cinemascore. Which is to say, Joe Sixpack and Charla Cheesesnack aren’t hostile to quality, but they are a bit sensitive when it comes to criticism (you can have their EZ cheez when you pry it from their cold, partially-amputated diabetes fingers).

All told, with Twilight, Skyfall, and Lincoln (my review) still cleaning up, the overall box office was up 46% from last year. Long story short, people will continue to make movies, and studios will continue to be rightly scared of interesting ones.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stimulus Whackage

Take it from this reviewer, there’s no finer date movie this season than Killing Them Softly. You and your special lady can hold each other close as Brad Pitt opens Italian guys’ skulls with a shotgun! Interlace fingers as you thrill to bloated Ray Liotta getting his teeth kicked in by a fat rapper! Heck, bring grandma and the kids! They’ll love James Gandolfini talking about cutting up hookers! And the best part is, it’s family entertainment that’s not just fun, it comes with an important message. Namely, “Everything sucks and people are assholes the end.”

If that sounds like a negative critique, it’s not, I loved this movie. Killing Them Softly is like that angry song you loved when you were 15, or that angry poem you wrote when you were 15. It’s a crime story-as-political-allegory that’s about as nuanced as a middle finger and as subtle as a pistol whipping, but what it lacks in complexity, it makes up for in panache, consistency, and consistently graphic skull trauma. The main point director Andrew Dominik is making, that politics is just as messy and amoral for foul-mouthed, shit-smelling murderers as it is for candidates wearing American flag pins, isn’t a particularly unique or insightful one, but then neither is “Eat the Rich.” Tight, fast, brutal, and gleefully immature, like my lovemaking, it’s sort of a cinematic Motörhead song, not especially smart, but there’s a certain poetry to getting punched in the face. Art in the same way that a brick through the window has a beauty that transcends the thrower’s justification.

Read the rest of this entry »

NOOOO! Not Scoot McNairy!

After Seven Psychopaths turned out to be more about fartsy navel fingering than actual ownage, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly seems like it might be Fall’s last hope for a shoot ‘em up (release date: November 30th). It stars Brad Pitt as a hitman and James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta as a couple bad guys, plus Gloansy McGloane from The Town, and really, you don’t hire Gloansy McGloane unless he’s going to die violently.  He’s like a fat Irish Michelle Rodriguez. Less spice, more grit. Anyway, the latest trailer is below, and it has murder and Johnny Cash. That’ll do, Pitt, that’ll do.

Read the rest of this entry »

COOOOOGAAAAAAAN!

I don’t usually get too excited by promotional stills from upcoming movies, but in case you’re interested, here’s a first look Brad Pitt in Cogan’s Trade. OMG, he’s wearing a necklace! Cogan’s Trade is the third film from director Andrew Dominik, who previously did Chopper and the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Casey Affleck. Cogan just wrapped shooting in New Orleans, with Pitt, James Gandolfini, and Sam Shepard. The film is based on a 1974 novel by George V. Higgins, which sounds like a Bawston stawry about cawps and rawbbahs.  New Orleans doesn’t seem like a very good stand-in for Boston, but I guess that’s the magic of… uh… Hollywood.  Are we still calling it that?  When’s the last time someone actually shot a movie there?

Cogan’s Trade is the top-notch crime novel rated by the New Yorker as the “best” from “the Balzac of the Boston underworld.” Crackling dialogue, mordant humor, and unremitting tension drive the suspenseful stakes of the game higher in Boston’s precarious underworld of small-time mobsters, crooked lawyers, and political gofers as George V. Higgins, the writer who boiled crime fiction harder, tracks Jackie Cogan’s career in a gangland version of law and order. For Cogan is an enforcer; and when the Mob’s rules get broken, he gets hired to ply his trade—murder. In the gritty, tough-talking pages of Higgins’s 1974 national best-seller, Cogan is called in when a high-stake card game under the protection of the Mob is heisted. [Amazon, picture via SlashFilm]

HEY, TAWMMY, AH YOU GONNA READ MY FACKIN’ NAWVEL?  It gawt rated “best” by the New Yawkah.

The New Yawkah?  Sounds queah.