Slick and mean and full of piss and chicken grease, Killer Joe has worse manners than its deadly, courtly antihero. But in its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin’s splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir. What begins as a set of open provocations and genre tweaks propping up the story of a trashily blended Texas family’s encounter with an alpha hitman takes a turn through Coen and Lynch Lanes before winding up at the corner of Friedkin and Peckinpah. There a trailer ignites with violence and the tone of alternately abject and mordant depravity begins flailing like a rogue firehose.
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Also in Monday morning's round-up of news briefs, Magnolia Pictures' The Queen of Versailles debuted strong in the specialty box office. Emile Hirsch in talks for Navy role and the Teamsters set contract with producers.
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At the Seattle International Film Festival over the weekend to fete director and Lifetime Achievement honoree William Friedkin and present their NC-17 Southern-fried potboiler Killer Joe, actor Emile Hirsch spoke with Movieline about the “secret” movie he’d just shot with David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche, also starring Paul Rudd) and the experience of being on a Friedkin set, where the pressure to deliver on a tight schedule was palpable. “If you messed up your lines or something, Billy would make you pay a little bit,” Hirsch said. “You really didn’t want to mess up at all.”
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Also in Wednesday afternoon's quick news roundup, The Hobbit is set to premiere in Down Under later this year, Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch complete a "secret" indie and Captain America 2 appears to have found its directors. Also up is news on a network starring Asian Americans and Universal chief Ron Meyer heads to UCLA festivities.
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The William Friedkin-directed, Matthew McConaughey-starring, hit-man-in-the-heart-of-Texas thriller Killer Joe has already enjoyed its share of festival notoriety for the sexualized violence that earned the film an NC-17 rating. Now comes a trailer that sanitizes for mainstream audiences what Friedkin and Co. won't.
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