This is a little ditty about John Mellencamp's vaguely annoyed reaction to Bradley Rust Gray's Jack & Diane. If you were born after the 1980s, you might not know that Gray's "werewolf-lesbian-psycho-drama," as it has been described, takes its title from Mellencamp's giganto-1982 number-one hit and little else. (The National Endowment for the Arts chose the tune as one of the "Songs of the Century," as in 20th, in 2001.) Mellencamp's song is about a teenaged boy and girl living the so-slow-it-hurts Midwestern life of sucking down chili dogs outside the Tastee Freeze. Gray's movie is about, well, two lesbians, one of whom happens to be a werewolf. more »
Also in Friday afternoon's round-up of news briefs, two more Toronto International Film Festival titles head for theatrical runs. And Sparkle's Mara and Salim Akil eye some Abandonment Issues.
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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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Juno Temple (recently, Selina Kyle's special friend in The Dark Knight Rises) and Riley Keough (the granddaughter of Elvis seen briefly in Magic Mike) star in Bradley Rust Gray's Jack and Diane, a dark romance about two young ladies experiencing puppy love and the peculiar transformations that ensue. After the jump watch the first official trailer, which sets up their sweet sapphic connection but shies away from major spoilers.
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A slew of new projects for various directors and stars were unveiled today, including new work for Nicolas Cage, Juno Temple and Nick Cassavetes. Meanwhile, Brad Pitt is apparently signing on to push a high-end women's perfume. Read on for more in Tuesday afternoon's Biz Break.
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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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Oh to be young and in love and periodically a flesh-rending creature of globular, hairy, throbbing pulp. That's the curse heaped upon the eponymous romantics in Jack and Diane, one of the more anticipated — and more disappointing — features in Tribeca 2012's narrative competition.
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How do you possibly promote a movie about a promiscuous high school student in the '80s? If you're ripping a page out of the Weinstein Co.'s Dirty Girl's marketing book, try launching a blog where users can anonymously share their deepest, darkest, most twisted sexual fantasies... then making it accessible for anyone aged 13 and up! Um, guys...?
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And you thought Jessica Chastain was having a busy year. Check out the resume of Juno Temple, the 22-year-old British actress whose early roles in such films as Notes on a Scandal and Atonement have given way to a 2011 comprising work on movies from The Dark Knight Rises to The Three Musketeers to this week's quirky indie dramedy Dirty Girl.
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