We can all agree that 2012 has been an excellent year for the movies, but the more salacious among us will note that it's been an awesome year to perv out at the movies. Although we didn't get another look at the Fassmember and all the conflicting feelings it brought up (Hotness! Confusion! Embarrassment at being psyched to see him naked in Shame when actually it's really f***ing depressing!) there were some rather interesting trends that reared their heads that invite a closer look. Whether studios are getting braver or filmmakers are getting bolder is a debate for another time — and please don't suggest that 50 Shades had too much to do with it. Let's salute all the sexin' that happened onscreen in 2012.
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Also in Monday morning's round-up of news briefs, Killer Joe shrugs off its NC-17 and performs solid over the weekend; Remembering Norman Alden and The Gatekeepers is heading your way.
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The studios rule the screens this time of the year - well, they do year-round, but especially in the Summer. So, here is a shout-out to some of this weekend's new Specialty Releases with trailers and background should there be any inkling to stray from Hollywood's big budget-busting, celebrity-saturated splendidly marketed juggernauts. OK, some here are also offshoots of the big guys, but all the same… Among the weekend's "indie/specialty/limited release" newcomers are docs Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and Big Boys Gone Bananas!*. Also hitting limited screens (and with the big-fat NC-17 no less) is Killer Joe; Straight from Denmark and gracing these shores is Klown; and finally Ruby Sparks.
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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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If William Friedkin’s adaptation of The Exorcist left you feeling a tad jumpy, just wait until you see Killer Joe.
After a six-year absence from the Cineplex, the 76-year-old Friedkin returns to the big screen on Friday with arguably the most disturbing film of his 45-year career. more »
Killer Joe had a gala screening Monday night in New York with stars Matthew McConaughey and Gina Gershon on-hand along with
Oscar-winning director William Friedkin who had some choice words about gun violence, the law and their relationship to movies. His film, which will be released this weekend, described by its official
website as a "Totally twisted deep-fried Texas redneck trailer park murder story" received an often-dreaded NC-17 by the MPAA for "graphic disturbing content involving violence and sexuality and a scene of brutality." McConaughey and Friedkin weighed in on violence and its sources post-
TDKR tragedy at the event, hosted by the Cinema Society.
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William Friedkin barrels into theaters this Friday with Killer Joe, boldly adapted from Tracy Letts' ultra-violent Southern-fried play about a Texas lawman/assassin who ingratiates himself into the family of the low rent punk (Emile Hirsch) who's hired him to murder his mother. Los Angeleno Movieliners, grab a bucket of fried chicken and your twisted wits and dive into our latest 10-word review contest, tackling any of Friedkin's cinematic output for a chance to win tickets to see Killer Joe this Thursday!
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Movieline caught up with the charismatic William Friedkin last weekend at the Seattle Film Festival, where the Exorcist/French Connection director received a Lifetime Achievement award and screened his brutal Southern-fried potboiler Killer Joe. Before he held court keeping a packed audience rapt with tales from his nearly five-decade career in film (highlights below), Friedkin stopped to discuss two of the topics he’s wrestling with these days: His legal battle to win back the rights to his 1977 pic Sorcerer, and the absurdity of the MPAA, which anointed Killer Joe with an NC-17 rating.
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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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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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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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