Apparently The Last Exorcism was a misnomer because I have here a trailer for The Last Exorcism Part II. Since the movie is not subtitled (This Time We Really Mean It), I'm going to assume that the finality of poor Ashley Bell's possession (and the future employment actress who plays her, Nell Sweetzer) will be dependent upon box-office results and VOD earnings. I'm also going to bet that if there is a Part III, it won't star Sofia Coppola — that's a little Godfather joke — and the poster and trailer will feature images of an even more grotesquely contorted Sweetzer. more »
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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In a career spanning three decades Michael Biehn has notched a number of iconic roles in beloved genre fare, from future freedom fighter Kyle Reese in The Terminator to Corporal Hicks in Aliens to one of his personal favorites, Tombstone villain Johnny Ringo. And that work has borne him witness to his share of tense, chaotic sets under some of the strongest personalities in the business. But no shoot of Biehn’s was as intense as the friction-filled production of this week’s The Divide, Xavier Gens’ bleak horror tale about strangers trapped in a basement after the apocalypse, which Biehn says was fueled by the “hatred” and “bitterness” of combative actors turning on each other under claustrophobic conditions.
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Child actors all grown up, Oscar-winning directors popping their collars, stars going silly for the camera -- anything goes when you stick actors and filmmakers in the studio for some good, old-fashioned family-style portraits. See who came to town for the 2011 Toronto Film Festival and gave good face for the camera, uberdramatic, super goofy, and otherwise, in Movieline's TIFF 2011 Photo Booth.
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