The Hitman has a long lineage in Hollywood. Of course, because the Hitman’s primary occupation is the extinction of human life by violent means – be it shooting, knifing, or other more extreme methods – this precludes him from adhering to standard Hollywood Code which stipulates that film protagonists must be likable and/or sympathetic. There are two typical remedies to this quandary – 1.) Make the Hitman a side character or 2.) If choosing to make the Hitman your principal character, romanticize the situation, play it for comedy’s sake or make him “empathetic” within his own context. And this brings us to the main character of the just-released Iceman, Richard Kuklinski, bewilderingly based on a real person.

After seeing The Iceman I did a little research on the real-life Kuklinski and learned he was considered as much a serial killer as a contract killer – a man who killed somewhere between 100 and 250 people, partly for varying crime families who sought his employment and partly for the sheer thrill it provided him. Shudder. Director Ariel Vromen, however, who wrote the script with Morgan Land which they based on Anthony Bruno’s non-fiction book, choose to essentially make Kuklinski a full-time family man and part-time hitman.

Consider the opening scene. It is not, crucially, of Kuklinski killing someone, though that turns up quickly in the second scene. No, it is a scene of Kuklinski taking his future wife Deborah (Winona Ryder) out on their first date, where she fiddles with the teensy cross around her neck as if trying to get the okay from above about this guy across the table. The scene establishes him as being genuinely caring (he opens the door for her), a stingy conversationalist and a liar – he tells her he puts together movie reels for Disney when, in fact, he puts them together for porn films as part of a mob run outfit.

The latter is how he comes into contact with mob moss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta) who shuts down the porn film ring but senses potential in this Kuklinski as a thug when he shoves a gun in his face and he does not react. So, to make ends meet, considering he has his wife and now two daughters at home, Kuklinksi begins taking human lives to make a living, though with a caveat – he does not kill women and children. This leads directly to his undoing and eventually an uneasy alliance with another skeezy hitman (Chris Evans) who drives an ice cream truck which gives him a convenient place to tuck away dead bodies.

Kuklinski is played by Michael Shannon in another of his seemingly ceaseless string of virtuoso performances. I can only imagine there are few things in this life more frightening than Ray Liotta thrusting a gun in your face – film fakery or not. Thus, you have to hire a actor capable of not flinching when it happens. Clearly this is why Vromen and his producers hired Shannon. He stares down Ray Liotta and wins. If that isn’t Academy Award worthy, nothing is. This might lead the reader to suspect that Shannon parades about this decade-jumping crime story (from the sixties to the seventies to the eighties, his suits and facial hair getting louder) like a preeminent badass, but Shannon wisely retreats from playing to convention or caricature.

Although the film makes it clear that Kuklinski’s family is what drives him to this untraditional vocation, it also attempts to make no apologies (even though Kuklinski makes a sort-of apology in the film’s last scene) for the character nor ask the audience to put on rose-colored classes and view him with empathy. That is daring.

Shannon, miraculously, lets us in behind the hard-boiled veneer while simultaneously not granting us much access to the inner-workings of what makes him tic. A key scene late as events around him are piling up and spiraling out of control takes place on an elevator where, in a way I struggle to describe, we can see – very nearly literally – the way in which his glut of secrets eat away at his mind and seem near to rendering insanity.

His wife, as wives unfortunately are so often required to do in these sorts of stories, mostly stands at her man’s side, either quivering or expressing affection. But The Iceman is particularly delicate in the way it presents indelicate moments of Kuklinski threatening to come unglued, essentially tipping his hand that something is rotten in Dumont, New Jersey. But, as quickly as those moments arrive, they disperse, and life goes on. Ryder cleverly plays the part so we are not entirely certain if she is willfully naïve or just naïve. And what of us, the audience? Are we willfully naïve or just naïve?

Michael Shannon, boldly goes where few movie Hitmen have gone before, snuffing out the romance, turning up his nose at comedy and refusing, even when giving his daughters their Christmas presents, to make space for sympathy. There is a scene in which The Iceman and the skeezy Ice Cream Man are dismembering corpses and tucking them away inside freezers. Strange as it may sound, this is the sort of scene we have encountered before. Typically, though, to relive the awfulness, there is some variance of black comedy. Not here. It’s presented almost like a docudrama.

I imagine a producer perusing the script, recoiling and telling Shannon to make the guy more likable. Then I imagine Shannon, in that terse Shannon-esque language, replying: “Likable? The guy kills people for a living. He ain’t likable.” And that’s what I liked about it. This is one Hitman who is not mythologized. He is real. And he is terrifying.

B +

The fairy tale intertwines the plots of several well-known Brothers Grimm fairy tales but most notably centers on a childless baker and his wife who journey into the woods to confront the witch that put a spell on them. Other characters such as Rapunzel, Cinderella, “Jack and the Beanstalk’s” Jack, and Little Red Riding Hood are also part of the story.

Variety now has word that Emily Blunt (Looper) is in final talks to take on the role of the baker’s wife, the female lead of the film. We already know that Broadway actor James Corden is set to star as the baker with Meryl Streep signed on to take on the role of the witch and Johnny Depp in an unspecified role.

Additionally, Chris Pine and Jake Gyllenhaal recently joined the cast as the Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s princes. It will be interesting to see how this impressive ensemble perform from a singing standpoint. Production is set to start this fall with a probable release date in the fall of 2014.

What do you think?

Warner Bros. has debuted the full trailer for Guillermo Del Toro‘s upcoming blockbuster Pacific Rim. The film is set in an apocalyptic future in which humanity is fighting a hopeless war against legions of giant creatures, known as Kaiju. Despite devising powerful robots called Jaegers, humans are on the verge of defeat and must turn to two unlikely heroes.

The trailer definitely showcases the humongous scale of the battle scenes and the heavy amount of CGI effects used in the movie. It’s tough to gauge whether moviegoers will be eager to see this movie, given the lack of star power and feeble marketing effort by Warner Bros. so far. Hopefully, the studio will pick it up as the movie opens in 3D on July 12th.

Watch the trailer below and let us know what you think!

Well, what we did think was going to happen by giving the keys to The Great American Novel to Baz Luhrmann, holder of a masters in Cinematic Spectacle & Kitsch? He takes the material and guns the engine like Jay Gatsby himself at the wheel of his beloved yellow 1929 Duesenberg, entirely evoking Nick Carraway’s own take on the unseen lavish Louisville wedding thrown by the infamous Tom and Daisy Buchanan – more pomp and circumstance than this literary adaptation has known before. The shot that introduces us to the infamous Daisy isn’t even of Daisy but of the luxurious wedding ring on her finger – style comes first, then the person.

It is difficult to discuss any adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless novel, The Great Gatsby, about a most particular time and place in American life – The Roaring Twenties of New York City – without also referencing any manner of themes its author may have intended. Then again, I would argue, based partially on The Auteur Theory, that once the source material has been translated to the screen, we must focus squarely on the film to detect what the director intends to convey. The Great Gatsby is still F. Scott’s book but this Great Gatsby belongs to Baz.

This is to say, Baz always has and always will love a good party. Can’t you imagine him getting his hands on a copy for the first time and reading and re-reading with giddiness those passages of extravagance at the Gatsby mansion, imagining how he could plunk a Carpathian castle down amidst all the new money of West Egg, conceptualizing soirees crossing his Moulin Rouge with his costume party in Romeo + Juliet, and brainstorming the entrance of the character on which the entire story turns.

Gatsby’s entrance, in fact, is a fine way to pinpoint Luhrmann’s vision for the material. In the book, Nick (Tobey Maguire in the movie) and his golf pro pal Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki in the movie) are sitting at a table with a well-spoken gentleman who suddenly, casually, drops into the conversation that he is, in fact, this mysterious Gatsby. The film, however, yearns, on appearance, to pay homage to Woody Allen’s romanticized and perfect opening to his classic Manhattan, presenting Gatsby with a backdrop of fireworks and an overlay of Rhapsody In Blue. They both work, just in different ways.

The story is meant to be seen specifically from the viewpoint of our awed surrogate, the aforementioned Nick Carraway, played by Maguire with a wide-eyed wonder like a tourist on vacation for the first time in the Big City, a WWI vet who becomes ensnared in the life and times of his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her philandering husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), seeing vacuous Myrtle (Isla Fisher) on the sly, and eventually his next-door neighbor. Luhrmann’s lone addition to the material is the unfortunate framing device of having Carraway recount this story from an asylum for alcoholism which, I think, is intended as an ode to Fitzgerald himself but is a needless agitation. (Why must narration always be explained? Why can’t it just……be?)

This is Nick’s indoctrination to a glamorous and carnal world he has never known and Lurhmann’s opulent 3D assists in rendering these newfound sights and sensations as larger than life. Of course, in the end, this is all just an illusion. Nick comes to New York ostensibly to strike it big in bonds but The Great Gatsby partly is meant to deconstruct how hard work was cast aside for easy living and how the prosperity of the Jazz Age was akin to the beckoning green light at the end of Daisy’s dock on which Gatsby keeps hopeless watch. The film, though, in in the very way it was made, also falls victim to this illusion.

Structurally, The Great Gatsby has a lot in common with Michael Bay’s recent American dream “examination” Pain & Gain. Both films build almost inconceivable heads of steam in their first half and, thus, inevitably crumble under their own immense weight. The core of The Great Gatsby, of course, centers around the title character’s quest to re-locate Daisy Buchanan, the lost love of his life, and re-fashion the past so they can live happily ever after. In Lurhmann’s hands, however, this, oddly, feels more like an afterthought, thematically mechanized.

The older – relatively speaking – DiCaprio has always seemed more rigid in his performances than the younger version, as if he spends his days and nights blocking every movement and gesture his character makes. This lends itself well to the character of Jay Gatsby, self-invented and studiously rehearsed, quickly coming unglued when his plans fail to see themselves through. The Daisy of the page always came across more skittish to me than does Mulligan’s rendition, but that seems to be on account of her choice to focus squarely on the winsome sorrow and superficiality. And when we finally see these two together and past their initial meet and greet awkwardness, a real fire is noticeably absent.

Look, this love affair is, in its very essence, a curious one, born more of what it once was rather than what it is now or what it could be. Despite Gatsby’s protestations, you can’t repeat the past and the unwillingness to recognize or admit this is what turns the tale so tragic. Any sense of tragedy in this film, however, is muted by its outsized look and feel. During the bitter shouting match between its principal characters you can’t help but notice the visual splendor of the room in which they are having it at the Plaza Hotel. Even the climactic moment of terror involving speeding automobiles is so artfully choreographed you are left ogling the visuals, feeling oddly empty inside.

The end isn’t a punch to the face, it’s a slap on the back. In a way, Gatsby lucked out, didn’t he, old sport? He got to miss out when in a few year’s time the fit hit the shan. On the page those grandiose parties are just a means to an end, a desire to lure the lacking Daisy back into his life, but on the screen they sort of become the point. Live life as long as you can and prosper. Sure, it ends with the iconic lines we all know so well but I was reminded of different lines – the lines of one of the film’s producers. “I like the party life.”

C+

Titled “An Ideal Hope”, the track is essentially the music used in that recent trailer but it nonetheless demonstrates once again that Hans Zimmer always manage to create memorable scores that elevate the films they are used in.

Man of Steel arrives in theaters on June 14th.