Thomas Jane plays Malone, a fedora-wearing, ‘52 Buick driving, ten thousand bullet firing, fake film noir style opening scene narrating, badass private eye motherfucker in a mostly empty city portrayed by Spokane, Washington. The movie takes place in the modern day (email is mentioned once) but obviously takes most of its cues from the cliches of detective stories/film noir, including the femme fatale client, the fast, back-and-forth quipping and, you know, his hat. He’s old fashioned enough that he keeps calling women “sister.” Also, alot of the score is that cheesy type of saxophone they always use in modern movies and TV as a code for “it’s like an old private eye movie.” (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Jane’
Give ‘Em Hell Malone
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
LikeDark Country
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Over on the Ain’t It Cool News I have what I believe to be the first review anywhere of DARK COUNTRY, directed by and starring Thomas Jane. Most of it takes place at night but I thought I would use the thumbnail on the left because I thought he looked kind of like Steve McQueen there. Also this is the beginning of the movie when he’s leaving for his honeymoon with his new wife, so I use this picture to symbolize Tom Jane beginning his new life as a director. One of the cups is for him and one is for directing. I’m sure you understood that without me explaining it though.
The Mist
Thursday, March 27th, 2008THE MIST is called THE MIST because it’s a cool and refreshing vapor of soothing horror quality in a sea of crappy bombast. Also because it’s about a mysterious mist that surrounds a small town and when they go into it there’s monsters. The small town is Castle Rock, Maine and you know what that means: based on a Stephen King story. The weird thing is the hero, Thomas Punisher Jane, is not an alcoholic writer, he is a guy who paints movie posters exactly like Drew Struzan (he even painted the poster for THE THING, just like Drew Struzan did, and came up with the same poster). So this is real new territory for Stephen King.
After a storm wrecks Tom Jane’s painting, his window, his boathouse, and his asshole neighbor’s Mercedes he takes his son and the neighbor (the great Andre Braugher of TV’s HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET) to the Food House grocery store. The place is chaotic with everybody stocking up in case of more storm and you can imagine how much worse it gets when The Mist traps everybody inside. By the way, even though this is Stephen King the grocery store is not possessed, not even the mist is possessed, it’s just mist that happens to surround monsters, which may or may not be possessed. I’m not really sure if monsters can be possessed or not, I have not considered this before.
There’s kind of a microcosm thing going on here. The story shows how people turn on each other due to fear. At first they band together and they trust the authority of the guys in uniform (strangely I’m talking about the guys with the Food House aprons, not the three uniformed soldiers who happen to be there). But as things get crazier tensions rise, they argue, they split into teams. Working class don’t trust college boys. Locals don’t trust out of town vacationers. Out-of-towners think locals are talking shit about them. The biggest split is religious when Marcia Gay Harden believes these are the end times, starts preaching, develops a flock. (more…)
Thursday
Friday, February 17th, 2006This poor bastard Skip Woods. How was he supposed to know? He stumbles across this winning formula of late ’90s independent quirky crime drama, and it just so happens that another individual, somebody named Quentin Tarantino, has already done it.
You gotta feel sorry for Skip. How was he supposed to know that Tarantino loved to take larger than life movie archetypes and show the mundane parts of their lives? Like this opening scene where three criminals who obviously don’t realize how annoying they are (Aaron Ekchart, Paulina Porezkova, James LeGros) stop in a convenience store after a big score to get coffee, and argue over the price until they end up killing the clerk and then have to pretend to work there when a cop comes in. And how could Skip have known that when he has the cop ask, for no reason, whether Eckhart prefers Picard or Kirk… that it JUST MIGHT look like he was some fuckin idiot jackass blatantly and embarassingly trying to copy the most superficial elements of Tarantino’s formula?
I mean let’s face it, Tarantino is not the only person who enjoys wacky intertitles to divide his stories into chapters. Or scenes where people are duct taped to chairs being casually tortured. Or criminals who casually use racial slurs and deliver random trivia about the Roman empire or porno films. Or people in the suburbs trying to clean up huge bloody messes before their wives get home. Or criminals stopping to tell each other colorful stories. Or all the other shit that this movie does that happens to be exactly what was done way better in Tarantino’s movies. I mean, Tarantino doesn’t have a copyright on the exact rhythm and tone of the speech Dennis Hopper famously delivers to Christopher Walken in TRUE ROMANCE, so why is it so wrong for Skip to COMPLETELY INNOCENTLY AND INDEPENDENTLY come up with a seemingly asinine and clueless dipshit retread of that speech for Thomas Jane to deliver? I mean he put his own spin on it anyway. For some reason an angry, heavily armed black drug dealer is willing to sit back passively as Jane gets in his face with a blatantly racist and personally insulting speech questioning the size of his dick. This unbelievable element adds a kind of poorly thought out and/or magic realism vibe to it that makes it COMPLETELY different from Tarantino. I mean come on. Skip Woods is an original. (more…)
The Punisher (2004)
Saturday, January 1st, 2005Well from what they tell me “The Punisher” is a Marvel Comics type super hero character. In the comic strip he’s a sadistic bastard that goes around “punishing” people. What this means I guess is not spidermanning them with webs or hulking them or whatever, what he does is kill them in horrible painful ways. He does not wear a cape or fly but he wears black spandex and a picture of a skull on his chest. Basically he is the guy from Rolling Thunder as a super hero. Without super powers or a hook hand. Superman’s morally questionable co-worker.
Guys who like The Punisher are not guys I can relate to. They like the violence and sadism and revenge aspects. They have a lot of anger in them and they enjoy getting it out. So far so good. But for some reason their idea of a bad motherfucker is a super hero in a comic strip. They think the right guy to get the rage out is a guy who wears a super hero costume. They can’t just watch Charles Bronson movies like everybody else, they gotta put the guy in a fucking uniform. That was one of the reasons they hated the earlier PUNISHER movie starring Dolph Lundgren. He didn’t wear the uniform. He doesn’t count as the Punisher because he wears different clothes. (maybe the movie takes place on laundry day. Huh? Ever thoughta that, asswipes?)
Another thing, they got John Travolta as the villain in this movie. Now obviously Travolta has been good before. I liked him in BLOWOUT, I liked him in PULP FICTION, etc. But these days the only surer sign of a bad movie is if Sean Connery is in it. I mean I could see Sean Connery being in SWORDFISH, I could see Travolta being in LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN. But without one of those two, movies like that would not exist. They just wouldn’t happen. (more…)
Stander
Friday, June 18th, 2004Dearest Harold,
Vern here and for once I’ve got the genuine article for you. Not just a better than average straight to video-er or something. This is an actual great theatrical film that you haven’t much covered yet and that I know you boys are gonna love. Guaranteed. I saw it here at SIFF and I know it’s played some other film festivals and it’s coming soon to a theater near some place or other. And if nobody goes to see it, well then, fuck those guys. They obviously don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
STANDER is the true story of Andres Stander, a police captain turned legendary bank robber in ’70s South Africa. At the height of the revolution he noticed that with all the police on riot duty to stop uprisings and protests, there weren’t enough police to really guard the banks. So he started robbing them, then pretending to investigate his own crimes, until he was caught and then busted out of prison and started his own very successful gang. Seems like a pretty good guy.
So it’s got all the thrills of your favorite bank robber movies but with the unique setting and themes of apartheid era South Africa. Stander is played by Thomas Jane (yes, the punishing guy from the Marvel comics) and like I said he’s a police captain, so obviously he’s a white dude. I don’t know what the real story is, but as it’s portrayed in the movie, the events are set off by his disgust with apartheid and with his own participation in it. The beginning of the movie really creeps you out by putting you in the perspective of a riot cop at an anti-apartheid protest. You watch the protesters (the good guys) marching and singing about Mandela from a helicopter, behind a gun. Things get rowdy, and Stander freaks out and shoots an unarmed man. Afterwards he can’t understand why no one really cares. He feels guilty but he also feels like he should feel more guilty than he does. And this is part of what pushes him to, on a whim one day, rob a bank during his lunch break. (more…)
