From the director of PUNISHER #2 and the star of PUNISHER #3 comes a solid, entertaining period gangster movie. It’s a biopic of Danny Greene, an Irish American union president, gang enforcer and dodger of car bombs in Cleveland, Ohio circa early ’60s through late ’70s. If it had been done as two separate movies maybe it would’ve got an arthouse release and some critical respect, but they did it as one so it was barely released by Anchor Bay and nobody ever heard of it.
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Posts Tagged ‘true crime’
Kill the Irishman
Wednesday, June 15th, 2011
Mesrine: Killer Instinct
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT is part 1 of a 2 part French true-ish crime saga about Jacques Mesrine, international terror, mustachioed robber of banks and casinos, killer of forest rangers, escaper of prisons, etc. One of these lovable maniacs who make the world worse and the movies better. This review is just of the first part. Both parts have been available as an import for a while but I waited for the official American release, so I gotta wait another month for part 2.
Vincent Cassel (EASTERN PROMISES) plays Mesrine as a fun-loving, woman-enjoying dude, a charmer who wins you over when he’s caught robbing a house and without missing a beat just pretends to be a police officer responding to the robbery. In real life nobody likes some asshole that lies to the elderly and steals their shit, but through the filter of a movie we admire his cleverness. And hey, he could’ve just pistol whipped them and gotten similar results. He made a better choice. But he’s not a good man.
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Bonnie and Clyde
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
It is a time of economic turmoil. The gap between the haves and the have-nots keeps getting wider and wider, like a hippopotamus’s mouth when he yawns. Hard-working people hit some bad luck and they lose their homes, property and life savings to the banks. Anger rises, and in the face of cruel systems too complex for guys like me to understand, it’s easy to fall into simplistic stick-it-to-the-man sentiment. These faceless institutions seem to be crushing people under their boots, and we want revenge. If a company can have the rights of a human being, it ought to feel the pain of a human being. We want it to suffer.
Am I talking about today? No, I’m talking about the Great Depression, as depicted in the movie BONNIE AND CLYDE. Arthur Penn directs Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the legendary armed-robber couple whose sex appeal and brazen outlaw lifestyle made them a media sensation in the early ’30s. You know come to think of it though I did say “we” a bunch of times, as if I was talking about us right here, the people alive now, that seems a little misleading if I was really talking about the movie. We’re not in the movie, we’re in today. Wait a minute, maybe I really was talking about today? I think maybe I was. Ah, shit. I can’t remember anymore. I get them mixed up. Man, I really fucked up this opening. Forget about this. Let’s start over. (more…)
Normal Life
Monday, January 4th, 2010
or NOTHING’S WORTH THIS SHIT
I think NORMAL LIFE is a good movie, but I’d sympathize with somebody for hating it. It’s a true crime story about a husband and wife bankrobbing team, but mostly it’s about their fucked up relationship, and it’s like it drags you into the whole mess when you watch it. It’s about as pleasant and fun as you’d expect from the director of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER if you didn’t know he’d go on to direct WILD THINGS. (more…)
The Manson Family
Saturday, January 1st, 2005About a month ago I saw this movie DEADBEAT AT DAWN, a sleazy, gorey student film about lowlife THE WARRIORS style gang members stabbing each other and robbing armored cars and spinning nunchucks in the cemetery. The director and star was Jim Van Bebber, who seemed a little bit too into shock value but I thought he was still likable. His movie is corny and amateurish as hell but it has alot of conviction. This guy is swinging on ropes and jumping off bridges and piling on the hideous gore effects like nobody’s business. It’s one of those things where you don’t really love the movie but the guy’s obvious dedication to getting it done sort of elevates it. It’s about the journey, man.
Usually a guy like this, they go on to make bigger and better movies and become well known and respected, or more likely they go on to make slicker but much worse movies and then their career fizzles out and you forget you ever thought they had any potential. It’s hard to say where Van Bebber is headed though because since he finished DEADBEAT in 1988 he never bothered to sell out to Hollywood or get stuck signing deals that never amount to anything. Since then he has spent almost his entire career on one other movie, CHARLIE’S FAMILY. Another raw, fiercely independent, ten thousand miles away from Hollywood kind of low budget movie. This time it’s about the Manson family, it has some of the same cast but Van Bebber plays family member Bobby instead of the lead.
According to my intense research (well, the trivia on imdb) CHARLIE’S FAMILY played some film festivals as a work-in-progress in 1997, but was only really finished in 2003 when that cool DVD company Blue Underground helped him out. So it’s coming to some American theaters this year, but I just saw it on some Czechoslovakian type DVD. (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…)
Paid in Full
Monday, February 24th, 2003Fellas -
As you know, last week I reviewed CUBE PART 2 and DRACULA PART 2. You know what that means: I’m right in the middle of a straight to video binge. The economy is gettin real bad, in my opinion, and it’s gonna get a whole lot worse when the bombs start dropping. It’s hard to justify paying 8 clams to go see some asshole in a red leather coat pretending he’s blind and can fly. I love you boys, I’d trust you with my life, I’d let my kids sleep over at your ranch, whatever. But for now I’m gonna have to hold off on trusting your recommendation of a movie that looks that silly. Maybe next week.
Anyway I think that’s a pretty good excuse for my quirky habit of digging through piles of video screeners hoping to find gold or at least some kind of shiny aluminum. Usually the best stuff I find is ridiculous straight to video sequels, but occasionally I find a GINGER SNAPS or an ED GEIN or a DOG SOLDIERS. A good low budget movie that for whatever reason didn’t get much of a release here in the unleaded states of america.
Today I found PAID IN FULL, which it turns out is not really straight to video. According to IMDB it played on 273 screens after Dimension released it last October. Didn’t get much attention though, at least not in these circles. When I typed that title into the search engine here I got a big fat fuckin zero. Thanks alot, search engine. (more…)
