They say mama knows best… Mom Calls Cops On Son Plotting To Shoot Up “Twilight” Theater NY Daily News A southwest Missouri man accused of plotting to shoot up a movie theater during the new “Twilight” film was charged Friday after his mother contacted police, telling them she worried her son had purchased weapons similar to those used during the fatal Colorado theater shooting. Blaec Lammers, 20, of Bolivar, is charged with first-degree assault, making a terroristic threat and armed criminal action. He was jailed in Polk County on $500,000 bond. “Thankfully we had a responsible family member or we might have had a different outcome,” Bolivar Police Chief Steve Hamilton told The Associated Press. He said Lammers is under a doctor’s care for mental illness, and court documents said he was “off of his medication.” A phone message left by The Associated Press at Lammers’ home wasn’t returned Friday. No attorney is listed for him in online court records. His mother contacted authorities Thursday, saying she worried that with this weekend’s opening of the final film in the popular Vampire movie series, her son “may have intentions of shooting people at the movie,” police wrote in the probable cause statement. Good thing his momma knows that he ain’t isht. She said she thought the weapons — two assault rifles and hundreds of bullets — resembled those used by a gunman who opened fire inside a theater in Aurora, Colo., during the latest Batman movie in July. That attack killed 12 people. Lammers was questioned Thursday afternoon and told authorities he bought tickets to a Sunday “Twilight” screening in Bolivar and planned to shoot people inside the theater. The town of roughly 10,000 people is about 130 miles southeast of Kansas City. According to the probable cause statement, Lammers also planned to “just start shooting people at random” at a Walmart store less than a mile away. He said he’d purchased two assault rifles and 400 rounds of ammunition, and if he ran out of bullets, he would “just break the glass where the ammunition is being stored and get some more and keep shooting until police arrived,” investigators wrote. Lammers stated he wanted to stab a Walmart employee to death and followed an employee around a Walmart store before officers got involved in 2009, according to police. This muhfugga is CRAZY! It’s sad that you can’t even go to the movies on opening weekend anymore because of fools like this guy and the one in Aurora Image via AP
There’s a five-minute tracking shot in the middle of Joe Wright’s 2007 film Atonement that is impossible to forget once you’ve seen it. A wounded Robbie ( James McAvoy ) is on the beach at Dunkirk, waiting to be evacuated, and in a nightmarish, beautiful single Steadicam take he wanders past crowds of soldiers, burning cars, horses being shot, a beached ship, a choir singing, the ferris wheel still spinning in the ruined background. It’s a mind-boggling piece of work, requiring immaculate timing and choreography, and it takes you right out of the movie because it’s there to show off. As impressive as it is from a production standpoint, the shot takes your focus away from the story and puts it on the mechanics of what’s happening on screen. Wright’s new adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina lives in the hollow clockwork world of that shot. From a filmmaking perspective, it’s a gorgeous shadowbox of a production, filmed largely in a single location: a set resembling a run-down theater that was built on a Shepperton Studios sound stage. It starts with the sounds of an unseen audience settling down — there are no visible viewers of this story other than ourselves — and closes in on a proscenium arch as a curtain goes up. The scrim behind it reads “Imperial Russia, 1874.” Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) is on stage, receiving a shave. When a door opens off the side, it is to a snowy street exterior in Moscow. He pays a visit to the family governess he’s having a fling with, and when he heads home, through a backstage area, he opens a door to see his wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) weeping over evidence of his infidelity. The scene sets the story into motion as his sister Anna ( Keira Knightley ) comes to visit in an attempt to save their marriage. Anna Karenina isn’t a filmed stage production in any way — it lives within this theoretical theater while not being confined to it. Characters stride up wooden stairs into bustling rafters that stand in for a city street, or walk through a bureaucratic office that, as the camera rotates, is pulled away and restaged as an upscale restaurant. Musicians wander through the space providing a soundtrack to the transition as it happens in front of our eyes. It’s an incredible thing to behold, at least at the start. Wright is clearly a fan of Aleksandr Sokurov ‘s Russian Ark , and the intense cleverness of his direction and the way Anna Karenina revels in artifice set the film apart visually from typically glossy film adaptations of classics that gleam with assured self-importance. But the gorgeous look and stage work and the way the movie connects impossible spaces — backdrops lift to reveal the Russian countryside, a grassy field running down the stage into the orchestra — is only a temporary salve. The unfortunate truth is that beneath the initial brilliance of its stylized setting, the film is just as dramatically inert as a more stuffy, traditional take on the material might have been. Scripted by playwright Tom Stoppard , the film labors to fit Tolstoy’s sprawling story into its two hour and ten minute runtime by drawing its characters with minimal lines. The film may be experimental, but the adaptation is actually fairly traditional, if briskly efficient. Anna, a Saint Petersburg aristocrat married to the stiff but good and moral Alexei Karenin (Jude Law), meets the handsome cavalry officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) when departing the train for Moscow. Everyone expects Vronsky to propose to Dolly’s sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander), but he falls for Anna, following her home to Saint Petersberg and around to the parties, operas and other frilly gatherings until he wins her. As Anna struggles with wanting to leave Karenin for Vronsky, a scandal that would result in her being shunned by society, Kitty comes back around to Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), the earnest, shy childhood friend of Oblonsky whose proposal she at first turned down. The performances in Anna Karenina are strong, albeit built around a story told in shorthand, and the actors sometimes feel like they’re staging recreations of famous paintings rather than embodying characters. Knightley, lit sumptuously and dressed in luxurious gowns, stands out among the performers-as-props, but she can’t portray the complicated journey of a character who gives up everything for love, only to doubt and regret it. In this condensed version of the story, she seems more like someone who dithers for a few hours before throwing herself in front of a train. Wright has said that his inspiration for this adaptation was that the aristocrats at the time of Tolstoy’s novel were constantly on display and observed in society, living their lives as if they were always on stage. But this Anna Karenina feels like a diminishment of the story, not the essence of it. Rather than a tale of an affair that would have been fine had it not turned into a more serious love that broke societal rules, Anna Karenina feels like a group of people play-acting at passion. They hit all the famous elements in the story — the train station, the ball, the races, the running off together, the suicide — without a sense of them as a coherent whole or as anything other than opportunities for innovatively staged sequences. It’s a beautiful creation, but a remote and empty one. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. 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A 20-year-old man was arrested in Bolivar, Missouri after admitting he bought firearms and 400 rounds of ammunition with the intent of shooting patrons this weekend at a screening of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2 — an attack that, had it been carried out, would have echoed the Aurora, Colorado tragedy . Blaec Lammers, who was charged on Friday with first-degree assault, making a terroristic threat and armed criminal action, told police that he bought a ticket to Breaking Dawn — Part 2 for Sunday with the intention of shooting people at the theater. According to the police report, however, he changed his mind and instead plotted to make his attack at a local Walmart so that he’d have access to additional ammunition if he ran out. The report also indicated that Lammers had never before shot a gun and that he was off his medication, although it did not offer specifics in terms of the latter. Lammers’ mother contacted police when she became concerned that he might be planning an attack similar to the Aurora, Colorado shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in July. Per the Springfield News-Leader (via Deadline ): An officer approached Lammers at the Bolivar Sonic and he agreed to come to the police station to be interviewed. During the interivew, Lammers said he had purchased two assault rifles for hunting, the statement said. As the conversation progressed, police asked Lammers about recent shootings that had been in the news. “Blaec Lammers stated that he had a lot in common with the people that have been involved in those shootings. Blaec Lammers state that he was quiet, kind of a loner, had recently purchased firearms and didn’t tell anybody about it, and had homicidal thoughts,” the statement said. Read more at the Springfield News-Leader . Related Story: You Will Never Feel Safe In A Movie Theater Again Revisit Movieline’s Coverage of the Aurora Tragedy Here. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
