We’ve got an eccentric assortment of nude features opening this weekend, from the NC-17 shocker Killer Joe (2011), which features Juno Temple (above) full frontal and Matthew McConaughey forcing Gina Gershon to do unspeakable things with a KFC chicken leg, to the more light-hearted– but still R-rated– Ben Stiller comedy The Watch (2012). And nude this week in limited release (and on VOD) is the outrageous and hilarious Danish comedy Clown: The Movie (2010), which hits theaters in advance of an English-language remake starring Danny McBride . More after the jump!
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. That the Smiths are low, stupid people is easily understood, but Friedkin hardly tires of reminding us. Killer Joe opens on the middle of a stormy Texas night, and the wailing and window-banging of a fuck-up named Chris ( Emile Hirsch ), who is locked out of the family’s trailer. When his stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) finally responds, Chris (and the audience) comes face to fat, mossy minge with her naked crotch. Chris’s complaints find no truck with his exceptionally dense, defeated dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), who echoes Sharla’s involuted logic about not being expecting to find her stepson on the other side of the door. It feels unpromising that what could be a funny gag gets lost in the scene-flattening commotion of idiocy, which too often gets cranked so high little else gets through. The Smiths have all kinds of boundary issues, not least when it comes to Dottie (Juno Temple), the gauzy baby doll daughter with a couple of little pink screws loose. Dottie sleepwalks, and either has crazy good hearing or crazy-girl intuition, because she cottons to Chris’s plan to kill their deadbeat mother (who remains deadbeat; we only get a brief glimpse of her corpse) from the moment he privately proposes it to Ansel. In deep to some coke dealers, Chris has word of his mother’s fifty thousand dollar life insurance payout (to Dottie) and a line on a police officer/hitman named Killer Joe Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ). No good can come of such a scheme, of course, and no good does. Perhaps the family’s shouty moron shtick is designed to make the arrival of a glossy, black-clad sociopath feel more like a relief. McConaughey has toned down his surf bum beam (and highlights) for the role: in his bad sheriff getup he’s a cold-eyed buck with asses to stomp. Sharing a tight frame with Joe in a typical low-angle shot, Hirsch becomes a mini-pony of a man. But it’s McConaughey’s scenes with Temple that form the twisted center of the movie; they make a pair as riveting as it is unlikely. That it is not as simple as beast-meets-beast of prey is largely a credit to the actors – each exudes an unnerving charisma that enwraps the other and together they create the movie’s only dramatically persuasive atmosphere. It feels a little wrong saying that, given the terms of their relationship. When Chris and Ansel can’t cough up half of Joe’s fee in advance, he proposes taking Dottie as “a retainer.” Because the Smiths’ is a desperate world dulled into moral nihilism by poverty and other indignities, Ansel’s response to the idea of pimping his virgin daughter out to a hired killer is that it “might just do her some good.” We feel scared for Dottie, though after being soothed out of her initial upset she doesn’t seem that scared herself, which of course is really scary. The lead up to Joe’s claiming of his collateral and the chillingly erotic scene that results feels like Friedkin hitting a mesmerizing stride. Instead it forms a peak in what slackens into another, if notably performed and perverse, pulp fiction paradox: Though desperate to shock, its success depends on our desensitization. ( Killer Joe received an NC-17 rating and is perhaps the latest rival to the kink and violent degradations of 2010’s The Killer Inside Me .) Much of the film takes place in close quarters, spaces well parsed by Friedkin’s camera and imbued with a sense of confined desperation instead of plain old claustrophobia. Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Letts adapted the script from his own play (this is Friedkin’s second Letts adaptation, after 2006’s Bug ), and as often as a dark, stage-y laugh line falls flat, Joe’s embroidered (and then fearsome) tones and Dottie’s loaded non sequiturs (including her casual mention, after things have gone miserably awry, that it might still all work out — “as long as I don’t get mad”) seem to land exactly how and where they’re meant to be. It seems likely it was the creepy sexual content and not the horrific violence that earned the MPAA’s admonishment, a bias Killer Joe seems to repeat in moving from its glimpses of genuine human darkness toward the more generic drawing of bright red blood. Killer Joe is in limited release Friday. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Hollywood.TV is your source for all the latest celebrity news, gossip and videos of your favorite stars! bit.ly – Click to Subscribe! Facebook.com – Become a Fan! Twitter.com – Follow Us! Matthew McConaughey along with co-star Gina Gershon, Driector, William Friedkin and writer Tracy Letts talk about their movie ‘Killer Joe’. Matthew talks about taking on such a dark role and such a departure from his normal romantic comedy movies. Hollywood.TV is the global leader in capturing celebrity breaking news as it happens. We cover all the major Hollywood events including The Golden Globes, The Oscars, The Screen Actors Guild Awards, The Grammy’s, The Emmy’s and the American Music Awards, as well as all the red carpet movie premiers in Los Angeles and New York. HTV is on the streets 24/7, at all the industry events and invited by the stars to cover their every move in Hollywood, New York and Miami. Hollywood.TV is currently the third most viewed reporter channel on www.youtube.com YouTube with almost 400 million views, and our footage is seen worldwide! Tune in daily for all the latest Hollywood news on www.hollywood.tv and http like us on Facebook!
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.” Hirsch’s Killer Joe character already suffers his share of punishment in the brutal black comedy, adapted from the play by Tracy Letts ( Bug ); he plays Chris, a trailer park-dwelling drug dealer who enlists a cold-blooded cop (Matthew McConaughey) to kill his mother. Things go awry, to say the least, drawing the entire morally-corrupt family (Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon, Juno Temple) into the fray, with violent consequences. “On set it was a high wire act,” Hirsch said, introducing Friedkin’s tribute event at the Seattle Film Festival. “He would be totally supportive of the actors to give the best performance that they could, but he let you know that you weren’t just playing with free time. You were here to shoot a movie very quickly and do the very best you could; he didn’t want you to give a great take on the tenth take when you sort of felt like it, he wanted you to give ‘the take’ the first time out. He would constantly remind you, ‘This ain’t a play, mo.’” Friedkin’s reputation preceded him before Hirsh went to meet for Killer Joe , the director’s latest feature following 2007’s Bug . “The chance to get to work with him was sort of intimidating, because you don’t really know what to expect,” recalled Hirsch to Movieline. “A lot of these legends are like, is this guy a legend for his movies or is he just some crazy maniac axe-murderer? But what he lived up to was the energy; he’s a combination of a tornado of energy but also this really specific intellect. He has so many stories and such insight, and is really quick on his feet and spontaneous and in the moment. He’s a really interesting mix of elements.” That’s not to say Friedkin wasn’t demanding, especially when it came to Hirsch’s more punishing scenes. His character is beaten by goons and bashed with canned goods — Killer Joe has a way with perverting even the most familiar of comfort foods — and Friedkin relished in pouring on the fake blood. “My character definitely has a bad week,” Hirsch laughed. “I think I felt the pressure in the sense that he doesn’t like to do a lot of takes, so there would be one or two takes that you’d know you would have and you wouldn’t want to blow your lines or not give your best performance. He would light that fire under you and there would be pressure, and you knew that if you fell off the high wire act, there wasn’t a net underneath — it kind of hurts, you definitely don’t want to fall.” Hirsch also discussed Prince Avalanche , the David Gordon Green-directed indie filmed under the radar last month near Austin, Texas. A remake of the Icelandic comedy Either Way , about two men on a road-striping crew, the film stars Hirsch and Paul Rudd and, as Hirsch told Movieline, his involvement sprang from another ill-fated project he and Green once hoped to make. “ Prince Avalanche — I didn’t actually realize it was a secret movie, I just thought we were making a really small movie that no one knew about. David had called me and I’d been wanting to work with him for years; we almost made a movie called Goat a while back. And it’s this kind of crazy, awesome cool script we shot with Paul.” Hirsch kept details under wraps, though he had this to say about the remake: “[Hirsch’s character] is kind of an interesting dude. It’s very similar to the original in a certain sense. It’s set outside Austin, in Texas. It’ll be an interesting mix of some real pathos mixed with some comedy.” Stay tuned for more with SIFF honorees William Friedkin and Sissy Spacek. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The producers of William Friedkin ‘s new movie Killer Joe (2011) are sticking to their guns. The legendary director of The Exorcist submitted this “totally twisted deep-fried Texas redneck trailer park murder story” to the dreaded MPAA censorship board earlier this year, only to be told that extensive cuts would be needed for an R rating. But rather than cut the already-infamous “KFC scene” where Matthew McConaughey forces Gina Gershon to give head to a chicken leg, the producers of Killer Joe have decided to wear the NC-17 rating with pride and will be releasing the movie uncut and on schedule on July 27. The NC-17 rating, long considered a cinematic “kiss of death”, has been experiencing something of a resurgence lately: Shame (2011) earned solid box office despite its NC-17 rating for graphic sex and nudity, a pattern that Killer Joe is hoping to replicate. (This will be Gina’s second foray into NC-17 territory: she also co-starred in the 1995 SKINstant classic Showgirls .) See the trailer for Killer Joe after the jump!
Legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman once said that nudity is “the world’s cheapest special effect.” Mr. Skin agrees, but with one little addition: it’s also the most effective. So join us after the jump as we rub down six upcoming summer flicks that forgo explosions and CGI wizardry in favor of much cheaper- and more exciting- thrills. (Ok, some of them also have explosions and CGI.) More after the jump!
The MPAA buzzkill brigade did what it does best in Hollywood this week when it slapped the film-festival favorite Killer Joe (2011) with the dreaded NC-17 rating. The film, which Deadline describes as ” Tennessee Williams meets Quentin Tarantino ,” stars Emile Hirsch as a young man with money problems, Juno Temple as his promiscuous younger sister, and Gina Gershon as their evil trailer-park witch of a mother. In order to avoid getting whacked by the Mob, Hirsch hires a hit man ( Matthew McConaughey ) to kill his mom so he can collect the insurance money. Both Temple and Gershon go nude in the movie. The filmmakers say they plan to appeal the rating in time for Killer Joe to hit theaters as planned in mid-May. The scene the MPAA found so offensive? Well, it involves Gina Gershon , forced fellatio, and a bucket of KFC. Speaking of which…lunchtime! Check out more from Juno Temple and Gina Gershon right here at MrSkin.com!
As summer blockbuster season winds down, it’s time to set your sight on this year’s star-packed Toronto International Film Festival . Among your favorite actors bringing new films to Canada: Jon Hamm, Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Jude Law, Kristen Wiig, Michael Fassbender, Seth Rogen, Michelle Williams and many, many more. Check out some new pics from the most-anticipated films at this year’s TIFF after the jump, and mark your calendars for Sept. 8. Just 44 more days.
