Giambrone describes the initial pitch as akin to Superbad, but quickly realized the film had a much stranger engine under the hood, blending buddy comedy with altered reality.
If a consortium of Italian grandmothers were to put down The Ten Commandments of making pasta, then 'Thou Shalt Not Break The Spaghetti Before Boiling It' is likely to be right up there alongside 'Thou Shalt Serve The Pasta Al Dente' and 'Thou Shalt Only Add Salt To Boiling Water, Never Oil'.
Wives, he wrote, "have left the housework undone and husbands have slipped away from their jobs to watch." The subject of all this excitement was an unlikely one: Congressional hearings. Hours and hours of them. What made it all so fascinating was the topic: Organized crime. Gangsters. Or, as Americans were learning right there on TV, something called "the Mafia."
An armed gang posing as police blew up a security van on a motorway dubbed the modern day "Italian Job" on Sunday. Video footage shows armed men driving a black Alfa Romeo which had a blue light on the roof and forced the cash security van to a stop. The organised crime gang wore balaclavas and blocked the motorway with a large truck which was set a blaze blocking access for the police to attend the scene.
If there's anything I miss in pop culture, it's the presence of ordinary movies. I don't mean blockbusters like Avatar or cultural events like Barbenheimer or Oscar contenders like One Battle After Another. I'm talking about the routine, well-made entertainments that, for nearly a century, used to open in theaters every week. You'd go see them because the story sounded good or you liked the stars or you just wanted to enjoy something as part of an audience.
Fargo feels like Blood Simple, the Coens' neo-noir debut, got fed through the genre, well, woodchipper, producing a pitch-black comedy about the emptiness of greed. It's messing with you from the moment it opens with a blatant lie about being a true story, with Joel Coen later saying, 'If an audience believes that something's based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they may otherwise not accept.'
The rapper, known on his tax form as Charles Wingate and known by his old Harlem associates as Charley Rambo, made his name in the rap game during an all-too-brief run in the 2000s, as one of the most colorful members of Jim Jones' Byrdgang, his solo offshoot from the Diplomats (although due to his growing up with rappers Cam and Mase, Max is like honorary Dipset).
Perhaps sensing this wariness, the creators of some of the more politically compelling movies and TV shows of the past year have instead explored how being alive feels during a tumultuous period. They capture the atmosphere, the mood, the ambient existence of everyday people who are living through a transformative time in history, whether or not they recognize that they are doing so.
On February 8, 1977, Indianapolis businessman Tony Kiritzis (Bill Skarsgard) kidnapped Richard Hall, a mortgage company president (Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery), claiming that Hall's company had sabotaged his real estate investment. Kiritzis rigged a 12-gauge shotgun with a hair-trigger "dead man's wire" around Hall's neck, ensuring that Hall would die if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. He held Hall for three days as police, family members, a charismatic local radio DJ (Colman Domingo) and TV reporters were drawn into the standoff.
George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."
Using the diary recollections of Coppola's wife, the late Eleanor Coppola, who was also disconsolately aboard and feeling thoroughly shut out of the alpha male chatting and joshing, Fischer shows our three dishevelled deities dizzied and stunned and even weirdly depressed by their staggering global acclaim.
For a director so celebrated for his masterful urban crime thrillers, in which contemplations on brotherhood and fate are inextricable from violent cop-versus-crook setpieces, it's a surprise to discover that Johnnie To wasn't all that interested in making action films to begin with. "It was [producer] Tsui Hark's fault," To said of The Big Heat (1988), the first of his many films in that genre. "He told me to do it."
"Scarface" actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio looked like any other New Yorker while riding the subway in the West Village recently. The actress, 67, went unnoticed as she took a seat, wearing jeans, a puffer jacket, earmuffs and mittens, while holding a shopping bag. Mastrantonio made her Broadway debut as an understudy in the 1980 revival of "West Side Story" and three years later made her screen debut in "Scarface," playing Al Pacino's sister.
Cyberpunk Cinema, by Thrillhouse Records, presents cyberpunk movie classics at The Knockout in the Mission every second Monday of the month from 6:30-9 pm. They'll show one episode of Cowboy Bebop at 6:30 pm, followed by the feature film. Use #cyberpunkcinema during the event to share trivia, thoughts or squishy human feelings on the HD projection screen. Cyberpunk Cinema Every second Monday at 6:30 pm The Knockout, 3223 Mission St., SF FREE
The only way to watch today is either a little bit sleepy, a little bit hungover, a tiny bit high, or all three. It was a provocative, pseudo tongue-in-cheek movie in 1996 when it was released on January 18, and 30 years later, it feels like a surreal fever dream. In some ways, you could say is the most patient B-movie of all time, waiting for nearly an hour to actually reveal its supernatural, bloodthirsty premise.
