Word: gangsters
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...plot machinations to slower members of the audience. His name is Archie (incarnated with just the right mix of menace and mystery by go-to Brit character actor Mark Strong), and at the beginning he helpfully deciphers the movie's title: a higher, more voracious strain of London gangster. "We all like a bit of the good life: some the money, some the drugs, other the sex game, the glamour or the fame. But a rocknrolla, oh, he's different. Why? Because a real rocknrolla wants...
...keep moviegoers flocking to the cinema in these times of emptying wallets and waning summer days? Hollywood seems to think it has a surefire recipe with “Righteous Kill.” Take two aging but legendary actors of ye olde gangster cinema, mix in rappers, guns, and badges, add a healthy portion of serial-killer storyline, and top it off with a dash of cheap twist ending. But if I really wanted to draw out this clichéd food metaphor, this Al Pacino/Robert De Niro tag-team event would have to be more of a reheated...
...Clichy-born criminal who made mischief on three continents in the 1960s and 70s. (A 1984 film, Mesrine, told the same story.) His life, at least as related in the prison autobiography that is the movie's source, put him in collusion or collision with all the gangster archetypes: a grizzled crime boss named Guido (Depardieu), a loyal and resourceful henchman (Dupuis), a tough-n-sexy babe (de France) to play Bonnie to his Clyde. And some political relevance: Mesrine questioned insurgents while serving his Army hitch in the Algerian uprising. There's not much suspense in whether he will...
...Motorcycle Boy), The Pope of Greenwich Village, Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon, the S-M erotic drama Nine 1/2 Weeks (with Kim Basinger, who also made a comeback at Venice in The Burning Plain), the satanic thriller Angel Heart (De Niro was the Devil), as a gangster in Elephant Man makeup in Johnny Handsome and a lowlife genius in a film of Charles Bukowski's Barfly directed by Barbet Schroeder (who also had a film at Venice; the Lido was one big Rourke reunion). The guy was sexy, dangerous, adventurous in his choice of roles. The actor...
...famous 1957 essay, "Underground Films," Manny argued that "the true masters of the male action film - such soldier-cowboy-gangster directors as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wellman, William Keighley, the early, pre-Stagecoach John Ford, Anthony Mann" - deserved a higher place in the cinema canon than the big-theme directors who won Oscars and the praise of mainstream reviewers. He praised Hawks especially "because he shows a maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least amount of flat foot." Manny's celebration of action directors took a while to kick in - it had to be doubled or seconded...