McConaugheys (via LotteReinigerForever)
Category: matthew mcconaughey
Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013 (left) and 1989
Jared Leto in 2014 (right) and in 1994
Matthew McConaughey in 2014 (left) and in 1996
Jennifer Lawrence in 2014 (right) and in 2007
Julia Roberts in 2013 (right) and in 1989
Sandra Bullock in 2014 (left) and in 1993
eryl Streep in 1980 (left) and in 2013
Tom Hanks in 2014 (left) and in 1980
Christian Bale in 2013 (left) and in 1987
Amy Adams in 2014 (left) and in 1999
Me and my shadow: Oscar nominees with their younger selves (via InspiringPieces)
Matthew McConaughey astounds and disturbs as a hit man preying on a wicked family.
Thomas Haden Church (l.) and Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe"The NC-17 designation was devised by the Motion Picture Association of America to distinguish films with strong and pervasive adult content (read: sex, mostly, and violence) from outright porn, the producers of which had co-opted the similarly restrictive X rating, rendering it meaningless.
In the 22-odd years of its existence, the NC-17 has been slapped on approximately 120 new releases. Most of them were recut and then resubmitted to the ratings board to obtain R ratings (major movie studios generally won’t release NC-17 titles, and lots of theaters can’t, because of lease restrictions, show them). A couple dozen, including the likes of “Y Tu Mamá También” and “Requiem for a Dream,” were released unrated, their makers deciding not to cut them but, rather, to distribute them without the scarlet stigma of a restrictive rating.
A handful of films, though, have gone into theatrical release wearing an NC-17 as a kind of badge of honor, a certification of their resolve to show and deal with themes, images and ideas that other films simply won’t touch. These include “Henry & June” (the first NC-17 title), “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” “Happiness,” “Mysterious Skin,” and, now, “Killer Joe,” an inky dark comedy from director William Friedkin -- who might’ve garnered an NC-17 for “The Exorcist” or “Cruising” if it had existed when he made them.
“Killer Joe” isn’t the most violent movie in theaters right now, nor is it the most sexually provocative or the most profanity-laced. But it is so focused on the depravity at its heart that watching it is like subjecting yourself to a nightmare that sucks the air slowly from your lungs. Art of any sort should have the power to make us feel, and while you may not like what “Killer Joe” makes you feel, there is absolutely no denying that it has an effect on you. It’s far more straightforward, but the only movie I can compare it to for immediate recognition is “Blue Velvet,” and I say that as praise.
The film is based on a play by Tracy Letts which was suggested by the true story of a Florida father and son who hired a hit man to kill their ex-wife/mother so that they could collect a small life insurance policy. In Letts’ version, the events are moved to a Texas trailer park, the hit man is a police detective, and the greed, lust, callousness and animal stupidity of the characters is plain and unguarded -- base, unfiltered, animal humanity. That, frankly, is the stuff of art: Take these people out of their jeans and pickup trucks and give them togas or horse-drawn landaus and it could be a Greek or Jacobean tragedy.
Playing the detective, in a breathtakingly chilly performance that tops a fine year on screen, is Matthew McConaughey, snaky, lascivious, casually violent, wiser by half than the people on whom he’s preying. Emile Hirsch and Thomas Haden Church are equally good as Chris and Ansel Smith, the avaricious son and father, respectively, and Gina Gershon is raw and convincing as a truly wicked stepmother who helps spark the talk of murder. In the middle, eerily still, Juno Temple is a strange and compelling blend of the innocent and the oracular as Chris’s sister, Dottie, who is given by the family -- just outright given -- to the hit man in lieu of prepayment for the murder.
Such is the fallen state of our world that reading the story, learning the details, and even imagining how it plays out makes “Killer Joe” seem no more shocking than something you might see on cable TV. But Friedkin takes two scenes -- a dinner between Joe and Dottie, and another between Joe and the three conspirators -- and turns them into horrorshow scenes of perversity and terror. There are laughs scattered throughout the film (Letts is a truly darkly funny fellow), but the two dining sequences inside that double-wide blast all the light out of the film. On the strength of that pair of scenes alone, the film can boast its NC-17 rating like a combat scar.
To talk so much of the ratings board’s classification of “Killer Joe” slights the film somewhat, because it is a tremendously capable and assured work. Friedkin, who has also directed an adaptation of Letts’s “Bug,” has never been an ostentatious director; rather, in the vein of Howard Hawks or Robert Aldrich, he’s a master craftsman of plain, solid American vernacular. He has shown some baroque tendencies in the past (off-screen, he actually directs operas, for heaven’s sake!). But here, as in “The French Connection” and “To Live and Die in L. A.,” he cedes center stage to a very strong cast and a compelling story, while getting captivating work from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.
If “Killer Joe” is, finally, too much for certain audiences to stomach, so be it. In the hands of Letts, Friedkin and this cast, it feels, despairingly, terribly real, and you can’t blame artists for reporting what humans are actually like.
(102 min., NC-17, Fox Tower) Grade: B-plus
The director of "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist" is still capable of pushing us where we don't necessarily want to go.
William Friedkin“I view it as a piece of material that was challenging to me, and I thought would be challenging to audiences.”
A statement like that coming from most moviemakers might leave you feeling dubious: ‘What do you know about “challenging,” fella?’
But this is William Friedkin talking, the man who made “The French Connection,” “The Exorcist,” “Cruising,” and “To Live and Die in L. A.,” among others. So when he talks about taking moviegoers places where they’ve never been, well, you pay attention.
At nearly 77 years old, Friedkin has found new ways to dare and provoke in “Killer Joe,” a hair-raising and darkly funny film, which opens in Portland on Friday, August 31, and is based on a play by Tracy Letts which, in turn, says Friedkin, was based on a true story.
“Tracy originally read this story in a newspaper,” the director explains in a phone interview. “A father and his son in Florida hired a hit man to kill their ex-wife and mother for a very small insurance policy. So when you ask what’s at the bottom of it, what it’s ultimately about, the answer is greed and the extreme lengths that some people will go to to get out of their unbearable situations.”
Letts transposed the story from Miami to Dallas, turned the hit man into a dirty cop, and turned it into something as horrifyingly and disturbingly human as a Greek tragedy about a morally corrupt family.
Friedkin saw the play some time ago, before directing the film of Letts’ play “Bug,” and then he heard from the playwright that he’d adapted “Killer Joe” for the screen. Friedkin wanted immediately to make it, but there were problems. The film is filled with blood, profanity and depraved sexuality, and would present real problems with the movie ratings board (who, finally, slapped it with an NC-17, its most restrictive designation): how would you finance such a thing? And who could play the seductive, sociopathic title character -- a cop who hires himself out for murders and has a taste for teenaged girls?
Money was the first hurdle. “Obviously,” says Friedkin, “no major studio was going to do anything like this, no matter who was in it. So I had to go to independent producers. I went to Nicolas Chartier, who produced ‘The Hurt Locker.’ And he’s sort of a courageous guy with a number of such projects. And he does commercial sorts of things so that he can pave the way for things like ‘Hurt Locker’ and this film. And he picked up on it right away.”
Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe"But that still left him with a hole in the middle of the film. One night, Friedkin was watching a TV interview show and saw, of all people, Matthew McConaughey, talking about his life. “He wasn’t the first guy I thought of,” Friedkin confesses. But I was very impressed with him. I didn’t know too many films he’d made before. I remembered him from (2001’s) ‘Frailty.’ And it occurred to me that he would be exactly the right sort of guy to play Killer Joe. Not some gruff old grizzly bear, but a really charming guy, good-looking, and unexpected.”
Friedkin reached out to McConaughey, and was, at first, rebuffed. “Matthew didn’t care for it at first at all,” he remembers. “He had no interest. But then he started to think about it, and after a lot of thought he realized the dark humor of it and the truth of it. And so he said he’d like to meet with me. We met, and we had about a two hour meeting, and we were on the same page, and we went ahead.”
As it happens, “Killer Joe” comes in the midst of what we might think of as the Summer of McConaughey, with the actor providing real energy, wit and strength in “Bernie” and “Magic Mike” prior to “Killer Joe,” in which he’s joined by Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon Thomas Haden Church, and Juno Temple. Friedkin says that he’s not terribly surprised to see an actor best known for light comedy turn out capable of something deeper. It is, he explains, a matter of technique.
“A good actor,” he says, “has to be able to go inside himself or herself, into his or her own psyche, to find the character that he or she is playing inside themselves. They’re not putting on masks, per se. But even if they’re playing Quasimodo or Hitler, you have to find that character somewhere inside yourself. You have to find those triggers which, when you use sense memory, will bring you back to those moments when you were angry or afraid or loving or threatening. You have to find those emotions in yourself.”
Over the years, he continues, he’s developed a sense for when an actor is really probing and delivering something honest, as well as strategies to help an actor who isn’t going deep enough find something true in a performance.
“When I see an actor just putting on an act, so to speak, and not becoming the character, I’m out of the show, I don’t believe it,” Friedkin says. “So before I cast someone in a film I’ll spend quite a bit of time with them, individually, and learn as much as I can about them, about the things that they’ve experienced that trigger certain emotions. And then, if necessary, during the shooting or even in rehearsal, I’ll call upon those things, very casually. I imagine it’s similar to the way a psychiatrist works. You’re calling on emotions that you know the actor has experienced so that they can draw on those in creating the character. And then, when you get on the set, you have to provide an atmosphere where the actors feel free enough to create, free enough to draw on their sense memories and not feel like they’re being judged.”
In a way, Friedkin speaks from personal experience when he talks about the freedom from being judged. Along with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, he was a lynchpin of the generation of so-called movie brats who remade Hollywood in the early ‘70s, that golden era between the death of the old studio system and the rise of the blockbuster movie.
View full sizeWilliam Friedkin directs Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple in a scene from "Killer Joe"
As Friedkin recalls, “I guess you’d have to say it was a special time, because so many people think that it was. Having lived through it, I can certainly say that it wasn’t that we had a lot more freedom than there is today. Several things were different. The guys who ran the movie studios were interested in all kinds of films, not just one kind of film. Not simply comic books or video games as movies. They were interested in all kinds of stories, they would take chances. And films cost a lot less money to make then. A lot less. So they could take those chances.”
At the same time, he says, it wasn’t like the keys to the studios had been handed over to a bunch of lunatic kids. “We were all watched very closely,” he says. “We weren’t given a totally free hand by the studios. They were all over us, making sure we came in on budget, on schedule. But they did allow us to undertake themes that were clearly different. Nobody knew we would make hits going into it. But studios were more interested at that time in challenging audiences. They weren’t interested in sequels or remakes. They were much more interested in, well, frankly, trying to replicate the success of ‘Easy Rider.’ They got the feeling that us young guys knew what the hell we were doing. And, frankly, we didn’t!”
Channing Tatum's sizzle is skin-deep in Steven Soderbergh's dark film about male strippers.
Channing Tatum (center) in "Magic Mike"But if that sounds like a blast, “Magic Mike” might surprise you, and not necessarily in a good way. Directed by Steven Soderbergh from a script by Reid Carolin, it deliberately echoes such iconic films as “Shampoo,” “American Gigolo,” and “Boogie Nights,” in which shiny, sexy surfaces hide dark and creepy interior worlds. That’s an impressive pedigree, but there are clunkers with the same agenda: “Cocktail,” say, or “Coyote Ugly.” And while “Magic Mike” isn’t as vacuous as those latter two, it doesn’t compel as powerfully as the former trio nor, I suspect, will it fulfill the expectations with which it teases its audience.
Tatum plays the title character, a Tampa schemer with a professional life cobbled together out of a variety of low-level pursuits and a personal life filled with boozing and bed-hopping. At his day job as a roofer, he meets Adam (Pettyfer) and takes him under his wing, eventually inducting him, without warning, into the world of stripping. There, under the tutelage of club owner Dallas (McConaughey), Adam starts to bloom, but in ways that his protective sister (Cody Horn) doesn’t condone.
As in “The Girlfriend Experience” and “Full Frontal” (and, for that matter, “Sex, Lies and Videotape”), Soderbergh promises raw sexuality and then holds back. There’s a lot of skin on display in “Magic Mike” -- male and female -- but there’s an iciness to its sensuality. The film is at least as much about the cost of self-exposure as it is about the pleasure of it, and the sex in it never seems particularly ecstatic or warm.
Indeed, the darkness of “Magic Mike” might push people away. The sheen of sweat on taut torsos may be comely, but the physical abandon of the striptease is never accompanied by an emotional or spiritual release. The film is almost always in shadow, even when bathed in glaring Gulf Coast light. It’s a broody male stripper movie, and that doesn’t sound quite so hot as the ads.
That said, there is electricity in a few of the staged routines and, it goes almost without saying, in Soderbergh’s craft (he simply cannot do dull). If Tatum still wobbles as a leading man and Pettyfer and Horn never quite spark to life, McConaughey is positively crackling as a preening, scheming peacock, infusing his role with personal touches and self-deprecating humor. He steals every moment he gets.
“Magic Mike” doesn’t sizzle often enough as either cinema or beefcake, though. It’s medium-strength Soderbergh, which is better than the full-strength stuff most filmmakers can manage but not exactly the brand that keeps you coming back for more.
(112 min., R, multiple locations) Grade: B
The unlikely comic trio of Shirley MacLaine, Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey brings a sordid little tale to sparkling life.
Shirley MacLaine and Jack Black in "Bernie"The film tells the story of Bernie Tiede, an East Texas mortician beloved in his community for his charitable works, his cheerful spirit and his attentiveness to widows. After the death of one of the town’s richest men, Bernie befriended the fellow’s irascible -- nay, mean -- wife, Marjorie, and became her unlikely best friend, to the point that the suspicious and sharp old gal gave him control of her fortune. It was eyebrow-raising stuff, and then Marjorie stopped being seen around town and some folks got more suspicious than ever.
Working from a script he co-wrote with Skip Hollandsworth, who chronicled the story in a magazine article, Linklater intermixes the recollections of actual denizens of Carthage, Texas, where it all took place, with the dramatic telling of the story as acted by Jack Black as Bernie, Shirley MacLaine as Marjorie and Matthew McConaughey as a district attorney.
The three are marvelous. Black espouses a mincy fussiness, uses his powerful singing voice beautifully, and stretches more than he ever has, even in Linklater’s “School of Rock.” MacLaine, 57 years into a movie career that began when she was 21, plays her wicked role with just the right blend of comedy and villainy. And McConaughey (whom Linklater discovered, recall) manages subtly to expose the dumb core of his prima donna prosecutor.
“Bernie” is slight but terrific. The intertwining of the sharply tuned actors and the guileless (and often hilarious) townspeople is seamless, the tale is sometimes despairing but never heavy, and the blend of drama, comedy and music is brisk and fresh. Linklater has many estimable qualities, but with this film he reminds us that he can craft a cinematic soufflé better than just about any director in America.
(104 min., PG-13, Fox Tower) Grade: A-minus
Shawn Levy is the author of 11 books, including the best-sellers The Castle on Sunset, Rat Pack Confidential, Paul Newman: A Life, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis, and Dolce Vita Confidential.
He also wrote and narrated the podcast Glitter & Might. The former film critic of The Oregonian and KGW-TV, he has written for Sight and Sound, Film Comment, American Film, Interview, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Black Rock Beacon. He jumps and claps and sings for victory in Portland, Oregon.
