Crime Thriller Movie Log: Hummingbird, East, Stand-up
For the last few weeks your local cinema has no doubt been bloated with flatulent franchise product, but there are a few smaller-scale crime thriller movies opening at the end of the week that may provide a welcome respite.
Now, I’m a great admirer of Mr. Jason Statham and his bone-crunching close-combat techniques, but nobody in their right mind would go to the cinema to admire his range. However, Hummingbird looks a bit more interesting than usual. He plays a homeless and damaged Royal Marine who assumes another man’s identity.
The movie was filmed mostly at night and features the real homeless. It’s the first film to be directed by Steven Knight, who wrote the screenplays for Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-SOW5tiG8E
Stand-Up Guys is about three old guys—Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin—who pull off one last heist, and so on. It’s stunt-casting, of course, with Pacino and Walken riffing on well-trodden gangster screen-personas. It’s low-key and bittersweet and, according to reviews, relies too heavily on the talent of its leads, but I could probably watch the three of them in anything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK0wWvROGAE
Political thriller The East looks more nutritious. It stars Brit Marling as a private intelligence operative who infiltrates an anarchist collective suspected of attacking multinational companies. Marling wrote the screenplay with the director Zal Batmanglij after they spent a summer practicing freeganism, where you eat food which has been discarded.
Here’s the trailer…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdhae7D_8ok
That was him from True Blood, right?
Sinister Nation States need to buck their ideas up if they’re not going to be knocked off their perch by multinational corporations as cinema’s favourite Bad Guys. Joseph Finder’s rather good thriller Paranoia is being made into a movie starring One Of The Hemsworths. It’s not out yet, but here’s the trailer anyway. Weirdly, Gary Oldman’s geezer accent sounds way off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bdZWrW6HnA
