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Hammer and Thump
Posts by Locke Peterseim
Most Americans know English artist Ralph Steadman through the splatter-mad satiric illustrations he did for Hunter S. Thompson’s books and articles, most famously 1971′s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That was certainly the case with me when I attended a Steadman (splatter) signing in London in 1986. But from there I came to love […]
Read MoreWhen you interview someone for an arts piece, there are numerous competing agendas at play, including: 1) What you, the interviewer, personally want to know, are curious about. 2) What you think is important for others to know. 3) What the average reader would probably find the most interesting, what will make the interview “pop.” […]
Read MoreAt a time when we’re about to be overrun for the season by loud, dumb, nonsensical, pointless action bloat at the box office, a small, quiet, brutal film like Blue Ruin reminds us why genre still matters. Funded on Kickstarter, Blue Ruin shows how something as simple and familiar as a rural revenge story can […]
Read MoreAs an actor, John Turturro grabbed attention in the ’90s in films by Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Clockers, He Got Game, Girl 6, Summer of Sam, She Hate Me, and Miracle at St. Anna) and the Coen Brothers (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, […]
Read MoreThere’s always the danger with reductionist film making that sticking with a single character and/or location–as in films like Castaway, Phone Booth, and Buried–will come off as more of a stunt than an actual film. That’s certainly not the case in writer-director Steven Knight’s new film Locke, starring Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke, an ordinary […]
Read MoreDrawing on the real-life WWII heroics of Pinchas Tibor Rosenbaum, Walking with the Enemy tells the story of Elek (Jonas Armstrong), a young Hungarian Jew who, in the final months of the war, donned an SS uniform and posed as a German officer in order to save hundreds of Jews in Budapest. Working from his […]
Read MoreYou may have heard that Under the Skin is an adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel. It is and it isn’t; at times the film strips away much of the book’s plot and details, leaving a very bare-bones abstraction. You may have heard that Under the Skin is the third feature film from writer-director Jonathan […]
Read MoreLast August when I sat down with writer-director David Gordon Green to talk about his excellent existential comedy Prince Avalanche, I hijacked part of the interview to pry into his next project: an adaptation of the late Larry Brown’s 1991 novel Joe starring Nicolas Cage. Joe follows Joe Ransom (Cage), a middle-aged former felon and […]
Read MoreBritish comic actor Nick Frost knows that he’s best known (especially in the States) for the “Three Flavours Cornetto” film genre-spoof trilogy he helped create and co-starred in with Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright: 2004′s Shaun of the Dead (zombies), 2007′s Hot Fuzz (cops), and last year’s The World’s End (aliens). But that’s only […]
Read MoreIn 2011, Welsh-born writer-director Gareth Evans dazzled the hard-core action-flick world with his second film, The Raid: Redemption. The high-energy, ultra-violent Indonesian-language crime film starred Iko Uwais as a Rama, a rookie cop and member of a task force invading a crime lord’s fortified high-rise apartment in Jakarta. Evans had discovered Uwais at an Indonesian pencak […]
Read MoreThe moment you point out the howling historical inaccuracies and possibly harmful over-the-top fantasy violence in a piece of super-stylized hard-core war porn like 300: Rise of an Empire (or in its equally offensive predecessor 300), some pundit or punter with one hand in a bucket of bloody popcorn is going to whine, “You don’t […]
Read MoreLike the mighty Mississippi itself, for better or worse the notion of rugged frontier independence rushes wide through the American Character—sometimes contained and guided within the banks of civilized society, sometimes overflowing, overpowering and washing away those same muddy borders. And sometimes just gunking up our National Psyche with a lot of useless, miring sludge […]
Read MoreThere was no compelling reason to remake Paul Verhoven’s 1987 Robocop. And there’s no great reason anyone has to go see José Padilha’s 2014 remake. A healthy, happy, culturally fulfilled life can be easily led without it. Even those jonesing for a mid-winter hit of PG-13 sci-fi action violence can probably find suitable sustenance elsewhere. […]
Read MoreLabor Day is the new romantic-convict (rom-con!) from writer-director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult), based on the 2009 novel by Joyce Maynard (To Die For, At Home In the World). Seen through the eyes of 13-year-old Henry (Gattlin Griffith), the film and novel tell the story of a Labor Day weekend […]
Read MoreWhile watching Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street last month, I jotted in my notes: “Just try to write about this without mentioning Goodfellas”. So there’s that challenge already failed. After all, as everyone has noted, Wolf and 1990’s Goodfellas share quite a bit of cinematic and structural DNA, not just through the obvious […]
Read MoreA decade ago, directors David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson’s artistic paths crossed streams. Anderson started out in the mid-‘90s dabbing at genre with the gritty down-and-out drama Hard Eight (aka Sydney) and then exploding into the full-blown backstage, “a star is porn” faux-musical Boogie Nights. Around the same time, Russell was grabbing critical [...]
Read MoreWhen doing film interviews, you talk to a lot of different folks involved in different parts of film making, and like anything, different interviews go well or not-so-well for different reasons. Sometimes you get to talk to big-name actors or legendary directors where it’s a thrill just being in the same room with them. Sometimes [...]
Read MoreThere are a million reasons (about $100 million budgetary ones, to be exact) that I should hate Ben Stiller’s new adaptation of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, written by Steve Conrad and directed by and starring Stiller. For this latest update (following the 1947 Danny Kaye version), Walter Mitty (Stiller) is now [...]
Read MoreWell, it’s better–at least more entertaining–than last winter’s first Hobbit film. So there’s that. But, like Gandalf and his fellow wizards and elf lords catching vague feelings of growing darkness in the wind, for us long-time Tolkien fans (and us fans of Peter Jackson’s decade-old Lord of the Rings film trilogy) there’s a creeping sense [...]
Read MoreThere are times—and they come at me more frequently these days—when I feel out of step with everything and everyone. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into full sobbing mental breakdown right here in the first paragraph—I’ll save that for later. But when I see the movie-going public go ga-ga for a dull, corporate [...]
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