- Listen to the entire program<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/p>\n
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<\/a>Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. <\/strong> <\/p>\nJonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. <\/em> <\/p>\n
Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net<\/a>. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim<\/a>, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com\/ReThinkReviews<\/a>. ReThink Reviews’ theme song is by Restavrant<\/a>. <\/p>\n
Killing Them Softly<\/strong><\/p>\n
Between \u2018The Sopranos\u2019, \u2018The Godfather 1 & 2\u2019, the movies of Martin Scorcese, and all their countless imitators, it\u2019s easy to think that there\u2019s nothing new to be done in the organized crime genre. But with its small scale, gritty tone, terrific cast, and political and economic overtones, \u2018Killing Them Softly\u2019, despite its lame title, manages to be something pretty special, as well as proof that age and raising a platoon of kids has put enough miles on Brad Pitt to make him a believable mob hitman.<\/p>\n
\u2018Killing Them Softly\u2019 takes place in New Orleans as the banking meltdown begins and the 2008 presidential election heats up. A small-time wannabe gangster named Johnny (played by Vincent Curatola) hires two barely-reliable petty crooks (played by Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) to rob a mob-run card game, believing that they\u2019ll get away with it or the guy who runs the game, Markie (played by Ray Liotta), will get blamed.<\/p>\n
But a small-timer like Amato couldn\u2019t know that robbing this game would send a tremor through the city\u2019s criminal underworld that\u2019s already been hobbled by the economy and hurricane Katrina. If mobsters can\u2019t feel safe gambling their money, all the card games across New Orleans may shut down, crippling the criminal economy. So a mysterious kingpin represented by a nebbish middle-manager type (played by Richard Jenkins) hires a hitman named Jackie (played by Brad Pitt) to restore confidence in the system by roughing up or whacking everyone involved with the robbery, a job for which Jackie must get backup from a New York hitman (played by James Gandolfini).<\/p>\n
If that sounds a lot like a gangster microcosm of the financial meltdown, it\u2019s supposed to, and director Andrew Dominik makes sure you know it by having clips of speeches by George W. Bush, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Barack Obama playing throughout the film on TVs and radios, which some might see as heavy-handed, but I thought was great. In both the film and in the meltdown, a disaster at one institution highlights a structural weakness that reveals that no one\u2019s money is safe, spooking investors and threatening the health of the entire system. In that sense, Markie\u2019s game getting robbed is like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, both of which require drastic action and a lot of pain to restore confidence and get business moving again, with Jackie as the cold-blooded hand of intervention to keep a corrupt but vital system humming. <\/p>\n
But this allegory is just one of the great things about \u2018Killing Them Softly\u2019. Another is the film\u2019s focus on dialogue and the personalities, relationships, and dark humor revealed as the characters hammer out the nuts and bolts of their criminal activities, where beatings and murder are just a cost of doing business. Despite what the ads might have you think, \u2018Killing Them Softly\u2019 is mostly made up of fairly long, often funny conversations that push the story forward while giving you insights on the characters and their work.<\/p>\n
All of the acting is excellent, highlighting the class differences between the different tiers of gangsters, with McNairy and Mendelsohn doing a particularly good job as knuckleheads who don\u2019t even qualify for the intern program. It\u2019s fun seeing \u2018Sopranos\u2019 alumni Gandolfini and Curatola back playing mobsters, and Pitt, who definitely doesn\u2019t look Italian, uses it to his advantage as an outsider brought in to restore fiscal order and a perverse sanity to a tumultuous time.<\/p>\n
\u2018Killing Them Softly\u2019 does a wonderful job of creating a realistic, lived-in world in the post-Katrina wreckage of New Orleans, without a lot of frills or even much music. And while \u2018Killing Them Softly\u2019 is no fast-paced bulletfest, when the violence comes, it\u2019s scary, gory, and brutal, as it should be. Director Andrew Dominik said that crime dramas are essentially about capitalism functioning at its most base form. By addressing the financial crisis through a tough, gritty crime movie full of great actors and humor, Dominik has made the most topical and timely mob movie in memory, reminding us that in America\u2019s economy, there\u2019s no mercy and no prisoners, whether you had it coming or not.<\/p>\n
\u2018Killing Them Softly\u2019 is rated R and is in theaters now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rethink-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33269,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268\/revisions\/33269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}