We all know and love the crazy jackasses that make up Jackass. Well they are back and Brad Pitt is not invited this time! Atomic Popcorn has the opportunity to bring you free passes to the latest in crazy. October 14th is the date and you better be there for more antics from party boy and the crew!!

Synopsis:

Johnny Knoxville and his buddies are up to their daredevil comic antics again. And this time they’re coming at ya’ in 3D.

Trailer:

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Make sure you check out our other free screenings in the Baltimore Area.

MTV announced yesterday that this year, for the first time, viewers will be able to vote on the nominees for the 2010 MTV Movie Awards. To vote, go to MovieAwards.MTV.com.

Voting will be open for the nominees until April 9. Then, votes for the winners will be taken starting May 11.

This year, you will be able to vote on 13 categories including Best Kiss, Best Fight, Best WTF Moment, and, of course, Best Movie. This year, 3 new awards will be given out: Global Superstar, Best Ass-Kicking Star, and Best Scared-Assh**t Performance.

The winners will be announced live on MTV on June 6, 2010 at 9PM ET. This year’s host is Aziz Ansari, who stars in the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation.”

Most of the time these “vote for the winner” awards shows are utterly worthless, but usually MTV’s is a fun show. However, in order to make the show great, you need to go vote. Hopefully, these awards can reward the movies that were great, but also have mass appeal.

So, who do you want to see win come June 6th? Or is awards season over in your mind?

On Friday night fans at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, TX were treated to two trailers and one scene from the upcoming film, Predators. Produced by Robert Rodriguez, the film is a sequel to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film and stars Adrien Brody as Royce, a mercenary and leader of a group of warriors who come to realize that they have been brought to an alien planet as prey. The hunters become the hunted.

After the screening, Rodriguez hosted a live Q&A. While shying away from revealing any more plot details, concept art from the film was shown, as well as a working Predator head prop. During the discussion, Rodriguez said that he has no intention to release the film in 3D and he also promised that, “This would be the real sequel.”

On Saturday, Rodriguez, director Nimród Antal, and star Adrien Brody, sat down with the press for a short interview. Antal said that he wants focus on “the hunt” — the element that made the original work so well. He also said he put “a lot of thought into mood and tone” and vowed to keep the monster in the shadows for as long as possible.

Hopefully, Predators proves to be a return to the suspense of the original. There is a good chance it will, too, as the movie seems to be heavily influenced by “The Most Dangerous Game,” the famous 1924 short story by Richard Connell in which a hunter is hunted on a mysterious island.

Missed the footage at SXSW? Watch the sneak peek over at the official Predators site and keep an eye out for the trailer, which drops March 18th.

Predators hits theaters July 9th.

There is a lot going on under the surface of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and it is a testament to the director’s management of her subject that the film is focused and prickly, instead of muted and insubstantial. Telling a story that will probably be off-hand referenced as the white, British version of Precious, Fish Tankfollows the tumultuous existence of Mia, a 15 yr old delinquent girl living in a British housing project with her estranged little sister, neglectful mother, and her mom’s charming, opportunistic boyfriend(Michael Fassbender).

The film is pensive and harrowing, and occasionally it’s even lonely and elegiac, as if it’s planning Mia’s funeral before she even grows up. I dare confess that there were times I would have gladly stopped watching it, so unsavory and forthright in their honesty are some of Arnold’s scenes and conversations. It takes a lot of bravery to tackle the world of teen poverty, neglect, and sexual abuse without the usual trappings of melodrama. Even Precious leaned heavily on emotional manipulation and calculated uplift to weather the stormy seas of its protagonist’s unfortunate life.

Fish Tank doesn’t feature any mentor characters or charitable individuals showing up to rescue Mia. This is her life, and she’s living it with uncertainty. She’s far older emotionally at 15 then she should be, and certainly older than her mother, who’s still living the irresponsible life of a drugged-out party skank who dances in her underwear while her underage children are smoking and drinking upstairs.

Still, Mia is just a teenager, and there’s so much of life she doesn’t understand not simply because she is young but because all of her experience comes from the dysfunctional microcosm she lives in. She can’t differentiate sex from love, affection from attention, or passion from intensity. She’s bitter, angry and lost and thinks she understands so much that she never sees danger or misfortune staring her in the eyes. Which is probably why Fassbender’s Connor so easily seduces her.

The passages of the film that deal with this older man carrying on an affair with a young, underage girl are, indeed, challenging ones. We see the film from Mia’s eyes however, so the initial outrage is lessened but the tragedy and sadness of it all is magnified. Arnold knows what she is doing here, and she pursues onward, giving Jarvis and Fassbinder scenes together that are emotionally difficult and intensely dramatic. What keeps rising to the surface is the hope that Mia will pull free and find a way to focus the restlessness, the passion for dance, and her own suspicions that her home life is fractured beyond repair.

Katie Jarvis as Mia is so good that it’s easy to assume that she’s just taking her background (she grew up in a similar project, was picked for the film when Arnold witnessed her having a row with her boyfriend, and had a child at 16) and living it out on camera. That’s not how it comes across here. She has real talent. Usually, people who have a real world knowledge of something actually let it prevent them from portraying it credibly onscreen.

Film is never reality, and sometimes we want to inject too many cumbersome details into what will always be, at some level, fantasy. Not Jarvis, who uses her ability for channeling simple, direct emotion to evoke and make sense of her own background, bringing in reference but creating Mia as a whole character. Fassbender is great too. He’s made Connor into a man who feels totally real and grounded, and his disarming air of charm makes it harder to wrap our heads around what he truly is. He doesn’t play a stereotype or a one note expansion of a trait, but a credible person and that somehow makes him all the more sinister.

Fish Tank isn’t an easy film, and Arnold doesn’t try to sell it as a ‘necessary’ one. It exists as what it is, telling with great sympathy and delicacy, a story grounded in reality. It doesn’t argue for itself, but like Mia, boldly strides across the screen just existing. You can take it or leave it, but make no mistake. It’s an effective piece of work.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

A film like Hong-Jin’s The Chaser is the exception to the rule for shock-based serial killer films. Speaking as someone who actively avoids most  women-in-peril horror pics, I was relieved to find that this Korean offering manages to unhinge and electrify  its audience without resorting to loathsome or  deviant imagery.

Recently William Monahan and Leonardo DiCaprio have showed interest in an American remake of it. I can see why.

The Chaser creates a believable and incredibly real environment out of the night-time streets of Seoul, and draws the focus not on gruesome torture or misogyny but on a critique of the  justice system in Korea, which allows a  murdering sociopath to go free even after he’s been apprehended by authorities.

At the same time, the film is a captivating and poignant study of a man who has crossed over so many moral and personal boundaries that it requires him coming face-to-face with real and calculating evil to even begin to see his way back home. Best of all, The Chaser works simply as a taut, unrelenting thriller; even when the film’s pace doesn’t match the breakneck speed of the events on screen, it holds us in its dark, chilling spell.

Taking place on the streets of the Mapo district in Seoul, The Chaser follows disgraced cop turned pimp, Joong-Ho, who is lamenting the financial hit his ‘business’ has taken of late; several of the prostitutes working for him have simply never returned. When e sends the sick Mi-Jin(because he has no one else available) out to a john, he realizes too late that the man’s cell number matches the last job each of the missing girls took. Joong-Hi tries to get in touch with Mi-Jin, and when this fails, he sets out after her; at this point, he isn’t so much concerned for her safety as he is fighting to protect his business.

As it turns out, a lot of things aren’t as they seem. Mi-Jin has a daughter that Joong-Ho finds when he goes to her apartment–he never knew she had a child– and when he single-handedly apprehends Young-Min, the john who has been taking his girls, he realizes that the man hasn’t been selling his girls, but murdering them. This means Joong-Ho has placed Mi Jin in harm’s way.

Without giving too much away, the film shifts its focus at just about every half-hour mark. The first 30 minutes  play out as an almost contained thriller with the pimp trying to selfishly defend his employees while taking down the chilling and nonchalant Young-Min, who looks like he would happily murder 70 more if given the chance.  With Young-Min in custody and confessing to the murder of the girls, it looks like an open and shut case. Until of course, bureaucracy gets in the way, and a crap-slinging (literally) protester who targets politicians becomes a higher responsibility than the vile killer.

Although the intensity of Mi-Jin’s predicament invests The Chaser with a horror-movie atmosphere, it is ultimately the slow awakening of Joong-Ho’s humanity that gives the film its emotional impact. This isn’t an easy role or a simple character, and I didnt’ find much to like in the man at first. To be honest, there isnt’ much to like by the end either, but he is in the process of growing and as played by Yun-seok Kim he has a complexity to him I did not expect. Joong-Ho is a slovenly, angry mess at the opening of The Chaser,  bullying the women who work for him and casting a sour eye at the rest of the world. He’s hiding out in a ratty, dingy office with yellowed wallpaper and sputtering flourescent lights. His mind, however, is still sharp and his skills as a detective haven’t dulled.

As soon as the ex-cop sets out to find Mi-Jin, he’s on the road to reconnecting with all he lost. He just doesn’t know it, and of all the things the film over-emphasizes, his gradual redemption isn’t one of them. It happens with little fanfare or posturing but it is meaningful precisely because it isn’t easy for him. There is a bitter truth at the heart of the film; despite his best efforts now, Joong-Ho won’t have come to the end of his journey by simply catching Young-Min or saving Mi-Jin. Over the course of this one angry night, he will be goaded to life by the young girl he’s watching over, haunted by the one he delivered into harm, and provoked by the man who has hidden her away in the bowels of Mapo. There are feelings being stirred that cannot be re-buried, and some time very soon, perhaps even before all this is over, Joong-Ho will have to pay the proverbial Piper. Maybe, there will even be enough of him left afterwards to make good out of it.

In contrast to the character of Joong-Ho, there is Yeong-hie Seo’s chilling performance as Young-Min. The Chaser is such a great film specifically because of his performance. Without him, it wouldn’t be nearly as disturbing or affecting as it ends up  being.  The filmmakers have based Young-Min and his crimes off of the real-life case of  Yoo Young Cheol who murdered 21 people in 2003-04. Killing mostly women and the elderly, Cheol was documented as callous, diabolical and an amoral mastermind.

Yeong-hie Seo takes those characteristics and delves into each one so fully that I do not envy his journey or the places he had to go to achieve such results. Other actors approaching the task of playing a madman employ hand gestures, facial ticks, or other forms of body language to suggest instability or abberration. Whats so completely disarming  about Young-Min is that there isn’t any of that. All of the ‘badness’ can be found in the eyes that stare just a bit too long, or the smilingat all the wrong moments, or the telling way in which he won’t touch anyone unless it’s in the process of physical violence. These are small, near-throwaway details, but there are so many layered on here they form a portrait of disquieting grotesqueness.

Finally, special mention must be made of the director’s work. Hong-jin Na provides an active and living backdrop for the drama and lifts it beyond merely an efficient thriller. He crafts each action piece with the skill of William Friedkin or Alfred Hitchcock and he never lets up. We think we know how the film will run. We assume we see where it is going. Most of the time, I think as viewers we follow the typical rhythms and tropes of filmmaking–especially genre films–and we can anticipate the next move. Thats part of why genres are popular; they are familiar. At some point, The Chaser jumps the ramp of genre and becomes direct, powerful and honest.This is a great film.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Now this is interesting news. Just last week when Matt covered the best fights of movie history, he cited the battle between Norris and Bruce Lee from ‘Way of the Dragon’. It’s a cool movie. Maybe not the best of Lee’s output, but a martial arts fan must give it due respect. As they also must Stephen Chow. This guy has been churning out spoofy, high-camp antics for decades and he’s a spirited and canny director to boot. Kung-Fu Hustle is one of the best comedies of the last ten years and some of his older work, including The Mad Monk, is just pure, joyful zaniness.

When we last heard, Chow was signed on for The Green Hornet, and when that fell apart, he has jumped onto directing ‘Tai-Chi’, a film based off of Lee’s Way of the Dragon. The word is that Jack Black and Anne Hathaway are also on-board for it, and since Chow is helming, expect it to not be a straight remake, but possess plenty of charm and insanity.

Chow will also play the starring role, which in the original film was a dishwasher who also moonlighted as a Tai Chi Master, bringing his skills to bear when a gang starts terrorizing the town. Yea, I know, sounds like every other martial arts movie from the time period. But Way was all down to the style and execution, and if it’s one that Chow has going for him, it’s style.

Consider me excited for this one. What do you think? Need a reminder to the awesome of Kung-Fu Hustle? Behold!

When the credits started to roll at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, I was left with an unexpected question. What was the point?

Here is a film that would have won Oscars aplenty back in 1956, the year it takes place. But alas, it is now 2010 and there isn’t a single idea or thought in the film that hasn’t been had a thousand times before and better. What is it then that has attracted a director of Scorsese’s calibre and actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Emily Mortimer?

The answer will become obvious once you lay eyes upon the film. It’s all about the style and atmosphere. This is not the kind of movie often made in the 21st century and it must have been enormous fun to make. As a viewer, it is a curious wonder to behold. There isn’t a thought or sensibility that exists within Scorsese’s movie that would be alien to the world of 1956. As a result, it takes some getting used to.

The style requires the actors to talk in pseudo-serious tones and deliver over-heated treatises that extend well beyond the terse soundbites most modern scripts require.  The camera spirals up and around the characters and there are quick pans to new scenes and wipes for others. There are long dark, hallways, moldering basements, wailing rainstorms, ominous cliffs and the kind of psychobabble that reveals a certain social naivete towards mental illness. No one behaves as we suspect they might, but instead they adhere to an out-of-date cinematic code that would be most welcome in a film noir.

One thing I love about Scorsese is his ability to make a film free of ironic sentiment. There isn’t any winking or nodding going on in Shutter Island nor does it feel the need to make the characters smarter than the movie they find themselves in. In doing this, he pulls stronger and more natural performances from his actors. For my money, he has been the only director capable of getting a robust performance from Dicaprio. Leo might be wrong for the square-jawed, damaged Federal marshal, but he plays the unhinged part with a recklessness that enhances the rising tension.

Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams and Patricia Clarkson are the females here, and none of them are typical damsels in distress or femme fatales. They sometimes exist as all of them and none of them, and Williams in particular gets some awfully chilling moments towards the close. It is always good to see Ben Kingsley, but even better when he’s giving it his all and not just cashing a paycheck. No fear, Sir Ben is at the top of his form and I was more than happy to see the creased, world-weary face of Max Von Sydow peek around the edge of the German doctor’s chair.

On a visual level, there are sights worth savoring. There is a handsome and lonely quality to the imagery that makes it a dark pleasure to drink in.  It is hard to describe the shivers of delight that accompany a moment like the one where Dicaprio, wrapped in the feverish dementia of his own grief-stricken dreams, holds Williams while a large smoldering hole containing thousands of flickering embers opens in her back. Later there are just shivers as hundreds and hundreds of rain-soaked rats pour from a crevice in the rock face and clambor to and fro on the craggy cliffs, inches away from the revolted marshal.

As moviegoers, we have been trained to enter a thriller with a keen awareness of the endgame and to believe that each piece only exists to lead to the next, building an arcane vertebrae connecting an all important conclusion. If those pieces cannot support the whole, or if we can’t reconcile the pieces, then we may reject the entire creation. As it turns out, Shutter Island could care less about building a water-proof mystery that holds up to scrutiny. It lives and breathes its own aesthetic beauty, savoring each unkempt graveyard and solitary lighthouse with a near hedonistic abandon.

Shutter Island wants to live free of the cares and concerns of its plot, but in the end the brittle narrative  apprehends the film and slams the iron door shut on Scorsese’s pulpy aspirations. He needed a better story for all of his dark props, eerie sets, and leering actors to inhabit. If not a better one, then at least one that feels fresher. Dennis LeHane’s story isn’t the lifeblood of the film, but it proves an unwelcome distraction from Island’s Gothic excess all the same. When the ’so what?’ comes it is a direct result of the saggy, predictable conclusion.

I didn’t love Shutter Island, despite its many good qualities. It’s a great entertainment if you don’t think much about it, but it’s hard not to see the film as a disappointment. There are moments of sincere power and then, too, entire sequences that simply don’t work. A significant lack of dramatic tension in the late going dilutes its status as a thriller. Still, it cannot be denied that the movie possesses a quality that isn’t often seen in the genre; good, old fashioned paranoia.

In 2008, Scorsese directed a documentary about Val Lewton, the 40′s era producer that developed films like The Body Snatcher and Cat People, the latter of which features one of the finest chase scenes in the history of the movies. I’d like to think if Lewton saw Shutter Island, he’d be there, saluting Martin, and offering his hand from the shadows.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

This trailer comes courtesy of the guys over at IGN. This is the new one from director Neil Marshall, who has already given us the action thrillers Dog Soldiers, Descent and Doomsday.

This one, called Centurion, moves one letter back in the alphabet but also tells the story of a small group under attack from external forces. This time a small division of Roman centurions find themselves waylaid behind enemy lines and must fight their way to freedom. Dominic West and Olga Kurylenko head up the cast.

Despite bearing resemblance to recent sword and sandal pics like King Arthur, The Last Legion and Gladiator, Centurion looks like it might be a bit grittier than those films . Knowing Marshall, there’s likely to be some surprises along the way.

The vibe I’m getting is The Warriors set in ancient times. What do you think?