Art and commerce? “They’re not meant to get along,” said Brad Pitt, the Cannes Film Festival perennial, whose film career has led to a bit of the former (art) and a bit more of the latter (commerce).
This year’s Cannes competition slate includes the film screened this morning at 8:30, writer-director Andrew Dominik’s small-scale hit-man yarn “Killing Them Softly,” in which Pitt reunites with his “Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” helmer.
Pitt, who also produced, plays a mob clean-up killer trying to do his job amid unreliable colleagues and recessionary spending cuts (the film’s set in 2008, as the banks are collapsing). Like the ’30s bootlegging drama “Lawless,” unveiled earlier this week on the Cannes main competition roster, “Killing Them Softly” is a Weinstein Company release schedule for release later this summer in U.S.
Compared to the weirdly lifeless “Lawless” at least with “Killing Them Softly” there’s something to debate — the film’s slippery black-comic tone, for one, or its blunt metaphoric use of the 2008 presidential election campaign footage. Conversation after conversation between Pitt and Richard Jenkins, or James Gandolfini, takes place with a TV in the background showing Obama on the ’08 trail, touting America’s eternal promise. The transactions and grisly tactics we see in the story makes those words taste ashen.
Read more. Thanks Gabriella.
FYI. And I hate papparazzi videos but this is Brad arriving @ the Cannes Film Festival this morning. I’ve nothing more to say but… Tristan?
Thanks Gabriella.