After the jump, I’ve got the first trailer for Killing Them Softly, from Chopper/Assassination of Jesse James director Andrew Dominik, starring Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini, and Richard Jenkins. Oh, and Slaine, the fat Boston rapper who was in The Town. Anyway, everyone loved it at Cannes, so if you don’t like it, you probably aren’t doing enough cocaine just don’t have a European sensibility. It actually looks pretty great, but it’s fitting that James Gandolfini is in it, because I feel like we saw a very similar plot in a Sopranos episode.
Opens October 19th. Meanwhile, Movieline points out that Dominik and Pitt frequently found themselves defending how violent the movie is (which only makes it sound more awesome to me):
In Cannes, both Dominik and Pitt took exception to suggestions the film had “too much violence.”
“I don’t understand the obsession with violence,” Dominik said. “It’s like people who don’t want to show children fairy tales. But fairy tales dramatize children’s concerns and emotions.” Added Pitt: “Violence is an accepted part of the gangster world. It’s an accepted possibility when dealing in crime. I’d have a much harder problem playing a racist for instance than, say, shooting someone right in the face.”
Dammit, Brad, this is why we make the actors read lines. I was with you guys until the “problem playing a racist” part. So violence is acceptable because it’s realistic… unlike… racism? Which is… not realistic? Huh? How does that work? Look, these debates are always stupid. Do you want everything to look like the Brady Bunch? No. Which means you want characters who have the capacity to do things that are horrible, because people are capable of doing horrible things – the paradox of humanity and all of that. There’s a difference between depicting something and glorifying it, but admittedly that can be a blurry line, especially since most people are dumb, and stories that are perfectly reductive tend to be boring. But at the very least, I think we can all agree that there isn’t really a solution, and there never will be. “Good storytelling” just isn’t something you can enforce. Otherwise Brett Ratner would be in jail.