RocknRolla - mini-review

I saw this film over the weekend with a group of girlfriends. Not all of us knew what we were in for. A girly pic this ain't, and it oozes with testosterone like Guy Ritchie's other gangster pics, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. It has the some of the same elements: British underworld, fast editing, impossibly large cast, but thankfully this time a woman in a prominent part. I love Thandie Newton's accountant character. She's cool and professional, but likes a bit of danger, which she seeks in Gerry Butler's One Two. Her eye rolls at his "dancing" had me howling.

Tom Wilkinson plays the lead gangster, and he looks like he had a ball. He's so often the retiring gentle man character, that it was just fun to see him be so bombastic. The standout new face for me was Toby Kebbell as Johnny Quid, the RocknRolla junkie. He has quite the presence, and since Guy is planning a trilogy if RocknRolla does well, the last scene of the movie hints that he'll have a big part in the sequel.

Of course, Gerard Butler was the best part of the movie for me. Finally, finally, he gets to show some of that humor of his in an action flick. Besides his hilarious dancing, I loved the scenes with his gay best pal. One Two (Gerry) thinks his friend is going to prison, and gives him a favor that last night. "So, what did you want to do to me?"

The serpentine plot is hard but not impossible to follow. It's typical complicated Ritchie. I liked Lock Stock and Snatch, and this is like them, so I like it, too. It didn't seem to have quite the same laugh out loud bits like Brad Pitt's accent in Snatch. Maybe some of the English humour went over my head. There were tons of little throw off moments that have me chuckling thinking of them even now, like the huge black gangster Tank who likes to watch English dramas like The Remains of the Day on DVD in his car!

Seeing what Guy Ritchie will do with Sherlock Holmes will be very interesting. Can he find success outside the modern London gangster world? I give RocknRolla three and a half stars. I certainly enjoyed it much more than a few of my girlfriends who I think thought we were seeing more of a chick flick!

How I know my husband loves me

He bought me this signed poster for RocknRolla on Ebay as a surprise! It was a limited edition from Comic Con signed by Gerry Butler, Guy Ritchie, Ludacris, Jeremy Piven and Idris Elba.

BBC RocknRolla interview

BBC Breakfast had an interview with Guy Ritchie and Gerard Butler this morning about RocknRolla, which is out in the UK. They show the robbery of the car scene, more extended than we've seen before. Watch it here!

RocknRolla Opening Credits

Watch the coolness that is the opening credits of RocknRolla in glorious Quicktime. Hat tip: Ain't It Cool

Fun interview with Thandie Newton

The Scotsman has a very fun interview with Thandie Newton who co-stars with Gerard Butler in the upcoming RocknRolla. She worked with Guy Ritchie on making her character tough in the movie:

USUALLY cast in sympathetic roles, Thandie Newton gets to show her wicked side in the upcoming RocknRolla. Guy Ritchie's return to the scene of the crime genre has plenty of stylised violence and machine-gun dialogue, and at its centre is Newton playing an egg so hardboiled that even 300's Gerard Butler cracks up in her presence.

"The character was written strong in the first half and then just dwindled away when it had gotten more serious so I basically said, 'Look, think of me as a guy.' From the middle of the movie to the end, I would change things and he was totally open to it, and that was so liberating, because it's his material. He just said, 'All right, this is your character. I may have written it one way, but I want you to do what you want."

My favorite part of the interview, though, was when she described playing a prank on Simon Pegg who she co-starred in Run, Fatboy Run:

"The annoying thing is that Simon would never react. Even when I'd sewn up the top of his T-shirt and knew he'd been struggling with it in his trailer like a tortoise trying to get its head out, he just wouldn't let on because he knew I was watching."

She finally got the response she was looking for by arriving at the film junket hours beforehand, emptying every one of the 12 bottles of water he had in his TV interview room, then refilling them with neat vodka: "On camera, he took a swig and – phwoooooh."

ROFLMAO!!

RocknRolla Trailer

I hadn't seen this version yet. "Where is reverse?!" LOL!!!

British TV Ad for RocknRolla

Empire Online has video of the commercial playing on British TV for RocknRolla. Has some new scenes we haven't seen before. Watch it here!

Snatch - mini-review

After sitting through a truly sucky film (more on that shortly), I came home and watched the terrific Snatch. I'm catching up on Guy Ritchie's films in preparation for RocknRolla's October release.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch is in a very similar vein. Lots of interesting characters, gangsters and mayhem. Following the success of Lock Stock, Guy Ritchie was able to get some very cool actors for Snatch. Benicio del Toro and Dennis Farina are hilarious, but Brad Pitt steals the movie as an Irish gypsy with an accent that is incomprehensible and a riot. RocknRolla is supposed to be very much like Lock Stock and Snatch, and to me that's great news because I loved both films.

Three and a half stars.

RocknRolla Sequel

GUY RITCHIE is praying his next movie ROCKNROLLA turns around his Hollywood fortunes, because he has already written a sequel. After a string of box office flops, Ritchie is banking on the underworld thriller capturing the imagination of cinema-goers.
It stars Gerard Butler, Thandie Newton and Jeremy Piven, and follows London gangsters fighting for a share of a real estate scam. Ritchie already has a sequel written and ready to shoot: "I've written one. So people better go see it. It'll allow me to make the next one."

RocknRolla Poster

Hurray! The American RocknRolla Poster is out.

RocknRolla Comic Con Panel

IFC has posted clips from the panel for RocknRolla, and Guy Ritchie and Joel Silver talk a bit about Sherlock Holmes as well. We see Gerry throwing the chocolate! LOL

Yippee! A New RocknRolla Trailer

RocknRolla made a splash at Comic Con yesterday, and we have a brand spanking new awesome trailer, too! It even has the famous goofy Gerry dance! Here's the trailer for the movie Gerry says is better than sex (except with him):


Gerry Butler made the fan girls scream yesterday at panels for both RocknRolla and a first look at his action film Game. He threw chocolates out to the audience saying the place was turning into Seaworld! Read a great interview with Gerry in the LA Times: Gerard Butler loves the Ladies.

RocknRolla Trailer!!

Empire online has the exclusive RocknRolla trailer. View it HERE!

Guy Ritchie is back in his old stomping ground with RocknRolla. The Lock, Stock... and Snatch director has returned to the world of dodgy dealers, shady scams and back-stabbing that made his name, with a story of a tale of Russian mobsters running amok in the Big Smoke.

Someone's seen RocknRolla!

Ain't It Cool News has a report from someone who saw a screening of Guy Ritchie's upcoming RocknRolla with Gerard Butler and Tom Wilkinson. The guy who saw it LOVED it:

I saw ROCKNROLLA, and it kicked MIGHTY ARSE. And while it doesn’t have the shock of the new, I reckon this is the best of Guy Ritchie’s good movies. And that bar’s pretty damn high. I saw it in London, where it’s set, although the London of the film is totally Ritchiefied. We’re back in Lock Stock and Snatch territory (thank fuck), where everyone has a name like One-Two or Mumbles, and speaks a deranged mockney argot. Come to think of it, they did that in Revolver too, but here we don’t have to deal with Jason Statham shouting at his own ego in a lift for minutes that felt like days.

Anyway, from the moment the opening credits not so much kick in as explode onto the screen – up there with Seven, Catch Me If You Can, and The Incredibles, in recent years – it’s clear Ritchie means business. He must know what dogs his last two movies were, he must know he won’t get too many more chances, but despite that, there’s a bravura confidence to this I wasn’t expecting. In the first five minutes we meet about a thousand characters, and if it wasn’t for Mark Strong’s splendidly laconic voiceover you’d be utterly lost. Even with it you’re struggling, but who cares? The camera’s flying around, the performances are mostly spot-on, the music kills.

The plot is basically about upstart oligarch Russians taking over London properties from the old-school likes of Lenny Cole, played by the reliably superb Tom Wilkinson. He’s having an extraordinary run right now, and this is a nice addition to the canon. His consigliere is the cool-as-all-shit Mark Strong, and the pair of them rock together. Lenny is owed a serious amount of money – I couldn’t tell you how much, not having understood the mockney slang – by a bunch of would-be gangsters, led by Gerard Butler’s One-Two, and it’s their attempts to get that money, inadvertently sabotaging Lenny’s deals with the Russian mogul every time, that form the central spine of the movie.

But like I said, there are any number of other spin-off storylines and characters, including various junkies, thieves, gangsters, pop stars, music promoters (the slightly underused Ludacris and Jeremy Piven), and a scheming accountant, played with drawling deadpan sexiness by Thandie Newton. While not even Guy Ritchie’s agent would argue that he can write good parts for women – anyone remember a female character in Lock Stock? Or Snatch? And then there’s Swept Away, which makes you glad there weren’t any women in the others – at least here the single note he gives Newton to play is a good one, and she seems to be having a fine old time.

As do all the others. Gerard Butler finds a nice line in self-mockery; he and Newton have a spectacularly uncool dancing scene together that drew howls of laughter from the audience. He’s kind of a dork, and all the cooler for it. Also in his crew are Idris Elba and Tom Hardy, whose romantic yearnings form the basis for some of the best jokes in the movie.

The Ain't It Cool News editor Moriarity also has this interesting news about Guy Ritchie:

Warner Bros loveses them some Guy Ritchie right now. ... Well, they’ve seen ROCKNROLLA by now, and we haven’t, and all of a sudden, Warner Bros is in the Guy Ritchie business in a big way. When I interviewed Joel Silver for the SPEED RACER release, he talked to me about how SGT. ROCK was set to finally find its way in front of the camera with Ritchie directing, the latest name in a long line of people who took their shot at that one. And Silver told me point blank that ROCKNROLLA works, that he thinks it’s awesome, and that it is a turning point for Ritchie as a director.

Read the rest of the report here, including news that there will definitely be a SEQUEL to RocknRolla!

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - mini-review

This weekend I did some homework -- some Guy Ritchie homework as I had never seen one of his films. He's directing Gerard Butler's upcoming RocknRolla due out this fall. I remembered lots of talk ten years ago about his wunderkind first movie as both writer and director: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. RocknRolla is supposed to be another English ganster caper film in a similar vein.

The film starts out with an amazing parade of characters. It feels confusing at first and you fear that you'll never figure out who goes with who. Roger Ebert joked in his review that he wished the gangsters were wearing nametags! And the Cockney language takes some getting used to. Ritchie had some authentic East Enders in the film and they use the rhyming slang of the streets-- "Chevy Chase" for face, for example.

This is a madcap plot, as we follow the adventures of Eddie and his pals as they get in over their heads with some local gangsters. Sting makes an appearance as Eddie's father and his bar is in danger as the big cheese gangster may demand it as payment for Eddie's debt.

This movie owes an homage to Quentin Tarrantino, but then what modern gangster film doesn't. It has lots of comedy mixed with the violence. You can certainly tell that Ritchie was a director of music videos and commercials. There are many stylistic flourishes -- lots of slo-mo and freezes, but I really enjoyed all that. It certainly was visually interesting! But the best thing is the characters and their names! I especially like Barry the Baptist -- evidently played by a former pro-wrestler in England. Jason Statham started his film career with Lock, Stock as one of Eddie's buddies named Bacon because he's spent so much time under arrest he's almost become a pig himself!

I give this excellent film 4 stars. It's really fun and has a satisfying finish after a wild ride. If you're looking forward to RocknRolla, you should really give this one a rental. Don't be put off by the confusing beginning -- it all makes sense by the end. I don't know if Guy Ritchie reached as great success again, but the man has talent, that's for sure. Have to check out Snatch next and let you know about that one, but I'll skip Swept Away (his film with Madonna). This film makes me even more anxious to see what he does with some bigger stars like Tom Wilkinson in RocknRolla. Can't wait! Guy Ritchie certainly is much more than just Mr. Madonna!