Shawn Doyle in Hitman Action Thriller ‘The Last Mark’ Official Trailer

by Alex Billington
February 4, 2022
Source: YouTube

“Forget about the girl! Get out of here.” Epic Pictures has revealed the trailer for an indie hitman action movie titled The Last Mark, yet another movie repeating pretty much the same plot of a hitman who has to do one last job before he retires. But he can’t take out this person because it’s a woman. Oh how original. This film opens on VOD at the beginning of March if anyone wants to watch. After a young woman witnesses a mob hit, a seasoned assassin and his psychotic partner must track her down before she turns them in, but she proves to be the hardest mark to kill. The Last Mark is directed by Reem Morsi and stars Alexia Fast, Shawn Doyle, Bryce Hodgson, Josh Cruddas, and Jonas Chernick. There’s not much to see here, it doesn’t look any good. The poster is the best part about this release, and it’s not even that impressive either.

Here’s the official trailer (+ poster) for Reem Morsi’s The Last Mark, direct from YouTube:

A self-loathing and aging hitman, Keele, is tasked to kill the witness who can link him and his psychotic partner, Palmer, to a recent murder. This routine execution falls apart as Keele struggles with pulling off his task due to a crisis of conscience. He quickly discovers that his new mark, Peyton, is the most difficult target of his career. The Last Mark is directed by the Egyptian-Canadian writer / filmmaker Reem Morsi, directing her second feature after making Bootleg previously, as well as numerous other short films. The screenplay is by Cheryl Meyer. Produced by Jordan Barker, Borga Dorter, Maddy Falle, Bruno Marino. This hasn’t premiered at any festivals or elsewhere, as far as we know. Epic Pictures will debut Morsi’s The Last Mark in select US theaters on February 25th, 2022, then on VOD starting March 1st. Anyone into this?

Find more posts: To Watch, Trailer

AM/NS to Acquire Infra Assets from Essar for $2.4 b

ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel (AM/NS) India will acquire a clutch of infrastructure assets including three ports, two power plants and a power transmission line from Essar Group for $2.4 billion, or about ₹19,158 crore, the companies said in separate statements on Friday.

Official UK Trailer for Intense ‘Notre-Dame On Fire’ Film from France

by Alex Billington
June 15, 2022
Source: YouTube

“Up there with a few men, we can do it.” Pathe UK has released their own official UK trailer for the Notre-Dame On Fire movie from France, dramatizing the tragic fire at Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral in 2019. The French title is just Notre-Dame Brûle and it’s supposed to tell a story “from inside the Notre-Dame de Paris fire of April 2019.” Made by the same director from Seven Years in Tibet and Enemy at the Gates, Frnech filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud who has stay away from Hollywood for a while now. The film retraces how heroic men women firefighters put their lives on the line to accomplish this awe-inspiring rescue. The ensemble cast features Samuel Labarthe, Jean-Paul Bordes, Mikael Chirinian, Jérémie Laheurte, Chloé Jouannet, and Pierre Lottin. It’s set to open in the UK this July after first premiering in France this March, but there’s still no US plans yet. I guess they’re waiting to see how well it plays in the UK first then will set a date. This doesn’t look half bad, I must say. Impressive work turning this event into a movie.

Here’s the new UK trailer (+ poster) for Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Notre-Dame On Fire, from YouTube:

You can rewatch the initial French teaser for Annaud’s Notre-Dame Brûle here, to view the first look again.

Notre Dame On Fire offers a blow-by-blow recreation of the gripping events that took place on April 15, 2019, when the famous Parisian cathedral suffered the biggest blaze in its history. The film retraces how heroic men and women put their lives on the line to accomplish an awe-inspiring rescue. Notre-Dame On Fire, originally known as Notre-Dame Brûle in French, is directed by prominent French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud, director of many films including Hothead, Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose, The Bear, The Lover, Wings of Courage, Seven Years in Tibet, Enemy at the Gates, Two Brothers, His Majesty Minor, Day of the Falcon, and Wolf Totem previously. The screenplay is written by Jean-Jacques Annaud and Thomas Bidegain. Produced by Jérôme Seydoux. Notre-Dame Brûle already opened in France earlier in March. It next opens in UK cinemas starting on July 22nd, 2022 this summer. Still no US release set yet.

Find more posts: Foreign Film, To Watch, Trailer

Meanwhile, RSS alleged that he died after getting assaulted by CPM workers. However, police said he fainted while attending to his brother in the hospital, who was injured during a brawl between RSS-CPM workers. He was pronounced dead later.

The essence of the cinema is the symbol—the filming of action that stands for something else, that gets its identity from what’s offscreen. There’s plenty of action in Jordan Peele’s new film, “Nope,” and it’s imaginative and exciting if viewed purely as the genre mashup that it is—a science-fiction movie that’s also a modern-day Western. But even that premise bears an enormous, intrinsic symbolic power, one that was already apparent in a much slighter precursor, Jon Favreau’s 2011 film, “Cowboys Aliens.” Like “Nope,” Favreau’s film involves the arrival of creatures from outer space in the American West; there, it was already apparent that what the genres share is the unwelcome arrival of outsiders from afar (aliens are to Earth as white people are to this continent). Peele takes the concept many ingenious steps further.

“Nope” is a phantasmagorical story of Black people in the American West, the unwelcome among the unwelcome, and it’s set in the present-day West, namely, Hollywood and the Hollywood-proximate, the very heart of Wild West mythology. “Nope” is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders. It is an exploitation film—which is to say, a film about exploitation and the cinematic history of exploitation as the medium’s very essence.

Peele’s film is set mainly on a horse farm in California, Haywood Hollywood Horses, that provides the animals as needed for movies and TV shows and commercials. Its owner, Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David), dies mysteriously after being hit by a bullet-like piece of space debris that showers the property. The farm is taken over by his two children, Otis, Jr., called O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya), and Emerald (Keke Palmer). Neither of the heirs, though, is entirely cut out to fill Otis’s shoes. O.J., who loves the horses and works devotedly with them, is something of an introvert; he isn’t the communicator—the on-set presence—that his father was. Emerald, who is very much a communicator, is an aspiring filmmaker and actor for whom the horses are just a job, and not a very pleasant one. To address the farm’s financial troubles, they sell horses to a nearby Western theme park. But, when the source of the space debris—a monstrous U.F.O. that sucks humans and horses into its maw and eats them—makes its appearance, O.J. and Emerald are forced to fight it. They’re also inspired, for the purpose of saving the farm financially, to film it, in the hope of selling the first authentic footage of a U.F.O.

I’m being especially chary of spoilers in discussing “Nope”; I greatly enjoyed the discovery of the plot’s daring and inventive twists and turns, along with the discerning and speculative ideas that they bring to light. By remarkable design, the movie is as full of action as it is light on character psychology. There’s no special reason why O.J. is taciturn or Emerald is ebullient, or why they’re able to marshal the inner resources for mortal combat with invaders from outer space. “Nope” offers the characters little backstory—at least, not of the usual sort. Rather, Peele pushes even further with a theme that he launched in “Get Out” and “Us”: the recognition of history—especially its hidden or suppressed aspects—as backstory. With “Nope,” Peele looks specifically to the history of the cinema and its intersection with the experience of Black Americans to create a backstory that virtually imbues every frame of the movie.

For the Haywoods, the crucial backstory goes to the birth of the cinema: the real-life “moving images,” created by Eadweard Muybridge in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, that are often considered the primordial movies. Muybridge was commissioned to study the movement of a galloping horse; the name of the Black jockey he photographed riding one of those horses went unrecorded. In “Nope,” Peele creates a fictitious identity for the rider—Alistair Haywood, the family’s forebear. Emerald tells the crew on a TV commercial, who are relying on one of their horses, that, when it comes to movies, the Haywoods have “skin in the game.” Acknowledging and extending cinema’s legacy while also redressing its omissions and misrepresentations of history is the premise of “Nope”: the responsibility, the guilt, the danger, the ethical compromise of the cinematic gaze.

The film-centric symbolism of “Nope” gives rise to the film’s distinctive, surprising sense of texture. “Get Out” and “Us” are films of a thick cinematic impasto, crowded with characters and tangled with action. “Nope,” made on a much higher budget, is a sort-of Blockbuster—but an inside-out Blockbuster. If the first two films are oil paintings, “Nope” is a watercolor of the kind that leaves patches of the underlying paper untinted. It’s set in wide-open Western spaces, and what fills their emptiness is power: political, historical, physical, psychological.

The movie is also filled with images—imagined ones, and also real ones, a visual overlay of myth and lore that fills the Western landscape with the history of the cinema. What embodies the invisible lines of power is the gaze, of the eye and of the camera alike. Peele has been, from the start of his career, one of the great directors of point-of-view shots, of the drama and the psychology of vision, and he pursues the same idea to radical extremes in “Nope.” Point-of-view shots are at the center of the drama; again, avoiding spoilers, the spark of the drama turns out to be, in effect, eye contact—the connection of the seer and the seen (including when they’re one and the same, in reflections). Alongside the intrusive intimacy of the naked eye, Peele makes explicit the inherently predatory aspect of the photographic image—the taking of life, so to speak—and the responsibility that image-making imposes on the maker.

There’s another bit of backstory that puts the filmmaker’s responsibility front and center. The movie begins with a scene in a TV studio, where an ostensibly trained chimpanzee performing with human actors on a sitcom runs amok. (This subplot reminds me of the horrific accident on the set of “Twilight Zone: The Movie,” in 1982.) A survivor of the chimp’s attack, which took place in 1996, is an Asian American child actor (Jacob Kim) who now, as an adult (played by Steven Yeun), is the owner of Jupiter’s Claim, the Western theme park to which O.J. has been selling horses. The jovial owner, called Jupe, has also had some contact with the U.F.O. and is also trying to profit from it, indifferent to the risks involved. Jupe’s space-horse show (something of a mysterious, invitation-only event) makes uncannily clear the predatory connection between viewers and, um, consumers.

Peele is seriously playful with the technology of movies in ways that recall Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo.” The action of “Nope” pivots on the power and the nature of movie technology—the contrast of digital and optical images—and the creative rediscovery of bygone methods, as reflected in its very cast of characters, which includes a young electronic-surveillance nerd and U.F.O. buff (Brandon Perea) and a grizzled cinematographer (Michael Wincott). The TV commercial for which the Haywoods rent a horse is being shot in a studio, in front of a green screen (another empty visual space shot through with power), where a melancholy horse is standing still, stripped of its majestic energy, reduced to a mere digital emblem of itself, ridden by no one but manipulated by a desk jockey with no onscreen identity at all. Peele presents the C.G.I. on which “Nope” itself depends as a dubious temptation and a form of dangerous power.

Yet the crucial bit of backstory remains unexpressed: the question of why, of all the horse farms in California, the space creatures chose to target the one that’s Black-owned. The answer to the question is one that both demands expression and faces a silencing on a daily, institutional basis. The movie opens with a Biblical quote: a scourging prophecy, from the book of Nahum. In transferring the politics of “Nope” to the intergalactic level—a sardonic vision of the universality of racism—Peele also transfers them to an overarching, spiritual, metaphysical one. He offers a scathing, exuberant vision of redemption. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Western theme park Jupiter’s Claim. It also incorrectly described the space debris that killed Otis Haywood, Sr.