Producer Lawrence Bender wears his Tarantino badge with pride. Which is fine when producing QT movies but problematic in everything else (see Killing Zoe, From Dusk Till Dawn 3). Knockaround Guys, in classic Tarantino fashion, has edgy twenty somethings (Barry Pepper and Vin Diesel), a bag of loot, leather jackets, guns, the mob and, natch, a high-intensity Mexican stand-off finale. Derivative.
Made for HBO, John Frankenheimer's final film shows how the US stumbled into the Vietnam war. Alternating choppy chaos with slow control, it considers the view from the White House during Lyndon B Johnson's troubled administration. An ambitious three hours in length, with Michael Gambon's LBJ backed by an incredible cast including Donald Sutherland, Alec Baldwin and Philip Baker Hall.
For a man so steeped in the honeyed hickory grit of Gram Parsons, newcomers to Bruntnell could be forgiven for mistaking his English 'burb origins for Bakersfield, Ca. New Zealand-born, Surrey-raised and westward soul-bound, he finally drew acclaim with 2000's superb third LP, Normal For Bridgwater. Its follow-up is equally fine, studded with guitars (courtesy of 21-year-old James Walbourne and Son Volt's Eric Heywood), faint washes of piano, peals of steel and a forlorn, imagistic delivery and way around a melody reminiscent of Joe Pernice.
