Michael Shannon Movies Blog

  Five years after the devastating events of 9/11, director Oliver Stone assembled a star studded cast to try and tell some of the stories behind the disaster. It would be churlish to criticise the film too much as it is well intentioned and celebrates worthy people, but you may find it a bit mawkish and sentimental. The film centres on Nicholas Cage’s Port Authority cop John. After the attacks take place – mostly off camera; we see only a shadow of a hijacked plane – Cage is sent down to the site to assist in the rescue. He comes over as a bit cautious and fusses about looking for equipment as the towers burn and fall. I’m not sure what was being conveyed here – was he playing it safe and by the book or was he fearful of walking in to near certain death? His choices are quickly made for him however, when a tower collapses and he and his men dive into a lift entrance that quickly collapses. Most of the men are killed immediately with another shooting himself in what I trust wa...

  This is likely to be my most up to date offering of the whole blog as I caught this on its cinema release at the Paisley Showcase. It was expensive at £20.30 for our two tickets but happily I had a £20 gift card that I won at a raffle at my Mum’s care home – back of the net! It was a sparsely attended afternoon showing but the film was decent, if a bit grubby and derivative. The film has the familiar framing of a documentary maker having present day interviews with the principals, with their reminisces detailed in extensive flashbacks. Most of the narrative is through the viewpoint of Kathy, played by Jodie Comer with a funny accent that swings between Liverpool and New Jersey. We are back in the 1950s and mumbling Tom Hardy is smitten with Marlon Brando in ‘The Wild One’. He decides to start a motorcycle club for racing and talking about bikes and things take off from there. The main framing device is Jodie Cramer’s Kathy, who stumbles on the gang at a bar. She gets her...

  The second half of this season is better than the first and it clears the board (walk) for new characters and events in the next batch of episodes. Shannon’s Van Arlen is sinking deeper into the mire as his wife files for divorce, somewhat understandably, and Nucky starts to get his claws into the hapless prohibition agent. The noose is tightening on Nucky as his rivals move in, so Van Arlen is soon blackmailed into spying on his new boss. A lady federal prosecutor has set up shop in Van Arlen’s office and she’s keen to take Nucky down. Van Arlen’s dossier on her target is a great help but unbeknownst to her our man is on the take. He is still walking the thin line between good and bad and he turns down a lucrative sting offer from Mickey, but it’s not clear if he’s still on the right side of the law or that he has a good eye for an unreliable partner. On the home front he is living a meagre existence with his baby daughter Abigail and his sing-song voiced Scandinavian n...

  Season two kicks off with episode recaps at the start of each outing, which can be helpful given the number of characters has ballooned. This season the main new character is Daredevil himself Charlie Cox, who at first is a bodyguard of an IRA fundraiser and who then hangs around as a kind of houseman for Nucky, who gets to sleep with Katy the maid. Mrs Schroeder has an eye for his diddle-de-dee charms too, but if memory serves that doesn’t end well. A few months have passed for Shannon’s agent Van Arlen who now runs a double life as a married prohibition officer and as ‘George Mueller’ who rents a run down apartment with his pregnant girlfriend. He wrestles with his religion and the hesitation we saw last season is quickly lost as he starts pinching impounded cash to keep paying the mother of his soon to be born child, who also happens to be Nucky’s ex-girlfriend. The series itself rumbles on well but there is a bit of repetition as the various gangster factions vie for...

  I’d seen this excellent film before but I couldn’t recall Shannon’s part. Having rewatched it, that’s not surprising as he only gets two scenes and is overshadowed by some big names and stand out performances. That said, he holds his own and offers a good bit of scumbag menace for your time. The film grabs you from the start with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei going at it hammer and tongs in a sweaty sex scene. Tomei gives a brave performance and sadly Hoffman does too! The pair are married and despite their drug fuelled sexploits all is not well in the relationship. We quickly learn that Tomei is also shagging Hoffman’s brother Ethan Hawke, who has fallen for the soon to be Aunt May. The brothers are low level crooks with Hoffman running scams from his real estate job and Hawke failing to make maintenance payments to his estranged wife, Holly Flax from ‘The Office’ Hoffman comes up with a grand scheme to alleviate their money worries, namely to rob a ‘Mom ...

  This period horror/drama is quite early Shannon, but he does muster 4 th billing in what has to be said a low budget offering. The two stars who have their names before the title are Henry Thomas and Patrick Fugit – if the child stars of E.T. and Almost Famous rock your boat then this could be the film for you. We open in the American Civil War era with a group of soldiers depositing some cash at a bank. It seems like a straightforward transaction but there is a lot of bad acting, long pauses and faffing over paperwork. It seems like something is a bit fishy, but before this is explored a bunch of bandits show up to rob the bank. Shannon is among their number playing Clyde, whose main character point is that he wears a funny hat. He is outgunned by another gang member who didn’t get the memo and showed up as a Droog out of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. The bank raid is pretty bloody with a head explosion and plenty of claret on the walls. The bandits take some shots themsel...

  Shannon gets perhaps his finest entrance to a film appearance in this outing, where we first meet him boffing Kim Basinger. Nice work if you can get it. Michael plays Greg, a sleazy contemporary of the film’s hero Eminem, who is having it off with the rapper’s mother in her trailer park home. At the time of filming Shannon was two years younger than Eminem and 21 years younger than the lovely Kim, who is somewhat miscast as the trailer trash bingo addict. You’ll probably be familiar with the film which follows the grim existence of Jimmy ‘Rabbit’ Smith Jnr. Who ekes out a depressing existence in Detroit in 1995. He lives in a grotty trailer with Kim and his young sister Lily who looks a bit too stage school to convince in her part. Jimmy holds a job at a car parts factory but hopes to become a rapper and escape his situation. He has a small crew who bitch and shout at other crews and with whom they engage in rap battles where they basically slag off each other’s mom...