u/stakes-lines-grades

Note: Leaves Tubi in 3 days!

This film cowritten and directed by Scott Cooper follows in the same bleak vein of working class character studies in American crime drama/thriller style films such as One False Move, A Simple Plan, Shotgun Stories, and the recently posted A Single Shot and Galveston, with quite the ensemble as well.

Christian Bale leads in the film as Russell Baze, a steel mill worker living with his four-tour Iraq War veteran brother Rodney (portrayed by Casey Affleck) in the small Appalachian borough of North Braddock, Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh. Struggling with gambling debt to bar owner John Petty (portrayed by Willem Dafoe), he engages in prize fights to pay off his debts due to his PTSD preventing him from getting and maintaining a regular job.

Russell visits the bar to partially pay off Rodney's debts to John and leaves intoxicated, and ends up hitting a car and killing everyone in it. While Russell is in prison for involuntary manslaughter, his ailing father dies and his girlfriend Lena (portrayed by Zoë Saldana) leaves him for police chief Wesley Barnes (portrayed by Forest Whitaker). After his release, Russell gets his job back at the steel mill while Rodney gets involved with New Jersey meth dealer Harlan DeGroat (portrayed by Woody Harrelson) who Petty owes money to, in order to get a higher payout in fights, it is after one of these fights that Rodney disappears.

This film was shot on location around the city of Pittsburgh and in West Virginia during the late spring and early summer of 2012, and the cinematography's representation of the declining steel industry in the area is one of my favorite things about this film.

All the performances here are great, and the standout scenes are the scene between Rodney and Russell regarding employment, Russell's goodbye to Lena, and the ending fight scene between Russell and Harlan.

Note: Leaves Tubi in 4 days!

Considered his passion project, Robert Mitchum takes his coolness to the hills of Tennessee in this Southern noir crime drama film inspired by an alleged incident involving a car chase between bootlegger hauling moonshine and the law on a stretch of highway between Kentucky and Tennessee titled "Thunder Road."

Mitchum heard of the story through his friend and Knoxville, Tennessee native James Agee, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiographical novel A Death in the Family and writing the screenplay for Mitchum's previous Southern Gothic venture, The Night of the Hunter.

For a film from 1958, it features pretty well done auto stunt work! Several of the moonshine running cars used in the film were once utilized by real bootleggers. Filming took place on location in Western North Carolina in and around the city of Asheville, and in East Tennessee.

The film wasn't a box office hit when it came out, but it found its place in pop culture, becoming a staple of drive-in movie theaters in the American South from the 1950s into the 1980s, inspiring several later bootlegger flicks such as Moonrunners, White Lightning, and Smokey and the Bandit, and providing the name for the 1975 Bruce Springsteen track of the same name, after Springsteen had seen a poster for the film while not actually watching it. However, this film also has a fun little theme song of its own co-written by Mitchum and has been covered by bluegrass and country music artists.

It's a bit of a slow watch, but it does a good job at capturing this era and region of America.

Bloody shootouts, car chases, gruff dialogue, and watermelons: that is essentially the run-down on this neo-Western action thriller film directed by Richard Fleischer, and written by the crime fiction great Elmore Leonard.

It stars Charles Bronson as the titular character, a Vietnam War veteran and farmer in rural Colorado hellbent on getting his watermelons picked with the aid of Mexican agricultural union organizer Nancy Chavez (portrayed by Linda Cristal).

Majestyk finds himself in a conflict with mob hitman Frank Renda (portrayed by Al Lettieri) who wants to kill him and destroy his farm after attempting to turn him in to local law enforcement after a prison bus escape.

This film has been referenced by Gary Oldman's character Drexl in the Quentin Tarantino/Tony Scott venture True Romance, comparing Christian Slater's character Clarence to Bronson in this film.

Filming took place on-location in and around the cities of La Junta, Canon City, Manzanola, and Rocky Ford in south-central Colorado in the fall of 1973.

Fun fact, the iconic pickup truck chase scene apparently used a singular stock Ford F100 pickup truck and shots from it were used by Ford for advertising purposes.

I want movies that feel like these pictures I took.