#ED NORTON 25TH HOUR MOVIE#

Cox also praises the late actor and “great friend Alan Rickman (“one of the sweetest, kindest, nicest and most incredibly smart men I’ve ever met”), and speaks kindly of co-stars Keanu Reaves and Morgan Freeman. But that’s the way it goes,” the candid star told the Big Issue, which also published several choice excerpts from Cox’s first book.īut it wasn’t all blood sacrifices in the tome. “I’m expecting probably never to hear from some people again. Johnson in “The Great Society,” now on Broadway. And besides, he has monuments to 9/11 to erect.Television Brian Cox knows why ‘Succession’ reminds you of the Trumps: ‘It’s about entitlement’Īctor Brian Cox is having a major moment thanks to the success of HBO’s “Succession” and a starring role as Lyndon B. But Lee is not-how can I put this tactfully?-a director who seems comfortable tackling homoeroticism, even for a second, even obliquely. To make any sense, 25 th Hour needed the kind of displaced homoerotic vibe that David Fincher brought to Fight Club (1999). Sexual panic fuels the wrenching climax, too, in which Monty prevails upon Slaughtery to save him from those muscular convicts by doing something that no pal should ever have to do-but that many pals might want to do. Monty urges his girlfriend to put on a short, clingy, cleavage-baring white dress for his last night at a mob-owned nightclub with the boys Jacob struggles with his lust for his flirty poetry student (Anna Paquin), who shows up high on Ecstasy and pulls him into a druggy, slow-motion pas de deux that’s one of the movie’s high spots and Slaughtery spends his spare time numerically quantifying his and his buddies’ desirability to women.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the story of 25 th Hour is fueled by the threat of anal rape: It’s what preoccupies Monty, and it’s the heart of the sexual-panic motif that runs (subtly, mischievously) through the screenplay (in different directorial hands, the film could been a queasy comedy). But all that registers for the audience is the pit and Lee ends the scene with a long, mournful shot of bulldozers clearing away what once was the World Trade Center.īarring the unlikely idea that the bulldozers symbolize said muscular sociopaths, something central hasn’t been fully dramatized. They’re talking about their friend’s coming maximum-security imprisonment: Jacob has a naive faith that Monty will emerge intact in seven years Slaughtery doesn’t think that a slender cutie like him will survive among all those muscular, horny sociopaths for very long. In one sequence, Jacob and Slaughtery stand before a large picture window with a prime view of Ground Zero. There is simply no connection between the themes of Benioff’s screenplay and 9/11, and every time Lee over-inflates the story, he loses its real pulse.

#ED NORTON 25TH HOUR MOVIE#

But the movie is also muddled by its own ambitions. And as Monty and a dog he has picked up wander the city-perhaps for the last time-we see a steady stream of American flags and memorials, even Ground Zero itself.Īt its best, 25 th Hour is a melancholy tone poem, deeply affecting in its mute apprehension of loss, with a lush, imposing orchestral score by Terence Blanchard that could be titled “Elegy for 9/11,” along with Bruce Springsteen’s “The Fuse” (with a Blanchard string arrangement) over the closing credits. He opens with a shot of two beams of light where the twin towers once stood.

Although the novel and the screenplay (both by David Benioff) were written before 9/11, Lee injects New York’s tragedy into the mix.

He also reaches out to his childhood pals, the timid prep-school English teacher Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the ruthless Wall Street hotshot Slaughtery (Barry Pepper). Monty passes the hours by thinking back over his life as the son of alcoholic firefighter turned bar owner (Brian Cox), the courier of a Russian mobster, and the boyfriend of a hotcha Puerto Rican girl (Rosario Dawson) who might have tipped off agents to his stash. Spike Lee’s entrancing 25 th Hour (Touchstone) revolves around Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), a convicted New York drug dealer with only one day left before he heads upstate to prison for seven years.

Ed norton 25th hour