Director : Bernard Rose
2010
Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny and David Thewlis star in Mr. Nice, writer-director Bernard Rose's adaptation of international drug dealer and U.K. spy Howard Marks' 2002 best-selling autobiography.
Ifans will play Britain's one-time most-wanted man, a late-'60s-era Oxford graduate and teacher who turned to drug smuggling to impress his future wife Judy (Sevigny). While enlisting the help of an Irish Republican Army boss (Thewlis) for a job, he was recruited by a British intelligence officer for a loose network of informants. The charming criminal assumed the alias Mr. Nice. After encounters with the Mafia and CIA and nearly 30 tons of pot smuggling, he spent seven years in prison.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
Director : Werner Herzog
2010
Inspired by true events, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done tells the peculiar story of Brad Macallum (Shannon), an aspiring actor who commits, in reality, the crime he is to enact in a Greek tragedy in which he is performing.
The title suggests a biopic of Robert Burns seen from his mother's point of view. The film is in fact Werner Herzog's characteristically bizarre, slightly fictionalised account of a real-life matricide in San Diego and these are the last words of a middle-class widow whose son killed her with a sword he'd used in an avant-garde production of The Oresteia in which he'd played Orestes. The murderer, Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon), claims to be holding hostages after the murder. These turn out to be a pair of pink flamingos whom he calls his "eagles in drag". As a sympathetic cop (Willem Dafoe) deals with the siege, we discover in flashback from neighbours, a Los Angeles stage director (played by that specialist in the deranged and menacing, Udo Kier) and Brad's long-suffering fiancee (Chloë Sevigny) what led up to this final act of madness.
