Last week I joked that, given their propensity to show mob movies, Channel 7 should just start running them exclusively in their Late Movie slot. As if in response, this Saturday Channel 7 fires back with yet another mobfest!
At this point, I’ve said all I could possibly say about the mob movie knockoffs that litter the Landfill. I’ve outlined time and again their shared elements and their obvious pilfering of the more famous mafia movies and TV shows. Rather than rehash all that again, I invite you instead to peruse my previous entries on such efforts – just click on any of the titles below.
”Avenging Angelo”
”Blood Vows”
”Under Hellgate Bridge”
”Amongst Friends”
”A Good Night to Die”
”Triggermen”
”American Strays”
The trailer for this Saturday’s movie is filled with “hey, isn’t that so-and-so from such-and-such?” actors. Folks whose names you rarely know, but you’ve seen them time and time again. If the casting here seems deliberately ”Sopranos”-esque, well, that’s the way the meatball crumbles. You can check out the movie’s imdb listing and from there go to the individual filmogpraphies – you WILL recognize some folks, but again, you probably won’t know their names.
The only one I’ll call out here is Robert Costanzo. You’ve seen him hundreds of times, and the fact that he has a similar look to James “Tony Soprano” Gandolfini could not have been lost on the creators of “Mafioso.” Costanzo is quite an adept character actor who can shift from comedy to drama with ease. And for the comic book fans out there, he’s also the voice of Detective Harvey Bullock on the various animated Batman and DC Superheroes cartoons.
Best moment in the trailer: the statement that the film was the “Winner of the Audience Choice Award at the Portland Festival of World Cinema” (I’ll let you come up with your own response to that).
So how about it, Channel 7? Why not just devote one of the late night slots exclusively to mob movies? You have enough of them to run one every Saturday night, for example. You can change the name from “The Late Show” to “Midnight Mobsters” (who cares if the movies start at 11:35). Or maybe one Sunday afternoon when there’s no sporting events, you can have an all-day mobster marathon. It could be a “hit”… you could score some big ratings… maybe even be “#1 with a bullet!”
View the trailer for “Mafioso: the Father, the Son” here...
Or watch the entire movie on WABC-TV Channel 7 on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 11:35 PM... if you dare!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment