Billy Bob Thornton
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
More typical and funny is a scene that recalls Peter Sellers' Being There persona, where Vaughn reveals his homosexuality to Karl and then queries the silent listener about his thoughts: “I was thinkin', I'm gonna take me some of these taters home with me.”
As a character, Karl has a surface similarity to Forrest Gump, and he may remind you, as well, of the mentally arrested holy innocents in Rain Man , Being There , or The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser .
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The ex-con-befriends-a-kid plot resembles that of grossly underrated Nicolas Cage/David Gordon Green film Joe , with echoes of About a Boy and Sling Blade .
Reminiscent of "Sling Blade" in its themes and tone, the Apple TV+ film hinges on the unlikely bond between a man and a young boy, offering the former redemption and the latter the supportive figure he's lacked.
As a reference, Mud will fit quite nicely into your movie collection alongside Billy Bob Thornton ’s One False Move and Sling Blade, and equally well next to adaptations of Tennessee Williams or Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
American icon Sam Shepard , another Malick veteran, appears as a houseboat hermit sporting Billy Bob Thornton 's haircut from " Sling Blade ."
Originality is pretty much a no-show, as I kept clicking off movies in my head like “Shane,” “Stand by Me,” “Sling Blade,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “A Perfect World” … Even the outstanding work by Matthew McConaughey, playing a scraggly good ol’ boy with love on his mind and the law on his tail, seemed much too familiar.
If anything, Karl seems too bright for someone raised in a chicken coop by religious fanatics, but writer-director Thornton has nonetheless given us the best portrayal of a troubled man-child since Cliff Robertson in Charly.
Yoakam's performance reminds one of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, explosive, unpredictable and frightening.
The muddy, comforting world Nilson and Schwartz put to film evokes the out-of-time South of Sling Blade and David Gordon Green’s early films, where days can pass in solitude and store owners add up your purchases with paper and pencil.
Sporting a guttural, octave-lowered drawl that makes him sound like a cross between latter-day Jeff Bridges and Sling Blade ’s Billy Bob Thornton, Cooper at times seems like a parody of an all-American boozer; when he and Elliott get into one of their recurring spats, it’s like two grizzly bears fighting over a T-bone.
Egerton’s character still strikes viewers as an endearing picture of hope, all awkward mannerisms, owlish glasses, and a jaw jut that might be the most committed actorly facial contortion since Billy Bob Thornton in “Sling Blade.”
But the thing about the film is its sneaky similarity to "Psycho II" (1983).
As a character, Karl has a surface similarity to Forrest Gump, and he may remind you, as well, of the mentally arrested holy innocents in Rain Man , Being There , or The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser .
Sling Blade belongs in a genre with Forrest Gump and Rain Man, developmentally disabled characters who are wiser than the rest of us, but the comparisons stop there.
Thornton's drawing on a character type that should be familiar to most filmgoers, from pictures like "Rain Man" and "Forrest Gump" - but with a background of horrendous primal violence.
The novelist Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been short of attention from cinema: John Hillcoat made a fine, harrowing film of The Road and there were middling versions of No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses.
Sling Blade effectively asks, "What if Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird was dangerous, his protective instinct leading to murderous rages?"
Like Boo Radley, the hollow- eyed recluse whom Robert Duvall played in "To Kill a Mockingbird," Karl Childers has spent his life on the icy margins of society, lonely and scorned.
The best of the cast plays against type: Efren Ramirez (Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite ) is a flaming club kid while Dwight Yoakam ( Sling Blade ) is a sleazy mob doc.
And yet my hatred for Doyle must be viewed as a positive, because it shows what a stellar job the script, which won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, did of forging a truly detestable character, and also how great Yoakam is in the role, especially bearing in mind this was one of Yoakam’s first roles, and he’s always been better known for his music career than his acting, with this, Panic Room and the Crank movies being all I can recall him in.
His relationship by QB Winchell all the more effective because of the father-son film history he shares with Lucas Black (who played the boy in Sling Blade and was directed by Thornton in All the Pretty Horses.)
Through sheer chance, he meets a young man - played by Henry Thomas ("All the Pretty Horses," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial") in a decent performance - who just so happens to work for the father killer.
Vallon's identity is only known by his childhood friend Johnny (Henry Thomas, "All the Pretty Horses"), but Johnny's loyalty is weakened when he sees Amsterdam bedding down Jenny (Cameron Diaz, "The Sweetest Thing"), the woman he loves.
Heath Ledger spends much of the film channeling Billy Bob Thornton’s accent from “Sling Blade”, and it takes some time to get used to his mumbling, even though it perfectly captures Ennis’ subdued demeanor.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced by All the Pretty Horses (2000)
Themes
Adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy (author of All The Pretty Horses and last year's Pulitzer-and-Oprah-approved The Road), No Country For Old Men takes place in the same harsh world as McCarthy's novels.
Joel and Ethan Coen co-directed and co-wrote No Country for Old Men from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, whose laconic masculine output was last mined in 2000's All The Pretty Horses .
When Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, "The Fugitive," "In the Valley of Elah") and his deputy Wendell (Garret Dillahunt, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") come across the corpse strewn mayhem left in the wake of a drug deal gone bad in the Texas desert, he knows that the trail the crime will take him on will prove his conviction that the time he now lives in is "No Country for Old Men." Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen ("Blood Simple," "Fargo," "The Ladykillers") adapt iconic author Cormac McCarthy's ("All the Pretty Horses") novel with the unmistakable Coen touch - outstanding production values, terrific acting, drama leavened - this time barely - by touches of humor.
Enter Jeff Bridges, doing his very best Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade.
In the film we see Speedman's attempt at serious work - a Sling Blade-like story of a mentally challenged young man called Simple Jack - but we're told the film bombs.
La Jetee became 12 Monkeys, Peluca begat Napoleon Dynamite, while Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade gave up a few words to be adapted into Sling Blade.