And here comes a report on a test screening that happened last night in LA called THE END OF VIOLENCE by Wim Wenders, a mondo cool filmmaker. Ol Clubber/Lord of the Storm here seems to pick the right test screenings. So go along to the land of LaLaLand with our spy to see a film earlier:

Hey Harry, The Lord of The Storm here (or "Clubber Lang" as you called me for some strange reason), reporting in from the City of Lost Angels.

Went to a cute screening of The End of Violence last night in West Los Angeles, a new film from (never heard of these people) Ciby 2000 Pictures. The film stars Bill Pullman (prez from ID4 last year), Andie McDowell (looking alternatively freaky and depressed), Gabriel Byrne, Lorean Dean, Traci Lind, and some other people you probably never heard of. Directed by Wim Wenders and written by Nicholas Klein.

It's a really great flick -- I've been blessed enough to attend some banging films recently, and will have more for you probably next week on some other new ones. But let's cut to the chase:

The film is about Pullman, who stars as Mike Max, a Hollywood superproducer of ultraviolent action movies. He's so into his work he's alienated his wife, who is planning to leave him as the film starts. Rushing to and fro, business consumes him and keeps him from establishing any connection to anyone around him ... until he's kidnapped and taken out to be shot in the hills northwest of Hollywood (at least that's where it looked like to me).

Two bumbling killers are arguing about whether or not they should kill him, and as he begins to try to talk his way out of it (offering them jobs, natch) something happens which isn't revealed until probably halfway through the movie (SPOILER ALERT!), which is that a sniper on a hill picks off the killers and narrowly misses Mr. Max himself, who escapes and disappears from public view.

Why? Well, in an extremely parenthetical phone conversation with his assistant Claire, it is revealed he has a 400 page FBI classified document in his email. So he hides out, asking his gardeners to take him to their home when they find him sleeping under some foliage in his own back yard.

A subplot surrounding the Griffith Park Observatory is also woven in and out, without being clear why until waaaaaaay later in the film. A solitary figure goes in and mans a battery of TV monitors, connected to cameras located all over LA (and I mean all over, in strange places, and LA has cameras absolutely everyhere). The solitary figure (played by Byrne) sees damned near everything, including a group of bank robbers running from the cops and subsequently getting caught. He then almost sees the aforementioned event (he was watching it when his bald mysterious government type supervisor pops up on all the monitors bugging him about getting some sleep -- SPOILER which later is revealed he was covering up the shootings from the sniper!) and becomes obsessed with reconstructing his system and surveillance data to see what happened.

Several other subcharacters figure prominently in roles that are well written and executed -- the plucky Cat, a knockout stuntwoman who ends up in too deep; Doc, the suave police psychiatrist/detective who wants to get with Cat and solve the mystery the force decides to ignore; Mathilda, (SPOILER) the Latina cleaning woman who turns out to be a black ops triggerman (triggerwoman?) for the bald supervisor; Fidel, the introspective gardener who takes his eccentric and dangerous employer into his home with no questions at all, etc. etc. etc. Look for musical super-phenom MeShell NdegeOcello in a surprise cameo.

In short, this is one bangin' filmorama, Harry! The writing is intricate, with much of what's going on shrouded in innuendo and confusion until the last half of the movie, where things get really gripping and moving. Pullman is cool, going from high powered industry weasel to secretive man-gone-to-ground, Andie McDowell plays her role with a quiet restlessness that really smacks you around as a viewer in the second half of the film. I must give extra credit to the Latino actors who played the family that took in Pullman -- in one scene at a Kinko's where things got crazy, they smoothly acted with the surreptitiousness that ethnic people have adopted around law enformecement in a way that was so smart it was like Mission: Impossible -- the original!

Two problems: In Kinko's Pullman checks his email via netscape navigator in a really corny way -- navigator must be configured, but Pullman just typed in a user name and password and got not only his email, but was able to see that a file had been deleted from his email (whoo, that'd be useful) and see a jpg-type pic of his assistant while a voice over appeared from some mysterious source in that same email. Pullman was shown to be really high tech at the beginning of the film, but this type of feat in a Kinko's looked very contrived to anyone who's ever sat down at a computer.

2nd problem: That Pullman was made so invisible by a lotta stubble and a baseball cap, that a squadron of fed-type agents with suits and guns wouldn't recognize him on sight and let him walk by them and escape. Kind of the whole, "Gee, Robin, that small strip of fabric makes you look nothing like Dick Grayson!" gag.

Otherwise, the film rocked. Especially a sequence near the end where Pullman breaks up with McDowell, and she demands he get 1/2 of whatever of his business (he disappeared for 2 months, according to the public), where he asks for the robe she's wearing (a lacy, frilly type number) and she gives it to him while holding him at gunpoint. He walks up to her, gun in his face, and tries to kiss her on the collarbone (she's standing in her skivvies). She says, "Is it worth dying for?" he replies, "It always was." He had a moment of clarity as to how much he loved her back at the kidnapping scene (or so a voice over said) and that love, now hopeless, burned brightly in him, although it was too dangerous to contact her.

Great film man. Theoretically, it's supposed to open today (friday) but I dunno. Anyway, Harry, keep up the great work and I'll try to get back to you soon with more info!

-The Lord of the Storm