After it's original theatrical release last October, Joseph Hahn's feature film directorial debut "Mall" is now available for instant streaming on Netflix. Details from the official press release are below:
There always has to be a few people to take the hit for the rest of the team and to then warn them of the danger ahead.
I've never been a fan of Joe's directing. I'm the type who gets excited when I hear someone else is directing an LP video.
You know how there's always that weird guy in a group that is super talented at everything he touches? Joe is not that guy.
I don't mind the music videos Hahn has directed, even the more recent ones, but I get excited when other directors jump onboard with LP simply because it'll be something really different and off the beaten path.
I thought Mall had some redeeming qualities. The music, obviously, and in terms of the overall visual aspect, it's a great-looking movie for how small of a budget it had. Vincent D'Onofrio also put in an amazing performance (sure to be a subject of "great performances in otherwise shitty movies" trivia in the future). Cameron Monaghan and James Frecheville's performances were both pretty disappointing though, Gina Gershon has never been a particularly good actress, and whoever the girl who played Adele was, she was absolutely TERRIBLE. One of the worst acting performances I've ever seen. The dialogue was also pretty bad for the most part, and I question how worthy the script (and perhaps even Eric Bogosian's novel itself) was of being made into a feature film. I feel like Joe did as well as could be expected with the budget he was working with, the quality of the cast, and the viability of the source material. I would have much rather seen his adaptation of King Rat finally happen (what even happened to that, anyway?).
From our interview in 2007: As much as I would've loved to have 'inactive' mean temporarily delayed, the fact that it's now 8 years later and no updates means sadly it's probably never going to happen.
I, for one, never really got a chance to get excited for "King Rat" Then again, the only reason I had any interest in "Mall" was because Linkin Park were doing the music
I don't mind whether Mall is good or not (I haven't seen it). It's a directorial debut anyway. Directorial debuts rarely become good, let alone great. James Cameron's debut was Piranha II. It's been rough getting this movie off the ground, and my hats are off to him for accomplishing this. Also Vincent D'Onofrio wrote the script, icydk.
Joe should make movies to his strength I guess. For eg. He's obviously creative in the visual department. And the mall was bad for a lot of other reasons too I guess, the script and the dialogue were pretty bad, the acting wasn't very good, the movie was trying to be dark but failed miserably (IMO). It isn't as bad as some people here make it to be, jokes aside. But, it's not a good movie. I don't really get the praise for the Vincent guy either, he was one of the people who wrote the crappy script too.
Because generally speaking he's a very talented actor. But if a script is poor, and the other actors deliver subpar performances...well no amount of great acting can polish a turd.
I think D'Onofrio did a great job, some of the scenes that he's in are appropriately tense ... but that doesn't really save the film at all
Come on, the guy wrote the crappy dialogue He might be a good actor but some of the talking in the movie was really cringe-worthy. I bet Joe's real life way of talking with words compared to sentences while looking bored would be better dialogue