Come Anticipate Martin McDonagh's 'In Bruges'

It will end horribly and be absolutely worth every minute

All in for this

yup

mostly lost faith/interest when he made 7 Psychopaths (which i haven't actually seen) but this looks much better

7 psychopaths is terrible but it may have a couple of moments iirc. not gonna watch it again to confirm.

this new one is supposed to be more serious than the trailer makes it seem

7 psychos was terrible, thought this sounded ok but the trailer looks p bad imo

Can't offhand think of a bigger drop in quality between a director's consecutive films than In Bruges>7 Psychopaths.

it's a promise of frances mcdormand cursing out her whole town for an hour or two, what are you talking about

keep forgetting this guy has stopped being a playwright, or put it on the backshelf

I didnt mind 7 psychopaths tbh

me neither. enjoyable overall, with moments good & bad. agree it's a huge step down from in bruges tho.

Def

That is otm

In Bruges suffers badly from the tie everything together traits that mcdonagh suffers so badly from. The main difference in quality is that there's just no beating Brendan Gleeson for adding heft to a midweight smartass violent movie.

Agreed. Fiennes raises the intensity bar a couple of notches too. The smashing of the telephone in the study seems strangely anachronistic.

well, one vote for his new one on Slant. Nice cast anyway.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/three-billboards-outside-ebbing-missouri

i found this movie troubling in all the ways it intends to be, and extremely well-acted, yet i find myself really annoyed with it. the angle of the police department's track record of brutality and racism, admittedly played up in the marketing but absolutely present in the film, is never seriously dealt with. the screenplay and acting heap tremendous sympathy on woody harrelson (so, what, he's absolved?) and about two-thirds of the way through start developing rockwell in a much more sympathetic direction, and knowing what we know about him this is really, really jarring. i've skimmed some of the rave reviews and i agree with everything they're saying but they do not mention this. a major character is clearly a racist cop who committed these acts of brutality, but it's not dwelled upon, it doesn't seem to come up even after he's committed more serious offenses that by rights should have him in jail, and at the end... well, i won't spoil.

and i'm not saying that the film straightforwardly asks us to like and sympathize with this character, nor that a film about a racist cop has to stop at depicting him as pure evil. because obviously this is a movie where the main protagonist also does some things that go beyond the pale, and we are forced to see her in a complicated moral light. but in 2017 to make a movie about american police, where racially-structured brutality is put in play as a theme, and then to end where we do is very.... weird. imo. it started to feel not like a deliberate provocative choice and more like a tone-deaf outsider filmmaker who Does Not Get It.

but maybe it's just me?

all re: three billboards if that wasn't obvious. i loved in bruges.

I agree with all of that, Doctor C. I was also a bit put off by the scene in which the new chief comes to town, and he's black, and he immediately calls all the white officers crackers and motherfuckers and lays down the law and fires Dixon on the spot. It just seemed so pat, like a fantasy of police accountability--some good black officers in high places could take care of the bad white ones, and that would be that.

(also reading back over my post above: i mean "more serious offenses" as in "additional serious offenses" not that they are "more serious" than the torture that apparently took place before the film started)

I used to think the Coen bros sometimes made bad movies, but really they were just lesser Coen bros movies. This movie and that terrible George Clooney movie that came out showed me what bad Coen bros movies would look like.

I definitely prefer McDonagh writing about Ireland than the U.S.

and yeah agreed with JRN about the new chief. also the only black characters are him, the guy who put up the billboard, and the other gift shop employee. they're all accessory characters with none of the home lives or inner complexity that the rest of the cast are allowed. dinklage gets more screen time and more dialogue establishing his personhood than the woman who is arbitrarily and punitively jailed and then shows up to just be happy as can be that she's out and that mcdormand is still doing her thing. did she have any feelings about this situation?

i think the chief's backstory is that he is lester freamon from the wire.
the mom from it's always sunny was a bit of on-the-nose casting, too.

I might ask that, if you're not going to make a separate thread for it, you'd refrain from "and then this thing happened" about a film that won't be released until next year in a lot of territories. I'm prepared to sacrifice my dignity and call you "Lads" if this will get the work done.

Backing Farrell 💯 on this one...lads

I read this thread backwards and thought you was talking about Colin

Sorry, Andrew. I started out intending to not be spoilery but it got away from me.

new thread: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - a Martin McDonagh film with McDormand, Harrelson, Rockwell, and SPOILERS

there’s also been discussion on the woody barrels on thread

lol

I saw a production of 'The Lieutenant of Inishmore' a few years ago., it was woeful stuff. "Father Ted meets Tarantino", arghh

― Michael B Higgins (Michael B), Friday, 12 October 2012 21:56 (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

shite

embarrassing

having discussed it with a half-a-bottle-of-red-down mrs mac, we have decided that without great performances, mcdonagh is in fact without merit in any way.

and im not offering but id write ten times better of actual irish dialogue, and god bless our diaspora but fucked if we should tolerate them making cod-irish characters a thing if flann o'brian was mocking yeats himself for doing so a century before this overboosted tart

His only play worth talking about is The Pillowman yeah that’s right

well now

https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-pillowman/duke-of-yorks-theatre/

and im not offering but id write ten times better of actual irish dialogue

oh do this already for every sake

breaks my heart to see these powers of anecdote and answerback wasted on ilx alone

read kevin barry

Kevin Barry read Shaw

”Well, they are not going to let me like a soldier fall… But I must say they are going to hang me like a gentleman."

if ilx were up on their barry id poll his short stories, there's stuff in there that broke me and renewed me tbh

I’m not up on my Barry apart from the lad from
Belvedere! What’s he like? Would I like him?

would hope so

he runs a bit towards fascination with the sex he imagines everyone is having and a certain gra for idk rural hippies

but some of the writing is so utterly irish in energy and phrase that i got homesick and sher i never left.

and a few of the tales and characters are pretty unforgettable

There's a Barry essay about living in Cork that's just superbly magical and gritty somewhere on the internets. I thought "City of Bohane" was an attempt at a bogger Mad Max that worked maybe a third of the time but fair play for having a go.

Martin McDonagh is a wasteman who hasnt done anything of any worth and I'm including "In Bruges" in there also.

Well now there's this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRu3zLOJN2c

Banshees is fantastic. I can never remember which McDonagh brother is which, but this is a lot like John Michael's Calvary. The small island grudges thing reminded me of Michael Powell's Edge Of The World too.

I haven't liked a movie this guy's done but I do want to see Colin Farrell get an Oscar so ...

https://i0.wp.com/www.popbabble.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/seven-psychopaths-colin-eyebrows.jpg?w=1600&ssl=1

I liked Calvary, so that's good news to me

First half was a great movie about how difficult it is for men to maintain long term friendships but then it gets progressively more daft for the sake of some high drama

Has this been released everywhere yet? It's one of my favorites this year.