Come Anticipate Martin McDonagh's 'In Bruges'

My friend worked on this and he claims he likes it. I remain deeply skeptical.

well it wants 2 have it both ways - it's a send up/deconstruction of all those hitman/killer cliches while also operating w/in that world - main prob is how tone deaf & unfunny it is

chuckled @ walken a few times tho tbh

It's too bad because his Irish-centric non-hitman plays are terrific.

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

Kept waiting for "Seven Psychopaths" to be more than what it is, and while I was ultimately disappointed at what it was (meta cliches?) I guess I enjoyed it enough. Can't believe he'd be satisfied with such a hoary screenwriter lives his own story conceit, though. It's been done a lot better (see: "Adaptation," etc.)

Love how often Sam Rockwell is cast for a particular strain of manic overacting. Loved Walken's underacting. Liked Farrell in this, who I think has been solid since sobering up, and got his own overacting out of his system in "Fright Night."

Farrell's performance in IB is one of my favourite of the last five years, and I pretty much hated him before that.

That was his big come back post clean-up, right?

Yeah, "Miami Vice" was two years before that.

Which means there was much soul searching and rehab in between.

Farrell is always better when he's acting in his own accent

love hoos itt

currently watching dis new ting and finding it very hard to watch cuz it is not 1996 and the sense of anachronism is just too great

whoever the bawbag is who isnt farrell i hate him

this is fucking waste

what the fuck nakh, we were watching this not half a fucking hour ago, gave up due to tiredness

are we in a mindmeld? god i hope so

still only el sur from this year, need more of its like

the poster for this always makes me think of the Dream Of The 90s song from portlandia. thats what mcdonagh is doing... living that dream

waste is the word. I liked Walken though. Especially his pronunciation of "hallucinogens"

i did find this to be majorly disappointing. there a couple solid chuckles, but there's nothing even slightly fresh or surprising about it. whereas In Bruges was a huge surprise (maybe just because i wasnt familiar with mcdonagh back then).

it's weird that he wants to jump into "meta" Hollywood shit so soon. Try just making a solid movie first. I've never seen any of the plays

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jit3YhGx5pU

swore i'd never see his stuff again for some reason but will obviously see this

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.