Showing posts with label Martin McDonagh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin McDonagh. Show all posts

Saturday 22 October 2022

#UCFF Tweets on Opening Night at Cambridge Film Festival : The new [Martin] McDonagh (work in progress ?)

#UCFF Tweets on Opening Night at Cambridge Film Festival : The new [Martin] McDonagh

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 October

#UCFF Tweets on Opening Night at Cambridge Film Festival :
The new [Martin] McDonagh (work in progress ?)

Dedicated, in gratitude for his BDI, to JLB



Laying your table :





Menu / ingredients-list / allergens :















Spoilery stuff from the sous-chef or kitchen ? :







Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 12 January 2019

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ?

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 January

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

 Those who think Seven Psychopaths (2012) a great film can delight in that opinion. However, after the $15m that was spent on it (so it is estimated (as reported on IMDb)), the bosses at investors such as CBS Films, Film4 and BFI may have been less sure : in the US, it just made back what it is thought to have cost.

 In that world, one could imagine Martin McDonagh, hawking pitches for a new film. He had tried a film that was very cinematic, and then had made this one, which dearly desired that some of Lynch had rubbed off on a tale of people who were not the people whom they seemed to be.

 Maybe the inspiration was to make visual what one would never try to show on stage, these billboards : in a play, everyone would be talking about them, but they would be an off-stage trio of elephants.

Yet, as soon as you have them in a film, and in its title, the film-goers will know without needing to think (or question) that they are significant*, and a fierce Frances McDormand, pictured with them, can then import a #MeToo message that makes it a winner.
To be continued


 * Missouri, and a made-up place there, being the other label on the tin : In Bruges, likewise, is going to be a film that is set in Bruges...



 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 26 January 2018

Looks like we've got a war on our hands ~ William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 January

This is a response to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)


Wes Anderson simply directs us in such a way that he has no need to show us the territory of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) on a map for us to know that it is representational, rather than actual - whereas, in a film that is not without other relevance, it is unhelpfully obvious to any attempt to read The Dressmaker (2015) literally that what is shown has scant sense of being a real place* [though this, for some clear reasons, is also not Dogville (2003)].



However, one believes that there are better grounds for abandoning any pretence that Kate Winslet (Tilly Dunnage), returning to her mother Molly (Judy Davis), is not just a revenge-romp (if one that is dusted down with touches of fairy tale and cod psychology). In Billboards, invoking such fictions as 'When they diverted the highway' causes one to think of Psycho (1960), rather - excellently entertaining though it is – than of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent : Travels in Small-Town America, but perhaps writer / director Martin McDonagh desires to operate on both levels ?

All this anger begets anger ~ Penelope (Samara Weaving)

If it were actually the premise of the film, it was pretty obvious from the title what the billboards would be doing. Even in terms of believing in the film and / or being asked to believe in what the film shows, likewise pinning too much (pun intended) on them cannot be done in literal terms** : people misquote what Hitchcock meant when talking about a MacGuffin, but, in that extended sense, the billboards certainly are one.

 Or, rather, they patently are one, but McDonagh will have it that they are not one...








Some film-references :

 * Calvary (2014)

 * The Dressmaker (2015)

 * The Hairdresser's Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990)




End-notes :

* According to Wikipedia®, the closest that we get with Billboards is Ebb, ‘an extinct town in St. Clair County, in the U. S. state of Missouri’.

** For example, as if although (and because) not rented out for the lengthy period of time found in the records of Ebbing Advertising Co. (and despite the obvious dilapidation [if one can have it, of something made of wood, not stone...] of the billboards themselves), the cogency of the installation is not going to need checking and repair before the resumption of an electrical supply. The conceit simply will not bear thinking of thus in those terms, if one had to imagine what would be an appropriate rental (rather than a figure and cash on the desk).




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 11 January 2018

Two laundromats near Staines, formerly Middlesex (in production)

Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 January
Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)



It is almost cunning that we are reminded that it is the writer and director of In Bruges (2008), and not - for some reason - of Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 27 July 2013

Fuckin' Bruges further

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 July

Having now watched the extras from the In Bruges (2008) DVD, including the one that almost makes a sort of rap by stringing together every shit-hole, fuck, fucking and cunt, I add a few further comments to my review :

* We learn that Martin McDonagh has parcelled out the two sides of his reaction to Bruges when he spent a weekend there - Ken is the part impressed by the sights and sounds, Ray the one that just wants to get away from it all and have a beer*

* McDonagh had also been quite careful that Bruges, as I found, should be another character, and, with the city's co-operation after he had selected all the views that he wanted to include, had access to all but one

* The scene atop the belfry was shot in a mock-up, reimagining how it would have been before safety-mesh and the like had been installed

* There is confirmation for the idea that the city may be a sort of Purgatory for Ray, or, at any rate, that his negative feelings about himself and what he has done mean that he cannot enter into its and Ken's desire for him to appreciate it

* In one of the extended scenes, Ray likens the balance that Ken talks of between culture and fun to a retarded black girl (culture) outbalancing a dwarf (fun) on a seesaw, and then goes on to say how he was beaten up by a black girl as a child

* The deleted scenes show that there was scope for far more references to boys and toys that did not make the cut, and justly so (although I am not sure how good it is to have these materials presented to us with the finished film)

* Other scenes suggested Ray's emotional vulnerability more strongly : he also supposes that the priest must have had it coming as a paedophile, but it is disabused that he was supporting a campaign against a housing development in which Harry has an interest

* An extended sequence with Chloe, when she jumps up, wraps her legs around Ray, and, when he says that he wants a drink, says that they should have a fuck, shows tenderness (although the scene in bed is clearly interrupted by memory affecting performance)

* It is unclear where these scenes, relating to Harry's personnel (or their foe), fit in, but we are graphically presented with a police detective being decapitated


End-notes

* Bill Bryson reports that reaction to Brussels in his travel book Neither Here, Nor There, and he is not far wrong.


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Monday 21 January 2013

Fuckin' Bruges

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 January

* Contains spoilers *

I don’t know whether In Bruges (2008) made the city even more attractive to tourists, but it was so well shot by Eigil Bryld – even the set-pieces from the typical guide-book – that it should have done.

For this was certainly not a film that did as that year’s Woody Allen’s Barcelona-titled work (as it had funding to be filmed in that city¹) and just treated us to a picture-show (however nicely), but one that embedded Bruges in the development of the film right from the opening to the closing shots (as Allen’s Paris- and Rome-centred films then did three and four years later, although it may be fanciful, just by virtue of the comparison, to suggest that Allen learnt from what Martin McDonagh’s picture does).

I did not see the film when it was released, but was aware of it at the time of Brendan Gleeson’s excellent performance in The Guard (2011), and then at the recent run of Seven Psychopaths (2012), in the light of finding which dire a friend lent me his DVD, so I know why people expected better from McDonagh writing / directing again.

In truth, though, what seemed like an under-par performance from common link Colin Farrell (as Ray) threatened to have me stop watching (either because it was too close to the use to which he was put in Psychopaths, or, perhaps, because I had thought more of him in another Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream (2007)), which makes it less implausible that Allen had seen this other Farrell film. I am glad that I did not quit, because, around the time that Ken (Gleeson) goes to see Yuri to get a gun, the film picked up for me.

Until then, possibly because I like the place, I had been rather irritated by Ray’s opening condemnation of Bruges as a shit-hole, his refusal to join in with Ken’s spirit of making the best of being sent there, including a smart-arsed comparison with Dublin, and even by his baiting some overweight Americans into chasing him : most of those things came back to haunt, as does the accidental killing that has led Ken to bring Ray to Bruges, and make the ending powerfully effective. Yes, the final theme does owe something to the t.v. series Life on Mars (2006 – 2007), and maybe even to the feeling of The Truman Show (1998), but I did not see it coming.

Early on, there had been palpable references to the exchanges between Gogo and Didi from Beckettt’s Waiting for Godot, to the situation in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter** (and, for good measure, to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as Ken is flustered and cannot remember which of the two aliases used is his), and I wrongly wondered how original the writing was going to be, before realizing that they were probably passing mentions (almost inevitable in a work with buddies).

Equally fleeting appeared the echoes of Dante in the theological chat, both in front of the Hieronymous Bosch painting The Last Judgement², of which we are shown details from the centre panel, at the art gallery, and on the bench afterwards. (Giving a message to Death, anatomy lessons involving human dissection, and gruesome, if miraculous, saints’ lives had all preceded the Bosch scenes, and pricked Ray’s sensibility (and conscience ?).)

Stepping back a bit, the film opens with these words, narrated over night-time shots by an unseen Ray :

After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off my hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter, the instructions came through: Get the fuck out of London, you’s dumb fucks – get to Bruges ! [quotation truncated]


However, we may not have fully caught these words, and, because of hearing the voice saying that he did not know where Bruges was (and so momentarily feeling superior ?), may not later spot a mismatch. This occurs when a boy with adults, whom Ray sees walking across a square, gives rise to a flashback, at the end of which Ray is dragged (seemingly by Ken) from the scene where a priest and a boy lie dead (re-enter Pinter ?).

At the end, as Ray is being put on a stretcher, and, from Ray’s point of view, we see an oxygen-mask being lowered (shades of John Simm as Sam Tyler, and Beckettt’s doubt-filled trilogy ?), we hear him narrate again, as the stretcher slides inside an ambulance :

[…] And I thought, if I survive all this, I’ll go to that house, apologize to the mother there, and accept whatever punishment she chose for me. Prison, death – it didn’t matter. Cos, at least in prison, and at least in death, you know, I wouldn’t be in fuckin’ Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me, and I realized. Fuck, man - maybe that’s what Hell is : the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin’ Bruges ! And I really really hoped I wouldn’t die. I really really hoped I wouldn’t die…


We have followed Ken and Ray thus far, latterly with their boss Harry Waters (another stunning role for Ralph Fiennes, that champion scene-stealer), as the triangle has been brought together by principle, betrayal, disobedience and sacrifice, centring in Bruges (words that unforcedly ring through the screenplay). Harry, who had professed a boyhood wonder for the place when he speaks to Ken, stalks through it, so fixed on his quarry that he scarcely seems to see it and its Christmas magic, which we, too, then feel less with the tense - turning to pounding and grinding - music of the chase, reminiscent of that of The Matrix (1999).

Both Ken and Ray still have life in them when, by rights (though I do not have the knowledge of the Flemish anatomists shown earlier) one might have thought that they should be dead. It is Ken’s bid to save Ray (just as it was when Ken, about to kill, stopped Ray shooting himself and put him on a train) that elevates matters above one killer (Ken himself) and whether he kills or is killed by another killer (Harry), although we are not really drawn to take sides (but cannot take the extreme behaviour of the ticket-seller of the belfry as reason for what Harry does in reprisal – one for McDonagh’s later tally of psychopaths !). (Stoppardian logic with the scene atop the belfry.)

Unknown to Ray, Harry has apparently wanted him to enjoy Bruges before being executed, but, from first to last, excepting that Chloe lives there (and, even so, he has to insult the city on their date), he never gives it a chance, whereas Ken has been soaking in the sights and experiences. Are there subterranean glimpses, here, of a meaning beyond the superficial, that Ken may be a Clarence to Ray’s George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)) – after all, there is Ray’s attempt on his own life, from which Ken, appointed to kill him, saved him (more Stoppardian logic), and, for example, when Ken encourages Ray to look at something during their canal-boat trip, he is hunched in his coat and does not even raise his head ?

Is Ken actually real, or no more so to anyone else than, say, Charles is to John Nash (A Beautiful Mind (2001), or Harvey to Elwood (Harvey (1950), although Harvey is, in fact, visible to others), because, of course, Ray is narrating the story and we only see what he envisages ? Enough in this film, I think, to give us pause whether Ray, like Sam Tyler, may be talking to us and / or himself from a coma, because of the horrific injuries from Harry’s dum-dum bullets (we have seen what one did to the head of Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), dressed as a schoolboy). If Ken is Ray's guide, is he a sort of Virgil to Ray's Dante ?

At the end of the film, the location of the film that is being made⁴ (on which Ray met Chloe) is peopled by some Bosch-like creatures, one of whom knocks Ray to the ground with his beak, and, somehow, Marie from the hotel is there, as well as Chloe (so even a bit of a feel of The Game (1997) or maybe 8½ (1963)).

When, after Chloe and Ray kissed (during which we saw Harry, intend on business with Ken, walk straight past, and Chloe said, of herself, ‘The most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in all of your stupid life’ as a reason for what Ray has to stay for), they took a romantic drink together. When Jimmy came over, he said about his character and that night’s shoot that ‘the psycho-dork turns out to be some loveable schoolboy and it’s all some Boschian nightmare’.

Stephen, in Joyce’s Ulysses, says the much-quoted words History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. In this film (with Ray’s past of an accidental shot that killed a praying boy, whose prayers, clutched in his hand, Ray reads), Ray says of history, as a retort to Ken’s interest in it – just before, at the hotel, Ken was reading The Death of Capone – I used to hate history, didn’t you ? It’s all just a load of stuff that’s already happened !, and immediately rushes off, because there are ‘midgets being filmed’.

At that moment, Ray isn’t trying to awake from history, but avoid it, by chatting up (the willing) Chloe, and hearing about the dream-sequence that is being filmed, which, she tells him, is neither a pastiche of, nor an homage to, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), but an overhead : the belfry and all the buildings do not interest him, but Chloe and Jimmy and the film do, and he is drawn to them.

He almost so wants to be part of the film-world that it is no surprise that he ends up on location again in the finale. Chloe had talked about site security, and Ray says that he evaded it, but there is certainly no evidence of any now. Does Ray have a little feel about him of Bill Harford from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (taken from a short story by Schnitzler) ?

However we interpret this film, there are a couple of constants – Ray’s lively, beetling brows (into which Farrell channels much of his acting), and his decorative shirt, which would seem to be the only one that he has (despite the fact that Ken and he are both shouldering bags when they arrive in the city). There are some shots where one can get a closer view of this shirt, and realize that what decorates it, which I took for music for a long time (trying to confirm which detracted from the action and drew attention to what seemed Farrell’s apparent one-dimensionality), is something else.

It cannot really be made out, but could resemble wild-card characters from an ASCII set together with a paper-trace-type pattern (when programs and data were fed in on paper-tape), or, put another way, the ones accessed from a font such as Symbol. Is that it ? Is Ray’s shirt a symbol – is it, as with the letters and numbers that, if one can see them, make up the world of The Matrix, an indication that he is – whether because he is really in a coma or in Hell (or Purgatory) – a piece of source-code amongst all this imagined reality, where Marie, Eirik, and Chloe are all somehow there to see his wounded body carried away ?


Post-script

Whatever Ray may say about Bruges, acting as a dismissive gobshite, when Ken alludes to what has brought him there, he is figuratively on his knees, as he is in front of the vivid depictions in The Groeninge Museum. Although, as dinner with Chloe shows, he is capable of violence in defence of that image, it does not seem to be his inner nature, which is to be fascinated by Jimmy (because he is 'a midget' - a childish state of wonder), to talk blarney to Chloe, to be reduced to the fear and trembling of a schoolboy facing his doom.

As Ray lies wounded, probably likely to die, and is thinking, these parts of him combine in deriving an eschatology where being in Hell equates to being in Bruges : the part of him that hopes, though founded on this extreme aversion, does not want to die and end up there eternally, but, with his wounds, living will necessarily be at the cost of being there for quite a while. If, that is, the whole foregoing has not been confused by his near-death state and he has confused and deluded himself...


There is a little more information and comment here...



End-notes

¹ For a screenplay apparently originally set in LA.

² The play is a big clue as to what instructions can eventually be expected. (The likeness to Father Ted, where Ken is an amalgam of Ted and Dougal, and Ray a more benign Jack, is less helpful.)

³ The work is a triptych, with the other two panels painted on the inside of doors that are hinged to meet in the middle, which, I gather, was a common method at the time for keeping the main painting concealed and protected when not required for devotional purposes.

Unusually for films, the work is where it is said to be, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, although the opening sequence had, which is why I have checked, made me wonder whether all the gargoyles, statues, moons and the like had been shot on location (as well as whether the topography is fairly represented in the depiction of the scenes).


⁴ Psychopaths tries to repeat this, and other elements of Bruges (e.g. the Harry Waters character is mirrored by Charlie Brooker), with a film within a film, but it just doesn’t work.


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