I Ate My DVD Collection

What a douche I am.  I promised an early return to blogging, what with arriving on campus two weeks before class with nothing to do, and wound up with not just an on-time return, but a late return.  I guess once I got used to not writing, it all just went downhill.  Anyway, after BOTO got its act together, it was time for monkey see, monkey do.

I’ve done plenty of watching movies recently, not so much listening, and some creative writing.  So we’ll go easy on the music reviews for the time being, but being at Oberlin – meaning being within Oberlin’s majestic file-sharing network – should give me plenty to stock up on.

My first review of the semester is Martin McDonagh’s brainchild In Bruges, actually his first feature film.  It’s quite ambitious for a debut, though he must have had some confidence based on the fact that his only other studio film, a short subject titled Six Shooter, won the Oscar for best live action short back in ’04.  In Bruges, like Six Shooter, is an incredibly dark comedy.

I’ve never seen the short film, so I’ll stop making comparisons at this point.  In Bruges is about two hitmen, Ray and Ken, played greatly by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, ordered by their boss to hide out in Bruges (pronounced broojh), Belgium, after a job gone bad.  We don’t exactly know what exactly went bad, or why Bruges, but this movie isn’t about the mysteries of that.  Gleeson and Farrell take time debating it out loud, so the audience doesn’t have to get too preoccupied with it.

The entire film’s formula goes as follows: the dialogue is hilarious – exactly what you imagine British/Irish repartée to be in film, with some midget and drug jokes thrown in (Lots of midget jokes, actually),  And the action and plot events are black as the night.  Everything goes sideways, people’s past actions come back to haunt them, etc.  And when I say “formula”, I don’t want that to be taken as an insult.  I really only realized this about the movie now, and I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago.  It didn’t tarnish my viewing at all.

The writing in this film is a joy (see above, British/Irish repartée), with lots of merry cursing (“You retract that last bit about my cunt fucking kids!”) to liven it up.  Colin Farrell seems like kind of a divisive, or at least divided, actor.  He has mostly done pretty bad movies, but has made a couple interesting choices, and he seems to be getting better into his 30’s.  I personally liked Alexander, though it was a bit long.  I thought Farrell was great, although overshadowed by the even-more-interestingly-careered Val Kilmer in their scenes together.  Here Farrell is very good, if not the strongest actor in the movie.  He really knows how to get a laugh, it’s when he gets weepy that he drops off a bit.  But not all that much.

The strongest actors are Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, Fiennes a bit more so.   Gleeson is paternal, wise, workmanlike, a bit presumptuous, and a bit simple.  Those may seem contradicting; they don’t to me and aren’t in the movie.  Fiennes is a cunt. (The movie’s words, not mine.  But I would have to agree.) A wondrous, wondrous cunt who, when his wife tells him to stop bashing a phone against a desk in anger (“It’s an inanimate object!”), screams “You’re an inanimate fucking object!” (Farrell notes, “Jeez, he swears a lot, doesn’t he?”)

This review was pretty crappy and fragmented, because it was written in spurts over a month’s time.  I promise to come back stronger with my next review.  Keep your ears to the ground.