"The Banshees of Inisherin" is the fourth feature film written and directed by Martin McDonagh after "In Bruges", "Seven Psychopaths" and "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". At the first sight it could fit the same line of dark comedy as the predecessors. That's until it becomes clear that it's much more dark and much less a comedy.
Somewhere on Inisherin, a fictitious island on the Irish coast, at the beginning of the 20th century, two glass mates, Colm and Padraic, abruptly get into a conflict. The reason, Colm, the eldest of the two, and having some talent of playing the violin, decides that his life is wasted in useless chit-chat. So, without explaining much, lets his former friend know that there's nothing to be dicussed between them and that he's busy with composing a new tune. The news is a real shock for Padraic, disrupting without warning a routine where pretty much the only "entertainment" on the island were the afternoon chats at the local pub with his buddy. Confused, Padraic tries to make Colm change his mind, but his attempts hit a rock. Moreover, to prove that he's not kidding, Colm threatens to cut one of his fingers each time he's approached in conversation. The situation seems funny initially, but slowly escalates to a typhoon disturbing the peace of the small local community.
I vaguely remember that also "In Bruges", starring the same Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, switched from comedy to drama, but here it happens quicker and more harsh. Even if in the first part of the movie the action seems sometimes to drag. The humor is not lost though, and it's really good, but it slowly gets to having more of a tension relief role, which is really needed. As a drama, "The Banshees of Inisherin" is much more complex than the summary above might suggest. There are a lot of ideas that can be drawn from what we see here. From the amount of risk in someone's life that a strict separation between black and white can create to the difficulty of leaving a comfort zone and its consequences but as well the lack of understanding of such situations, and others. These many senses seem somehow to contrast the small number of characters and the geographic isolation. The entire community that interacts with the two main leads is limited to a number below 10 (+ 2 animals), out of which more present in the action are actually just Padraic's sister and the son of the local policeman, where we have another mini-drama as a side-story. I guess, however, that actually this reduced context creates an opportunity, such that each character can be carefully crafted and integrated in the script, so that finally what you get is a rich picture of an isolated corner of this world. A picture that is completed by a tragic but open ending, reason why it might be a bit disappointing. Even though, if you want you can see here some tiny hope for a happy-end. It really depends on which half of the glass you prefer ;)
I ignored for a while "Don't Worry Darling", simply for the reason it was bashed by critics + neither the scores on IMDb, RT, etc. didn't help it. I was wrong. Not that I wouldn't know that lately it's better to be skeptical about the aforementioned ratings.
The movie is set sometime close to the '50s, taking place in an isolated community - "Project Victory", somewhere in an oasis at the edge of the desert, where the life seems stuck to the typical American stereotype of the period = each couple has a home with a backyard and each housewife tends to the house chores for the entire day waiting for the beloved husband to return from work. The "work" seems to be a top secret engineering project coordinated by Frank, the community leader, which is developed at a couple miles away from the settlement, in a place more restricted than Area 51. The plot is centered on a couple formed by Alice and Jack, their idilic life starting to shake after she begins observing that some things are not as fine and well as they seemed to be. Beginning with another wife who miraculously survives an inexplicable suicide attempt to a plane dissapeared without a trace after an apparent crash that passes by ignored by everybody. The mystery advances with the rhythm of a psychological thriller, in which Alice slowly becomes the pariah of the community due to the unnecessary tension she creates around. Somewhere at around three quarters of the movie we get our answer for the whole thing. What I can say without spoiling anything is that I didn't expect "the twist" I got this time. My mind went more towards something like military experiments at the beginning of the Cold War. It's not that. Still, unfortunately, the answer the movie offers come either too early or too late - therefore, probably some reason for the harsh reviews it got.
Even if there are some parts that might disappoint a bit, these definitely aren't on the technical side where the movie is top notch - from camera work and production design that provide an excellent support for atmosphere of the middle 20th century to the soundtrack that mixed together with the rest gets you the vibe of an erie episode from "The Outer Limits". The actors are a bit overshadowed by Florence Pugh's performance in the title role, but still, you could say her role is already enough for what the movie needs. The ending is indeed unpolished. However, concerning the criticism on having nothing new in the main twist, I'd be curious to see which movie that turns towards SciFi really brings something new, especially counting probably less than 5 I've seen released for the big screen this year within the genre. And actually, I could say there is some originality even just for the psychedelic contrast placed on top of the retro look. To conclude, I don't know what did or who upset Olivia Wilde, also directing this besides having a side role, to get such an avalanche of bad reviews. For what I can say the movie's not a masterpiece, but definitely above average.
With that I'm also closing more-or-less metaphorically the year of 2022 in a note of "don't worry" :) = I can hope for a more "retro" careless time with a density of entries more close to the blog's origins. Obviously, I'm delusional.. Anyway, Happy Holidays! ;)
Usually, if there's nothing to cause a delay, I'm posting the "traditional" seasonal entry before the actual beggining of the "season". Now I'm a couple days late, and not only due to lack of time, but mostly because of the lack of content... Maybe I got struck by some winterish very gloomy mood and I dislike everything. But let's see what can we put on the table...
I know there are other high budget and more marketable titles announced for December, but the only that I thought it's worthy to stop to is the already delayed "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish". Unfortunately even here, as in many of the recent animations, and not only, the trailer gave me the impression that the coffee or sugar consumption at Hollywood is exaggerated. This hyperactive pacing is tiring, and the density of light jokes present in anything that has a touch of comedy doesn't help. What follows is not far from that...
In January, we get the same hyper-glicemic rhythm in (apparently) a completely different genre - the next movie by Guy Ritchie: "Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre". Given the way the trailer goes, starring Jason Statham as the "classic" lead, if you wouldn't know it's a movie by Guy Ritchie, your chance of guessing would probably be higher than the chance of getting some snow this winter. Anyway, this wouldn't be a problem if so much of the action wouldn't be spoiled already. Like that, what's left to see is only if there's enough room left to expect to see more.
The fact that for February I didn't manage to find anything more promising than "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" says a lot. Between this and "Cocaine Bear", well.. maybe I shouldn't think twice on it.
March: no escape from sequels. At least the trailer for "John Wick: Chapter 4" looks more exotic than "John Wick: Chapter 3". And the hope that will be more close to "John Wick: Chapter 2" stays alive.
I'll move over April and stop in May at the single entry of this list that I can say I'm looking forward to watch, even though again there's not something new: "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3". I still think, James Gunn, the director + writer, is pretty much the only one who managed to move out of the typical Marvel line and to provide some distinct personal touch, the first two GotG being in my opinion by far the best movies out of the most profitable = commercial super-hero universe. On the other hand I can't say the trailer looks very promising this time, but well, as above, the hope remains.
For the 15th year of my blog, I intended for a subject worthy enough of a round anniversary. Obviously, I didn't have enough time to find anything new and I'm again forced to recycle something. This spring, if I remember well, I've rewatched Kieslowski's colors trilogy, supposedly connected to the French Revolution symbols through the well-known colors of the flag - bleu, blanc, rouge. I've always found it a bit overrated, maybe except for the second movie, "Blanc". In essence, it's a comedy, slightly bitter, but that's what makes it special.
Karol Karol is a Polish barber, who recently arrived in Paris, and even more recently left without a dime by his ex-wife after a quick divorce motivated by his incapacity to perform his duties as a husband. Losing his passport, without speaking much French, and with his hair salon set on fire by his former wife, he ends up with a big empty suitcase as a beggar in the metro station, singing with a pair of... combs. The Polish tune catches the attention of Mikolaj, another Polish guy, considerably more wealthy, who offers a deal - to kill somebody who wants to die but doesn't have the guts to do it by himself (we finally find out that "the somebody" is Mikolaj, but let's save some of the story). Karol says no, but Mikolaj finally decides to help him by arranging an illegal journey to their home country, packing Karol in his empty suitcase. Long story short, Karol gets back to Poland barely alive, and slowly starts building a revenge plan. How does that go? It's probably better to watch the movie than read it here :)
Unlike the rest of Kieslowski's trilogy, "Blanc" is more a Polish production than a French one. Besides the story, slightly unrealistic at some point, but dense enough to keep you watching - we definitely have a subject here and it's probably better to keep the current entry spoiler-free - we have very well-picked casting. The score is also surprisingly good and allowed me to discover Zbigniew Preisner (the composer), my only reference until then in Polish film music being Wojciech Kilar. The cinematography is nice, but that's valid for the entire trilogy. Each movie shows an obvious intent to bring forward as much as possible the color set in its title.
As far as I know "Blanc" is mostly considered by film critics a good movie, but still the weakest of the three. Maybe because it's the one with a rich plot, drawing attention there instead of being centered on deep philosophical questions. Concerning that, I didn't care much about the references it draws to "egalite" = the middle link between the "liberte" and "fraternite", as it's considered to be, but I've seen it simply as a stand-alone picture. A "revenge movie" in the end, which surprisingly presents itself this time as a comedy packed within a drama. Or the other way around :) Pretty much like the life of the main character. Maybe that's a reflection theme that's deeper than others ;)
Unfortunately, during latest months I didn't have the time and neither the mood to watch any movie worth writing about. Somehow though, I got to spend my hours before going to sleep with the two prequels mentioned in the title for "Game of Thrones", respectively for "Lord of the Rings", and even though I don't usually write about tv stuff, I said it might be a a good subject for an entry (+ I don't want to let the blog die for good yet). Besides that, being released at about the same time, the two series seemed comparable, therefore, the idea to put them one near the other, although I don't really have the same opinion at the end of the first season.
"House of the Dragon" has a soap-opera-like development bringing dragons as the unique element of fantasy, while "The Rings of Power" is a pure fantasy, or at least that's what it wants to be. This is where my negative bias ends for the first one, and the positive one stops for the second. The new soap (unsurprisingly after the original GoT) is wrapped in a very smart screenwriting, which somehow masks the typical lengths where nothing of much imporance happens, crowning that with an extremely efficient "refresh" in the second part of the season by jumping over some years in the action timeline, telling you basically: look, we didn't try to squeeze out some useless episodes to fill up the season, exactly when this seemed to be what's coming. On the other side, with all the fantasy elements LotR tries to add to its checklist, and despite limiting the first season to just 8 episodes, the script is horribly "economical" in the narrative development. Practically, if you extract some key elements out of three episodes or so (1,6,8) it's most probably enough to jump directly to the second season, whenever that might be released. The rest of it feels like empty filling bringing on top of it a bunch of cliche in the writing, which might be normal for a production, but it's not so normal to be so obvious. You can have some cliche in a script, but you need to alternate that with some more natural dialogue. Here what you get are lengthy sequences, spanning minutes of lines, which lead you to the "classic" question - who's talking like that for real? The lack of experience of the two lead writers is obvious - which you can confirm by a quick check on IMDb and find out that's basically the first production in their carreer.
If the narrative is "the root of all evil", more limited in GoT, and more obvious in LotR, unfortunately the balance between the two is completely messed by the rest of the production elements. If GoT benefits of an exceptional production design for a tv series, LotR is far far away to live up to some titles in the online press referring it at some point as "the most expensive series ever". The comparison is almost moot. You can only look at the CGI in LotR, which is either sloppy or absent, leading to hilarious scenes in terms of amplitude, such as the battle for Southlands between men and orcs limited to something like a handful of people in a small village with a few houses, somewho lucky enough to be found by the reinforcements arrived from across the sea, having a perfect sync to find exactly that place on the Middle-Earth map and land perfectly on time to change the fate of the battle (as I said the script is the "root of all evil"). To pick something ample enough for comparing, you can pick for instance the coronation scene in GoT's 9th episode, where I don't how much is the part of extras and how much is CGI, leaving the dragon aside, but in any case the whole sequence is impecable, not ignoring apparently trivial details such as the size of the place where the action takes place. Besides that, if we got to this, it's one of the two scenes in GoT that creates a powerful emotional impact on the viewer through all it brings along, including the actors and the score. The second scene is the one of the king's entrance in episode 8. Both scenes are very carefully built and could very well stand as a subject of a more complex analysis in something like New York Times' "Anatomy of a Scene". In LotR we don't really have something on par with that, maybe the ending of episode 6, where we basically watch the creation of Mordor, but even that seemed partly failed to me from the directing perspective, wasting some of its potential. To compare yourself (more-or-less), with a strong spoiler alert, I included in the end a capture with what transpired on YouTube from all the above mentioned (although I don't know if it will last long).
Some other parts where GoT shines and LotR struggles are the casting and the soundtrack. You can see again here, what's probably the experience of HBO's casting crew. Generally, I don't like expressing opinions about actors because this is subjective, but here the overall difference is obvious. With some exceptions, in LotR we have quite a lot of "flat acting". It's true that again... it the script offers you one cliche after the other, you probably need to struggle to make a believable impression. Concerning the sountrack, even the piece on the main title by Ramin Djawadi recycled from the original GoT has a stronger impact than what Howard Shore did for LotR, apparently brought in especially for that. Besides this, I think that Bear McCreary who has the credit for scoring the episodes content is a good composer, but even in "The Walking Dead" it took something like five seasons to release a pice that fits so well with a scene to stick to your head and make you search it after. For the moment here is completely "forgettable".
I must say that I'm not at all a fan of prequels - it always seemed to me the perfect example to find an opportunity to squeeze the last drop out of an used subject. In a sequel, at least you get a new ending that you wait to discover. In a prequel, you pretty much know the ending, which from my perspective reduces quite a bit the potential of the narrative to catch your attention. Besides that, I somehow had low expectations from "House of the Dragon" after the messed up ending in the original GoT, and I had somehow higher expectations from "The Rings of Power" after the previous experience with an excellent Amazon adaptation for "The Man in the High Castle". This probably contributed at least a bit to a completely reverted effect in my opinion after watching the first season of the two... In any case, my feeling is that LotR doesn't have much chance to grow unless the radically change the production team, and for GoT I think it's hard to keep the current level without getting affected by similar narrative issues, but we'll see.
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