Cynical Cinema

The first 20 minutes of In Bruges are absolutely hilarious. Minutes 20 through 25 are heartbreaking and suddenly, crazily brutal. And the last 82 minutes are hilarious and brutal. And all 107 minutes of this movie are joyously, darkly, utterly fantastic. In Bruges has got to be an early candidate for best movie of 2008. It’s beginning to end fantastic, it never stops being side-splittingly funny, and at no point does it ever half-ass anything, shy away from offensive subject matter, or compromise itself in any way. And this movie could well be considered offensive. To everyone. Blacks, whites, natives, Irishmen, Americans, Belgians, and especially the Vietnamese. Fat people, pregnant people, Christians, tourists and especially midgets and dwarves. And boy, is it ever funny.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star as Ray and Ken, two Irish hitmen who have just carried out an assignment in London that has gone horribly wrong. Their employer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has sent them to lay low in Belgium, in a tiny town called Bruges. Bruges is actually a real town in Belgium, one of the prominent “World Heritage Sites” of UNESCO. It’s a famous town because most of the buildings and structures from the medieval era remain intact, and because, like Venice, it is one of the few canal-based cities in the world. There are roads and plazas, but for the most part people get around on the canals. Bruges features dozens of museums, concert halls, festivals, theatres, and sightseeing locations. And that makes the town an absolutely wonderful place to set a movie filled with such coarse language, gratuitous drug use and graphic violence.

Brendan Gleeson gives an absolutely mesmerizing performance as Ken, the hit man who is completely enamored with this quaint little antique town. His glee at seeing the sights is as charming as Bruges itself. Farrell, on the other hand, absolutely hates the place. He hates the tourists, he hates the sights, he hates the quaintness and the charm. And he has never been funnier in his life. On top of his hatred of Bruges, he has an obsession with midgets, (and their tendency to commit suicide in disproportionate numbers), abuses many substances, and is himself suicidal. There is real pathos in his character, and through all the jokes and the ridiculous situations and the violence, he manages to convey a real sense of pain, loss, and heartbreak in his character.

There is certainly violence in this film, but it’s all first-rate violence. And by that I mean that it’s violence played for laughs, then violence done to tear-jerking effect, then violence for the sake of violence, and then violence for the sake of emotional effect. And it’s all letter-perfect. In fact, just about everything in this movie is done to perfection. The recurring themes - suicide, dwarves, honour - could have seemed very contrived in lesser hands. But in this case, every theme fits perfectly into the scope and tone of the movie. A tone which is sometimes dry, sometimes ironic, sometimes totally insane, and always, always, totally ballsy. This movie does not hesitate to break any taboos, to push any limits, to test any outrage the audience might feel.

Gleeson and Farrell are amazing together. They have the sort of relationship Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega had in Pulp Fiction. And many parts of this movie - especially the dialogue and the drug use and the violence - are very reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. And these two Irish hitmen are every bit as funny and interesting as Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. And then - Ralph Fiennes shows up! Fiennes, one of the great actors in movies, is playing a psychopathic character that is unlike any other he has played in his career. And yet, he is perfectly cast for the role. While his arrival on the scene seems to forecast a darker, less humourous turn to the movie as it reaches it’s bloody peak. And it certainly does get even darker once Fiennes enters the picture, but amazingly, it actually gets funnier too!

In Bruges is that rarest of movies that manages to be dark, comedic, dramatic, violent, charming, sweet, bad-ass, action-packed and clever all at the same time. It even throws in a little romance. This is the first great movie of 2008, opening in limited theatrical release in February. It made a total of 8 million dollars in North America, 21 million worldwide. The Love Guru, which by all accounts is an absolute pile of crap, made 14 million in it’s first weekend. But then, how many people watch the great films at the box office? In Bruges was the film debut for writer and director Martin McDonagh, who is one of the great talents to watch in movies. Some day, In Bruges will be remembered the same way people remember Reservoir Dogs. As the brilliant first film that launched a brilliant career. And you can pick up this wonderful movie today, July 1st, thanks to Alliance Films.

I am giving Beowulf the benefit of the doubt here. It is a movie that relies mainly on visuals, and the only TV I have where I can actually see the picture and hear the full sound is in the shop. I guess when I bought it, it had a faulty screen, and the warranty does indeed cover it. I sent it into this shop a week and a half ago. I called them yesterday to find out when I could have it back, and they said they thought perhaps, with some good luck, they might just have the parts they need to fix it within a month. Good thing I have that Blu-Ray player and pay for those HD cable channels. So, I had to watch Beowulf on a TV with a shaky, tiny screen and only one channel of sound. Which means that I will give the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume that the visuals ARE amazing and that the sound is impressive. Hey - anyone who has seen this film - can you tell me something? Angelina Jolie comes out of the water naked in the middle of the film, right? And she is all metallic or something, and there is no definition and no nipples. But at the end when she comes out of the water, there are nipples. Right? I couldn’t really tell.

But the animation seems strange to me. This movie is done sort of like 300, where it is live action actors which then have animation done over them. This worked with A Scanner Darkly, because it was constantly obvious. Right now, I’m not terribly certain why these movies are doing this. At least in 300, you forget the technique about halfway through the film. And then you just let the mindless entertainment wash over you. With Beowulf, it seems to come and go. Sometimes the actors look like real-life actors, and other times they look like computer animations from a kids’ movie. Which is bizarre. It also means that those computer-generated characters walk like the characters in Shrek. Shouldn’t they walk like, well, real people? Because they ARE real people? Again, I will assume that I thought this simply because of the lousy TV. Although I doubt it.

There are some cool scenes in the film, and it is fairly easy to make some decent entertainment out of the story. Not, of course, by following the original classic story line, but simply by pitting a mythic hero, Beowulf, against an indestructible monster, Grendel. After that, I guess people assume they can just do whatever they like. Much like 300, this involves a lot of yelling and flexing. The giant Grendel shows up first, and rips people apart in a Dansih banquet hall. As far as monsters go, he is more reminiscent of The Elephant Man or that kid in Mask than he is of any truly frightening creature. We watch him slink back to his lair to be comforted by his mother after his rampages, and I guess we’re supposed to feel some kind of sympathy for him? I guess. Then Beowulf shows up. For about half an hour after his arrival, I was expecting the punchline. I mean, this guy couldn’t possibly be for real, or played straight. He kicks open every door, flexes, screams “Beowulf!” at people…he’s like that kid on your high school football team who has permanently screwed up his brain with steroids, and can’t control the volume of his own voice, and the only word he really has command over is his own name. So he yells his own name over and over to get pumped up for that big football game. Then gets ejected for fighting on the first play. Don’t do ‘roids, kids. I’ve actually known this guy. He is now in prison.

Beowulf decides that since Grendel is unarmed and has no armour, that in order to make things fair, he will have to face him completely naked. This leads to an incredibly comical series of camera shots that cover up his wang with various objects, a la Austin Powers. I really don’t think it is meant to be funny. I think it is meant to suggest that Beowulf is hung like a telephone pole. The objects obscuring his junk are a sword, a spear, a mace…anything mean-looking and long. God, I hope it was done for comedic effect. Otherwise, it was the dumbest thing in the whole movie. So the woman looks at his wang and almost faints, he lies down naked among his men while they drink and carouse, and he waits for the monster. Then defeats Grendel, rather easily, while still being naked and still having those crotch-obscuring shots. Which makes the fight rather implausible. Grendel could possibly have won the fight had he not spent so much time putting his arms and legs in the right places so we can’t see Ray Winstone’s computer-generated penis. Poor Grendel. And I’m still waiting for the punchline.

Then we have naked Angelina Jolie. Only, she’s a cartoon. A very obvious cartoon. And there are no nipples or any kind of definition whatsoever, because that allowed Beowulf to keep it’s PG-13 rating. You see, in movies such as this one, all kinds of blood and gore are OK, because it is basically a cartoon. (In Kill Bill, Tarantino changed some scenes to black-and-white, and others to anime cartoons, so that the film would still be R-rated and not NC-17.) So you can show Grendel ripping guys in half, drinking their blood, chewing off their heads, and it is still PG-13. However, if you put nipples into the mix, this film would have been slapped with an R. So Angelina Jolie looks like the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Well, in it’s metal form, not it’s Robert Patrick form. Completely smooth, with no features at all, except for her face, which is a cartoon, and therefore not nearly as hot as she ought to be. And that’s the scene everyone seemed to be raving about.

There are many scenes that made me laugh out loud because they really did look like a set-up to a punchline. Ray Winstone’s Beowulf is a character begging to be mocked, yelling his own name at anyone who will listen, bragging about himself at every turn - this is the guy who, in any other movie, would be exposed for the fraud he is, and would receive his comeuppance. But in this movie, it just means he’s that much more heroic. If this was all it took to be a hero, Terrell Owens would be Superman. TERRELL! And while his performance is consistently laughable, so too is the monster Grendel. He rips a body in half, and then he cries, he drinks some blood and then covers his ears because the shrieks drive him nuts…apparently he was “played” in the film by Crispin Glover, but he’s just a giant computer-generated freak, and as such could have been “played” by me, my grandmother, a six-year-old, or Terrell Owens. And during the final, climactic battle scene, there is a dragon incinerating the world. It gets to the Danish castle where Beowulf’s wife and young concubine are hiding, for some reason, on a bridge. When the dragon appears, it pops it’s head up over the bridge in the same manner one would use to attempt to scare one’s younger sister by thrusting a sock puppet up from behind the couch upon which she’s asleep. Boo! It then tilts it’s head comically for some reason, before burning up the place with it’s fire-breath.

And John Malkovich is there too, apparently to provide some kind of human face to evil. He is set up, through the whole movie, as the dastardly back-room dealer who will usurp the king and take power himself through some kind of unscrupulous deed. But then he and Beowulf have a very laughable confrontation, he admits Beowulf’s superiority, and they bond. But we’re still given the feeling that this show of good faith is insidious and devious on Malkovich’s part, that he doesn’t mean a word of it. And then…he just keeps showing up through the movie, and nothing happens. He still looks and talks evil, and in this cartoon world of characters that must obviously mean he IS evil…but he stops doing stuff. Maybe his talk with Beowulf convinced him? Or maybe the film crew forgot he was evil. My money is on the latter. Based on what I saw, Beowulf gets 3 stars out of ten. but I’m giving it an extra two assuming that it would be far more visually brilliant were I to have my good TV back. If I could truly believe that the intention of Robert Zemeckis and his people was to make us laugh, that the intent of the movie was satirical, it would get 7 stars. Which means it’s campy enough for the bad-movie fans out there to really enjoy it.