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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jit3YhGx5pU Walking Oscar statue Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, an embittered mother fighting to have the truth about her daughter (tortured, raped, burned - you see a brief photo of her toasted marshmallow corpse) dug up by cops she considers complacent, among them Sherrif Willougby (Woody Harrelson) and local dipshit Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell). To provoke them into action, she buys three billboards on the edge of town near her house from the local advertising agent (played by an adorably twinky Caleb Landry Jones) that read: RAPED WHILE DYING STILL NO ARRESTS? HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGBY? What follows is both expected and unexpected. Martin McDonagh, in his typical style, takes familiar story aspects (in clumsier hands the same story could be a weepy Lifetime original) and twists them with brutal, unflinching cruelty to highlight the spaces between people where kindness goes to die. McDormand plays Hayes with such ferocity it's kind of a surprise that she's able to form her rage into words, but she does, and she's got lots of them, and most of them are foul. The surprise is the degree to which that ferocity and unwavering need for revenge (and even martyrdom) is colored by uncertainty - it turns out, for example, that the lack of conclusions isn't because the cops are lazy or stupid, but because there simply weren't any leads, but Hayes pushes on regardless. She, like most people, have an innate desire for closure, and as the town turns against her, it only stokes her indignation. Sometimes it feels good to spit back, but McDonagh doesn't let it become a story of righteous vengeance, which would be too simple and pat. In other words, he doesn't allow Hayes to be the only character with agency, and the best aspect of the film is the way it reflects our current broken political atmosphere. How many Thanksgiving dinners are going to be a mirror image of this film's tensions? My main problem with this film is how drawn out it is. McDonagh insists on inserting endless soft country-music interludes, and I don't feel like he was able to stick the landing in his shifts from bleak, misanthropic social satire to more straightforward rural drama. I think this will function better for some people than others, but I couldn't shake off the feeling of absurdity (there's a scene with a deer that borders on Tennesee Williams parody). If the fusion works for you, then congrats! You've won the movie. Anyways, this is either in wide release or it's rolling out presently, if it turns up you should definitely go see it. McDormand's performance is like watching a haystack burn, and McDonagh's sense of humor is well displayed. Magic Hate Ball fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Nov 18, 2017 |
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Nov 18, 2017 18:35
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Yeah that's a really well-timed cut, it got gasps both times I saw it. I like that the movie sells the ending as this kind of like, "heck yeah!" moment but it's actually just really sad and hosed up.
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Nov 24, 2017 22:12
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Gavok posted:The scene that stays with me the most is the sudden cough bit. There's all this tension and we see Hayes and Willougby inch towards becoming enemies, only for this sudden moment that brings them back to earth. It's both relieving and incredibly sad to watch. That scene didn't work for the audience I was with at all because everyone laughed when it happened.
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Nov 27, 2017 21:53
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:ngl that is a very strange audience reaction Different audiences have different energies.
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Nov 27, 2017 22:15
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:For sure, that's still bizarre though. I saw the movie twice with two very different audiences (a film festival crowd and a general release art house crowd - film festival crowd was way better) and both times that bit got gasps. It’s not bizarre if you have an audience that’s really enjoying the black comedy elements, and it can easily scan as a moment of shocking, dark hilarity. edit LAUGHED AT MOVIE AND STILL NO REMORSE? Magic Hate Ball fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Nov 27, 2017 |
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Nov 27, 2017 22:21
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Film festival audience was super into the black comedy bits. Not sure where you're going with the "you seem to be taking this personally" thing, I'm just observing that laughter is a weird reaction to that scene. If you'd been in the audience I was at, it wouldn't have seemed weird. An audience reaction can create an atmosphere that influences the film - this is why sometimes a play flops one night and sizzles the next. It's not like we were all yukking it up over Schindler's List.
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Nov 27, 2017 22:30
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:It's a less extreme example but it just reminds me of stuff like all the stories of people cracking up at Hateful Eight showings when JJL got punched in the face or people dropped racial slurs on Samuel Jackson. Which is to say, I can see it in a "nervous laughter" type way but not a "now that's funny!" type way. Equating laughing at a dark comedy scene with laughing at a racial slur is really loving weird of you, ngl.
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Nov 27, 2017 22:36
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Okay dude I apologize for calling your audience weird, willing to entertain the possibility that I am also weird Well, it's interesting because I think that's why the film's turns towards more earnest drama fell flat for me, because that key scene in particular failed to act as a signal that the story would be shifting its genres. I'd kinda like to see it again because it might land better with a different audience - the whole second half felt incoherent, and someone behind me said "oh..." in a really puzzled voice when the credits came up. I do earnestly think that this film needed another script pass to trim it down and assemble itself better, particularly in organizing its own allegiances for and against its characters. McDonagh cripples himself by playing so fast and loose with an ensemble cast, which makes the turns of character that could be dramatic feel simply like comical flip-flops and muddles the ending. Or at least it did for the audience of psychopaths I saw it with.
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Nov 27, 2017 22:57
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:I can definitely see how it plays different with a different audience. Like I said, the general release audience I saw it with was way less fun than the film festival audience - it was a very art-house crowd and they seemed to be treating it as a Very Serious Movie with some jokes as opposed to the caustic black comedy that it is. I was going to write something less productive but actually I'd really prefer just to hear your interpretation of the last half. How are we meant to take her decision to decide, on the road, whether or not to kill the rapist? Is the soft-hearted drama meant to be funny, or sad? My sense was that McDonagh was aiming to trick the audience by making them think she was on her way to redemption, before pulling the rug out and saying "haha, just kidding, she learned the wrong lesson and now she's a misguided vigilante. I just couldn't tell why we were assaulted with multiple soft-country interludes, if they weren't meant to be parodic.
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Nov 28, 2017 03:24
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:I don't think McDonagh is trying to trick the audience at all. I do think that he is pointedly denying the audience the catharsis they want or expect not just from the mystery, which isn't solved, but from the revenge, which not only do we not get to see and take part in, we don't even know if it occurs at all - clearly neither Dixon or Mildred really have their hearts in it at the end, and it seems equally likely they'll turn around and call it off as go out in a Rolling Thunder style blaze of glory. If I had to pin it down to one thesis or statement (which I don't really wanna do, because I like the ambiguity of it), it's that if someone is dealing with a loss so great, you really can't say for them what's the right way or the wrong way to deal with it I mean, again, I think this is just a case where something about the movie failed to function for me. Part of it is that I'm just kinda sick of movies where the ending is "man, life doesn't have endings", but also I just wish it had done a better job of elucidating and elaborating on its own thesis. In McDonagh's desperation to shock the audience with reversals and twists, he loses cohesiveness - and it's not like McDonagh can't write a cohesive story with a strong centerpoint, Beauty Queen and Pillowman both cut with a precision that makes their impact greater. McDonagh either made a choice to be ambiguous or accidentally made an ambiguous film, and I think the former is a bad decision and I bemoan the latter. It fluctuates awkwardly and I found that to be offputting (even though, and I guess this probably worth re-stating, overall I loved this movie and can't wait to slap it in my 2017 top five list), particularly because the Coen brothers have made a career of tonal ambiguity, so there's something murderously concrete to compare it to.
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Nov 28, 2017 06:06
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:The implication is that he raped, tortured and murdered someone in Iraq or Afghanistan and the military covered it up (or, like a lot of crimes during wartime, it went uninvestigated) I'd loving love a McDonagh movie about Lynndie England.
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Dec 3, 2017 15:47
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Those were such disparate moments that I didn't even connect them as being the same person.
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Dec 3, 2017 20:22
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I mean, the point of the film is that there's no current appropriate cultural response to overwhelming grief, trauma, and personal conflict, and that both sides of the equation (e.g. Tracy Martin and George Zimmerman) are equally redeemable, but it's more likely that they will simply be driven into a useless and counterproductive bloodthirst by our double-pronged social attitude of selfish forgetfulness and spiteful failure of forgiveness.
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Dec 4, 2017 01:26
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Escobarbarian posted:Also the controversy around Dixon as a character is unbelievably dumb, especially the claims of “redemption”. I mean, it is a redemption, in that the film details how his violent racist leanings are just a reflection of the social ills surrounding him and that, like most people, he merely has a misguided notion of taking back what he believes to be his, which is mirrored in Mildred's insane and harmful quest for closure and revenge over the death of her daughter. The broadest message of the film is that we should be able to let go of the past, hold hands, and be nice to each other, rather than holding grudges and expecting reparations. This is partially illustrated by the humanization of the guy who tortures black people in custody, because McDonagh is also a misanthropist, providing much of the comedy and irony.
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Jan 14, 2018 17:59
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Nothing I said conflicts with what you're saying, and I said nothing of forgiveness, merely that the film suggests reparations aren't necessarily due and struggling to attain them frequently causes more grief than satisfaction, so people who have been harmed should, as the characters in the movie struggle to do, accept their place in the murky waters of fate and move on with their lives rather than blame others and expect some kind of refund.
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Jan 15, 2018 01:55
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It's not that deep, the basic stances the film takes are: -The quest for reparations is misguided -Don't get in too much of a tizzy over violence you can't control -Racists and their victims are both subjects of the system My biggest issue with the film is just that the actual script is so messy, I wish McDonagh had stuck a little more to his stage roots and let the momentum build in longer scenes. All the best moments come at the end of a good bout of one-scene development, but the overall structure of day-calendar-ripping sequencing trips it up.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:06
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Franchescanado posted:Can you elaborate on this? Cuz I don't really ever remember the film putting Dixon on the same level as his victims or condoning him as a symptom of the system. It’s pretty explicit depiction of the “convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man” quote.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:52
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Guy Mann posted:I want to see the movie that the monologue about how priests are just like the Crips and the Bloods would actually fit in, because that was the biggest offender in terms of feeling like the leftover from a much more heightened and Tarantinoesque draft. It felt like a scene from a Father Ted episode written during a high fever.
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Jan 23, 2018 20:29
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Mover posted:I felt the crips and bloods/culpability speech was less about the church and more about how Mildred doesn’t feel this way about priests specifically but all of humanity: there isn’t anyone alive who isn’t culpable in the death of her daughter. That's exactly what it was, it just stands out because it's the most Irish-sounding dialogue possible - Mildred barely stops short of calling God an "auld oval office".
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Jan 23, 2018 20:41
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Franchescanado posted:From GenChat For this movie it's a redemption - there are loads and loads of people who never approach that level of self-awareness and desire to change. If you approach redemption as some kind of epic biblical saved-eternal concept, then no, he does not experience redemption, but within the limitations of the film's narrative he absolutely does. Uncle Boogeyman posted:from genchat: "I hope you get raped" was one of the more believable moments, honestly
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Jan 23, 2018 23:41
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There's a lot of "agree to disagree" happening around this movie.
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Jan 23, 2018 23:55
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:this is a tautology. it counts as a redemption for this film for no other reason than because you say so. It’s a fairly literal arc of redemption - he undergoes a change of values that saves him from a life of sin.
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Jan 24, 2018 01:43
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:the second part seems pretty up in the air Sure, but that's where the earnest drama and dark humor meet (which, for me, doesn't work) - she's got steely perseverance and he's learning lessons about empathy, but they're both pushing all their energy in a terrible, ugly direction, which wavers at the end.
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Jan 24, 2018 02:01
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Guy Mann posted:The amount of backlash surrounding this movie that most people never even heard of until the Hot Takes started circulating on the internet a week ago is absolutely insane. It's really entertaining.
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Jan 24, 2018 02:46
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Escobarbarian posted:But other than that I still think the whole backlash is absolutely insane and anyone who uses the word “redemption” wrt Dixon is a complete dipshit 
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Jan 25, 2018 03:47
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resurgam40 posted:Does he? I dunno, especially in regard to the note the movie ended on. A character can be both redeemed and misguided - Mildred is a chaotic flywheel of insane spite and he's suckered in by her desperate, unhealthy need for revenge (the broad point, again, being that people need to let the past be and not punish others for something they had no control over), but he does start as an overtly racist cop (he literally tortures black people) and, triggered by Willoughby's letter pleading him to "give up hate" as well as the scene where Red turns the other cheek and feeds him orange juice, vows to do right. It's an arc of redemption that would make Victor Hugo blush - that it unfortunately carries over into brutish eye-for-eye bloodthirst is the complication that comes with his association with Mildred (a theme that runs through the movie - actions and pride frustrate each other) and even at the end they both seem to be wavering.
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Jan 26, 2018 03:50
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She's essentially a violent lunatic who can't let go, which allegories nicely with a lot of people in real life who want others to unjustly atone out of a selfish desire for reparation.
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Mar 5, 2018 21:43
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McDonagh is pretty specifically a writer of grotesque black comedy so the weirder elements of Three Billboards are the parts that (apparently?) try to be genuine drama, like the goofy deer scene, which is part of why it scanned as parody to me - it felt like something out of Father Ted.
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Mar 8, 2018 20:29
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got any sevens posted:The deer scene is mildred not having to put on a tough face for other people, she lets her guard down and actually says what she feels Yes that is the content of the scene.
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Mar 11, 2018 05:34
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There are other movie boards?
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Mar 29, 2018 07:14
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