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Today I saw Boondock Saints
Okay, just to get it out of the way: RON JEREMY. KILLED IN A PEEP SHOW BOOTH. LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
I know everybody loves Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flannery, and I liked (and drooled over) them a lot but this film belongs to Willem Dafoe's tough, gay, classical music-loving, totally unhinged cop. He's amazing in his trajectory from in-control to crazy and then realising what he's done at the final conflict. He's also a fully realised character, which is something the brothers lack. They make up a character together, but they aren't characters - they're conduits for the message of the film. The early scenes make a good attempt at giving them some sort of personal traits, particularly the terrific scene in the room with the guns, but it's hard to tell where they've come from or how they go from being the son of The Duke to the neighbourhood saints who get into barfights and kill in self-defence to being the vigilante heroes they become. They're adorable and I can't fault the actors (though I can fault Norman's constantly slipping accent - sorry Reedus fans), but even Rocco is more rounded than they are. Hell, Ron freaking Jeremy is almost more rounded than they are, and not in a literal sense. Also, Billy Connelly was underused terribly. The man is a god. You get him for your film, you use him.
A lot of it was funny, and the scene where Dafoe inserts himself into the suburban murders is a set piece to die for.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of the film, but it's been compared to Tarantino more than I'm comfortable with. Please. This is NOT Tarantino. This film has nowhere near Tarantino's amount of style or wit, and it lacks his narrative genius. It's like Tarantino-lite, but with more sexy Irishmen and a plot that has some grounding in the world we actually live in. This is probably the part that bothers me about it, actually, rather than making me like it more. Tarantino's universe is parallel to ours but separate from us somehow, a shiny, glossy, cool, violent world where everyone speaks in witticisms and pop culture references. This film was firmly grounded in mobs and cities and suburbs and cops. No matter how outlandish the characters are, they exist in places we recognise, which makes their vigilantism that little bit more unsettling. The implication of the film is that they are every bit the heroes that the director's painted them as, the final interviews just a passing nod to differing opinions but ending on the idea that they're right.
5 out of 10. Sorry, guys.
And tonight I saw Kissing Jessica Stein
I liked this a lot more. It has a sort of shaky start but the two girls have lovely chemistry and it's full of lovely human moments. Jessica is a frustrating protagonist but she didn't manage to piss me off totally, which is a credit to the acting and writing. She is the kind of character that could have driven me nuts, but she manages to walk the thin line between totally unrelatable and neurotic but open nicely. The sequence in which she overanalyses every sexual move the two of them make is hilarious and filled with humanity.
The cast was very good. Jessica's mother is appropriately scene-stealing, I completely loved her pregnant friend, and the different worlds are nicely played without being played up too much. It's all very indie-sensibility, but it moves along nicely.
SPOILERS
I am very happy with the ending, which is happy and hopeful but still realistic. However, I saw this with my mother, and for people like her it pretty much just confirms their pre-formed ideas about being gay, which frustrated me through no fault of the movie's. See, my mother isn't so much homophobic as...thinking they exist in this separate world, I suppose. She kept saying how she knew they were always going to end up just being friends because 'Jessica wasn't gay in the first place and the other girl already, you know, liked both' but I know it's more because she sees Jessica as one of us who's experimenting, but will come back to the normal, heterosexual lifestyle in the end. With Helen, she's automatically more experimental because she's in that parallel world of art and flamboyance and all thay weird stuff that normal people don't do. The whole point of the movie, to me, was challenging that kind of thinking. It was basically saying that those guys have a point, and maybe if the workaholics and neurotic right-brainers of the world would take a leaf out of the artsy left-brainer book, they'd be a lot better off.
The film exists mostly in that art world, though, being an indie film, which means that it's sort of limited in its ability to really get that message across. Jessica is, for all intents and purposes, just a frustrated artist who needs that contact with the free-thinking art world to liberate herself from the constraints of the conservative world she comes from. Also, the amount of shock that exists in a bunch of journalists when one of them turns out slightly gay was kind of unbelievable, no matter how supportive they all are 5 minutes after finding out. It turns out the most homophobic person in Jessica's life is Jessica. The filmmaker seems to lack a grasp of what being conservative and right-brained is really all about, making the only accountant in the film a kind of desperate penny-counter, which doesn't quite work with what she's trying to say. That whole desperate dating thing is getting old for me.
Wow, I seem to be stuck in overly critical mode tonight.
8 out of 10.
Don't know why they bothered to photograph them separately, but look how happy!
Guh.
Hee, yay! So cute.
Oh right, there are stars of this movie:
Look at Jack Davenport! SO cute.
The light in this one is great.
I don't know why but I really like this one.
The little half-smile is so lovely.
A penny saved is worth two in the bush
Green Queen
Okay, just to get it out of the way: RON JEREMY. KILLED IN A PEEP SHOW BOOTH. LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
I know everybody loves Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flannery, and I liked (and drooled over) them a lot but this film belongs to Willem Dafoe's tough, gay, classical music-loving, totally unhinged cop. He's amazing in his trajectory from in-control to crazy and then realising what he's done at the final conflict. He's also a fully realised character, which is something the brothers lack. They make up a character together, but they aren't characters - they're conduits for the message of the film. The early scenes make a good attempt at giving them some sort of personal traits, particularly the terrific scene in the room with the guns, but it's hard to tell where they've come from or how they go from being the son of The Duke to the neighbourhood saints who get into barfights and kill in self-defence to being the vigilante heroes they become. They're adorable and I can't fault the actors (though I can fault Norman's constantly slipping accent - sorry Reedus fans), but even Rocco is more rounded than they are. Hell, Ron freaking Jeremy is almost more rounded than they are, and not in a literal sense. Also, Billy Connelly was underused terribly. The man is a god. You get him for your film, you use him.
A lot of it was funny, and the scene where Dafoe inserts himself into the suburban murders is a set piece to die for.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of the film, but it's been compared to Tarantino more than I'm comfortable with. Please. This is NOT Tarantino. This film has nowhere near Tarantino's amount of style or wit, and it lacks his narrative genius. It's like Tarantino-lite, but with more sexy Irishmen and a plot that has some grounding in the world we actually live in. This is probably the part that bothers me about it, actually, rather than making me like it more. Tarantino's universe is parallel to ours but separate from us somehow, a shiny, glossy, cool, violent world where everyone speaks in witticisms and pop culture references. This film was firmly grounded in mobs and cities and suburbs and cops. No matter how outlandish the characters are, they exist in places we recognise, which makes their vigilantism that little bit more unsettling. The implication of the film is that they are every bit the heroes that the director's painted them as, the final interviews just a passing nod to differing opinions but ending on the idea that they're right.
5 out of 10. Sorry, guys.
And tonight I saw Kissing Jessica Stein
I liked this a lot more. It has a sort of shaky start but the two girls have lovely chemistry and it's full of lovely human moments. Jessica is a frustrating protagonist but she didn't manage to piss me off totally, which is a credit to the acting and writing. She is the kind of character that could have driven me nuts, but she manages to walk the thin line between totally unrelatable and neurotic but open nicely. The sequence in which she overanalyses every sexual move the two of them make is hilarious and filled with humanity.
The cast was very good. Jessica's mother is appropriately scene-stealing, I completely loved her pregnant friend, and the different worlds are nicely played without being played up too much. It's all very indie-sensibility, but it moves along nicely.
SPOILERS
I am very happy with the ending, which is happy and hopeful but still realistic. However, I saw this with my mother, and for people like her it pretty much just confirms their pre-formed ideas about being gay, which frustrated me through no fault of the movie's. See, my mother isn't so much homophobic as...thinking they exist in this separate world, I suppose. She kept saying how she knew they were always going to end up just being friends because 'Jessica wasn't gay in the first place and the other girl already, you know, liked both' but I know it's more because she sees Jessica as one of us who's experimenting, but will come back to the normal, heterosexual lifestyle in the end. With Helen, she's automatically more experimental because she's in that parallel world of art and flamboyance and all thay weird stuff that normal people don't do. The whole point of the movie, to me, was challenging that kind of thinking. It was basically saying that those guys have a point, and maybe if the workaholics and neurotic right-brainers of the world would take a leaf out of the artsy left-brainer book, they'd be a lot better off.
The film exists mostly in that art world, though, being an indie film, which means that it's sort of limited in its ability to really get that message across. Jessica is, for all intents and purposes, just a frustrated artist who needs that contact with the free-thinking art world to liberate herself from the constraints of the conservative world she comes from. Also, the amount of shock that exists in a bunch of journalists when one of them turns out slightly gay was kind of unbelievable, no matter how supportive they all are 5 minutes after finding out. It turns out the most homophobic person in Jessica's life is Jessica. The filmmaker seems to lack a grasp of what being conservative and right-brained is really all about, making the only accountant in the film a kind of desperate penny-counter, which doesn't quite work with what she's trying to say. That whole desperate dating thing is getting old for me.
Wow, I seem to be stuck in overly critical mode tonight.
8 out of 10.
Don't know why they bothered to photograph them separately, but look how happy!
Guh.
Hee, yay! So cute.
Oh right, there are stars of this movie:
Look at Jack Davenport! SO cute.
The light in this one is great.
I don't know why but I really like this one.
The little half-smile is so lovely.
A penny saved is worth two in the bush
Green Queen
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And Orlando clearly straightened his hair which is cute. He must have been CRAZY hot though in that suit. It was, like, 32 degrees :P
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Your wife looks extra pretty in those pics... LOVE the earrings.
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The thing that pissed me off first was that Sean Patrick Flannery's name was mispelled in the opening credits, which to me says "this movie is shit - we can't even be bothered spelling the actors' names right". And I just felt that this kinda story has been told numerous times before, and much better told as well. ... but I didn't see all of it so I'll probably have to suffer through it again if I want to judge it properly.