Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Ebbing, Easier Screwed

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
2017 USA/UK Directed by Martin McDonagh
UK cinema release print.

You know, I nearly didn’t bother with this movie.

I'd read on Twitter from a few people that the film was completely devoid of emotion and also, on the IMDB, that it was not much better than a TV movie. Well... I should have probably already remembered to not let the conclusions of people on Twitter, bad or good, be a factor in deciding whether I should go see a film or not... and in the case of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri... well it’s a good reminder to always take what you read on the internet with a modicum of salt.

As it happens, this is one of those damn near perfect films that come along every once in a while. Consequently, this may be a somewhat short review because I don’t really have too much to say about it but let me press on for a minute or two here.

So the film’s inclusions in this years Oscar nominations were mostly another nail in the coffin for me because a film’s acceptance for a potential industry award is so often completely off the mark in regards to the organisers making value judgements on the year’s cinematic art that it's really not to be taken seriously. As it happens, though, Carter Burwell... who is a composer I feel is a bit hit and miss when it comes to effectively scoring a movie... was nominated for his contribution and so I thought I might as well go an hear what he had to offer. As it happens, though, the score is probably one of the least deserving of Oscar attention that I’ve heard and, if this is in this year’s awards then there’s definitely something wrong with the system here... although, to be fair, the fact that Wonder Woman (reviewed here), Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (reviewed here) and A Ghost Story (reviewed here) didn’t get nominated for at least 15 categories each proves that the whole Oscar thing is a joke... put together by people who just don’t seem to understand or appreciate the art of film. It’s all very strange.

However, for this reason I ended up in the cinema to see this thing and it really is a great little movie.

The film starts off with some fairly strong visuals showing us the three billboards from various angles and master shots to establish them as the defining motif of the film... one which we shall come back to, in terms of the shot content, time and time again. However, this is undercut with this totally rubbish song which started getting on my nerves from the very start and which is joined, at various places in the film, by various other irritating songs that almost managed to kill the scenes they were in... so there’s that.

We then join Frances McDormand’s character, Mildred, as she drives into town past the three billboards of the title, stops the car and then gets the idea to rent them out to poke the police who have kinda given up on solving the recent rape and murder of her daughter. This is what the film is about... the battles she faces keeping the billboards up and using them as a force to keep the police’s mind focused on her unsolved murder. However, this film is not a one trick pony of a movie, it turns out.

It’s a particular work of art which is populated by a very strong cast. Joining the always brilliant McDormand we have Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, the underused, chameleon-like Caleb Landry Jones, Abbie Cornish and Peter Dinklage. They’re all fine actors and all brilliantly supported by a cast of character actors who are all as fine as they are. Despite comments I’ve seen, you would think that these performers, between them, could conjure up the necessary emotion and you’d not be wrong. It’s true, McDormand plays the character of the mother as a somewhat tough and muffled person but... she’s certainly not lacking in emotion and her turn here packs one hell of a wallop, I can tell you that.

I think what impressed me most about the film is that it’s not populated by black and white characters. The writing of the characters... and I’m not necessarily talking about the wonderful dialogue here but the way they are structured... is all very much portraying them in shades of grey. For example, one might say that there are two characters on the police force who could be seen as villains but, as you get to know them, you realise that its not that simple and they more than redeem themselves at certain points in the film, completely changing your perceptions of them. And it’s a similar situation with Mildred’s character... even though you are rooting for her the whole time, you can’t always say that she follows a good and righteous path to her ultimate destination and, by the end of the movie, you may not even be sure what that destination is supposed to be anymore. It’s phenomenal writing and that’s why you need these strong performers to handle the different shades of right and wrong which are inside every character.

The performances also help with the dialogue too. The comedy in this film is brilliant and, though it is a bit of a ‘movie review’ cliché to say this, there are scenes in this movie which will have you laughing your head off one minute and then stone cold sober the next. Such as a moment between a mother, an abusive ex-husband and their son turning from everyone being two seconds away from serious bodily harm to being tempered and turning back into comedy again with the stupidity of the ex-husband’s 19 year old girl friend accidentally diffusing the situation. This stuff requires a deft touch by everyone, I would guess (including the editor) and that’s exactly the kind of perfect attention to getting things exactly right that this film seems to possess in spades. You really don’t know how the characters are going to behave here and some of the drama, especially in a scene where Sam Rockwell’s character is on a phone while holding a shotgun, comes from the various characters never really knowing what is going through each other’s heads. It’s a big strength of the script and the way in which it’s shot. It also means the occasional, visceral violence that punctuates the story is entirely unexpected until various incidents happen. Which is a good thing.

Another thing that struck me was that the director sometimes opts to use shots that are very high in contrast... in that you’ll have a lot of dark and light in a shot. He’s not afraid to turn the lights off and use an outside source to pitch against the darkness, for example. Like when Mildred is reading a letter that Sheriff Willoughby ( played by Woody Harrelson) has left her and she is in a completely dark interior but the windows (she is nicely framed in one for this shot) are a contrasting light source which pitches her into silhouette.

Similarly, there is a scene later where one of the characters is reading a different letter from Willoughby, in a darkened room where he is not supposed to be, having let himself in at night. Because his back is to the windows, he doesn’t realise the building has been set ablaze by molotov cocktails until he is blown forwards by the last of five bottles. But while we watched him reading the letter, the light from the fire outside those windows is what gives the shot this similarly strong contrast and I couldn’t help but wonder if the director had used this kind of composition with strong areas of light and shade to provide a counterpoint to the complicated greyness of the characters. Probably not but it would be a nice thought if this probably serendipitous to and fro between the intricacies of the character’s internal, psychological make-up and the bold, simplicity of the shot design was a conscious decision.

Carter Burwell’s score is... serviceable when it’s not being undermined by needle-dropped songs on the soundtrack. It’s similar in melody to the terrific score he did for Carol (reviewed here) although it doesn’t... ahem... ‘homage’ Philip Glass in its constitution like that score did. Certainly, there were a lot more scores worthy of Oscar attention this year although, ironically, not many (if any) made it into the 2018 nominations list, it would seem.

And that’s me just about done on this movie. The film ends with something which, almost, leads onto a sequel but you know there’s no way you’d actually want to witness the possibilities implied as to what comes next. It is, however, a good ending and that’s another big win for the director here, as far as I’m concerned (I’ve not seen any of his other films so I’ve got no idea what he’s normally like). Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a phenomenal motion picture and I’m really glad I had the opportunity to still be able to catch it at a cinema. Definitely recommended for lovers of the art of film-making, for sure.

Geostorm

Disaster Piece

Geostorm
2017 USA Directed by Dean Devlin
UK cinema release print.
Warning: What the heck... there are some partial spoilers in here.

Wow. Geostorm really is a load of old bobbins.

And I don’t mean bobbins you can re-watch every now and again because it has a certain, good natured quality to it and has a script that revels in it’s bobbinsy nature, winking slyly at the audience in a knowing way. This is the kind of, admittedly slightly entertaining but ultimately not all that interesting variety of bobbins infested movie-making which really isn’t going to stand the test of time and will forever be relegated to that time slot on Boxing Day TV, when everyone is too tired and attempting to digest the festive mixture of Turkey and Christmas Pudding in their gut to be too concerned with anything more taxing than this kind of thing on in the background. This, to me, seems to be Geostorm’s natural place in the world.

The movie features a cast who are all more than up to the meagre challenge this movie provides... okay, so some of the ‘floating around in space - let’s try to copy some of those Gravity moments’ stuff must have been challenging for the actors, to be fair. However, although they all take their roles very seriously and turn in some pretty believable performances... well, they absolutely have to be believable performances with a story and script like this. Geostorm is certainly ambitious, for sure, in a disaster created by ‘a bad guy’ scenario set in Earth’s near future kind of way... but it doesn't really live up to the execution of that ambition in any really enjoyable way.

The plot to Geostorm goes something like this...

In 2019, the Earth is/was ravaged by global storms that left us defenceless against an ever increasing planet that is trying to survive the fallout from global warning etc. Luckily, Jake, played by the always reliable Gerard Butler, has invented a costly weather neutralising system controlled by the International Space Station, effectively throwing a physical net around the earth with numerous ‘weird science’ ballistics that keep our weather calm and as it should be. However, three years after being fired by his little brother Max, the other leading action hero style male protagonist of the movie played by Jim Sturgess, Jake is recruited to go back into space and ‘fix’ the whole satellite net system, a project called Dutch Boy, due to some random weather disasters happening in various countries. However, it soon comes to light that this is not a small series of random cataclysmic malfunctions at all but a bid for global domination (if you take things to their logical conclusion) by the main villain of the piece, who you will spot at least an hour before the reveal, unless you’re somehow ambivalent to the less than subtle intricacies of Hollywood typecasting syndrome.

So it’s Jake in space kicking butt while Max and his secret service agent girlfriend are trying to stay alive on Earth, even though they have to kidnap the president of the United States to get authorisation for Jake to be able to flush a virus out of the system on Dutch Boy. And that’s your basic set up and... it’s all fairly breakneck in its pacing but terribly, terribly clichéd and, even with a semi-interesting car chase through an intensified lightning storm sequence, the movie never gets really great or, even, very good, truth be told. Butler and Sturgess are both fine and so are their supporting cast, including nice turns from Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Adepero Oduye, Ed Harris and Andy Garcia. However, this really doesn’t help with the script and although there are some nice effects shots, the eye candy nature of some of these always seems to be tempered with some spectacularly silly moments such as an ‘it’s okay, the dog’s alright after all’ shot which, frankly, the movie could do without, at least not quite as frequently as it does stuff like this here. It even has a long, protracted ‘goodbye’ scene for Butler as he sacrifices himself to save humanity... only for it not to mean anything five minutes later because... oh look, there was a ‘back door’ escape route off the self destructing space station after all. Ugh!

Also, there’s an immense amount of title dropping in this movie to keep reminding the audience, constantly, that there’s a lot at stake. If Geostorm is the new buzzword in the 'made up pseudo-science section' of the script department here then they certainly found a lot of ways to get it into the dialogue in as conspicuous a way as possible. People keep talking about the damned Geostorm all the time, in case we’ve forgotten where the movie is supposed to be heading. It’s not quite as bad as, most of the time, as “We’d better get a move on or that damned Geostorm wil be geostorming down on us before we can geometricise our geostormingly bad science!” Okay, so that’s not really an actual line of dialogue from this film but... it might just as well have been. Oh and, you know, since this movie is called Geostorm, as we’re being constantly reminded, it would have been nice to actually see the Geostorm happening, rather than have it averted at the eleventh hour to leave the audience wondering when they’re going to get to see the actual manifestation of the much repeated title taking place.

Throughout the running time, I never once felt like the writers were treating their target audience as anything other than super dumb and, really, that goes for the science too. I’m no expert in the scientific realm, not even close but, I can’t help but think that if they’d run a disclaimer on the end of the credits saying “No scientists were seriously harmed during the writing of this screenplay.” then the Scientist Humane Association would be up in arms. Not that there actually is a Scientist Humane Association but, who knows, after watching this thing then people living in the real world may just want to form one.

Okay so, as you can see, I didn’t get a huge amount out of Geostorm. Even cool composer Lorne Balfe’s score to the movie never really seems to give any real lift to the proceedings, which kinda disappointed me. That being said, I just listened to a few sample tracks from the forthcoming CD and they are actually pretty good away from the movie so I’m guessing the score was just mixed too low and the sound effects were burying it in a lot of places. Grabbing great scores to terrible movies is something of a hobby of mine so I may well put this one on my Christmas list.

And that’s really all I’m going to say on this one. Geostorm has some great talent which appears to be completely wasted in what seems to amount as... well... it’s definitely a kids movie, it seems to me. I can’t imagine actual adults out of their teens are going to take much of a liking to this but, like I said, I bet you’re going to be seeing a lot of this one airing on TV stations during public holidays in a few year’s time. Not something I can recommend, in all honesty and... well, it is a disaster movie, for sure but... not necessarily the kind of disaster the producers were hoping for, methinks.

Solace

Quantum Psychics

Solace

2015 USA

Directed by Afonso Poyart

UK cinema release print.

Well... there was some terrible, underplayed marketing put out for Solace but I was lucky enough to catch a trailer for it at the cinema, quite literally the week before it played. I say lucky because it piqued my interest enough for me to give it a go... which is great  because it’s actually a pretty cool film and I can’t quite comprehend how, or why, most critics - armchair or professional - seem to be giving this movie such a hard time. 

Neither can I understand why the production company has had the finished film languishing in a vault for, apparently, two years while they figure out if its getting some kind of a release or not. Seriously Hollywood types... did you not realise what you’ve got here? This is a smart and visually witty film that more people who are into these kind of dark thrillers should know about. 

Okay... so the set up to this movie is very simple. The often brilliant, always watchable Anthony Hopkins plays John Clancy... a gifted clairvoyant who used to help the FBI out with their cases before his daughter died of cancer and he left his wife, retreating into himself and away from the world at large. His friend in the FBI, Agent Joe Merriweather, played by the equally watchable Jeffrey Dean Morgan manages, with the help of his partner, criminal psychologist Agent Katherine Cowles, played by Abbie Cornish, to persuade Clancy to come out of retirement and help them out with a serial killer who is giving them some trouble. 

Clancy is hard to convince until he sees visions of the two of them in various states of, what he assumes to be, dying, and he jumps on board the case with them, very quickly using his psychic talents to lead them to places they never would have gone to without his help. However, after a little while, it becomes clear to Clancy that the man they are tracking also has the exact same, only much more powerful, talents that he does... and that their killer is leading them along, probably into a trap. 

And with a plot set up like that, you probably wouldn’t believe that, at some point in its development, the powers that be wanted to rewrite the script a little and turn it into a sequel to Se7en... with Brad Pitt’s character metamorphosing into the psychic protagonist, no less. I think that the fact that this idea didn’t go ahead is a pretty much on the money, to be honest. Bringing supernatural elements like unlocked areas of the human brain is probably not a good mix with the gritty, more realistic world view expounded in Fincher’s earlier film. Solace is quite definitely doing its own thing and wouldn’t, I suspect, gel too well with Se7en in its aesthetic make-up. This is not to say that Solace is any less of a good movie, of course.

This film has a lot going for it. You’ve got the combined performances of Hopkins, Morgan and Cornish, for starters, and they all, as you would expect, knock it out of the park. Hopkins, particularly, gives an amazing, matter of fact performance which I really found myself identifying with a lot. It’s not so much emotionless as much as it is ‘damaged’ in terms of his character’s background... and you will find the full extent of the reason for that right at the close of the movie, when the main plot line has thundered towards its fatal end game. We also have Colin Farrell playing the serial killer in this movie and he seems pretty good too. I never really get on all that well with Farrell as an actor, truth be told. Don’t know why... just don’t seem to like his personality much, even though I loved his version of Total Recall a lot more than the original (yeah, I know, but they’re both complete alterations of Philip K. Dick’s original story and I just prefer the latter... sorry). As it happens, although Farrell is obviously the main focus of the investigation of the movie, he really doesn’t come into it until the final third of the film and... since he’s playing a villain anyway... I really had no problem with him in this.

The direction, editing and cinematography in this one is also pretty cool. In fact it’s quite unique in some ways, being a completely strange combination of shooting styles including long held static shots with the occasional slow zoom, frequent use of long and slow swooping camera movements and also, in almost a direct clash to this, there’s also some of that slowly reactive, handheld stuff going on like an observer is just catching something out of the corner of the eye and has to readjust slightly to catch it. What’s more, that last style of shooting seems to be reserved for cutting into some of the slower, close up and intimate scenes and it’s almost like the camera movement is a reaction to the words spoken out of the mouths of the characters... like it’s finding somewhere on a person’s face or body too look. I did, I have to say, find this version of that technique quite refreshingly interesting and, in combination with all the other visual somersaults in the movie, including a fair few 360º camera pans, I found it a quite chaotic but, due to the remarkable sense of editing, quite easy to follow style and I think the crew have done a tremendous job on making this, presumably deliberate, hodge podge of shooting methods blend and work so well together. Seriously interesting stuff.

Now, the film deals with the nature of precognition and all that it implies... which means the audience is going to be on their guard in terms of the end game of the film and it is fairly easy to figure out just how the denouement scene will play out. The director does try and distract a little by giving you all the possible scenarios in the precog moments (not to mention the many, almost surreal, dream trance moments)... an it’s not dissimilar to the science fiction movie Next in that respect. However, as much as I was sure I knew how the last major confrontation scene would play out in this movie... and it turns out I did... what did impress me was that this isn’t the ultimate twist in the film and the end prologue/coda to the Anthony Hopkins character, which I really wasn’t expecting until it happened, is a really nice touch and explains a lot about why Hopkins’ character responds now to the world in the way in which he does. Now, I was completely kicking myself for not even twigging this little character detail as, really, it something that probably is a really obvious thing in hindsight... but somehow it took me by surprise and my only excuse for that is that Afonso Poyart managed to distract me so much with the ‘leading you on’ nature of the main plot that I failed to see what, personally, I feel is an all important part of the puzzle of the film. So he really impressed me with this.

The music for the film, by somebody called BT, is all over the place and possibly that’s meant as a reflection of the shooting style... but I have to say, I really enjoyed it a lot and it’s a crime against filmanity that the score of this film hasn’t gotten any kind of release from the studio. C’mon people, this stuff needs to be out there! BT has ample time to shine because the director does seem to have a penchant for going off into those musically charged montages that are a firm staple of American movie making these days. Almost at the drop of a hat, I would say and it’s my one criticism of the film that I think the director could maybe have just cut down a little on using this kind of cinematic shorthand a bit. Saying that, I didn’t find it too distracting and it’s probably one of the better put together movies I’ve seen this year... might even make my 2015 Top 20, I reckon.

So yeah. Great little movie. Solace is quite violent and unflinching as it shows you the uglier side of the life that the main characters have to negotiate on a daily basis and the world and its population are portrayed fairly frankly by the director. If you are more into hearts and flowers, topped off with an uplifting ending for your cinema fix, then you might find this movie a little outside of your tastes. If, however, you enjoy a good thriller then I think you’ll find that if you seek Solace at you local cinema then it will be just your cup o’ tea... or at least a quantum of it.