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.

Pixels

8 Bits &  Pieces

Pixels
2015 USA/China/Canada
Directed by Chris Columbus
UK cinema release print.

Blimey. You know, I never expected to be extolling the virtues of an Adam Sandler movie on here, let alone find myself sitting through one but actually... this one surprised the hell out of me. Now, the reason for my shock comes from the fact that I’ve really never even seen an Adam Sandler movie before this one. I’m not the biggest fan of out and out comedy (just give me The Marx Brothers or Woody Allen and I’ll stick to those) and whenever I’ve seen a movie trailered for a film starring Sandler, I’ve basically just never been interested. Not his fault... they just don’t look good the way they are marketed.

The trailer for this one was a lot different, though. For starters, Sandler seemed to be headlining more of an ensemble piece here (which you’ll find is true... once you see the full movie) but, way beyond that, the one thing which caused me to be curious about this was... it had a load of the games I used to play when I was a kid in it. Technology has moved too fast in recent years but let me take you back to my childhood for a few paragraphs...

I was born in 1968 and, about 4 years later, amusement arcades were hit with the first proper electronic video game... and it wasn’t more than a year or two before this was also sold as a plug in unit which you could attach to your own television set and play whenever you wanted. Called Pong, it was a pretty simple, black and white game. You basically had two bats made of pixels, plus a ball, and you had to try and hit the ball past your opponent’s bat. Now that might not sound like much to you but, for that point in recent history... it was mind blowing. You actually had something which was really just a picture on your screen which you could actually remotely control with a little twiddly knob on a control unit and with an on-screen bat that would go up and down depending on how you twiddled that knob. Seriously? How was this possible? This was like magic. It blew everyone’s minds I think... not just the kids. We were surely at the very end point of a technological wonderland here... we could never imagine mankind ever progressing past this place in history as far as electronics were concerned.

Then, in 1978, Space Invaders was launched into arcades and bars.

There was a cabinet version and a table version where you could rest your drinks next to the screen while looking down at the table in whatever bar or cafe you happened to be in and, for the expensive price of 10 pence per session, play out your three lives to your heart’s content. And we were all like... What new sorcery is this? How could this be? How could anyone manage to invent something even more mind bending to our laws of physics than Pong. What’s happening to the world?

And then that world just exploded.

By 1982 I had one of Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum machines to play games on and my folks had a Philips G7000 (known in the US as a Magnavox Odyssey², apparently). Everyone was playing video arcade style games, both in the games’ native environment and also in their own homes. We all just couldn’t believe what was happening and it consumed our lives for a while.

And this is what Pixels is all about, in a way. It’s based/inspired on a 2010 short film by director Patrick Jean and I have to say that I haven’t seen that short... yet. However, this longer version is pretty entertaining in that’s it’s a loving homage to the old video arcade games of our past which took over our lives, to a certain extent, way back in the 1980s.

The film starts off in 1982 with the young versions of the film’s four main male protagonists as they compete in the Arcade Video Game championships of the world. Adam Sandler’s character Brenner, along with the young versions of characters played by Kevin James (Cooper) and Josh Gad (Ludlow) are beaten out in the final by Peter Dinklage’s Eddie, as he and Brenner compete in a tie-break game of Donkey Kong. Meanwhile, the video games manufacturers send a time capsule of their arcade games into space as a means of shouting mankind out to other beings... hmmm. Okay.

And then we cut to the modern day and everything about this film which is already on a whimsical level completely crosses over into complete unreality but... that’s okay because it’s a way of the filmmakers setting up a crazy premise without it seeming insulting to the audience’s collective intelligence. For example, Brenner has grown up to be a low paid employee of a corporation called NERD, whose job it is to go to people’s homes and set up their newly purchased technology such as sound systems and computer games etc. Here he meets a military expert called Violet, played by the always brilliant Michelle Monaghan, and this sets up the film’s romantic sub-plot (of course). His mate, Cooper, then calls him on the phone and he goes to see him... in the White House... because Cooper, it turns out, grew up to be the president of the United States.

So I guess the tactic here is that, if you’re going to ask the audience to buy into a plot which is totally insane and incredible to begin with, you might as well prep them for it before hand. If you can accept the fact that Kevin James is playing the President of the USA but still finds time to hang out with his low income buddy from their arcade playing days... well, then anything they ask you to accept after this will seem just a little more credible as a premise to work with, I suspect. And I have to say... it worked for me.

If you don’t already know the plot yet, aliens have found the time capsule sent out in 1982 and see it as a challenge to a battle for the destruction of the planet Earth. So they start attacking us with real life versions of our 1982 video games. Each battle counts as one out of three lives lost for the losing side and, if the losing side is planet Earth... no more planet. We get pixilated for good. So it’s up to the President and his old pals... plus Peter Dinklage’s Eddie, who they pull out from jail where he’s doing hard time for income tax evasion... to save the Earth and battle the aliens in giant, life threatening video games, aided by the light cannons and other inventions rigged up in a hurry by Violet and her robot helper.

Now this all sounds fun but with a movie premise that insane, which gives every adult kid with a part of their heart left in 1980s retro-gaming a little whoop for joy, there’s got to be a down side to a movie like this, right? They’re probably going to screw it up or it’ll be too dull or unwatchable but, I have to say... and I really didn’t expect to be saying this about Pixels, this movie is absolutely as entertaining and fun as its initial set up would want you to believe. I don’t know how the film-makers managed to pull this off with such panache but, bearing in mind it’s a broad comedy, it’s mostly done with a certain amount of taste and, absolutely, with a lot of loving homage to those old arcade classics that made our hearts race as the speeding, heartbeat rhythms of the games caused our fingers and thumbs to punch harder at those big, round buttons.

Now this won’t be a film which will appeal to everybody, I’m sure, but if you remember these games from your youth or you are happy to buy into a premise as silly as the one pitched by the film and then run with it... well then you should have a pretty good time with this one. The pacing is speedy but not so fast that the various characters don’t have time to breathe and the performances in here are all great. The action scenes are easy to follow too... something of a challenge in the Earth bound sections of the final battle sequence to be sure... so the coverage and editing, not to mention the groovy special effects of various 8-bit characters who people my age will know and love, are all first rate and you don’t need to worry about not being able to follow anything in this one.

There are also some amazing cameo appearances here as well such as Max Headroom (voiced by the man himself, Matt Frewer... and it’s the first time Max has actually been computer generated as opposed to a post-make-up manipulated Frewer illusion of the same), Serena Williams, Martha Stewart and Dan Akroyd.  Plus you have some great supporting actors in this too, such as Brian Cox and Sean Bean, who become slight problems to our heroes as they try to save the world. There are also some interesting ‘manipulated cameos' from the likes of Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize (to name just two of the dead celebrities brought back for the film) which also bring a smile to the face as the aliens use old 1980s TV personalities to communicate with the people of Earth.

And of course, there are a whole slew of video game characters turning up in this movie too... such as Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger and the lovable Q*Bert. It has to be said there are also a fair amount of anachronisms for the time these arcade games are supposed to date from too... Paperboy was not as early as 1982, for example, but he makes a prominent appearance in this film’s final battle, along with a few others not quite ‘of their time’ in this movie. However, I guess with such an unreal film that has Kevin James as the President and a... gosh... a female Prime Minister (some of the action is set in London, England)... well I think I’m prepared to overlook a little historical accuracy in this case.

And that’s really all I’m going to say about this one. Pixels is a nice comical movie with some lovely performances, some ‘not too uncomfortable’ comedy moments, some relatively ‘good taste’ decisions (for the most part... I really didn’t need to see Q*Bert wet himself in fear) and, all in all, a great time at the cinema in a loving homage to the video games which made some of us what we are today (as shallow as 8-bit characters, I would guess). I’m not even going to get into a lather that the video games in this film are made up of voxels (which are 3D) and not actually pixels (which are 2D) because I, quite surprisingly, really enjoyed this movie. So if old style retro arcade games are your thing... you really might want to give this one a watch at some point. It’s kinda fun.