Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005)

I've been meaning to write a defense of the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (one of my favorite movies of the Aughts), for some time now, so I knew what to choose for my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture. The theatrical cut is an admittedly mediocre movie, stressing Gladiator-esque action in an attempt to cash in on Lord of the Rings. The director's cut, however, belongs with films like Munich and Gangs of New York as some of the finest American filmmaking to seriously address the War on Terror and the modern context of endless infighting, wrongheaded wars and relativist righteousness, typically through the prism of the past. All three films (even Gangs, which concerns the American Civil War, not ages-old Middle Eastern conflicts) suggest a cyclical movement of violence from outside forces that creates seemingly endless fighting that eventually tears apart people from the inside. Kingdom of Heaven takes (even) more liberties with history than the other two, but its fundamental position, that peace, however tenuous and short-lived, is preferable to senseless war, is delivered with a nuance I've sadly come not to expect from Scott.

My full piece is up at Spectrum Culture.

Albert Nobbs (Rodrigo Garcia, 2011)

Well, Albert Nobbs could have been worse, I guess. It could have been offensively opinionated about gender identity and made a play for a typical Hollywood lesson about understanding founded upon deep ignorance. Instead, it's just tedious and dramatically inert, with no suspense of Albert being found out and no passion behind his life goals. I can't imagine why Glenn Close should have been so enamored with this story as to have fought for three decades to bring it to the screen, nor how that length of time could have birthed so simplistic and half-formed a screenplay. I've already forgotten practically everything but Janet McTeer, who makes the film almost watchable every second she's on-screen.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Steven Spielberg: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Given that my return to A.I. is what prompted my decision to revisit all of Steven Spielberg's films in the first place, I was afraid I had nothing to add to my original review. However, I think I mostly avoided retreading and if I have no particularly new point to make about the ending, I do at least come at it from a different angle in response to Roger Ebert's recent addition of the film into his Great Movies canon, a move that makes me happy but does not preclude me from disagreeing with his interpretation. I stand by this being Spielberg's finest film, and also one that I think is better for his involvement, not some second-best option to a Kubrick direction (Kubrick likely would have agreed, since he urged Spielberg to take it well before he passed). Perhaps the most philosophical blockbuster ever made, and certainly one of the finest American films of the Aughts.

Check out my new review of the film at Cinelogue.

Green Zone

From an opening sequence set during the initial bombing of Baghdad through a climactic final chase, Green Zone proves up and down that Paul Greengrass is still the director par excellence of shakycam action. Hot on the heels of the critical success of The Hurt Locker, Green Zone will almost certainly find itself judged by comparison to Kathryn Bigelow’s feature, aesthetically, narratively and thematically. It’s unfair, because the two can cleanly co-exist as counterpoints for each other: Green Zone serves as the political answer to The Hurt Locker’s humanism.

Like Bigelow, Greengrass has the ability to give each brief shot just enough duration to give the audience some semblance of spatial relations while jumping around to maintain a sense of disorientation. Gunshots and explosions break and scramble in the heavy digital grain, particularly in the many night shots, spreading so wide that one could almost mistake the atmosphere over Iraq as being made of gunpowder and shrapnel. The sounds and visuals crash together so violently you wonder how anyone could stay sane in this safe version of combat, to say nothing of the real thing.

Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) knows how to keep his head, though. He leads a unit searching for weapons of mass destruction, and we meet him as he and his team fight through a resistant sector to reach a reported chemical weapons facility. After taking casualties, the unit takes a warehouse, where they find nothing, their third straight piece of bad intelligence. When he voices this in a meeting, his superiors assure him that the intel is good, despite nothing but evidence to the contrary.

From that moment, any question whether the film would play its politics close to its chest goes out the window. Green Zone is all about rubbing America’s nose in its mistake, an approach both interesting and wearisome. “Interesting” because America is long overdue for a public shaming for our arrogance and jingoism, and the notion that this should come from the guy who capitalized on flag-waving, tragedy-appropriating attitudes with United 93 makes the prospect all the richer. “Wearisome” because it frames much of its politics as shocking twists, seemingly under the delusion that its secrets are still unknown. Green Zone’s ultimate reveal is that there were no WMD in Iraq, and I imagine that even the spoiler criers feel no need to protest me now.

Some of the script’s bluntness has a Fulleresque, no-bullshit quality to it, made better when delivered by the superb cast. I knew Greg Kinnear would be playing an officious executive before I even learned his character’s name or found out that he represented the Pentagon, but, credit where credit is due, he is just such a magnificent prick. He speaks most of the best lines of the film, and I suspect that they are the best lines precisely because he says them. Kinnear’s Clark Poundstone manages to spin everything and shut down any attempt to endanger the party line. He leads reporters like Wall Street Journal writer Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) on wild goose chases and stymies Miller’s quest to get to the bottom of the bad intelligence reports. Poundstone advises Miller to avoid CIA Baghdad chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson); “He’s been in the Middle East a long time,” Poundstone says, “He’s got a lot of preconceived notions.” For Poundstone and the administration he represents, practical experience and firsthand knowledge are not only unimportant, they can be a liability to furthering a political agenda. Miller gets a chilling line across to Poundstone in the end when he confronts the official about all the lies and asks, “What’s going to happen the next time we need somebody to trust us?” Occasionally, someone makes a less expansive political point that is no less astute, such as the angry reaction of the Iraqi informant, “Freddy” (Khalid Abdalla), at the excavation of a town square in the search for bombs; Freddy curtly tears down the illogic of such an exercise, asking the Americans how the Iraqi army or some insurgents could have buried weapons or chemical agents without the townspeople seeing it.

Sadly, lines like these rub up against chunks of dialogue so obvious and emphasized that they break the often-compelling blend of fact and fiction. Miller finds himself between Brown and Poundstone and remarks, “I thought were were all on the same side” and Brown responds, “Don’t be naïve.” As if this wasn’t clear enough, Poundstone appears in the next scene, denies Miller’s request for transfer under Brown’s command and tells the solider that he “chose the wrong side.” And, frankly, every scene set entirely in the POV of Iraqi Ba’athist officials -- led by General Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), who seeks to make a deal with the Americans to keep the Iraqi army together to help the U.S. maintain order -- with the exception of the cold open only rehashes points made by the American characters. Setting the film entirely in the American perspective may seem a narcissistic gesture, but it would heighten the suspense by maintaining confusion -- when Freddy first comes to tell Miller about the Ba’athist meeting, we know he is telling the truth because we just saw the meeting occur, thus eliminating the suspense of knowing whether the troops would drive into a trap -- and would avoid the repetitive pontificating of the Iraqi generals, most of whom don’t have anything approaching Iraq’s best interests at heart. Freddy, too, oversteps the boundary between endearing and grating when left to give a monologue, preachy and overstuffed affairs that they are. I wanted to roll my eyes during his lengthy speeches, though perhaps that was a result of the camera movement.

This is all the more bewildering given the skill with which Greengrass conveys the film’s politics through those overwhelming images. Colliding shots of crowds swarming Humvees that subtly exaggerate the size and furor of the indignant populace, barren warehouses meant to store WMD that emphasize the failure of intelligence reports through the cavernous emptiness, an American couple casually posing for photographs in front of tanks in the green zone as Baghdad lies in rubble around them; with such suggestive shots, Greengrass doesn’t need to back them up with clunky, polemical dialogue. His visual placement borders on the ingenious with a pair of shots of a detention center where prisoners are kept without stated purpose. On the fence that surrounds the facility, a placard reads that the assigned unit is “honor bound to defend freedom,” a bitterly ironic sight gag that recalls the looming “Peace is Our Profession” billboard that overlooks the air force base in Dr. Strangelove. Inside the makeshift prison, guards hang a Confederate flag, a symbol of the opposite of American patriotism, of hate and spite. Why the director still cannot use a tripod at any time remains a mystery, but his visceral style has few peers, if any. Only shots of crying children and a needless montage of scanning newspaper articles stick out as sore thumbs in Greengrass’ superb visual presentation of the film’s confrontational politics.

Those politics are so fearlessly spoken, however, that I found my more reserved initial reaction to the film has softened. The Hurt Locker had its political messages, yes, but they were so subtly combined into its character drama that discussions of its politics have only just begun in earnest after numerous appraisers mistook it for an apolitical war movie. Though made long before Bigelow’s film hit theaters and garnered its reaction, Green Zone wants to leave no room for misinterpretation. The Iraq War was a mistake, no, it was a premeditated crime that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of Americans, destroyed our national credibility and ruined the world economy.

If Green Zone at times loses track of its otherwise taut structure to air its grievances, that is only because there are too many grievances to list. The film wisely implicates journalists for their complicity in the war, for being so enthused about receiving information from the government that would drive up readership that they never bothered to vet the intelligence. That’s right, the so-called liberal mainstream media are as responsible as the politicians who capitalized on panic, and Greengrass drives home the point when Freddy appears at the end of a climactic confrontation to throw a curveball before flatly telling Miller, the liberal do-good soldier who wants to expose the truth in order to help Iraq, “It is not up to you to determine what happens in this country.” Is it any wonder, then, that the most outrageous and sickening moment of the film is the airing of George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech?

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

Fans of Alex Garland's cult novel The Beach must have scratched their heads when Danny Boyle's adaptation essentially cut out the horrific last act when the beach community goes mad. Garland must have been confused as well, for he supplied the director with a script containing nothing but rage-filled, zombiesque creatures.

Now before I lose some people, let me address the zombie aspect of the film. I'm no horror expert, but the original George A. Romero Dead trilogy (why oh why couldn't he leave well enough alone?) and Max Brooks' recent, spellbinding novels The Zombie Survival Guide and the schlock masterpiece World War Z remain some of my favorite entries of either medium. I know the rules well: the zombie disease -- be it a virus, radiation, or some mystic curse -- spreads through blood and saliva. Those infected stand no hope of recovery. To kill a zombie, you must destroy the brain; decapitation will stop the body, but the head can still bite. Once a human has turned, he or she will never emit an emotional response, will never somehow remember a relative who begs for life by attempting to reach the loved one they once knew. Most importantly, zombies don't run.

28 Days Later follows several of these guidelines loosely, but it loses people in the running. I, for one, had no problem with it; what Garland and Boyle have created is a revisionist zombie flick, a Romero film for the post-9/11 era. Obviously, Romero eventually made his own "Romero films for the post-9/11 era," but Boyle's hyper-kinetic, gripping thriller vastly outstrips either of Romero's entries into his trademark franchise this decade.

Furthermore, not even Romero sticks to the "proper" formula: the zombies in Night of the Living Dead can run, and we all remember the humanized zombie Bub from Day of the Dead (as well as "Big Daddy" in Land). John A. Russo, co-writer of Night, eventually teamed up with Dark Star and Alien scribe Dan O'Bannon to create a more lightweight zombie franchise which broke damn near all the rules. Dismissing 28 Days Later, a film that doesn't even refer to its bloodthirsty mobs as "zombies," for not following a set of arbitrary rules established by fans of the genre when some of its most notable touchstones veer wildly as well strikes me as little more than fanboyish rage.

Shot mainly with grainy digital cameras, 28 Days Later has a docudrama feel that total first-person experiences such as Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead fail to communicate. Even with gorgeous, haunting establishing shots of a vacant London -- you have to admire and wonder how a film with a paltry £5,000,000 budget could co-ordinate cordoning off large blocks of the city for extreme long shots of total desolation, even if only for a few days of shooting -- breaking the personal feel of the action, Boyle invites us into this world, and a truly nightmarish one it is.

Following a prologue involving an outbreak of scientifically infected monkeys, the film shifts forward, well, guess how long, to focus on a young man waking up from a coma following a car accident. Jim (Cillian Murphy, in his breakout role) stumbles out of his hospital bed to find an abandoned building. The streets of London are likewise barren, until he walks into a church and finds a stack of dead bodies. Some of them stir at the noise he makes, and now the poor lad (still in a hospital gown, no less), must run from insane, fleet-footed killers who dart about as fast as humanly possible.

A group of survivors saves him, and they offer up some much-needed explainin': following the chimp outbreak, a mysterious virus known only as "Rage" swept through Britain, as infection spreads through even a drop of blood in an open wound, mouth or eyes, and any hapless victim covered in the red stuff turns in under 20 seconds. Once turned, they attack anything that moves with unrelenting ferocity. Jim joins the two survivors who rescue him -- what choice does he have? -- and soon finds himself in the sort of despair you'd expect from someone who woke up to the apocalypse. Eventually they run low on supplies and set out through London, searching for anything or anyone who might help them survive.

The real horror of 28 Days Later comes not from the infected but their after-effects. It is genuinely unsettling to see a handful of people move through a desolate metropolis. I suppose the city really should have teemed with infected, but I would hazard a guess that Boyle was doing good just to shut down parts of London for shooting, much less paying hundreds of extras (all of whom would need decent make-up) for every exterior shot. The infected are not interested in eating flesh, only attacking, and it's chilling to watch one of the few human survivors sprayed in the face with blood either vomited by the infected or (more disturbingly) spurted by wounds that the human inflicts to stop the rampaging beast.

Selena (Naomie Harris), a steely, kickass black woman ripped straight from The Omega Man, knows all too well what it means when an infected spills some blood on a person, and when she spots a gash on her comrade's arm created by one of the Ragers, she cuts him apart with a machete without a moment's hesitation. He's the first of the characters to fall prey to this fast-acting disease, but he sure isn't the last.

Of course, horror doesn't mean much if the characters afflicted by monsters/killers/insanity do not connect with the audience. Even if we're never meant to root for a character or get much of an insight into them (think Repulsion), we have to care on some level about the people on screen. Garland's script succeeds because he gives us people who have their own issues and personalities outside of dealing with the Rage threat. Selena and Jim happen upon Frank (Brendan Gleeson, stealing the show as ever), a kindly but strong single parent desperately trying to give his young daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) a shred of normalcy even as they are barricaded in their flat.

Of course, the raison d'être for most great zombie films is sociopolitical allegory, and 28 Days Later treads this path as well. After overhearing a radio transmission promising "the answer to infection," the foursome makes their way to a compound controlled by a small band of soldiers led by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston). West's "answer" is to hole up until the infected die of starvation, then to rebuild civilization; one day, he takes Jim aside and tells the now-steeled survivor that he sent out the transmission to give his despondent squad hope and he "promised them women."

The readiness of the soldiers to rape Selena and the teenage Hannah is forced -- I figured they'd want at least some semblance of a human connection outside of sex -- but the martial law of West illustrates a point hammered home with amusing repetition in The Zombie Survival Guide: in most cases, surviving humans pose more of a threat to each other than the zombies. Eccleston puts in a fine performance as, in many ways, a foil for Frank: he's trying to keep his soldiers -- a surrogate family -- going and sees procreation as much an avenue to bring them back from the brink as it is "necessary" to keep humanity going. That only Great Britain suffers from this outbreak, at least according to the most sympathetic soldier, only reveals how mad West has become in his attempts to literally hold down the fort.

The insanity of West's compound sets up an inevitable confrontation between the soldiers and the civilians, but 28 Days Later hits a bit of a snag in the end. Basically, a royally pissed off Jim tears through the complex to save Selena and Hannah and generally acts in a manner just as terrifying as the infected who swarm about the place. There's an interesting theme there that Garland and Boyle, suddenly salivating over the violence like men possessed, do not explore. It especially looks bad in a coda that was re-written after an original, bleaker, and infinitely superior (because it actually works) ending drew negative response at test screenings, that most useless of industry tools. This new ending offers hope, but it directly contradicts the rest of the film and its lack of any organized government, military, religion or any other social institution. Again, that might have been a suitably dark and contemplative direction, showing that both the soldiers and civilians tore each other apart when help might have been on the way, but the poor filmmakers had to make a forced happy ending that rewards these characters for their bloodlust.

Nevertheless, even the final act contains enough full-tilt action to keep your pulse-pounding no matter how reactionary it is. Boyle's grainy, jumpy footage ratchets up the tension even as I found precious little that scared me (I have a strange tendency not to be scared by horror films I like, as I'm "too busy" admiring them). I also appreciate the dark humor of a group of animal rights activists unwittingly causing the outbreak in their attempts to free monkeys, rather than the carelessness of clinical scientists. Garland has a history with mocking the counterculture (i.e. The Beach), but I think that Boyle at least subconsciously wanted to demonstrate that well-meaning people can bring about massive destruction; after all, the scientists who always set something loose in these sorts of films are usually working toward something good and noble.

28 Days Later may divide zombie fans, but I for one delighted in all the nods to Romero's films: a Bub-like infected man under study, an attack in a decrepit gas station, the ruthless military vs. civilians. Boyle wears his influences on his sleeve, and he and Garland crafted a thoroughly enjoyable, somewhat thoughtful meditation on how man can lose himself in hysteria and anger, released in the wake of both September 11 and the SARS panic. It loses steam at the end, but 28 Days Later is more than a respectable entry into the horror genre, and its gritty look set off a wave of inferior imitators just as Romero's zombie satires did decades ago.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

While I disliked the omissions and alterations of Prisoner of Azkaban when I first saw it, revisiting it after aging enough to distance myself from a rabid love of the books allowed me to appreciate it for the artistic triumph that it is. It's still got its fair share of weaknesses, but the character moments and stylistic feel made it far more interesting than the previous films combined. I noted with a certain sense of regret and resignation that Steve Kloves once again penned the screenplay for this next sequel, but Azkaban was a step up, so anything's possible, right?

To my surprise, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is almost as good as Prisoner of Azkaban, and sometimes a bit better. Cuaròn's direction hinted at an Expressionist influence, which the latest director, Mike Newell, mixes with the action movie vibe of the Triwizard challenges and really plays up in the final act, in which the film becomes a true horror film, albeit one softened to appeal to the young demographic. Mad-Eye Moody himself looks like he tumbled out of a Fritz Lang movie, while Hogwarts' juxtaposition o cluttered, maze-like halls and the quiet terrain that engulfs its exterior continues to cast a sense of foreboding.

Harry finds himself in the Triwizard tournament, which is only open to 17-year-olds, when his name somehow appears in the titular goblet, which announces the names of the champions representing each of the three schools involved: Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poesy) for Beauxbatons, star Quidditch player Viktor Krum (Stanislav Ianevski) for Durmstrang and Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson) for Hogwarts. Understandably, these rightful contestants and their headmasters are a bit miffed to discover that Hogwarts has two shots at glory and that such a young boy (the biggest celebrity in their world, no less) should steal the spotlight from them. Harry is simply terrified.

Aiding him in preparing for these tasks, naturally, are Ron and Hermione, who apparently reached the pitiful apex of their character arcs in the film series and must now start the slide down back into mediocrity and two-dimensionality. Harry's moodiness is on the horizon, but here it's Ron's time for angst, which just comes off as shallow. The book didn't handle this subplot in a particularly deep way, but you could at least understand why Ron, the dirt poor kid always in the shadow of the celebrity Harry and the whiz Hermione, might deeply resent his friend thrust into the spotlight yet again, but you'd think he take into account how much Harry loathes the attention and how he never seeks it. Watson reverts to that annoying breathlessness that defined her line deliveries in the first film. Even as she must deal with the half-formed love triangle involving Krum and Ron, she becomes less interesting than ever thanks to the incessant overacting.

Also helping out is Moody (Brendan Gleeson), a battle-scarred Auror (dark wizard catcher) with a fake leg and a magical replacement eye. He accepts the empty Defense Against the Dark Arts position, presumably because he clearly has so few limbs left to lose. Gleeson is on fire as the thundering, lumbering Moody, capturing the character's off-kilter, slightly sadistic humor nicely. The only other noteworthy addition is David Tennant as Barty Crouch Jr., though the nature of the character means he remains mostly unseen, unfortunately.

Each of the Triwizard tasks are filmed with a harmonious blend of blockbuster action and darker chills, particularly in the the reedy mire of the lake bottom and the icy fright of the maze. When Harry winds up in a graveyard to face his nemesis, the tone only grows colder, thanks in no small part to Ralph Fiennes' short but sweet appearance as the reconstituted Voldemort. Before he even utters a word, you know they found the right man for the job: Voldemort speaks not with an evil, serpentine hiss but with the ennui befitting someone so powerful. The wretched stammering of his summoned followers doesn't concern him, and the only time he displays any emotion at all is in his wrath toward Harry. Fiennes is one of the finest casting choices yet in a franchise stuffed to the gills with magnificent actors.

Sadly, many of the newcomers fail to elicit any response other than annoyance. Pattinson's job is simply to stand there and look pretty (a damn fine warm-up for Twilight if there ever was one), while Poesy and Ianevski act like caricatures. Miranda Richardson knows the steps but not the rhythm to muckraking gossip hag Rita Skeeter, and what might have been a nice commentary on the corruption of glamorization of the media is sacrificed in favor of a paper-thin characterization (you can deal with adult themes in kid movies; see Pixar). Roger Lloyd Pack plays Barty Crouch Sr. less on the verge of a breakdown as in the novel as insufferably wild-eyed. I know Gary Oldmans had more practice at playing loopy, but compare his mania in the third film to Pack's mugging and there's just no contest in the crazy department.

Still, despite some terrible dialogue delivered in manners that don't help the matter, Goblet of Fire does a marvelous job of sustaining the excellence of the previous film while adding enough plot back in to make a reasonable and linear narrative. I still prefer Azkaban for its artistry, but Newell should be commended for finding a working blend of the inoffensive popcorn sheen of the first two films with the darker tone and direction of the third.

In Bruges

There's a refreshing audacity in Martin McDonagh's feature-length debut that is so lacking in Hollywood today. McDonagh, one of the UK's most celebrated modern playwrights, claims his first love was film, and that joy practically leaps off the screen and asks you for a dance. Don't get me wrong: this is not some musical, or even a happy movie, but it's so gleefully ignorant of the "right" ways to make movies that it carves out something wholly unique and indefinable. To those who say "you need to know the rules before you can break them:" meet Martin McDonagh.

You know something special is on the horizon from the very start of the film, as a man recounts completing an assassination and being told to flee London for Bruges. "I disn't even know where Bruges was." A pause. "It's in Belgium." Our narrator is Ray (Colin Farrell), a hitman hiding out in the city after a hit goes horribly (and very, very darkly funny) wrong. Accompanying this fresh-faced nervous wreck is Ken, played marvelously by Brendan Gleeson. Ken looks after Ray and conferences with their boss Harry, a man whose importance and legend is conveyed without ever mentioning them.

At first the two seem like obvious foils, and they are: Ray looks young and handsome but broils inside with guilt, while Ken, sporting what Ebert terms "that noble shambles of a face" presents himself as a kind and caring man who ust so happens to kill people. Ken looks at all the medieval architecture in wonder, spouting off facts he gleaned from brochures. In a way, he seems younger and more idealistic than Ray, who couldn't care less about any of the sights. You get a taste of how un-P.C. the film will get when Ray dismisses the whole town in an argument with Ken: "If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't."

McDonagh does structure things like a play, but he never falls into the perilous trap of the playwright-cum-director. Yes, the film has three acts, but then don't most films, regardless of whether or not they're adapted from a play or written by a playwright? Besides, the acts defy any set logic: each act introduces and ends a new conflict while contributing to the overall story, yet at no point does the movie feel episodic.

First we see Ray and Ken adjust to this European fairytale land, and finally we learn what went wrong with his first hit. The startling revelation leads to an emotional fallout in the second act, as Ray grapples with his demons and Ken must deal with an order from Harry to dispose of the lad for his errors. When Ken ultimately refuses, we finally, after two-thirds of the movie, see Harry. Now, he's on the poster and the DVD cover so it's not like I was surprised, but I can't tell you my joy when Ralph Fiennes popped on screen on the other end of that telephone. He's received no end of accolades, but he's just one of those actors that can so thoroughly entertain in anything he does that he almost feels underrated. In a way, the film ends with the inevitable shootout, but it plays out in ways that are anything but clichéd.

Filling in the gaps of all this is our heroes' rambling forays into the city and the utterly bizarre people they meet. The two consume astonishing amounts of lager and stumble onto the set of a film starring a dwarf, whom Ray repeatedly refers to as a "midget" even though he knows it's not the proper term. He also strikes up a relationship with Chloë (Clemence Poesy), one of the production designers who actually just steals and supplies drugs to the stars. All of this leads to numerous scenes too bizarre to place into words (unless you're McDonagh, of course), and every last one is screamingly funny. It's the kind of humor you really shouldn't be laughing at, yet McDonagh is above simple shock comedy: Ray uses all sorts of un-P.C. language, but in such a way you're far more caught off guard by the context of the jokes than the words.

2008 didn't exactly deliver the goods in terms of great movies (especially in comparison to the slew of magnificence in 2007), but In Bruges stood out amongst the few. It wasn't the funniest film of the year, but it flouts so many clichés and goes in so many unexpected directions that it entertained me far more than the funnier Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It's the kind of film that's easy to overlook, but do yourself a favor and sit down with this endlessly dark yet very human comedy.