Three Billboards Outside Belling, Missouri - Martin McDonagh

From my vantage point, Martin McDonagh's film, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," was unexpected. It had popped into the movie theaters around the start of December, without a lot of promotion. Or else I haven't been paying attention as carefully as I should.

Well, it has all eyes on it now, and rightly so.

Seven years after her daughter is raped and murdered, Mildred (Francis McDormand), has lost her patience with the police and their ineffective investigation.

Rather than repeatedly going to the cops, Mildred decides to take matters into her own hands. She takes out advertising space on three billboards which together, spell out, "Raped while dying" "And still no arrests?" "How come, Chief Willoughby?"

To say this causes a stir would be a silly understatement. The entire town comes rushing to defend Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson).

Sadly, in their minds, Mildred turns from a sympathetic mourning mom to a shrew throwing blame on who the towns considers to be a good man.

One the cops under Willoughby's wing, Dixon (Sam Rockwell), takes the situation very personally. To Dixon, Willoughby is the ultimate father figure, cop, and man, and how dare Mildred say anything bad about the man?

Things get ugly very quickly. It starts with just a small tit-for-tat between Mildred and Dixon then whirls up to the exercising of true hatred and then the story explodes.

"Billboards" is a cautionary tale about vengeance. The films demonstrates what can happen when even the most ordinary people allow rage and hatred to burn hotter and hotter.

I do understand why everybody is making such a big deal out of this film. Firstly, the performances by Frances McDonald and Sam Rockwell are a marvel.

And Woody Harrelson excels as he plays the world-weary Chief Willoughby.

As far as the story goes, it's a beautiful, escalating screenplay. In many films structured like this, the acceleration is sloppy and the movie loses its way. But McDonaugh takes us through what someone is capable of in their grief and holds it all together. That's why the film more than the ordinary eye-for-an-eye movies.

"Three Billboards Outside Belling, Missouri" may look like a run of the mill film of  escalating one-upsmanship, but it's so much more than that. The performances are close to perfect. Pair that with an incredibly subtle but intensely emotional screenplay as its foundation, and you have a small masterpiece.

So yes, "Billboards" lives up to the hype. It actually is among the best pictures of the year.

Message From the King - Fabrice du Welz (2017) Hope You Liked "The Limey."

When I started Belgian director Fabrice du Welz' "Message From the King," I could not help from being reminded of Steven Soderbergh's 1999 masterpiece, "The Limey" starring Terence Stamp. "The Limey" is a sort of art-house "Death Wish." It is a vengeance story fueled mostly by Stamp's stoic performance.

Jacob King's (Chadwick Boseman) entrance into Los Angeles is crude and abrupt.

He has come because his sister, Bianca, had left an alarming phone message and he flew in from Cape Flats in South Africa to make sure she was happy and healthy.

After beating his way to the truth about what happened to his sister, he finally goes to the morgue and finds her. Not only was she dead but she had been brutally tortured first.

Jacob goes straight into Charles Bronson mode. His ruthless cruelty does not seem to have any limit. Like Stamp's performance in "Limey," Boseman keeps his stoicism despite his savagery.

About halfway through the film, I was half-convinced that "Message From the King" maybe was a remake of "The Limey."

Jacob goes after lead after lead, obtaining most of their information cruelly. He starts with Bianca's neighbors and her drug dealer, Frankie (Tom Felton.) He orders each of them to give him what little information they have. His constant question: who do you work for? After all, their boss knows the whole story behind how, when and why his sister died.

The search brings Jacob to a charming but suspicious dentist, Wentworth (Luke Evans) upon whom he focuses his investigation.

Wentworth leads Jacob to big-shot film producer, Mike, (Alfred Molina) an unwitting accomplice. Wentworth had Bianca's murder orchestrated. Mike had just told him to 'take care of'' Bianca. And boy, did they. Why, we still don't know.

Now, Wentworth has figured out that Jacob is a threat. He gets two cops and gives them fifty-grand apiece to pick Jacob up and kill him. Fortunately for Jacob, these cops are no smarter than the rest of their ilk. He gets away, which is good because you can not just end a movie at the one-hour mark.


Now, it is time for a trip to the hardware store. It's a cliche, but it's a fun one. Jacob goes back to his hotel and he builds a bomb.

As it turns out, everything, the dentist, the cops and other thugs Jacob runs across all connect with Mike and his predilection for creepy-as-hell sex.

Bianca had seen something she should not have seen and she had in her possession a video she should not have had of her, her friends and Mike playing out his deviant fantasies. She was murdered simply because she had leverage on Mike.

Jacob confronts Mike at his home. He quickly kills him. Then Wentworth shows up, just ahead of all the lower-level thugs. All the rotten eggs in one basket.

All the pieces tie themselves together nicely and all there is left is to do is wonder what Jacob is going to do with that bomb. Gonna be fun.

I kept wondering why so few vengeance films are better than the barrage of others that follow the same formula.

Part of its success is, of course, a matter of how good the screenplay and direction is. Some people are talented and some are not. So many of these films just use the pretense as a starting point for their simplistic blood and violence. That is why most of these vengeance movies suck.

The other ingredient in the good vengeance movie recipe is love. "The Limey" worked because Stamp's character, Wilson, is not a violent man by nature and is motivated by a desperate love rather than sadism. Jacob is exactly the same. He is grieved by Bianca's death to the point where he goes against his gentle nature and explodes into a flash-bang of brutality.

Like "The Limey" and "Death Wish," "Message From the King" rises above most of the cheap pictures in the vengeance sub-genre.

Death Wish (2017) Will I or won't I?

When I first saw they were doing a remake of Michael Winner's 1974 triumph "Death Wish" starring bad-ass Charlie Bronson, I did not form an opinion right at first.

Then, I saw that one of my top five favorite actors, Bruce Willis, was picking up Bronson's torch, it peaked my interest. There was one mark in the 'good' column of the "Death Wish" quandary.

Then I saw that "Death Wish" is set place in the greatest city on earth: Chicago. So that is two marks in favor of the remake.

Now, I just saw that this is an Eli Roth (Hostel, The Green Inferno and Hostel) film. Three marks.

It's unanimous. Bruce Willis, gun, murder.

So now, I am left counting the weeks until I get to go see what I predict will likely be the second best action film of the year. It looks gleefully and wonderfully violent. Even if you can not tell that from the trailer, just look at Roth's past work.

Vengeance is Mine - Shohei Imanura (1979)

Iwao Enokuzu deserves a place alongside Travis Bickle and Alex de Large as one of the most commanding and sociopathic antiheroes in cinema.

The way he simply cuts a swath through the lives of everyone he touches, destroying those he seems to care about in his own twisted way, those he detests and those to whom he is indifferent alike.

It is hard to watch because not only because of a vicious murder. We have become accustomed to those. What is painful is the profound betrayal.


You won't know what to make of this film, but I promise you will never forget it.

In what may be one of the most devastating murder scenes I have seen, Iwao starts to strangle a woman who has come to love him, knowing full well that he is on the run for murder.

Her face, as he strangles her is docile, as if she trusts him completely and will accept whatever he feels is best.

But aside from the sickening protagonist, what stands out are the side characters, many of whom are every bit as twisted as Iwao, most notably the killer’s father who wants more than anything to touch his daughter-in-law.

There are so many resonant moments in this film. The scene where the killer’s father buries a puppy alive up to its neck as his daughter-in-law pours boiling water on its head.

The scene where an old woman quietly instructs Iwao not to kill her...and he inexplicably obeys.

But I think my favorite moment in the film is when the father tells his daughter-in-law that he is ready to be carted off to the old folks’ home where he can set in the sun and drool all over himself.

His daughter-in-law tells him that she’ll come to see him every day and lick the drool off his lips.

Part of you is genuinely moved but this level of affection and devotion while the rest of you is just going ‘eeewwwwww.’