The Banshees of Inishiren (4/5 Stars)

Inishiren is an island off the coast of Ireland. This movie, the latest by writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboard’s Outside Ebbing Missouri) takes place on Inishiren in 1923. Apparently, at that time there was a civil war on the mainland. The characters can hear and see distant explosions off across the channel in the distance. But no one on the island seems to know what the fighting is about nor do they have an opinion as to how it should end. Its just this bad thing that exists in the world and nobody can do much of anything about it.

The location of Inisherin is as much a character in this story as any of the humans inhabiting it. It is exceedingly small, holds perhaps hundreds(?) of people, mostly farmers and herders, and everybody seems to know everybody else and their business. Indeed, they would have to because there is only one church, one post office, and one bar in the whole place. The bar is called the pub, short for public house. You don’t need a brand when you’re the only place in town.

This isolation and poverty makes what would be a trifling event into a very big deal. You see Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) does not want to be friends with Padraic Suilleabhain (Colin Farrell) anymore. He doesn’t want to drink pints with him. He doesn’t want to sit next to him. Indeed, he makes it clear that he never wants to speak with Padraic ever again. Padraic, much hurt, asks Colm why. After all, they were very good friends and Padraic does not recall ever saying or doing anything wrong. It is not anything you said or did to me, Colm explains, its just that life is short, he has things to do (or at least he feels that he should) and Padraic is dull. In other words, Colm feels that Padraic is wasting his time, time better spent working on composing music (he plays a mean fiddle) than listening to Padraic talk about his donkey. This would be a mean thing to say and do in any town, and in any other town it may just stop there. Maybe Colm and/or Padraic would just start hanging out in different pubs. But in Inisherin, there is only one pub, and its 1923, so there is absolutely nothing else to do in the evenings than drink in this one pub and stew about this cold breakdown in a long standing friendship.

Martin McDonagh is best known for employing cruel wit with low born characters, many of them criminals. As an example, in In Bruges, the first time Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell were teamed up in a McDonagh movie, Gleeson’s character was tasked with an honor killing of Colin Farrell but changes his mind at the last moment in order stop the Colin Farrell character from committing suicide. That’s the type of irony that appeals to Mr. McDonagh black sense of humor, and it works more often than not in his plays and movies (A Behanding in Spokane, yes, Seven Psychopaths, not as much.) Interestingly, Banshees is one of McDonagh’s least funny movies and that probably is a good move. Cruel humor would be out of place here given that all of the characters are basically good and some of them faultless. When bad things start to develop, it is appropriate that McDonagh does not try for the types of laughs he usually goes for. This keeps the story engaging as opposed to off-putting. There are only so many ways this can turn out given the constraints of the location and it remains fresh up to the end.

What drives the material home is the performances by Gleeson and Farrell. Gleeson has always been an interesting actor. He has the type of looks that generally would deprive an actor of a starring role in anything but interesting movies. Over time he has become one of those beloved actors that can just show up in a mainstream flick like an old friend and liven up the joint (have you seen Paddington 2?). It is Colin Farrell that is more of a revelation. Here is a man that has the looks of a leading man and if he wanted to, could remain a boring hot shot indefinitely. Instead, he has become a favorite of movie buff’s for his great acting against type. You wouldn't know to look at him but Colin Farrell is at his best playing losers (In Bruges, The Lobster, True Detective). I tell you, he is exceptionally good at it. His character is Banshees is a boring dolt. It’s another fantastic performance.

It can also be noted that the movie is particularly adept at capturing the language of 1920’s Ireland. I have no idea whether the dialect is accurate, but can attest that it is much different way of speaking than you may hear today. At the least, if you see this movie, you’ll finally have an idea of how to pronounce the name Siobhan.

Edge of Tomorrow (4/5 Stars)

or: All You Need is Kill!

Roger Ebert once caused an Internet firestorm by declaring that video games can never be art. Boy did he get hell for that. He had a point though and it was that video games because since they had rules, points, objectives, and an outcome that is preordained. Of course, this all denies the massive amount of artistry that generally goes around whatever is the actual game. For instance if you took out the game elements of a superior video game and kept the visual design, the story, and the characters, perhaps what you would be left with was art in the Roger Ebert definition. And what would such art look and feel like? Perhaps like the new Tom Cruise science fiction action flick, “Edge of Tomorrow” is such an example.      

Cinephiles would generally associate the concept of ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ with such great movies time-loop movies like ‘Groundhog Day’ and ‘Source Code,’ but the original manga comic book that this movie is based on, ‘All You Need is Kill!’ is unabashedly a lover of video games and it is possible to argue the movie has more in common with Super Mario than the former. The movie follows the exploits of Cage, played by Tom Cruise, as he is placed in the front lines of an invasion of Europe against an alien foe named the Mimics. Through a freak accident on the day of the invasion, Cage kills an Alpha Mimic and gains the ability to relive each day if and only if he is killed on that day. This is how the Mimics are winning the war in the first place. They can rewind the day of the battle until they learn exactly what the enemy will do. Once they know how the day goes they can plan accordingly the next time they play the game, I mean movie.

This is a video game. You die. You start over. You keep doing it until you get it right. The whole world is at stake. There is a particularly dangerous pitfall to this type of story in that it at some point should get boring if the whole thing just keeps on repeating. This problem is deftly avoided by the director, Doug Liman, the writer Christopher McQuarrie and another great action performance by Tom Cruise. The art in telling this story is knowing what parts to skip. After all, by the story’s logic everything is always the same; so each time Tom relives a day, and the movie suggests that number is in the thousands if not more, we are only shown some of it and most of the time none of it. There is a running joke in the movie where the audience is actually not entirely sure whether Cage has gotten this far into the day or not. Plenty of times you will see a scene for the first time before realizing that Cage has been there one hundred times before and knows exactly what will happen. Other times, he is continually surprised by the day’s developments. The movie keeps the audience out of the know as to what situation it is at most times in the movie and thus retains a sense of suspense as to what will happen further into the movie than one would think is possible.

Another ingredient that helps the movie ride along smoothly is the character of Rita, played by Emily Blunt. Rita’s nickname is “Full Metal Bitch.” She is the army’s best soldier having killed over 100 mimics in her first day of battle. How did she do that? Well, because what happened to Cage, happened to her and she was able to relive the same day over and over again. After Cage goes through the obligatory scenes of trying to explain things to disbelieving army personel it is with a sense of relief that when he gets to Rita, she knows exactly what is going on and sets about training Cage for combat immediately. Nothing really needs to be explained to her, although every day is completely new no matter what. So in plenty of scenes we see things for the first time through her eyes, even though Cage has been there before. In this way, the movie gets away with the former conceit of not needing to show the first time Cage sees something to the audience. In that case, we can follow Rita who knows as much as we do.

This is another great performance by Tom Cruise who, dare I say, is one of the most underappreciated actors of the last decade. It has been almost ten years since Tom Cruise had his Oprah Winfrey “meltdown,” which wasn’t really a meltdown but a crash collision between old media (the interview was 43 minutes long in front of the craziest audience of Tom Cruise fanatics the show could possibly shove together into the same room) and new media (the YouTube clip was about 16 seconds long and completely devoid of context). New media destroyed Tom Cruise’s image in a way that has made it impossible for him to do what made him one of the most admirable movie stars in the 80s and 90s, that is to say take on edgy roles in small ambitious movies like Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Vanilla Sky, etc. But what is extraordinary now is how he is using his image as a hated celebrity to his advantage in his current action hero bent. “Edge of Tomorrow,” is perhaps the best example of this so far. His character is introduced not as a soldier but a marketing spokesman for the army. He sits in TV stations and sells the strategy to the public. He is suave and charming and utterly superficial with that classic/cliché Tom Cruise smile. He is then called to the general’s office and informed that he will be part of the invading wave. Tom Cruise’s reaction is just utter conniving cowardice. This is a man who can go in front of TV cameras and with 100% certainty declare that they will win the battle but is going to do everything he possibly can to get out of actually fighting. If you think Tom Cruise is full of shit, you will enjoy like hell the first half hour of this movie. But that’s just the thing that is so extraordinary about Cruise. He seems to know everyone thinks he is full of shit and so is deliberately taking roles that exploit that image in the best way to tell whatever story he is trying to tell. Cruise is such a strange example of humanity. That this guy, an ardent believer of Scientology, one of the most ludicrous religions ever invented, can also side by side possess a brilliant ability to communicate with an audience is amazing to me. How is that kind of compartamentalization even possible? Anyway, another thing that is generally underappreciated is how well a physical performer Tom Cruise happens to be. This movie is stunt heavy and though I’m sure Cruise did not do all of his stunts, some he obviously done plenty of them and that particular type of skill takes a level of dedication and coordination most actors are simply incapable of. I wouldn’t go so far as to say his performance here deserves an Oscar Nomination like I said of his performance in “Mission Impossible IV: Ghost Protocol,” (a position I still hold to) but it is definitely worth noting. Try spreading the word about how good of an actor he still is because I miss the Tom Cruise that could, between larger blockbuster movies, help smaller stranger movies get made. I like this Tom Cruise too, yes, but I want my old Tom Cruise back as well. What I’m trying to say is I miss my Tom Cruise.

p.s. ‘All You Need is Kill’ is a much better title than ‘Edge of Tomorrow’