By The Bug‘s fillum reviewer Don Gordon-Brown
Firstly, I’ve just noticed that someone in the organisation has mistakenly promoted this column online as the complete guide to the 2023 Oscars ceremony taking place later this morning. For that I apologise. The Bug’s dirt poor and it’s been decades since the lovely PR people at the fillum distribution companies used to invite us to their cute little theatrette critics’ screenings with the good tucker and where we got to laugh if some poor sap sat in Des Partridge’s seat … or to those big full-cinema previews. They were fun.
So, the reality is that we’ve only seen just the one fillum of the 10 up for best-picture honours later this morning; the terribly overrated and overblown The Banshees of Inisherin.
And if this was one of the year’s 10 best, I’d hate to have paid good money to have seen the bottom 100.
As it was, I took this gloomy timewaster in for $8 on a budget day; my choc-top cost almost as much and I’m still ruing the cost of both.
It’s when I watch a fillum like The Banshees of Inisherin that I always think how great it would be to have been a fly on the wall when the scriptwriter first pitched the idea to the moneymen.
So let’s roll the tape….
Producers: Okay, give us your best shot!
Martin McDonagh: Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are…
Producers: Hit men hiding out?
McDonagh: No, just two long-term friends living an isolated rural life on a bleak and blustery island off the Republic of Ireland’s west coast in the early 1920s and enjoying a jar or 20 most afternoons.
Producers: Hmm.. okay go on.
McDonagh: For some unexplained reason Gleeson’s character decides to abruptly end their friendship and Farrell’s character can’t accept that decision.
Producers: So they’re not hit men in hiding then?
McDonagh: No, it’s just a study of the breakdown of a friendship.
Producers: Right. Is there village idiot in the fillum?
McDonagh: It is set in Ireland.
Producers: So what happens then?
McDonagh: Well, Gleeson’s character gets angrier and angrier at Farrell’s character’s refusal to accept the breakup and takes graphic and gruesome steps to make his point that the breakup is permanent. In the background, Ireland’s civil war is taking place on the mainland.
Producers: Great! Graphic and gruesome violence on both sides of the water. Now we’re talking. Is this village violence a symbolic microcosm of the larger battle raging across the way?
McDonagh: Not really.
Producers: No extensive battle scenes?
McDonagh: Not really.
Producers: Hmm. So what’s the romantic interest thread so we at least get to see some tits and some rumpy pumpy?
McDonagh: No, there’s none of that. But Farrell’s character lives with his sister and their single beds are in the same room.
Producers: Kinky!
McDonagh: Not really. They are very poor and their cottage is small and humble.
Producers: So it’s just really a story of simple people eking out an existence in near-poverty conditions…
McDonagh: Correct. They are very poor. The local pub doesn’t even have Guinness on tap!
Producers: Crikey. And this friendship schism occurs and it makes no real sense at all?
McDonagh: Not really. Gleeson’s character is a bit of a nut case to start with.
Producers: Hmm. Okay. It’s no Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is it? Have you got anything else?
Scene ends.
So there you have it, Buggers. The acting’s good, the cinematography is great and the traditional Irish music is foine – hence the two-and-a-half-stars – and the Irish Tourism Board probably wishes it was never made. But would I ever want to watch it again? No. Which is not a good thing to say about one of the top 10 fillums of 2022, is it?
But if you do get to see it on video or when it streams, watch several scenes where the glasses of Guinness seem to get miraculously topped up despite the number of sips being taken. No wonder the Irish have a reputation for getting pissed in their charming little pubs. Their pints refill themselves!
Don Gordon-Brown
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