Seven Psychopaths

[72teeth]

Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh
Synopsis: A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster's beloved Shih Tzu.

[modage]

I saw this. The trailer is pretty misleading.

[72teeth]

i saw it too... and just wrote a huge post about it... and then hit the back button like a jackass.

gimme a sec...

[72teeth]

This Film.. it's something else! A real discussion starter if all goes well.. best way to describe it, as cliche as it sounds, is as the thinking-man's shoot'em up. I'm anxious to see what everyone can make of this one. One for the multiple viewing and annotation people, for sure...

And the cast! Walken is at his most Walken, Rockwell most Rockwellian (his character might be a statement on the "Manic Pixie Dream BestFriend" too), Woody's on que hamming it up just right, and Farrell makes for a great... viewer surrogate?

(What is that called, the character who says out loud what hopefully the audience is thinking?)

And great cameos! Don't go snooping! Don't go spoiling this one for yourself!




Spoil yreslf Below!




Harry Dean is in this! And Waits really is more-so a glorified cameo... akin to John Hurt in The Proposition..

But it's this casting, and yes, marketing (and even title) that really reveals the experimental film at hand... it's completely playing on expectation.

Farrell's character, the screenwriter, is named Marty... and it seems as if this whole film came of McDonagh questioning his own work altogether..

The questions that keep coming back to me when i think back on this film are:
"What are the implications of being exposed to violence?"
"What statements are made with violence?"
"What do our character's reflect about us?"

It was a very rough cut i saw and the pacing is very odd, which makes me worried...
worried that they are going to fuck it up and release the film they're actually advertizing instead of the statement on "guns-and-laughs movies" that this film ultimately made when i saw it..

it almost gets into Kaufman territory too, where our characters suddenly are addressing their situation and discussing how it should end in "their movie"

...and it gets Profound by the end, tacking on a 15minute philosophical ending after the shootout that questions violence and humanity as we know it.



End o Spoils!






Goddamn, i really did have a great post composed, im kinda all over the place with this one, but

Go see it Xixax when it comes out!

We need to break this fucker down from the inside out.

[72teeth]

RED-BAND TRAILER

[HeywoodRFloyd]

Did anyone else watch this colossal piece of shit and hate it? I just saw it today.

First of all, I love In Bruges, so re-watchable, so quotable, so funny.

I can't believe the same guy that made In Bruges made this film.

Most of jokes are cringe worthy, there was maybe 3 times I chuckled in the whole film, the film wasn't funny in the slightest.

The story was redundant too, but could've been overlooked if it were hilarious, which it wasn't.

It's like McDonagh watched Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze's Adaptation, thought to himself, hmmm I like the idea of that, lets just make a shittier version with some unused jokes from The Dictator (I hated The Dictator too, but if you liked it, you might like this).

Comedy is subjective, I know, but I walked in there expecting another In Bruges, and instead got a nice palette of misfires, mishits, and disbelief that these great actors agreed to make this film with such a poor script.

Massive letdown for me.

[Sleepless]

Not the review I was hoping to read. Thanks for taking one for the team, I guess... Care to respond, 72teeth?

[pete]

I saw it and loved it. It was like adaptation meets In Bruges.
there was a big story about three guys writing a script together, but really it serves as a structure to string together a series of short stories. What really ties the film together is the big story is messy and the characters get to interact with the stories they're telling and they're laughable for the most part but I still rooted for them - not to finish their scripts, but to at least come out in the end getting something out of the mess.

[socketlevel]

I'm with pete and 72 on this one, it was great.

cringe worthy laughs? when sam rockwell is telling his version of how the film should end was balls out laughter. his machine gun voice, playing over the entire scene, which must be like a minute straight had me in stitches. essentially he stood in front of those guys that long just machine gunning. so good.

in bruges and this film have almost what seems like poor pacing, but it actually makes the experience that much better. you never know what's coming next.

[pete]

it's a throwback to the thing that indie films did so well in the 90s - the chatty psychopath. both in bruges and this suffered from villains so chatty they were almost cute, but both made up the facts by not really focusing on the villain, but instead delivering something that's unexpectedly somber in the film's closing minutes. sam rockwell was channeling his charlie day. and that's a good thing.

[72teeth]

Comedy is subjective

True, and/but the comedy is really just a delightful garnish (along with such pitch-perfect performances by nearly everyone on screen) to a most fulfilling buffet of intelligence that the film fires at it's audience with just as many varying ideas as there are bullets during "the shootout."

What about the "drama," Heywood?

Did it's contradictions come off as just sloppy to you?

Did it not raise any questions within you, be it film-wise or beyond?

Did you watch so intently for jokes and one-liners that you left the theatre too pissed off to let your mind wander?

[HeywoodRFloyd]

Wow many people actually loved the film, this doesn't happen often to me, but I guess I'm in the minority here.

Not the review I was hoping to read. Thanks for taking one for the team, I guess... Care to respond, 72teeth?

Not the film I was hoping to see, but maybe that's the reason I didn't enjoy it like 72teeth said, but regardless if I usually have expectations for something, I'm open to shed them about 20 minutes into the film, and go along with the film I'm seeing, as I did for this film.

True, and/but the comedy is really just a delightful garnish (along with such pitch-perfect performances by nearly everyone on screen) to a most fulfilling buffet of intelligence that the film fires at it's audience with just as many varying ideas as there are bullets during "the shootout."

What about the "drama," Heywood?

Did it's contradictions come off as just sloppy to you?

Did it not raise any questions within you, be it film-wise or beyond?

Did you watch so intently for jokes and one-liners that you left the theatre too pissed off to let your mind wander?

Firstly, did I watch so intently for jokes that I missed the film's true nature?
Good point, it may have come across like that in my initial post, but the reason I referred to the lack of humour, was because the film was trying so desperately to have one-liners and jokes everywhere, nearly every major line from every major character is intended for a laugh, it's an obvious attempt at humour, and if it doesn't make me laugh, then is that a fail from my behalf or the film?
I really wanted to love this film, and I understood it thematically and what it was attempting to achieve (as I said before, it was riffing a little from Adaptation) but that doesn't mean the film works.
I think pitch-perfect performances is reaching, because there were a number of instances where a few extra takes to refine the performance could help elevate the scene, especially with some of the line delivery, everyone knows that at least 50% of a comedic impact of a line is from the delivery of that line, the joke is there, it has the potential to be hilarious, a few extra takes to refine that delivery would have been great.
Did it not raise any questions within you, be it film-wise or beyond? See this is where my subjectivity comes to play, yes the essentials for raising those questions are there, it is playing with some layered thematic material, but it doesn't work, and because the film obviously lost me from the reasons I mentioned above, it was more of a chore than a natural enlightenment to seek out those themes.
And it seems that I'm in the minority on this as many of the people whom have commented here have loved this film, maybe it just didn't work for me, maybe it's because I'm Australian (The rest of my aussie theatre audience was hardly laughing in the scenes that were meant to be funny).

cringe worthy laughs? when sam rockwell is telling his version of how the film should end was balls out laughter. his machine gun voice, playing over the entire scene, which must be like a minute straight had me in stitches. essentially he stood in front of those guys that long just machine gunning. so good.

This is the scene were I had a few of my laughs that I mentioned in my initial post, it was pretty funny, but there were so many other misfired attempts of humour throughout the film that I was cringing at.
I think I also had a little memorable laugh right at the start "Was it John Dillinger who got shot in the eye?" "I think it was Moe Green who got shot in the eye"



I really wanted to love this film and it was one of my most anticipated of the year, maybe I need to see it again.
But let me reiterate, I love In Bruges, I think that film has pitch perfect performances, and a great deal of ironic, contradictory moments that makes it completely hilarious, the characters feel real whereas in this film they feel like caricatures.