The Screengrab : brendan gleeson

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "I Went Down" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The snowballing reputation of the Irish playwright Conor McPherson reached a peak with The Seafarer, which he directed at the National Theatre in London in 2006; last year, the Broadway production won the actor Jim Norton a Tony Award, to go with the Olivier Award he'd won the year earlier for his performance. McPherson himself has directed three feature films, the latest of which, The Eclipse, was recently picked up for distribution after playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. McPherson's first produced screenplay was for I Went Down, an Irish gangland buddy comedy that was a huge indie hit in Ireland in 1997 but achieved only measly distribution here. At that time, McPherson was an unknown quantity here, and for the most part, so were the movie's stars, Peter McDonald and Brendan Gleeson. It was the John Boorman film The General, released here the same year as I Went Down, that helped raise Gleeson's profile as everybody's favorite Irish gangster, a position he shored up last year when he co-starred with Colin Farrell in the playwright Martin McDonagh's movie writing-directing debut, In Bruges. That movie actually has a striking family resemblance to I Went Down, though I Went Down is both lighter in tone and the better, more well-sustaned movie; unlike McDonagh's, it doesn't fall off a cliff overreaching for significance.

McDonald and Gleeson play Git and Bunny, a couple of layabouts who are ordered by a small-town gangster with a face like a bank overdraft notice (Tony Doyle) to run an errand for him, sending them out on the road to bring back an old associate (Peter Caffrey) who he claims is holding some money for him. You know that Git is a good lad because he got into trouble by assaulting a goon who was threatening a friend who hooked up with Git's fiancee while Git was serving an eight-month prison sentence. (It turns out he took the rap for his father, who, it turned out, was terminally ill and didn't survive to see the sentencing date.) You can also see that his run of bad luck has left him with a fatalistic attitude that he only begins to tentatively shake off when he and Bunny collect the gangster's old pal and begin to pick up signs that all may not be as they've been told. ""Did you ever make love to a gangster's wife?" Caffrey asks his new road partners, by way of conversation. "Jesus, you can't really enjoy yourself. It's like making love with the angel of fucking death on your shoulder"

As Bunny, Gleeson is decked out in the trappings of a fortyish rockabilly cat, with sideburns you could use as a can opener. Bunny, who helps set the tone for the slick job of gangstering that he and and Git will be performing off by stopping for gas in a stolen car whose fuel tank he can't get into, looks like nothing but a 200-pound handicap for the first leg od the trip, but he snaps to as he and Git warm to each other and he begins to have a stake in whether or not he makes it to the next day in one piece. (It turns out that he, too, in his own bearish way, is nursing a broken heart. Before setting out on the road, he stop by the house so that he can look through the glass and call out to the wife he's separated from, who's trying to hide in a corridor; he gently points out that he can see her clearly. He also phones in from the road, asking the little girl who answers if he can talk to an adult. "No," she says cheerily, as she hangs up. The director, Paddy Breathnach, keeps things simple, letting the actors develop their own weird rapport and make the most of McPherson's dialogue. (In the only other film of his that I've seen, te 2001 Blow Dry, the director went a little nuts, trying to cram brightly spotlit eccentricity down the audience's gagging throat.) I Went Down may be a small, distant stepping stone in McPherson's and Gleeson's careers, but it's a beautifully cut stone, more gem than pebble.

It's Back! The Indie Box Office Roundup

Paul Clark — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Normally, Screengrab doesn’t go in for box office figures. After all, most of the movies that top the weekend standings are mediocre at best, and it gets downright depressing when you consider how many shell out their hard-earned wages for Meet the Spartans. Besides, the movies with the highest grosses usually play on upwards of 3,000 screens, so of COURSE they rake in the dough.

Better, I think, to use the yardstick of per-screen averages. Not only does this weed out the overhyped junk that’s playing to 25%-full houses in every mall multiplex from Schenectady to Sheboygan, but it allows some more interesting and esoteric fare to enjoy some time in the sun. And you all know how Screengrab is about esoteric fare. So, we've decided to bring back a feature from back in the day- The Indie Box-Office Charts. Then we decided to throw in the word "Roundup" after it was suddenly dropped from its regular Trailer Roundup gig. We felt so terrible seeing ol'Roundup moping around on the sidewalk in front of Screengrab Tower that we had to find it a job again, to keep it out of trouble and the like.

Moving on... this week’s per-screen winner was Focus Features’ In Bruges, the debut feature from Martin McDonough starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes. While we’re happy that the talented McDonough (to say nothing of Screengrab favorite Gleeson) looks to have an arthouse hit on his hands, much of the film’s draw comes from the name cast.

Of greater interest are the films that reside just below it on the list. Both #2 film The Band's Visit and #4 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days were unceremoniously snubbed by the Academy’s Foreign Language Film branch (albeit for different reasons), but it would appear that the controversies have only helped their grosses. 4 Months is a particularly interesting case- last year’s Palme d’Or winner, Cristian Mungiu’s film has also been released on IFC’s On Demand network, so who knows how much better it would be grossing if the big screen was the only option.

Rounding out the top 5 are a pair of single-screen releases: Pere Portabella’s The Silence Before Bach and Jia Zhang-ke’s 2006 Venice winner Still Life. The most widely-released film in the top 10 is Persepolis, currently playing on 125 screens. The wide (1,000+ screens) release with the highest average gross is There Will Be Blood, which is currently sitting at #13, pulling in $2,456 per screen on 1620 screens.

Top 10, Weekend of February 8-10:
1. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($16,330 per screen)
2. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($9,642 per screen)
3. The Silence Before Bach [Films 59] ($8,814 per screen)
4. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [IFC First Take] ($5,996 per screen)
5. Still Life [New Yorker] ($4,755 per screen)
6. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($4,319 per screen)
7. The Witnesses [Strand Releasing] ($4,260 per screen)
8. Summer Palace [Palm Pictures] ($3,410 per screen)
9. Bab'Aziz [Typecast Releasing] ($3,286 per screen)
10. Persepolis [Sony Pictures Classics] ($3,042 per screen)

Source: IndieWire.

Take Five: Belgium!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Opening wide this weekend, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of exiled hitmen stuck in the Belgian city until it's safe for them to return home, and their sojourn is meant to be hellish in every sense of the word. Belgium has long been Europe's punchline — yes, even more so than Poland; its stolidly middle-class character and reputation as "where culture goes to nap" makes it the butt of many a joke. David Rees of Get Your War On calls the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus "the last interesting Belgian", which insult is all the more cutting considering he was actually French; and in a memorable Monty Python sketch, game show contestants are challenged to come up with a derogatory term for Belgium, and one noteworthy entrant claims that he can't think of anything more derogatory than just "Belgian". But all kidding aside, if you actually were trapped in Bruges for a prolonged period of time, you could do a lot worse as a way to pass the time than to head for the local cinema. Belgium has, er, sprouted one of the more interesting independent film scenes in Europe recently, and as this short list of some of our favorite Belgian movies of recent years should illustrate, there's a lot more to Belgian filmmaking than just Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MAN BITES DOG (1992)

One of the first Belgian films to create a great deal of buzz outside of Europe, Man Bites Dog (the French title translates, creepily, to "It Happened in Your Neighborhood" or "He is Coming to Your House") is a postmodern twist on the serial killer narrative a good five to ten years before such things became trendy. Anticipating the self-aware American horror films of the 2000s, it follows a small documentary camera crew as they tag along with Ben (played with sinister charm by co-writer/director Benoit Poelvoorde), a disconcertingly media-savvy mass murderer. Crammed with supremely disturbing moments, shocking violence, and genuinely clever moments of humor, Man Bites Dog has held up quite well and is still better than most of the films it undoubtedly helped to inspire.

D'EST [FROM THE EAST] (1993)

One of the best things about Belgian cinema is the experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Her complex, meditative, sometimes almost motionless films lull you into a nearly placid state so that you barely realize it when a moment of epiphany arises. D'Est, a far too little-seen documentary from 1993, is perhaps her greatest film: a deceptively simple series of images of people in Eastern Europe, many of them only a few years removed from the burdens of Soviet rule, are shown. The people take vacations, engage in sport and play, have long moments of leisure, and Akerman's brilliantly photographic sensibilities capture long stretches of beautiful simplicity over a period of almost two hours. The effect is not unlike watching a well-crafted painting slowly mutate into something entirely new and different.

LUMUMBA (2000)

Director Raoul Peck is a Haitian; the film takes place in Africa, and the production itself was a joint effort of Belgium, France, Germany, and Haiti. But almost all of the filming was done in Belgium, the majority of the financing came from there, and in a greater sense, the entire film is a legacy of Belgium's blood-soaked imperial past. The radical reformer Patrice Lumumba (brilliantly portrayed here by Eriq Ebouaney), prior to his assassination, was the ruler of the Congo, a huge country in central Africa that suffered more than most during its colonial period thanks to an incredibly brutal occupation and exploitation by Belgium's King Leopold. The film was an independent success, and a testament to the fact that some countries are more willing to examine their colonial legacies than others.

ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS (2002)

If Tom Barman's sprawling 2002 film, based in and around the port city of Antwerp, isn't one of the best Belgian movies in recent history, it's at least one of the most ambitious, and definitely one of the oddest. Part travelogue, part documentary, part music video (and showcase for the director, who's also a well-known local pop star), and part bizarre remake/interpretation/'homage' to movies like Short Cuts, Magnolia and Pulp Fiction, Any Way the Wind Blows features a diverse group of French and Flemish citizens, all from different backgrounds and with widely different characters, who all wind up, through a rambunctious and chronoligically confusing narrative, at the same party on the same night. It functions almost like a collage of several more convincingly made films, but it's not without its charm.

THE ALZHEIMER CASE(2003)

When you first hear De Zaak Alzheimer described, you think it can't possibly be anything but a tasteless, awful disaster: it's about a pair of detectives attempting to track down and capture a mob hitman on his final assignment — final because he has an advanced case of Alzheimer's Disease. Amazingly enough, though, director Erik Van Looy manages to pull the thing off without recourse to depressingly tasteless jokes or maudlin sentimentality. Instead, he presents us with a surprisingly plausible plot, a tight, chilling narrative with plenty of suspense, and a nicely presented noir sensibility. An American remake of this movie (which played at festivals under the name The Memory of a Killer) is in the works, but if you can hunt down a DVD copy of the original, it's well worth checking out on its own merits.

Sundance Roundup: Day 1

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The 2008 Sundance Film Festival kicks off tonight in Park City, Utah with the world premiere of In Bruges. The directorial debut of playwright Martin McDonough, it’s the story of two London hit men (Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson) cooling their heels in the titular Belgian city. For the Independent, it’s the harbinger of a new British invasion, as the first of 23 UK-made films to play this year’s fest.

This year’s Sundance crop is expected to be lighter in sprit than the 2007 edition, according to the New York Times, “offering more comedy and optimism than last year’s batch, which contained many darkly hued films about the Iraq war.” Meanwhile, at the Treasure Mountain Inn at the top of Main Street, Slamdance keeps chugging along – no longer the upstart but still the rebel, according to Variety.

Other than that, there’s not much going on today besides the usual schmoozing, swag-bag hoarding and snow-tubing expeditions. During this calm before the storm, you can refresh your memory of Sundance history with this handy FAQ from the L.A. Times. And if you can’t make it to Park City this year, you’ll miss out on the parties, but you can still catch some of the films: the festival’s official website will be offering up one short for free viewing each day.

Trailer Roundup: Speed Racer, The Great Debaters, In Bruges

Peter Smith — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Speed Racer

I never really watched the old Speed Racer cartoons, so I can't say how faithful this is. But I find the cartoonishness of the trailer to be pretty charming. With something as stylized as the original, it would be a mistake to try for realism, so the Wachowskis are aiming for a more animated style in the lighting and the CGI, and this has extended to the performances. What clinched it for me was Emile Hirsch's vigorous nodding when he asks the little kid, "oh no?" toward the end of the trailer — this is about as un-naturalistic an acting decision as one can make, and it fits in perfectly. Whether this movie will please the fans is a question I can't hope to answer here. I only know that this looks like a lot of fun.

The Great Debaters

If someone told me there was a movie coming out about a group of African-American college students in the 1930s starting a debate team, I would be able to predict with relative certainty how the trailer would play, and in this case I would be more or less correct. From the time I saw Denzel Washington standing on top of a table while the words "based on a true story" appeared onscreen, I knew I was in the presence of a movie with almost nothing new to say. Frankly, outside the presence of Oscar winners Washington and Forest Whitaker, this feels more like a TV movie, down to the presence of Oprah Winfrey as producer. Also, debate isn't that interesting, folks. Sure, it allows actors to give impassioned speeches that rile up an audience one way or another, but that doesn't exactly make for great cinema. At least this year's Rocket Science, which portrayed the world of contemporary policy debate, had novelty going for it.

In Bruges

Maybe it's the Irish I inherited from my mother's side of the family, but this trailer makes me giggle uncontrollably. The cast is clearly having a great time — Colin Farrell flexing his Irish accent for a change, plus the great Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes, who's so much more fun now that he's stopped playing so serious all the time. When I heard the plot synopsis for this, I was afraid it would come off like a Guy Ritchie gangster movie, but there's enough blarney on display in the trailer to put those thoughts to rest. I'm partial to the scene where Farrell and Fiennes negotiate their way through a shootout, but why choose? In Bruges might not break the bank at the box office, but I for one will be in line to buy a ticket.

— Paul Clark