BBC Review of "Three Billboards" (WARNING: SPOILERS)

[shenmue]

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42615064

[avebury]

1. I saw it today and can see

why it did so well at The Golden Globes. Definitely a contender for Best Picture and some acting awards.

[Thunderbeast]

2. GREAT MOVIE!

[pressbox69]

3. Frances McDormand

is the new John Wayne but with real talent and real guts. I usually don't like seeing actors win multiple Oscars. (D D Lewis) McDormand deserves a second Oscar this year.

[NRaleighLiberal]

5. my wife and I just utterly disliked it - turned it off after first hour

every other word was "fuck" - and worse. Mean, nasty, negative - couldn't stand any of the characters. Predictable - yet totally unrealistic.

We are just not resonating at all with many recent releases - disliked Shape of Water, this - recent releases just make us feel old and completely untargeted for movies. So we go back and watch Out of Africa, Howard's End, Babel - long movies with character development and stories.

oh well....we spend most time watching series like Fargo, Americans...and Twin Peaks!

[shenmue]

6. Don't particularly care

[NRaleighLiberal]

7. thanks for your totally assholish comment. Only you that is important, apparently.

[cwydro]

9. I watched it all the way through, but felt a lot of the same you mention.

I thought it was a moving movie, but I’ve no interest in watching it again.

[CrispyQ]

10. I thought it was awful.

She blew up a building, injured a man, & got away with it. And she should feel guilty for saying those awful words to her daughter before she left the house. What mother says something like that? I should have walked out then.

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

11. You think she DIDN'T feel guilty about what she'd said?

Her internal anguish over those last words she ever spoke to her daughter was a huge part of what motivated her, and her actions, and therefore just about the whole movie.

[CrispyQ]

12. I got that & I'm glad she felt guilty cuz it was a horrible thing to say.

A statement like that isn't a joke so I'm glad she felt guilty, but her guilt doesn't justify blowing up a building & injuring someone else.

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

13. 'k. My complaints were more with the deputy, such as the crimes he committed and got away with.

SPOILERS

The Irish? (Scottish?) writer-director seems under the impression that police violence is so epidemic and unprosecuted in America that a rural Missouri deputy could without any justification other than anger brutally beat the advertising guy and fling him out of a second story window, in front of witnesses including an outside law enforcement authority sent to said town, no less, and not be charged with felonious assault if not attempted murder.

Another issue I had is Woody Harrelson's sheriff character was smart enough to have not left Sam Rockwell's deputy the goodbye message he did without foreseeing the deputy would go apeshit and try to hurt or kill somebody. The sheriff would've been more careful to somehow head that off from happening. And he let other misunderstandings exist in his goodbyes; he didn't make it clear enough it was the cancer and not Frances McDormand's character's campaign that was the reason he was choosing to die right then. IRL the sheriff would have known to do more to keep her from being blamed.

I still enjoyed both movies overall but had those and similar implausibility complaints with Three Billboards and In Bruges as well. Probably a european thing but the auteur doesn't understand firearms, for one thing. 100 million Americans do, though, and we might watch your movies. (Admittedly, the same ignorance doesn't worry, say, The Walking Dead producers either.)

If I'm investing my time in a drama, unless it's meant to be surreal or a dream, I appreciate it being realistic.

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

8. Mixed reactions

I found 3 Bilboards to be brilliant in a number of ways and frustrating in other ways. Very much like I'd also found Martin McDonagh's earlier film, In Bruges.

McDonagh made a movie set in, to him, a foreign country, America, without really understanding it adequately to write all the things he wrote.

Yet there were also any number of great segments in it.

[bif]

14. Saw it flying back from London. Really enjoyed it.

I can see how some folks might not like it. But I thought it was quirky and offbeat. Great acting.

[pressbox69]

15. Still

My favorite movie from last year.