Tales from the Bitface

Martin McDonagh’s latest is sad, hilarious, tragic, and true. Or feels like it could be true, even if some of the decisions characters make are baffling, to say nothing of gruesome.

On a rugged, beautiful island off the coast of Ireland in 1923, with the civil war going on on the mainland, two friends fall out. Or rather, one says he doesn’t like the other any more. A whole sequence of events flow out from this simple, almost child-like choice.

The funniest part happens when one of them goes to confession.But that’s only to be expected: confession’s a pretty funny kind of thing, when you think about it.

(Updated 2022-12-11 at 18:47:58)

Reasonable filmic conversion of the graphic novel. It doesn’t really do a lot with it, but it’s fine.

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Another US high-school comedy. Not a John Hughes 80s one, but one that makes explicit reference in-universe to things like The Breakfast Club. It’s a pretty good example of the genre.

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I saw this at the cinema when it came out back in 2017. Loved it then. Loved it even more now. Incredible soundtrack, amazing (daft) car chases. Crime.

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It's an old Merchant-Ivory period piece. Pleasant enough, but kind of stilted in places. In part. some of that may be deliberate, to reflect the buttoned-up nature of the times, but it's hard to say.

Amusingly, the image that's shown as I type this on Letterboxd — which may or may not be the image that accompanies the post when it reaches my blog — is from the very last scene of the film, if I'm not mistaken. An odd choice.

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Fun story about competitive acapella singers at a US university.

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Decent story about a US lobbyist who takes on the support of a bill to restrict some tiny amount of gun rights. She quits one company and moves to a smaller one to do it.

An absurdly fanciful ending, sadly. The sadness is in American society, not the film.

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There's a lot to like here if you're already a fan — or at least, have some interest. Probably not too much if neither of those apply.

It has interviews with those who are still with us (or who were when it was made). Not just John Cale, Moe Tucker, Doug Yule, but members of Andy Warhol's Factory crew (the 'Superstars'), like Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga.

I'd like to have heard more of the songs, especially the less well-known ones, and seen more footage of them, such as there is. It uses the documentary style that just films people speaking and edits those interviews together. That has a certain power, but I feel it might have helped to have a narrative, a voiceover elaborating on the story.

Recommended, though.

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Long time since I saw this, so all I remembered really were the quotable bits ('We've gone on holiday by accident!')

The high dinginess and run-down state of Britain as the sixties ran down is skilfully evoked. It's very male, though. The only female character is the woman in the tearoom who refuses to serve our heroes. If that's the right word.

It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it has aged surprisingly well.

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