Seven Psycopaths (2012)

Starring: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko

Director: Martin McDonagh

Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama

Rating: A-

This movie is nothing like what you expect it to be.  That's the warning; the trailers and even the poster for this movie make it seem like it's about seven people, each one of them a psychopath, as they get up to shenanigans following a dognapping.  It is about that... but it's also about a lot more, and people who are implied to be a psychopath in the promotion for this (and even are implied to have a major role) aren't.  Not really, or at least not in the manner that you expect.

Marty (Farrell) is a screenwriter, currently working on a film titled Seven Psychopaths.  He has a few problems, however; one he's an alcoholic, two he's suffering from a bit of a writer's block, and three his screwball best friend, Billy (Rockwell) keeps on offering to help.  In addition to wanting to help Marty out, Billy is also a professional dognapper.  He and his partner, Hans (Walken), kidnap dogs then after a few days return them to their owners for a reward.  This is all going great, until they kidnap Bonny, the dog of a gangster, Charlie (Harrelson).  Charlie is willing to go to great lengths to get his dog back, killing and destroying anything that is related to this dognapping.  Through this all, Marty begins to find his inspiration for his film - although whether he or any of his friends will survive long enough to finish the script is debatable.

I did have a problem with how this film was advertised.  The trailer presents each of the stars as one of the psychopaths, and while this isn't entirely false, some of them are psychopaths, the reasons for which aren't what happens in the movie.  Furthermore, three of the stars aren't really stars and have very minor roles in the film - I loved Tom Waits' role, but it's not really an important one overall to the film, and neither of the women really have anything to do in this movie.  It's just very misleading to have them in presented as being so important and then barely have them present.

That having been said, I loved this film.  I love the way in which they tie in Marty's script and the overall plot of the film, and the struggle between the belief systems of the core characters - with Marty and Hans being pacifists, Billy being all gungho for the action sequences, and Charlie being hell bent on revenge and getting his dog back.  There are as many sequences of long talking as the characters articulate and argue about their beliefs as there are fight sequences, if not actually more.  A lot of this is a talk about what's going on with Marty's script, but everything that they say about the script relates to what's actually happening in the film's plot. It all really ties in nicely, which I loved.  The one thing that did worry me for a bit was that things wouldn't be resolved, or that the ending would be anticlimatical.  Having seen Martin McDonagh's films before, I should have known better than to worry.

The acting was also really great.  I thought the actors were really well cast.  Sam Rockwell plays the perfect weird, creepy guy, as does Christopher Walken, and to have them together is just awesome.  I thought Colin Farrell did a really good job of providing the straight man to them, particularly Rockwell, while also embracing his character's issues - somehow, Colin Farrell does drunk Irishman with a lot of life problems in general.  It was really good and made me want to watch it again and, even better, made me want to watch more of McDonagh's films.  The first thing I wanted to do when I got home was put on In Brughes.

A View to Kill (1985)

Starring: Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Tanya Roberts, Grace Jones, Robert Brown

Director: John Glen

Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller

Rating: D

Bond (Moore) is at it again, this time investigating something to do with microchips and atomic bombs and what not and it all really made absolutely no sense to me.  What I did follow, though, was the girl, Stacey Sutton (Roberts), who is the daughter of an oil tycoon whose company has been taken over by the villain, Max Zorin (Walken).  Definitely not my favourite Bond girl, but I did really like Walken as the villain.  I've found that it really doesn't matter what it's in, when Walken acts it's great.  He doesn't necessarily save the movie, but he does make it a bit easier to take.

What helps Walken is the overall stunts.  View's biggest problem is the plot is absurd and Moore is, at this point, becoming a bit old to play the character of Bond, and the overall gender of one of the villains (May Day, played by Grace Jones) makes it so that Bond can't comfortably kill her.  Where the film attempts to redeem itself is in the stunts, which are fun and pretty much what you expect from an 1980s era action film, and Walken is definitely a great villain worthy of a classic Bond film.  In the last few movies I've been a bit bored by the villains and annoyed by the fact that they all either seem to be a part of a government organization or just weird individuals who have too much money.  While Walken's Zorin isn't part of some greater organization like SPECTRE and has ties to the KGB we still at least get some idea of who he is and why he is that way.  Honestly, I didn't think I'd ever say it, but I kind of miss SPECTRE.

A couple notes.  With this film, we're saying good by to a few people.  The most obvious is, of course, Roger Moore, who retires as Bond after this film.  So far, I'd say he is my second favourite Bond, well above  George Lazenby, but far below Sean Connery.  The second goodbye is to Lois Maxwell who played Miss Moneypenny in the first fourteen Bond films.  One of the best parts about these movies is the dynamic between Moneypenny and Bond - the woman who's always present, often flirting, and yet never in Bond's bed.  A far more subtle leaving is Maud Adams, the only Bond girl to appear in three Bond films.  Adams was first seen in The Man in the Golden Gun then again in Octopussy, where she played Bond's love interest of the film, first Andrea Anders then Pussy Galore.  In View she only plays the role of an extra, but it's still significant if only because she's the only Bond girl to appear in three films.

Domino (2005)

Starring: Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Édgar Ramírez, Jacqueline Bisset, Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique, Mena Suvari, Dabney Coleman, Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken

Director: Tony Scott

Genre: Action, Crime, Drama,

Rating: C

This might be the worst movie I've ever seen Kiera Knightley in - which says a lot, because she's been in movies like Phantom Menace, Bend it Like Beckham, and King Arthur.  Actually, I'll take that back; this isn't the worst Knightley movie I've seen, but it might be the worst Tony Scott one - I've seen fewer Tony Scott movies.

Domino claims that it's the true story, mostly, of real life actress turned bounty hunter Domino Harvey (played by Knightley), although having watched it I suspect that's as legit as saying that Pearl Harbor is based on the true story of the attack of Pearl Harbor.  It tells the story of an angry girl who never really fit in until she became a badass bounty hunter.  The film alternates between being flashbacks, telling her journey into being a bounty hunter and the incident that got her arrested, and her interrogation by FBI agent Taryn Mills (Liu), to which she is all too willing to tell her story.  Not that you really believe her story.  The whole thing comes across as this ridiculous concoction, which is made worse by the fact that the movie pretends like it's based on a true story.  I think had it dropped that premise - had it simply said that the character of Domino was base on the person of Domino but that the story was a complete fabrication, it would have been better.  The entire film is really rather ridiculous, requiring viewers to suspend their disbelief - which is hard to do when it's pretending to be based on truth.

That's the biggest problem with this movie.  It's not the acting or the script or the shooting choices - all of which vary between good and not so good, but none of which alone make the movie a bad one.  It's the fact that it asks the viewer to suspend too much of their disbelief.  It's important to not ask too much of your viewers.  I can suspend a lot of disbelief in a science fiction or fantasy movie - I love being sucked into some sort of alternate reality, a world which is the result of the imagination of its creators.  At the same time, however, I hate it when someone pretends that something is set within the real world, pretends that this is even a real story.

Despite that, however, I don't really dislike Domino.  It's not a good movie, but it's kind of fun.  There's action and there's some funny bits - thanks largely to the likes of people like Mo'Nique.  The plot could have been hugely simplified, the story cleaned up a lot, and the script tightened.  But the biggest problem is definitely going to remain the fact that this film pretends like it's real when anyone can see that it isn't.