Hail, Caesar!

HAIL, CAESAR!           C+              

USA  Great Britain  (106 mi)  2016  d:  Joel and Ethan Coen  

Universal Pictures [United States]                       

A zany parody of the Hollywood studio system that features a terrific cast, though many just make brief appearances, but ends up being something of a stinker, where it’s just not that funny, and is not among the Coen’s best efforts, despite a screwball comedy style wreaking havoc with the mayhem that develops behind the scenes.  More of a nostalgia piece, where the Coens look back fondly with memories of old Hollywood, a simpler time when studio heads were gods that ruled the earth, whose exponential power was unrivaled and indisputable, where the world turned on the decisions made by these men—at least according to moviegoers and the movie moguls that controlled the Hollywood industry.  While they affectionately take us backstage with many tributes to earlier times, we see Scarlett Johansson as DeeAnna Moran dressed in her Esther Williams swimsuit diving off of elaborate Busby Berkeley designed platforms into a pool filled with synchronized swimmers, taking a fantasy approach to the world around us.  The postwar Hollywood era of 1951 was filled with behind-the-scenes recriminations, with the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist, where the industry was uncovering communists from under every rock and the paranoia of the Cold War was in full force.   Into this insulated, self-contained yet totalitarian system is an idealized fictional hero, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the head of production for Capitol pictures, a guy known as a fixer for all manner of things that could and do go wrong.  He’s the guy that wanders from set to set, hailed by all the actors, extras and crew as a swell guy, a kind of father figure that they can turn to for help or commiserate with over a drink after hours, where his job never ends, as he’s busy 24 hours a day solving the various problems of the industry, like heading off scandals before they become public.  Hovering around the studio like locusts during a plague are rival gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (both played by Tilda Swinton), twin sisters that loath one other, think they are world renowned investigative reporters, and would stoop to any lengths to get the dirt before the other.  In this case, word has it that unmarried DeeAnna has become pregnant, though the humor is the crude street language coming out of her mouth in a thick Brooklyn accent, where her scintillating sensuality in water is undercut by a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed dame straight out of a gangster picture.  Mannix, with his secretary Natalie (Heather Goldenhersh) always in tow close behind, clipboard in hand, spends the rest of the film trying to keep this story under wraps. 

While he greases the palms of afterhours policemen for looking the other way, Mannix rescues his damsels in distress, pulling them out of compromising situations before word gets out, then rearranging the facts like a Hollywood script to fly under the radar, allowing his productions to stay on schedule with as few interruptions as possible.  Simultaneous to these incidents, he meets on the sly in some unnamed Chinese restaurant to discuss the latest offer from Lockheed Corporation for an executive position that would allow him to sit pretty for the rest of his career, where he could live a country club lifestyle of ease without all the headaches associated with running a studio.  Spending a moment or two at breakfast with his wife (Alison Pill) and kids, who barely know what he does for a living, he’s out the door and back on the job.  In a tribute to Hollywood epics like QUO VADIS (1951) and BEN-HUR (1959), the studio has all their money behind a mammoth sword and sandals spectacle set in ancient Rome called HAIL, CAESAR!  A TALE OF CHRIST, starring George Clooney as Baird Whitlock, the face of the studio, playing a Roman general who begins to see the light while standing below Christ at his crucifixion.  Slipped a mickey into his drink during a shot by one of the extras, he passes out stepping out of his trailer and is quickly abducted, whisked off to some remote oceanside villa down the coast.  Shortly afterwards Mannix receives a ransom note from a Marxist group calling themselves “The Future” claiming they’ve got his star, demanding $100,000 for his release.  Pulling the money out of petty cash, stuffing it into a briefcase, he awaits further instructions.  When Thora arrives ready to release her incendiary story that will light all of Hollywood on fire, he’s happily surprised to discover she knows nothing about the kidnapping, that instead she’s dragging up old rumors about how one of the studio stars slept his way into stardom.  Enter Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), revising one of those all-male dance numbers from the Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra sailor comedies like ANCHORS AWAY (1945) or ON THE TOWN (1949), embodying everything the rumor suggests, as does the director in question, the urbane director of drawing room comedies of manner, Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), who may as well be wearing a silk Hugh Hefner smoking jacket on the set, as he exudes elegance, savoir faire, and sophisticated sleaze, as if he’s slept with every young boy on the set.  

Not to be forgotten is rising star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a singing cowboy in the manner of a young Roy Rogers or Gene Autry, who may be the studio hope of the future, whose bronco-buster accent is part of his boyish charm.  Mannix, however, has him playing a male romantic role in one of Laurentz’s lurid melodramas, hair slicked back and dressed in a suit, where he has trouble saying a single line without that Western slur.  Laurentz works with him personally, taking the time to rehearse his entry line, but he remains tongue-tied, where he can’t even remember how to pronounce the director’s name properly.  Due to their evident dismay, little by little they whittle his lines down, so when we see the finished product, it’s actually one of the few jokes that works in the film.  Later we see him go out on a studio-sponsored date for his movie premiere with Carlotta Valdez, played by Venezuelan actress Veronica Osorio in an exotic Carmen Miranda-style, where they’re sure to draw attention.  As they go party hopping afterwards, Doyle recognizes the belt Mannix borrowed from him to wrap around the suitcase with all the money.  So on a hunch, he follows the suitcase.  Simultaneous to this, the nearly unrecognizable Francis McDormand as film editor C.C. Calhoun also has a brief but memorable scene, cigarette in hand, where she suffers a Buster Keaton moment in the editing room.  Meanwhile, Whitlock wakes up and is surrounded by an eclectic group of Marxists all claiming the Hollywood machine is only good for reinforcing its own capitalistic interests, namely making money for all the executives in Hollywood, with little regard for anything else, hoping that with his kidnapping they can coerce the industry to make movies with a skewed poltical content that is more working class friendly.  To suggest the industry would capitulate in an era of McCarthyism, which was a right-wing wet dream, is outlandishly naïve, as is much of the rest of the film, and while it veers into a level of farce, a paranoid fever-dream where perhaps the industry’s worst fears are imagined, it doesn’t really go anywhere, feels overly slight, and never rises to the level it seeks.  Instead of nonstop hilarity, which is the stamp of screwball comedy, there are instead only occasional outbursts of laughter, where most of the sequences die a slow death that simply chokes the life out of the film.  Lockheed tries to lure Mannix with insider pictures of the A-bomb explosion, suggesting this is the power of the industry, but it all just goes up in smoke without really generating much of an impact.  While it features a great cast, most all of whom are terrific, the large majority appear in brief cameo roles, where they barely register a dent in the overall effect.  It turns out to be a film that sounds funnier than it is, as it’s a clever set-up, but we keep waiting for a punch line that never comes.  

The Grand Budapest Hotel

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL         B-                           
USA  Germany  (99 mi)  2014  d:  Wes Anderson       Official site

Despite a coming attractions trailer to die for, where the sheer tone of subversive humor looks like mandatory viewing, and despite all the accolades this film has been receiving, it is not one of the better Wes Anderson films.  While the film espouses to be a rollicking thrill ride through the behind-the-scenes, Kafkaesque inner workings of the Eastern Bloc, rivaling the plot twists and cherished thrills of any Agatha Christie novel, what’s lacking, unfortunately, is a connection to any of the characters, generating a dull thud in the viewer’s heads suggesting none of the sheer daffiness of the story makes any difference in our lives whatsoever, but instead feels like an over-caffeinated, completely invented, cartoonish world of lunacy and adolescent silliness on display.   Yet we’re led to believe this film is so clever, as the rambling narrative offers a continual diversion into another dreamlike world, where we feel immersed into an Arabian Nights fantasy set behind the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War, where the film features a gala of stars where all of this offers such amazing potential that the film never comes to realize, as so much of it lies flat on the screen.  While it’s a well decorated screen, given an overly sweet, confectionary sugar look where an attraction to baking goods is essential to appreciating the film’s many side plots, but it just gets too carried away with its own indulgent excess, as if this is a whimsical, lighthearted delight, but so many of the comic bits feel overly contrived and repetitive in tone, where it’s so caught up in a dry parody of sophisticated wit that it forgets the magic of whimsical fun.  Some will have a good time with this film, but it’s an acquired taste and not for everyone.  Unlike 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Moonrise Kingdom, arguably Anderson’s most delightful and thoroughly enjoyable film, one that reaches artistic heights because the essential story being told actually matters, where two highly intelligent pre-teen kids in love make a run for it, escaping the hum drum conformity that waits for them at home, where the kids lead a more charming life, feeling highly autobiographical and supremely tender, using the sophisticated interplay of the music of Benjamin Britten to add a theatrical flourish.  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a return to the smart-assed, mocking tone of Anderson where he remains aloof from the audience. 

It’s not for lack of trying, as the effort given by Ralph Fiennes as hotel manager Gustave H. is exemplary, one of his finer performances, as is the previously unheralded Tony Revolori as Zero, his Lobby Boy, where the mischief these two get themselves into comprises the heart of the story.  Many of the secondary characters, however, barely generate a pulse, despite the exaggerated, over-the-top nature of their creation.  Even the opening falls flat, as there’s a slowly developing, somewhat boring modern era prelude that leads to a flashback sequence that generates all the interest, becoming a story (the present) within a story (the near past) within a story (the far past), where Fiennes immediately finds the right tone, becoming the center of attention, but so many of the rest feel like stock characters.  The meticulously designed sets feel like zany fun, but the execution of much of the material leaves something to be desired.  A tribute to troubled Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a pacifist and anti-nationalist during the rise of Hitler, Anderson draws upon his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday that he wrote escaping the Nazi’s in exile during the war shortly before his suicide, a practically unknown writer in America today, yet in the 20’s and 30’s he was the most translated European writer. 

The hospital train in which I was returning arrived in Budapest in the early morning hours. I drove at once to a hotel to get some sleep; my only seat in the train had been my bag. Tired as I was, I slept until about eleven and then quickly got up to get my breakfast. I had gone only a few paces when I had to rub my eyes to make sure that I was not dreaming…. Budapest was as beautiful and carefree as ever before. Women in white dresses walked arm in arm with officers who suddenly appeared to me to be officers of quite a different army than that I had seen only yesterday and the day before yesterday…. I saw how they bought bunches of violets and gallantly tendered them to their ladies, saw spotless automobiles with smoothly shaved and spotlessly dressed gentlemen ride through the streets. And all this but eight or nine hours away from the front by express train. But by what right could one judge these people? Was it not the most natural thing that, living, they sought to enjoy their lives?—that because of the very feeling that everything was being threatened, that they had gathered together all that was to be gathered, the few fine clothes, the last good hours!

Here it jumped out at me, naked, towering and unashamed, the lie of the war! No, it was not the promenaders, the careless, the carefree, who were to blame, but those alone who drove the war on with their words. But we too were guilty if we did not do our part against them.

Transporting us to the illustrious era of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the most glorious vacation spot in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, the film attempts to recreate the luxurious aristocratic splendor on display before that polite, civilized world was destroyed by war, even as the building still stands today nestled among the mountainous beauty of the peaks dotting the landscape, quiet and empty now, completely harmless, an old decaying structure that is a wondrous relic of the past that stands as a metaphor for a society on the verge of collapse.  In the era when Gustave H. runs the hotel, he represents the essence of civilized manner and high level service, where everyone’s needs are catered to and taken care of, where his job is to make it as smooth and effortless as possible.  His Lobby Boy is an apprentice still learning the trade from the master, teaching him to understand what a guest wants, and then getting it to them before they can even think of it themselves.  His secret is wearing a scent called Eau de Panache cologne, turning him into a ladykiller, where female guests of all ages are his specialty, offering the most intimately personalized services of the house.  When one of his wealthiest guests dies unexpectedly, Tilda Swinton as Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis, her extraordinarily wealthy and extended family is shocked to see she left her most prized painting to none other than Gustave H, causing a scandalous outrage, where her maliciously foul-minded son (Adrien Brody) and his heinously depraved hit man (Willem Dafoe) are determined to get the painting back, using a series of threats and intimidation tactics, which include detestable passport challenges of his precious Lobby Boy, a man in exile who unfortunately travels with flimsy travel documents, where Gustave H. is even thrown into prison.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Gustave H. adapts miraculously to prison life, where he’s at his best while serving the needs of others, but all that matters now is making an escape.  Borrowing liberally from all the prison escape movies, this has to be the most difficult and convoluted escape route ever devised, turning what should be a suspenseful event into a tedious exercise of extending a joke far too long, as whatever original cleverness there was is eventually overwritten to the point of exhaustion.  The rest of the film is basically a chase movie filled with murders and double crosses, remaining out of reach from Dafoe’s deadly assassin who is a miraculous master of disguises, where the sinister threat of fascism on the rise is expressed as a Zubrowkan political movement involving black jackboots and leather trench coats, where they may as well be Blue Meanies out to destroy the candy-colored beauty of Gustave H’s pastel dreamscape.  Much of this does recall Guy Madden’s hypnotic use of surrealism and color, also a kind of slapstick hit-or-miss the way the story develops, but mostly the film deals with a superficial world of illusion, where all the eloquent manner and artificial extravagance simply disappears, where the war saps the life blood out of the hotel and everything it stands for.  After a slow start, it’s eventually told in a frantic pace with a zest for enthusiasm and crazy screwball antics, where what’s perhaps most surprising is on the surface, the movie is all comedy and light, lost in a chaotic confusion of narrative overkill, but under the surface the film just isn’t that funny, instead feeling surprisingly somber and dull, where there’s no emotional connection to any of the characters, where the sheer dependence on such extreme artificiality suggests little of this will even matter afterwards.  Had there been no dedication to Stefan Zweig, the underlying tale of tragedy and doom about the destruction of what was once a genteel and civilized Europe might have loomed even further under the surface, but as is, it’s a confusing mix of nostalgia, comic farce, overdecorated production design, and a strange and peculiar fascination with the past, where memory can be a bewildering embellishment.   

Strange Days

STRANGE DAYS                   B+                  

USA  (145 mi)  1995  ‘Scope  d:  Kathryn Bigelow 

Look, I want you to know what we're talking about here. This isn't like TV only better. This is life.  It's a piece of somebody's life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You're there. You're doing it, seeing it, hearing it... feeling it.                

—Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes)

It’s about the stuff you can’t have, right, the forbidden fruit, hmm?  Like running into a liquor store with a .357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenaline pumping through your veins, huh? Or, um, you see that guy over there with the drop dead Philippino girlfriend, wouldn’t you like to be that guy for about twenty minutes, the right twenty minutes?  Yeah, and I can make it happen and you won’t even tarnish your wedding ring. See I can get you what you want, I can, I can get you anything, you just have to talk to me, you have to trust me, you can trust me. Cos I’m your priest, I’m your shrink, I am the main conection to the switchboard to the soul.  I’m the Magic Man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious. You say it, you even think it, you can have it.     

 —Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes)

You love that red, white, and blue, but you hate that black, black, black... But a new day is coming. 2K is coming.  The day of reckoning is upon us.  History is, and begins again, right here, right now.                —Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer)

Look, everybody needs to take a walk to the dark end of the street sometimes, it’s what we are. Now, the risks are out of line. The streets are a war zone, and sex can kill ya. So, you slip on the trodes, get what you need, almost as good as the real thing, and a lot safer.   —Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes)

Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale.         —Philo Gant (Michael Wincott)

You know one of the ways that movies are still better than playback? Cos the music comes up, there’s credits, and you always know when it’s over. IT’S OVER!!                      

— Faith (Juliette Lewis)

You’re some piece of work, Lenny Nero. You’re just calmly backstrokin’along through the big toilet bowl and somehow you never let it touch you. I mean between working vice and your current so-called occupation you must have seen every kind of perversion. But you’re just like some Teflon man, still come out this goofball romantic.                

—Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett)

Like Billy Wilder’s always popular The Apartment (1960), this is a terrific New Year’s eve movie.  Set in the year 1999, STRANGE DAYS is a wild look into the near future, a cyberpunk science fiction film, a picture of the world going out of control as we approach the New Year’s Millennium of 2000, told with a kind of apocalyptic over-kill, where already the streets of Los Angeles have been reduced to rubble, a veritable police state where citizens are openly beaten on the street by police in riot gear.  Written by former husband James Cameron and Jay Cocks, Bigelow’s approach is an over-the-top variation on the futuristic Blade Runner (1982), a picture of extravagance and largesse, oversaturated with kinetic energy, throbbing with a street life of filth, chaos and decay, showing a paranoid society on the verge of ruin, where law and order is all but absent, and the rules of society have been replaced by a rampant corruption.  Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, sort of a Harrison Ford gone to seed, as he’s a picture of sweat and grime most of the time, as if in need of detox, but his drug of choice is called playback, a video electronic device that records directly from the cerebral cortex, maximizing the potency of the experience when played back for the viewer, creating a virtual reality which, by its extreme intensity, overshadows reality.  Initially designed as a police surveillance tool, it has instead surged out of control in the rapidly developing underground black market, mostly targeting porno videos.  Lenny is a former vice cop who now makes his living selling these bootleg discs, where his expertise as a fast talking salesman are uncanny, but the world he thrives in is one of sleaze and smut, “I’m the magic man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious.”  His best friend is Max (Tom Sizemore), a private eye who roams in the subterranean realm, something of a moral cesspool, a guy with police connections everywhere but also seems to represent the scum of the earth.  Nonetheless, he’s the kind of guy that has Lenny’s back. 

While talking in a bar, a call girl friend of theirs named Iris (Brigitte Bako) arrives in a hysterical panic, afraid she is being pursued, but disappears in fright just as quickly, warning Lenny that his ex-girlfriend and still secret crush Faith (Juliette Lewis) is also in mortal danger.  Iris makes a panicked getaway on the subway, pursued by two equally manic cops, Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner, who show no regard for shooting directly into the line of fire of the public.  When they attempt to grab her, all they get is her wig, which includes a playback headset, suggesting it was all being recorded.  Lenny, meanwhile, feels compelled to visit Faith, who has flat-out dropped him, refusing to return any of his phone calls, leaving him more eager to see her.  They are visited in the bar by his other friend, Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett), a straight-laced bodyguard that sides as a bulletproof limo driver, protecting high-priced clientele.  She has a long history with Lenny and disapproves of his latest habit, as if he’s making a living distributing drugs and porno, but she’s a loyal friend.  In the bar, they view a socially relevant black rapper on the television, Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), who uses the Millennium metaphor as the arrival of a coming judgment day, which is added to the mix of others who feel the world is coming to an end.  What’s perhaps most strange in this atmosphere of doom is the way the entire film is one long party sequence, all celebrating the coming New Year, where confetti, house music, and party revelers are seen and heard throughout.  What’s also obvious is Bigelow has a tremendous talent for building suspense, as the tension throughout is off the charts, creating a surreal and intoxicating mood and atmosphere. 

When Lenny hits the upscale nightclub where Faith hangs out, she’s unreachable, surrounded by security and her new boyfriend, Philo Gant (Michael Wincott), a sleazy music industry manager whose clients included Jeriko One, mysteriously murdered overnight, meaning his monetary value has only skyrocketed.  Faith ignores all his pleas to talk before going onstage and rocking the PJ Harvey song “Hardly Wait” Strange Days - Juliette Lewis "Hardly Wait" - YouTube (2:13).  Lenny gets his ass kicked by bodyguards for his efforts, but sneaks back in and meets her backstage, concerned for her safety, only to be told in no uncertain terms that it’s over between them.  What’s most disconcerting is receiving an anonymous disc that shows via playback a snuff recording of Iris’s death, which only sends Lenny into more of a panic, as some deranged person is obviously on the loose who enjoys the idea of sharing his demented thrills with Lenny.  STRANGE DAYS is a mixture of a societal panic spreading like a contagious disease, filled with incidents of racial turmoil and police brutality, a secret police death squad, a serial killer on the loose, and Lenny’s attempts, mostly through the aid of Mace, to figure it all out and bring some sense of rational order to the surrounding chaos spinning out of control.  Bassett was never in better shape in a movie, wearing a variety of form-fitting outfits while also kicking plenty of butt while aiding Lenny’s dangerous investigatory pursuits, as they meet plenty of bad guys along the way.  Lenny is more than a little scuffed up, where Los Angeles is simply covered in a seedy film noir depiction of endless brutality, where life is cheap and the end of the world is near.  Bassett makes a terrific femme fatale, while the usually affluent and upper crust Fiennes seems wearily overmatched through most of the film, yet the fact he’s such an odd choice only adds interest and intrigue to his dilemma.  Trying to survive in this shadowy world when forces are trying to destroy you is a thrill ride adventure, leading to a bizarre finale that fuses playback with reality, where all of the forces come together in a mish mosh of pandemonium and mayhem, all of which leads to the final New Year’s countdown, brought in with a bang.    

In Bruges

IN BRUGES                B+                  

Great Britain  Belgium  (107 mi)  2008  ‘Scope  d:  Martin McDonagh

An extremely witty, at times outrageously funny crime thriller written by the Irish playwright director McDonagh, featuring Brendon Gleeson and Colin Farrell as the freely cursing Ken and Ray, an unlikely pair of Irish hit men on the run holed up in Bruges, Belgium, which is a tourist delight for Ken and a living Hell for Ray.  The two are stuck together booked in the only room available during the Christmas holiday season where they continually grate on each other’s nerves, stuck there until they hear from their boss.  Meanwhile, Ken is astounded by the history of what turns out to be the oldest medieval city in Belgium, including a church that lays claim to having actual drops of Jesus’s blood, not to mention an old world charm of narrow cobblestone streets with plenty of dark alcoves, ancient church towers, small pubs, restaurants, hotels, and outdoor café’s overlooking the arching bridges spanning over a picturesque canal running through the city, sumptuously filmed by Eigil Bryld, while Ray thinks it’s a hellhole and is itching to get out as soon as the boss arrives.  The incessant harping dialogue between the two is the essence of the film, a stymied, existential Waiting for Godot purgatory through which other characters are introduced, offering brief rays of hope in an otherwise desolate interior landscape, where Ray especially is morbidly miserable after a hit goes wrong, accidentally killing a young boy.  Adding to this disconsolate mood is a visit to an art museum where grotesque Brueghel paintings reveal a kind of apocalyptical human mayhem, as if Hell has broken out on the face of the earth. 

Something of a character driven road movie, this outcast pair can hardly let a day go by without creating some kind of petty disturbance, usually caused by Ray, who is at his wits end pretty much every second of every day.  His mood changes, however, when they run across a film shoot where he sees the best sight Bruges has offered him so far, Chloë, a gorgeous woman on the set played by Clémence Poésy, who he impresses by sneaking past security to introduce himself. When it turns out neither is what they seem, a sudden fascination develops, which of course meets a temporary setback when a brooding boyfriend shows up, but despite the gloomy nature of their professions, all is in good fun in this movie, which for the most part is a light-hearted romp, not the least of which includes the presence of dwarf actor Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), who’s part of the dream sequence of the film shoot, and has a fixation for prostitutes and drugs, in no particular order, or Eric Godon as Yuri, the Russian gun dealer (“You can get guns anywhere.”) who finds himself characterizing his customers by their response to his carefully chosen vocabulary, which borders on the mundane, yet he swears by his methodology, or Thekla Reuten as Marie, the pregnant hotel desk clerk who insists on placing a special line in a written message left by the boss taking exception to being called the clerk, when in fact she is the owner of the establishment.  Lest one think it’s all artifice and surface hilarity, there are also abrupt mood shifts, beautifully complimented by the superb music of Carter Burwell, one of the more sublime is expressed by the musical choice of Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey), also featured in Bergman’s IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN (1997), as Ray wakes up after a boisterous party one morning, where his dour mood is the picture of inconsolable winter melancholy.   

Eventually the boss, Harry, Ralph Fiennes with a hair trigger temper and an even greater affinity for curse words, shows up in an attempt to sort things out, where it turns into an every-man-with-firearms-for-himself movie, expressed through a kinetic kind of Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt) (1998) relish, where Burwell amps up the volume and characters are seen racing through those narrow city streets in a kind of picture postcard tribute to the city itself, reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s exquisite use of Venice in Don't Look Now (1973).  Somehow, absurdity is the rule of the game, as its chaotic presence reveals itself throughout, beautifully balanced, however, by the superlative performances onscreen, by the more subdued, reigned in emotions of Ken and Ray matching wits with the near hysterical force of Harry, by the actions of the pregnant hotel owner who refuses to budge, standing between two would be killers urging them both to put down their weapons, where Fiennes utters the inevitable line: “Don’t be stupid. This is a shootout.”  Despite repulsive dwarf jokes, ridiculous race humor, and a flurry of ethnic slurs, all representative, however, of Ray’s deteriorating mood in Bruges of a Brueghel Hell on earth, where a literal Pandora’s Box of anything goes is cracked wide open, where an anti-American tourist thread is among the funniest in the film, it’s this kind of cathartic openness of no restrictions whatsoever that makes this dialogue so sharp, so free-wheeling hilarious and scathingly incendiary at the same time.  This first time film director has an extraordinary gift for dialogue, and in this picture he’s got equally gifted actors who can deliver his lines with ease, making it one of the more enjoyable movies of the year.