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By Cole Smithey

‘In Bruges’

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“In Bruges” (pronounced brooj) is a highly unique and stylized black comedy that makes good on its ostensibly simple hitmen/boss narrative trope. Colin Farrell has visible fun as Ray, a newbie assignment killer sent to Bruges, Belgium, with his more experienced Irish compatriot, Ken (Brenden Gleeson), to hide out after a London kill that went astray. A Laurel and Hardy friendship develops between the two men as they sightsee Belgium’s best preserved medieval city while awaiting instructions from their excitable and profane boss Harry (exceptionally played by Ralph Fiennes). The film shifts into a postmodern existential satire even as the body count goes up in a surprise-filled climax. Here is an unapologetically irreverent European flick that makes subtle character development as effortless as Ferrell’s upward bent eyebrows.

“You’ve got to stick to your principles” is the theme that our characters wrestle with individually as their similar, but different, purposes are revealed for coming to the picturesque town with its romantic canals, bridges and cobblestone streets. Harry visited Bruges with his parents as a boy and looks back nostalgically on the ancient city as a magical kind of fantasy land. There’s a streak of poetry in Harry’s psychology that allows him to send his bumbling killers to hide out in a place he genuinely loves. We can interpret Harry’s subconscious longing for an excuse to revisit Bruges. The foreshadowing is icily transparent and allows for a loaded periodic climax of noir, comic and dramatic elements that dip into Grand Guignol visuals.   

Ray and Ken are two fish out of water and as such attract odd pals that include drug dealers, prostitutes and a racist American dwarf film actor Jimmy (Jordan Prentice). There’s some borrowing from last year’s black comedy hit “Death at a Funeral” in transferring a dwarf character to carry significant plot points, but when Jimmy goes off on a cocaine rant about an imminent race war, the character metaphorically sticks out his tongue and bites it clean off.

Ray repeatedly complains that Bruges is a “shithole,” while happy-go-lucky Ken clearly enjoys the place’s innate charm. But Ray’s generally put off demeanor conceals a terrible heartbreak over a lethal mistake he made in London. Nonetheless, Ray’s spirits rise when he meets a local hottie named Chloe (Clemence Poesy), a criminal in her own right, with a boyfriend (Jeremie Renier) who loads his gun with blanks.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh (“Six Shooter”) follows the form of classic ’60s era European cinema in giving the first act a leisurely pace in which nothing much seems to happen while layers of behavior are adding up. There’s no mistaking the township of the title as an enormous secondary character stealing for menace. The film’s gradually escalating tonal steps from innocence to violence begin with an unintended verbal insult from Ray toward a family of fat Americans that want to climb the narrow stairs of a bell tower. The weight challenged patriarch ineffectually chases Ray around the Town Square in a desperate attempt at pummeling the cheeky Irishman. Ray’s anti-American disposition gets more unflattering when he punches out an offended couple in a restaurant. The edgy humor has a ring of realism that extends the language of the text. Everything is understated and everything is overstated, at the same time.  

“In Bruges” is a movie that makes you thirsty for the golden Belgian beer that its characters savor at every opportunity. It made me want to travel to Bruges to spend a few days drinking, but the film’s rapid submersion into the inky waters of pitch black comedy is its real reward. Black comedy is a rich genre when done well because it forces the audience to look at humor, culture and death under an abstract microscope. I just love a good abstract laugh. CV

‘Untraceable’

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2008 gets its first installment of torture porn with a predictable thriller that blames a bloodthirsty public and big media for fostering an atmosphere of retribution violence. Diane Lane gives a solid performance as FBI cyber crimes Special Agent Jennifer Marsh. Marsh discovers an untraceable web site (“killwithme.com”) where a murderer tortures victims at a rate constant with its number of visitors. The unwritten subtext of the gory torture scenes is that the horrific murders pale in comparison to the punishments doled out daily by American military at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison camps. So long as the American government continues to torture people, it seems we will continue to see horror thrillers like “Untraceable” arrive in cinemas at a steady clip.

“Untraceable” starts with a darkly humorous jab. Our anonymous killer (Joseph Cross, “Running With Scissors”) sits a kitten in front of a sticky rat trap that will ensnare the feline for Web viewers to witness its gradual demise. It’s a back-handedly-benevolent comic narrative gesture that eases the audience into the gruesome torture and violent visual images yet to come.

Special Agent Marsh is a widowed, single mother living in a modest house in Portland, Ore., where her own mother (Mary Beth Hurt) is a fixture. At work, Marsh nails identity thieves and pedophiles that she can call in surgical police strikes against quicker than she can go out for a coffee. As such, her prescient leap of logic about a kitten killer’s inevitable aptitude for torturing people to death comes too quickly to allow for much suspense to build before the first human victim makes his appearance. A taser gun becomes cinema’s modern-day chloroform when a man is abducted in a sports arena parking lot before being stripped, cut and shackled in front of a Web cam with an intravenous needle that speeds bleeding with every new visitor that logs on. Some clever satire attends a discussion among FBI staffers over whether or not to publicize the situation for fear that it will accelerate the man’s death. But their concerns are quickly cancelled when a huge number of Web hits prompt the inescapable fate.

Marsh’s right-hand cyber crimes partner Griffith (Colin Hanks) makes a foreshadowing observation that, if only the victim had been a boy scout, he could have blinked out his location to the camera with Morse code. It’s enough to send viewers on a personal quest to learn the alphabet of dots and dashes should a need ever arise.

Director Gregory Hoblit (“Primal Fear”) ramps up the tension with the second Web cam killing that involves the use of sunlamps. The picture takes on the tone of a “Saw” franchise slasher picture where the mechanical method of insuring a grisly death takes on as much importance as the incident itself. And yet, the keystone of the plot rests on the visually shocking suicide of a college professor who combines a well-placed gunshot with a bridge fall to insure his desired result. The filmmakers outdo themselves with a disturbingly real vision of expiration by suicide that is shown repeatedly to underscore the responsibility of the media to the motives of our resident psycho.  

“Untraceable” provokes discussion over the way snuff films were thought to be the stuff of myths even just a few years ago, but are now widely available to any adventurous Web surfer. It ultimately fails as a thriller because the script is so anxious to make some oblique point about the power of the web and exploitation media that it forgets about Marsh’s underdeveloped psychological journey. There aren’t enough layers of visual meanings for the plot to add up emotionally. What you see is what you get, and as the famous quote about pornography goes, “you know it when you see it.” Death is the new sex in American cinema. CV

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