Ripley Under Ground

Ripley Under Ground (2005) directed by Roger Spottiswoode stars Barry Pepper as Ripley, Jacinda Barrett as Heloise, Tom Wilkinson as the detective John Webster. The other principals are Douglas Henshall as Derwatt, Alan Cumming as Jeff Constant, Claire Forlani as Cynthia and Ian Hart as Bernard Sayles. Willem Defoe plays the art collector Neil Murchinson.

The story begins with Ripley on his way to an art gallery to see the exhibition of Derwatt’s work. Due to unfourtionate circumstance, a marriage proposal untimely delivered and then refused by Derwatt’s gold digger girlfriend Cynthia and a bad car crash, Ripley becomes involved in an art scam.

The idea is simple. Derwatt’s body is stashed in Jeff, the gallery owner’s country house, in a big freezer. The four friends Jeff, Cynthia, Bernard and Ripley decide to withhold the news of Derwatt’s death until all the paintings have been sold.

On the same night Ripley meets the lovely Heloise, a french student, and falls in love. Or what you will. He is after all supposed to be a psychopath, and if you look at the pathology that is supposed to be a tricky proposition.

The rest of the movie is one long complicated series of circumstance and accidents and bloody deaths all very neatly contrived to increase the sense that maybe Ripley won’t get away with this at all.  He is portrayed as more misfourtionate than mischevious.

The 1999 movie The Talented Mr. Ripley was to my mind a neat, stylish and very dark movie. It had a much more serious tone. I liked it well enough to venture into this one as well.

My response to this movie is not surprising if you take that into account. I find myself watching with a slightly inquisitive tilt to my head. This is a comedy. A very dark, messed up and bloody comedy, but a comedy none the less. Despite the cast, which contains some very good actors, the it feels hectic and contrived. Barry Pepper with his shirt off holds very little fascination for me, and yet the viewer is graced with that view quite a lot. Enough that I would remark on it as being gratuitous.

Not only is it a comedy, but it reverts to slap-stick in a couple of scenes. Ripley going at Derwatt’s frozen corpse with various implements to get him out of the freezer and then falling down the stairs with the corpse in his arms so that various appendages break with a popsicle crunch is a dark kind of slap-stick.

It’s not what I expected, nor frankly, what I wanted out of this movie. Assumptions are of course never a good thing, but like I said I had The Talented Mr. Ripley in the back of my head when I picked this movie up.

I don’t mean to convey that I was not entertained.

But if you want dark, bloody and funny I suggest you watch the TV-series  “Dexter” instead, with the far superior quality psychopath Dexter played by Michael C. Hall. It is put together in a much sharper and frankly more intelligent way.

All in all I find the performances cartoonish and the acting constantly on the verge of being down right silly. There are moments, of course, when it all seems solid, but on the whole I recommend you stick to the first movie.

Mule

Intermission

Director John Crowley and writer Mark O’Rowe have put together an interesting mix of comedy, action and romance with the movie Intermission (2003). The cast consists of Colin Farrell as Lehiff, Cillian Murphy as John, Colm Meaney as Jerry Lynch and Kelly Macdonald as Deirdre amongst others.

The story takes place in Dublin, Ireland and focuses on the everyday, working class side of society. The protagonists work as grocery clerks, busdrivers and police. It’s fairly gritty in style and works with more of a realistic look than an epic one. It serves up a slightly wicked sense of humor, and is quite dark in its moments.

The opening scene with Colin Farrell is a good indication of what is to come. Farrell’s character Lehiff seems to be chatting up a young lady in a shop, talking about true love and soul-mates, but the minute the store empties of customers, he viciously beats her and robs the till. It is done with the kind of callous brutality that actually constitutes real crime and as such it is quite realistic.

This is one of those stories where a group of characters lives intersect in interesting and unexpected ways. Sometimes those things can be quite pretentious and over elaborate, but this one works. It never crosses the line into feeling contrived and corny.

The whole thing gets started because John (Murphy) decides to test his girlfriend by offering to “take a brake”. That’s a classic mistake, becuase she says yes. What he wants is of course for her to say no. And this has strange and far-reaching ramifications, that escalate to kidnapping and murder.

Never mind the tough guy cop and the journalist who wants to play in the big league. We also have the emotionally wounded young lady who manages to go from closed off to full on heroine when a bus turns over.

This is a quirky, unexpected and charming piece of work. I like the fact that it won’t submit to easy classification, or conform to type.

So if you are in the mood for something that’s a little like life in its absurdity, has fun and games and violence and a screwed-up sense of realism I strongly recommend this one.

Mule

Hot Fuzz

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg team up again for Hot Fuzz (2007) the story of police officer Nicholas Angel who has been moved from London police to a lovely little village called Sanford in the English countryside.

 

Angel is too good at his job, making the other officers look bad, which is why they send him to a nice, quiet and out of the way place, which actually turns out to be run be a secret society in the guise of the Neighbourhood Watch Association, and yes, the acronym is completely intentional.

 

Angel is teemed up with the well-meaning, but bumbling officer Danny Butterman played by Nick Frost who has eaten one too many Cornettos and watched a few too many American cop movies, which are heavily references throughout. If your anything like me you’ve seen them all, Point Break and Bad Boys especially. It’s hilariously funny to think of this quiet and sedate British village as the setting for a huge and bloody Hollywood action spectacular, but as usual they pull it off.

 

I am a big fan of Shaun of the Dead (2004) for the same reasons. They take all the genre conventions, stand them on their head, shake them all about and in the end you wind up with a story that is deeply ironic but still manages to be scary and funny and have all the action you could possibly want.

 

Brits do comedy well for the very simple reason that when they set their minds to it they play it straight and that makes it funny. It you play it like slapstick or with a wink and a nudge it doesn’t go over as well. Mainly I think in Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead there is an assumption that the audience is intelligent enough and clued up enough to work out the references for themselves.

 

 

We also get great actors like Bill Nighy, Bill Bailey, Stuart Wilson and Timothy Dalton in minor roles. It seems true to the good old tradition that comedy deserves to be taken every bit as seriously as tragedy in order for it to be any good. It’s still a very British comedy, which means that the straight man in the centre of the action is the pivoting point in the action, but in this case the comedy doesn’t come from his loss of status. The comedy comes as a result of the clash between movie expectations created by the block buster action and the friendly little villages deep dark secrets.

 

The violence is bloody in the extreme, so if you are in the mood for a bucket of blood you’ll get it here and more than what you bargained for. And you really should watch the gag reel. These guys are really funny. Sometimes unintentionally so. And if you haven’t seen Shaun of the Dead you should. It’s got zombies. It’s got snark. What more could you ask for?

 

Mule