The Banshees Of Inisherin (2022) - Movie Review

 

So, back in high school, I had this friend. We’ll call him… Jay. Around when we started school, me and him were put into a special morning roll call group with a few others, all of whom were neurodivergent in one form or another. We hung around a lot during class breaks, and they were pretty much the only friends I had back then. Sure, I got along okay with the rest of my classmates, more or less, but they were more acquaintances than anything else. These guys, though? Proper mates.

Then Jay decided that that wasn’t happening anymore. One day, he just up and told me to piss off. To not hang out with him and the others during lunch like we usually did. Knowing my often-violent mood swings at the time, I’m not saying that he probably didn’t have his reasons for doing so; just that it came out all of a sudden.

And this wasn’t a one-off thing either; every so often, he would just suddenly decide that I shouldn’t be there anymore, after however many days of us kinda-sorta being cool with each other again. On a random whim, I would get cut off from the only friends I had for however long he felt like. It finally came to an end a little while before we graduated, when he made nice because, and I quote, he “found someone worse” than me. Not exactly the most welcoming apology, but I didn’t hold it against him then or now; at least the merry-go-round ended, and we were able to part on good terms.

Wild Mountain Thyme (2021) - Movie Review

Much like with The Woman In The Window, the latest from writer/director John Patrick Shanley feels like a film that wants to immediately let the audience know how much of a shambles they’re in for right from the start. Here, that takes the form of opening narration from Christopher Walken as an Irish farmer talking about how he’s already dead, but will stick around because he died in the middle of telling a story. This is the first piece of dialogue we get at about two minutes into this hour-and-a-half feature, and it’s an apt introduction for a film where I am struggling to figure out how anyone even reached this point, let alone thought it was a good idea.

Finding You (2021) - Movie Review

Sometimes, my habit of keeping track of names attached to movies gets me interested in new releases for all the wrong reasons. Much like with Fatale, The Unholy, and Kidnapped, I gravitated towards this Ireland-set romantic comedy not because of its cast, or its setting, or any of its actual content, but rather because I’m familiar with one of the filmmakers for something… infamous, let’s say. And in the case of Finding You, we have director Brian Baugh, who those with a hate-boner for PureFlix (let’s not be too hypocritical about such things, *ahem*) might remember from I’m Not Ashamed, a religious film about the Columbine school shooting that treated the subject matter with the nuance of a monster truck at a divorce hearing. I won’t say I was expecting more ‘God vs. those darn vidya gammers’, but I won’t say that primed me for good things either.

And in a way, this has a fair bit in common with I’m Not Ashamed, at least in terms of structure. See, that film was mainly focused on one of the victims of the shooting, but it also involved a lot of other shit that didn’t really need to be there (especially with how leaden a hefty amount of the dialogue turned out, in typical PureFlix fashion). Finding You has the same issue. It starts out with violinist Finley (Rose Reid) taking a semester abroad in a small Irish town, but there’s quite a few subplots bordering that one idea.

There’s also the inclusion of young movie star Beckett (Jedidiah Goodacre, easily the most Amish-sounding name I’ve ever encountered in these reviews) filming a movie nearby, the resulting romance, the bed-and-breakfast they both stay at by sheer coincidence (I’ll refrain from using that word again, lest I use it to describe every plot development here), Vanessa Redgrave as a crotchety old woman that everyone in the town hates for… reasons, showbiz drama surrounding Beckett’s public life, an old drunk who plays a mean fiddle, Finley going on a graveyard scavenger hunt using her brother’s drawings, etc.

It’s a two-hour film that certainly feels like it, but oddly enough, that didn’t end up rubbing against my pre-established short attention span for such things. It’s more that the film is packed to the gills, and it feels like a lot of trimming could have been done to make the dramatic moments ring through a bit clearer, but it isn’t actively dull to sit through in the moment. It’s quite cheesy in places, but like the scenes showing the film-within-a-film that Beckett is starring in, quite a bit of that is deliberate (right down to the Asylum-level effects work on the dragons therein). How deliberate, though, is up for debate, given the repeated line of “things aren’t always as they appear”, in a film where the opposite couldn’t possibly be more apt.

But again, I have no real hate for this thing. As much as their chemistry is rocky in a lot of places, I liked the two main leads, the scenes set in the town pub were welcoming as they should be, and for as Macaulay Culkin as Beckett’s professional arrangements are, I kinda dug the comparisons made between small town and Tinsel Town when it comes to rumours and public perception dictating how people are treated. Even with everything that’s happened over the last five years, the degree to which I got into the depiction of Beckett’s behind the scenes drama was rather unexpected. Shame the same can’t be said for the third-act break-up, as this has a particularly egregious example.

It’s a bit of an Irish stew of a film, but credit to the makers for giving a damn about what went into it and how smoothly it goes down. There’s nothing groundbreaking here as far as ‘big fish in a small pond’ storytelling, but for a relatively low-key tourist flick, it’s very pleasant and didn’t drag at any point, even with the overstuffed narrative on display. I wouldn’t say this is worth seeking out, but if it pops up on streaming at some point in the future, it’s a decent serving of scenic comfort food.