Finished watching the film. It is fine. The first thirty minutes are good, as are the last thirty minutes, the main problem, for me, is that hour in between that goes nowhere, or rather, it does go somewhere, but it is both obvious and unnecessary long, and hence as dull and dreary as life on Inisherin. If that was the point, then it is well executed. Now, it is not nearly as dull or overly long in the setup as some series I have watched who had preciously little to show for 26 episodes, like the recently watched Noir, but that cannot possibly be the yardstick against which to compare a self-indulgent film that otherwise had exquisite mastery of filmcraft lovingly applied to its making, including fantastic performances from almost everyone involved. Except the priest. Screw that guy. Pretty sure Colm was right, he does have impure thoughts about men.
So, basically, this has the exact same issue as Everything Everywhere All At Once had, just with darker and much less whacky humor.
Beyond that, do I have much of an opinion about it? Not really, other than perhaps mentioning that in times past I have had my fair share of Padraics that I luckily managed to phase out of my life without becoming am Irish civil war analogy, a conflict I admittedly do not know enough about to find deeper meaning in what is depicted in The Banshees of Inisherin, but I doubt it would have led me to greater appreciation.
As far as there being any comedic (under)tones, I have laughed three times, which is actually not that bad:
I also once knew a Dominic, someone who ended up on my team during my (not brief enough) stint in the armed forces. I could write a whole essay about how much fun acting out the Full Metal Jacket boot camp in real life is, but what would be the point, just go watch the boot camp part of Full Metal Jacket. We ended up carting him to an fro at the weekends, because his parents could not be bothered. They would have left him at the barracks. Hell, they probably intended for him to be left there just to have a couple more days without the guy around them.
Not entirely sure how he passed the psych/mental ability eval. He was much more limited than Dominic, really, barely capable of even remembering the ranks. He kept calling the corporals corpo-rats, and the NCOs sub-officers, which was hilarious in some ways, and decidedly less in others. Never managed to properly unload his assault rifle either. He also kept folding up his used shirts and putting them back into his locker for inspection, because he was told that all the shirts in the locker needed to be folded perfectly. Except, of course, the ones that should be in the laundry. Sigh.
Well, that is that. As with EEAAO, the world is once again safe from any impending apocalypse, at least as far as breaking the laws of physics to the point where reality unravels goes.
Indeed. There is a time and place for everything, and I do not mind slow burning movies or even series. Not that I would need to state this so explicitly, as my past posts on the subject and on really slow material (Violet Evergarden comes to mind, but also the initial seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica series), but it bears repeating. The problem I had with The Banshees of Inisherin was that after 31 minutes I felt like the setup of the film had run its course, but instead of moving on, it basically kept showing the same things over and over again to really drive home the point that Colm was trying to make to Padraic.
It was enough to make me feel Colm's pain. Then I looked at the time elapsed, and it was 36 minutes. At this point I was ready to post "I hate myself" in this thread, and almost did, but then I just sat through the rest, at least until I noticed that Padraic's beer kept moving around in the same shot, depending on the camera angle. Three separate configurations in ten seconds, I have no idea how that was not caught.
Well:
The film did catch my attention early on though. It did so rather well, it just completely turned sour at around the thirty minutes mark, and then it go progressively worse until just before the second round of Colm throwing stuff at Padraic's door. Funny, I had almost said that after that the film picks up some pace at the time, but it really does not. It just stops telling me that life on Inisherin is dreadfully dull. It felt like sitting through a work meeting or a seminar where someone keeps asking the same questions, and they are getting everything patiently explained over and over again until they finally understand it, while meanwhile I contemplate how to best resist my personal urge for self-harm in such situations.
Alan Rickman was awesome in Dogma, but I was talking about Christopher Walken. I think you clearly need to go and watch The Prophecy. The film very clearly proves that most film critics are simply hacks, because they could not appreciate its greatness - at least it became a cult hit. Avoid the sequels though, they have something in common with the Starship Trooper sequels. You can watch them, of course, but only if you can appreciate them for what they are.
The Prophecy also had the best portrayal of Lucifer. Only appears for a very short time, but Viggo Mortensen steals everyone's show, and that is hard to do next to Christopher Walken.