Cinemavenger

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is what happens when you let a playwright make a movie.  You wouldn't let a veterinarian perform your heart transplant - or a plumber do your abortion - now would you?

Martin McDonagh couldn't be more on Quentin Tarantino's dick if Q-Dog was balls deep in him.  If you tossed Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction into a blender and dumped the resulting goo onto a stage, you'd have McDonagh's Leenane and Aran Islands trilogies, which were first produced in 1996 just two years after Pulp Fiction got that mongoloid Tarantino his first taste of top shelf tang.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Like his idol's work, McDonagh's plays and, more recently, movies (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) all feature blunt as a stump tough guys whose every other word is "fuck" or "cunt."  I guess he deserves a midget's dick's worth of credit that the "cunt" spewer in Three Billboards is an actual cunt, Mildred Hayes ("Don't Call Me" Frances McDormand).  Three Billboards never tells us if Mildred's cuntiness resulted from her ex-husband beating her or caused him to, but by the time the movie gets going she makes 30-grit sandpaper look like raw silk.

Mildred's teenage daughter was raped and murdered seven months earlier.  The local cops, led by Chief Willoughby ("Morning" Woody Harrelson), have run out of leads, and Mildred feels like they've given up on the case.  To motivate them, she rents three billboards calling out the po-po.

Even though the billboards are in the middle of nowhere outside of a town and the police have arguably done everything they could possibly do to catch the rapist/murderer, everyone in Ebbing gets their panties in a twist.  Leading the charge to have the billboards taken down is one of Willoughby's men, Dixon (Sam "Norman" Rockwell), a borderline retard, full-blown racist, violent bully and mama's boy.  Dixon's mama is played by Sandy "Shores" Martin, Mac's mom on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  So there's that.

Police brutality, arson, medical malpractice, assault and battery all follow . . . at a pace that would bore a snail but apparently racks up independent film awards.  At least with every character being a total piece of shit there's no one to root for.

Wait a fucking minute.

December 1, 2017