2022 was a good year for movies, for the most part—refreshingly so after two years where you can blame the poor output on the pandemic (though also another year before that, where you can't). But, man, some of the movies people have hyped the most have been some of the least worthwhile. Here's some more mini-ish reviews of a couple of aggravating films I didn't like, The Banshees of Inisherin and We're All Going to the World's Fair, plus a couple of pleasant little animated movies that I did, Inu-oh and The Bob's Burgers Movie.
"You're all feckin' boring!" cries Siobhan Suilleabhain (Kerry Condon) about two-thirds of the way through The Banshees of Inisherin, giving voice to my inchoate feelings as regards the ulcerating feud that has developed between her brother Padraic (Colin Farrell) and his friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) over the latter's decision to end their friendship of many years because the former is, as Colm has it, simply an excruciatingly dull time-sink. And nevertheless did Martin McDonagh make a movie about them. Siobhan isn't very interesting either, for the record. She has Belle Trait: her personality is she's literate. As for the movie McDonagh made, what we have is basically a stageplay that happens to have establishing shots sometimes—McDonagh, an Oscar-nominated (maybe Oscar-winning, I forget) filmmaker, is perhaps still fundamentally a playwright, for better and worse—and such establishing shots as there are here are mostly just things he likes to drop in, as editing bumpers. The cinematic element of Banshees is mostly just wondering how a movie devised for theatrical release and with some of the most Hibernian stretches of Ireland at its disposal still looks so much like streaming content in terms of its photography and color grading (the most "theatrical" element is that it's in 'Scope ratio, which is always the right choice for any film that is mostly close-ups and two-shots). However, if I'm being very nice I do in fact like the occasional use of windows made out of badly-made early 20th century glass to construct frames-within-frames, principally by having Farrell milling about outside a structure, frowning like a middle-aged puppy through the distorting glass whilst Gleeson, sitting in the foreground, scowls and pointedly ignores his silent entreaties. These threaten to be funny until, as they almost inevitably do, those silent entreaties become active wheedling and Padraic turns about and enters said structure. This is pretty much his whole character, now that I think about it, except he gets madder about it as time goes on.
