Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - RAPED WHILE DYING

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - RAPED WHILE DYING

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

The white trash dropping slurs every other line made me kind of uncomfortable. Like, it worked, it wasn't like Tarantino bad, but it did feel kind of edgy and only affirmed the fact that I found basically every character repugnant and deserving of suffering. I wasn't really laughing much and neither was my audience, which felt appropriate.
Except the billboard company guy I guess
A lot of it felt kind of forced and fugazi, like the deer scene and (at least for me) a lot of the Woody Harrelson stuff. Also rolled my eyes at the third act black police chief but hey, good cast, good movie.

Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Dec 22, 2017

# ¿ Dec 22, 2017 01:44

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# ¿ May 23, 2024 21:08

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life...scar/977024001/
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/white-critics-three-billboards-racism_us_5a3135eae4b091ca268479f3
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-golden-globes-2018-nominations-three-billboards-director-martin-1513009970-htmlstory.html

to touch on this a lil more...I liked Three Billboards (still enough to put it in my top 10 2017) but I still genuinely find it less enjoyable and bleaker and more unsympathetic than mother! which is saying a lot. At least you feel for Jennifer Lawrence in mother! whereas every single character in Three Billboards is for the most part repugnant. I guess I live in a bubble, a lot of us do, but we don't humanize people who drop friend of the family and human being every other line. They don't deserve that.
of course, that was the point. just like the torment that was mother! so I cut McDonagh way more slack than I would Tarantino

but I can't deny agreeing with a lot of this. the movie made me squirm and I basically wanted every character to die painfully. again, I guess that was the point...but...yeah it was uncomfortable being the only PoC watching this in theaters while the white audience chortled.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/three-billboards-bad-on-race

quote:

During the "friend of the family torturing" exchange between Dixon and Hayes, everyone in the theater around me laughed. It was, of course, supposed to be comic relief. I was the only black person in the theater, lured to the film by its glowing reviews�at the time of this writing, it holds a rating of 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, boosted by several notices that gush about how the film is a dark but honest look at humanity and grief. I haven't seen many reviews mention the friend of the family-torturing gag. I haven't seen any review that asks about the joke's purpose, or who the punchline might be serving. The joke is that the white cop who tortures black people is trying to stop calling them niggers. Or maybe the joke is that McDormand, the righteously angry white protagonist, has a black friend (one of two black people we see in the town) but still thinks provoking a joke about niggers is funny. Or maybe the joke is that if we got rid of every racist police officer, we'd have no police at all�according to the white police chief.

In the conversation about being The Only One in the Room, we mainly talk about black people in professional settings. I think about it in those moments, of course, but I also think about it in movie theaters, particularly when I'm at a movie that uses race as a narrative vehicle�a movie that uses black people as part of a storytelling device, but doesn't cater to black people or show the faces of (m)any black people onscreen.

I imagine, then, that perhaps the problem of Three Billboards is one of who it is being made for: the type of people who might laugh at an extended gag about friend of the family torturing in the first act while looking forward to the redemption of a racist and abusive police officer in the third.

....

I'm interested in how much people are asked to invest in the interior of racists. It doesn't take much work to see how�in our actual lives, not just in movies�Americans are not asked to invest in the same way in the interior of the marginalized, particularly after the marginalized have died. I didn't know why I should care about the interior complexities of Dixon. After what I watched of him and after what I knew of him, I was so uninvested in the character that I had zero interest in complicating him. I was more interested, for example, in the interior of the woman he busted on a bogus drug charge�a woman presented as one of just two black people in town, who seems loyal to McDormand's character and interested in protecting her at all costs. There are Jason Dixons everywhere.

It is also worth mentioning that race didn't really need to be a topic in Three Billboards at all, especially given that writer-director Martin McDonagh handles the topic so clumsily, and never really sees it through. Black people in this movie largely exist as victims, seen and unseen, of the town's violence, and as I watched I found myself wondering why they existed there at all. As a final point of hilarity, the only two black people we see in the town end up on a date together after laying eyes on each other for a few seconds. The movie didn't need racial provocation to get its point across, and McDonagh clearly wasn't the writer to handle it anyway. In this instance, I would have gladly bowed to a landscape bereft of black.

this doesn't even bring up the comical SUDDENLY THIRD ACT BLACK POLICE CHIEF IN BIGOTED 99% WHITE SMALL TOWN which made me immediately roll my eyes (almost as much as the deer). felt like McDonagh just inserting a character for validation.

Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Jan 3, 2018

# ¿ Jan 3, 2018 20:56

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

I did reshape my opinions on a second watching not surrounded by chortling white people...it really helped. solid movie.

and it's not that I ever thought the humor was the fact itself that they were saying those words...it still just made me uncomfortable initially

# ¿ Jan 6, 2018 05:00

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

That's another one of those scenes where I was surrounded by old WASPs in theaters and had the uneasy feeling more than a few of them were unironically nodding along.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2018 20:33

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

I'm fine with where this film did end up, or didn't end up. It was well directed and acted but I can't say it was in my top 5. I don't think Martin McDonagh has quite topped In Bruges for me. Seven Psychopaths gets a lotta run here, but it was just an okay Tarantino riff for me. In Bruges > Three Billboards > Seven Psychopaths, imo

# ¿ Mar 6, 2018 17:29

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

the deer just made me kinda roll my eyes
not as much as the over the top love everyone gives to Woody and not as much as his wife's shifting accent(s) though
the whole catholic rant felt like it was inserted in from another movie too (just like the ex-husband's young GF and the humor she injected), but Frances McDormand gave it an entertaining run so w/e

# ¿ Mar 8, 2018 22:51

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# ¿ May 23, 2024 21:08

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The new chief is one of the three black characters whose sole character trait is, collectively, �being black� and �voicing approval/disapproval of how the white characters seek justice�. Rockwell�s ostensible redemption, for example, is marked by how the black couple in the bar come to his rescue by shouting �he�s a cop!� That is to say that he�s earned the black couple�s recognition - is no longer a bad cop.

spot on here.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 20:49

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