Whiplash Cinema 1: When Irish Eyes Are Smilin'

I suffered from severe whiplash last week. I wasn't involved in a car accident or anything. No, I went to the movies. Twice. To see Shrek the Third and then The Wind That Shakes The Barley. Perhaps you now see why I'm dizzy and disoriented.

The original Shrek was a decent adaptation of a children's book by William Steig. Sure, the movie cleaned up Steigs's truly ugly ogre until he was just movie ugly, which is actually kinda cute. (It's the same standard that television uses when the terminally adorable Alyson Hannigan is given a bad haircut and we're supposed to believe that she's ugly, or that Sarah Michelle Gellar is an unattractive outcast ((sue me, I've been watching Buffy on DVD with my daughter))). The movie was a funny and mildly subversive take on fairy tales, almost like a family film for parents who loved The Princess Bride when they were dating or without child.

Shrek did very well at the box office, so it was written in the stars that Shrek II would come to be. Surprisingly, it did not come out as a crass grab for cash. It was a breezy, zippy trip that was elevated by the decision to treat the land of Far Far Away as an ur-Beverly Hills/Vegas. Antonio Banderas came aboard as Puss-n-Boots, a welcome counterweight to Eddie Murphy's braying ass... I mean, Donkey. The genuinely witty jokes blended rather well with the fart jokes and the whole enterprise was so well-cast and done with so much obvious affection that it was one of the better sequels in memory. It made piles of gelt. Would there be a third installment? Need you ask?

Shrek the Third does feel like a cash grab. It's not horrible. It doesn't blatantly insult the audience. It does lay there like a day-old fish, something once sleek and shiny, now cloudy and dull and starting to smell just a bit. The sense of enjoyable daftness that propelled the second movie is utterly absent. This is big-budget, lowest-common-denominator Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking at its most depressing--talented people doing a workmanlike job with zero inspiration or joy. C'mon, your movie involves a quest for the young King Arthur and you can't even making a frikkin' sword in the stone joke? The Third is a Shrek too far.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley on the other hand, is a movie that could never be a commercial hit. There are reasons for this. The theater where I saw it has an intermission in the middle of every film (it's a small indie theater and the owner has to change the reels by hand.). This is actually a nice chance to visit the snack bar and the bathroom and chat with other audience members. One fellow kept complaining that the film needed subtitles. He couldn't understand the Irish accents. So, the vast majority of the Deal or No Deal masses probably couldn't understand the actors. The film is also set in 1918 in Ireland. It doesn't explain what's going on; it assumes that you, by virture of your presence, either know something about "The Troubles" or that you'll be able to catch on. It's also unrelentingly intense and packed with passionate people taking opposing sides of a complex issue. Cillian Murphy, an actor both pretty and simian, and Padraic Delaney play the O'Donovan brothers and both actors are fantastic as they portray two characters who start out in very different places and travel the same path to arrive at two (tragically) altogether different endings.

The movie is directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty. It is gorgeous; the beauty of the Irish countryside makes the violence and bitter anger that occurs even more heartbreaking. At the end of the day, The Wind That Shakes the Barley couldn't be a box-office smash because it has no hero and no real villain. It only has people; flawed, miserable, lovely people who want something noble and who do things both great and awful to achieve it.