Friday, February 8, 2008

Paradise Lost

Martin McDonagh is the Quentin Tarantino of the theater, which is descriptive shorthand for something quite extraordinary. The Tony-nominated, Olivier Award-winning playwright has single-handedly taken Tarantino’s visceral, blood-and-guts filmmaking style and transported it to live theater, exploding the possibilities of the stage like a lightning bolt. His most recent plays to reach Broadway, The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, both feature graphic scenes of murder and torture (Inishmore, in particular, is a masterful mix of stomach-churning gore and stomach-holding hilarity). Now with In Bruges, McDonagh’s debut feature starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two hitmen forced to take a vacation in a fairytale Belgian city after a botched job, he’s transplanted his fantastic film/theater hybrid onto the big screen, canceling out his own accomplishment in the process and delivering to us what can only be described as “McDonagh lite.”

To read the rest visit The House Next Door at:

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2008/02/paradise-lost-in-bruges.html

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