2010

[Originally Published: August 17, 2010]

For Mr. Marshall, who, when he heard I was penning this column a couple of years back, suggested this rather cleverly-written film as a possible Hidden Flick. Well, Big T, here it is at long last. Better late than tomorrow, eh? As always, the wordsmith was right.

And so the Merry Prankster hands me some dessert, which I appreciate since I’ve been eating salty food, and taking drinks from a monstrous soda, and jaysusHcrist!! When did Phish start playing a 45-minute Light?! This is bad ass porno funk, just like ‘97. Kneeling nearby, resting, at peace, content with the flow of the planets, and oblivious to nothing, her deep gaze resting upon me, forcing its own mysterious link, is a shy woman reading Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance. She smiles, I smile, and as I walk out through the in door, a tall and amiable lyricist follows, matching me stride for stride. We head to my European car—ever onwards, of course—to a destination he has plotted, as we shoot out towards Belgium, in our next edition of Hidden Flick, In Bruges.

Although In Bruges did minor business in the States, it garnered numerous international awards, and better box office overseas. Nee bother, of course. Who cares? We, of course, at the Hidden Flick factory are more interested in the hidden truths buried ‘neath the surface of these little celluloid gems, and buried below this little ‘two hitmen hide out in Burges, Belgium caper’ surface is a dark truth about humanity. What if one chooses the path of the cold-blooded, gun-for-hire, mercenary in a bloodless society, and someone who isn’t on The List, the Unholy Writ which Determines who is Slain and who Isn’t, gets nailed, tagged in the head with a stray bullet, and dies. Well, what if that innocent bystander is a child, a young boy, a young wandering soul with all his life, hopes, ambitions, dreams, and world-yet-to-be-conquered-aspirations still ahead of him?

Indeed, therein lies the entire surface details about the film co-starring Colin Farrell as the hapless upstart Irish hitman who runs way fucking afoul in his first job, killing a priest and a young boy, and also co-starring Brendan Gleeson, his senior hitman, and one who quickly takes him away to Bruges, Belgium, due to the specific instructions of their evil boss, Ralph Fiennes. The script is taut, pristine, profane, politically incorrect, and joyfully hilarious in every way. It is also sad, profound, dead right in wrong ways, and oddly reminiscent of what makes humans so divine and soulless all at the same time.

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick, In Bruges…

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