THE BUTCHER BOY
****/****
Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by
McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan
THE BRAVE ONE
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan

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THE
BUTCHER BOY
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by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics
produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The
Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a
secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the
filmmaker's affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live
in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of
good and emissaries of evil--worlds where the most colourful places are
the interiors of churches, where the characters' fears and failings
alike are assets. Jordan's films are unfailingly about transformation
(though sometimes they're about the failure to transform adequately, or
quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential
introspection--the Judas strain with which the modern superhero
pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality,
confronted by the idea that for as hollow as it is to change to fit the
demands of a particular time and place, it's equally useless to try to
stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry
Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from
the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh
little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the
bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute
mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game
to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair
to
Interview with the Vampire, are
pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the
lives of deviants.
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