The Boondock Saints Release Date: February 10, 2009 Own it on Blu-ray Director: Troy Duffy Writer: Troy Duffy Stars: Willem Dafoe, Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, David Della Rocco, Billy Connolly MPAA Rating: R HoboTrashcan’s Rating:

“We must all fear evil men, but there is another kind of evil that we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men.”
- Monsignor, The Boondock Saints

The Boondock Saints doesn’t fit nicely into a single genre. Instead, it’s an amalgamation of a straight action flick, a dark comedy and a crime drama. It’s the story of fraternal twins in South Boston who become vigilantes and the FBI agent trying to track them down. It’s pretty safe to say that it’s unlike any other film you have ever seen.

It’s the story of the McManus brothers, Connor and Murphy, who, after quarreling with members of the Russian mafia, decide to become vigilantes who rid the world of evil. They are aided by their friend David Della Rocco, a package boy for the Italian mafia, who provides them with a hit list of bad guys. Trying to catch the McManus brothers is Paul Smecker, a sassy FBI agent played perfectly by Willem Dafoe. In addition to Smecker, the boys are being hunted by Il Duce, an unstoppable freelance hitman played by Billy Connolly.

The film has an incredibly strong cast. Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus do a great job playing the McManus brothers, David Della Rocco is excellent as David Della Rocco (a part that was written specifically for him, which is why the character shares his real name), Bob Marley (sadly, not Jamaican singer) offers some great comic relief as Detective Greenly and Billy Connolly is amazing as Il Duce. But the best performance by far is Willem Dafoe’s portrayal of Paul Smecker.

Paul Smecker is a truly memorable character and it’s hard to imagine anyone except Dafoe playing the role. He’s an incredibly intelligent and intuitive FBI agent with a low tolerance for stupidity. (All of his interactions with the moronic Detective Greenly are hysterical, especially when he shoots down Greenly’s “huge guy” and “serial crusher” theories). What’s most interesting about the character is the ethical dilemma he finds himself in – he believes what the McManus brothers are doing is necessary, but as an officer of the law, he is morally obligated to bring them to justice. Smecker is also a homosexual, but while he is certainly quite sassy, he’s far from a stereotypical Hollywood portrayal of a gay man. Smecker actually smacks his partner in the head and calls him a “fag” when he tries to cuddle and he gets kicked out of a gay bar for calling the bartender who cuts him off a “fairy fuck.” Much like Omar in The Wire, while the officers around Smecker seem to know he is gay, they respect him and fear his wrath enough not to make an issue out of it. Every scene that Smecker is in is a memorable one, although seeing Dafoe dressed as a woman at the end of the film is a memory you will most likely want to forget. (If you are wondering what crossdressing Dafoe looks like, picture the female Gremlin in Gremlins 2.)

One thing that writer/director Troy Duffy does that sets this film apart from most straight action films and crime dramas is he shows the McManus brothers heading to their victim’s location, then he cuts to the aftermath and shows Agent Smecker and the Boston Police Department investigating the crime. It’s only as Agent Smecker begins to unravel what happened that we see how things played out when the McManus brothers arrived on the scene. The best use of this concept is when Duffy shows the brothers’ first encounter with Il Duce. Duffy actually superimposes Agent Smecker pantomiming his version of what happened at the crime scene on top of the footage of the McManus brothers and Rocco squaring off with the hitman, which is a very memorable visual sequence.

The film was released with little fanfare in 1999, but eventually the movie gained a huge cult following on DVD. Thanks to the secondary success and strong DVD sales, Duffy is currently filming Boondock Saints 2 (though sadly, Willem Dafoe will not be returning for the sequel). Also, on February 10, the original film was released for the first time on Blu-ray.

Those of you who have seen the film on DVD will be surprised at how much brighter and more vibrant the picture looks on Blu-ray. While the picture still looks a bit grainy, overall the picture quality is much better than on the original DVD. The sound quality is also vastly improved.

The Blu-ray version comes with a host of extras, including two audio commentaries – one by writer/director Troy Duffy and one by actor Billy Connolly. There are also outtakes, deleted scenes and the original theatrical trailer (which is terrible and a very poor representation of the film, which may explain why the film didn’t do very well in theaters). Also, for those of you who want to reenact your favorite scenes, the disc includes the original script.

The Blu-ray release also includes two versions of the film – the original theatrical release and an extended director’s cut. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, the film’s release date was delayed and the film was heavily restricted by the MPAA due to its violent content. The director’s cut of the film includes all of the violent scenes that were original sanitized in the finished product. The only real difference is that the director’s cut features more blood splatter, and to be completely honest, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the two versions of the film. So, if blood splatter is your thing, then go for the director’s cut, but honestly you aren’t missing out on anything by sticking with the theatrical version of the film (which still has a body count of 33 and 246 utterances of the word “fuck”).

If you already own the film on DVD, you could probably be perfectly content with the DVD version of the film, but I still recommend picking it up on Blu-ray. If you’ve never seen The Boondock Saints or if you have seen it, but don’t own it, then I highly recommend picking up the Blu-ray version.

Written by Joel Murphy. The Boondock Saints is available now on Blu-ray.

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Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … the feel-good aspect of that US Airways Flight 1549 reunion.

Hell no, this isn’t going to be a borsch-belt comedy club rant on the tiny bags of peanuts, the screaming toddler in row six or the nonstop chatterer who sits beside you on that Seattle to Miami red-eye, enthralling you with every stirring detail of his humdrum life. The writing might suck, but I’m a bit more original than that.

When Mrs. Bitters and I saw the third or fortieth story about the reunion these lucky crash survivors had, I asked her, “[Wipes martini residue from lips] Even after being part of a miracle like that, do you think you would want to get together with those people ever again?”

Mrs. Bitters, always the voice of reason, said, “Hell no, because after every flight I hate every motherfucker on the plane.” The Bitters abode is a bastion of class, it is.

Flying makes me homicidal. My mood progresses – or deteriorates, if you’re one of those level-headed Buddhist types (pussy) – from irritation during baggage check-in to brooding anger in the waiting area to blood boiling wrath while boarding the plane to “give me four Valium and a syringe of heroin before I stab every prick on this plane with the nail cutter they so generously let me keep in my bookbag, which, yes Miss Leatherskinned 32-year veteran of the flight attendant world, is securely stowed under the seat of the jerk in front of me who I just know is going to slam his seat into my knees the second we hit cruising altitude, which will cause me great discomfort pain but will not, in fact, wake me up, as Captain Constant Update will feel the need to waken us every six minutes with the not-to-be-missed vitals on our cruising altitude, our cruising speed and the barometric pressure in Peoria, even though we’re headed to Dallas.

Yes, I really do hate every person on the plane.

I hate the phony-assed flight attendants. I don’t hate their safety spiels, and I don’t blame them for the pathetic snacks and soft drinks that I never eat or drink. I don’t hate the fact that their 27 trips up and down the aisle keep me from sleeping and instead serve only to distract this ADHD-afflicted moron from the too-easy in-flight magazine crossword puzzle I’m breezing through. (“Let’s see … 12 down … ‘Heston Movie ___ Hur’ … hmmm …) I don’t hate that they were last hot back when flight attendants were called stewardesses. What I hate is their phony, joyless smiles, smiles performed with the mouth but never with the eyes, those condescending empty grins that confirm that I am one more infinitely hate-able blob of airborne protoplasm crammed into smelly tube. You hate me, ma’am? Well, right back atcha Tiffani, or Melodee, or Barbi, or Misti …

I hate the pilots and their useless wind reports from our destination city. Gale force winds I want to hear about, but the fact that the winds are out of the southeast at five to seven miles per hour (oh wait, sorry, I mean knots … the pretentious pricks) is information I need only if I’m headed to Chicago for a kite-flyers convention, which unless I make some major lifestyle changes, that probably won’t be happening any time soon.

I hate the selfish asshole in the wing seat by the emergency exit door who assures the flight attendant that he for-sure-you-betcha can handle the door removal duties in the event of an unplanned landing (or, to put it in CNN Newspeak, “a fiery crash with no survivors”) when we all know good and goddamn well that he’s going to go all George Costanza on our asses and save his own lucky-to-be-in-a-row-with-no-middle-seat ass and forget the rest of us.

I hate the hot chicks. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. They strut through the airport with that born-beautiful sense of entitlement, reaping the probably-paid-for-by-some-moneyed-boyfriend-plane-ticket benefit that comes from the genetic lottery strike of a sweet little ass and a stomach flatter than Hugh Jackman’s singing voice.

I hate the fuckers in first-class. No, not because they’re in first class. They probably deserve it by having worked their asses off. I’d sit in first class if I weren’t such a shiftless blob of free-time craving sloth. What I hate about these bastards is their sense of first-class shame. When you walk through first class on the way to your seat (and I know no one reading this has ever sat in first class, because the people who sit in first class are too busy FUCKING WORKING to read poorly written online diatribes), no one in those seats ever looks up and makes eye contact with you. They pretend that they are busy, fiddling with their seatbelts and stashing magazines in the seat pocket and firing up their laptops. They don’t look at the coachbound unwashed for fear of inciting some sort of Tale of Two Cities-level class upheaval. I’d like these people so much more if they’d just glare at me with the sense of disdain and superiority they’ve earned in life, sipping their white wine while awaiting their smoked salmon appetizer. Their gesture of humility is worse than the gloating they are entitled to.

I hate everyone in the waiting area, or the pre-boarding area, or whatever the hell it’s called. It’s the Land of Flip Flops Showing Stumpy or Badly Gnarled Toes. It’s the Land of People Wolfing Down Shitty Airport Sandwiches, Doing that Ferocious Head Dive into Each Bite, Apparently Unaware that Their Fellow Flyers Can See the Disgusting Display of Ravenous Eating They Are Perpetrating on the Rest of Us. It’s the Land of Pointless Phone Calls Informing Some Bored Shitless Relative that You Are Now, At This Very Moment, Waiting for Your Flight. It’s the Land of Too Loud Phone Calls Aimed at Impressing the Rest of Us as to Your Business Acumen. (We’ll all see you in coach with the rest of us, so your bellowed phone stunt fooled no one.)

I hate the model quality blond chick who sat next to me on the flight from Florida, repeatedly bumping her bare luscious (and long, hence the incessant bumping) leg into mine for two straight hours. I hate her for her sense of entitlement, thinking she deserved whatever space she wanted because she was so hot she could be the “good looking sister” in the Aniston family. She wasn’t doing it to turn me on or to toy with me. She just wanted the space that was awarded her by the same cosmic forces that made her achingly gorgeous.

So, should I ever survive a plane crash, I’ll be forever grateful to the pilot (that is, if it wasn’t his fuckup that put us down in the first place), the flight crew (that is, if their septuagenarian asses were somehow able to assist me in my selfish, tossing-aside-of-all-smaller-bodies dash to safety) and any passengers (but not the first-out-of-the-plane douchebag with the well-stretched-out legs who was fortunate enough to land that cushy wing seat, always making him the winner in the People I Hate Most on This Fight contest I hold in my obviously sane mind) who aided in my miraculous avoidance of a premature death.

But damn it, I will not be grateful to the model quality with the long luscious legs, even if she does pull from the frigid waters and give me mouth-to-mouth. How dare she make me fly all the way from Florida with a zipper-stressing hard-on …

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Angela Martin can be a bit uptight. She is the sort of judgmental buzzkill that we’ve all had to deal with in our workplace. But Angela Kinsey, who plays Martin on The Office, couldn’t be more different from her character. Upbeat and bubbly, this Texan was more than happy to sit down and chat with us back in 2006.

If you missed the interview then, here’s your chance to read it now:
http://www.hobotrashcan.com/2006/02/28/one-on-one-with-angela-kinsey/