5.9 | / 10 |
Users | 2.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.4 |
A dark comedy about the people who <i>don't</i> find fame and fortune, the film is loosely based on the lives of brothers Neil and Ivan McCormick, who grew up with the members of U2 and played in a rival band, only to watch their former schoolmates become world famous while the McCormick brothers continued to struggle for recognition.
Starring: Ben Barnes, Robert Sheehan, Krysten Ritter, Stanley Townsend, Pete PostlethwaiteMusic | 100% |
Dark humor | 7% |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The most delicious irony about the title Killing Bono is that it was suggested by the U2 frontman himself. "If you want your life back, you'll have to kill me," he jokingly told his childhood friend, rock critic Neil McCormick, on whose memoir the film is loosely (very loosely) based. As schoolmates, McCormick and the Irishman Formerly Known as Paul Hewson both wanted to be rock stars, and McCormick's brother, Ivan, briefly played in Hewson's band, which was then called "The Feedbacks". But not everyone can be a star. Hewson and his band became Bono and U2, while the McCormick brothers hit one snag after another. Bono would eventually tell McCormick that they were cosmic opposites and that McCormick had "soaked up" all of Bono's bad luck, inspiring McCormick to subtitle his book "I Was Bono's Doppelgänger". Director Nick Hamm was attracted to McCormick's story because of what it was not—namely, not a classic bio-pic of a show business icon. McCormick's was the story of most people, who don't grow up to fame, glory and success, but have to reckon with an ordinary life, except that McCormick's tale had the recurrent frisson of constantly rubbing shoulders with someone who'd made it. Hamm optioned the book and began the six-year ordeal of developing a script and raising the financing, a process that McCormick would later call "so soul-destroying, it makes rock-and-roll look easy". After fourteen rewrites, the story had been heavily fictionalized in ways that McCormick found unnerving, even if the core of the experience remained intact. The film now opens with the title's jokey metaphor transformed into literal fact, as McCormick aims a real gun at his former school chum (something that never happened, except possibly in McCormick's imagination). Of course, by the end that opening scene is revealed to be more complicated than it first appears. Hamm and his inventive screenwriters, who included Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (The Commitments, The Bank Job and Flushed Away), transformed McCormick's life into a mordantly witty absurdist comedy filled with surreal touches in which, as McCormick would later say, "I still don't get to be a rock star, but I do get the best lines". He also got to be played by actor Ben Barnes, who was Prince Caspian in the Narnia series and who, as the vintage photos accompanying the credits demonstrate, is a lot handsomer than McCormick ever was.
As a deluded, fame-obsessed young man, of course, I never doubted that one day someone would make a film of my life. It just never occurred to me it would be a comedy.
Killing Bono was shot by Kieran McGuigan, who is used to working with tight budgets in both TV and independent features like The Whistleblower. According to IMDb, the shooting format was Techniscope, which is the poor man's Cinemascope created in Italy in the Sixties, frequently used by Sergio Leone and making something of a comeback now that digital intermediates can be employed to overcome its limitations. (And no, it's not Super35; you can look up the differences.) Shooting in Belfast to get the look and feel of Dublin in the Seventies and Eighties, McGuigan has created a wide array of palettes and textures for Killing Bono, from the surreal, almost fluorescent sheen of the 1987 sequence that opens the film to the gritty, earth-toned origins of the Bono/McCormick rivalry in the mid-Seventies. All of these are smoothly reproduced on Arc's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which features deep blacks (where appropriate), fine detail and a natural-looking grain structure that one must look hard to notice. Colors range from faded (e.g., in the brothers' London flat) to fully saturated (check out the reds at Machin's club). There's no sign of high frequency filtering or artificial sharpening, nor did I spot any compression artifacts.
Music is the most critical component of Killing Bono's DTS-HD MA 5.1 track, and one of the mix's interesting features is how effectively it recreates realistic sound for the eras and venues represented. In the early portions of the film, when Ivan McCormick and the future U2 are rehearsing, they sound like teenagers jamming at home, which is to say, they sound terrible. Later, as the various incarnations of the McCormick brothers' band move into local venues and, eventually, go on the road, we get the muddy mix, overloaded amps and boomy bass familiar from sound systems that have seen better days. The best-sounding songs are usually heard in the distance, and they're almost always by U2. Wait until the credits, though, for a medley of studio recordings of the McCormick brothers' songs as well as songs written for the film by "Joe Echo"; they may not have the iconic heft of U2's hits, but they're good tunes. Other than to support the music, the surround channels are used sparingly. Dialogue is always clear, assuming one has no trouble with Irish accents. (If you do, there are subtitles.)
In addition to its other virtues, Killing Bono is the final film of the great Irish actor Pete Postlethwaite, whose long battle with cancer ended in January 2011. Director Hamm, who had been friends with Postlethwaite for years, has said that he knew during the making of Killing Bono that the end was near. The actor says in the "Making Of" extra that he'd never before played a character like this one, but he brought to the role the same vivid depth that made all of his characters memorable, from the sinister lawyer Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects to the hunter Roland in The Lost World to the gangster Fergie in The Town. Here, as the McCormick brothers' cheerfully dissolute gay landlord, Karl, who insists that there be no sex or drugs on premises unless he's allowed to participate, Postlethwaite manages to convey in a single character the spirit of an entire bohemian culture. You can almost feel the debauched Seventies trailing after him. Highly recommended.
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