This blog is primarily about my films, my screenplay, the influences behind it and my efforts to get ‘The Fugitive Stag’ on the small or big screen – OK, sometimes a few other interests sneak in from time to time. Last night we both enjoyed an excellent black comedy, as above. An intriguing story, brilliant acting all round, great screenplay, producing and directing, by Martin Mc Donagh. Don’t know how we missed it when it came out in 2017. It was a great cast, with superb performances from Frances and Sam.
While traveling through the southern USA at thr end of the millennium, Mc Donagh came across a couple of accusatory billboards about an unsolved crime, which he described as “raging and painful and tragic” alleging the murder of a woman named Kathy Page by her husband Steve Page in Vidor, Texas. The billboards highlighted the incompetence of police work and deeply affected McDonagh; he said that the image “stayed in my mind […] kept gnawing at me” and presumed that they were put up by the victim’s mother. This incident, combined with his desire to create strong female characters, inspired him to write the story for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Wikipedia.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 387 reviews, and an average rating of 8.41/10 – On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film had a weighted average score of 88 out of 100, based on 50 critics, indicating “universal acclaim.
We both gave it 9/10.
The Fugitive Stag 