The biggest film date of the year is coming up. It’s June 1, the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth. A hundred years on we’re still talking about her, watching her films, seeing documentaries about her on TV and discussing in bars and homes whether she was a good actress or just chewing gum for the…
I was reading a book in Eason’s one day some years ago when I got the distinct impression the words were familiar to me. After a few minutes I realised why. They were my own ones. But someone else’s name was on the cover. Plagiarism is as rampant in the music business as in literature.…
There’s a difference between emotion and emotionalism, between sentiment and sentimentality, between pathos and bathos. Unfortunately, Morgan Matthews’ 500 Miles (12A) loses out on all three counts. If Maeve Binchy was still with us, it’s the kind of thing she’d probably be penning, giving us an Ireland that’s not so much the way we see…
In Trad, a rebellious young fiddle player Shona (Megan Nic Fhionnghaile) leaves her Donegal Gaeltacht home to find herself through her music. She joins a band and lives a hippie lifestyle of hitch-hiking, camping and busking with her sort-of boyfriend Ray (Cathal Coade Palmer) whom she hooks up with on the rebound from the older,…
Our gender defines us. Men fight in trenches while women engage in different types of struggles in civilian life. Which is the stronger sex? Is it the military person or the homemaker? Brain or brawn? Adolf Hitler or Eva Braun? We often hear taunts about the British being “the old enemy” but Ireland never had…
Recent conflicts in Gaza and Palestine have caused many people to reflect anew on the holocaust of World War II. In such circumstances, it might be timely to re-view the 1959 film Conspiracy of Hearts. Featuring Lilli Palmer as the Mother Superior of an Italian convent, this is a moving work dealing with the efforts…
Many musical personages told lies at the beginning of their careers. Bob Dylan would have had people believe he jumped trains with Woody Guthrie. Nadine Coyle used “creative mathematics” about her age to get onto a pop show when she was 16. Louis Walsh made up stories every other day to propel Boyzone into the…
Eock Hudson used to say, “I can’t play a loser because I don’t look like one.” George Clooney doesn’t either, which makes his casting in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (15, Netflix) questionable. It’s a film about a kind of male Norma Desmond – the faded star of Sunset Boulevard – trying to find out what’s…
There are very few bank robbery films about which I could say that my prevailing impression of them was one of quietness but No Ordinary Heist falls into that category. Having said that, the tension isn’t compromised on that account. Maybe it’s even amplified. Such quietness is a welcome relief from the flash-bang style usually…
If you think the people who shot Veronica Guerin are bad,” a garda said after the heroic journalist was shot in 1996, “you should see what’s coming up now.” Evil spiralled through the decades. Spilt Milk is set a decade before 1996. We’re in the relatively early days of Ireland’s drug ‘culture.’ (I’ve always hated…
Aubrey Malone