Aubrey MaloneIntimate dramas are generally more quality-studded than ‘big’ movies. The latter are flattered by the opportunities provided by multiplexes, as opposed to that nightly visitor to our living rooms we call the television set. This summer the following behemoths await you should you decide to submit yourself to their not so tender mercies. Disclosure…
Category: Film
A walk on the Wilde side at the Gate Theatre
Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband has been filmed a number of times. This week, however, I’d like to depart from my usual genre and recommend a theatrical production of it that I recently enjoyed at the Gate Theatre. Films are fine, but there’s nothing to compensate for the experience of having real people within…
Get an earful of this – finding the right note
The last time we saw a ‘good’ thief in a film was Channing Tatum in Roofman. Leo Woodall looks somewhat like Tatum in Daniel Roher’s Tuner (15). He has the same attractively lazy style of acting as him as well, and even wears a similar tracksuit. The ‘double life’ plot of the film has similarities…
A century of Hollywood’s most enduring love goddess
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…
When someone steals your words… and melodies
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.…
Misty-eyed dose of picaresque diaspora
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…
Shona fiddles while Ray burns in picaresque pastoral
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,…
British women showing grace under pressure in 1940
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…
Hearts of fire and hearts of stone in Nazi Germany
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…
Lying one’s way to the top of the music world
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…
