Movies And Shakers

Irish movies are, for the most part, a load of pants. There are good reasons for this, not least of which is the all-important issue of finance, or lack thereof, but as often as not hamstrung from the off by scripts that are – there’s no gentle way of putting it – not good. In the past couple of weeks alone I’ve seen Situations Vacant and Happy Ever Afters, both of which appear to have been written by people who haven’t seen a movie since the mid-’70s.
  That said, this week sees released on DVD two Irish movies that at the very least tried to shake things up for the indigenous film industry, although I’ll allow that I’m biased towards Anton (2008) because I know one of the producers. Still, for a movie that was independently made, and for a budget of around €500,000, it’s a minor triumph. To wit:

Ireland, 1970s. Returning home to County Cavan after five years at sea, Anton O’Neill (Anthony Fox) finds himself sucked into the Troubles that have erupted across the border in Northern Ireland. A political innocent, he becomes a pawn in the hands of ruthless terrorists, all the while striving to stay one step ahead of the hardboiled Detective Lynch (Gerard McSorley). With a baby on the way, Anton has big decisions to make – but he’s quickly discovering that sometimes it’s the decisions that make you. Made on a miniscule budget, Anton at times displays the kind of naïveté that bedevils Anton himself, and some of the dialogue is unforgivably clunky. For all that, and particularly given its humble origins, the movie represents something of a call to arms to the indigenous film industry, especially in the context of the series of more lavishly funded and abysmally executed Irish movies we’ve been subjected to in the last couple of years. Vivid cinematography and strong performances in the key roles make for a compelling drama, with Fox (who also wrote the script) marking himself out as a name to watch.

  Re-released this week is Adam & Paul (2004), which may well be the best Irish movie ever made. To wit:

Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam & Paul is a rough diamond that follows ‘dying sick’ junkies Adam (Mark O’Halloran) and Paul (Tom Murphy) on their day-long purgatory through inner-city Dublin as they try to beg, borrow, scam or steal the money that will get them their next fix, with only an occasional toke to take the edge off. If that sounds like a bleak prospect, then be assured that script-writer O’Halloran has read and appreciated Beckett for his combination of black despair and blacker humour: rather than wait around for the elusive Godot, our latter-day Pozzo and Lucky tramp the streets in a Ulysses-style odyssey, encountering various friends, enemies and (for the most part) people who veer clear. Abrahamson makes wonderful use of Dublin’s grimmer environs, O’Halloran has a wonderful ear for vernacular dialogue, and the central roles are excellently played, with Murphy just about claiming the laurels. Hauntingly dark and frequently touching, Adam and Paul is also hilarious: when the pair mistake a Bulgarian (Caramitru) on a park bench for a Romanian refugee, the enraged Bulgarian denounces Dublin as ‘a shit-hole’ on the basis that the city is full of “maniacs, liars and fucking Romanians.” Assured and provocative, albeit indulgently sympathetic to its characters’ addiction, this as good a film as you’ll see all year.

Black Day at Bad Rock

The line-up for John Sturges’ movie ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ had the greatest cast of character actors ever assembled on the same lot: apart from Spencer Tracy in the one-armed lead, you had Robert Ryan, Walter Brennan, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. Although Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ is arguably better. Can anyone name the Wild Bunch off the top of their head? I’ll give you Bo Hopkins for a starter …
  Anyway, the point of today’s broadcast, courtesy of Caroline Walsh at the Irish Times:

A film version of Irish novelist Kevin Power’s debut novel BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, inspired by the death of a young man after an attack outside a Dublin nightclub, is in the offing. The book has been sold via agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor to Ed Guiney’s Irish-based company Element Pictures which produced the movies Garage and Adam and Paul and co-produced The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

  Very nice, especially since 'Adam and Paul' is the greatest Irish movie ever made.
  Actually, I’m not even sure if BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK is a crime novel, or even a novel of crime. And I’m pretty sure Kevin Power didn’t write it as a crime novel. But it’s a good book, and I think in time it will be an important book, and Kevin Power seems to be a decent sort of chap who can write very well, and I think he deserves all the publicity he gets, including the precious few molecules generated here. Well done, that man.
  Meanwhile, there’s already an Irish movie called ‘Bad Day at Blackrock’ (2001), Gerry Stembridge’s story about racism in the south Dublin suburb, the same backdrop against which Kevin Power’s novel takes place. So: what are they going to call it? ‘Black Day at Bad Rock?’

My Week At The Movies

You get to see a lot of rubbish when you review movies for a living, and while it’s nowhere as bad as thinning turnips or working on a building site, it’s incredibly frustrating to waste a couple of hours (plus the couple of hours it takes to get there and back) watching complete tosh when you could be doing something more useful, like staring at a blank screen and trying to remember how this whole writing lark goes again. Last week was a bad week, upon which we won’t dwell, but this week has been one of the better ones.
  I saw Waltz With Bashir (above, right) on Monday morning, an animated film dealing with the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war, the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the voluntary amnesia of some of the Israeli soldiers involved. Written and directed by Ari Folman, who served during the conflict, it’s a fairly straightforward narrative, in that it’s constructed from a series of interviews Ari conducts with former comrades in an attempt to fill in the missing gaps in his memory of that time. The animation is crude, a technique called ‘rotor-scoping’ that involves filming live and then painting over the resulting film; it’s deliberately crude, however, designed to place the kind of dream-like barrier between audience and action that the soldiers themselves seem to experience when they try to remember the details of the war. Naturally, it’s those details, as they emerge in a drip-feed manner, that prove harrowing. A brave and haunting film, Waltz With Bashir is as compelling as its subject matter is repellent.
  I saw Choke on Tuesday morning, the movie version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. I thought the novel overwrought and grating when I read it years ago, a story with all the idiosyncrasies of FIGHT CLUB but none of the substance. The movie isn’t much of an improvement; the main character, Victor, is an accumulation of quirks and oddities, and never really convinces as a fully rounded person. Yes, I know he’s supposed to be a despicable human being, and that I’m not supposed to like him, but I’d have been equally happy to hate the sex addict-cum-scam artist. I just didn’t care enough either way, although Angelica Huston’s performance, as Victor’s dying mother, is a strong one.
  Tuesday afternoon brought the Irish movie Kisses. To wit:

Two kids, Dylan (Shane Curry) and Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) run away from home to escape Dylan’s abusive father and Kylie’s creepy uncle, and spend the night wandering the streets of Dublin. That’s the very simple set-up to Kisses, which was written and directed by Lance Daly, and the movie is as beautiful as it is simple. That’s not to say it’s a picture-postcard depiction of Dublin, or of its central characters. Dylan and Kylie are expertly drawn pre-teens from one of Dublin’s less salubrious suburban estates, with all the angst, conflict and hormonally-charged naïvety that that suggests, and both have the vocabulary of a fishwife. Most of the situations the pair find themselves in are not ones that will have Bord Failte rushing to promote this movie – Kylie and Dylan, searching for Dylan’s homeless brother, find themselves dealing with a variety of winos, perverts and security guards keen to make a name for themselves. But it’s the chemistry and relationship between the leading pair that make this work, as well as a script that showcases a very sharp ear for Dublin slang, and despite their sordid environment, this is an uplifting tale that’s similar in tone and intent with the last great Irish movie, Adam and Paul.

  Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
  Tuesday night found me in the Abbey Theatre for The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Berthold Brecht’s tale of the rise of an Italian-American gangster in 1930’s Chicago and the parallels between his coming to power and that of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Jimmy Fay, who has been turning out some terrific productions in the last couple of years, directs, and it’s a long but always compelling tale. Central to its success is the performance of Tom Vaughn Lawlor as Ui, a stunning piece of work in which Lawlor somehow manages to channel Hitler, Al Capone, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin and Richard III. It’s as fine a performance as I’ve seen on a Dublin stage in 10 years of reviewing theatre; if you’re in the vicinity of Dublin over the next few weeks, don’t miss it.
  Finally, the clip below is the trailer to Kisses. Roll it there, Collette …

Git Along Little Dogie – A Round-Up Of Interweb Stuff-‘N’-Such

Our good friend and colleague Mr Adrian McKinty was included in The Telegraph’s list of ‘50 Books Worth Talking About’, which appeared last weekend. The novel in question is THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, and the object of the exercise is to get people talking about books in advance of World Book Day, which happens on March 5, 2009. As a point of fact, the list should really be renamed ‘51 Books Worth Talking About’, as it’s impossible to discuss THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD without referencing ULYSSES. Anyhoos, we’re done talking about THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD …
  Over at the Book Witch, the young but knowledgeable Charlie conducts an in-depth interview with Eoin Colfer, during the course of which the Artemis Fowl movie rears its head. Quoth Eoin:

“On the movie, at the moment I’m working with the director to write the script. I think it could be very good, because we’re going to put some new stuff in for the fans that they won’t expect, and because I’m writing it, I’m hoping they’ll allow that … I’ve just been up to Scotland last week, where we’re making HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS into a TV show, and that looks great so I’m very happy with that.”

  HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS as a TV show? I’ll buy that for a dollar. Meanwhile, Emerging Writer brings us the news that Aifric Campbell’s THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER has been short-listed for the Glen Dimplex Awards. The GD award is given to ‘best first book’ in a variety of categories, with €5,000 going to the winner of each of five categories, and €20,000 going to the overall winner. I’m not sure what the criteria for inclusion is, but it’s all done in conjunction with the Irish Writers’ Centre, so no doubt it’s all above-board, ship-shape and depressingly worthy. Aifric? You go, gal …
  Finally, I’m about two-thirds of the way through Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, which took a bit of a hammering on RTE’s arts TV programme The View last Monday night, by all accounts. Quoth Colm Keegan: “The most telling comment I think came from Peter Murphy. He said it was the first real book of the Celtic Tiger age and that it was ugly.”
  On the other hand, John Boyne, writing in the Irish Times, liked it a lot:
“This is a book that breaks the rules of the conventional crime narrative … It’s an excellent novel, though, there’s no two ways about that. It comes from the gut, it’s raw, it’s passionate and it suggests, like Barry McCrea’s THE THIRD VERSE did a few months ago, that there are a group of young Irish novelists about to be set loose on the world like a pack of hungry wolves. Bring ’em on, I say. I’ll read them.”
  Erm, chaps? At the risk of banging a hole right through this here drum, has no one heard of Gene Kerrigan? Declan Hughes? Tana French? Ken Bruen? Brian McGilloway? Et al?
  Celtic Tiger novelists, one and all …