Posted on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 by Longman Oz
Posted on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 by Longman Oz
The challenge with conspiracy dramas is overcoming the possibility that they have been done to death at this stage. For example, a journalist suspects that a politician may be on the take only to discover that the government is in league with a master race of Sasquatches who plan on enslaving all of humanity. Meanwhile, local cops discover that a hit-and-run involving a homeless man in downtown Baltimore is somehow linked to an evil corporate scheme involving the illict trade in used nappies. Most devastatingly of all, though, is when a busty but brilliant biologist, whose ex-husband so happens to be in the FBI, finds out that opposition politicians plan on slipping garlic into the President’s food so that he will end up offending voters with his halitosis. As a result, she must race against the clock to try and preserve truth, justice, and the American way.
Accordingly, anyone pondering the remake an eighties television mini-series based on how the murder of a policeman’s daughter is part of a much bigger political intrigue would surely recognise the need to freshen up the plot significantly if it is going to compare well, twenty-odd years later, with the likes of nine series of The X-Files, eight series of 24, and the few dozen other such television programmes and movies that have been made in the interim?
Wouldn’t they? Read more »
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: Bojana Novakovic, Edge of Darkness, Martin Campbell, Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone | 2 Comments »
Posted on Monday, 8 February 2010 by Longman Oz
Posted on Sunday, 7 February 2010 by Longman Oz
At 38 years old, the host of a popular BBC comedy quiz show, married to a surgeon, and a father of one, it does not seem unreasonable to describe Dara Ó Briain as being comfortably middle-aged and middle-classed. Of course, neither is a crime (for now), but they do form the backbone of his current run at Vicar Street. Accordingly, there is plenty of observational humour about signs that you have become old, about what happens in prenatal classes, and life as a father.
Now, perhaps such material sounds awful enough to curl your toes, dear reader. Yet when Mr. Ó Briain proudly boasts that he does not feel the need to listen to new music anymore, many in the room welcome this pronouncement. Moreover, with music from The Smiths and The Cure featuring during a lengthy interval, the show is definitely going to be best enjoyed by those who can relate to where the London-based comedian is with his life right now.
Where Mr. Ó Briain excels, though, is in terms of smoothly working plugs for his television programmes, Twitter account, and new book into his performance. Well, yes, he is good at that too. However, what has always been impressive about Mr. Ó Briain (and it frightens me a little to recall when I first saw him perform) is his aptitude for improvisation. Comfortable engaging with an audience (who, on the night in question, are deferential and sober for the most part), he riffs well off their mundane responses to his questions. Initially, it is to mock a couple of business students about their upcoming job opportunities. However, the real pay dirt comes when he finds a man who buys produce for a well-known frozen foods company. In a flash, the audience is getting treated to a skit on a highly unethical “Man from Del Monte”-type character. Read more »
Filed under: Comedy | Tagged: Dara Ó Briain | 1 Comment »
Posted on Saturday, 6 February 2010 by Longman Oz
Music @ Mixtapes
First up is a mixtape featuring some songs from recent (enough!) movies. A great big “jolly well done” to whoever can name the films from which they are from!
Songs from the Movies
This is followed by the next instalment in The Weather Series, For the week that has been in it, the common theme here is rain, with the tape featuring music from the likes of Tom Waits, Massive Attack, and Faust!
The Weather Series: The Rain
Read more »
Filed under: Mixtapes, Music, Videos | Tagged: Frightened Rabbit, Local Natives, The Strange Boys | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Friday, 5 February 2010 by Longman Oz
Night trains are a funny universe to inhabit. Be it the discombobulating sleeplessness, the stale body odours of strangers, or that empty feeling triggered by the all-encompassing darkness outside. In effect, for the solitary traveller, they can become a steel-shelled limbo between two points of reassuringly familiar experience. Moreover, within this void, the unoccupied mind will inevitably busy itself with wondering why its fellow passengers would also undertake such an uncomfortable journey at this desolate hour. What has brought them to this point? What will become of them afterwards?
It is perhaps with such ideas in mind that Galway-based director and playwright Bernard Field has created this decidedly peculiar encounter here between two Irishmen. Both are straight off the Dublin-to-Holyhead ferry and now bound by train, during the dead of night, to their ultimate destinations in England. Indeed, with its culturally evocative title, one can even imagine how this well-worn path of generations of lonely Irish immigrants is now populated by their ghosts. For sure, when the anonymous gypsy woman (Shirley Walsh) first arrives onstage, she does so with an air of intense foreboding, as if conscious of some powerful supernatural forces at play in this drab and empty train carriage. Read more »
Filed under: Theatre | Tagged: Bernard Field, Donal Cox, Last Train From Holyhead, Shirley Walsh | 2 Comments »
Posted on Thursday, 4 February 2010 by Longman Oz
Les vies les plus belles sont celles qu’on s’invente.
Beginning with a morbid wartime anecdote (which may or may not be true!), the audience is immediately drawn by director Jacques Audiard into the curious world of Albert Dehousse (Mathieu Kassovitz) – a timid, sensitive, and lonely young man whose head seems firmly fixed in the clouds. This stems, in part, from a lifelong love of adventure stories and, in part, from the fictitious life that his mother has weaved around how his father met with his demise. However, with the Second World War waging around their northern French home, it is only when the gormless Albert discovers that deceitfulness can win him the heart of Yvette (Sandrine Kiberlain) that he truly starts to become a Walter Mitty-type individual.
However, after a rare moment of epiphany leaves Albert acutely aware of his shortcomings as a person, he ends up cold and penniless on the rain-soaked streets of post-war Paris. Here, though, he has a fateful encounter with the suave and charismatic Captain Dionnet (Albert Dupontel). As a result, Albert ends up embarking upon a new life where he benefits incredibly well from having a finely-honed memory, even sharper wits, and one dollop of good fortune after another. Unfortunately for Albert, though, all of his new-found success is built upon an ever-growing thicket of lies. Therefore, for all of his mental nimbleness, these falsehoods are slowly but surely wrapping their tendrils around his life and gradually ensnaring him in place. With anyone deemed to be a wartime collaborator or otherwise engaging in unpatriotic behaviour subject to all manner of summary justice, Albert thus finds himself playing a very dangerous game. Read more »
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: A Self-Made Hero, Albert Dupontel, Jacques Audiard, Mathieu Kassovitz, Sandrine Kiberlain, Un héros très discret | 2 Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, 3 February 2010 by Longman Oz
For his penultimate film, Yasujirō Ozu gives his familiar preoccupation with an ageing parent wishing to see all of his daughters married off an interesting tweak. Here, Manbei Kohayagawa (Ganjiro Nakamura) is the head of a family-owned sake brewery in Kyoto. He has three daughters – one married, one widowed, and one still single. In an amusing opening sequence, the widowed daughter Akiko (the eternally charming Setsuko Hara) has been unwittingly set up by her uncle (Daisuke Katô) to meet with a potential suitor. As with most films by Mr. Ozu, there is then just enough body language on display for the audience to be able to read between the lines of the polite exchanges that ensue. Elsewhere, the single daughter Noriko (Yôko Tsukasa) confesses that she is feeling hesitant about meeting with a family-approved match. Moreover, the reason for her lack of enthusiasm will soon become clear!
However, where The End of Summer notably tends to differ from the other such works in Mr. Ozu’s canon is the partially inverted relationship that exists here between the parent and his adult children. More specifically, Manbei has always been something of a “fast worker” when it comes to women. Now a widower, he has taken to sneaking off several times a week to meet up with an old flame (Chieko Naniwa). However, when his married daughter Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) finally learns of what he has been up to, she becomes unstinting in her scolding of him, as if she was the exasperated mother of a wayward schoolboy who refuses to admit that he has been caught out in a lie. Things are to take another dramatic turn, though, when Manbei’s health starts to fail him. Read more »
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: Chieko Naniwa, Daisuke Katô, Ganjiro Nakamura, Kohayagawa-ke no aki, Michiyo Aratama, Setsuko Hara, The End of Summer, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Yasujiro Ozu, Yôko Tsukasa | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 by Longman Oz
There is a darkness at the heart of Still Walking that surprises. Yes, it may be immediately apparent that Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is a brusque and stubborn old goat, whilst his wife Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) does not know how to hold her tongue at times. As a consequence, some degree of frostiness – even bitchiness – was to be expected when their black sheep of a middle-aged son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) returned home for a rare visit, with his wife and stepson in tow. However, beyond any such petulant froideur and tactless remarks, there then lies a whole other level to this family drama. Yet, this only reveals itself when one may have already conceded that this film is destined to be little more than a respectable but relatively banal modern-day homage to the work of the great Yasujiro Ozu.
Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Ryota and his sister Chinami (You) have returned with their families to their parents’ home in order to mark the fifteenth anniversary of their brother Junpei’s untimely demise. Employing a mostly static camera to observe typical domestic situations such as food preparation, dinner table conversations, and preparations for bedtime, writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda then allows the character’s mundane interactions to gradually build up a profile of this family. As with the work of Mr. Ozu, nothing terribly dramatic happens in this film. Rather, the latter concerns itself with peeling back the many layers that have built up around the various relationships on display here. Read more »
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: Aruitemo aruitemo, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hiroshi Abe, Kirin Kiki, Still Walking, Yoshio Harada, You | 2 Comments »
Posted on Monday, 1 February 2010 by Longman Oz
Posted on Saturday, 30 January 2010 by Longman Oz
Posted on Friday, 29 January 2010 by Longman Oz
Samuel Beckett’s tramps waited interminably by the side of a road for salvation to arrive. Here, though, Brian Friel’s itinerant faith healer roves all over Scotland and Wales in search of answers to his growing sense of spiritual crisis. Their obscure yet lyrical place names even become a form of desperate mantra that he can intone. Perhaps he does so as a form of self-mollification or perhaps it is an incantation to temporarily summon back forgotten wisps of memory…
What does become immediately clear, though, in a play rich with imagery and allusion, is that Frank Hardy (Owen Roe) has spent a lifetime trying to come to terms with who he is. His initials are identical to those of his occupation. However, could his life have been predestined in this manner? Sometimes he does heal people. Is it because of him, though, or is it because of something within themselves? His poster proclaims him as the “Fantastic Francis Hardy”. Yet, has his life really just amounted to some short, vague, and erroneous article in a little known regional newspaper? In all, how does one keep going? From where does one’s faith obtain its sustenance? Read more »
Filed under: Theatre | Tagged: Brian Friel, Faith Healer, Ingrid Craigie, Kim Durham, Owen Roe | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Thursday, 28 January 2010 by Longman Oz
I have not been to Drogheda anytime recently. However, I hazily recall it as being a grey, time-warped, and godforsaken place where the people spoke with harsh, flat accents. Moreover, it felt like the sort of town where an outsider would not want to be wandering the dark streets alone late at night. Locals may protest at this sort of description, but there one goes. Yet I can also remember running very late for the intercity bus there one evening when a kind and highly perceptive stranger pulled in and offered me a lift down to the station. In one sense, this was nothing more than a simple but considerate act. In my experience, though, it is also an extremely rare one.
Moreover, this notion of goodness and decency hiding behind an ugly and menacing-looking façade can equally be found in Yasmine Akram’s one-woman play about “Mad” Mary McArdle, an aggressive and somewhat aimless young woman from a rough part of Drogheda. Having just served a prison sentence for assault, Mary (also played by Ms. Akram) is now trying to get her life back on track. This includes obtaining a job flipping burgers, as well as finding a suitable date for her best friend’s upcoming nuptials. However, in a town where her reputation for drunkenness and violence precedes her, accomplishing the latter is going to be easier said than done! Read more »
Filed under: Theatre | Tagged: 10 Dates With Mad Mary, Yasmine Akram | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 by Longman Oz
Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex’d in the extreme [...]
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus.
- Othello, Act 5, Scene II
A cockney gangster drama? From the writers of Sexy Beast? That makes several nods to Quentin Tarantino? Which stars Ray Winstone? There will be fawcking blood, mate!
Or will there be?
Beginning with Mr. Winstone’s corpulent character of Colin Diamond lying flat on his back in the middle of a thrashed living room, the signs are indeed promising that bloody vengeance is on the cards. There are two nagging concerns though. Firstly, Colin’s face looks like a fish gasping for air on the deck of a trawler. The other is that the audience must endure Harry Nilsson’s weepy dirge Without You as they follow the camera around the room. All that is missing from the scene is for Colin to be holding a manbag and wearing a sarong!
The next couple of scenes are hardly promising either for fans of bloody knuckles and grievous bodily harm. Firstly, there is Archie (Tom Wilkinson) giving his ageing mum her supper ahead of an evening watching Panorama on the sofa. Next there is Meredith (Ian McShane) soaking up the sight of a man posing naked in his apartment. Fortunately, once the five-strong gang are all assembled, they promptly stage a very public kidnapping. Moreover, it soon becomes apparent that they plan on doing the decent thing with this man, who apparently has turned Colin into a cuckold. Namely, he is set to receive a slow and painful death. The only problem is that the distraught husband is struggling to get his head together and the gang is now into its second night of waiting for him to officially make a start on the retribution. Read more »
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: 44 Inch Chest, David Scinto, Ian McShane, Joanne Whalley, John Hurt, Louis Mellis, Malcolm Venville, Melvil Poupaud, Ray Winstone, Tom Wilkinson | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Tuesday, 26 January 2010 by Longman Oz
Around a year ago, a well-known Irish recruitment agency began advertising its latest service – how to offload staff in an effective and legally acceptable manner. Now, they put it in a much nicer way than that, of course. However, the subtext was only too clear. In a similar manner, lawyers and accountants make a fortune putting big deals together and then are able to make even more money when those deals go sour a few years later on. In other words, capitalism has proven to be a highly resilient beast for one very good reason. It will always have its acolytes who do not vacillate about the morality of how they make their money.
Therefore, if Daniel Plainview and Gordon Gekko represent the unashamedly greedy faces of capitalism, then Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) aspires to being its perfectly perfunctory one instead. Indeed, this polished business executive is the ideal instrument of his trade – an unemotional, smooth, and assertive loner who is in absolute thrall to the perks of his job and who can also relish what many would consider to be its spirit-crushing lows. In other words, Bingham can happily spend his days informing people that they are being made redundant and his evenings in the blessed anonymity of airports, airplanes, and hotels. His only problem in life is the forty-odd days of the year that he has to spend back home in his depersonalised apartment in Omaha. That said, a psychiatrist might also like to chat to him about his highly questionable philosophy on life… Read more »
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: Anna Kendrick, George Clooney, Jason Reitman, Up In The Air | 4 Comments »
