Just a very short note to mention a documentary showing at the IFI this Sunday. Blind Man Walking features Mark Pollock (pictured), the blind adventurer that just won’t quit. I met Mark while doing a feature on him ahead of his race to the South Pole, in which he became the first blind man to reach the bottom of the world on foot. He had previously run several ultra-marathons including the Everest Marathon, the Gobi March and other unmentionably long endurance races. Blizzards and white-out conditions meant little to him because he couldn’t see anyway, he said. We hit it off, and after he got back, and I’d shifted a business, we started working together on some things including sponsorship pitches, his website, revamping the copy and figuring out the best way for Mark... Similar posts

Paolo Sorrentino’s (below) English feature debut ‘This Must Be the Place’ started filming this week in Dublin. Today it started to rain. It has been glorious the past month! The film stars Oscar-winners Sean Penn, Frances McDormand (yiphee), popster David Byrne, Simon Delaney, Olwen Fouere and newcomer Eve Hewson (one of Bono + Ali’s daughters). Cristiana Travaglioli will edit movie. The film’s about wealthy former rock-star Cheyenne (Penn), who lives quietly in Dublin with his wife ( McDormand). When his father, a holocaust survivor, dies in New York Cheyenne embarks on a journey across America to track down his father’s nemesis. Sorrentino co-wrote screenplay with Umberto Contarello. ‘This Must be the Place’ is an Irish-Italian co-production between Ed... Similar posts

The majority of film plots about what it’s like to be married are as welcome and as much fun as a friend who slips you a mickey.  All the gender mythology Hollywood produces can feel like an assault on a rational mind through its narrow scope, mean spirit and reductive characterisation.  At the cinema we’re too often mistreated by depictions of women as the shrew, basketcase, clingy, desperate type while men are rendered as perpetual children, horndog, selfish commitment-phobes. The celluloid short hand rates as lazy at the very least for failing to capture how complex and messy real-life marriage can be.  Movie makers either conclude at the altar in the Jane Austen tradition or else delight in showing us folks who are miserable or on the way to a fractious divorce in... Similar posts

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In recent years we’ve seen a predominance of films, cult classics or otherwise be mined for potential in terms of remakes. Whether it’s simply due to the goodwill involved in the original concept and calculated risk or a lack of original material capable of development I’m not sure but the stakes can often be daunting when fighting to warrant their existence against the original. Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother Sherry (Tajari P Henson) are forced to move to Beijing when her job at a Detroit car manufacturer demands it of them. Not long after arriving Dre tries to impress the young violinist Mei Ying (Wen Wen Han) in the local playground, attracting the negative attentions of Cheng (Zhenwei Wang) and his motley crew of kung fu prodigies. After one particular... Similar posts

When film-maker Maya Derrington’s Pyjama Girls opened this year’s Stranger Than Fiction documentary festival in Dublin, it played to a sold-out theatre. The tender-hearted observational doc about two young teens feeling their way through life in the flats of the inner city has been brought back for a week’s run at the Irish Film Institute from August 20-26. Derrington co-founded Still Films, which produced Pyjama Girls and the IFTA-nominated Seaview. She moved to Dublin from London in 1997 and has worked with Tyrone Productions and Blueprint Pictures, as well as co-founding Cow’s Lane Fashion and Design Market. She lives with her partner Julien and two-year-old daughter Sylvie. What’s the first record you ever bought? My mother took me to Virgin in the centre of... Similar posts

Music to my... Similar posts

Went to the Wexford Opera House last night to see the re-enactment of the famous The Last Waltz concert by The Band by a Dublin based ensemble. The troupe did a great job and it was a most entertaining night. If it comes around your neck of the woods you should go along. The Wexford venue, by the way, was as good as any venue I have ever been in. Top... Similar posts

There has been a plethora of philosophical American movies over the last decade, attracting a surprising amount of Hollywood stars, chief amongst them Dustin Hoffman (also starring in I Heart Huckabees). Each tend to focus on free will and interconnectivity, theories often asked of us but never examined exclusively, preferring to focus on entire schools of thought rather than a specific principle. Enter “Stranger Than Fiction”, an attempt by Will Ferrell to be considered as a capable actor in his own right, even if it is in the familiar ground of comedy. However despite being absurd in it’s leanings, it is thoroughly conventional in execution, answering an open-ended question with humanity and poignance. These personal relationships that develop are the project’s... Similar posts

Since I've come back from holidays (Rome & Sorrento, since you ask), I've caught up on the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film and also the first two editions of the new BBC1 drama "Sherlock".The Ritchie version left me cold. It totally concentrated on the pugilistic skills of the great detective, whilst placing the deductive aspects in the background. It might as well have been an Indiana Jones film for all it added to the Sherlock Holmes canon.However, the BBC drama was much more aligned to the Conan Doyle original. Although placed in modern day London, it not only lost none of the late 19th century appeal, but also added to the original by staying true to Doyle's intriguing, and still enduring, creation. I particularly found fun in the adaptation of Holmes' deductions set in the modern... Similar posts

  Edward Hopper,'Five Easy Pieces', 'On the Road' - Amber Valletta, Vogue UKRoadtrips, USA, diners, country music, trashy mismatched outfits, deserted gas stations, the wide open road.The soundtrack:'When there's a fire in your heart', Tammy Wynette, from the 'Five Easy Pieces' soundtrack'The Weight', Smith, from the 'Easy Rider' soundtrack'On the road again', Willie... Similar posts

A moving... Similar posts

In a sort of natural progression from the previous post...well not exactly...in fact, the idea of this one  reminded me that Lee Miller has been on my ‘Most Blog About’ list with about two years or so... The forties has long been one of my favourite fashion decades; all those A – line skirts, belted jackets, lux evening wear and veiled pill box hats and vixon red lips and Veronica Lake waves. I particulary consider 1940s' daywear as one of my key inspirations – neat little Sunday dresses, ankle socks and low heels, faded florals, cardigans, knits ( I think The Edge of Love, that silly, rather contrived film, provides a reasonably good example of what exactly I mean by this). What I have been thinking about recently though, is the whole notion of... Similar posts

Avatar Days is a pretty neat short movie about online gamers living in Dublin – only that they swapped places with their online-avatars here. Originally created for the Darklight Festival’s ’4 Day Movie’ project, Avatar Days is a portrait of four online gamers in Dublin whose daily lives contrast with their virtual identities. Advanced 3D technologies and Motion Capture animation were used to insert the players’ in-game characters in place of their real selves against the backdrop of the banal urban landscape which they inhabit. Avatar Days from Piranha Bar on...... Similar posts

It goes without saying, directors, especially those that write as well as direct can be a contentious breed, attracting criticism from every corner for the consistent abasement of their own output with each new installment they bring forth. M. Night Shyamalan started off strongly with both “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable”, movies that were not necessarily universally liked but had a vision and execution few could criticize in their entirety yet since then, he has continually resorted to cliché, abandoning that which he had once made his name with in favour of nonsensical hodgepodge. With his newest feature, the feature adaptation of the beloved Nicktoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender” Shyamalan further digs the grave for his own relevance, reducing... Similar posts

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Inception. It is an episode of Hustle, wrapped in a Bond/Bourne film, inside The Science of Sleep; but perhaps there is a kick. That kick allows the credits to roll.”*There’s been a lot of hype about Inception, and the general plot device of conspiring to plant an idea inside someone’s dream (or inside a dream in a dream) was as well seeded in the public’s consciousness as it was in mine.As the film opened, I wondered if it was about to become a harsher, less sandy remake of the Prisoner? Later I wondered why Juno (the actress Ellen Page playing the character Ariadne) had turned up studying in Paris?One year, the sacrificial party included Theseus, a young man who volunteered to come and kill the Minotaur. Ariadne fell in love at first... Similar posts

Good film,... Similar posts

The familiar plot motif regarding an adult child returning to the family home after a long absence found its commercial and critical success with “On Golden Pond,” a film which garnered three Academy Awards and was second at the box office in 1981.  The bloodless Henry Fonda and braying Katherine Hepburn were of a piece in a saccharine production with Jane Fonda in the difficult daughter role.  One key problem with this and other films in the same narrative territory seems to fall in the grasp of an idyllic and idealised setting.  The first thing an adult long absent from their childhood home would note is how small, shabby, constrictive or estranged the place is compared to memory.  The places you knew and inhabited as a child gleam and stretch to such a degree in your... Similar posts