Popiól i Diament (Ashes and Diamonds) (October 15, 2007)

There is a Polish film festival currently at the IFI, where they are showing a different Polish movie (not all of them recent) every day for a week or 2. Having never actually seen a Polish movie before (sorry, Susa, if you’re reading this), I was certainly not adverse to going at Chiara’s suggestion. The film that she picked for us (myself and 2 of her friends from her college course) was, Ashes and Diamonds, which was made in the late 50s about the end of World War II. She had met the director, who is apparently a Polish legend, when she was in Poland for grad school, so seeing one of his movies seemed like a good idea.

It may seem a bit random for the Irish Film Institute to be hosting a specifically Polish film festival, but it isn’t. Bear in mind that Ireland’s population has become about 5% Polish in the past 10 years, and this has only increased more rapidly since Poland’s accession to the EU 3 years ago. Irish people, it seems, don’t particularly want to do manual labor if they don’t have to. Couple that with massive construction projects going on all over the country, et voila.

The main plotline is that it is VE Day and a Polish resistance fighter is told to kill a former soldier who has just returned from hiding in Russia, presumably to be part of the new communist regime. He has uber issues with doing so, despite having killed many people in the past. He contrives to fall in love with the barmaid at the hotel where everyone is staying, which gives him an overly dramatic new lease on life. So then the question: does he try and have a regular life with all its normal passions with this beautiful girl, or does he continue his fighting even though he doesn’t really want to anymore. There are a couple of subplots as well, the most amusing being a double agent who gets hopelessly drunk the night his “legitimate” boss is made a minister, and sacrifices both his resistance and aboveboard careers.

This was one of those movies that I really enjoyed at an artistic level, but it didn’t really hit me. I don’t think it was so much the language issue as it was the style – every emotion heightened and elevated, with very direct dialogue. Just a different time, I suppose. All the scenes with the main character and the bar maid made me want to shoot myself in the face, since the setup was just too blatant.

This being said, everything was beautifully shot, and the shell-shocked remnants of Poland featured were gorgeous. There was also some really cool imagery, my favorite being an upside-down Jesus with a thorny halo separating the main character and the barmaid as they talked in a bombed out church. One of the last scenes, which involved running through sheets blowing in the wind was also stunning (though its effect was mitigated as I had seen a very similar scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the night before.)

There’s a couple of other movies on at the festival that look really interesting if I have time. I’ve got Thursday and Friday free this week, so if the weather’s crap and I don’t feel broke I might go back.

Am I glad I saw it? Upside-down Jesus, ahoy!

Ratatouille (October 12, 2007)

The original plan for Friday night had been to see the chickiest chick flick in Dublin cinemas, The Nanny Diaries. However, it was discovered that The Nanny Diaries was not playing after 4pm, which led us to a) re-evaluate the plan and b) wonder aloud who the fuck would be watching The Nanny Diaries at any time before 5pm on a week day.

No matter. The acceptable second choice was Ratatouille. Yes, The Nanny Diaries had an earlier bedtime than an animated movie about a gourmet rat. I had seen it already, but I had liked it, even while being the 7^th wheel.

And I still liked it. Quite a lot. When I originally saw it, I had had zero expectations and was blown away. It’s good for repeated viewings; I don’t think the humour holds up as well as it does in The Incredibles, but Ratatouille is far more nuanced in its message and details. I’d forgotten quite a bit of the rat community plot, and was surprised that I had since it was a) integral to the plot and b) hilariously cute. And my favourite detail I hadn’t noticed before was the Parisian health inspector’s Smart Car.

Side note: In the lobby was a poster for “Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.” How long has Natalie Portman been making herself up to be Audrey Hepburn? I remember a magazine cover last year with her wearing the Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress, but I had thought that was a once-off kind of thing.

More interesting than the movie itself was the cinema we saw it in: The Savoy. The Savoy is on the upper end of O’Connell Street, which is the main street through the North side of Dublin city centre. It takes up about a block of real estate in a pretty densely packed area. If what we were sitting in was the second biggest screening room, I’m eagerly awaiting going to something in the biggest screening room, which my friends told me is used for most of the big Irish movie premieres.

In the theatre I was in, there were old school plush seats, with a matching damask curtain over a massive screen that put anything in stadium seating theatres to shame. After the previews, the curtain drew shut so that people would have time to get more refreshments or use the toilets, and reopened a few minutes later to start the movie. Cinema really and truly the way it should be seen.

Was I glad I saw it? Yep, and more importantly, I’m glad I saw The Savoy.

History Boys (October 10, 2007)

Imagine The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with slightly older, male children. These 8 boys are all studying for scholarship exams to Oxford and Cambridge in their last year of secondary school. Now imagine that these slightly older male children have two male teachers competing for their affections, both mentally and physically. The fresh young teacher wants them to purposely incite debate by using controversial arguments for the sake of standing out in the exam marking process. He is quietly gay and keeps checking out the cockiest, most attractive boy of the bunch. The older, experienced teacher (whom they all adore) teaches them literature, cinema, poetry and French for their own sake, both the in the artistic sense and the conversationally glib sense. This teacher also likes to fondle the hot boys as he takes them home from school on his motorbike. The boys are of the opinion that this is an annoying inconvenience, but none of them actually care. They go so far as to joke about how they should be scarred for life. Yep, I suppose so, if they bothered to care.

What follows is a very clever but ultimately inconclusive commentary on many things about both the Western education system (e.g. the actual learning process itself, the place of women in history, revisionist history, memorization, art for what sake) and the lure and allure of charismatic teachers. There’s a nice closing at the end about what happens to each of the 8 boys after college – saying that, at the end of the day, what’s most important is thinking for ourselves and what we want, not what other people want us to be.

This is all well and good, but it’s not as clean, nice, or inspiring as it sounds. The hottest piece of underage ass, Dakin, lusted after by practically everybody on stage, is a narcissistic asshole. He’s too clever and savvy for his own good, and he doesn’t care who he’s fucking as long as he’s on top. In short, the sort of person who (frustratingly) gets ahead in life through dodgy means and always comes out unscathed while many around him crash and burn. Posner, the only one of the students who is actually gay, (and quietly in love with Dakin) is the kind of impressionable, quiet type, who does his best to please everyone and in the end can’t even please himself. He’s the most academically gifted of the lot, but doesn’t have the spine or the balls to do anything with it of his own accord. The other 6 boys are varying degrees of bright, self-aware, and ambitious, and they meet various ends. It was good how there was no happily ever after, but…

I had very weird dreams the night after I saw this. I’m willing to bet that this was because of my own experiences with amazing teachers, none of whom molested me. I think that the sexual aspect to the teacher/pupil relationships was overdone and a conveniently controversial point for the playwright, which was more frustrating the more I thought about it. As far as the students were concerned, they put up with having their balls fondled because they loved the way their teacher inspired them – it was almost a non-issue for the people whom it should have been affecting the most. This ultimately vilified his unorthodox teaching methods, and everything they learned that were valuable life lessons were mitigated. The teacher’s innocence regarding his molestation of the boys (which I know sounds ridiculous but take my word for it) was completely crushed, as was his life and career.

Ignoring the molested students, History Boys would be a commentary on the loss of that individuality in teaching that makes school fun for the smart kids there, and the rise to prominence of postmodern cynicism. But because MOLESTER flashes at you in neon lights for the entirety of the play, that message is lost. I’m not saying that the teacher should have been molesting his pupils, or that there is any excuse for his behaviour. Molestation = bad. But it takes the focus off of the more philosophical, more interesting issues of what education is, teaching to tests, and the draw of charismatic teachers. Molestation: the big shiny cop out.

While it’s true that good teachers can have cult-like followings, especially in schools with many bright students, the propensity in modern literature to make them into child molesters or completely damaged, deranged, and manipulative human beings frustrates me to no end. It simply does a disservice to their work. It’s also unrealistic to make these people into selfless Pollyannas, but there should be a way to create some kind of a medium.

And don’t get me started on the NAMBLA insinuations that pervaded the entire performance.

Was I glad I saw it? Definitely; very clever, very good writing, and the performance itself was fantastic. But it left a really bad, frustrating taste in my mouth. Life is life? It helps a lot if you’re cynical and manipulating.

Dark City (October 9, 2007)

This was a free screening on a Tuesday night at the IFI. I’d been told that The Matrix blatantly ripped off parts of this movie, which is true. But, I can also see why The Matrix was far more successful. Both feature the same sci-fi stilted dialogue and bad science, but where The Matrix had leather, pleather, computing machines, and other manifest shiny, Dark City has none of the above. And while noir, a Truman Capote-esque Mad Scientist™, and a crackpot distinction between memories and personality (changing the former but keeping the latter stable) have their place, they are by no means shiny.

This is not even getting into the VampireZombieAliens (VZAs) who want to capture the essence of humanity and to do so create a floating walled city somewhere in outer space with no daylight where they freeze everyone at midnight (or noon) to re-vamp everyone’s memories. At least I THINK that’s what it was. I was mostly distracted by Riff Raff (from Rocky Horror Picture Show) who did, despite all evidence to the contrary, have another film role. Playing Mr. Hand, the VZA who gets the Erstwhile Hero’s fake memories injected into his head so he can be one step ahead of Erstwhile Hero, who has become a hybrid of humanity and the VZAs, who the VZAs are trying to destroy before he figures out what’s going on and destroys them. Also, Mr. Hand (or the Erstwhile Hero’s past personality/memory combo) likes to kill hookers and leave bloody spiral cuttings on their corpses.

Now splice in a little Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in a subplot between the Erstwhile Hero and Jennifer Connelly (his lounge singer wife) when memories get erased or redone, and you’ve got it. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s everything.

I couldn’t decide which inspiration was drawn on the most: Star Wars, James Bond, Double Indemnity, or Metropolis. On some level, it doesn’t really matter, because I also couldn’t stop laughing when a small child VZA hissed HE MUST BE KILLED to preclude the climactic fight scene between the Erstwhile Hero and the resident director of the VZAs who looked like the Emperor in Star Wars.

Maybe one of the problems with seeing a movie like this is that better movies have developed its themes before and after. It is a very interesting and cool hybrid of lots of different genres, and tries to go somewhere else with all of them. But this does not mean it is a good movie, and I’m not sure if I liked it or not.

Am I glad I saw it? Yes. Especially because it was free.

La Marea (October 6, 2007)

This was a free play that the Dublin Theatre Festival put on for 3 nights in the Italian Quarter; we caught it the last night of its performance. Originally in Spanish by someone from Buenos Aires, there are 9 speechless plays simultaneously occurring in a neighbourhood of a city. Any words are either omnipotent narration or internal monologue projected onto a screen near where the actors are miming. Each play is 10 minutes long, some are inside and some are on the street, and they are repeated on a loop for 2 hours until the play is over. You walk through the neighbourhood and watch them in no consecutive order. It had been translated into English, and the city details had all been changed to Dublin, but some of the cultural details remained very Latino (e.g. a huge party for a girl’s 15^th birthday, not 18^th as would be more common in Western Europe.)

There were some common themes, most notably a recurring motif of If Only I Go Somewhere Else My Miserable Life Will Be So Much Better, which is an idea that I think is delusional bullshit. Seeing it repeatedly just annoyed me. The omniscient narration, both internal and external, was fractured and schizophrenic, echoing the way life unfolds for the most part, and so surreal at times that it was laugh out loud funny. I’m not sure how seriously the whole thing was meant to be taken, but at times it seemed to be a farce of itself.

This was only exacerbated while we were watching the scene of a couple making out for the first time. As they started to get into it and roll around against the brick wall, a drunk bachelor party chose that moment to start walking down the street. The scene proceeded without incident until the last, and most likely drunkest, of the entourage walked up behind the actors and started miming and making faces at their making out. He then looked out at the audience and asked what the fuck were we watching, he would show us something, pulled down his pants, and mooned the crowd. Someone yelled out at him that it was a play, and he responded with “Holy fuck! Me arse is in a play!” and railed for a few seconds about how it was the stupidest play in the world. He continued to stagger down the street afterwards, and I could hear him yelling up at one of the other plays a bit further down the street a few minutes later.

Am I glad I saw it? Entertaining enough, but the format probably had more to do with the experience than the play itself.

Radio Macbeth (October 5, 2007)

A staged version of the Orson Welles-edited Macbeth (for radio broadcast) with the actors going in and out of Shakespearian character as well as radio actor characters they play. Very meta, very interesting, very fresh, yadda yadda yadda.

What was especially cool is that the way everything was presented forced you to actually listen to the Shakespearian English, which is quite often overshadowed by elaborate staging (standard productions), avant-garde staging (independent productions), or just trying to figure out what the hell is going on (high school English class). When acted with precision and clarity, the words take on a hypnotizing quality of their own, divorced from whatever it is you are literally seeing. The woman who was the 3 witches, in particular, had a way of speaking both theatrically and realistically, and made the witches’ cliché soliloquies sound new.

Additionally, the staging involved the actors speaking both on and off mike, which added helped to differentiate between internal monologue and external dialogue, as well as being used for emphasis. The best example of this would be that of Lady Macbeth, whose mad speech at the end of the play was given both on and off stage, on mike and off mike, was completely impassioned madness. It was even more impassioned than merely the character’s descent into madness and regret – it had been implied throughout the play that the radio actress, married to the radio actor Macduff, was having an affair with the radio actor Macbeth.

So, all was very well and good, until the discussion with the cast and the director afterwards. I’m not sure that I should stay for these sorts of things, because they end up being roundabout discussions and intellectual masturbation about acting and art method that kind of bore me, but I stayed for this one. By the end, the smart questions had been asked, many of the actors were licking each other’s method assholes, and the idea that “stillness is as important as movement” had been expounded so many times I wanted to throw a brick that would do much more damage moving than still.

Am I glad I saw it? Play = very good. Actors talking with their own words = *brain melt.*

Long Day's Journey Into Night (October 2, 2007)

This is one of my very favourite plays. Period. It’s a very lyric story about emotional abuse only a family can inflict, while at the same time musing on how much of one’s situation is one’s own making, and/or undoing. I read it for the first time when I was in high school (not for a class, just for my own curiosity) but had never seen it staged. It is 4 hours long.

So, I was very excited when I saw that it would be performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival. We went to a preview show a day or two before it was officially starting, as the festival was just kicking off. 4 and a half hours (including 2 intermissions) later, even my gung-ho fandoration had flagged.

Eugene O’Neill’s language is amazing, and one of my favourite parts was always the use of literary figures and quotations from different eras to speak for the different characters – Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde for the father and his two sons, respectively. This held up well, even though the bulk of it comes 3+ hours in, when my attention was already flagging a bit.

The thing is, when you read the play, you can break up the abuse. You can get some ice cream, take a walk, come back to it a few days later if it’s been too intense. When it’s flung at you for 4 hours straight, you leave the theatre feeling emotionally drained and exhausted. The last 20 minutes of the play involve wanting to go to bed but avoiding it, and you want everyone on stage to just shut the fuck up and go to bed so you can too.

Eugene O’Neill had stipulated in his will that after his death, this play was to be destroyed and never published. I imagine he thought that such direct catharsis had no place in front of an audience. Obviously, it was not destroyed, but I can understand where he was coming from – not wanting people to see his lightly fictionalized dirty little family secrets.

The staging and production were very good. The two sharpest actors were ones I had never heard of, who were obviously predominantly stage actors. James Cromwell (the farmer in Babe) was the father and more or less the featured draw. He fumbled over his lines a little too often and seemed a bit more ill at ease on the stage than anybody else there. The cast itself was half Irish and half American, which modulated everyone’s accent into a neat hybrid and was an interesting choice.

Am I glad I saw it? Absolutely, but won’t be seeing it again for a long tim

Quand J'Etait Chanteur (October 1, 2007)

I saw a preview for this in March and thought it looked interesting. It came out in Montreal last summer, but was only playing at Ex-Centris without English subtitles, and my French definitely isn’t good enough to see it without English. Then, when I got to Dublin, it was playing at the IFI. The premise: A never quite successful lounge singer and a young real estate agent with her own issues have some kind of relationship, physical or otherwise. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what a movie plot is from the preview.

Question: Was Gerard Depardieu actually ever sexy? As a 300-pound blob with an enormous bulgy nose, 3 chins, bad fashion sense, a man purse (not bag, little purse) and sandy blond dyed hair, we’re expected to believe that not only was he a wannabe Tom Jones, but that he has enough charm and looks to sleep with someone who looks like she just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. True, she was drunk. And true, she ran away right after. But, really, how much suspension of disbelief is there supposed to be here – enough so that that he could get her into a room and naked of her own volition? Yeah, right. Nobody’s THAT desperate.

Then, Gerard Depardieu is all like “Hey, you know what would be awesome? If I force her to hang out with me under the pretence that I am looking for a house. THAT’S the way to win her affection.” What follows is an ambivalent story about two people eventually developing a friendship that could be something more, but isn’t. Old habits die hard, life gets in the way, etc etc etc. The real estate agent has a child who is either autistic or retarded, issues with her own motherhood, a volatile ex-relationship with the baby’s father, and about 8 feet of emotional wall built up around her.

The whole romantic friendship idea is pretty interesting to me, especially after an offhand comment by Dan Savage in one of his columns. His point was that extremely close platonic friendships often take the place of romantic ones until one of the friends finds a romantic partner. He was referring specifically to fag hags, but it’s a similar kind of un-relationship dynamic as there was here. With the sex away and done with in the first 10 minutes of the movie and no real desire to repeat it on the part of the real estate agent (can you blame her?) all pretence is out of the way and you get to what really makes these two people tick.

Or, rather, you would if any effort was made to elucidate where these characters were coming from. The way things were ultimately presented, it was easy to see what you wanted to see and disregard points that would have contradicted however it was you saw these characters. And above all else, even with friendship, the walls remained extremely high. If something was starting to become more open, or starting to change, someone would pull back into their comfort zone and everything was back at square one. And maybe that was the point.

Maybe it’s because Gerard Depardieu is so damn funny looking.

Am I glad I saw it? Meh.

Shoot 'Em Up (September 25, 2007)

Clive Owen stabbing people to death with carrots, and running around with a plastic baby used as a part-time bullet decoy? Count me in!

Am I glad I saw it? Absolutely! Except for the breaking fingers torture scene. *Shudder

Hallam Foe (September 17, 2007)

Seeing this movie was my initiation to the IFI (Irish Film Institute.) The IFI is the sort of cinematheque that all cities should have, and not enough do. There are two relatively small screening rooms up a flight of stairs with plush seats arranged in semi-circular rows. The viewings change weekly, sometimes daily. Occasionally there are free screenings of older (not necessarily old, by any means) movies and they also organize smaller film festivals. The showings are mostly independent and international films.

Hallam Foe is a Scottish movie about a 17 year old boy whose idolized mother either was killed or committed suicide. Hallam would like to believe that his ice queen stepmother arranged for his mother’s death so she could marry his father, whose secretary she was at the time. In one of the most bizarrely manipulative and pathetic scenes I have ever seen, Hallam and his stepmother have sex, and he flees the family’s large country estate for Edinburgh. After a chance encounter on the street, he becomes obsessed with a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother. He talks his way into a dishwashing job at the hotel where she is a personnel manager, spies on her for a while, and they eventually begin an affair. His father and stepmother track down his whereabouts and he has to go back to the country estate to manage some business there (as stipulated by his late mother’s will) where he then nearly drowns his stepmother. Only at this point does he accept maybe mommy wasn’t as perfect as he thought, rescues his stepmother before it’s too late, and moves on with his life.

Generally speaking, this is a weird little movie full of weird little people. Hallam is by far the weirdest, but that might also be because you see the most of him. People give him more chances in more ways than would normally be considered reasonable, but I suppose a strange little movie needs strange little somethings to further the plot along (if stepmother sex weren’t strange enough.)

The kind of insane, antisocial weirdness so matter of fact in this movie is what makes it unreasonable, unrealistic, and unromantic from the start. I’m not sure if it was meant to be another one of those quirky dysfunctional family/coming of age dramas, but everyone was so unsympathetic that any sort of character growth was mitigated by all the external hoopla.

Am I glad I saw it? Ask me when I spy on that obscure motherly object of desire from rooftops while she’s screwing a co-worker who’s cheating on his wife.