Thursday, Mar 18th 2010
As you are probly know if you are a funky culture vulture with your fingers in the pulses, peoples everywhere are rave about the new blue movie Atavar, by Irish director James Cameron, mostly because it is in three dimensions, going not only up and down the screen and both ways across the screen but [...]
The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki - Finland, 2002)
Kaurismäki narrowly missed out on both the Palme d’Or and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for this film in 2002 but it deservedly made him known to a wider international audience. A man is brutally beaten in a mugging and wakes up with no recollection of [...]
Part 3 of the 100 Best Films of the Decade. Part 1 and Part 2 have already appeared. Only two to go.
The Life Aquatic…With Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson – USA, 2004)
People either love or hate Wes Anderson, though I find I have a foot in either camp. I initially detested The Royal Tennenbaums before [...]
The much anticipated second installment of the 100 films of the decade. Part 1 can be found here.
Man on the Moon (Milos Forman – USA, 2000)
Milos Forman followed up his Larry Flynt biopic with one of another American curio, comedian Andy Kaufman. You don’t have to think Kaufman was an undisputed comic genius [...]
The past decade presented both new challenges and new opportunities to cinema. While on the one hand new technology freed filmmakers from the shackles of financing, a greater homogenisation of taste and lack of adventure among distributors and producers has made it harder to get interesting films seen. The internet has made it possible for [...]
Hari Kunzru | Nowhere to Hide: The Films of Michael Haneke
Hari Kunzru provides an excellent and detailed overview of the films of Michael Haneke, director of Hidden and Funny Games in the context of Austria, it’s history and his politics, and the cultural politics of the films with some interesting stuff on his Brechtian technique. [...]
Pleasures of Underachievement | Disco Infernal
Seanachie of Pleasures of Underachievement, and this parish, on Tony Manero, a movie about a Chilean man obsessed with Saturday Night Fever who descends into crime while trying to win a Tony Manero impersonating contest:
But Tony Manero is a far more scabrous, unobliging work, an ill-mannered riposte to the idea [...]
The Irish Seminar, which is currently underway and runs until the 3rd of July, provides a wide variety of lectures, seminars and workshops on Irish studies by a number of writers, academics, journalists and curators. The topics include Irish literature, culture, politics and society within an international context and should be of interest to readers [...]
“An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”
Nancy Mitford
Amidst the collapse of the Irish economy, the inhabitants of a rural hinterland begin to feel the touch of the dead hand of the housing market.
This [...]
Another year at the movies and another good one. Too often we hear jeremiads about the decline of cinema and the lack of good films out there (of course, such gripes are usually based on a diet of English-language cinema, which is far from being the world’s most interesting at the best of times). But [...]