Lá Fhéile Padráig!
A long overdue first-time watch. Rewatching Sing Street the other day got me in the mood for this.
I love how it captures the Dublin of a bygone era, and Jesus Christ I have never seen the city photographed so beautifully in a film.
While I appreciate the Dublin humour of it all, there's a lot that's aged badly, particularly how the female characters are handled. Not that the Bechdel Test is a good measure of a…
Forgot how genuinely funny this film is. Huge laughs from a packed audience again and again and again. Easily one of my favourite Irish films, even if its not necessarily the kind of Irish film I want to make. Rewatching the Up scene brought me right back to my teenage self watching this film for the first time.
I think more than anything else, what makes this film work is how it identifies the source of teenage awkwardness: the gaping…
Don't get me wrong, it's good, it has its moments, it's not not scary, but it's too familiar.
Very clearly modelling your villain on Michael Jackson? That's Teddy Perkins, Atlanta. Banging your face against a table til there's blood everywhere? That's Hereditary. Making it ambiguous whether the bad guy is just a serial killer or has supernatural abilities? That's Cure. There's shades of Zodiac and Silence of the Lambs too.
Nothing new under the sun and all that, great artists…
The distance between this and Killers of The Flower Moon, a high budget epic from a revered New Hollywood director in his 80s, is insane and needs to be studied. A more comparable film would be Gaspar Noe's Love, a self-indulgent and seemingly endless film in which not one, but TWO, characters are named after the director.
I don't know where the 120 million dollar budget went, because it's not up on the screen. Most frames look AI-generated*, and while…
