Category Archives: Film Review

Film Review: Circle of Friends (dir by Pat O’Connor)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1995’s Circle of Friends tells the story of three friends who come of age in 1950s Ireland.

Bernadette Hogan (Minnie Driver), better known as Benny, is our narrator, the daughter of a local tailor whose shyness and insecurity disguises a quick mind and a sarcastic wit.  After years of jokes about her weight (which feel particularly cruel since Benny doesn’t appear to be particularly overweight), Benny has resigned herself to being alone.  Her parents may want her to marry their accountant, Sean Walsh (Alan Cumming), but Sean is obviously a creep.  He’s one of those guys who drinks his tea with his pinky extended.  Everyone knows better than to trust him.

Eve (Geraldine O’Rawe) is an orphan and was largely raised in a convent.  Now that she’s 18, the Westawards — the protestant heretics who once employed her father — are grudgingly keeping their promise and paying for her education.  She gets 60 pounds per term.  (I know my uncle, who paid my college tuition, would have loved it if my college tuition had been whatever the American equivalent of 60 pounds may be.)  Eve has inherited a cottage, a nice and isolated little building that becomes quite important later on in the film.

And finally, there’s Nan (Saffron Burrows).  Nan grew up with Bernadette and Eve, though her family eventually moved to Dublin.  Benny says that Nan is destined to be known for being pretty.

Nan is reunited with Benny and Eve when they all enroll at University College Dublin.  The film follows their friendship at the college, examining how they grow and change over the course of the term.  Benny develops a crush on and eventually starts dating Jack Foley (Chris O’Donnell), a medical student who enjoys playing rugby.  (I’ve never quite understood rugby, to be honest.  It seems weird to me that everyone always starts all huddled up and then apparently, they all try to grab a muddy ball until someone ends up with a compound fracture.  I’m not sure why someone would want to risk losing a limb over a game.)  Eve dates Jack’s friend, Aidan (played by a young Aiden Gillen).  And Nan …. at first glance, Nan would seem to be living every film lover’s dream!  Not does she lose her virginity to a character played by Colin Firth (in this case, Firth is playing Simon Westward) but they also regularly have sex in Eve’s lovely little cabin.  Of course, they don’t bother to let Eve know what they’re doing.  That’s part of the forbidden appeal of it all!  Unfortunately, despite being played by Colin Firth, Simon turns out to be a bit of cad.

Indeed, all of the men turn out to be a bit of a disappointment, though some do manage to redeem themselves.  The film is less about Benny finding love and more about Benny discovering that it’s even more important to love and respect herself.  As so often happens when it comes to lifelong friends, there are some struggles.  Not all of the friendships survive.  Unfortunately, that’s just a part of growing up.  Still, Benny, Eve, and Nan are all wonderfully written and acted characters and the film does a great job of portraying their difficult but very true-to-life relationship.

Circle of Friends is a lovely film and a personal favorite of mine.  Unfortunately, it’s not always an easy film to watch.  It’s not streaming on any of the usual services.   However, the film has been uploaded to YouTube so be sure to watch it while you can.

Film Review: Michael Collins (dir by Neil Jordan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Released in 1996, Michael Collins tells the story of the early 20th century struggle of Ireland to gain independence from Britain.

Liam Neeson stars as Michael “Mick” Collins, the revolutionary leader who perfected the use of guerilla warfare against the British and then, in the greatest of ironies, found himself fighting some of his former allies during the Irish Civil War.  Aidan Quinn plays Mick’s friend and fellow revolutionary, Harry Boland.  Both Harry and Mick fall in love with Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts).  Stephen Rea shows up as Ned Broy, a member of the Dublin police department who is inspired by Mick’s words to become a double agent.  Charles Dance has a cameo as the fearsome Soames, a British intelligence agent who is sent to Ireland to violently put down the Irish insurgency.  Finally, Alan Rickman plays Eamon de Valera, who goes from being one of Mick’s strongest allies to being one of his fiercest rivals.  The film follows Collins from the Easter Rising of 1916 to his eventual assassination in 1922, providing a look at the history of Ireland that is as much directed towards those outside of Ireland as those on the inside.

When watching Michael Collins, it helps to have a working knowledge of Irish history.  Otherwise, it can occasionally be a bit difficult to keep track of who is angry with who at any particular point in time.  Of course, it should be noted that the movie itself is not exactly historically accurate.  In the film, the gentle and likable Ned Broy becomes a victim of British bloodlust.  In real life, Ned Broy outlived Michael Collins by several decades and died peacefully at the age of 84.  For that matter, the film presents Eamon de Valera as being coldly Machiavellian and it suggests that de Valera was jealous of Mick’s popularity.  Though both Rickman and director Neil Jordan later said it wasn’t intentional, the film also seems to suggest that de Valera played a role in Collins’s assassination.  While Eamon de Valera remains a controversial figure for many reasons (including his neutrality during World War II), Jordan has said that he feels de Valera was not necessarily treated fairly in Michael Collins and indeed, de Valera — who plays as big a role in the founding of the Irish republic as anyone — is portrayed as often being ineffectual and unwilling to truly put himself at risk to fight the British.  De Valera’s relationship with Collins was undoubtedly more complex than portrayed in this film but, when one makes a movie for an international audience, nuance is often the first thing that’s abandoned.

Seen today, 29 years after it was released, Michael Collins is an impressively made film that has a few inescapable flaws.  It’s gorgeous to look at, full of moody shots of dark Dublin streets.  The violence is often shocking and Jordan doesn’t shy away from considering the moral implications of Collins’s guerilla warfare.  Michael Collins doesn’t make the mistake of blindly celebrating violence, which would be a valuable lesson for the world’s current crop of self-styled revolutionaries if they were only willing to hear it.  Having gotten used to seeing Liam Neeson cast in one generic action film after another, it was interesting to watch Michael Collins and see what a good actor he truly could be.  Even in 1996, He was perhaps a few years too old to playing a man who was only 31 when he died but Neeson still plays the role with a ferocious charisma that makes him believable as a leader.  His scenes with Aidan Quinn have a joie de vivre that brings out the both in best actors.  Alan Rickman is memorably sinister as Eamon de Valera and Stephen Rea’s gentle style makes Ned Broy into a truly tragic figure.  That said, the very American Julia Roberts feels miscast as Kitty Kiernan.  One gets the feeling that she was cast solely for her box office appeal.  Every film, the feeling goes, needs  a love story and those love stories need to be between people with familiar faces and Roberts is such a familiar face that her every appearance in the film feels like a distraction from the story being told.  That said, the film captures the excitement and danger of being in the middle of history-making events.  It’s a historical epic that’s never boring and manages to hold the viewer’s interest.

Michael Collins is ultimately a flawed but entertaining look at the early days of the Irish republic.

Made-For-Television Film Review: Hogan’s Goat (dir by Glenn Jordan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1971’s Hogan’s Goat opens in Brooklyn in the 1890s.  This was when Brooklyn itself was still a separate city, before it become a borough of the unified New York City.  If you’ve watched the video that I include with most of my Welcome Back Kotter reviews, you’ll notice the boast: “Fourth largest city” on the Welcome to Brooklyn sign.  And indeed, if Brookyln had remained independent, it would now be the fourth most populated city in America, behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.  Sorry, Brooklyn.

(However, Houston thanks you.)

Local ward boss Matt Stanton (Robert Foxworth) heads home with what he thinks is exciting news.  He tells his wife, Kathleen (Faye Dunaway), that he is finally going to be mayor of Brooklyn.  The current mayor, a man named Quinn (George Rose), has been caught up in some sort of corruption and the Democratic political machine is ready to abandon him.  Matt Stanton is about to become one of the most powerful men in New York.  That’s not bad for a relatively young man who came to America from Ireland in search of a better life.  Adding to Stanton’s happiness is the fact that he’ll be defeating Quinn, a canny politician towards whom Stanton holds a grudge.  Kathleen, however, is worried.  An immigrant herself, Kathleen met Stanton while the latter was in London.  They were married in a civil ceremony and, ever since Stanton brought her back to Brooklyn, she has been lying and telling everyone that they were married in a church.  Kathleen feels that she and Stanton have been living in sin and she wants to have a convalidation ceremony.  Stanton refuses because doing so would mean admitting the lie in the first place and he can’t afford to lose the support of the Irish Catholic voters of Brooklyn.

However, it turns out that there are even more secrets in Stanton’s past, ones that Kathleen doesn’t know about but Quinn does.  When those secrets start to come out, Kathleen comes to realize that there’s much that she doesn’t know about her husband.  Stanton, with political power in his grasp, desperately tries to hold on to the image that he’s created of himself and Kathleen, leading to tragedy.

Hogan’s Goat was an Off-Broadway hit when it premiered in the mid-60s and its success led to Faye Dunaway getting her first film offers.  The made-for-television version of Hogan’s Goat, which premiered on PBS and featured Dunaway recreating her stage role, is essentially a filmed play.  Little effort was made to “open up” the story and, as a result, the film is undeniably stagy.  It’s clear from the start the film was mostly shot to record Faye Dunaway’s acclaimed performance for posterity.  Indeed, she’s the only member of the theatrical cast to appear in the film version.  Dunaway does give a strong performance, easily dominating the film with her mix of nervous intensity and cool intelligence.  The rest of the cast is a mixed bag.  Robert Foxworth is appropriately driven and ambitious as Stanton but his Irish accent comes and goes.  Philip Bosco does well as a sympathetic priest and George Rose is appropriately manipulative as Quinn.

In the end, the story of Hogan’s Goat is probably of the greatest interest to Irish-American history nerds like me, who have read and studied how Irish immigrants, especially in the 19th century, faced tremendous prejudice when coming to the United States and how they reacted by building their own political machines and dispensing their own patronage.  In Hogan’s Goat, the conflict is less between more Stanton and Quinn and more between Kathleen’s traditional views and her devout Catholicism and Stanton’s own very American ambition.  Whereas Kathleen still fights to retain her faith, pride, and her commitment to who she was before she married Stanton, Stanton fights for power and to conquer the man who Stanton feels has everything that he desires.  In the end, Stanton’s hubris is not only his downfall but Kathleen’s as well.

I Watched Touchback (2012, Dir. by Don Handfield)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

When he was in high school, Scott Murphy (Brian Presley) was nicknamed “Mr. Football.”  He was the best high school player in Ohio and everyone knew he was going to make it far in the NFL.  His dreams of football stardom ended on the night of the big game when his leg was shattered during a running play.  Twenty years later, Scott is still living in his small town.  He owns a farm that he can’t make the payments on and crops that he can’t bring in.  When Scott learns that he is to he honored at the next high school football team for taking the team to the state championship years ago, it causes him to break down.  He attempts to commit suicide but, when he passes out from inhaling carbon monoxide, he doesn’t die.  Instead, he wakes up as a high school student in 1991.

Scott has his second chance.  The championship game is coming up and, if Scott can keep from getting injured, he’ll be able to accept his scholarship to Ohio State and go on to the NFL.  He makes sure to introduce himself to his future wife Macy (Melanie Lynesky) so he won’t lose her.  He befriends the kids that he picked on the first time he was in high school.  When a college scout tells him that his scholarship will not be rescinded if he chooses to sit out the big game, Scott decides to stay on the bench but then his coach (Kurt Russell) explains how much the game means to the people in the town.  Scott realizes he has to play for them but can he get through the game without getting injured a second time?

What would you do if you had a second chance?  That’s something that everyone wonders.  If I had a second chance to relive my senior year of high school, I would take more risks, worry less about the unimportant stuff, and try to be nicer to everyone and not just the members of my social circle.  If I knew I was going to suffer a life-changing injury, I would probably go out of my way to make sure it didn’t happen.  That’s where Touchback loses me because I just don’t think Scott would have played in that game, no matter how eloquent the coach was.  If Scott had sat out the game, the town might have lost the championship but Scott could have gone on to the NFL, still married Macy, and his family wouldn’t be struggling to make ends meet on the family farm.

If I didn’t really believe Scott would have made the decision that he made, there were still parts of Touchback that I liked.  Kurt Russell was a great coach.  I liked the way the town rallied to Scott, even when he was at his lowest and about ready to give up.  That’s one thing I love about close-knit communities.  They take care of each other.

I Watched Dreamer (2005, Dir. by John Gatins)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Dreamer is based on the true story of a horse that did something that few horses have managed to do.  It broke a bone but it still managed to make a comeback as a racehorse.

I love horses, which is why I’m not a fan of horseracing.  I find horseracing to be cruel.  The horses, which have an innate need to follow the orders of whoever is riding it, will literally run themselves to death to try to keep their jockeys happy.  When you add that many racehorses are kept in deplorable conditions and that, with insurance, they are often worth more dead than alive, you have a sport that brings out the worst in a lot of people.  Horses are wonderful animals because they are so loyal.  That loyalty deserves better than being shot because they broke a leg due to their trainer’s negligence.

Given how I feel about horseracing, I’m amazed that I liked Dreamer when I saw it in the theaters and I was surprised that I still liked it when I watched it this weekend.  I guess it’s because the horse in Dreamer is not euthanized.  She would have been euthanized if not for the fact that her trainer (Kurt Russell) brought his daughter (Dakota Fanning) to work with him that day.  Russell loses his job but he does gain a horse.  After the horse recovers from its injury, Russell hopes to breed the horse.  It turn out that the horse cannot have a foal but it can still race.  With Russell and Fanning’s help, the horse returns to competition and shows up everyone who gave up on her.  Russell and Fanning refuse to give up on the horse and the horse doesn’t give up on herself.  Along the way, Russell and Fanning finally spend time together as father and daughter and Russell reconnects with his wife, Elisabeth Shue, and his father, Kris Kristofferson.  Everyone involved gives a good job.  The movie may be predictable but there aren’t any false notes in any of the performances.  I not only wanted the horse to get better but I wanted the family to grow closer and I was happy when both those things happened.

Dreamer is a good family movie.  If only every trainer was as kind and willing to admit his mistakes as Kurt Russell is in this film.  There’s nothing surprising about Dreamer but it’s still a movie that makes me cheer.  It makes me cheer in a way that a real horse race never would.

 

Far and Away (1992, directed by Ron Howard)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1892 and Joseph Donnelly (Tom Cruise) is a poor tenant famer in Ireland, used and exploited by the wealthy landowners.  Joseph falls in love with Shannon Christie (Nicole Kidman), the rebellious daughter of his landlord.  Shannon dreams of going to America, where rumor has it that land is being given away in the territory of Oklahoma on a first come/first serve basis.  Shannon even has some valuable spoons that she can use to raise money once they arrive in America.  Joseph, after being challenged to a duel by the Christies’ money manger, Stephen Chase (Thomas Gibson), also decides that heading to America might be a good idea.

Life in America is not as easy as Joseph and Shannon thought it would be.  They first end up in the dirty town of Boston, where Shannon loses her spoons and Joseph works for a corrupt political boss (Colm Meaney) and makes money as a bare-knuckles boxer.  They’ll reach Oklahoma eventually but not before Stephen and the Christies come to Boston and Joseph ends up working on the railroad and getting called “that crazy mick” multiple times.

Far and Away was Ron Howard’s attempt to make an American epic, in the style of John Ford.  It doesn’t work because Tom Cruise is too contemporary to be believable as a 19th century Irish immigrant and Howard tries so hard to push everything to an epic scale that it just makes it even more obvious how slight and predictable the movie’s story is.  Far and Away is full of big movie moments but it lacks the small human moments necessary to really engage its audience.  I will always remembers Far and Away because it was one of those films that seemed to take up permanent residence on HBO when I was growing up.  I didn’t really care about the film’s flaws back then.  Nicole Kidman was attractive and tall and she had wild red hair and back then, that’s all a movie needed to hold my attention.  Unlike Cruise, Nicole Kidman can effortlessly move between historical and contemporary films and, of the two leas, she comes off the best.  The movie is really stolen, though, by Colm Meaney, playing a ruthless political boss who could have taught Boss Tweed a thing or two.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, when we will be celebrating the legacy of immigrants like the Christies and the Donnellys.  Far and Away tries to pay tribute to their courage and their refusal to give up, even when things were tough and deadly on the frontier.  For me, though, Far and Away will always just make me think of HBO in the 90s.

Scenes that I Love: Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Beware the Ides of March!

The scene below is from the 1953 film, Julius Caesar.  This Oscar-nominated Shakespearean adaptation had a cast that was full of distinguished actors.  James Mason played Brutus.  The great John Gielgud played Cassius.  Louis Calhern was Caesar while other roles were filled by Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson, Edmond O’Brien, George Macready, John Hoyt, Edmund Purdom. and a host of other distinguished thespians.  And yet, the best performance in the film came from an actor who, at the time, no one considered to be a Shakespearean.  Marlon Brando brought his method intensity to the role of Mark Antony and the result was a performance that is still electrifying today.

On YouTube, someone referred to this as being “the world’s greatest speech delivered by the world’s greatest actor.”  Sounds good to me!

Here is Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar:

The underrated RED SUN (1971) – Charles Bronson & Toshiro Mifune in an East meets Western! 

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Every so often I’m going to throw out a movie that I don’t think gets enough love, and that just doesn’t set right with me. Today’s movie is RED SUN. 

In RED SUN, two of the most macho actors in the history of world cinema team up in a western where train robber Link (Bronson) is forced to lead the honorable samurai Kuroda (Mifune) on a cross country trek to reclaim a stolen sword that was intended to be a gift from the Empire of Japan to the US President. If the two men can’t get the sword back in a week’s time, honor demands that the two men will lose their lives out of shame. Link isn’t really down with this plan, but he doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter due to the power and skill of Kuroda. Charles Bronson & Toshiro Mifune command the screen, with Charlie showing a likable sense of humor in his role as the bad / good cowboy. The two must find the evil Gauche (French superstar Alain Delon). Gauche is Bronson’s old train robbing partner who stole the sword and killed a samurai in the process, providing even more motivation for Kuroda. Add in Ursula Andress as a sexy woman who has a history with both Link and Gauche, and it doesn’t get much better than this!

RED SUN is not a perfect movie, but I couldn’t imagine anyone being disappointed by this enjoyable East meets Western that features true international superstars. In my book, it’s highly recommended!

Enjoy the trailer below:

A Blast From The Past: The Velvet Underground in Boston (dir by Andy Warhol)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

 

In the late 60s, The Velvet Underground often performed at the Boston Tea Party, a concert venue in — you guessed it! — Boston.  Lou Reed described the Boston Tea Party as being the band’s favorite place to play and the Velvets’ performances at the venue would eventually become legendary.  The Velvet Underground would attract an audience made up of bikers, Harvard students, MIT Students, Northeastern Students, celebrities, and a young Jonathan Richman.

In 1967, artist Andy Warhol attended a performance and filmed the show.  He got 33 minutes of footage, one that doesn’t quite work as a concert film but which does work marvelously as a time capsule.  While the music itself is often distorted (and this is not the film to watch if you’re wanting to hear your favorite songs performed live), Warhol’s camera does capture the feel of the psychedelic 60s, complete with strobe lights, sudden zoom shots, and an audience that alternates between moving to the music and standing still in a state of stoned contemplation.  Warhol films like someone who has just gotten his first camera and can’t wait to experiment and see what it can do.  The end result is actually rather likable, even if it is often incoherent.  The enthusiasm and the excitement of filmmaking and capturing history comes through.  When you’re first learning and experimenting with film, there’s nothing cooler than a sudden close-up or a sudden pull back to reveal the size of the crowd.  The film finds Warhol having fun with the camera and the footage is ultimately rather hypnotic.

It’s a true time capsule.  Here is The Velvet Underground in Boston.

 

 

The TSL Grindhouse: Dixie Dynamite (dir by Lee Frost)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Georgia!

Yes, the 1976 film Dixie Dynamite is supposedly set in Georgia but it’s hard not to notice that all of the hills and mountains in the background look like they’re from California.  The story features two sisters, Dixie (Jane Anne Johnston) and Patsy (Kathy McHaley), who go into the moonshine business after their father drives his car off a cliff.  Their father was the best moonshiner in the business and they aim to carry on his legacy, despite the efforts of Sheriff Marsh (Christopher George) and banker Charlie White (R.G. Armstrong).  Blowing up their stills and threatening to auction off their land isn’t going to stop these two from doing whatever it is exactly that they’re doing in this film.  Eventually, the sisters steal a bunch of dynamite and start blowing stuff up.  Normally, I’d say “Woo hoo!” but this film even makes random explosions seem as boring as the 4th of July in Canada.

Warren Oates plays Mack, a motocross champion who occasionally helps the daughter’s out.  At least, I think he’s helping them.  To be honest, it’s not always easy to tell what Mack’s purpose actually is in this story.  He tends to show up randomly, usually after all the action has ended.  He’s kind of a useless friend, to be honest.  Warren Oates brings his rough-hewn charm to the roll and you’re usually glad to see him, if just because the actresses playing the sisters are genuinely lousy, but you’re never quite sure what he’s doing there.  Watching the film, one gets the feeling that Oates just dropped by the set whenever he felt like it and filmed a scene or two.

It’s really not that crazy of a possibility.  Actor Steve McQueen makes a cameo appearance in this film, riding a motorcycle and challenging Oates.  McQueen didn’t make many films in the 70s.  Let’s consider some of the films that he turned down: The Great Gatsby, Jaws, Apocalypse Now, The Driver, The French Connection, Sorcerer, and Hard Times.  None of those films appealed to McQueen but he was still willing to show up for a day’s worth of shooting on Dixie Dynamite.  Of course, McQueen does go uncredited.

This is an odd film, full of slow spots that not even actors like Warren Oates, Christopher George, and R.G. Armstrong can make up for.  Director Lee Frost was best-known for his softcore exploitation films and Dixie Dynamite is full of odd transitions and jump cuts, leading me to suspect that the film was originally meant to be a lot more like a typical Frost film before it was decided to go in a PG-direction as well.

Perhaps the oddest part of the film is that the daughter’s final scheme to get revenge on the sheriff and the banker involves stealing two dead bodies from the local morgue.  The bodies are made up and dressed to look like Dixie and Patsy so that the sisters can fake their own death.  I can understand that and even give them credit for hatching a clever plan.  But I still find it weird that the film never really explains how the bodies were stolen or why they were in the morgue in the first place.  What are the chances that Patsy and Dixie would head down to the morgue and find two look-alikes?

The film features dynamite, Warren Oates, and corpse-stealing  but it’s still incredibly dull.  That’s just weird.