• Hector and the Search for Happiness

    Soon into Hector and the Search for Happiness, the baffling new leading man vehicle for Simon Pegg from director Peter Chelsom (The Hannah Montana Movie), I realised why the ‘dramedic’ inertia felt so familiar. Hector has much in common with last year’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a Ben Stiller film which was remarkable for recreating perfectly in cinematic form the polished emptiness of a high-end credit card commercial. Both are adaptations of a literary work (here, a popular 2002 novel by Francois Lelord), both use a well-known comic actor for a slightly straighter role, and both are about…

  • Happy Days Festival: Catastrophe

    It seemed certain that somebody would let the cat out of the bag. A tongue would slip and the secret would surely be out. The mystery surrounding the location of the Ceithleann Island Theatre Company’s performances of Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe was an imaginative programming touch of the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival and a great publicity generator. Despite two performances every day bar one throughout the marathon eleven-day festival, nobody spilled the beans. On this day, the bus routinely picks up about fifty people from Enniskillen Castle and heads out into the wilds of the Fermanagh countryside – destination…

  • Guardians of the Galaxy

    Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel’s big summer movie, is a hot-blooded, swaggering space-opera blockbuster and a finely-judged exercise in controlled chaos. On the one hand, it’s another big-budget, aggressively promoted film from the production factory of Marvel Studios, which has achieved unprecedented box-office success through shrewd creative decisions and a tight-fisted promotion of a ‘house style’ across their properties. On the other hand, they chose as writer-director (with co-writer Nicole Perlman) James Gunn, whose CV includes Super, in which a psychotic Rainn Wilson dresses as a superhero and runs around smashing people’s faces in with a wrench, and Tromeo and…

  • Happy Days Festival: Donal O’Kelly reads Samuel Beckett’s Sedendo et Quiescendo

    For some, purgatory might well be a dawn rise to catch a 7am boat on Lough Erne, one that ferries you to an uninhabited island for a reading of Samuel Beckett’s lesser known work. Lough Erne was an ancient pathway for pilgrims from the Shannon heading to the monastery of Devonish and other church sites. But purgatory this is not, for the pilgrims this fresh, sunny Fermanagh morning are all Beckettphiles. The Purgatorio Island Readings have been a constant feature of the first three editions of the Happy Days Eniskillen International Beckett Festival, and hugely popular with attendees as well…

  • The Purge: Anarchy

    2011’s The Purge, written and directed by relatively green film-maker James DeMonaco, was a concept in search of a movie. The ropey home invasion flick was built around an irresistibly trashy hook: in less than a decade from now, America is a sort of Tea Party NRA wonderland where, for one night a year, violent crime is legal. Murder is not just allowed, but promoted as a civil duty, all the name of spiritual self-renewal. It keeps the crime and population numbers down and the welfare rolls under control (dead people don’t claim the dole). The low-budget but decent-grossing film…

  • Boyhood

    Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is both an aesthetic and logistical triumph. That it exists at all is a victory of sorts, considering the (much-hyped) eccentricities of its production. The film is an impressionistic time-lapse of human development, charting the growth of a young Texan boy from primary-school to college age and the evolution of his surrounding family. To achieve an honest chronicle of this temporal stutter effect, Linklater returned to the small troupe of actors every year or so for eleven years to shoot a handful of scenes, guessing ahead and developing the narrative on the fly. In a neat folding…

  • I am Divine

    Prolific filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz turns his attention to the life and career of drag artist Divine, the cinematic muse of John Waters’ signature films. Divine didn’t invent the idea of being a drag queen, but she did reinvent it, challenging expectations, boundaries, society’s idea of ‘beauty’ and just plain decency and taste, and she did it like nobody else before. As Waters quips in the film, “Divine took it to another level, a level of anarchy”. The film begins with perhaps the crowning moment of Divine and John Waters’ long professional partnership – the premiere of Hairspray in 1988 –…

  • Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

    The first of this Planet of the Apes trilogy, 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, benefited enormously from the goodwill produced by exceeded expectations. The original series of films, based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 sci-fi novel, existed in the public mind primarily as a vague collection of B-movie twists and lines of dialogue, ripe for sly parody. The first attempt at a modern remake, Tim Burton’s 2001 film, was muddled and saddled with an obtuse twist ending. There was room to go further. Rise, in which James Franco’s scientist raises the hyper-intelligent ape named Caesar and unwittingly develops…

  • Transformers: Age of Extinction

    That the Transformers films, brought to us jointly by Hasbro’s accountancy department and the jock-bro personality of Michael Bay, are bad is nearly common knowledge. But few Hollywood franchises have so aggressively courted the kind of sublime awfulness to which audiences have been subjected every second summer or so in recent memory. At the beginning of Age of Extinction, the fourth in the franchise and scripted by series regular Ehren Kruger, Optimus Prime is introduced hiding out in an abandoned movie theatre, where the old-timer owner bemoans the state of modern cinema. “It’s all sequels and reboots!” he complains, a…

  • Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie: A Dissection

    It is hard to imagine a less fashionable sitcom than Mrs. Brown’s Boys, Brendan O’Carroll’s cash-spewing granny-drag comedy in which he plays the foul-mouthed matriarch at its centre. Based on the act O’Carroll and various family members developed on stage over years of touring, and co-developed by RTE and BBC Scotland, the show is powered by the comic appeal of a stocky man in a dinner lady’s vest pottering about sets, mugging for the audience, laughing at his own jokes and spitting out ‘fecks’ like punctuation. Trading on shoe-worn sitcom set-ups, Mammy-knows-best nostalgia and gags so broad a rookie stormtrooper…