The Frame » film-Ireland

The Crying Game

Jandy — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:01:24 +0000

An IRA cell captures Forest Whitaker, eventually ordering Stephen Rea, one of their number, to kill him. However, Rea has been talking with him while guarding him and finds it difficult to shoot him. When he’s killed anyway, Rea leaves his group to go find Whitaker’s girlfriend. Instead of telling her who he is, though, he falls in love with her. There’s another twist, which I won’t reveal, but if you know anything about this film, you probably know it already. It’s pretty much all anyone ever talks about with regards to The Crying Game, even though it’s really sort of a secondary thing. Heh. I didn’t even know it was an IRA film until I started watching it, though with Neil Jordan directing, I should’ve had an inkling. Jordan is a really good director, able to take strange plots and turn them into something more. Ultimately The Crying Game isn’t quite as successful as I’d hoped. It’s a quite good crime/terrorist thriller, but the, uh, unrevealed plot twist actually seemed unnecessary and sensationalist to me–though I suppose it does fit in with Jordan’s interest in identity, a fascination that I, oddly enough, felt was better realized in Breakfast on Pluto.
Well Above Average

Breakfast on Pluto

Jandy — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:53:12 +0000

Patrick is a young Irish boy who before very long becomes Patricia. His story is about more than just his attempts to get people to accept him as a her; his quest for identity and his lost family (he was abandoned on a church stoop as an infant) is played out against the backdrop of the early years of the Troubles, as his friends get more and more involved in IRA factions while he does his best to keep from getting involved in things that are too “serious.” There’s a lot of heart to the film, yet it never gets overly sentimental or stops being fun. There’s a tough-to-find sweet spot between hilarity and tragedy, and hilarity that masks tragedy, and director Neil Jordan and actor Cillian Murphy found it with this film. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it is a really well-done indie-type Irish film.
Well Above Average

Once

Jandy — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:19:29 +0000

Once is an Irish film about a Dublin man working in his dad’s vacuum repairshop by day but spends his nights performing as a street musician, hoping to eventually record a demo CD. He meets a Czech woman one night, and they become friends–turns out she’s also a musician and they team up to record the demo. It would be common for the film to turn into a romance at this point, but it doesn’t….really….and that’s actually incredibly refreshing. Once doesn’t follow any of the standard moviemaking formulas–there’s too much music, there’s no sex, there’s no great conflict–and yet it works tremendously well. It’s joyful, it’s fresh, it’s bittersweet, it’s perfect.
Superior

Millions

Jandy — Sat, 06 May 2006 19:28:44 +0000

When I first started watching this, I was like, “whoa, this is sort of weird.” Then I picked up the case and noticed that it was directed by Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Trainspotting), and then the weirdness all made sense. The story is relatively simple: Damian, a young idealistic boy in Manchester, finds a duffel bag with thousands of pound notes in the field behind his family’s new house, and thinks it’s a gift from God. He shows the money to his brother, who wants to spend it on themselves, but our young idealist (who has visions of saints) wants to give it to the poor. A worthy goal, but as he starts handing wheelbarrowfulls of money out to the neighbors, the charity representative at his school, and even welcomes the creepy guy who shows up at his improvised fort in the field, suspicions rise. Adding to the pressure is the fact that in the story, the UK is about to make the switch from pounds to euros, and the children’s millions are soon going to be worthless. Now, this could be a really routine family film, asking what’s really important in life, money or family, bringing out all sorts of ethical questions about whether they should keep the money, report it to the police, give it to the poor, etc. But in Danny Boyle’s hands it’s not routine at all…it’s also not really a family film. It’s extremely fantastic in presentation, with Damian’s visions of saints and flights of fancy. The manner in which he discovers how the money really came to be in the field (the robbery of a train on a nearby track) is more punk-action style than anything else. It’s a really hard film to describe, and even now I’m not sure I’d say I thought it was really good. It was certainly not what I expected, and it kept me interested and fascinated all the way through, so I suppose there’s that. And there’s a joy of watching Alex Etel as Damian…he’s really brilliant.
Above Average