Mar. 25th, 2013 10:14 pm
Féarach na Fola
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muckefuckSo Mann and Marsé are still taking a backseat while I ride this Irish kick for all it's worth. I even took Lotte out of my bag, though I'm still carrying around Embrujo on the off chance I'll need to impress some Spanish-speakers with my cosmopolitanismo. I'm not making as much progress with the written word because I've added a second front: Besides The Secret of Kells, we've NetFlixed The Guard, The General, The Snapper, In Bruges, and The Field. (Why yes, I do have a bit of a thing for Brendan Gleeson--as if you didn't know!) I've just come from watching the last of these and I'm a bit on the fence about it. It straddles a line between stark realism and Poor Mouth self-parody, not always successfully. (It was filmed only two dozen miles away from the Quiet Man, after all.)
Really, it's hard to imagine it working at all without the magnificent Richard Harris in the starring role. I've never seen Sean Bean so milquetoasty before--I mean, I understand that's his character, but it's done to the point where I found it hard to care what happened to him. Writing in a romance with a tinker girl doesn't help (and feels heavy-handed to boot given how Harris' old crofter is always banging on about the damn field). Similar problem with Berenger: one account said his character was made American rather than English to make him "more sympathetic", but it had the opposite effect on me. Even if that was actually the intention, there's a difference between disliking a character who acts like an asshole and disliking an actor who just sounds like one. Beautiful locations (though it does annoy me a bit how they keep rewriting properties set in Cork or Kerry so they can film them in Connemara) but lousy music--derivative and a bit cheesy. The ending is overdetermined and they seem to have upped the quotient of anticlericalism relative to the play as well.
We'll have a break for the weekend with a Korean film I've been wanting to see for simply ages and then it's back to...well, I don't know what given that the two films (Hear My Song and I Went Down) I really wanted to see aren't available. Any suggestions?
Really, it's hard to imagine it working at all without the magnificent Richard Harris in the starring role. I've never seen Sean Bean so milquetoasty before--I mean, I understand that's his character, but it's done to the point where I found it hard to care what happened to him. Writing in a romance with a tinker girl doesn't help (and feels heavy-handed to boot given how Harris' old crofter is always banging on about the damn field). Similar problem with Berenger: one account said his character was made American rather than English to make him "more sympathetic", but it had the opposite effect on me. Even if that was actually the intention, there's a difference between disliking a character who acts like an asshole and disliking an actor who just sounds like one. Beautiful locations (though it does annoy me a bit how they keep rewriting properties set in Cork or Kerry so they can film them in Connemara) but lousy music--derivative and a bit cheesy. The ending is overdetermined and they seem to have upped the quotient of anticlericalism relative to the play as well.
We'll have a break for the weekend with a Korean film I've been wanting to see for simply ages and then it's back to...well, I don't know what given that the two films (Hear My Song and I Went Down) I really wanted to see aren't available. Any suggestions?
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