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FatherCrow
Reviews
The Hard Way (1980)
Must see, if you can find it.
Amazing film, especially for a low budget Irish TV Movie. Bone chilling, sparse, and lovely canvas. McGoohan is as always unmissable, and Lee Van Cleef though in another low budget movie, really shines in this.
I saw this originally in 79' when I was seven, it left an indellible mark on my psyche and I was 40 before I was able to find a copy of it, I was wondering if it was going to be as good as I remembered. I need not have worried, it was even better.
This really needs a DVD release, as if seen by a wider audience would increase both McGoohan's and Van Cleef's reputations (not that either need it, but it's a gem in both their careers.)
Peace and Hope
FatherCrow
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Made my hands shake just too watch it.
A brief review, you can get all the spoilers and plot details from the other entries. Linklater's "A Scanner DarklY" is for my money one of the only two book to movie adaptations that does that genre any good at all, the other being Terry Gilliams "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", and oddly enough, they are both drug movies.
A Scanner Darkly was, for my money, Philip K. Dicks most autobiographical work (save for the later religious or ontological tracts like VALIS and EXEGENISIS). Linklater has done an admirable job of taking all that needed to be in a limited movie length format from the book, reinvigorating the old rotoscoping techniques and bringing it to the screen in all its paranoid hallucinogenic glory.
As for the actors, all performed to the letter of what the book presented the characters to me as, with a special mention for Robert Downey Jnrs Barris, absolutely amazing. But then again getting Downey Jnr to play a paranoid dope fiend isn't really a stretch, the guy has enough real life experience in it himself.
A must see, and in fact, the only anti-drug tract that I take seriously, forget the "just say no" brigade, check out "A Scanner Darkly" for a true reflection of the risks of drug taking (well specifically speed taking). And believe me, I have explored some of the same territory that Dick did.
Check it out, you won't be disappointed.
Peace and Hope FatherCrow
Crush Proof (1998)
Cúchulainn of the North Side
Darren Healy stars in this mythic parable set in 1998 Dublin. A flawed but ambitious Irish movie set in my home town.
Neil (Darren Healy) gets out of jail and tries to see his son, the mother tries to bar the door of her flat to him, slams and things rapidly get out of control from there.
The director throws everything including the kitchen sink at the cinematic wall in the hope that something sticks, and surprisingly most do, there are moments of glaring awkwardness in the script and some dreadful miscasting (specifically Viviana Verveen as Nuala.)
"Crushproof" works well as cinematic metaphor of the harshness of todays Dublin underclass and their dead end lives and our own ancient heroes who fought like lions despite the inevitable violent death. Looks like someone finally saw the parable between the "thug" mentality of Dublin's Lumpenproletariat and our own mythic heroic past. The spirit of "Hyla" lives on.
Good soundtrack and some great performances, however the director tried too many different techniques, "Crushproof" manages to be both stylised and verite at different points depending on what was thought was needed for the scene. Unfortunately the styles do not seamlessly blend. Also at some points the mixture of the "humour of the damned" and the more serious scenes are juxtaposed to the point of being jarring and not helping the flow of the film.
Still all in all I would give this a seven being all at once in touch with both our ancient and modern Irish identities. Many, many great and truthful moments, that do not all hang together comfortably as a film.
Peace and Hope
FatherCrow
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Jesus died for his own sins, not mine.
Well for the duration of the movie, I got to watch Yeshua Bin Yosef get gradually and sadistically get beaten half to death and then eventually murdered by crucifixion. This was apparently done to redeem the world of it's sins (though how one mans suffering can redeem the world I do not know).
What makes more sense to me is that I finally got to see a retro-active punishment for the man who started a world religion that has killed, tortured and mutilated millions whilst spreading the "good news" and "truth" across the globe and through the centuries. The "truth", which is an invention of man anyways (truth being the subjective filtering of experience). The brutalization of Christ is in essence the reason for me giving the movie a ten.
"No-one comes to the Father except through me" - I'm right, you're wrong, there is no other way. - the ancient version of "You're either with us or against us" and we all know where that leads, the dead piled in mounds and the whole world turned to Golgotha.
Spreading the word Mel? or profiteering from your savior? - I wonder how that will go down in Heaven?
Peace and Hope
FatherCrow