Any Other Business: Part LXXII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Photo: Eric Ray Davidson

David Boreanaz Said What?!

You could have knocked me down with a feather the other month when watching SEAL Team on the channel formerly known as Sky One, David Boreanaz’s Bravo One Jason Hayes on being informed the HVT was leaving the train with the triggermen still on it, shouted “F*CK!”. What?! WHAT?! On Network TELEVISION?! I thought I must have misheard it. Did he perhaps say cluck, duck, luck? None of which would make much sense… Then he said it again. What was going on? Then a quick google later I saw that SEAL Team had moved from CBS to its streaming service. Ah… And, based on what had been happening in that rip-roaring train episode, it must have done this between commercial breaks. I’m not sure that SEAL Team actually gains that much from the profanity that has been added to the show. But my word it remains weird as hell to say Boreanaz after a network television career of eight years as Angel, twelve as Seeley Booth, and four and a bit as Jason Hayes, suddenly start effing and blinding like a sailor.

Portia Coughlan

The Abbey’s revisiting of Marina Carr’s 1990s coruscating work continued apace with a revival of Portia Coughlan starring Denise Gough.

Portia Coughlan is turning 30. But she has no intention of marking the day with any positivity, instead drinking alone as soon as the kids have gone to school, as her husband Raphael (Marty Rea) discovers to his horror. Despite the best attempts of her friends and family to cheer her up, and her own fumbled affairs with local likely lads, the day is hollowed out by the absence of her twin brother Gabriel who drowned himself years before. And the horror of that long past day will be lived all over again, and then explained, thanks to Carr’s curious structure.

The opening line of the play signals that extreme abrasiveness is about to follow. And the influence of Pulp Fiction is plain to see in the death of Portia, in what seems an incredibly bold stroke, only for the clock to rewind as we follow her up to that point, as Carr once again invests the Midlands with the depravity and ritual horror of Ancient Greek myths. Once again the lack of an interval seems less a means of sustaining tension and more an affectation as an obvious curtain is played through. Caroline Byrne, however, directs with a keen eye for pace and balance between black comedy and harrowing drama.

4/5

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Hopes: 2022

The Batman

Top Gun: Maverick

Killers of the Flower Moon

John Wick: Chapter 4

Elvis

Jurassic World: Dominion

Don’t Worry Darling

Hallowen Ends

The Flash

The Nightingale

Avatar 2

Top 10 Films of 2021

Oxygen

The Velvet Underground

I’m Your Man

Space Sweepers

CODA

The Nest

Meeting Point

The Suicide Squad

Blithe Spirit

Worth

O Holy Night

I’m putting the blog on ice for a bit while I do not cook a turkey for Christmas dinner, and desperately try to get closer to meeting my Goodreads challenge for the year than my current abysmal standing.

Talking Movies proper will return in January with a Top 10 Films of 2021, and previews of 2022′s best and worst films.

The blog has been far more sporadic this year than previously, for various reasons, not least of which was the continuing nightmare for morale of COVID-19. I don’t make any promises that things will improve on the writing front next year, but I do have some hope that normality will ebb back into our lives, and for that reason let us revisit Sorkin Christmas: Part Two.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Roll on Omicron and endemicity.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XLIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Lynch After Lynch

A strange thought came to mind the other week as I was listening to the sound of the wind whistling thru tall trees, a favourite sound of David Lynch. Is Lynch, like 1990s Tarantino, a dead-end, or, more accurately, such a singular creative explosion that while he at first might appear liberating and invite people to join him in his explorations he actually leaves a Tunguska-like blast radius around him which nobody else can ever enter. Can you make a film that has surreal elements and escape being called Lynchian? Can you use dream logic or corny dialogue mixed with extreme violence and weird sexuality and not have everyone start writing up their Lynchian comparisons? Can David Lynch even escape his own shadow at this point?

Any Other Business: Part LXXI

As the title suggests, so forth.

Ladies and gentlemen, to whom it may concern, it’s the Tonight Show

I was recently reading Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing and was surprised to find he wrote for Herb Shriner’s TV show. Which I know about purely from a DVD extra showing an episode Orson Welles appeared on that, apart from Welles, had some serious Conan O’Brien vibes – as if America nailed the format in the 1950s and never changed. This started me wondering why nobody ever really attempted that kind of late night comedy talk show here. (Let us not mention Craig Doyle) I mean, besides the obvious – we would run out of guests needed to populate a show every night. Or would we? Suppose you broke apart the Late Late Show, that unwieldy illogical near three hour behemoth, into three shows a week. Put in an opening monologue making fun of the news a la Johnny Carson every night, and then had a guest and a musical slot, maybe some recurring bits, and two long ad breaks. Couldn’t that work in a 50 minute slot?

Goodbye to all that

• 

It has been five months since the Sunday Breakfast Show with Patrick Doyle bowed out after a three year run on Dublin City FM.

I was involved for most of the run as on-air film critic and behind the scenes as contributing writer, cameraman for promo shoots, and on delirious occasion producer.

As with so much else the show changed irrevocably with the coming of the coronavirus, but I think it rose to the technical challenge with some elan.

I shall miss it

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