The Bigger Picture is a programming strand they have in the Irish Film Institute, in which they invite someone (usually someone involved in the film industry, broadly defined) to select a film to show and then to introduce a screening of it. Local filmmaker Luke McManus had his turn on the Bigger Picture wheel back in September. He picked Lone Star, John Sayles's 1996 film, in which Chris Cooper plays Sam Deeds, the sheriff of a border county in 1990s Texas. I had not seen it since its original release. but I eagerly took the opportunity to see it again in the cinema, as I remembered it very fondly and regard it as one of the very best films I have ever seen. And it is as good as I remembered.
The basic plot is a murder mystery (Sam's search for the killer of Charlie Wade, the psychopathic old sheriff who disappeared in the late 1950s but whose skeletal remains show up at the start of the film) but it manages to bring in all kinds of other themes, including forbidden love, race and immigration, how historical events are recorded, difficult family dynamics, and even the nature of evil. There's also a gothic tinge to this tale of dark secrets emerging from the past, for all that this is a film set in sunny Texas rather than darkest Transylvania.
Having subsequently seen a few of Sayles's films, including 2008's Honeydripper, I think that his thing is eliciting strong performances from ensemble casts, with this film being no exception to that. There are so many good performances in Lone Star that it feels like I am letting the side down by singling individuals out, but Chris Cooper's understated sheriff, Elizabeth Peña as Pilar, his old flame who was kept away from him by cruel circumstances and disapproving adults, and Kris Kristofferson (in terrifying form in flashback scenes as Wade) are particularly striking.
The other Big Picture film I saw recently was Disney's 1985 film Return to Oz. Directed by Walter Murch, this is based on two of L. Frank Baum's novels. It was introduced by director Aislinn Clarke, who talked about how back in days of yore Walt Disney had always wanted to make a film of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but MGM got the rights ahead of him. Eventually Disney acquired rights to some of the other Oz books but it was only after Walt died that his company made this film. And it tanked at the box office, which might explain why Murch never directed anything else (though he remained in demand as an editor and sound designer, winning awards for his work in these areas).
Clarke talked a bit about how the film is quite dark and a bit too edgy for a kiddy film audience (though let's face it, the more famous 1939 film has scenes that are absolutely terrifying to small people). And the beginning scenes are no fun, with a young Dorothy (played by Fairuza Balk, unlike Judy Garland an actual child when she played the role) being sent to some sinister quack psychiatrist by her guardians after she won't stop going on about her previous visit to the imaginary realm of Oz. Then of course she does find herself back in Oz, but everything has somehow gone to shit, with the Emerald City in ruins, its inhabitants mostly turned to stone, her old friends either missing or also turned to stone, and the streets patrolled by the sinister Wheelers. Fortunately she makes a series of new friends (a talking chicken, a wind-up mechanical man, Jack Pumpkinhead and eventually a flying sofa with a moose's head). It all comes good at the end but not without some moments of strange danger.
And it is pretty good, maybe even very good. I think Return to Oz suffers from not being as iconic as the 1939 film, but that's like saying it impresses less because it was less successful. It feels a bit like it is cut from the same cloth as Dark Crystal - a fantasy film for kids who can take something a bit on the scary side, with enough going on that it might actually have a stronger appeal to adults of a more discerning nature.
I am now thinking of what film I will pick when my turn arrives to choose one for the Bigger Picture.
Is maith liom dul go dtí an phictuirlann. Tá mé freisin ag foghlaim Gaeilge san obair. Mar sin de, chuaigh me chuig na dhá scannáin Gaeilge An Cailín Ciúin agus Róise & Frank. If you don't live in Ireland then An Cailín Ciúin is the one of these you are most likely to have heard of, though you will probably have heard of it under its English title, The Quiet Girl. Written and directed by Colm Bairéad, it is a finalist in this year's Academy Awards in the Best International Film category and is based on Foster, a novella by Claire Keegan. The eponymous girl is a child of neglect, her father a deadbeat piece of shit from central casting (so well played by Michael Patric that I can imagine the actor having to wear a paper bag over his head to prevent random strangers hurling abuse at him when he is out in public) and her mother completely ground down and mired in the slough of despond.
But then she goes on an extended stay with distant relatives (an older and apparently childless couple, the woman warm and affectionate, the man initially more gruff and reserved) and experiences the kind of parental affection hitherto denied to her. We learn things and so do the characters, but not in a "And you have learned how to make a good bagel!" kind of way. It's all pretty subtle, with many things remaining unspoken or implied. But it puts you through the emotional wringer, not least because there is no Hollywood transformation in the film's end; he viewer left wondering how the poor girl's childhood and life pans out, with various non-ideal outcomes looking entirely possible. The three central actors (Catherine Clinch as the girl and Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett as the fosters) give incredible performances and it is hard not to recommend this film. My beloved did however feel that the girl is a bit talkative for someone supposedly defined by her quietness.
Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy's Róise & Frank meanwhile is about a widow who is struggling to deal with her grief when a mysterious dog shows up at her house and refuses to go away. Soon she realises (or concludes) that the dog is in fact the reincarnation of Frank, her late husband. Frank was a keen hurler in his human life and the dog too shows an affinity for the noble sport, soon helping a local school team to advance to the finals (he does not actually play in the games, because that would be insane, but he helps with coaching). Róise's son is less convinced that the dog is his late father returned, but he cannot deny the positive transformation "Frank" has wrought on his mother.
It would be easy to dismiss Róise & Frank as a kitsch feelgood film, but I think there is more to it than that. There are some deeply moving scenes in it and I think the film will resonate with anyone who has ever lost a loved one or suspects that they may do so at some point in the future. It is also worth reporting that "Frank" is a very good dog. He is played by Barley, an English dog who had to learn Irish for the film. He appears to have greatly enjoyed making Róise & Frank, as he got to eat a lot of sausages and even some steak (I can imagine him deliberately fluffing some of the dining scenes as a way of getting more sausages in the re-take). The human actors (Bríd ní Neachtain as Róise and Ruadhán de Faoite as the main kid hurler are also pretty memorable, as is Lorcan Cranitch as the neighbour who resents the arrival of "Frank" as a blocker on his making moves on Róise).
Interestingly, both of these films are (mostly) set in the same part of the country, the Ring Gaeltacht in County Waterford. In both cases I think the choice is fairly deliberate. When most people in Ireland think of Irish speaking parts of the country they imagine bleak windswept places in the west of Ireland, but setting films there means the landscape takes over the story and you start having to deal with themes of isolation and remoteness, together with an association of the Irish language with being far away from modernity. Ring is a mostly rural area but in neither of these films does it look like a land that time forgot or somewhere that remained Irish-speaking because it was too far away from the centre of imperial power and too poor to be worth bothering with. So that lets the stories of the films speak for themselves: these are films in which the characters speak Irish but they are not really films about the Irish language.
I've been on a bit of a David Bowie roll lately, largely thanks to Brett Morgen's brilliant Moonage Daydream film. I went to see it again and enjoyed the experience much more the second time. Partly I was fortunate in that the screen was not hurting my eyes (I'm not sure if previously the awkwardness came from my eyes being shit or the particular combination of the Moonage Daydream montage and the IFI's screen 2 combining to downpress me, but I certainly got nothing like the same disturbance from the screening in the IFI's screen 3) but also I was approaching the film in a more relaxed manner, letting it wash over me without trying to identify the various bits of funny German expressionist footage they kept throwing into the mix. It's a great piece of work, submerging the viewer in Bowie's work while avoiding the standard music documentary thing of wheeling in Bongo to tell us all why Bowie was quite so important as someone who paved the way to the music of U2. I continue to be struck by the contrast between the audiences shown for his early 1970s Ziggy Stardust concerts and the Serious Moonlight tour of the 1980s, with the former audience being made up an excitable bunch of freaks and weirdos while the 1980s audience looked pretty square, even by 1980s standards. More generally I found myself wondering when Bowie's audience shifted from being primarily girls to primarily boys. Or did it? My beloved noted that there were always a lot of both, and one might perhaps overestimate the number of girls in the early years where the boys are all dressing like girls.
With Moonage Daydream pushing my buttons it seemed only natural that this year I make some kind of engagement with the Dublin Bowie Festival. This takes place in January of each year, around the anniversaries of Bowie's birth and death. I've never bothered with it before so I can't say whether this year's programme was typical, but I can confirm that the line-up featured musical performances (by Bowie tribute acts and Bowie-linked musicians), a photographic exhibition, talks, and film screenings in the Light House cinema.
The film screenings included another showing of Moonage Daydream, which I skipped on the basis that i) it was only a week or two after my last viewing of it and ii) it was on very late. But I did go and see The Hunger, Tony Scott's film adaptation of Whitley Streiber's novel. Truth be told even if I was not on a Bowie kick I would have crawled out of the grave to see this, as it is a film I have long been fascinated by without ever actually seeing, ever since I read the book and found its evocation of immortal sadness intriguing. And the film is an interesting one to show as part of a Bowie festival, as he only really plays a supporting role. It is a prominent supporting role, but Bowie is very much playing third fiddle to Catherine Deneuve and Sarah Sarandon.
The basic plot is simple enough. Deneuve and Bowie are an immortal vampire couple, except something is going wrong with Bowie's character, who starts to rapidly age, his hundreds of years of undead life rapidly catching up with him. Deneuve's character is sad, but there's nothing really she can do about it. And hating being alone she starts lining up the Sarandon character as Bowie's replacement.
Plotwise I kept finding myself comparing it with the book, or my memories of it (it was thirty years ago, your honour), and at certain key points I found the film wanting in this department. But the look and feel of the film is incredible, with its dark lighting, shadows and close-ups making it like the bastard child of German expressionist cinema and film noir. There is some great fractured time stuff too, with edits jumping backwards and forwards between the vampires on the hunt and then laying into their victims. It also does a good job of communicating the idea that maybe the life of an immortal vampire isn't really all that, even if your centuries do not start suddenly catching up with you. I did find myself wondering if this might be the first screen depiction of a sad and sympathetic vampire. The film also seems to have largely established the idea that if vampires existed they would hang out in goth clubs (as featured in the memorable opening sequence with Bauhaus playing in a New York club while the two vampires stalk their victims), something that would eventually become something of a cliche.
It also features doves, which seem to have been a bit of a thing in films of the era. In The Hunger they hang around in a loft but seem to never deposit their droppings on the floor.
Plus the film features Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon getting it on. This may have been the elevator pitch.
Aside from the cinema I attended a couple of the festival's talks. One of these was billed as a listening party for the album Aladdin Sane. David Bowie has a lot of albums and Aladdin Sane is one of the ones I've never heard. For the listening party they had Hot Press journalist Pat Carty chairing a discussion with Gerry Leonard (guitarist on Bowie's last albums), Leah Kardos (an academic), and B. P. Fallon (famous Irish music biz character whose actual link to Bowie is not entirely clear to me but he did provide a certain "I was there man" vibe to proceedings). But billing this as a listening party was a think necessarily false advertising. With the likes of Tim Burgess and his Twitter listening parties participants could listen to the records while reading the tweets (and possibly posting their own), but you can't simultaneously listen to a record while also listening to some guys yap away about it. So for this event they started off by playing bits of the songs and then having a bit of yap, but as the yap started going on and on they gave up on the music as otherwise we would have been there all night. For me this made for an odd experience, listening to people talking about a record I had not heard, but it was interesting to hear the general view of the panelists regarding pianist Mike Garson, whose playing was deemed a bit plinky plonky. Actually it was B. P. who introduced the plinky plonky criticism (the phrase "plinky plonky vibe" may have been uttered) but there was no real pushback against him. Leonard, who had played with Garson on late Bowie records said something about how Garson was now a good friend of his but then admitted that the pianist definitely loved the plinky plonky.
More generally the tacit subtext to the Aladdin Sane discussion was that the album is not really that good. Maybe not bad as such but certainly not front rank Bowie. I was nevertheless sufficiently intrigued by the discussion to pick up a copy afterwards and yes indeed, it is inessential. Definitely some good tracks (notably the title track and the hit) and some rofflesome lines (the one about how time falls wanking to the floor) but a good few of the tracks feel like Bowie by numbers (save where he is trying to evoke the Rolling Stones). Maybe it is not too surprising he broke up the Spiders soon after it was released. But it's not actually that plinky plonky.
That said, I am wary of going all in on dissing Aladdin Sane for fear that at some point in the future the penny will drop and I will realise that actually it is amazing. This has happened before.
There were two interesting and almost in-passing references to money in the Aladdin Sane discussions. Leah Kardos mentioned that around the time the album came out Bowie began to experience financial problems. Ziggy Stardust had pushed him up a level but he was now finding that his outlays had gone up considerably (with a large entourage and touring machine to support plus a sudden need to take limousines everywhere as well as a mammoth coke habit) but his income had not increased proportionately. She suggested that the eventual decision to rake in the cash with Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight tour was largely driven by a need to get himself out of this financial hole. The other money thing was a "probably shouldn't be saying this" comment from one of the participants that I think it would be inappropriate to reproduce.
The following day, a Sunday, I went out to Rathfarnham Castle to see an exhibition entitled Bowie: Icon, which was a collection of photographs of David Bowie by one Philippe Auliac. The pictures were worth seeing but I am not sure they were worth going to see, though I did like what I saw of Rathfarnham Castle itself and may well make a return visit sometime. On returning back into town I returned to Whelan's where Leah Kardos (academic, Wire writer, stylophonist) was treating us to an audiovisual exploration of themes in and influences on Bowie's last works, the albums The Next Day and Black Star and the musical Lazarus. This touched on a lot of stuff, but one thing I found interesting was the way Bowie kept referencing The Man Who Fell To Earth in his work. I was also intrigued by the stuff about a young Bowie appearing in a mime/dance troupe with the pub landlord from The Wicker Man (the actor, dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp), dressed as a similar kind of clown to the one he plays in the "Ashes to Ashes" video. The influences meanwhile pushed a lot of my buttons, with Kardos showing long clips from various Derek Potter dramas (reminding me that I have long been a Derek Potter fan without actually having ever watched any of his dramas all the way through). Some of this stuff was interesting to me in terms of what it said about Kardos herself, in terms of her age and background: she's from Australia and a good bit younger than me, and she seems to have come to Derek Potter through his being referenced by David Bowie rather than his being someone whose TV programme were always on when you were growing up.
I was also intrigued by Kardos's discussion of the Lazarus musical and the clips she showed from it. This had completely passed me by and I was barely aware of its existence. It is a jukebox musical (and so is suspect) but it seems to have not done a Mamma Mia and used the songs to piss on Bowie's legacy, instead having a plot based on recurring themes in his work, with Bowie himself being involved in its creation for all that popular Irish playwright Enda Walsh did the actual writing. Wikipedia lists it as being a straightforward adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth, but that was not really the impression I got from Kardos's presentation, though she did suggest that it certainly referenced that work (as does a lot of late Bowie material). It came across as being quite multi-layered and almost enigmatic, not something that just gives us a simple story that allows the cast to belt out the Bowie hits in a manner that might appeal to the casual Bowie fan. This may explain why it did not do that well.
I was also interested by the in-passing assertion that the second Tin Machine album is actually great; the Tin Machine reappraisal starts now!
I probably would have bought the big brainy book about late Bowie that Leah Kardos has written but she didn't have very many copies with her so that was that. I might look out for it.
And that was it for the 2023 Bowie Festival. Maybe next year I will go to some of the gigs.
images:
Moonage Daydream still (Irish Independent: "Moonage Daydream review: Bowie documentary as zany and brilliant as the man himself")
The Bigger Picture is a programming strand they have in the Irish Film Institute, in which they invite someone (usually someone involved in the film industry, broadly defined) to select a film to show and then to introduce a screening of it. Local filmmaker Luke McManus had his turn on the Bigger Picture wheel back in September. He picked Lone Star, John Sayles's 1996 film, in which Chris Cooper plays Sam Deeds, the sheriff of a border county in 1990s Texas. I had not seen it since its original release. but I eagerly took the opportunity to see it again in the cinema, as I remembered it very fondly and regard it as one of the very best films I have ever seen. And it is as good as I remembered.
The basic plot is a murder mystery (Sam's search for the killer of Charlie Wade, the psychopathic old sheriff who disappeared in the late 1950s but whose skeletal remains show up at the start of the film) but it manages to bring in all kinds of other themes, including forbidden love, race and immigration, how historical events are recorded, difficult family dynamics, and even the nature of evil. There's also a gothic tinge to this tale of dark secrets emerging from the past, for all that this is a film set in sunny Texas rather than darkest Transylvania.
casts, with this film being no exception to that. There are so many good performances in Lone Star that it feels like I am letting the side down by singling individuals out, but Chris Cooper's understated sheriff, Elizabeth Peña as Pilar, his old flame who was kept away from him by cruel circumstances and disapproving adults, and Kris Kristofferson (in terrifying form in flashback scenes as Wade) are particularly striking.
And it is pretty good, maybe even very good. I think Return to Oz suffers from not being as iconic as the 1939 film, but that's like saying it impresses less because it was less successful. It feels a bit like it is cut from the same cloth as Dark Crystal - a fantasy film for kids who can take something a bit on the scary side, with enough going on that it might actually have a stronger appeal to adults of a more discerning nature.
