by Oscar O’Sullivan

Monday – I Did Not Watch A Movie

I watched two episodes of Takeshi’s Castle and then went to the pub and had a pint with my brother and there was supposed to be a comedy show but it wasn’t on but that’s OK.

Tuesday – Uh Oh, No Movie Again

I went to the Out Of Frame ‘Animation from Palestine’ fundraiser in the Kino bar, which was really great. Out Of Frame does monthly film talks right here in Cork city at The Roundy, always a great time with great conversation. I was going to go home and watch a movie after the fundraiser but instead I went out and had pints and whiskey.

Wednesday – Juror #2 and Small Things Like These

Clint Eastwood’s latest (and possibly final) film is a rock-solid legal drama and paranoia thriller that largely sticks to the straight-and-narrow, for better and worse. It’s difficult to begrudge a 93-year-old man for being conventional in his directing choices and this is obviously a film that’s all about the script anyway. Nicholas Hoult is phenomenal as the straight-laced everyman, putting his heart-throb chops to use before the dark undercurrents of the character upend that squeaky-clean image. As he scrambles to avoid his accidental crime being uncovered, his attempts to do the right thing wind up digging him into an even deeper moral hole and making his fellow jurors – and even his own wife – unconscious accomplices in an utter perversion of justice. The film is unclear on whether justice can even exist, on a social, governmental or personal level. Toni Collette’s character is a star lawyer ignoring the facts of the case because a conviction would secure her election as D.A. – if the people we trust to enforce the law cannot be impartial, how can justice itself be impartial? Hoult and Collette play such complex, fully-formed characters that it’s a shame most everyone else is a stock archetype, fulfilling their roles in the drama and little more. There are plenty of intense twists and turns in the case, lots of grappling with guilt and moral quandaries, but not a whole lot of answers. The story remains pointedly unresolved, not in a mysterious way, but a tired one, as if the characters have been driven to simply give up and succumb to ennui. Maybe another director could have made a more visually exciting version of this, but Eastwood lets the script do the talking. 8/10.

You can read my full thoughts on Small Things Like These here.

Thursday – Breezy

Now here’s a real hidden gem – Breezy has only been logged by about 5,000 users on Letterboxd, making it the second-least-seen feature film from director Clint Eastwood. His third directorial effort is wildly different from anything he had done before or would do after – for one, he doesn’t star, and for another thing, the film is a sedate, bloodless romance. Hippie vagrant Breezy (Kay Lenz) drifts into the life of divorced real-estate man Frank (William Holden), upending his carefully constructed lifestyle and initing him to give love another chance. The film is leisurely-paced, dialogue-driven and and surprisingly counter-cultural, using ageing star William Holden as a symbol of tired, impotent masculinity. He turns up his nose at Breezy and her dirty hippie friends, but soon finds that her honesty and openness appeals to him more than the tight-lipped conservatism of his own crowd. Much drama is made of the age gap between the two leads – Breezy is fresh out of high school, while Frank is in the back half of middle age. As Frank’s feelings become harder to deny, age becomes the one concern that keeps him from committing, both his own moral doubts and the fear of how others will react to him pursuing a girl that could be his daughter. Frank wrestles with so many doubts and fears because the film needs somebody to be uncertain and it sure as hell won’t be Breezy. She’s an utterly free-spirited, idealised figure. She knows what she wants and has no reservations about pursuing it. Far from being flaky or lazy, she actually shows obsessive dedication, hounding Frank until he accepts her first as a friend, then as something more. Her one and only flaw is that she loves too much, so quickly and deeply that she has convinced herself she doesn’t need to be loved in return. It’s possible that she’s every bit as lonely as Frank, but she’d never show it, perhaps isn’t even aware of it – all she knows is that she loves him, or that she wants to love him, and that’s enough. Beautiful, charming, heartwarming movie. 10/10.

Friday – Bird and A Perfect World

I actually already gave Bird a full review too, check it out here. I’ll hopefully be giving full reviews to every new film I watch at the Cork International Film Festival, so keep an eye out for more of my long-form writing over the next week – and pray for my keyboard.

An utterly insane film in the best possible way, A Perfect World is Eastwood’s follow-up to his Best Picture winner Unforgiven, and it’s almost on that same level of genre perfection. Escaped crook Butch (Kevin Costner) takes a young boy hostage as he flees across the state of Texas with gruff ranger Red Garnett (Eastwood) and criminal psychologist Sally Gerber (Laura Dern) hot on his tail. The film is only vaguely about Cop Versus Crook drama or the limits of punitive justice – the beating heart of the story is the touching friendship between Butch and his unwilling sidekick Buzz (T.J. Lowther), an eight-year-old Jehova’s Witness who quickly becomes endeared to and enamoured by the boisterous, free-wheeling energy of his captor. The feeling is mutual, with Butch becoming immediately protective of his hostage, even killing his fellow escapee to keep the boy safe. Butch is considered a dangerous man, but we can tell straight away that Buzz is in no danger from him – we learn later that Butch had a complex relationship with his own criminal dad, explaining why he quickly falls into a friendly paternal role when given the opportunity. Costner plays the role perfectly, switching back and forth between outgoing friendliness and chilly intensity as needed, making it clear that both modes are equally true to Butch’s personality. The film often cuts away to Eastwood and his posse on the road in a high-tech mobile command centre, bickering and sniping at each other as they completely fail to catch up to their criminal quarry, even with Ms Gerber giving them vital insights into the criminal psyche. Neither empathy or cruelty is enough to stop the escapee – in the end, it’s dumb luck that they even have the chance to corner him. To even try and describe the antics that the two fugitives get into would be a disservice to the sheer lunacy of certain set-pieces – there are car stunts that wouldn’t be out of place in the climactic comic sequence of The Blues Brothers, while the in-your-face raunchiness and the frank way that the child lead is exposed to sexual situations will have you slack-jawed in alarm. There’s nothing distasteful about it per se, but it has a startlingly European attitude for a 90s Hollywood action film. A Perfect World is a rambling, messy film that works in spite of how scattershot its plotting is, thanks to a solid-gold emotional core and the steady hand behind the camera delivering picture-perfect imagery. 10/10.

Saturday – Bring Them Down and We Live In Time

You guessed it – I’ve already reviewed both of these films here.

Sunday – Kingdom of Heaven

I’m going it keep it real with you guys – this is too many movies to be reviewing at this sort of length. Imagine where I’d be right now if I had watched stuff on Monday and Tuesday too. Christ. Anyway, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven is a magnificently vivid rendering of life in the Medieval world that carries a deeply measured and surprisingly high-minded moral message behind it’s action epic trappings. The central conflict revolves around the European view of Jerusalem and the Holy Land at large as a ‘New World”, a sort of proto-America where ambitious men can escape the old social order and make their way in land far away from the troubles of the world they knew. But of course, this place was not empty before the Christian armies arrived. Jerusalem was taken in bloody conquest from the Muslims and, despite the best efforts of the leprous King Baldwin (Edward Norton) to create a lasting peace, the Muslim armies under Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) will soon shatter the tenuous hold Christendom has on the region. Amazingly for a Hollywood blockbuster released at the height of the Iraq War, Scott’s film paints the Muslims in an almost exclusively heroic light, with the only true threat they pose being the potential harm that will befall the ordinary people during a war. Otherwise, they are more peaceable and unified that the Christian forces, only laying waste to them in response to brutal provocations from the fanatical Templar Order. Saladin himself recognises that the Holy Land is worth nothing, but also everything – even the Muslim holy places were built over the ruins of the Jewish Kingdom, and protagonist Balian (a somewhat wooden Orlando Bloom) strikes a nerve when he threatens to burn down the entire city and all the holy sites it contains unless the people within it are spared. Religion is a futile and destructive force in this film, but faith is not – faith gives the heroes the moral guidance they need to do the right thing and walk away from pointless conflict, while religion drives the two major factions to almost destroy themselves outright. The modern-day parallels are so blindingly obvious I need not even mention them. As always, Scott is the master of historical realism, bringing history to life on a scale rarely seen even in the biggest blockbusters. Not just in the enormous battles, but in the the smallest details, this is a tangibly alien world that we can still recognise as our own. Perhaps too ambitious and unwieldy in the scale of its thought, but never uninteresting, and so deftly executed that it’s story flaws barely register in the midst of the sweeping majesty. 9/10.