ALBERT NOBBS GETTING A RELEASE

At the end of this month. Empire magazine gave it a poor rating so don't expect the best.

IRISH FILM BOOKS: NATIONAL CINEMA AND BEYOND

Another academic book this one discusses Irish No-Wave director Vivienne Dick, Jim Sheridan, Disco pigs, Butcher boy, Bloody Sunday, and Magdalene sisters.

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE AGAIN!

Strange, todays Irish Daily Mail newspaper reviewed the new movie This must be the place. That's TWO weeks after it got released here! They only gave it one star.

ROGER CORMAN

This week I watched a Corman movie called Deathsport. Unfortunately like most of his productions it was rubbish! But it was the famous director/producer's birthday yesterday and most are aware of his connection to Irish cinema. Back in the 1960s he produced Dementia 13 here. Then in the 1990s he set up a studio in Ireland called Concorde. There he made films such as Criminal affairs which caused a sensation at the Galway Film Fleadh. Unfortunatley due to the almost soft-porn content it was for the wrong reasons! Apparently it was the crew who selected this movie for submission and not Corman himself. Another film made here (and out on DVD) was A very unlucky leprechaun. There was trouble with unions, reporters, staff turnover, and a few controversial interviews with the Irish media. Legal threats were made when one Irish journalist gave Corman a script to produce but he turned it down. The Irish media then turned against him. There are three kinds of film categories: rubbish but fun stuff that Corman produces; bland, middle-brow stuff that our Film Board funds; and then high-brow stuff that the world-class directors make. Not only do we need an Irish director that's world class but we also need an Irish Roger Corman!

FILM ARCHIVE

Is getting moved to Maynooth Universtity due to size issues which begs the question: why was it in Temple Bar in the first place?

IRISH HORROR MOVIE GETS USA RELEASE!

It's called Citadel. Can hardly be worse than Shrooms or Dorothy so well done!

FUTURE OF THE IRISH FILM INDUSTRY!

Watching a short on the RTÉ website called Crossword and it really is shit. Is this the future of our film industry? Crap shorts that rip off stuff like Amélie. Stupid and annoying voiceover, titles melting on screen, and absolutley zero narrative. Then there's the obligatory plinky piano soundtrack. They couldn't even get the parrot to say 'absolutely' when earlier in the film they said it could. This is how bad Irish cinema really is when rubbish like this gets accepted for funding and a TV screening.

IRISH FILM BOOKS: NEW IRISH STORYTELLERS

New book about recent Irish cinema. Lots of academic ideas and even more errors! For example Frankie Starlight is incorrectly listed as never getting a theatrical release. There's a photo of Michael Gambon with the wrong movie listed underneath. But without a doubt the biggest fault is that this movie discusses only Film Board titles. That excludes stuff like Anton (which was more ambitious than many state-funded titles). Also excluded for some reason is Pavee Lackeen (one of the best Irish films from the last decade). There's a bizarre chapter about romance films and even stranger charts to explain some silly theory. Another chapter is devoted to John Carney (before Zonad got a release to ruin his reputation!). Worth a look but too academic (some good one paragraph ideas) and like the IFTAs, it ignores most Irish feature films. Might discuss some of the ideas from this book another day.

Conspiracy of silence

Imagine if someone made a film about the Irish fishing industry in crisis and tried to convince the audience that this would affect the world's fishing industries? That would be daft. Yet this movie tries to make out that because there is a crisis in the Irish Catholic church that this will affect the same church right across the globe! So what is this crisis? The priests want to get married. Two young trainees get kicked out for breaking the rules. It's the old vs the new. As Dave McSavage might say: 'if you want to get married then don't become a fuc*ing priest!' The rest of the movie is awful: handheld camera in one scene, camera moving around actors while they stand still in the next scene, followed by a self-conscious slow zoom!Even Gay Byrne doesn't convince playing himself! Strange movie that's out on DVD everywhere but no-one mentions it with regard to Irish cinema. Maybe because it got made in Britain? Also, any director who uses a handheld longshot of a car approaching in the distance is just a bad filmmaker!

FRANK DEASY RADIO INTERVIEW

There's an old interview with the late writer/director on today's Liveline.

DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS?

But RUSSIA are the most frequent visitors to this blog after Ireland/Britain/USA.