Film – Page 15 – The Sundae

2 Apr, 20174 Aug, 2020 Ciara Moloney Film

Martin Scorsese’s Violence of Grace

In the stories of Flannery O’Connor, grace is violent. It overpowers. Baptisms are drownings. It is only with a gun pointed at her that a grandmother can recognise the humanity of her murderer: she would have been “a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This violence of grace is often represented by human violence, but it isn’t the same as human violence. Grace is beyond human comprehension, and so is impossible to represent literally. Any religious text is filled with metaphors, because metaphors are the only way to communicate about the divine. Using violence to represent grace, art can express how grace strikes: dramatic, overwhelming, painful. It is painful because it is transformative. Like violence, it is destructive, but it destroys only evil.

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26 Mar, 201715 Jan, 2024 Dean Buckley Film

Written in the Stars or Some Crap Like That

I Love You Phillip Morris is the lost film of the noughties, a masterpiece of filmmaking that no one remembers less than ten years later. Everyone who loves film has a movie they champion in the face of an indifferent world, and I have several, but none so much as I Love You Phillip Morris. Wikipedia calls it a “black comedy drama” but I Love You Phillip Morris is one of those rare multi-genres films that layers each element so perfectly the result is pure alchemy, a work of art so inexplicably magical that even an accurate label can only ever be a reductive one. I Love You Phillip Morris is a biopic, a caper, a black comedy and a tragedy, but if it’s any kind of film, it’s a romantic comedy, and not just a romantic comedy, but one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time.

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12 Mar, 201713 Aug, 2019 Dean Buckley Film

Notes on Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables

Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables is not a good movie. But it’s an interesting movie to watch, if only as a cautionary tale of how a reasonably talented director can lead an excellent cast into a quagmire of poorly-executed ideas, both good and bad, through a singular absence of artistic vision.

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27 Feb, 201714 Sep, 2020 Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

The Sundae Film Awards 2017

We can’t really claim these are what we think should have been nominated at the Oscars, or should have won, since we can’t be one hundred percent sure that any film that wasn’t nominated at the Oscars was even eligible. But if we were the only two members of the Academy and we could nominate any film that came out since last year’s Oscars (since lots of Oscar-nominated films didn’t come out in Ireland until a week and a half ago) and we only cared about the eight major awards (we care about most of the others, but this post would be twenty thousand words long if we picked those too) this is what you’d get – the Sundae Film Awards.

We each filled out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only came from films we’d both seen and both nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up from our slate regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We’ve tried to give some voice to our reasons for picking who we’ve picked since we hate lists that don’t say anything. You can see each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of the post.

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