Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

Top Gun: Maverick: The Sundae Presents Bonus Episode 5

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. It’s another emergency episode from our top secret vault! Dean finally got around to watching Top Gun: Maverick, so Ciara finally got to grill him about it. They talk about the original film, the death of the movie star and how Tom Cruise saved cinema.

Top Gun: Maverick – The Sundae Presents

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The Cheerfully Dystopian Americana of Hands on a Hard Body

On paper, the premise of Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary–released twenty-five years ago this week–might sound niche: it documents a 1995 endurance competition where the last contestant to keep their hands on a Nissan Hardbody pick-up truck wins the truck. But on screen, it’s enthralling, an irresistible salted-caramel treat. It is, somehow, both giddy and grim: at once a bite-sized anthropological study of post-Reagan America and the most exciting sports movie not to feature Rocky Balboa. 

A dealership in Longview, Texas has run the Hands on a Hardbody competition for years. The twenty-four contestants are drawn from a raffle because there are so many entrants: you’re only allowed to put your name forward once per day, so prospective hopefuls come back day after day to maximise their chances of being selected. When the selected two dozen arrive on the morning of the competition, the rules are outlined. You must have one hand on the truck. You cannot lean on the truck, or squat; you have to be standing. There is a five-minute break hourly and fifteen-minute break every six hours.  The first time I watched it, I thought six hours seemed like a long time. 

I wrote about Hands on a Hard Body for Crooked Marquee. You can read it here!

Ciara Moloney External Links

The Miracle Worker Is Not The Film You Think It Is

The Miracle Worker is something of a middle school staple in the United States. Helen Keller is a significant figure in American history—she was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor’s degree and a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, among other things—and the 1962 film offers an accessible way into her story. But when something’s a middle school staple, you inevitably tend to continue viewing it through your middle school eyes, no matter how the years pass. It can take so much to let go of that—even though, if pushed, none of us would have trouble admitting that we were really stupid when we were 13. 

I’m from Ireland, where The Miracle Worker doesn’t have that kind of cultural cache, but I’ve spent enough of my life online to absorb it by osmosis. For American leftists in particular—eager to reassert Helen Keller’s socialism, since that doesn’t seem to come up in middle school—The Miracle Worker is almost a bogeyman. The more I learned about Helen Keller, the more it seemed like people talking about her life and work were actively countering The Miracle Worker, sometimes explicitly. The Miracle Worker is the official Helen Keller story, sanitized and shrink-wrapped for moral majority suburbanites, a reduction of a complex, trailblazing woman. For disability activists, it’s invoked the way Rain Man is by autistics: this is how they see us, this is what we are understood to be. 

I wrote about the 1962 Helen Keller biopic The Miracle Worker for Current Affairs. You can read it here!

Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

The Best Years of Our Lives: The Sundae Presents Episode 28

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Ciara takes Dean back to 1946 with The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s kitchen sink epic about soldiers returning from World War II. They talk about Harold Russell’s double-Oscar-winning performance as Homer Parrish, Gregg Toland’s groundbreaking deep focus cinematography and why Ayn Rand tried to complain about the film in Congress.

The Best Years of Our Lives – The Sundae Presents

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Ciara Moloney Film

Notes on Where The Truth Lies

This article is part of the Notes on Failure series, which discusses interesting cinematic failures. Previously, The Conjuring.

As I threatened to at the end of last year, I have gotten way into Martin and Lewis. I have watched all their movies and a bunch of Colgate Comedy Hour, and read Dean & Me: A Love Story, Jerry Lewis’s memoir about his partnership with Dean Martin. I have bored the pants off people by subjecting them to irrelevant Martin and Lewis anecdotes.

So, naturally, I carved out a couple of hours to watch Where the Truth Lies. Adapted from a novel by Rupert Holmes (of ‘Escape (The Piña Colada Song)’ fame), it’s a queer fictional take on Martin and Lewis’s break-up – a ‘90s erotic thriller half a decade late. By rights I should love it no matter how bad it is. But Where the Truth Lies is not just bad, it’s baffling. Top to bottom, it’s full of insane decisions at basically every level of filmmaking.  

Here’s why:

Continue reading “Notes on Where The Truth Lies” →
Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

The Long Goodbye: The Sundae Presents Episode 27

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. It’s The Long Goodbye, and it happens every day! Dean turns the tables on Ciara and shows her a classic seventies film widely considered among the greatest ever made, Robert Altman’s neo-noir classic, starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe. They talk about its portrayal of post-Manson L.A., the many iterations of its title song and the security guard’s amazing celebrity impressions.

The Long Goodbye – The Sundae Presents

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Ciara Moloney Television

Come and Have a Go, If You Think You’re Clever Enough

Television criticism, maybe even more so than other forms of arts criticism, has an implicit but rigid hierarchy. “Often, these biases involve class, gender, race, and sexuality, disguised as biases about aesthetics,” Emily Nussbaum writes in her book I Like to Watch: “Green/grey drama, serious; neon-pink musical, guilty pleasure. Single-cam sitcom, upscale; multi-cam, working class.” Nussbaum attributes this, in part, to television’s status anxiety: it wasn’t too long ago that TV was considered the idiot box, the boob tube, a vast wasteland. “So much of TV,” John Mason Brown told Steven H. Scheur in 1955, “seems to be chewing gum for the eyes.” For the rest of the twentieth century, at least, most people would agree with him. And so critics appeal all too readily to other, more respectable mediums – it’s a visual novel, a ten-hour movie. It’s not TV, it’s HBO.

I agree totally with Nussbaum’s argument, and have made versions of it myself over the years. But the privileging of drama over sitcoms, of gritty realism over silly genre fare, of masculinity over femininity, is a relatively small part of the equation. The types of television most neglected by critics are, if we’re honest, the same ones that make up most of the TV made and most of the TV watched: all the vast, vast area that exists outside of scripted comedy and drama programmes.

Continue reading “Come and Have a Go, If You Think You’re Clever Enough” →
Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

As Good As It Gets: The Sundae Presents Episode 26

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. The lads kick off season three with a classic rom-com as Ciara makes Dean watch James L. Brooks’ As Good As It Gets. They talk about What It Gets Right About Mental Illness, the finer details of Jack Nicholson’s performance and whether Melvin should have got the girl.

As Good As It Gets – The Sundae Presents

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In Defense of South Park

In 2017, the two-headed monster of Donald Trump’s inauguration and South Park’s 20th anniversary prompted much hand-wringing over the show’s legacy. In the post-2016 rush to point fingers, a cartoon about the adventures of some potty-mouthed 8-year-old boys was made to bear at least some of the blame. Dana Schwartz tweeted that it was impossible to overstate the cultural damage of South Park’s portrayal of “earnestness as the only sin” and mockery as “the ultimate inoculation against all criticism”—and then, her point seemingly proven, she was descended on by trolls. South Park didn’t invent the alt-right, Sean O’Neal wrote for The AV Club, “but at their roots are the same bored, irritated distaste for politically correct wokeness, the same impish thrill at saying the things you’re not supposed to say, the same button-pushing racism and sexism, now scrubbed of all irony.” For Lara Zarum in The Village Voice, the show’s misogyny—the creators “never seem content just to make fun of women; they relish sexually humiliating them, too, all while shunting the show’s female characters, young and old, to the maddeningly familiar role of disapproving nag”—is deeply tied to Hillary Clinton’s election loss. 

The consensus that seemed to calcify was that South Park’s corrosive influence on popular culture raised a generation of nihilistic trolls that revived American fascism for the lulz. At best, it inculcated a wilful apathy, political and otherwise. According to Lindsay Ellis, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone spent the whole 2000s “explaining that things were fine actually, both sides bad”: both symptomatic of, and feeding into, a wider apathetic cultural attitude towards social injustice in the 2000s. As Schwartz outlines, South Park has always skewered “both the left and the right—and anyone who believed in anything—as equally ridiculous. The smart people were those detached enough to know that everyone was full of it.”

There is some ring of truth to all this. The best of these critiques—like Zarum’s or O’Neal’s—are rooted in an acknowledgement that South Park is and has always been extremely funny, and that its cultural effect is not necessarily reflective of Stone and Parker’s intentions. But even still, a fundamental rift inevitably opens up between these arguments and my experience of the show itself.

I wrote about South Park, shock humour, and morality in art for Current Affairs. You can read it here!

Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

A Night to Dismember: Love at Worst Sight Episode 4

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. For the final episode, Ciara showed Dean the (theatrical release of the) sole horror film by one-of-a-kind sexsploitation director Doris Wishman: A Night to Dismember. They talk about how she cobbled it together after the original cut was lost (and found), the purity (and perversity) of its auteurist vision and Wishman’s place within (and outside) the history of cinema.

A Night to Dismember – The Sundae Presents

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