Ciara Moloney Film

Westerns, Part 3

“I can name for you every western I’ve ever seen. It wouldn’t even be hard.” – 2018

“There’s something just better about westerns, I can’t explain it. A great western is a special thing.” – 2019

“… nobody wants to be the crotchety old man saying things were much better in the good old days. But then you sit down and actually watch a 1940s western and it melts your face clean off.” – 2020

There probably wasn’t an exact moment when I went from “getting into westerns” to just “being a big westerns guy,” but if I had to pick, it would probably be around the time I started watching the Friday western on TG4. TG4 is an Irish public broadcast TV station that mostly shows Irish language programming, but every Friday night, they show a western. I’m not sure why, but I’m glad. “An western”: Irish for “the western”, with the word western untranslated, the way you wouldn’t translate noir or giallo into English. The films they show range from established classics to obscure gems to stuff that really isn’t very good at all, but usually in an interesting way. I don’t always watch the western on Friday, but I’m always happy I did. There are some things in this world that are so purely joyful, so satisfying, that they make your heart feel like it will burst. They’re precious, and I try to hold onto them where I can. A great western is one of those. The particular pleasures great westerns offer make me fall in love with films all over again.  

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

2018 in Film(s That Didn’t Come Out This Year)

Check out The Sundae’s 2017 in films that didn’t come out in 2017 here. 

There’s a huge pressure on anyone who wants to talk or write seriously about film to pretend as if they’ve already seen every great film ever made, whether in the form of a self-imposed anxiety or others dismissing your opinions because you haven’t seen X or Y. This is silly, obviously, because no-one has seen every great film ever made: the last time anyone could conceivably watch every film ever was in the early 1930s, and here in the present, it would take someone years to work through the established canon of great American cinema – let alone the cinema of every other country, experimental and avant-garde filmmaking, and all the great films (and okay films) that have gone unnoticed or unrecognised.

But that’s no reason not to try. Sometimes when people reject the pressure to pretend to have already seen every great film, they throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject a desire to try to catch up all the great films they haven’t seen, as if boldly declaring that you will never watch Casablanca is anything but a tragedy. It’s looking at the whole thing backwards.

The joy of accepting that you’ll never see every great film ever made is realising that there will always be more great films that you’ll get to see for the first time.

In February, we’ll go through our favourite new releases of the year when we post the third annual Sundae Film Awards. But looking back on the year in film shouldn’t just mean looking back at what came out this year. 2018 is the year Ciara got into westerns and Michael Moore documentaries, the year Dean watched A New Leaf again and was like, oh no, wait, this is great. So here are some of the best films we saw in 2018 that didn’t come out in 2018.

It’s no big deal if you haven’t seen them, but we definitely recommend checking them out.
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