Ciara Moloney Podcast

Friday Film Showcased – No Way Out (1987) – The Big Clock/No Way Out Special Part 2

Friday Film Showcased (FFS) returns with the second and final part of our two-part special on adaptations of Kenneth Fearing’s novel The Big Clock, ostensibly in tribute to the late Gene Hackman. That is borne out in this episode, as Ciara Moloney and Conor Hogan discuss a film Gene Hackman is actually in: No Way Out (1987), in which he stars opposite Kevin Costner.

Ciara and Conor discuss topics including: bad alternate titles, Mel Gibson and Roger Donaldson re-enacting Who’s On First, remakes vs readaptations, limo-based coitus, inaccurate IMDb trivia, Cold War paranoia, Will Patton’s Smithers energy, magic computers, Iran-Contra, bad music, great twists, and whether Kevin Costner could play baseball in the Old West.

No Way Out (1987) – The Big Clock/No Way Out Special Part 2 – Friday Film Showcased

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Catch up on Part 1 here!

Mentioned in the podcast:

Kevin Costner on Oprah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4gHNGa2sCs

Richard Schickel’s review of No Way Out for Time: https://web.archive.org/web/20080408202708/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965232,00.html

Paul Haspel, Agency Games in Cold War Washington: Politics and Gender in No Way Out, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 38(3), pp. 133–142. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01956051003725236

Kevin Costner on baseball movies vs westerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDbEYJ9Mbtk

Ciara Moloney External Links

The Witch Who Came From the Sea

The poster for 1976’s The Witch Who Came from the Sea shows a woman with ample breasts and a bare midriff wearing a dark, flowing cape. In one hand, she holds a bloody scythe above her head. In the other, she holds a man’s severed head. Blood drips onto the rocky islet where she stands, waves breaking around her, her long hair swept up in the wind. “Molly really knows how to cut men down to size!!” the tagline reads in bright yellow letters, “cut” underlined with a stroke of red.

It’s a great poster, both trashy pulp advertising and beautiful painting, with impressionistic brushstrokes blurring the boundary between the turbulent sea and sky. It promises a supernatural fantasy with gratuitous nudity and pleasingly gory vengeance. The Witch Who Came from the Sea is not that movie. It’s something so much better.

Millie Perkins plays Molly, a barmaid who spends her free time drinking (too much), watching television (too much), and babysitting her nephews while her sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) sews clothes to try and make ends meet between welfare checks. She regales her nephews with tales of her sea captain father, whose body she says was lost at sea.

I wrote about my beloved The Witch Who Came From The Sea for Fangoria! Read the whole thing here.

Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

Meet Me in St. Louis: The Sundae Presents, Episode 42

Ciara and Dean take a Christmas journey to St. Louis, Missouri with Judy Garland. They talk about wonderfully horrible children, the history of world’s fairs and whether John Truett is a neurodivergent king.

Meet Me in St. Louis – The Sundae Presents

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Ciara Moloney Film

The Art of Singing Badly

Armageddon is the kind of movie that people say “not that it’s a great movie or anything but…” before they say anything nice about it. It’s a Michael Bay movie about guys who work on an oil rig going to space to save the Earth from an asteroid, and therefore dumb, and therefore sucks. One day I’ll write about how it is a great movie, actually, because Michael Bay is a genius and he deserves his flowers after being treated as a critical punching bag for most of his career. But right now, I want to tell you about my favourite scene.

The oil workers, having been given a crash course in being astronauts, are about to board the rocket. They’re in their space suits. Harry (Bruce Willis) hugs his daughter Gracie (Liv Tyler) goodbye, promising to see her in a couple of days. Then Ben Affleck, who plays her boyfriend AJ, holds her close, swaying her in his arms as he sings: “All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go…” It’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, which manages to be fun and silly at a potentially tense moment, but also resonate as terribly romantic and bittersweet, heart utterly on sleeve. Affleck first sings in a quiet intimacy, forehead pressed to Tyler’s, and then belts with buoyant exuberance, sweeping her up off her feet.

He can’t sing worth a damn. It’s beautiful.

Continue reading “The Art of Singing Badly” →
Stephen Chambers Film

Mickey Rourke: The Star That Should’ve Been

I used to think no one pursued a career in entertainment without hoping to be famous, but that’s not true. There are plenty of faces you’ve seen in films over and over, but couldn’t tell me their names if your life depended on it – and they like it that way. There are plenty of working actors, writers, musicians who just want to make a living doing something they love. But with Mickey Rourke, it seemed he was destined to be a star, regardless of what his initial goals were. The look he had, the roles he played: he should’ve been the next big thing. And he kind of was, but he kind of wasn’t. Either way, it stopped. The general consensus is that it stopped because Hollywood had enough of him and his attitude. Maybe he had enough of Hollywood. Maybe it was suicide by cop. Maybe he didn’t know that an actor couldn’t want the amazing heights of fame and so, like someone too cowardly to break up with someone, even when they know they should, he made them make the decision for him. He made the cop shoot him, the girl leave him, the industry toss him.

And so that might be the key to understanding the whole “reluctant star” thing. “Careful what you wish for” may not always apply, especially when referring to someone who did no such thing. Did Mickey Rourke sit in his bedroom daydreaming of – wishing for – the Hollywood glitz and glamour? I doubt it. He just wanted to be good and for people – not everyone, but some nebulous, satisfactory someone – to respect him for it.

Continue reading “Mickey Rourke: The Star That Should’ve Been” →