Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film, Music, Television

The Best of The Sundae #3

It’s been a banner year for The Sundae and we’re only halfway through. We got a shout out from Todd in the Shadows, took the New Zealand drag community by storm and did an objectively better job of rewarding the best films of 2018 than the Oscars by sheer virtue of not nominating Bohemian Rhapsody for anything. We also wrote some really good shit. And, for the first time ever, our best-of round-up contains two pieces from a pair of fantastic guest contributors.

So, if you’re a long-time reader, revisit some of our greatest hits. If you’re a recent reader, catch up on some stuff you might have missed. If you’re a brand new reader, take a chance on something a little different. And, if you like what you see, drop a tip in the jar so we can continue our mission of publishing independent cultural criticism unbeholden to the hot take cycle, and destroying the Walt Disney Company.

Here’s the best of The Sundae so far. Again. (Again.)

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Dean Buckley Film

Double Features #2: Sweet Dreams and Bitter Pills

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that taste great together. Check out part one here.

One of the things that make double features such a source of fascination, for me, at least, is how two films can bring certain aspects of each other to the fore. Most great films are multifaceted and rich in theme, you can and should look at them from any number of different angles. But it can be hard to do in isolation, when all of a movie’s themes and ideas are inextricably bound up in each other. But place two films side-by-side, or, in this case, one after another, and it’s like the similarities reach out to each other, making both their common ground and their differences more apparent and easier to appreciate.

All ten of these films deal in some way with the rupture between expectation and reality, between how we dreamed our lives would be and how they turned out, between what our society claims to aspire to and what the world is actually like. They all do a great job of navigating these themes alone, but, together, they’re even better.

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Ciara Moloney Film

Saint Lady Bird of Sacramento

I have a very hard time articulating why I’m (still) Catholic. It’s a question that other people ask me not infrequently – it’s a “do you mind if I ask you a question?” question, an inexplicable part of myself that does not seem to vibe with my weirdo androgynous socialist persona – but nowhere near as often as I ask myself. The Church has committed legions of crimes, and besides, preaches lots of things I don’t believe – that I find positively repugnant, particularly when it comes to teachings around gender and sexuality. Of course gay people should be allowed get married; of course trans people are the gender they say they are; of course women should be ordained as priests. Traditionalist Catholics and the non-religious alike are quick to write off my Catholicism as more or less bullshit: maybe it’s a lie I tell to please my parents, maybe it’s a lie I tell to please myself, a pathetic refusal to admit that all it amounts to is a cultural affiliation. But it’s not bullshit, I know it’s not. I’ve tried not being Catholic, but it’s something I can’t shake, something deep down in the bones of me.

The only answer to the question of why that feels like the full truth is a tautology: I’m Catholic because I am Catholic. My religious feelings – that seem to resonate right in my core, that seem as real as any part of me – are so hard to articulate, even to myself, that I don’t know how to even begin to express them to someone else. And so the best I can do is a kind of scrapbook religion, pointing to other people’s articulations in the hope that a collage of all of them will make me understood: Franny and Zooey and how everyone is Christ; Leo Tolstoy and the Christian imperative of nonviolence; how deeply, impossibly I believe that ‘Anarchy, My Dear’ by Say Anything is a hymn. Most of the best and brightest entries in my scrapbook, the ones that set my heart on fire, are Catholic – more or less. Liberation theology, St. Francis, St. Joan of Arc, St. Oscar Romero, The Exorcist and The Omen, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Brighton Rock, Gerard Way scrawling Catholic across his neck and his arm, Dogma, The Blues Brothers, stained glass windows and Gregorian chanting and what Stewart Lee once described as Catholicism’s love of inane seaside tat. Hitchcock for guilt, Ford for redemption, Rossellini for saints. That I think making fun of transubstantiation is hack when it is so much funnier to make fun of consubstantiation. My favourite director is Martin Scorsese, and a big reason is that no artist’s work has ever resonated quite so strongly with the religious part of my heart: felt Catholic in all the ways that I am Catholic, saturated in everything from The Last Temptation of Christ down to his most secular-seeming genre pictures.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film

The Sundae Film Awards 2018

It’s been an extraordinarily long Oscar season, seeming to last from summer to March, with even a smattering of awards contenders coming out before that. It’s also been a particularly good year for films – which is awkward to define if you don’t live in America. We’ve decided it means “films that came out in 2017 in Ireland unless they were eligible for the Oscars last year as well as films that came out in 2018 in Ireland if they were eligible for this year’s Oscars.”

We can’t really claim that these are what we think should have been nominated at the Oscars, or should win, since we can’t even be sure if any film that wasn’t nominated was eligible. But if we were the only two members of the Academy, and we only cared about the eight major awards – we care about most of the others (except for the fake awards like Best Original Song) but this post would be absurdly long if we picked those too – this is what you’d get: the Sundae Film Awards 2018.

We each did out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only come from films that both of us have seen and nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each picked a Special Achievement Award for something not covered in the major categories. You can see each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of this post, which we encourage you to check out if you’re looking for recommendations, because there really were a lot of fantastic films this year.

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