I wrote about possibly the most underrated of the underrated movie brat musicals, New York, New York, for the Martin Scorsese issue of Film in Dublin’s zine, Pretty Deadly Films! You can get the digital download here or buy the physical copy here.
The Sundae Film Awards 2020
This was a really, really great year for film. It was full of reflective elegies by aging masters; sophomore features that delivered on their predecessors’ promise in spades; and at least one or two blockbusters with some guts. There were so many films that could have been contenders any other year – the sweetness of Paddleton, the daring weirdness of Velvet Buzzsaw, the meditative exploration of masculinity in Ad Astra – that just ended up getting squeezed out. I mean, Happy Death 2 U was a masterpiece. Some years it’s hard to scrape together enough nominations in some categories – this year it was heart-breaking to make cuts. This is one of those years that we’ll remember.
The film year, for the record, we define as “films that came out in 2019 in Ireland unless they were eligible for the Oscars last year as well as films that came out in 2020 in Ireland if they were eligible for this year’s Oscars.” Perils of being a film fan outside of North America.
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 2020.
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 strongly encourage you to check out if you’re looking for recommendations. There were so many brilliant films this year, and we only got to award a small fraction of them.
Review: The Irishman [Scannain]
The Irishman gets the band back together, but not just to play the old hits.
I reviewed Martin Scorsese’s latest, The Irishman (or, if you have a contrarian streak, I Heard You Paint Houses) for Scannain. Spoiler: it’s great, and you should see it on the big screen if you can.
You Should Watch More Short Films
Tragically, since I last broached the subject, the world hasn’t responded to my plea to watch more short films. “Dining Room or There Is Nothing” hasn’t taken the Internet by storm, the commentariat has yet to return the great “Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd” debate to its rightful place at the heart of public discourse, and no one in my life has bought a boxset of subtitled Jan Švankmajer films I can borrow. I have no one to talk to about that Scott Barley short, “Hinterlands”, and how I think it’s good, but I feel desensitised to it because the colour palette reminds me too much of elements of the YouTube found footage horror series Marble Hornets.
All I can do is try again. I’ve tried a more populist approach this time: we’ve got a war movie and some horror films, a lovely sentimental children’s film and a cute little rom-com, a couple of animated classics and one of Martin Scorsese’s least Jesus-y films. (In the interest of clarity: I like my Scorsese Jesus-y. I recognise that I’m in the minority on this.) And if this doesn’t work, I’ll just have to go hard experimental for the next round.
Here’s another ten short films – covering seventy-odd years – that you should watch.
Weekend at Bernie’s Is Not the Film You Think It Is
Weekend at Bernie’s might be the most misunderstood film I know. It was a hit in 1989, despite bad reviews, and has had staying power since: the image of Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman propping up Bernie’s lifeless body is seared onto the cultural memory, one of those iconic cinematic images that has been parodied and homaged and referenced enough to take on a life of its own beyond the film itself. It’s a very famous film, is the point – though not exactly acclaimed – but when I watched it, I kind of felt like the first person to ever see it.
Here’s what I assumed Weekend at Bernie’s would be like: an extremely dumb, extremely wacky 1980s comedy, in the vein of Porky’s or a National Lampoon movie, that is probably not very good but has a kind of charm that not very good films from the 1980s tend to have. I knew the basic plot – two guys pretend another guy, Bernie, is alive, while staying at his place for the weekend. I assumed – either because it’s how it turns out in any given Weekend at Bernie’s-inspired TV episode, or because of the existence of Weekend at Bernie’s II – that Bernie wasn’t really dead. That our heroes found him unconscious and panicked, but, by the end of the film, Bernie would wake up, and we’d arrive at our happy ending.
Weekend at Bernie’s is something much stranger, and much more interesting.
Continue reading “Weekend at Bernie’s Is Not the Film You Think It Is”
The Best of The Sundae So Far
The Sundae launched seven and a half months ago with a history of the decline of multi-cam sitcoms and a counterpoint to the 89th Academy Awards. Since then, we’ve published a piece a week every week for thirty-two weeks, and this week will be no different, except that it’s completely different, because we’re not publishing a new piece of criticism, analysis or opinion.
We’re taking a week off because, well, we don’t get paid to do this, and we’re both in full-time education, and we both have coursework to do, and we’d rather not write something this week than write something half-assed, rushed or forced. So, instead, we’ve looked back over the past seven and a half months of writing we’ve published and picked our favourite pieces. If you’re a long-time reader, revisit the classics. If you’re a recent reader, catch up on some stuff you might not have read. If you’re a brand new reader, take a crash course in what we’re all about.
Here’s the best of The Sundae so far.
All We’re Looking for Is Love from Someone Else
“They say you gotta want it more,” a young man sings in ‘Another Day of Sun’, La La Land’s opening number, “So I bang on every door.”
He came to LA with dreams of making it in the entertainment business, but his problem is not that he doesn’t want it enough. He wants it desperately, single-mindedly. He’s dancing in the middle of a traffic jam, singing about wanting it – as desperately as the dozens of other people singing the same song.
‘Another Day of Sun’ sounds bright and happy, but lyrically, it’s about constant rejection, about running out of money, about leaving loved ones to pursue unrealised dreams – and about a pressure to blame yourself. They say you gotta want it more.
The chorus initially sounds like an ode to perseverance:
And when they let you down
You’ll get up off the ground
‘Cause morning rolls around
And it’s another day of sun
But it’s more melancholy with every repetition, as getting knocked to the ground emerges as a habit. “It’s another day of sun” is a joke about LA not having seasons, but it’s also a comment on how that lack of weather can feel oppressive. It’s an environment that refuses to bend, impervious to your feelings. There’s weariness to it: constant sunshine, constant disappointment.
La La Land is not a film about how you should pursue your dreams.
Continue reading “All We’re Looking for Is Love from Someone Else”
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.
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.
The Sundae 