JDIFF roundup (or: The director's here, look like you're enjoying yourself)

In the end I only saw three films in this year's Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, but they were all worth it in their own ways, so it was a bit of a result.
Both mrmonkey and I were excited to see the new Whit Stillman film, Damsels in Distress, because I like Whit Stillman and he likes pretty ladies and we both like films that build a world slightly removed from reality but still recognisable as an internally consistent universe, with its own hierarchies and rules and idiosyncratic language.

The film opens with a standard gambit for a film featuring young women in an educational setting: an established group seeks out a newcomer and tries to change her to fit in with the group and to better fit in with the college as a whole. However, the established group turn out to be more than a little outside the mainstream themselves and have their own problems trying to deal with the manipulative and/or stupid males they're trying so hard to make sense of. The good news is, though, that the members of the group turn out to be genuinely well-meaning, if completely idiotic, and they really do want to help each other make their way in this small world in order to prepare themselves for making their way in the larger one outside. They make some bad choices, they are taken advantage of, they experience some triumphs, and on the whole you find yourself rooting for them, especially since many of the actors come from a particular set of television shows that feed so well into this kind of film: Parks & Recreation, 90210, Gilmore Girls, The OC, etc.
Even still, for a film that is just an hour and a half long, Damsels in Distress outstays its welcome. It's too whimsical, too slight, too insubstantial, with too little to say about anything to bear the weight of watching it in the cinema, never mind watching it in the cinema with the director sitting right over there, waiting for people to ask him questions about it. I just kept wondering what the point of it was. I'll probably love it when I see it again on television.
Stillman seemed like an affable enough guy, but either the interview was badly conducted or he was tired or people just didn't have a lot to ask him, because the Q&A session wasn't particularly interesting or illuminating.
(It didn't help that the cinema was packed and I was sitting beside a young woman who was there on a freebie who could not stop bouncing around in her seat for even five minutes. Bloody kids, grumble grumble.)

Another distinctive auteur showing his movie about young women trying to make their way in the world was Kenneth Lonergan, who was on hand to answer questions about his film, Margaret, which stars Anna Paquin as a teenager who is involved in a bus crash that kills a pedestrian. The film charts her attempts to deal with this event while she is negotiating the general life issues associated with someone growing up in New York after 9/11, attending a small private school on a half-scholarship, with parents who are too wrapped up in themselves to really notice what's happening in the lives of their children until the problems become too acute and noisy to ignore any longer.
At two and a half hours, this film is definitely longer than it needs to be, but it is so absorbing and beautiful that it not only gets away with it, but is probably worth a rewatch (and will be getting one as soon as I can get the DVD). Lonergan himself was an entertaining speaker, gracious in accepting praise, honest (or seemingly honest, anyway) and forthcoming about creative decisions, and funny.
Margaret has been pretty comprehensively discussed elsewhere on the Internet so I don't need to go into a lot more detail about it here: here's an article on Hitfix about the authenticity of its treatment of privileged high-school students, here's one from the Guardian about the studio allegedly trying to bury it, and here's a good interview with Lonergan from Movies.ie (the interviewer didn't like the movie one bit).
 The last movie I saw was Headhunters, mostly for research purposes, I will admit. This Norwegian thriller, directed by Morten Tyldum, starring a whole bunch of Norwegian people (and Nicolaj Coster-Waldau), and based on a book by Jo Nesbo, is a good time if you like fast-paced action interspersed with extremely crunchy violence.

The main character, Roger Brown, is a corporate headhunter who, in order to compensate for feelings of personal inadequacy and maintain a lavish lifestyle, steals expensive art works from wealthy clients. His wife introduces him to the mysterious and creepy Clas Greve, and while trying to steal an original Rubens from Greves's Oslo apartment, Brown discovers secrets about Greve, and these secrets don't lead anywhere good for anyone. There's a lot of running about in the Norwegian countryside, a fair amount of tension, menacing looks, nice suits, finger-breaking, and commentary on identity and self-perception.
Warning: contains canine peril.
Overall my experience of this year's JDIFF was reasonably positive, except that both the night-time films I went to started late, which is annoying when you've got to get the last bus home and you don't like standing around in big groups of people for long periods of time, and the website was just too hard to navigate. I couldn't find a search box on the home page, for example (but maybe I'm just thick).
Also, on behalf of people like Dave & Aoife, who've been supporting the festival for years, can I ask the organisers to either book a decent surprise movie or just give up? Hamlet 2, Greenberg, and This Must Be the Place? These are not good films and you shouldn't be charging people festival prices to see them.

Dara Ó Briain - Craic Dealer

Giddy, is the best description of Dara's mood last Wednesday as he took the stage in Vicar St. Downright giddy.
Mind you, I think I'd be giddy too if I'd just finished presenting three live television shows on one of my favourite subjects in the world and was selling out most gigs on my current tour. Dara says himself that he knows this show lacks the single idea that has given some of his previous shows an obvious hook--the neutrinos from two years ago, the Milky Bar kid, the Gillian McKeith stuff--but it is still a special show, and it did seem to have a clear theme from where I was sitting: Dara's turning forty and he's having a little stocktake.
Milestones are mentioned at several points during the evening. When he lines up his helper elves in the audience, for instance, he reminds everyone that he's been doing this job for nearly twenty years now and so has only a hazy idea of what it is that real people's jobs actually entail. And how could he have? Even at his level of fame, life has become an odd round of being photographed, imprinted on, ignored, or complained about. Not that he minds any of this, really. It's just another phenomenon in the universe for Dara to study and try to make sense of and get a laugh from, along with racism, astrology, the logical conclusion of the necessity for balance on television programmes, last summer's riots, whether we should just put all our resources into girls from now on, what is really the best thing to say to a burglar who breaks into your house at three in the morning when you're having "adult time", and bullshit modern nativity plays that feature characters from Toy Story alongside proper biblical figures.
This is all suffused with the kind of unapologetic intellectualism, massive doses of cheery swearing, and surreal asides that (since we're taking stock of almost twenty years of a career here) used to remind me of Eddie Izzard but have become as ingrained a part of Dara's shows as his callbacks to his helper elves in the audience (I love how people now lean forward to watch him do this, as if he was going to do a magic trick). But this time he also managed to include a couple of wistful stories about his youth that, for me anyway, gave the second half of the show a particularly personal feel as well as reminding people of just how far he has come.
So, yes. See the show if you get the chance. It is honkingly, snortingly good.

Nice interview with Elmore Leonard about Raylan

Thanks to Sinead Mac for digging out this CNN interview with Elmore Leonard for me. It must be a real joy for a writer to see one of their characters realised like this on screen:

I've always liked him. He's just one of my favorites. Now when I see him on the screen I can't believe it. He acts exactly the way I write him. He's so laid back and he always has the best line in the scene. He's perfect, boy. The way he talks I hear him just the way I heard him when I'm writing it.

That's just about the best review a television series can get from the source material's creator, I would think.
Might just treat myself to that new book, as well.

Like French silent movies?

Thanks to Twitter pal Paul Duane (@punkyscudmonkey) for posting this. I'm parking it here to look at later, and also so that you can look at it later, should you so wish.

Ménilmontant (1926) was written, directed, produced, edited and co-photographed in Paris by Dimitri Kirsanoff. And it is, on any terms, a remarkable piece of writing, direction, production, editing and cinematography.

From  Notebook.

You could spend all day on Mubi. It's a fantastic time suck of a site.

Inmytune 2011: Clock Opera "Belongings"

Some of my friends and acquaintances are organised enough to share their music with each other. I don't do this, for several reasons.

• It's illegal! And wrong! Right, kids?
• I operate at a staggering level of laziness and disorganisation. Honestly. You would be amazed.
• I have never really learned how to upload music.
• I will never again have to impress/warn off (delete where applicable) a new potential boyfriend with examples of my taste in music, so making mixtapes is a skill I'm happy to leave behind.

Having said all that, I did listen to this song about six million times in 2011, so I thought I'd share it with you. It's that kind of big song I really like. I know Clock Opera aren't exactly flying under the radar, but another two or three plays can't hurt, right?

A special treat for me: Margin Call and Shame at the Screen Cinema

Excitement abounds in Dublin artsy circles (alright, my Twitter stream, but that's got more people from Dublin's artsy circles in it than I've any right to) because the Lighthouse is reopening.
This is good news, of course, but I've never been a Lighthouse person. Even in its original home up on Abbey St., the Lighthouse was never my stomping ground. I've always been a Screen girl. Ever since it stopped being the Metropole and started being the home of first-run, mainly American, slightly left-of-centre movies, the Screen's been my spiritual home. I remember bunking in from She's Gotta Have It to Raising Arizona with my brother and his friends, and my brother almost having to be stuffed under the seat because he was laughing so much he was disturbing the other punters. I went there on a weekly basis in my second year of college because I had a rich friend who was prepared to pay for my ticket (and for a naggin of vodka to split between our small Cokes) just to have someone to go to the cinema with. We laughed a lot more at Talk Radio than I think you were supposed to.
Moving to the country and generally falling out of love with the city and chatty people in the cinema meant a parting of ways between me and the Screen for a while, until I started following them on Twitter and became a bit more organised about going to see things. At Halloween last year they ran a lovely print of Don't Look Now, and there was no yap at all during it. Result. I decided to make an effort to go to more films there in 2012.
So, after the slog of being ill over Christmas and New Year and constantly having to talk to people (even though those people were the ones I love most in all the world), I decided to treat myself last Friday and took myself off to the Screen to see Shame and Margin Call on their opening day. Perhaps not the obvious choice for a double bill, but they've more in common than you might think: both low-budget New York movies, both portraits of a short but pivotal period in the lives of the protagonists, both examining that moneyed lifestyle and frantic duck-paddling that goes on underneath it.

I don't have a whole lot of insight to add to the mountain of praise that has been heaped on Shame, but I would say this: you know the way that Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott think they're a great partnership? They have nothing on Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender. Fassbender seems to be able to do anything McQueen requires of him, and McQueen returns the favour by making Fassbender look like a work of art even when he's not behaving like one. It's not a perfect film, and I wouldn't go and see it with your mam if I was you, but it is both entertaining and artistic.
Margin Call is a bit more functional. It has a story to tell and it tells it. Some of the characterisation is a bit basic: this one loves his dog, this one has kids, this one is trying to give up smoking (this handing out of the identifying attributes always reminds me of the stories about the Magnificent Seven, how McQueen (the other one) would only relinquish top billing if he was given the rifle, or something), but that's a small quibble.
I've heard other reviewers complain that the top brass keep asking for things to be explained to them in simple terms--"as if you were speaking to a child, or a golden retriever," Jeremy Irons says at one point--because wouldn't these guys know the jargon? But of course, that was part of the problem. The younger guys, the Penn Badgeleys and Zach Quintos, came up with new algorithms and bundles that the people above them didn't understand, but they let the money ride on them anyway because hey, they were covered either way.

The limited number of sets, the fact that the action takes place across a single night, and the coded conversations between vaguely threatening, suited men, all combine to give the feeling of a David Mamet play, or something by Pinter. Do not, whatever you do, take someone to this movie who insists on knowing every single thing that's going on at all times, because the constant whisper of "what are they talking about?" will drive you mad. You don't need to know what they're talking about. Half of them don't know what they're talking about. What the film is trying to get across is that these are just people. They might not be particularly good people, but they're not particularly bad people either, and rather than hating them personally, you might want to think about changing the system that rewards their behaviour.  I'm not sure I believe that, but I'm prepared to accept that others do. Unsurprisingly, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, and Jeremy Irons are all great in this movie. I wasn't even particularly surprised by how great Zach Quinto and Penn Badgeley were. Simon Baker, though, his performance kind of snuck up on me. I've always written him off as one of those pretty faces whose popularity I don't quite get, but he was really sly and hard and imposing in this. Well done, everyone.
(See how I didn't just talk about Paul Bettany? See? I am getting better.)
Also: did you know the Screen sells wine now? And that you can see a movie there for less than €7? Well, you can. And you should.

Two things that annoy me: search engine optimisation and unnecessary origin stories

Jareth, aged 4

Psst, says the Guardian website's article about the Labyrinth prequel, want to read an article about DAVID BOWIE and LABYRINTH? Look, here's a picture of DAVID BOWIE in LABYRINTH just to prove to you that that's what the article is all about. See? Clicky clicky, all nice now...
Ha ha, it's not about David Bowie at all. It's about a graphic novel prequel to Labyrinth, which will "cover Jareth's past" and tell you all about how he's "pulled into the labyrinth for the first time." So, you're a sucker, first of all.
Second of all, I don't know about you, but I am sick to death of origin stories now. Everybody from Darth Vader to the women from Sex and the City apparently have an origin story worth mining for cash, and they all turn out to be humourless rubbish*. I'm done with it. I have no curiosity at all about how Jareth got into the labyrinth. He has always been there. I kind of assumed he built it. But I don't really care either way, because the important thing to remember about Jareth is that people only like him because he's David Bowie. If he's not David Bowie (and a graphic novel character is not the same as David Bowie) then he is just some creepy middle-aged dude who will go to great lengths to get with a teenage girl, and I'm not cool with that.
(Although, he's not as bad as a werewolf who falls in love with a baby, which is what happens in the most recent Twilight movie, I believe. I haven't really checked, it all sounds a bit too body horror for me.)
*Actually, I quite enjoyed the original Wicked, but that would spoil the flow of the post.
There, that's a nice zeitgeisty blog post for you. Hello, random googlers! Move along, nothing to see here.