Our chief Irish underground reporter Ozymandias has sent Father Geek the following 2 reviews for Dublin, so here they are for your enjoyment this weekend...
Guys,
For all our AICN readers this is an example of the best of the best of new Irish cinema - made on a shoestring and the most fantastic documentary I've seen in ages..... Aidan's website is as fascinating as the guy himself - check it out by Clicking Right Here.
Ozy's review of:
AIDAN WALSH - MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE
For all our AICN readers this is an example of the best of the best of new Irish cinema - made on a shoestring and the most fantastic documentary I've seen in ages..... Aidan's website is as fascinating as the guy himself - check it out by Clicking Right Here.
Ozy's review of:
AIDAN WALSH - MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE
AIDAN WALSH - MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE
Simply put Shimmy Marcus' documentary Aidan Walsh - Master Of The Universe is the most remarkable real Irish story I've ever seen on any screen. For about the first fifteen minutes I was genuinely torn between believing that what I was seeing was the truth and wondering if it was all one gigantic spoof. If it were fictional, you'd dismiss his story as out of hand.
It tells the real life story of Aidan Walsh - one part Howard Hughes, one part David Bowie, one part Forrest Gump - and his life as opera singer, ploitical candidate, entrepreneur, video cameraman, photographer and the rock legend who got a record deal based on one rendition of the hokey cokey.
Marcus' work here as director is extraordinary. He's edited down what he describes himself as thousands of hours of footage shot over four years into a very sharp 71 minutes full of humour, wonder, sadness and pathos (particularly the footage of Aidan returning to the orphanage in Cork he ran away from as a child) peppered with interviews with the likes of Irish broadcasters Dave Fanning & Gerry Ryan, rock stars Simon Carmody & Gavin Friday and artist Guggi. For me it ranks as the single most entertaining and illuminating hour and a bit I've spent at the movies all year. It is astonishing.
The entire movie is shot digitally and I have to say that the quality of the images I saw at the press screening were fantastic. It bodes well for the future of the medium if, as in this case, anyone can take up a camera and shoot a perfect film like this on a less than non-existent budget. Without the technology Aidan Walsh - Master Of The Universe wouldn't exist. The era of true guerrilla filmmaking is upon us.
It might seem like I'm unnecessarily raving about this little gem. I don't believe so. I see so many other Irish productions every year made with far larger budgets on a far grander scale on real film stock that are truly best forgotten. It makes Shimmy Marcus' achievement as director here all the greater.
Our national broadcaster here in Ireland RTE has declined to take up an option to screen Aidan Walsh - Master Of The Universe. Shame on them for depriving a wider viewing public of a brilliant Irish-made documentary that deserves a far greater audience than a week at the Irish Film Centre will allow. Maybe a US distributor will pick up where we've lost out.
PANDAEMONIUM
I've been promised this one for a while from one of our guys in the UK - a report from inside the cast and crew screening of one of the biggies from Toronto this year - the new Julian Temple film on the life of Wordsworth and Coleridge.......
Hello,Ozymandias!
I got see the film on Sunday morning.The famous faces present included Emily Woof,John Standing,Julien Temple(director),Samuel West and Emma Fielding.The biggest surprise was the arrival of Michael Gambon of whom I am a great fan.He's not in the movie but is connected with someone who worked on it. We all settled into comfortable seats at the Warner Village,Leicester Square and Julien Temple got up to say a few words of thanks to everyone and said it had not been the easiest film to make and hoped we liked it.The applause at the end indicated that it went down well! Producer Nick O'Hagan told us that a deal was about to be signed with a UK distributor and that it was being shown at the London Fim Festival on 3rd Nov. www.lff.org.uk/
The lights dimmed and the movie started.The story follows the ups and downs of two of Britain's literary giants-poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Temple sees them as the Lennon/Macartney of their era-a time when inventors were experimenting with electricity and other key developments that were the foundations of the Modern Age.
The film opens at a high powered literary gathering where the name of the new poet laureate is to be unveiled.An opium ridden Coleridge turns up to lend support to his old friend Wordsworth.Making a spectacle of himself he is led into a side room and finds himself in his crazed mind thrust through a door and flashes back to his earlier life addressing a public meeting on the quayside at Bristol. There he sees Sara (who is to become his wife) for the first time and meets Wordsworth.
The next phase of the film shows Samuel and his wife enduring a soggy rural utopia in Somerset (a kind of 18th century'Good Life') only lightened by the arrival of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy who have rented a house nearby.She is highly influential on Samuel and there is clearly a spiritual and sexual chemistry between the two.
The four of them enjoy long walks in the Quantock Hills and experiment with hallucogenic substances.
The Ancient Mariner sequence in the film is one of the best predicting future environmental disasters.
This most creative period in the two poets' careers that led to the anonymous publication of The Lyrical Ballads ends with Wordsworth's decision to leave Somerset and return to his Lakeland homeland.Devasted Coleridge insists that he and Sara follow them and thus we see the destructive disintegration of the creative partnership and friendship of the poets.
What struck me more than anything about this film was Temple's extraordinary use of visual imagery to illustrate the poems like Kubla Khan and Frost at Midnight.The performances by the leading actors are all excellent especially Linus Roache as Coleridge and above all Emily Woof as Dorothy Wordsworth who in her batty later years at the poet laureate gathering is completely gripping. The sound was just wonderful and the photography of the English landscape from which the poets drew so much of their inspiration was superb. The applause at the end was well deserved.A film about dead poets may not sound very enticing but I would highly recommend it.
Best wishes, Tim King, Somerset,UK
