the song of the sea

a chunkily animated irish folk-tale cartoon about a lighthouse-keeper, his selkie (seal-mermaid) lover, and their children; set in modern ireland, the story tells of children discovering their parents’, and their own, identities

it’s beautiful to watch, and from start to finish soaked, sunken, in irish music

bohemian rhapsody

the reviewers were right: a weak script – sentimental, sometimes cringy, and (i learnt later) not even historically accurate (e.g. freddie never left queen, to return for live aid); but – magical in its re-creation of the 70s, and of the live aid performance; ‘doing alright’ performed pre-mercury at a student gig was amazing to watch – something from the little-known first album, but containing all the elements of later queen – beautiful tune, rapid changes, hard rock

How they are related

Mercury as an Irish fairy – beautiful, vulnerable but with a deep power – mercurial? Well… Certainly both are about the power of music: in the Queen film, when you see the audiences rhythmically chanting and swaying with Freddie, particularly at Live Aid, you realise how music grabs us, and how skilfully Mercury operated those grabs.

‘[The Song of the Sea] tells of children discovering their parents’, and their own, identities’ – OK – one of the narrative frames of Bohemian Rhapsody is the move from his mother’s initial incomprehension of her son and her later proud acceptance, and some of the film’s sense is Freddie’s discovering his gay identity, and how his particular lifestyle within this killed him.

denial

timothy spall’s brilliant portrayal of hitler-admiring and holocaust-denier david irving, tom wilkinson’s patrician barrister, andrew scott’s arch lawyer, and rachel weisz’s deborah lipstadt: all reasons to remember this film

it’s about holocaust-denial, of course, but in terms of genre it’s more a mixture of courtroom drama (what’s the judge going to say at the end?) and comedy of manners, as lipstadt is faced with quaint english traditions like our wicked libel system, fried breakfasts and rain

it also turns nicely on two senses of ‘denial’: irving’s denial of the holocaust, and lipstadt’s reluctant self-denial in complying with the lawyers’ wishes that she (and holocaust-survivors) don’t take part in the trial (the legal team insisted on this to deprive irving of the chance publicly to cross-examine these witnesses, and to ensure that the focus on everything was on irving himself – his racism and his deliberate distortions); it worked

shaun of the dead

my first of the pegg/frost trilogy: lovely, rich and fun; enjoyable cameos from familiar luvvies, and cleverly, ostentatiously, self-consciously, well made

insubstantial, but hey – i suppose a film purely about film has to be at least a little celluloidal

How they are related

Zombies are the easy meat of horror films; they look good, heighten the gothic, and are perpetrators of, as Mark Kermode puts it in his recent BBC minidoc on the genre, the ‘slow chase’. How they can be ‘killed’ when they’re already dead is a question of paradox and controversy – I think in Shaun it involves splitting the brain.

The Nazis’ victims, including the actually living survivors, are denied a living voice in Denial, but through their tenacious representative, and (hurrah) jolly old English legal expertise and sense of fair play, what, effect a powerful victory over those who would change the past to suit their present prejudices.