Anna Karenina | the m0vie blog

Immatürity for Charity, Tonight, 9.30pm, RTÉ 2

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Darren

Christmas is often the time to indulge your inner child, so Immatürity for Charity seems perfectly suited for a post-holiday comedic treat. I had the pleasure of checking out a preview of it last week, and it is deliciously juvenile. It is, as the title suggests, a decidedly low-brow comedy sketch show, the kind of thing that could easily grate if it weren’t handled with the right amount of skill and enthusiasm. Luckily, writer (and star) Domhnall Glesson and director John Butler have done an outstanding job. Not all the sketches included are absolutely pitch-perfect, but the beauty of sketch comedy is that if you don’t like what you’re watching, well… another will be along shortly.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Amy Huberman, Anna Karenina, arts, brendan gleeson, christmas, Clubs and Venues, comedy, David Wilmot, Dredd, Holidays, Hugh O'Conor, John Butler, Performing Arts, Sketch comedy | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Now is Good

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Darren

Now is Good wallows in all the clichés that we’ve come to expect in these stories of young lives cut tragically short. There are long sequences without dialogue, scored to music designed to cue our emotions, inviting the audience to contemplate the profundity of everything going on. There’s care not to dwell on this as a bleak or depressing story with an inevitable downer ending. However, despite the awkward and trite direction, the script itself is surprisingly sturdy. While it seems to check off all the items on the list – not that set down by our protagonist, but the one codified by other recent stories of child mortality – it does have a hint of humanity that shines through from time to time. “Life is a series of moments,” the narration is prone to remind us, and there are some nice moments to be found in Now is Good, slotted between the plotting and structure dictated by the genre.

Their troubles are far afield…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Adam, Anna Karenina, arts, Before I Die, books, British people, Child mortality, dakota fanning, Dustin O'Halloran, fiction, film, Millennium Development Goal, Mortality rate, Movie, non-review review, Ol Parker, Olivia Williams, Online Writing, Paddy Considine, Recreation, review, Shopping, Short Stories, Tessa, UNICEF, United Nations | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Anna Karenina (2012)

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Darren

All the world is a stage, literally for Joe Wright’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic novel. Anna Karenina is visually stunning, and perfectly put together, doing a workman-like job of condensing Tolstoy’s 800-page doorstopper into a film running justover two hours. The wonderfully inventive idea of staging the film entirely in a theatre – from the foyer to the rafters to the stage itself – gives Wright the opportunity to showcase his talent as one of the finest working directors today. Tom Stoppard’s scripts is dripping with wit and does an excellent job providing digestible chunks of Tolstoy’s epic and a fair few pithy one-liners. Unfortunately, this is countered by the fact that the film never feels like it’s quite enough, and in particular the fact that its central figure feels like a shadow cast against a back wall rather than a three-dimensional character.