past lives | the m0vie blog

431. Past Lives – Leaving Cert 2025 (#—)

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, with week with special guests Conor Murphy and Natasha Waugh, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.

This August, we are taking a look at the films on the Irish Leaving Certificate Curriculum. This week, Celine Song’s Past Lives.

Nora Moon was just twelve years old when her family emigrated from South Korea to Canada. Moving to New York to pursue a career as a writer, Nora tries her best to stay in contact with her childhood friend Hae Sung, who remained in Seoul. Time passes and the pair drift out of contact. Years later, Hae Sung reaches out to let Nora know that he will be visiting New York, causing Nora to confront and re-evaluate many of her life choices.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: Celine Song, character complexities, cinematographic techniques, conor murphy, emotional narrative, film education, immigration, Irish Leaving Cert, love, natasha waugh, past lives, podcast, Relationships, The 250 | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – The Field Where I Died (Review)

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

Morgan and Wong’s four scripts for the fourth season of The X-Files are utterly unlike any other stories in the show’s nine-season run. Experimental, bold, confrontational; these four stories stretch and pull at The X-Files, as if eager to see just how far the hit show will bend.

The Field Where I Died is probably the weakest of these four episodes, but it is also the most ambitious. It is a script with big ideas and a willingness to commit to those ideas. There is no modesty here, no hesitation. There is a sense that Morgan and Wong are committing wholeheartedly to their themes and their concepts. The Field Where I Died is an episode that rubs quite a lot of people the wrong way, for a number of different reasons; however, the episode never pulls its punches. It never holds back. It never tries to be anything that it is not.

Far afield…

There is a lot to admire here. The Field Where I Died is not an episode with a simply formulaic concept or a conventional structure. It looks and feels completely unlike any other episode of the show. Even when the show touched on similar themes in its final season, the result was radically different. Hellbound is a much more conventional episode than The Field Where I Died. More than Home or Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man or Never Again, this is an episode that really seems like an odd fit for The X-Files.

Then again, that may be the beautiful thing about The Field Where I Died, for all its many flaws. It is utterly unlike anything else on television in the nineties. The fact that it can produce an episode of television so unique and incomparable is ultimately what makes The X-Files feel like The X-Files. The fact that The Field Where I Died feels so unconventional and eccentric is precisely what makes it a worthy episode of The X-Files.