Irish theologian, Kevin Hargaden
Before The Master arrives, I watched this other movie about cults where we see in Elizabeth Olsen the best debut since Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone and it surprised me how effective a horror film it is.
Your Correspondent, Marvels that a film about losing our sense of self can have such a firm sense of its own identity
The narrative careers along with infectious wit and style and verve but because its focused on the insouciant Dude it feels like its taking its time.
Your Correspondent, Had a rough night and hates The Eagles
When you consider how easily it could have descended into a cheap lesbian-themed shock-laden schlocky horror movie, Heavenly Creatures is a prime and subtle example of how masterly direction is at the heart of a successful movie.
Your Correspondent, Wonders if that director might seek to interpret other difficult projects on screen?
For longer than seems feasible, people in the 1980s couldn’t imagine the buddy-comedy formula growing old and in the same way I will forever and always enjoy the knowing-intertextual-referential faux-sentimental comedy formula wherever it appears.
Your Correspondent, His life is actually like the accounts office on the set of Die Hard
One of my clearest moments of pure childhood surprise was the evening my aunt called to our front door with a cycling cap signed by the inestimably great Sean Kelly himself. It was a gift for me. I dared to not wear it. I showed it to my friends on the road I grew up on but otherwise it stayed in my bedroom. It was a relic. It was a sacred totem. I owned a bright orange Super de Luxe bike that I inherited from my older siblings. Everyone else had a BMX. I didn’t even have brakes. It pushed the pedals backwards to stop. In retrospect, the bike I grew up with was an awesome piece of classic design but I couldn’t see that at the age of 8.
I still won all the impromptu races we’d run during the Tour de France, in that era when Kelly and Stephen Roche were the greatest riders in the world.
I don’t know where the bike or the cap went. I wish I still had them both.
I knew of another Irish professional cyclist, Martin Earley and distinctly remember him winning a stage of the Tour in 1989. That was the summer I fell in love with soccer and forgot my dreams of being a cyclist. But reading Paul Kimmage’s classic memoir of his years as a pro cyclist, my boyhood adulation of these heroes came rushing back to me. Kimmage was the one Irish professional I was not aware of as a child. I knew him as a journalist in the Sunday Independent. I came to read the soccer news religiously and so his name was just one of those bylines I didn’t really care to pay attention to because it was rare that he would be interviewing Alan Kernaghan or Andy Townsend.
Rough Ride is now firmly canonical within the pantheon of great sporting books. It tells of Kimmage’s passion for the sport, growing up as the son of an Irish amateur champion, with a brother who was a gifted rider as well and with a circle of friends that included Roche and Earley. It tells of his rise through the amateur ranks to eventually make it as a pro in France in his early twenties. And then it tells with crushing and compelling momentum of his heart-breaking realisation that the sport he has sacrificed his youth for is plagued by drug abuse. He quit after four years, his spirit broken by the realisation that to even continue to compete, nevermind to win, he would have to start doping.
It was published in 1990 and won prominent awards but it was met with scepticism. There was a culture within the sport of deriding those who “spat in the soup” by trying to lift the lid on steroid usage. Kimmage was dismissed as a bitter failure who was driven to explain the mediocrity of his results by exaggerating the scale of corruption. The massive drug scandals that destroyed the Tour de France in 1998 were the most stunning vindication of Kimmage’s long-held claims.
That a cyclist would then suffer cancer, go through chemotherapy, lose a testicle and go on to win an unprecedented seven Tours in a row and still not be seriously suspected of doping is remarkable. Lance Armstrong’s recent, final, long awaited exposure as a fraud prompted me to read this book. But what Kimmage’s book revealed to me was that my easy characterisation of Armstrong as a cheat is simply not accurate enough. Armstrong and Kimmage and every cyclist since the late 1980s has been caught in a system where competition was skewed by doping. The doctors, therapists, team directors, race organisers, sponsors, sporting administration bodies and journalists were all complicit in a complex drive to assure results at any cost. A more keen follower of sport might be able to argue that the problems facing cycling flow inevitably from the professionalisation of sport. Having read this book, any scepticism I might have held about doping culture in other sports has reduced to a minimum. Innocence is hard to protect when the drugs exist and the TV money is on offer.
My favourite part of the book is a paragraph in the middle detailing an especially hard climb on a fiendishly hot day up an Alpine slope in the Tour de France. The Prodigal Son echoes through the memory Kimmage shares:
The only regret I had was for my parents. They came over from Ireland on two weeks’ holiday to see the race with my youngest brother Christopher. My only bad day of the race was on the first mountain stage to Mondane. It was a scorching hot day and I cracked early on the Col de Glandon. I knew my parents were waiting for me at the top. I dreaded passing them so far down the field, and in my frustration I composed a speech that explained my role of domestique. On seeing them at the side of the road I planned to stop and say, ‘Da, I’m sorry. Look at me. This is the reality. This is what I am. I’m not a star and never will be. I am a water carrier, a domestique, a nothing.’ I never got to say the prepared words. He was standing two kilometres from the top, with a bottle of water. I smiled, pulled in and filled my bidon. He said I was doing fine, and pushed me off, encouraging me further. His enthusiasm lightened my heart and my speech was cancelled.
– Paul Kimmage, Rough Ride, pp. 110-11.
Your Correspondent, Needs a tagline like a fish needs a bicycle
England and her film industry which is so patently incapable of making anything really good never came close with this one, especially in the closing scene that features the inexplicable appearance of a random girl from school at Christmas dinner.
Your Correspondent, Looks forward to the John Cusack Hollywood adaptation which will be miles better
Squandering a stellar cast including a very funny Colin Farrell, this movie becomes tiresome very quickly because I suspect its director is horrible at being the boss of directing things well.
Your Correspondent, What he just did?- Yeah they’ll offer him a screenplay writing contract for that.
This book is an acclaimed masterpiece of comedy, a Pulitzer prize winner and according to my friend Leanie, whose judgment I trust in all things artistic, the funniest book she has ever read. It simply didn’t capture me at all.
Ignatius J. Reilly is a dirty, obese, lazy, scowling serial masturbater who holds the world and everyone in it with utter contempt. That is a hard character to build a novel around. And according to what we might call the David Brent Rule for antiheroes, if you’re gonna chart a story around someone so repugnant, there must be a kernel to them which can be truly loved. Maybe I missed it, or maybe the scene around the burial of Rex was meant to evoke it in me but at no point did Kennedy Toole make me like or even understand Reilly. As his mother says of him, he isn’t only crazy, he’s mean too.
And I can see that the novel is charted out like The Consolations of Philosophy, which is Reilly’s favourite book. There are plenty of memorable and amusing set-pieces (“Attacked by a bird,” Mrs. Reilly wept. “That hadda happen to you, Ignatius. Nobody ever gets attacked by a bird.”). I can appreciate that there is a vivid description of New Orleans. But the problem isn’t just that the lead character is such a gickbag. Everyone is awful. His mother is weak and aggressive, the Levy couple are awful to each other and dreadful on their own, Mancuso is inexplicable in his incompetence- there is no one in this novel you can even hope to like.
Which makes it hard to finish the novel and say, “Gee, that was a book I liked!”
Your Correspondent, Needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency.
These 1926 lectures by the famed Christian socialist are full of keen insights, lovely personal biases declared in shining prose and together form a coherent argument that the idea of the the liberated economic agent which is the basis of social theory since the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood separately to theological commitments arising from the Reformation that created the space in which the view we now take for granted could grow.
In other words, nuancing Weber, today’s capitalist is the mutant offspring of yesterday’s Puritan, who in turn was a prodigal son of Calvin. The intellectual family tree is complicated further by the fact that at the end of this, I’m even more convinced than ever that Karl Marx is in some important ways Thomas Aquinas’ long lost heir.
As I head into serious study on this topic in the next few years, I found this passage a useful warning to keep me from going astray and writing things that other church leaders or theologians think quite fancy but make absolutely no contact with the world we actually live in:
Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the whole controversy over ‘good conscience’ in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers, and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century.
Your Correspondent, Bade self-love and social be not the same
“What would I do with Jessica Biel?”
Thus said Wife-unit at the end of Total Recall and I again remembered how pointless marriage is because invariably the other person says things like this and you just have to wonder what the hell goes on in their heads.
She added to the crimes against the imagination:
“She’s just that crappy boyish-looking actress from a dreadful sitcom about American Christians.”
Let’s be honest, and admit that there is something fundamentally immoral about remaking movies after only 25 years. If we don’t oppose this now, we’ll have a remake of Jurassic Park in three years with Peppa the Pig playing Lex and Justin Bieber as Hammond. But if the film studio has gone to great lengths to go and make the damn thing I suppose the least we can do is pay to watch it. And in this case really enjoy it. And actually decide it is much better than the original.
The design of the movie is a visual treat. If you are a fan of the stupendous blog Fuck Yeah Brutalism then you’ll enjoy the sets in Total Recall. Brutalism in the sky! Also, Colin Farrell is made for these kinds of gigs. He hasn’t got the acting chops (one presumes) to star across from Philip Seymour Hoffmann in an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel. But he can look moody and leap at things as good as Tom Cruise (and much better than Arnie).
The plot of Total Recall is truly ingenious, as one would expect for a story by the insane Christian storyteller, Philip K. Dick. And its sleek little premise is handled pretty well right up till the end when epistemology is dumped in favour of Oprah style follow your heart shite. But let me be clear, especially for Declan, if you are going to this movie to inspire a philosophical conversation about ethics, then you will be very annoyed because 43% of its running time consists of Kate Beckinsale glowering down the camera lens with immaculate hair.
The auld lad from Love Actually is a Messianic rebel leader. Thankfully he isn’t in it long enough to ruin the fun.
In the end, a film about the permeability of memory achieves a certain classic status by being perfectly enjoyable in the moment and hard to remember a day later.
Your Correspondent, Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
