Lance Daly’s touching fairground of a film about two young runaways from a grim Dublin housing estate and their Heely adventures around town is well worth a gander. It even makes Smithfield’s annual Dublin on Ice eyesore a thing of beauty. Go see it and be won. 
The Irish Film Institute’s French Film Festival kicked off last night with the Irish premiere of Faubourg 36, Christophe Barratier’s tale of a working-class community and their beloved theatre, set in Popular Front France. Likely highlights of this ten-day festival include Capitaine Achab (Captain Ahab), Philippe Ramos’ imagining of the life of the famous Moby Dick character (Wednesday, November 19th), Eleve Libre (Private Lessons), the latest from Private Property director Joachim Lafosse (Sunday, November 16th), and Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis, Danny Boon’s comedy about moving to rural Northern France, a box-office smash in its native France. (Saturday, Novemer 15th and Monday, November 17th). The newly restored version of Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes, once famously described by Andrew Sarris as “the greatest film ever made” is also a chance to see whether this fifties film about the fascinating Irish-born courtesan lives up to the hype. For more details of what’s on offer, check out the Irish Film Institute website.
Yes, I have seen Steve McQueen’s film, but this is not a review because what I really want to write about is this: David Cox’s ignorant, vituperative rant against the film on the Guardian’s Film blog. His post is so offensive it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll give it a lash anyway.
“Far from being shocked at seeing the inmates roughed up a bit, I found myself wishing they’d been properly tortured, preferably savagely, imaginatively and continuously.” Er, let’s assume he’s just being provocative here, because the alternative – that he’s some kind of torture voyeur that would be happy snapping alongside the rest at Abu Ghraib – is a little hard to stomach. Because, Mr Cox, we’ve been through this. Those who perpetrate torture in the employ of the state are reviled and repudiated when their actions come to light. It’s banality-of-evil, stuff, if you want to look into it. Once you brush up on those “administrative conditions” in the North that the irritating Irish were so chafing against; the political aims of the IRA; and — this one’s important — how not to make your clinical sadism clearly apparent in copy, you should go ahead and make that film you want to make, the torture-porn epic celebrating Britain’s role in the Troubles. Maybe you can play Captain John Bull and your character can mete out some ‘heroic’ treatment of the Irish. A fine vicious Celtic romance, to be sure.
