Hyping up Wilde in Earnest won't win Parker and Oscars. "Life is too important to be taken seriously," Oscar Wilde observed. He demonstrated that principle most dazzlingly in The Importance of Being Earnest, his 1895 play satirizing, among other things, the uselessness of British upper-class twits, the hypocrisy of would-be moral arbiters, the shallowness of social standing, … [Read more...] about Film Forum: The Importance of Being Earnest
joseph McBride
The Quiet Man Turns Fifty
This year marks fiftieth anniversary of John Ford's The Quiet Man, the favorite movie of many Irish Americans. The native Irish tend to see it with more ambivalence, yet the readers of the Irish Times in 1996 voted it the greatest Irish movie ever made. The beguiling comedy-drama won Ford his fourth Academy Award as best director, as well as bringing Oscars to cinematographers … [Read more...] about The Quiet Man Turns Fifty
Book Reviews
RECOMMENDED For decades, one simple question has split the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic into two warring factions: Do you love or loathe The Quiet Man, that 1952 stage Irish classic starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, and directed by John Ford? Ford himself was often more Irish than the Irish themselves, making up an ultra-Gaelic name for himself, and playing … [Read more...] about Book Reviews
Film Forum: Land of the Second Chance
Once the most popular form of American filmmaking, the Western has not fully recovered from the commercial and critical debacle of Michael Cimino's 1980 epic Heaven's Gate. Although a far better film than conventional wisdom would indicate, Heaven's Gate provoked widespread derision because Cimino dared to use the disreputable Western form for a serious purpose, to question the … [Read more...] about Film Forum: Land of the Second Chance
Film Forum: When Brendan Met Trudy
The first original screenplay by Irish novelist Roddy Doyle is automatically a cinematic and literary event. When Brendan Met Trudy offers many quirky delights, but it is an uneven and ultimately disappointing film. Doyle's oddball yarn about a movie-obsessed Dublin schoolteacher (Peter McDonald) who falls in love with a thief (Flora Montgomery) is dragged down on screen by its … [Read more...] about Film Forum: When Brendan Met Trudy