Garage a complete dud

We've enjoyed Pat Shortt and Jon Kenny in their parts as anarchic comedy duo, D'Unbelievables. We've enjoyed Shortt's multi-tasking in the television comedy, Killinaskully. We've enjoyed the bitter-sweet Adam & Paul, from director Lenny Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran. So putting Shortt, Abrahamson and O'Halloran together on a project should have resulted in high entertainment. Certainly, given the accolades so prominently reproduced on the DVD box of Garage one expected a great couple of hours viewing.

The movie is set in a rural backwater town where Josie (Pat Shortt) runs a ramshackle petrol station for an unsympathetic local businessman. Josie is obviously a sandwich short (no pun intended) of a picnic. He is variously ridiculed, exploited, even dispised by other characters in this unremittingly bleak drama. Where Adam & Paul pulled few punches in that movie's portrayal of drug addiction, it was at least relieved by some tragic comedy. Garage has no obvious relief in it whatsoever. An interesting comparison to Garage is Sweety Barrett (1998), where the similar underdog character played by Brendan Gleeson ultimately triumphs against adversity. There is no redemption in Garage.

Garage won IFTA awards in 2008 in the Best Film, Best Director, Best Script, and Best Actor categories as well as a prize at Cannes 2007.

I don't get it. It is the most boring, depressing, black movie I have sat through in a very long time. I hope never to look at it again.

Guinness Christmas Advertisement

Youth may be "wasted on the young..."

...but what fun to find this video of two fine ladies who rocked the 80s. Watch their original 1980s video here.

Best. Aria. Ever.

Wikipedia (all bow) tells us:

"An aria (Italian for air; plural: arie or arias in common usage) in music was originally any expressive melody, usually, but not always, performed by a singer. It is now used almost exclusively to describe a self-contained piece for one voice usually with orchestral accompaniment. Perhaps the most common context for arias is opera..."

"Pagliacci (Clowns) is an opera in two acts written and composed by Ruggero Leoncavallo. It is the tragedy of a jealous husband in a commedia dell'Arte troupe...."

So anyway, this fella, Pagliaccio , finds out his mot is playing away with another clown. (Where have we heard this scenario before, or so perfectly described???). The show must go on. But the heart must also break. The words of the aria are shown in Italian and in English in Wikipedia in this article.

The best rendition, I think, of this is by Placido Domingo in this 1978 version:

UPDATE: The site owner has disabled embedding, so the video won't show now on this Blog. However, please Visit This Page to see the video.

Original Italian
Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio,
non so più quel che dico,
e quel che faccio!
Eppur è d'uopo, sforzati!
Bah! sei tu forse un uom?
Tu se' Pagliaccio!
Vesti la giubba,
e la faccia in farina.
La gente paga, e rider vuole qua.
E se Arlecchin t'invola Colombina,
ridi, Pagliaccio, e ognun applaudirà!
Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto;
in una smorfia il singhiozzo il dolor, Ah!
Ridi, Pagliaccio,
sul tuo amore infranto!
Ridi del duol, che t'avvelena il cor!

English Translation
Play a part! While I'm still reeling,
Unsure of what I say
or what I'm doing
Yet you've got to, force yourself!
Or aren't you a man?
You're just Pagliaccio!
Get into costume,
and smear on your makeup
The public's paying to have a laugh or two
If Arlecchino runs off with Colombina
laugh all the louder, the croud will cheer you on.
Pretend your anguish is nothing but clowning,
and hide your sobbing behind a silly grin.
Laugh, Pagliaccio
though your love lies in pieces.
Laugh through the pain, the pain that poisons your heart.

Grease

Click here. That's all.

Montel show "I Love You" doggy

Danny Boy

Elephants. Yeah.

"What," Herself asks me, "What do any of those movies on your blog have to do with... well, your blog?"
"It's my blog. I can put on it what I like," I reply, with a right snoot on.
"Fair enough," she says giving me a A Look.

In this multi-media age, "Writing it down" isn't always enough to fill in pieces of the puzzle. Movies on my blog are of things I like or which strike a personal chord. Simple as that. I even have a list of things which won't ever see the light of day on my blog, either because their copyright is too tightly held or because there isn't a technical way I can figure out to put them here.

For example, I roared the other night like I haven't roared laughing in years at Pavarotti over on the rathergood.com site. You may not find it amusing -- I'm looking forward to seeing it again as soon as I click on the "Publish" button.

Titter too at the Beatles video.

WIDFIPOTP is not responsible for the content of other websites. The links offered above are family friendly. Others on the third-party site may not be. Consider yourself warned.

"How to dismantle an atomic bomb"? Boys, I've done that loads of times.

The back room, as we called it, was the one with the packing crates for floorboards that you didn't want to jump up and down upon too often. In there were kept my toy boxes, which contained the ruins of at least three childhoods before mine came along and the scraps of my hobby of disassembling things into minute parts and never being able to put them together again.

All the kings horses and men had nothing on me.

I was always bothered about why toys come in different scales. On the one hand I had one large green plastic army tank (sans wheels), that had a great turret that moved 360 degrees and could be pulled off to simulate an explosion like they had in Warlord, the weekly comicbook. Then, by contrast, there were about fifty or so small green plastic soldiers, way out of scale to the tank. I got over that be watching Godzilla movies and reading about dinosaurs. Suddenly, the idea of the giant menacing monster facing off against bevvies of human-sized victims had a real appeal. Legions of helpless soldiers were run down by the giant tank until someone managed to lob a last gasp hand-grenade through its driver's window and Boom! off went the turret. The day was won!

I think my mother might have been perturbed at my propensity to distruction, because she finally settled on a toy I could take apart and put back together: Lego.

Lego makes good exploding tanks. With the right kits, you could get moving turrets, tank tracks (Lego constuction-site machinery put to a reassembled use), and even put together a fairly impressive spaceship. Exploding turrets in primary colours are as much fun as green Made-in-Hong-Kong ones.

The TV show, Space 1999, was a great inspiration. Most of the spaceships in this sci-fi afternoon hide-behind-the-sofa epic looked like they'd been modelled out of Lego anyway.

Warlord was my favourite comic. It was a real stiff-upper-lip, how-we-won-WWII British publication, but it didn't matter. Comicbook action heroes in army uniforms were the staple fare, except for super spy, Lord Peter Flint, who sometimes could be seen in civvies. The faceless hoards being exploded by limpet mines and other wonderful boyish weapons was the great attraction. It was no surprise that I moved on to a collection of WWII factual part-works discovered in another corner of the back room, although the real-life photos of death, cruelty and destruction were no boyish entertainment.

I haven't disassembled a toy and found the bits more interesting than the whole in years and years. I wonder are they even made the same way these days?