The Secret of Kells (2009)

Guys, I’ll be honest. I haven’t been this daunted by a review since Frozen. First you have the fact that this is an absolutely adored film with a lot of fans amongst readers of this very blog, and then you have the fact that the movie is Irish (well, an Irish-Franco-Belgian co-production) and the fact that I’m Irish (well, an Irish-Greek co-production) and that people seem to think that gives me some kind of special insight into this movie. I mean what are you expecting, that I’m just going to emerge from my turf cottage and impart some ancient Gaelic wisdom through the haze of my clay pipe?

“Yes, now quit stalling.”

Okay, okay. Special insight. Special insight. Let me see. Okay. You know that episode of the Simpsons where they’re crossing from the American embassy into Australia and Homer’s all “Look boy! Now I’m in America! Now I’m in Australia! America! Australia!” and so on and so forth? Imagine an entire culture built around that joke and you have the Irish. We’re obsessed with borders. OBSESSED. The places in space and time where one thing ends and another starts. Ask an American when summer begins and they’ll say “Ohhhh, round about Memorial day, I guess?”. Ask an Irish person when summer begins and they’ll say “01 May. Midnight. Greenwich Mean time. And not a second before.” Borders are where things get weird, where things aren’t one thing or another. Why is Halloween so creepy? Because Samhain occurs on October 31^st, right when Autumn ends and Winter begins on the Gaelic calendar. It’s at times like that when the…things in the other world can cross into ours. This fear and fascination with borders runs bone deep in the Irish psyche and ties into our historic relationship with the fairy realm. My wife is a dyed in the wool atheist, but she would not enter a fairy ring if you paid her. You just don’t do that.

“IT’S COMMON SENSE PEOPLE!”

Secret of Kells is a very Irish movie, and I don’t just mean because it draws so heavily on Irish mythology, art and history and features some of the greatest Irish actors to have been claimed as British by the English media at some point. It’s obessed with lines drawn between over here and over there, between light and dark, between faith and fear and between civilization and the wild wood.

It is also feckin’ smurges.

So. Background. Secret of Kells is the product of Cartoon Saloon, which began as a loose animator’s collective in 1999 and has now produced four full length animated features, two of which have been nominated for Academy Awards. Despite this incredibly small filmography, Cartoon Saloon is already considered to be on a par with Studio Ghibli. Clearly, Irish Animation has come a long way since Daithí Lacha.

HE WAS TERRIBLE.

But is the praise justified? Yes. Is the movie as good as YES. Does it YES. Whatever hypothetical question I could ask the answer is almost definitely YES.

Let’s take a look.

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What if there was an election and nobody won?

Guys, if I can briefly distract your attention from the ongoing flaming six-train pileup that is the US elections I need you to take a look at what’s happening in Ireland right now.

What’s happening in Ireland?

We had an election, and nobody won.

What? How is that even possible? Did nobody vote?

On the contrary, turnout this election was a very healthy 60%, down from 2011 but still high for a country where voting isn’t mandatory.

So what’s the problem?

Okay, a little background. Ireland elects the Dáil (our parliament) with the Proportional Representation: Single Transferable Vote. It’s the system that most accurately reflects the views of voters and using it makes the Dáil one of the most democratic legislatures in the world. Compare that to our upper house, the Seanad, which isn’t even fully elected and is probably the least democratic legislature in the developed world. Ireland: A land of contrasts. Basically in PR:STV you are allowed to not simply vote for your favourite candidate but to rank all the candidates in order of preference. This allows people to vote for smaller parties that better align with their politics without worrying that their vote will help parties they disagree with (think, being able to vote for Nader without worrying that you’re helping Bush to win).

That sounds super complicated.

It’s really not. You put a 1 by your favourite candidate, a 2 by your second and so on. Easy peasy.

No, I didn’t mean the voting, I meant the counting the vote.

That is SUPER complicated, yes. It’s a Lovecraftian, nightmare inducing madness but hey, I just vote so it’s not my problem. Although if you’re interested, this video explains the whole process better than I ever could.

So what happened?

The people cast their ballot and at the end the vote looked like this:

Election

Holy shit that’s a lot of parties. What am I even looking at?

Okay, so the blue bar at the top is Fine Gael, currently in government in coalition with the Labour party (the lighter red bar). Second down is Fianna Fáil who’ve been the party of government for most of Ireland’s history but were banished to the land of ghosts and shadows in the 2011 election because the 2008 crash happened on their watch. They’ve bounced back in a huge way this election because apparently a quarter of the country suffered some kind of head trauma that effects medium term memory. The bright patriotic green guys three rows down are Sinn Féin who are ABSOLUTELY NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE I.R.A. IN ANY WAY AND NEVER HAVE BEEN.

Wink

And below them? That big long black 13%? The independents, just ordinary men and women without even a party who managed to collectively come in fourth over all.

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“This deal’s getting worse all the time…”

“You think me strange? Good strange, or bad strange?”

First dates are essentially scams. You sit down to dinner with someone you don’t know, and try to pretend that you’re someone else. Someone charming, and succesful, and definitely not into doing weird things with fish. No sir. Not you. The second and third dates are more or less the same. But by the time the fourth date rolls around you need to start being honest. That’s where you take your date on a long walk and say “Look. I really like you. I like where this is going. But if we’re going to have something together I’m going to have to tell you just how much of a freak I actually am.”

“This. This is me. This is what I get up to.”

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has essentially been a long, meticulous romancing of the mainstream. Thor is the part of the relationship where Marvel finally says “I’m glad you like the snarky businessman in the robot suit and the scientist who turns into a green monster. Now here’s where we get nuts.” As a title, The Mighty Thor has always been an unapologetically melodramatic, ridiculous, camp, epic, nonsensical, glorious, mess. In short, it is one of the purest comic books ever written. It’s huge men with long flowing hair and fabulous capes yelling cod-Shakespearean insults at each other and not understanding the difference between “thee” and “thou”.

It, quite simply, does not give a fuck.

But first, a little history.

The character of Thor was created early in the first millennium by the Germanic peoples inhabiting what is now Scandinavia. Some stuff happened. Then, in 1962, the character was introduced into the Marvel universe by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby in the pages of Tales to Astonish. There’s a little bit of confusion as to who actually came up with the idea (aside from the ancient Vikings, I mean). Stan Lee claims that the idea came to him when he realised that the only way to create a character stronger than the Hulk would be to make him a god, and that rather than go with the more well-known Greek or Roman deities he decided to delve into Norse mythology.

Meanwhile, Cúchulainn sits on the damn shelf.

Jack Kirby, on the other hand, claims that he created the character because of his love of Norse mythology and to be honest, I think the evidence is on Kirby’s side. Kirby had already created not one but two versions of Thor for DC in the golden age, so he clearly had an interest in the character. Not only that, but “comic book characters as post-industrial mythology” was kind of Jack Kirby’s whole deal. Thor’s sales have never exactly set the world on fire but this is nonetheless a character with some serious cred. There are many who consider Lee and Kirby’s run on the character the finest work of either men in the sixties (damn high praise) and he’s also had some celebrated runs, none greater than Walt Simonson’s glorious, batshit insane epic in the eighties.

This is normally the part of the review where I would say “we do not speak of the Frog of Thunder” but even this was AWESOME.

He’s also been a very consistent presence in the Marvel universe, showing up in almost everyone else’s books at one time or another and, if there’s a team of Avengers that Thor’s not on, it’s probably only because he’s dead again. He’s always been one of the company’s “faces”, one of their most visible and iconic characters. And yet, Thor has always struggled outside of comics. His live action appearances before 2011 was just a single episode of The Incredible Hulk, and he hasn’t headlined his own cartoon series since the frickin’ sixties (compare that to Spider-man, who gets a new cartoon show every time Stan Lee sneezes). Same Raimi originally pitched a Thor movie to Marvel all the way back in 1990 and from there it was dropped, picked up again, briefly re-conceived as a TV show starring Tyler Mane before bouncing to Sony, then to Paramount before finally arriving back at Marvel. The decision to nominate Kenneth Branagh to direct was surprising but also kind of inspired. Branagh is famous as an interpreter of Shakespeare for the masses, and Stan Lee is of course one of the biggest Shakespeare fanboys out there.

He made Falstaff into a superhero, people.

Branagh was the perfect candidate to make the overblown, melodramatic bluster of Thor work for a mainstream audience. Just, for the love of God, don’t subject yourself to his commentary on the DVD.

“The director’s an ass.”

Marvel knew going in that compared to Iron Man and Hulk, this movie was the real test. This is where they’d learn if a mainstream audience could really accept all the comic book nuttiness they were about to bring. It was time to see if this relationship had legs.

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Stand Up: Part 2

Yup, I’m still at it. Here’s a show I did at the Battle of the Axe at the end of January where I talk about Jesus’ catchphrase, being the bisexual Zorro and almost being burnt alive at my daughter’s creche. Be warned, I get a little blue.

MERCH!

My friends, the day at last has come when I cast off the lodestone of artistic credibility that I have carried on my shoulders for so long, and embrace the glorious freedom of unbridled capitalism.

I am selling out, and it feels so GOOD.

“Only capital can deliver freedom and prosperity to the working class!”

“But Mouse, what about your dedication to the eternal revolution!?”

“Only capital can deliver freedom and prosperity to the working class!”

“NYEEEEEEEET!”

I’ve partnered with the good folks at Ekki Ekki to bring you the Unshaved Mouse online store! Hoodies, mugs, T-shirts and more! We’ve got it all at the Unshaved Mouse store! That’s not our motto, simply a statement of fact. Simply go to the store, select a design, item (T-shirt, hoody, sweatshirt, tank top, mug or phone case) and colour and it’ll be printed to order and shipped straight to you.

What designs? At the moment we’ve got Unshaved Mouse, Spouse of Mouse, Mini-Mouse, Baby Mouse, Unscrupulous Mouse and BluCatt with hopefully more to come.

What better gift for your significant other/child/past self/evil doppelganger/mysterious foe who turned out to be Don Bluth in the end? It’s your only option really.

Mouse out!

“Like all guilty men, you try to rewrite your history…”

I’m still feeling my way around reviewing these Marvel movies. I was thinking that, when I review the first movie featuring a hero I’ll give you some history and overview of that specific character, and when the time comes to review the sequel I might take a look at their rogues gallery and what their villains say about that particular hero. Problem: Iron Man has quite possibly the worst rogues gallery of any major superhero. Notoriously so. Legendarily so. If you were to make a chart of superheroes by the quality of their rogues’ gallery it would be Batman at the top, closely followed by Spider-man and the Fantastic Four, then respectable mid-carders like Captain America and Superman and then waaaaaaaaaaaay way down at the bottom Iron Man and Wonder Woman are hanging out and getting sloshed on Ouzo. Yeah, yeah, no such thing as bad characters, only bad writers. True as far as it goes. Any villain, no matter how lame, can be made compelling with the right scribe working on them.

Some, however, take more heavy lifting than others.

Some, admittedly, take more heavy lifting than others.

But Iron Man’s villains probably require more heavy lifting than probably any other hero’s. Even Tony’s arch-nemesis, The Mandarin, while certainly a cool villain, doesn’t really have that much that sets him apart from similar bad guys like Doctor Doom or Baron Mordo other than the fact that in his early days he looked like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Oh sixties.

As for the rest, they were mostly just an interchangeable series of commies in robot armour and rival industrialists. I mean hell, when the time came to find a villain for Iron Man 2, they actually just slapped two of them together. Ivan Vanko is a mishmash of Whiplash and the Crimson Dynamo. And nobody even cared. Think about that for a minute. Can you imagine if they did a Batman movie and they just merged the characters of Joker and the Penguin into one guy and called him the Penker? My God, the fans would skin them alive and hang their carcasses in the online forums as a warning to others. That’s how lame Iron Man’s rogues gallery is. Not even Iron Man fans care enough to get mad about changes to the source material. But, did it work? Were they able to reverse Iron Man’s traditionally awful luck with villains? Will our hero triumph over the Penker? Let’s find out! Right after these messages.

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If I said I was happy, I’d be lion.

“Disney?”

“Um…yeah?”

“Are you tarnishing the legacy of one of your beloved classics again? I thought we were past this.”

“I’m not! I swear!”

“Then what, pray tell, is this the fuck?”

“Oh it’s an exciting new chapter in the Lion King mythos!”

“You have ten seconds to explain yourself, sir.”

“Okay, see it stars Kion, Simba and Nala’s son, as he forms the Lion Guard, an elite group of animals whose sworn duty it is to protect the Pride Lands from danger.”

“Okay. That actually sounds like a pretty decent premise if handled well…”

“See, Scar used to have superpowers…”

“WOW. Ok. Stop right there. Pull this bus over…”

“See, Scar had the magical Roar of the Elders and led the Lion Guard…”

“Scar? “Shallow end of the gene pool” Scar?”

“And when he tried to get the Lion Guard to turn against Mufasa and they refused he used the roar to destroy them.”

“No. No. That never happened. You lying media conglomerate.”

“But then because he used the roar for evil he lost it.”

“So why didn’t he just use it against Mufasa in the first…no, you know what I’m not even going to engage with the idea. So tell me, does this travesty ignore Simba’s Pride or take place in the same continuity?”

“Neither! It canonises some aspects while blatantly contradicting others!”

“Ah! So everybody’s angry!”

“Yeah!”

“WHAT ARE YOU ON?”

“Everything…everything…so much…I…I can see God…”

“Disney you’ve got to stop this. You’ve got to stop this now. You’ve got to pull every episode and pretend this never happened. When people ask, tell them it was a hoax by Dreamworks. Tell them that the perpetrators will be caught and justice will be swift.”

“But I haven’t told you the best part!”

“Down we go, down and down.”

“Who’s the tatted up chipmunk?”

(more…)

“I don’t want to control it. I want to get rid of it.”

When comic fans and writers talk about a character’s “status quo” they don’t just mean the existing state of affairs in that character’s book. The Status Quo is sort of like the Platonic Ideal of a comic character, the version of the character that everyone thinks of when they hear the character’s name. For example, Spider-man’s status quo is:

Spider-man is mild-mannered Peter Parker, who gained incredible spider powers when he was bitten by a radioactive spider during a science presentation.
He wears a red and blue spider-suit.
He lives in Queens with his elderly Aunt May.
His love interest is Mary Jane Watson.
He works as a freelance photographer for the Daily Bugle, where his boss is J. Jonah Jameson.
His life is a never ending parade of misery.

Now, you could pick up any comic featuring Spider-man since 1962 and the odds are good that at least one of those bullet points is not true for the book you’re currently reading (except the last one. That never changes). Spider-man might be dating Gwen Stacy. He might be working as a science teacher. He might not be Peter Parker at all, but instead Ben Reilly or Miles Morales or Otto Octavius or Miguel O’Hara. Aunt May might be dead again. But still, that’s the default version of the character. Whenever the comic goes off the rails, chances are they’ll return Spider-man to his roots and have him back at the Daily Bugle, back with Mary Jane, living with Aunt May. Sooner or later, he will return to status quo like he’s attached to it with a bungee cord.

The Hulk, who debuted a few months prior to Spider-man in 1962 also has a default version; When he gets angry, scientist Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk, a massive rampaging green giant with the mental capacity of a three year old who destroys everything in his path. He is a man of few words, and those words are “Hulk” and “Smash”.

This is the version of the character that everyone is familiar with, and to comic fans he’s known as “Savage Hulk”. What’s interesting about the Hulk is that I can think of very few superheroes who spend less time “at status quo” than the Hulk. And the reason for that is, there’s not really that much you can do with Savage Hulk. Savage Hulk is less a character than an event that other characters react to. He’s like Godzilla. What kind of story can you do with Godzilla? What journey can he go on? Is he going to adopt an orphaned child and raise him as his ward? No. He’s going to stomp on buildings and go “SKRONK!”. Is he going to discover a shocking secret about his past that throws everything he though he knew about himself into doubt? No. He’s going to stomp on buildings and go “SKRONK!”. Is he going to serve as an allegory for the horrors of nuclear war? Yes. While he stomps on buildings and goes “SKRONK!”

That’s basically Hulk’s problem (just swap out “SKRONK” for “HULK SMASH”) and probably why the character often had trouble maintaining a series of his own while still being a very popular guest character in the books of other superheroes. Writers have gotten around this by staying as far away from the Savage Hulk status quo as they can. Often the Hulk will be made more intelligent, or a different side of Banner’s personality will emerge as a new Hulk. Or Banner and the Hulk will merge personalities. Or they’ll swap personalities. Or the writers will huff paint and do something really stupid.

We do not speak of the time Hulk tried to bang his cousin.

Despite that, Savage Hulk retains a near total grip on the general public’s perception of the character, especially since all the non-comic depictions of the (the seventies TV Show, the two cartoon series and both movies) have been pure Savage Hulk. And the reason for that is that Savage Hulk, despite the limitations he brings from a story-telling point of view, is a fanastic concept because he is so universal. Everyone can relate to the Hulk. When we see Bruce Banner finally lose his temper and transform into a huge, rampaging monster it’s cathartic as all hell because on some level we all wish we could do that.

Following the success of Iron Man it was time for the difficult second album and Hulk seemed an obvious candidate for the studio’s sophomore effort. He was, without question, the highest profile character in Marvel’s stable that they owned the movie rights to, thanks to the success of the Bill Bixby series. But there was a problem, looming over the production like a big hulking…hulk.

In a way, it would have been easier if Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk: A Mediation on Moss has been an out and out flop. That way Marvel could have simply said “Don’t worry, we’ll fix it! The grownups are in charge now!” and completely ignore it other than to work a few sarcastic swipes at it into to the script. But here’s the thing, Lee’s Hulk might not have been popular with comic fans but it actually did fairly decently at the box office and got not a little critical love. Personally, I appreciate what Lee was going for and think that there are some beautiful moments and really good performances but yeah, the movie is kind of a snooze fest. It has its fans though, putting Marvel in a bit of a tricky position. Should they embrace Lee’s Hulk and make their version a straight up sequel, or start again with a new origin story that firmly established their Hulk as a new, separate beast? In the end, they did neither.

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East of Berlin by Hannah Moscovitch

The strongest moment in East of Berlin, the career-making play of Canadian scribe Hannah Moscovitch currently having its first Irish run at the Project Theatre, occurs at the dinner table. Rudi (played with considerable charm by Colin Campbell) is a young lad living with his parents in a German expat community. In the fifties. In Paraguay. Where they throw a party every 20^th April.

You can probably guess where this is going.

A casual remark by a schoolfriend (Liam Heslin) reveals an unspeakable truth to Rudi about his father and what he did during the war. This leads to that confrontation at the dinner table between father and son where Rudi asks him how he could have done such awful things and receives answers that, while obviously self-serving, nonetheless have a terrifying plausibility.

How could you have selected people to go to the camps?

If I hadn’t, they just would have sent everybody.

How could you infect people with typhus?

I thought about how many lives I would save if I discovered a cure.

Why didn’t you leave?

I had a wife. They would have come after her.

In this exchange Moscovitch gives us a glimpse into a world where all choices lead to atrocity. Fleeing his family in disgust, Rudi arrives in Germany and falls in love with a Nice Jewish Girl named Sarah (an excellent turn by Erin Flanigan, by turns brassy and vulnerable) whose mother survived the camps. They discover to their wonderment (in one of the most touching scenes in the play) that a mere generation after the Shoah a German and a Jew can fall in love. “It feels right.” Sarah says in amazement “It feels…normal.” But of course, the Dark Dramatic Secrets in Rudi’s past rise up to threaten their happiness as Dark Dramatic Secrets are wont to do and Rudi most decide just how far he will go to exorcise the demons of the past.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Moscovitch has a deft hand with dialogue and characterisation and it remains throughout a play about people rather than themes aided by briskly fluid direction and strong performances from all three actors.

East of Berlin by Hanna Moscovitch runs in the Project Theatre.

Dates: 8 – 16 Jan €16/€14
Matinee: 16 Jan 2.30pm €14/€12