Friday 12
VOD and theatres
A lot of movies riff on Leonard Cohen but they’re rarely as interesting as the Godfather of Gloom’s work. On one side, you have Sarah Polley’s
Take this Waltz, a romantic drama set to and enhanced by Cohen’s music. On the opposite corner you have self-serving documentaries like
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love in which director Nick Broomfield manages to make their epic story all about himself.
Death of a Ladies’ Man is at least its own beast. This mildly compelling character piece with surrealistic overtones revolves around a Leonard Cohen-like character, Samuel O’Shea (Gabriel Byrne). A poetry teacher who’s a bit of a cad and a full-blown alcoholic, O’Shea is going through a rough patch: his second wife has left him, his job doesn’t fulfill him and, perhaps more pressingly, he’s hallucinating and not in the fun way.