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Dir: John Patrick Shanley. Starring: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Jon Hamm, Dearbhla Molloy, Christopher Walken. Cert 12A, 102 mins
When it comes to
Cats, the worry isn’t that revealing the ending might spoil the fun. It’s that no sensible soul would ever believe it in the first place. Once this feature-length ad for Ireland – if someone’s concept of Ireland were surmised entirely from St Patrick’s Day specials on QVC – reaches its big twist, the whole film starts to feel like an elaborate prank. Is John Patrick Shanley, the Oscar and Pulitzer prize-winning director behind this alleged romcom, simply sitting back and cackling at all our befuddlement?
11 Dec 2020
On 11 November 2020, the National Leprechaun Museum, the keepers of the flame of whimsical Irish mythology and gentle storytelling, tweeted after watching the trailer for
Wild Mountain Thyme: “Even we think this is a bit much.” They’re not wrong. John Patrick Shanley’s woefully misjudged romantic drama, based on his play
Outside Mullingar, is more Irish than Bono drawing a four-leaf clover into a pint of Guinness, so full of rural quirk, magical enchantment and oversaturated tweeness it makes
Hunger. The cast, especially Emily Blunt and Jon Hamm, do their best to breathe real life into the fanciful proceedings, but it is let down by easy stereotypes, a botched tone, a distant relationship to authenticity and one truly brain-melting storytelling decision.
Wild Mountain Thyme Movie Review
By
Director: John Patrick Shanley
Cast: Jamie Dorman, Emily Blunt,
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 12/27/20
Opens: December 11, 2020
John Patrick Shanley, who directs and wrote both the movie and the four-character play on which it’s based, must have French-kissed the Blarney Stone for inspiration once again. His delightfully stereotyped look at an Irish family that is not as traditionally-oriented as it appears is not unlike his equally stereotypical look at an widowed Italian-American woman in “Moonstruck,” who falls for her fiancés’ energetic brother. The movie opens with a drone shot of rural land in Ireland (is there any other?) that could have been made by the Irish Tourist board and has a musical soundtrack that leads the viewer into a mood of enchantment. “Wild Mountain Thyme” considers a 75-year-old man’s decision to leave the land he owns with its sheep and adorable dog to his American relative rather to his local gra
WONDER WOMAN 1984: 3 STARS The release of “Wonder Woman 1984,” now available in theatres and as a 48-hour rental on digital movie stores for $29.99, comes as an answer to one of the worst dad jokes of all time. Do you know why Diana Prince was called Wonder Woman? Because we all wondered what she was going to do next. I know, it’s a terrible joke, but there was a great deal of talk about what was next for the character and, in pandemic times, when and how we’d be seeing the finished film. Now that we know what Diana Prince’s next moves are, I’m wondering about something else. Where did the wonder go?