Love & Friendship in A Date for Mad Mary

A Date for Mad Mary. Element Pictures, 2016. Directed by Darren Thornton. Screenplay by Darren Thornton and Colin Thornton. Produced by Ed Guiney and Juliette Bonass. Adapted from the one-woman play 10 Dates with Mad Mary (2010) by Yasmine Akram. Starring: Seána Kerslake, Tara Lee, Charleigh Bailey, Denise McCormack, Siobhan Shanahan. [Image: scannain.com]  Darren Thornton’s...

A look at youth culture in Irish film and television: 2003-2017

In 2016-17, I completed an MA in English, specialising in Irish Writing and Film, at University College Cork. As part of the course, everyone in my class was required to set up and regularly update a blog. The idea of the blog initially filled my classmates and me with dread, as blogging was completely uncharted territory for...

Thrones and Roses: The history behind Game of Thrones, part 2

In a series of articles, I will look at the links between Games of Thrones and the Wars of the Roses, pointing to the real-life inspirations for several of the key characters in the series. For this study, I will be looking solely at how these events and characters are portrayed in the HBO series rather than...

Rewind: Looking back at David Gleeson’s Cowboys and Angels

A profile of David Gleeson's 2003 comedy-drama. Contains some spoilers. Set in Limerick city during the boom years, Cowboys and Angels depicts the growing friendship between two very different men and looks at the anxieties and challenges faced by young people trying to establish their identity in a modern city.  When shy civil servant Shane...

Beyond ‘Hip Hedonism’: The darker side of urban Celtic Tiger Ireland

In his 2007 essay "Cinema, city, and imaginative space: 'Hip hedonism' and recent Irish cinema", McLoone outlines how the relative prosperity and optimism of the Celtic Tiger years led a cultural rebirth of Dublin, and a re-imagining of Ireland's capital in film as a space of "sexual freedom and exploration" (213). Films like Goldfish Memory...

‘Living, in our own terrible way.’* The disorientation of Ireland’s youth culture in contemporary film and television

Through a series of blog posts, I will explore how contemporary Irish film and television portray the difficulties faced by young Irish men and women. The last few years have seen a string of Irish films and TV series that portray a darker side of Irish life with issues like depression, alcohol and drug abuse, alienation,...