Coffee & TV - Sunday Breakfast with Dee Reddy: Simon Tierney on TV and Movies

Box Set Match

Love Hate - Series 4

Love/Hate is Ireland’s answer to Breaking Bad. It is our most expensive programme. It is about crime. It is highly addictive. Oh, and it makes me wince when I watch it.

While the season opener of Series 3 featured a rape and a murder, this years reintroduction to the world of Nidge and his motley crew showcased a much less horrifying episode: a cat was shot dead by a young boy. Sure, that’s grand.

The uproar caused by this incident made many front pages over the past week, including a shaming from ARAN (Animal Rights Action Network).

There is something rather perverse going on here. No one seems to complain when a human is shot dead on screen. But a little pussy cat? That’s just too much. Beyond that, ARAN believes that showing this sort of abominable behaviour on screen can only add to the problem of animal abuse. One of the functions of good televsion and film drama is that it casts a light on what is going on in our society, but which we may not be aware of. Surely Love/Hate has brought to our attention the horrendous things that people do to animals rather than encouraged us to take a rifle to little Felix?

What makes the scene so powerful is the fact that it is a child who perpetrates the crime. He laughs afterwards. Writer Stuart Carolan is making a point here; a child may begin shooting a cat but it is the first rung on a ladder which reaches up to the ignominy of Nidge.

Tommy is brain-damaged from the beating he received from Nidge at the end of Series 3. Killian Scott does a great job of portraying the infantile naivety of Tommy, with his line, “Can I have a fizzy orange”, now gone viral.

Nidge is a haunted man in this opening installment. The episode begins and ends with his visits to the grave of Darren. He has a new nemesis in the guise of DI Moynihan, played by acclaimed Irish actor, Brian F O’Byrne. Things are threatening to spiral out of control for Nidge as he attempts to keep a handle on the ever-increasing complexity of his relationships.

He is a different man to previous series. Before, there was something likeable about this character. He was a sort of clown despite his ever present menace.

What we have now is a man who is clearly miserable and disillusioned. In one scene he is using the services of a prostitute. He lies there, motionless, his thoughts a million miles away while his prostitute rocks back and forth on top of him. A part of him has died.

This has the effect of removing our sympathy for him. Is he just a killer now? What is the point of his life?

One of the successes of Breaking Bad is that it makes Walter White normal and human and steeped in the context of domesticity. We need more of the domestic in Love/Hate and less of the gangland violence. Otherwise what is the point? We need to see glimpses of the normality of their lives in order to justify and heighten the criminal aspects.

Keepin’ it Reel

Blue Jasmine goes up in smoke

Woody Allen has pulled his latest movie, Blue Jasmine, from the Indian market, just before its much anticipated release. Censorship laws in India are very strict. Any films which show characters smoking cigarettes are required to have a scroll running at the bottom of the screen throughout the scene. This warns viewers of the negative effect of smoking on their health. The film would also require a graphic anti-smoking advertisement at the beginning of the film. Not only that, but the film would need to be interrupted half way through for another anti-smoking advertisement to ensure that the viewers are quite clear of the most obvious message in the world: Don’t try this at home, kids!

What sort of precedent is this farcical endeavour setting? If this is happening, should there not also be a warning scroll during a violent scene (“violence is bad for your health”) or a sex scene (sex is bad if you’re underage”)? What about if a character uses a knife to cut a birthday cake (knives are sharp and can be dangerous”). Eventually the entire film screen will be filled with warnings..I can envisage a giant flashing text warning now…”EVERYTHING IS BAD! DON’T DO ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN THIS MOVIE!

New drama about Charlie Haughey

RTE’s production on Charlie Haughey’s political career goes into production this week. Aidan Gillen of Love/Hate and The Wire fame will play the late Fianna Fail leader, while Tom Vaughan Lawlor, AKA Nidge, will play PJ Mara, Haughey’s political adviser. The show is written by Dublin man Colin Teevan. It will be a trilogy of 90 minute episodes. The current working title is ‘Charlie’...while other sources say its going to be called ‘Citizen Charlie’. The show has a budget of 3.7 million Euro.

David Jason and Bridget Jones: a match not made in heaven

David Jason’s autobiography, My Life and the new Bridget Jones novel, Mad about the Boy, both came out on the same day last week. Fans of the Helen Fielding series will have been surprised half way through the book however, as there are forty pages of David Jason’s book accidentally inserted in the middle. The publisher, Vintage Books, said, “The printers have had a Bridget moment”.

Coffee & TV - Sunday Breakfast with Dee Reddy: Simon Tierney on TV & movies.

Homeland - Season 3

One of the most appealing aspects of the first season of Homeland was the secrecy surrounding Nicholas Brody. What had happened to him during his incarceration in the Middle East? Had he been turned? Is he a Muslim? 

In this latest season, which premiered on RTE Two on Tuesday evening, the secrecy is of a much broader and less intimate kind. The CIA is fighting for its own survival, in the wake of the bombing of its headquarters. "How can the American people expect the CIA to protect this country when it can't even protect itself?" asks one of its critics in this rather disappointing season three opener. 

Carrie Matheson, the bipolar and desperately unstable CIA agent played by Claire Danes, is testifying at a Congressional Hearing which is attempting to establish why the CIA let the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11 happen. She cannot account for why she and Congressman Brody were seen leaving the auditorium together, just minutes before the bomb detonated. 

Saul, on the other hand, is now the Acting Director of the CIA and is under pressure to carry out a series of reprisals against Al Qaeda in order to create a sense that the agency is actually achieving something other than its own self destruction. 

The problem with Homeland is that it has retreated from its original sense of intrigue. In the opening season, Brody's secrets were immersed in the intimacy of humdrum domesticity. The kids went off to school and Brody went to meet his accessories. His wife fell asleep and Brody went to the garage to pray to Allah. And all the time, Carrie Matheson watched it all unfold and tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, just as we the audience did too. It was these wonderfully dark yet intimate contrasts that made the first season a thrilling cat and mouse chase. 

While the second season had its detractors, I found it to be almost as riveting. Once again the intimate secrets were there, but this time we knew the secrets and were accessories to Brody as he attempted to conceal his actions from an increasingly perplexed family. The stakes grew as he climbed the political ladder on Capitol Hill. 

What we are left with now is a situation where Brody's identity has been revealed and he is the most hated and wanted man in America. The only cause now is that of an injustice being thrust upon him. The audience knows that he was probably not responsible for the CIA bombing. But where is he? He does not appear once in this opening episode. Has he gone back to Iraq? Is he camping across the border in Canada? Or has he perhaps shacked up with some poor unsuspecting woman elsewhere? 

There were of course moments of intensity in this episode. Agent Quinn is back as the CIA's go to tough guy. In fact, his five minutes of screen time were about the height of the thrills, as he is sent on a covert mission to track down a target while suffering a grave misfortune in the process. 

We need Brody's storyline to play out for the audience or else we will all lose interest by episode three. Bring back Nicholas Brody, not least for the fact that Damian Lewis is such a superb actor. 

Keepin’ it Reel

US Box Office

Taking a peak at the US box office gives us a really good idea of what is in store for us on this side of the pond in the not too distant future. The big movie in the States this weekend is the new Alfonso Cuaron movie, Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as two astronauts working at the International Space Station. They suffer an accident which casts them adrift in space. Sounds absolutely terrifying but getting great reviews stateside and is proving a well needed boost to 3D bookings.

The Ronan Farrow Controversy

The Woody Allen/Mia Farrow saga continues…Mia Farrow told Vanity Fair that her son Ronan could be the progeny of Frank Sinatra but she says that a paternity test was never undertaken. Up to this point it was believed that he was the son of Woody Allen. Farrow was married to Sinatra for a year and a half but says she was still sleeping with him even during the beginning of her relationship with Woody Allen. “We never really split up,” she says in the interview. Woody Allen’s representatives said, "The article is so fictitious and extravagantly absurd that he is not going to comment."

It has to be said that Ronan, a 25 year old former advisor to Hilary Clinton in the State Department, looks astonishingly like Frank. Old Blue Eyes to Young Blue Eyes, if you ask me.

Upcoming Biopics

There are a number of interesting biopics in the pipeline, not least the film about Freddie Mercury from Queen. Originally Sacha Baron Cohen was due to play the title role but was then axed as the remaining band mates were afraid he might turn it into a joke. The latest name to be thrown in the hat is Dominic Cooper of An Education fame.

The long awaited Pele biopic has just started filming in Brazil. The film charts the rise of the great footballer and climaxes at the 1958 World Cup, where Pele, then 17,  played a crucial role in Brazil’s victory over Sweden. Our very own ubiquitous Colm Meaney will be playing George Raynor, the English coach of the Swedish team. Pele himself will be played by newcomer, Kevin de Paula.

Of particular interest is the upcoming biopic of Julian Assange, the man currently in hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The Fifth Estate follows Assange and his collaboration with the Guardian newspaper as they prepared to launch hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and war files into the cybersphere. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Assange and looks unbelievably like him in the press stills, long blonde hair and all.