How the west won Daithi

The Galway Races are upon us so for the Irish Independent's special supplement, I got a guided tour of Galway hotspots by TG4 weatherman Daithi O Se:

DID you hear the one about the Kerry weatherman who got caught in the rain without a brolly? Dingle native Daithi O Se is used to being the punchline to playful jokes in his adopted hometown of Galway.

He has made the city his home base since joining TG4 over a decade ago. "So I'm not a blow-in as such," he says. "But the lads in the pub do love to give me an awful going-over. I'm 'fear an aimsir' and they love taking the mick when I'd get the weather wrong.

"I remember getting caught out once, running out into the rain and no umbrella with me, and some old fella says, 'You're some weather man all right'."

The Galwegian talent for banter has made O Se -- anointed with the gift of the gab himself -- feel right at home and the 34-year-old takes full advantage of his new life in the only medieval city in Connacht.

"I think that part of Galway's charm is linked to the fact that we are surrounded by this other language. Even though a lot of people in the city might not be able to speak it fluently, they can understand it and they salute each other in Irish almost unbeknownst to themselves.

"Thinking in a different language gives Galway people a different outlook on life. Very individual, more philosophical and relaxed about it all."

Not that O Se has had the chance to take it easy of late. He's just back from driving through America for TG4's upcoming series Daithi ar Route 1 and, next month, he'll present his first Rose of Tralee on RTE.

But first, he has six days of the Galway races to look forward to, starting with the evening meeting next Monday. This is very much a locals' night out. O Se has a particular way of gearing himself up for a hectic day at Ballybrit.

"I'm an early riser and nothing beats throwing yourself into Galway Bay for a swim to clear the head," he says.

"I love walking along the pier and along the prom at Salthill but I would encourage people [who are] down for the races to go for a swim as well. The water would be cold enough but it will stand to you later in the day," he adds with a broad beam. A man who knows how to handle 18-hour days during race week.

Those of a less hardy nature could opt for O Se's second morning cure-all: the big fry-up. He'll be hosting a number of old friends from Dingle for the Galway Races and tradition has it that no-one makes a move out of the house in the morning without Daithi whipping out the frying pan.

"It's great soakage but to be honest, I think people who go racing eat once and make sure it sets them up for the day," he says.

Galway has no shortage of great dining options and as we walk around the streets of the city, the Dingle man points out some of his favourites. He name-checks Vina Mara on Middle Street for fresh seafood or Ard Bia at Nimmos beside the historic Spanish Arch on the Claddagh for a real treat. But it's iconic chipper McDonagh's that gets his regular custom.

"They serve pints of milk in there which is one of the reasons why I love it and the chips are homemade. The fish is basically just out of the water, you get a nice side of baked beans and you're sorted for the next 24 hours," says O Se, who lists fisherman as one of his many career paths -- alongside butcher, nightclub bouncer and teacher.

If you're Daithi O Se, you might get your chips dropped up to Freeney's Bar by owner Peter McDonagh.

"That's kinda cool alright; he'll do that from time to time," says O Se, taking care to look at least a little bit bashful. O Se is musical. "I don't play music but I used to sing," says Daithi, who fesses up to singing on a Chieftains album that was nominated for a world music Grammy some years back with his friend, Dingle singer Seamus Begley. "Myself and my friend Laurence sang with him for a while. We called ourselves the Three Fivers -- we weren't even The Three Tenors!"

Now's the perfect time for exploring his musical tastes, by heading to Tigh Neachtain, one of Galway's most famous pubs, located on the corner of Cross Street and Quay Street.

O Se reckons there is a pub in Galway to suit every taste. We pass the Claddagh (where the famous Claddagh Ring originated) and the famous tourist attraction of the Spanish Arch, which was not built by the Spaniard but to keep them out. We head to the triangle of trad music bars, Taaffe's, Tigh Coili and The Crane.

"I love the trad bars because you sit down and next thing, there's Sharon Shannon beside you with her accordion. It's unreal," he says.

"Paul Brady could call in every now and then you could look up and Dolores Keane is singing in the corner."

If Daithi's not in the mood to loosen the vocal cords, he will head to one of the "talking pubs" as he calls them. There's Murphy's and Fay's, which sit neatly poised across the road from each other -- with a bookie's beside Murphy's, handy for the thirsty punter.

"You might land in there before getting the bus to Ballybrit from Eyre Square and if the craic is good enough, you might never get the bus at all."

O Se downs his coffee and grows momentarily serious. "That's the one problem with Galway in race week. There are too many tips. I met four people last year who swore black and blue that their horse was going to win -- and that was in the same race."

With the exception of a couple of high-rollers, few come to Galway to make money in race week. Some are not even -- whisper it -- as concerned with what goes on trackside as they are about simply enjoying the atmosphere.

"What I love about Galway race week is that it's all about having the chat. Talking about who you have a 20 on in the next race is just the ice-breaker," says O Se. He's decamped to the Champagne Tent at Ballybrit on occasion, but says the whole area is like a big party.

"Galway is always in semi-party mode. Go into one of those music pubs at 5pm on a Monday evening in the middle of November and they're packed. Coming from a town like Dingle that would be very quiet in the winter, it was a real eye-opener. When you arrive in Galway it's like you're on a stag for your whole life."

Living life like you're on a permanent stag weekend isn't entirely advisable of course and O Se likes that Galway -- perched on the edge of some of the most stunning scenery in Ireland -- affords him the chance to spend time on one of his favourite spots. The Aran Islands are special to him and he eulogises about happy times there.

"One of the most gorgeous times I ever had there was when I camped out there overnight with Lucy Kennedy for her RTE show, Living With Lucy," he remembers.

O Se uses the word gorgeous a lot, letting the 'r' roll off his tongue with that gaelgeoir inflection, as if no other word can articulate how in love he is with Connemara sunsets, or the grace of a Galway hooker boat, in full flight.

"Fishing is one of those things that I love to do if I get a day off. Give me an evening in September casting off from the rocks. Gorrrrgeous."

He catches white pollock, takes it home, bakes it if he's being good but more often than not revs up the trusty frying pan and throws it in with a knob of garlic butter.

"Sure if you cooked your socks in garlic butter, you'd ate them," he laughs.

Galway's artistic reputation is not lost on the Kerry man. The highly-respected Film Fleadh and Arts Festival have just finished but O Se points out, the arts are a year-round obsession for its citizens.

"I'd go to the Town Hall Theatre and the Druid when I could," he says. He particularly enjoyed Druid's recent version of Juno and the Paycock. "I did it for my Leaving Cert but this was on a different level altogether," says O Se.

Visitors to Charlie Byrne's bookshop at Cornstore Mall might be surprised to find the normally ebullient O Se quietly browsing the history and biography sections.

"I'd give an hour or two there all right if I had a day off," he says. "Then I might take the book to McCambridge's (café) on Shop Street and while the afternoon away.

"I have my quiet times too you know," he says with a wink before he heads off to see a man about a horse.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/sport/horse-racing/galway-races/how-the-west-won-daithi-2270227.html

Movie review: Inception

My review, in 700 words, of Christopher Nolan's Inception from the Irish Independent's Day and Night magazine:


INCEPTION (12A, General release) ****
Summer season at the cinema is not traditionally a good time to go looking for smart, original films. Expectations have weighed heavily on Christopher Nolan’s Inception to cut a swathe through the sea of insipid sequels and till-ringing remakes.

This is a director who doesn’t deal in the predictable and generic. Ten years ago, he reinvented the psychological thriller with Memento, which didn’t so much tamper with the normal rules of narrative as completely dismember them. When he got his hands on the Batman franchise, he remoulded the tired superhero flick into that rare creature, an intelligent blockbuster.

Inception is Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight (2008). The buzz surrounding it has been stoked by the director’s insistence on keeping the most minor details of the plot under wraps.

The basic outline isn’t revolutionary. Leonardo di Caprio plays Dom Cobb, mastermind of corporate espionage. He steals secrets from one side and sells to the other. He has tired of his lonely, risky lifestyle and agrees to a final big job that will free him to go home and become a Normal Dad to his two children.

Yet this is anything but a typical one-last-job heist movie. Cobb is no ordinary thief. He and his team of egghead accomplices invade the dreams of their targets and prise secrets from their subconscious. This being Nolan’s world, dream-snatching is not as simple as waiting for their man to fall asleep. Cobb and right-hand-man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) construct entire dreamscapes designed to lure the subject into a fantasy world that they control.

Recently though, Cobb’s own guilt-ridden subconscious has been throwing a spanner in the works. A sinister projection of his dead wife Mal threatens to sabotage the missions. Marion Cotillard is riveting as Mal although it is hard to forget her Oscar-winning performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, mostly because Nolan has bizarrely chosen to use Piaf’s torch song ‘Je ne regrette rien’ as a key narrative trigger here.

Di Caprio, however, is brilliant as the haunted Cobb. As in the recent Shutter Island, Leo looks like he has the world on his shoulders and his fingertips barely clinging to reality. He is no position to refuse the escape hatch cracked open by powerful businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe). Saito offers to clear up Cobb’s personal problems if Cobb and company abandon the usual business of ‘extraction’ in favour of an ‘inception’: implanting an idea into the mind of a business rival.

Apparently this is a near-impossible task. We know this because straight-laced Arthur keeps protesting along the lines of, “This is a near-impossible task.” Instead it is the jumping-off point for Nolan’s mind-bending sci fi proposal involving multiple planes of consciousness and the sketchy human grip of reality over fantasy.

Cobb bolsters his team of operatives with wideboy fraudster Eames (Tom Hardy) and narcolepsy-inducing chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao). Nolan favourite Michael Caine dispenses a few bon mots as Cobb’s father but these auxiliary characters don’t really have heart. They seem to exist just to jolly the plot along by pressing the right button to blow up the right fantasy universe at the right time.

Our own Cillian Murphy succeeds in injecting Saito’s rival Robert Fischer with a pathos that fleshes out his role as the hapless ‘mark’ and Ellen Page brings some smarts to dreamworld architect Ariadne.

Mercifully, Ariadne also serves the function of helping the audience navigate the densely-layered fabric of Nolan’s plot. There are dreams within dreams, and dreams within those dreams and – frankly – it can get confusing. When Cobb explains the logic underpinning his intricate theories to new gal Ariadne, he is simultaneously explaining it to us.

The dreamscapes are gorgeously realised. The visuals are there to be marvelled at, a cityscape folding over onto itself, a snow-crusted fortress imploding into ice crystals at the blink of the mind’s eye.

Nolan masterfully ratchets up the tension as the film’s denouement plays out on four different stages. Inception lacks a deep emotional core but it messes with the mind. It is a bold vision that takes its cue from Eames who declares: “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger.”

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE (in truncated form): http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/movies/movies-inception-2261052.html

When Johnny played Ozzy...

By SUSAN DALY (from last Saturday's Weekend mag in the Irish Independent
WOMEN who look like Scarlett Johansson, wisdom has it, can pretty much do what they like. But even Scarlett might be pushing it with her latest demand. She has decided that she would be just perfect to play wild woman rocker Courtney Love in an upcoming biopic of Love’s tragic husband Kurt Cobain.

Johansson has flirted with a music career previously, recording her breathy vocals on a solo album two years ago. But does that qualify the cushion-lipped actress to play bad girl singer Love? Say what you like about Love but she’s got a wild, passionate energy that it’s hard to imagine the louche, laidback Johansson doing justice to.

Mind you, Love seems to have given her the stamp of approval, already sending the actress the script of the film. But then who – even Courtney Love – doesn’t fantasise about a gorgeous A-lister playing them in the movie of their life? Ozzy Osbourne, for example, recently decided that Johnny Depp is the only man to play him in a biopic. Clearly the drugs have done some lasting damage to Ozzy’s grip on reality.

Who knows? Perhaps Johnny Depp would be on for playing the Prince of Darkness. There is something about movie biopics that is catnip to Hollywood stars. They recognise the whiff of guaranteed Oscar glory if they get them right, as happened for Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Naomi Watts and Michelle Williams must both surely be eyeing the glittering prize when they take on the role of Marilyn Monroe in upcoming rival movies.

Movie bosses are all for the biopic, knowing there is nothing we love more than to watch a famous person play another famous person. When it’s good – Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner – it’s very, very good. But when it’s bad it’s, well, Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart.

Last year’s movie Amelia was a hit – on paper: Oscar-winning actress plays free-spirited legendary aviator. On the big screen, it was a dud, with most of the talk of Berry’s wan performance centering on her bad hair and teeth day.

Miscasting movie roles is easily done – Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist in The World is Not Enough, anyone? – but it’s most embarrassing and obvious when it happens in biopics. The 2008 movie How to Lose Friends and Alienate People had a pop at inappropriate casting when sexpot Megan Fox’s actress character lands the role of a lifetime as… Mother Teresa.

Sometimes the travesty is down to a star’s ego being unable to accept that they are wrong for the role. Madonna kept knocking on Alan Parker’s door until she persuaded him to cast her as Eva Peron in Evita, “the role I was born to play” as she called it. Sadly, although Madonna is a great businesswoman and pop hitmaker, she’s not much of an actress. Evita, a musical, also showed up her limitations as a singer.

It could have been worse. In the 1980s squeaky-clean Olivia Newton John was touted to play the manipulative Peron, as was Liza Minnelli – in a blonde wig.
Wigs and fake teeth don’t necessarily fool an audience. Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose landed her an Oscar as suicidal author Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002) but there surely isn’t enough Latex in the world to transform Kidman into soul queen Dusty Springfield. That idea was put about two years ago but the idea of poker-faced Kidman tackling Dusty’s bisexual, drugs-and-drink lifestyle has subsequently sunk without trace.

That’s the problem with getting white-bread stars to play iconic roles. Invariably your average Botoxed, protein-shake-personal-trainer-regime star is never half as interesting as the exciting life they are being asked to portray. All-American boy
Chris O’Donnell as macho, boozy, bullfighting author Ernest Hemingway? Please. Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig as doomed poet Sylvia Plath and womanizing Ted Hughes had, as one critic put it, “all the sexual chemistry of a couple of bored professors”.

Paltrow in particular is guilty of getting ideas above her station. The yoga bunny is being talked about to portray Marlene Dietrich, a bisexual cabaret-cruiser who had more lovers than Paltrow has had wheatgrass shots.

Then there are those actors who can’t bear the thought of ‘uglying up’ enough to accurately portray a real-life person. Hollywood reimagining ‘plain Jane’ Austen as the doe-eyed Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane. Children’s author Beatrix Potter got a bosom-heaving turn from Renee Zellwegger in Miss Potter.

Julia Roberts apparently intended to persuade us that she was feminist icon Andrea Dworkin in a 2005 film. (Yes, Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, whose most famous role insisted that becoming a prostitute was a valid way to bag a rich husband, as a feminist icon.)

When an icon is dead and half-forgotten for long enough, it should theoretically be easier to get an audience to believe in an actor’s portrayal of them. Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace will always be Mel Gibson in a kilt to me, for example.

Even so, it’s remarkable how we know when something is just not right even when a historical figure is hidden in the mists of time. We might be a bit hazy on the feats of Alexander the Great, but we’re fairly sure he wasn’t a mummy’s boy with blond highlights a la Colin Farrell.

The best thing is probably for a star to play it safe and portray someone whose life is extraordinary but largely unknown until a film is made about them. Ms Roberts finally got it right when she won an Oscar for playing single-mom campaigner Erin Brockovich, as did Sean Penn when he portrayed gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

And yet, as sure as Tom Cruise will one day decide he wants to play L Ron Hubbard in Alien 5: The Story of Scientology, there will always be bad casting decisions. We don’t have far to look: Kate Winslet is being tipped to play Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl kidnapped and kept in a cellar for 8 years. Winslet is a good actress but playing a 10-year-old girl? She’s not that good.

SPITTING IMAGE – Who should play who in the movies of their lives…
NELSON MANDELA
Who has played him: Morgan Freeman in Invictus (2009).
Who should play him: Morgan Freeman. Invictus was too lacklustre to do the role any justice. We say: give Morgan another script – and another chance.
COURTNEY LOVE
Who wants to play her: Scarlett Johansson in upcoming biopic of Kurt Cobain.
Who should play her: Courtney Love. There is no-one else wild enough to play her and she has already proven she can bring a real person to life with her electric performance as Althea, wife to porn boss Larry Flynt. Johansson in turn could play Marilyn Monroe – she has the curves that Naomi Watts and Michelle Williams don’t in their upcoming biopics of her.
EVA PERON
Who has played her: Madonna in the musical movie Evita (1996)
Who should have played her: Cher. No, really. In movies like Moonstruck and Mask, she was equally able to portray vulnerability and strength, a cocktail of which is what made Peron so charismatic. And it’s easy to picture her belting out Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina from a balcony, albeit in a spangly leotard.
DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
Who has been touted to play her: Nicole Kidman, Amy Winehouse.
Who should play her: Winehouse would be a good choice apart from concerns over her ability to turn up on set every day. Chloe Sevigny does troubled yet kinky very well – and she does look well in a beehive.
ELVIS
Who has played him: Kurt Russell, playing Elvis in a 1979 movie, wouldn’t even have come fifth in an Elvis lookalike contest in Vegas.
Who should play him: He already has – our own Jonathan Rhys Meyers earned plaudits for playing a young Elvis in a TV series recently. Let’s see that curled lip and snake hips on the big screen.

Nightwatch: Guilt-stricken by the human sushi bar

My Nightwatch column from last Friday's Day and Night magazine...

GUILT is an unwelcome guest on a night out. It is an emotion best saved for the morning after. It's going to come unannounced anyway, letting itself in with the key you meant to get back from your ex.

It will sneak up the stairs, stand drooling over your pillow for a moment and then yell in your earhole: 'I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST NIGHT!'

Ah yes, guilt. The horrors, the shakes, the frantic scramble for the Solpadeine followed by a grab for the phone to see who was texted, what was texted and what planet of inappropriateness you were on at the time.

It ain't nice, but it's like penance for throwing caution and all three sheets to the wind the previous evening. It helps us to say, hand on heart, 'Never again' and mean it for at least four working days.

What is pointless is feeling guilt before you've actually done something wrong. I get it when I throw up a deadline for a dinner date. It makes the crème brulee stick in the throat. (Ed: What?! You told me you had to rush your pregnant friend to Holles Street that time you were late last week.)

Ahem, I mean, I can imagine that kind of thing might make one feel guilty. Please don't fire me. Then there is the particular type of seasonal guilt that comes into play about the time my hayfever kicks in every year.

The nights, theoretically, are balmier. The risk of developing frostbite or being hailstoned to death is, theoretically, negligible. It's that wonderful time when al fresco drinking becomes de rigueur.

This also means that the chances of being asked for spare change five times in an hour are pretty high.

A friend more cynical than I describes it thus: in summer, in Dublin, each pub has two bars. There is the one inside and the one outside, which my friend calls the sushi bar.

Apparently, you see the exact same people pass in the exact same order at regular 20-minute intervals, asking for change or a cigarette. It's like watching the same bit of tuna go past on loop, and you're trying not to catch the tuna's eye.

As my friend is one of these sad old gits who insists on sticking to the same pub in a city full of watering holes, I'll have to take his kerbside observations as reliable.

My friend is somewhat hardened to these regular appeals to his benevolence. He has decided to give money only to the old lady with the shopping cart and a polite but firm 'No' to the others.

Me on the other hand? I take my gin with a rather large slice of guilt in it. I don't want to be hassled, but then I feel bad for not wanting to be hassled. I can't blame some down-on-their-luck person for noticing how many drinks I have in the space of an hour and how I could well afford to spare them the price of one.

Oh I know, poor me, what a dilemma for the person who does actually have a bed to go home to. Seriously though, what do you do?

I just holidayed in Italy -- again, doesn't your heart bleed for me -- and spent a night in Milan watching the beautiful people at a bar so cool I thought I was going to be thrown out any second for parting my hair on the wrong side.

These hipsters had an 'interesting' way of dealing with unwanted approaches from outside the velvet rope -- scream at them until they went away. Clearly, that's not the way to go.

Nor is staying inside the pub an option. That would just make me feel guiltier still.

I guess the only thing for it is to either give with good grace or stop feeling bad about saying no. Alternatively, I might spend the rest of the summer hiding behind my friend.
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/columnists/nightwatch-guilt-tripped-by-the-human-sushi-bar-2225704.html

Movie review: Hot Tub Time Machine

As published in last Friday's Day and Night magazine with the Irish Independent:

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE
***
Does anyone really want to relive the 1980s? The disastrous hair, Maggie Thatcher and Mr Big: there are so many reasons not to go back.

Hot Tub Time Machine revels in ’80s nostalgia right down to its ludicrous, neon-lettered title. For Adam (John Cusack) and his estranged buddies Lou and Nick - all stuck in depressive, dead-end adulthood - the era of Ronald Reagan and legwarmers were the best years of their lives.

When Lou (an insanely funny Rob Corddy) almost comes a cropper thanks to a cocktail of booze, exhaust fumes and Motley Crue, Adam and Nick (Craig Robinson) decide a restorative road trip is in order. The trio travel to the ski resort of their hedonistic late teens.

Like the lead characters, the resort has seen better days and there’s a rotting dead animal in their hotel hot tub. Enter repairman Chevy Chase (funny again for the first time in decades – a sure sign we’re heading back in time), add a dash of male bonding in the titular time-bending tub and the boys are rocketed back to 1986.

There is a nod to a Back to the Future style plotline, but this isn’t the place to come looking for a treatise on the time-space continuum. This is a movie having fun with itself and the era it parodies, where Don Johnson is a style icon and tape cassette Walkmans are the zenith of audio technology.

Directed by Steve Pink, who wrote Cusack’s Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, the script isn’t what it should be, relying a lot on visual gags, some toilet humour (literally, in the case of a catheter) and pop culture references that will be lost on audience members under 30.

Saying that, there are enough laugh-out-loud moments – especially a running gag about how Crispin Glover’s bellboy loses an arm – to keep things ticking over. As for the title, like much of the 1980s, it’s so bad, it’s good.