Domhnall Gleeson recently said Rachel McAdams “changes a room merely by entering it.” I wondered if I was hearing him right. He wasn’t talking about Einstein or Winston Churchill. Domhnall appeared with McAdams in About Time, an average enough film.
Where does this kind of hyperbole emanate from? Are film stars on such elevated plateaus nowadays that the mere mention of someone’s name is liable to cause hysteria? Domhnall, like Rachel, is a good actor, but he is, as they say, a ‘nepo baby.’ We have to ask the question: Would he have got where he is without his dad? (That’s Brendan, of course). Domhnall, one is tempted to say, changes a room because his father entered it.
In Send Help (15A), a thriller with a darkly comic undertow, McAdams plays the survivor of a plane crash. She’s stranded on a desert island with a boss she doesn’t like (Dylan O’Brien). They have to find a way to get on together to survive.
In equally strange cinematic terrain, Cold Storage (15A) deals with a fungus that escapes from a laborato-ry. If it’s allowed to spread unchecked, it could, as they say, destroy mankind as we know it. Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery head the cast. Liam Neeson takes time off from rescuing kidnapped relatives to help out.
For nostalgic cineastes among you, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (12A) re-imagines Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark work Breathless, which became synonymous with the French ‘New Wave’ in 1960.
Infinite Icon (12A) attempts to answer a question many of us have been asking for years, i.e. what does Paris Hilton do all day besides looking at herself in the mirror?
Another World (15A) is an animated Hong Kong/Japanese film about a spirit guide in the afterlife helping a young girl release her anger so she can be reincarnated in peace.
The Scarecrow’s Wedding (G), also animated, has the aforementioned Domhnall Gleeson voicing a scare-crow who decides to marry another one – as you would – voiced by Jessica Buckley.
Everyone is talking about Jessica at the moment because of her Oscar nomination for Hamnet. You could do worse than watch her in I’m Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix, a surreal film for which she received an IFTA nomination in 2020.
I had a surreal experience myself with Netflix shortly afterwards, having lost my Visa card. When the time came to renew my subscription, their Accounts Department rejected the new one. Various emails from me to their renewal section proved fruitless.
One day, I got an email from them saying, “Please come back to us. We miss you.” I replied saying, “I tried to, but you won’t let me.” This email was answered with, “You have messaged a non-reply address.”
It’s possible these two emails came from the same office – or even the same person. Was such Kafkaesque confusion George Orwell’s 1984 revisited, or God’s way of telling me not to bother re-joining it because it mostly shows junk?
