Word: blarneyer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mass audience has paid scant attention to films about the Irish Troubles, but this one may find friends precisely because it renounces political nuance for emotional bullying and old Hollywood-style blarney. The movie's forebears are '30s Warner Bros. melodramas like Kid Galahad (a fighter and his trainer KO the crooks) and Angels with Dirty Faces (the Dead End Kids learn who's the real tough guy). The Boxer could even be a Going My Way without priests--it's that hokey...
...points, The Mollusk strays from the misguided water creature stories, coming alive on songs that happily reject oceanic representation for unadorned raucousness and personal sentiment. "The Blarney Stone" is an Irish pub romp of sex and drunken chicanery ("Who's that girl, that pretty young thing/After I fuck her she'll get up and sing/Sharpen your boot, bludgeon your eye/The Blarney Stone brings a tear to me eye") that sticks out like a sore thumb. Tapping into a similar stylistic tradition, "Waving My Dick In The Wind" hastily ponders loneliness in a humorous jaunt...
...examination of conscience." He is also volubly aware that the culture of violence that has haunted his country's history was embodied by Collins and his cohorts. Jordan therefore owes to the present, as well as to the past that shaped it, something more than the higher blarney of his interviews and his press releases. He owes us--not to mention the fascinatingly ambiguous figure of Michael Collins--a rigorous and nuanced honesty instead of the admittedly entertaining fantasia on historical themes that he has delivered...
...Conroy's new novel Beach Music (Doubleday; 628 pages; $27.50) jumps onto your lap like a large shaggy dog that will do anything to get your attention. It's friendly but still has teeth, like The Prince of Tides with its theme of family violence barely concealed in Southern blarney. Beach Music's Jack McCall has his own troublesome clan in South Carolina. His father the Judge is a brilliant drunk. Mom is a former striptease dancer, feisty cancer patient and savior of threatened loggerhead turtles. McCall's brothers include a hermit who lives in a tree house. Friends...
...temptation to call "The Secret of Roan Inish" an outrageous bit of Irish Blarney is difficult to resist. This movie swings from realism to fantasy as it portrays the shenanigans of an isolated family in Northwest Ireland when they start believing their own far-fetched lore...