Movie Review: Emily and Chris “go brah” in John Patrick Shanley’s “Wild Mountain Thyme

Many a long, poetic scene decorates the John Patrick Shanley (“Moonstruck”) Irish romance “Wild Mountain Thyme,” just two characters talking, the way the Irish do, about “waiting” which the Irish also do.

That might explain why this light charmer starring the widely-worshipped Emily Blunt (Twitter has many a Church of St. Emily Herself congregation) never found even a hint of traction when it opened mid-pandemic.

But the novelty of her slinging an Irish accent (more or less) and the utter delight of Christopher Walken showing off his “version” of “the gift of the gab” as narrator and one of her co-stars, make this slender, ever-so-Irish romance worth tracking down.

It’s a farm fable about neighbors Rosemary (Blunt) and Anthony (Jamie Dornan, “Fifty Shades Free At Last”) who grew up next door to each other and seem destined to be together.

But he’s troubled and distracted, and she’s been in a decades-long funk over his inattention in a romantic way.

Once, when they were children, Anthony pushed Rosemary because she was bullying a cute lass who had little Anthony’s eye. At some point, his family had to sell a piece of land that was their sole access to the county road. And since that’s the very spot where Anthony pushed Rosemary, she’s sitting on it after inheriting it, making the Reillys go to the trouble of opening and closing a couple of gates just to get home after a trip to town or a visit to the pub.

Tony (Walken), Anthony’s Dad, is over that and then some. He’d too old to farm and would like to make the property more valuable by getting back that land. Because he’s determined that their farm (in Crossmolina, County Mayo, while the setting of the Shanley play this is based on was “Outside Mullingar”) not fall out of the hands of their family, which has owned it for 131 years.

And Tony is disappointed and damned tired of waiting for Anthony to get on the stick, marry and produce an heir, preferably with the woman he’s grown up with on the next farm over.

People age and grouse and die, machinations involving an American relative (Jon Hamm) play into the proceedings, and a lot of lovely sentimentally-Irish dialogue gets brushed over by Blunt, Dornan and Walken, who opens proceedings by relating that “If an Iiiiiirishman dies telling a story, you can be shore e’ll be back!”

Your affection — or tolerance — for that sort of cinematic Irish affectation should be your guide in deciding whether to see “Wild Mountain Thyme.”

There’s little Rosemary grousing, “Eeeyyye ‘ave no poorpose. I’m joost a gurrrrl, and the world is fulla gurrrls.”

Adult Rosemary is much more sanguine. “Hope is a force, and women are the salvation of the world.”

Adult Anthony muses that “Some of us don’t have joy. But we do what we must. Is a man who does what he must but gets no pleasure any less of a man?”

His Dad is sure his boy’s “no farmer…You take after John Kelly (one of his late wife’s relatives). And that man was as mad as the full moon.

As for all this “waiting” Anthony does, and Tony must do, and Rosemary foolishly persists in, Tony’s got one sentence for Anthony that lands hardest.

You’re famous all over Ireland for what goes by you.”

I love that sort of thing, to be honest. It’s a real guilty pleasure, hearing Rosemary’s mother (Dearbhla Molloy) grump “Take me home before me PACEmaker runs down to zero,” and describe her daughter’s stallion describe as “That hairse is Saaatan on fourrrrr feet!”

Blunt sings the title folk tune — beautifully — in a pub talent contest, and Hamm’s faintly-boorish American gets to be the adult in the room, wondering why the Irish “accept these crazy things” and noting the emotional cost of the sort of romantic idealism that Hollywood and John Patrick Shanley Himself traffic in.

“The kind of dreams kids have make adults miserable.”

“Wild Mountain Thyme” is a mixed bag of a romance. The Irish may not take to it and its cloying speeches delivered in “Quiet Man” accents. But it’s not for natives or native speakers, is it? It’s for the diaspora and those of us who look to our fantasy ideal of the Irish to provide a dream — wistful, melancholy, hopeful and “waiting.”

Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and suggestive comments

Cast: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Christopher Walken, Dearbhla Molloy and Jon Hamm

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Patrick Shanley, based on his play. A Bleecker St. release, now on assorted streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:42

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Movie Review: Catholic Scottish Schoolgirls get into trouble as “Our Ladies”

A lot more license might have been granted the randy, horny teenagers farce “Our Ladies” had it started life as a novel by a woma, and reached the big screen with, you know, a woman or two on the script or behind the camera.

Because all due respect to Michael Caton-Jones, who has everything from “Scandal” and “Doc Hollywood” to “Memphis Belle” and “Rob Roy” in his credit, it can play like some sort of adolescent male’s wish-fulfillment fantasy.

I mean, libidinous Catholic teenage girls — in uniform — comparing notes, bragging about sexual prowess and their conquests in terms so coarse, crude and explicit they’d make many a men’s lock room collectively blush? “Girls” (16-17) with a “bottom’s up, knickers down” ethos when they’re away from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School in Fort William? That plays into a whole lot of borderline-to-well-across-the-borderline pervy male fantasies, the world over.

But good humor and a heaping helping of heart pull it off.

A coming-of-age dramedy set in 1996 Scotland, it has the feel of a movie filmed in that era in indie international cinema. You’ve got rude, rebellious and sexually active — or desperate to be sexually-active — small town Catholic schoolgirls gone wild in a world of karaoke, growing up too fast and ’80s and ’90s Brit pop and pubs.

Every guy in it is either hapless or an utter heel — daft, think-they’re-rakes peers and older creepy disco era holdovers trying to prey on a schoolgirls’ choir come to Edinburgh to compete and raise hell. And to the filmmakers’ credit, the poor Scotsmen and Scots boys are no match for this estrogenized mob.

Orla (Tallulah Greive) is the mascot of this crew, dodging her pills and covering her head with a scarf to hide her short hair. She’s “our miracle,” choir mistress Sister Condron (Kate Dickie) enthuses. Yeah, Orla survived something horrible, and narrates our tale. And of course they call Sister Condron “Sister Condom.”

Lifelong pals Manda (Sally Messham) and Finnoula (Abigail Lawrie) are kind of ringleaders. But Kylah (Marli Siu) is the cool one with the best voice, which she trots out for a rock band she fronts and “shags” for kicks. Chell (Rona Morison) is the most sexually uninhibited.

And there’s the rich girl Kay (Eve Austin) they all love to hate. They can make all the sneak-off-and-stir-it-up plans they want for their choir competition in Edinburgh. No way they’ll include the choir mistress’s pet, the college bound “head girl” dropped off in a luxury sedan at “The Virgin Megastore” (their nickname for school) every morning.

But over the course of their trek to the Big City, we’ll learn each girl’s hidden pain or secret shame, figure out their aspirations or lack of them — college, or trapped in Fort William — as they navigate a minefield of under-age drinking and unprotected sex.

“Our Ladies” dances through a string of melodramatic cliches and almost riotously funny situations — always interrupted by a dollop of humanity and heart.

The girls tart up and drink until they vomit, break the rules and break each other’s hearts as they figure out Truths about themselves in a city famous for its drinking and Scottish sin.

Caton-Jones keeps it on its feet, which helps the cliches skip by as quickly as the truly cringe-worthy moments, most of which end with a guys-are-such-losers punchline.

And Grieve, Siu, Lawrie, Austin, Messham and Morison each get a passable “big scene” and telling moment, some more serious than others, that make “Our Ladies” worth hearing out, no matter how filthy their modes of expression.

Rating: R for sexual content, language throughout, brief graphic nudity, and teen drinking and drug use

Cast: Tallulah Greive, Sally Messham, Marli Siu, Abigail Lawrie, Rona Morison and Kate Dickie.

Credits: Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, scripted by Michael Caton-Jones, Alan Sharp, based on a novel by Alan Warner. A Sony Pictures International release on several streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:46

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Movie Preview: Jake Gyllenhaal & Co. pull the heist in Michael Bay’s remake, “Ambulance”

It was a French thriller about 16 years ago, about a heist that goes wrong and ambulance that gets hijacked.

Eiza Gonzalez, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, A Martine Garret Dillahunt and Devan Long flesh out the cast of this action packed Feb. 18 release.

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Preview: Netflix’s live action vamp of “Cowboy Bebop” teases out

Interesting to see what they’re going for here.

Sort of an anime rendered into live-action ’60s camp approach.

November 19, John Cho & Co. (Daniella Pineda), drop this bounty hunter series adaptation onto Netflix.

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Series Preview: Kaepernick’s Odyssey: “Colin in Black and White”

This comes to Netflix next week.

Curious to see it, because his image/message control has meant that we don’t hear him making statements or being interviewed. We just see memes and his latest message t-shirt, and gauge reaction to him accordingly.

“In his own words” could be revelatory, even if it is a recollection/reconstruction of his high school years.

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More Beatles? Brian Epstein feature “Midas Man” cast

Jacob Fortune-Lloyd of TV’s “Queen’s Gambit” landed the lead. Here’s a look at him in character, and at the real Beatles manager Brian Epstein — dapper, gay, classy and canny — whom he’ll be playing.

Rosie Day (“Outlander”) just joined a cast that includes Emily Watson, Eddie Marsan and Lukas Gage.

Jonas Åkerlund (“Lords of Chaos,” Netflix’s “Polar”) is directing this 2022 release, set to film in Liverpool, London and the US.

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Movie Preview: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, treasure hunters — “Uncharted”

A February 18 release with a lot of geography, exotic cultures, and Spider Man and Marky Mark.

Looks…nuts. Bugs Bunny Physics, “National Treasure/Tomb-Raiders” plotting…

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Movie Preview: Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson — “Red Notice”

The director did “Dodgeball” and “We’re the Millers” and DJohnson’s “Central Intelligence” is behind this Netflix comedy/thriller, about an art thief hunted by Interpol, among others.

We’ll see what Rawson Marshall Thurber finds funny in all this Nov. 12.

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Location Scout: Revisiting “The Quiet Man” corner of Ireland

In the late spring of 1951, John Ford and his repertory company decamped from Monument Valley and Hollywood and took passage — paid for by B-Western house Republic Pictures — to The Old Country, the Eire of John Ford’s imagination. A great director of Westerns, famous for iconic tales, with even the most serious told with wit and sentiment, the man born John Martin Feeney was adapting a Maurice Walsh story for a film unique in his canon, “The Quiet Man.”

He was to serve up a screen romance that crosses into romantic comedy.

It would star Ford’s muse, John Wayne, and the only actress tall enough and Irish enough to go toe to toe with the Duke — Maureen O’Hara.

And while Ford made greater films — “Stagecoach,” “Young Mr. Lincoln,” “My Darling Clementine” and “The Searchers” — every St. Patrick’s Day proves the “It’s a Wonderful Life” durability of “The Quiet Man.” It’s easily his most beloved film in America.

It was ridiculed in Ireland, labeled “maudlin” and treacly back then and never taken all that seriously, a box office bomb everywhere in 1952. And yet here we are, 70 years later, still talking about it because it endures.

The deal was, Ford had been trying to get this movie set up for over a dozen years. Republic agreed to ship Himself and His Own — Ford, Irish native O’Hara, Wayne, Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen and Mildred Natwick — to Western Ireland, near Galway, for a working vacation. In return, Ford owed Republic another Western.

People in the Republic of Ireland may have showed their ire, but the Irish Diaspora and generations of others have embraced “A Quiet Man.” Look on the plaques commemorating “‘The Quiet Man’ filmed here,” and you see the grudging, now affectionate recognition that the character “types,” the quaint 1920s village of Innisfree and the stunning Technicolor cinematography of Winton C. Hoch (“The Searchers,” “The Green Berets,” “The Lost World” and of course, “Darby O’Gill and the Little People”) sold generations of Americans on their own Irish dream.

Irish tourism, to this very day, owes a staggering debt to a lush, sentimental slice of green whimsy from 1952.

The Saints Themselves know that it made me want to go, and movies from “Circle of Friends” to “Hear My Song,” “Into the West” and Roddy Doyle’s “Van/Snapper/Commitments” trilogy just reminded me in between St. Patrick’s Day showings of “Quiet Man” that “I have got to see where they filmed this.”

This trip to Ireland, a friend and I rented a six-speed Peugeot and made our pilgrimage to many of the places they filmed “The Quiet Man,” from Pat Cohan’s Bar, the White O’Morn cottage (recreated), the Dying Man’s House, Ashford Castle (now a hotel), the church and trout-fishing river in Cong, County Mayo, located northwest of Galway.

A replica cottage was rebuilt there as headquarters to “Quiet Man” tourism, which may not turn out the numbers it once did, but is still Cong’s greatest lure and claim to fame. There were people posing by the statue when we drove up, “out of season” and all.

The train station in Ballyglunin, some 25 miles east, fell into disrepair after the spur that ran there (an indulgence of a couple of local swells) was closed off. But enterprising locals are well along in restoring it, a telegraph/signalman’s tower and a “rood” and “goods” building that loaded local produce and livestock onto trains there.

It will be a museum and community center of sorts, and the exteriors are mostly finished to Hollywood 1951-52 standards.

Plaques at the train station — Ballyglunin was named Castletown in the film — note how the weather was bad, even by Irish standards, for the film shoot and getting the shots of Sean Thornton (Wayne) arriving and Mary Kate Danaher (O’Hara) trying to make her getaway took forever.

One thing I was struck by — driving the paved pigpaths that are, to this day, Ireland’s idea of “Escape to the Country” — was how in the world they could have managed the travel logistics, even utilizing local talent to flesh out scenes and build sets to cut down on the people who had to be bussed in.

Just getting the stars to and from their lodgings must have been trying, even by the remote Western location standards Ford & Co. normally worked under.

But those settings — the “Quiet Man Bridge” still stands — are still worth a little white-knuckle driving to get to, still capture the charm of a region of stone-walled sheep pastures, Cong Woods, stone bridges and thatched cottages and the original pub “where everybody knows your name.”

Get your vaccine passport laminated and get online to see about bookings as Ireland and the rest of Europe start opening back up, and returning to America (we still had to do the COVID test pre-boarding for our return flight) grows less complicated as of the first week of November.

For a film lover, a Ford lover and a Maureen O’Hara/John Wayne fan, it’s a bucket list pilgrimage.

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Movie Preview: Maggie Gyllenhaal directs “The Lost Daughter”

This Netflix drama stars Oscar winner Olivia Colman as a haunted mother of “two daughters” on holiday, running into a mother (Dakota Johnson) distracted and overwhelmed and perhaps disinterested in hers.

Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgaard and Jessie Buckley also star on Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel.

This one hits theaters and Netflix Dec. 31.

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