This and that
Here are a few quick notes, much of it, as it turns out, about blog housekeeping stuff.
Film kingdom
My film festival attendance has really suffered in recent years. Usually, though, I at least manage to make it to the Galway Film Fleadh, but this year—due to a very busy summer of family activity and travel—I did not even get down the road for that festival. Happily, I was able to make up for it (a bit) with a quick visit to last week’s Kerry Film Festival.
Strangely, this was my very first visit to The Kingdom’s cinema event. I say strangely because I like to consider myself a near-quasi-ex-officio-Kerryman from all the time I have spent in that county over the past couple of decades. Oh, well, better late than never. The event definitely gave an extra bit of buzz to Killarney, a town that really does not actually need extra buzz on top of all the hen parties, stag parties and inevitable American tourists.
On Friday night we took in When All Is Ruin Once Again, a very interesting documentary by Keith Walsh about the region where he and his wife became transplants. I had a particular interest in seeing this flick because it is about an area I have driven through numerous times over the years—first on twisty, narrow two-lane roads and later on a big, modern motorway. It is precisely that change which the movie is about. It is a haunting, well-made film and certainly caused the journey back to Connacht to feel much different than before as we crossed the Clare-Galway border.
The documentary was preceded by Land of Winter, a lovely short film by Tommy Creagh, which was a tribute to James Joyce and, by extension, to Dublin. Declan O’Connor’s soulful performance in the main role and the Joycean flavor of the dialog made it a pleasure to watch.
Sunday night saw the premiere of Bertie Brosnan’s Con. Followers of this blog will have read my review of it back in June of last year. “It’s been a long time coming,” said Brosnan, “but we got there through a weird but learning experience of indie no-budget distribution. I am glad that we have come full circle and will screen in our home county and close to where we shot Con.” Specifically, it was shot in and around Tralee and centers on an interesting character study of an actor/filmmaker (played by Brosnan) just out of rehab. As I noted in my review, it was filmed in Kerry around the same time that another movie was doing location shooting in the county. That other one was a little flick called The Last Jedi.
Blog remake
If you got here by way of this web site’s main page, then you may have noticed a bit of a change—but not too huge of a change. Hardly worth mentioning, actually, but it’s too late now because I’ve already mentioned it. Anyway, in a further bow to make this site more like a standard blog, I have given up my slavish insistence on grouping front page links by category (commentary, feature films, short films, etc.). Now they are ordered so that newer links will be near the top. Hopefully, this will make it easier for both regular and occasional visitors to find new content more easily. Do not worry, though, my shameless, self-promoting link to my book blog, where you can find all kinds of ways to buy my novels, will still be annoyingly hard to miss. Expect more tweaks, as I find that the new format totally does not work on your phone or on your still-functioning Commodore 128.
Blog classic
And speaking of making this web site more like a normal blog, in my “spare” time, I have set up place where you can read this site’s content in the form of, well, a normal blog. Think of it as Scott’s Movie Comments Classic. I’ve started copying this web site’s content onto Blogspot, which hosts my other blogs. I am doing this as I have time and in the order that my film reviews—and eventually commentaries—were written, beginning with my posts from the 1987 Seattle International Film Festival. You can see it at scottsmoviecomments.blogspot.com, but do not be surprised if the page design goes through a few (or many) changes as I keep working on it. And I cannot promise how diligent I will be about refreshing the content on a regular basis. On the other hand, now that I’ve drawn attention to it, I guess that gives me some incentive to keep at.
I suppose, in theory, once I get all 2,544 reviews (and commentaries and other stuff) copied over—and that supposes the copying will happen faster than the generation of new content—the Blogspot blog could eventually replace this one. It sure would be a lot easier to maintain than the dinosaur you are currently perusing. On the other hand, this web site certainly helps keep my HTML coding skills from atrophying completely. Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted to have the experience of reading this blog from the very beginning, you now have a place to go.
-S.L., 22 October 2018
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