Jamie brings cinema to
The Siege of Jadotville (2016) Available now
ON a stage in Paris last spring Netflix CEO Reed Hastings envisaged a future where the same content is legally available at the same time in the cinema or on your laptap. That moment comes a little closer with this offering, which is also currently running in cinemas. Of course you were already sold on this when you heard “Jamie Dornan in a soldier’s uniform” but The Siege of Jadotville has much more to recommend it. It’s the debut feature from music video stalwart, Richie Smyth, based on the 2005 book by former Irish soldier Declan Power and adapted by Kevin Brodbin. It’s based on a scarcely credible true story, as the UN sends a company of untested Irish soldiers into the wilds of the Congo region of Katanga and all hell breaks loose. Dornan plays Commandant Pat Quinlan who is forced to rise to the challenge without any experience in actual battle. This film goes some way toward rehabilitating the reputation of Quinlan and his colleagues, whose heroism for too long went unnoticed.
Haters Back Off 8 episodes, from Friday
Colleen Ballinger is sort of like the Florence Foster Jenkins of Generation Snowflake. She has built a YouTube empire on getting a rise out of people. Her signature character, a self-regarding wannabe singer called Miranda Sings, has been irritating people since 2008 with her long diatribes and tuneless versions of pop songs. Like Florence she’s so bad she’s good and like Florence the self-belief is bottomless. And now Ballinger’s creation has started to transition to other platforms. The deliberately unhelpful book Self-Help, supposedly written by Miranda, was a bestseller in 2015. A television series seemed like it was only a matter of time and here we are. This first season delves back into Miranda’s beginnings. The supporting cast includes Steve Little from Eastbound & Down as Miranda’s uncle Jim, and Angela Kinsey of The Office as her fretful mother.
Glitch
Available from Saturday, 6 episodes Occasionally Australia throws up a TV series that is impossible to resist. Of course many of us were raised on their soaps and, in adulthood, succumbed to
Summer Heights High (easily the best comedy series of the last 10 years). Well now the Aussies are doing zombies. In the opening moments, village policeman James Hayes (Patrick Brammall) arrives at the local graveyard to discover a number of naked people staggering around covered in dirt. He hands them over to the local doctor who finds them all to be well nourished and in good health but confused — James can relate to their confusion because one of the people is his wife — who has been dead for two years. Gradually the undead reveal themselves — from a variety of periods in the town’s history — and picking apart their individual stories is what sustains this series as it goes on.
Boyhood (2014)
Available now Quentin Crisp once said that the problem with modern movies was that they had become as boring as real life. The self-described “stately homo” felt that film makers had forgotten that their role was meant to be keepers of the dreams. One shudders to think, then, what he would have made of this — which was one of the sensations at the box office and the Oscars last year. Its rambling narrative of growing up seems to happen at the same torturous pace as actual growing up, which makes sense when you realise that the makers just filmed the same group of child actors as they got older. The mistakes made by the bedraggled mother of the family (Patricia Arquette) happen with a depressing repetition that would be par for the course in real life but would seldom be seen in a script because make believe characters need arcs. In the end, though, this all turns out to be a masterful stroke. While everything about Boyhood is done well, the real genius was clearly casting the little boy, Ellar Coltrane, who through some extraordinary stroke of luck (they could hardly have predicted this) turned into a thoughtful-yet-awkward young man, perfect for later scenes. Not quite as good as everyone says, but still pretty brilliant.