Laundering cash and rugby shirts
Ozark, series 1 10 episodes, Available from Friday
It’s been four years now since Breaking Bad finished on Netflix and though the streaming service has flourished in the meantime no crime drama has quite matched Vince Gilligan’s creation for interest and hype. Narcos got somewhat close. Better Call Saul has tided us over. But now with Ozark we have a series which mimics a lot of the plot arcs of Breaking Bad, but with even more depravity and violence in the descent of the central character. That would be Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), a Chicago financial adviser and secret money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel, who — for reasons unfathomable — decides to make off with stupendous stacks of the criminal organisation’s money. Consequently, Marty goes into hiding in a scenic mountain area with his wife Wendy (the always stupendously good Laura Linney) and teenage children Charlotte and Jonah. However, the cash-stashing city slicker family aren’t exactly a discreet presence and, amidst obvious culture clashes, trouble manifests that puts Marty’s family in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people. It’s not as good as the series to which it obviously doffs its cap — primarily because it can’t resist getting too dramatic too quickly. But it is well written and the performances — especially from Linney and Bateman — are special.
Handsome Devil Available from Friday
As a Smiths-loving gay boy who went to a southside Dublin rugby school, I was fully prepared to completely loathe Handsome Devil for being a glamorisation of my own lived experience. In truth it’s a slightly formulaic but still feelgood coming-of-age film, in which two outsiders learn to be true to themselves. Unable to convince his widowed father (Ardal O’Hanlon) and frosty stepmother (Amy Huberman) that a boarding school where rugby is a religion is the wrong place for him, Ned Roche (Fionn O’Shea) braces himself for another term of boredom and teasing, much of it at the hands of his “tormentor in chief,” bully (Ruairi O’Connor). Ned is into David Bowie and is of ambiguous sexuality which makes everything more difficult and when a hot exchange student is assigned to be his dorm mate he fears the worst — the guy is a rugby player and they have always been the enemy for Ned. But the rugby player has his own issues and the two boys are drawn together.
Overall it’s not a patch on the mischievous Smiths song which gives it its name but some of the details are spot on (especially the essay competition) and this is at times a moving little film. Netflix has brought it to the small screen with blinding speed.
The Breakfast Club Available from Friday
If Handsome Devil was at times a little less than real, The Breakfast Club — another celluloid Bildungsroman — seldom comes close to anything anyone who grew up in Ireland will have experienced as a teenager. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a classic of the coming-of-age genre. John Hughes directs the story which centres on five different, yet representative, high school types: a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. In short, they have nothing in common other than their plight and a mutual aversion to their supercilious and bullying principal, who is supervising their detention. At the time this was seen as a brave departure from other youth movies. Now we rightly regard it as a bit pat but it is still important because of its central place in 1980s pop culture and because it introduced the idea of older people playing teenagers, which we’d need for 90210 and any number of other American dramas.
The Blair Witch Project Available from Friday
Working with a minuscule budget of less than $25,000, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez wrote, directed, and edited one of the most successful independent movies ever made. It’s sort of hard to see it with fresh eyes now, having been subjected to the endless parodies, but the horror chills do cut through the marketing buzz here and there, and there are reasons this found footage masterpiece made such a big splash. An opening caption tells us that three wannabe filmmakers disappeared in 1994 in the Black Hills Forest of Maryland and that all that was ever found of them were several cans of film, which have been edited together into the documentary we are being shown. The dialogue is believable, the shaky camera is disorienting and the whole effect is still scary to this day — it’s a lesson in how little is needed to make real horror.