Let yourself go

Welcome to Press Play and Surrender, a new blog featuring film reviews that will serve to track my viewing habits and share my pithy observations with the world. How pithy these observations will be remains to be seen. I expect to err on the side of reverence for the medium and keep snark to a minimum. I want to continue to develop my voice as a writer, my understanding of film history, my ability to analyse.

Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” (1994)

Film is incredibly important to me, always has been. It may speak to my low threshold for thrills, but I rarely feel more alive than as an audience member seated in an auditorium, allowing a great film to wash over me, in the presence of others held in equally rapt attention. I like to be provoked, challenged, but more than anything entertained. To me as an experience it may be rivalled only by being a director on set who is seeing their vision come to life in real-time; especially when losing the light and contending with frayed tempers. Therefore, here on this blog, I may occasionally branch out of strictly film reviews, to reflect on the dreaded “creative process”.

A little about me. I’m a filmmaker, actor and writer living in Dublin. I have made a number of short films and documentaries, including 'Staccato', an LGBT period drama that screened at DCIFF and QFlix Philly, and which has received over 2 million views on YouTube. I wrote my first feature-length screenplay in 2021 as part of an MA in Screenwriting from IADT National Film School. As an actor I played a supporting role in Conor McMahon's 2012 horror comedy 'Stitches', and subsequently contributed to a book of essays on the subject of clown horror "The Many Lives of It" by Ron Riekki. I continue to clown around, auditioning and writing my own roles, as well as writing short and feature-length screenplays, in the hopes of one day being reckless enough to risk it all again in the name of cinema.

I do believe it’s just as important to absorb as to create. It will inform your choices and inspire you to aim high. So in the meantime, as a distraction from my would-be visionary grindstone, I plan to cover a wide variety of films here. These will mainly be blindspots I am targeting at home, but also new releases, so there’s bound to be some “bad” movies encountered. But why are they bad? As Pauline Kael once wrote:

“Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.”

Please join me for the trash and the treasure.