Aubrey Malone
Bono was sitting beside Sophia Loren on a plane once when a lightning bolt flashed through the sky. She leapt into his arms in terror. “Don’t worry,” the U2 frontman assured her, “That’s just God taking your photograph.”
It’s hard to believe the 86-year-old star is still acting. The term “living legend” is over-used but it definitely applies to her. In The Life Ahead she plays a former fallen woman reaching a catharsis of sorts in the autumn of her life by taking care of an immigrant child from Senegal. Her son Edoardo Ponti directs.
I was only a child when Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay as he was then known, beat Sonny Liston to win the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in 1964. I ‘watched’ it on the radio, being let stay up until the middle of the night for the first time in my life. That was when the transmission was going out because of the time lapse between Ireland and America.
Civil Rights movement
One Night in Miami is a ‘what if’ film featuring Clay discussing his victory as well as the Civil Rights movement of the time with fellow black-American icons like Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown. It’s creative fiction along the lines of Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance.
I’m Your Woman is a crime drama set in the 1970s. It deals with a woman who goes on the run with her one-year-old baby after her Mafia-affiliated husband betrays his partners. Director Julia Hart namechecked The French Connection as an influence. You’ll probably notice this most particularly in the car chase scene everyone is talking about.
Orson Welles’ participation in the screenplay of his 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane has been the source of much conjecture among film scholars over the past eighty years. It was once almost sacrilegious to suggest he wasn’t the main contributor to it. In Mank, David Fincher gives his perspective on the situation with Welles’ co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) taking centre stage in this monochrome retro piece.
Rumours
Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan had to be subtitled for overseas viewers. They had difficulty making out what Shane was saying. He’s not the man he used to be but rumours of his demise have been exaggerated as Mark Twain might have said. In this documentary the folk-rock pioneer (perhaps the only sense in which the term “pioneer” could be applied to him) is still rolling along, three wheels on his wagon.
Jack Charlton, who died last year after developing dementia, was someone else who gravitated between Ireland and England in a tumultuous career. Finding Jack Charlton is an affectionate tribute to the man who took us to the top of the football tree. He even had the Pope praying for us to do well when we reached the quarter finals of the World Cup in 1990.
As if that wasn’t surprising enough, the team we were drawn against at the time was, you’ve guessed it…Italy.