Waking Ned Devine
In observation of this week's Saint Patrick's Day holiday, I thought I'd give up my AMC MovieWatcher Card for one day, abandon the friendly confines and local color of the Independence Commons Hyper-GigaPlex and waddle up the stairs at the Tivoli Manor Square to soak up some Irish culture in the cinematic form of "Waking Ned Devine". Yes, I know I've long been cynical regarding March 17th's excesses, and will likely continue to be, but this was a cute movie, and I really don't think I can sit twitching through "The Quiet Man" one more time without going completely random.
"Waking Ned Devine", Written and directed by Kirk Jones. With Ian Bannen, David Kelly, Fionnula Flanagan, Susan Lynch, James Nesbitt, with Jimmy Keough as Ned Devine. MPAA Rating PG for nudity, language and adult themes. Run time 90 minutes.
In the sleepy little Irish village of Tulleymore - population 52 - someone has just won the Irish state lottery. But the only three people who know that are a couple of aging buddies, Jackie O'Shea and Michael Sullivan (Ian Bannen and David Kelly) and the winner himself. Jackie and Michael decide that if they become bosom buddies with whomever the winner turns out to be, he'll have no choice but to share in the windfall - after all, what are friends for?
After a number of false starts, dead ends, a meat pie, a pile of chickens and gallons of Irish whiskey, the boys come to the conclusion that the only possible candidate left to be their benefactor-for-life is one Mr. Ned Devine (Jimmy Keogh). Their deductive powers are bang-on, but soon find that the sudden shock of becoming an instant tycoon has cooled Ned Devine to something approaching room temperature. He's extremely dead.
Jackie, a card-carrying opportunist, can't see any reason why he and Michael shouldn't cash in Ned's Lotto ticket - Ned would have wanted it this way, after all - and they set the machinery in motion to get the money for themselves. The machinery has a few wrenches thrown in, and the boys undertake (no pun intended) a mass scam involving the whole village except for the cantankerous and just plain mean old pain in the town's ass Lizzy Quinn(Eileen Dromey). Lizzy looks like what Jim Varney might look like if he had a sex change operation and let the prescription run out on his hormone replacement therapy. Whoa!
WARNING!
There are naked old guys in this film. Really old. Really naked. Full wrinkled dorsal nudity on speeding motorcycles. It's just one of several real gut laughs in this movie. In one of my favorite scenes, Jackie tries to rearrange the expression on the late Mr. Devine's face so that he doesn't look quite so cheery when the time comes to collect the body. Jimmy Keough, who plays Ned Devine, allows his face to be twisted, pushed, pulled and yanked all while playing an extremely convincing totally dead Irish guy. Adam Sandler read for this part, but the casting director decided that Sandler lacked the required spark to play a corpse.
Under Jackie's guidance and encouragement, the whole town agrees to go after a fifty-two way split of the nearly seven million pound prize by pretending that Ned Devine is alive and well and living in the person of Michael O'Sullivan, Lizzie decides to hold out for a straight ten percent whistle-blower's ransom, and the whole situation gets sticky. Several character development sub-plots are woven into this free-for-all, a couple of which seem to exist only for their own sake. Thankfully, the brogueish dialogue is for the most part intelligible even to my Gaelic-challenged ears.
I liked "Waking Ned Devine". Kirk Jones could have taken this thing way over the top, but instead managed to keep a certain sensitivity and avoided a Pythonesque farce. It has much of the wit and charm of movies like "Local Hero" without being overproduced or too slick. The movie is beautifully filmed in "Greetings from Ireland" postcard style in the village of Cregneash, on the Isle of Man, and the folksy Celtic soundtrack blends in smoothly and adds to the easy country feel of the film. This would be a nice way to spend part of Saint Patrick's Day, provided you don't go to Wesport to see it. (Readers outside Kansas City kindly substitute your own local disco/watering-hole district or seedy road house as THE place to avoid Wednesday.)
I gave "Waking Ned Devine" three cows. Try not to paint them green.
"Waking Ned Devine", Written and directed by Kirk Jones. With Ian Bannen, David Kelly, Fionnula Flanagan, Susan Lynch, James Nesbitt, with Jimmy Keough as Ned Devine. MPAA Rating PG for nudity, language and adult themes. Run time 90 minutes.
In the sleepy little Irish village of Tulleymore - population 52 - someone has just won the Irish state lottery. But the only three people who know that are a couple of aging buddies, Jackie O'Shea and Michael Sullivan (Ian Bannen and David Kelly) and the winner himself. Jackie and Michael decide that if they become bosom buddies with whomever the winner turns out to be, he'll have no choice but to share in the windfall - after all, what are friends for?
After a number of false starts, dead ends, a meat pie, a pile of chickens and gallons of Irish whiskey, the boys come to the conclusion that the only possible candidate left to be their benefactor-for-life is one Mr. Ned Devine (Jimmy Keogh). Their deductive powers are bang-on, but soon find that the sudden shock of becoming an instant tycoon has cooled Ned Devine to something approaching room temperature. He's extremely dead.
Jackie, a card-carrying opportunist, can't see any reason why he and Michael shouldn't cash in Ned's Lotto ticket - Ned would have wanted it this way, after all - and they set the machinery in motion to get the money for themselves. The machinery has a few wrenches thrown in, and the boys undertake (no pun intended) a mass scam involving the whole village except for the cantankerous and just plain mean old pain in the town's ass Lizzy Quinn(Eileen Dromey). Lizzy looks like what Jim Varney might look like if he had a sex change operation and let the prescription run out on his hormone replacement therapy. Whoa!
WARNING!
There are naked old guys in this film. Really old. Really naked. Full wrinkled dorsal nudity on speeding motorcycles. It's just one of several real gut laughs in this movie. In one of my favorite scenes, Jackie tries to rearrange the expression on the late Mr. Devine's face so that he doesn't look quite so cheery when the time comes to collect the body. Jimmy Keough, who plays Ned Devine, allows his face to be twisted, pushed, pulled and yanked all while playing an extremely convincing totally dead Irish guy. Adam Sandler read for this part, but the casting director decided that Sandler lacked the required spark to play a corpse.
Under Jackie's guidance and encouragement, the whole town agrees to go after a fifty-two way split of the nearly seven million pound prize by pretending that Ned Devine is alive and well and living in the person of Michael O'Sullivan, Lizzie decides to hold out for a straight ten percent whistle-blower's ransom, and the whole situation gets sticky. Several character development sub-plots are woven into this free-for-all, a couple of which seem to exist only for their own sake. Thankfully, the brogueish dialogue is for the most part intelligible even to my Gaelic-challenged ears.
I liked "Waking Ned Devine". Kirk Jones could have taken this thing way over the top, but instead managed to keep a certain sensitivity and avoided a Pythonesque farce. It has much of the wit and charm of movies like "Local Hero" without being overproduced or too slick. The movie is beautifully filmed in "Greetings from Ireland" postcard style in the village of Cregneash, on the Isle of Man, and the folksy Celtic soundtrack blends in smoothly and adds to the easy country feel of the film. This would be a nice way to spend part of Saint Patrick's Day, provided you don't go to Wesport to see it. (Readers outside Kansas City kindly substitute your own local disco/watering-hole district or seedy road house as THE place to avoid Wednesday.)
I gave "Waking Ned Devine" three cows. Try not to paint them green.
