Are you as excited as I am about "The Rising"?

josephryan1989

Apparently the latest news about the proposed movie penned by Colin Broderick and Kevin McCann is that Jonathon Rhys Meyers will star as Patrick Pearse while Colin Morgan (Merlin) will play Sean McDermott and Scottish actor David O'Hara (Braveheart) will play James Connolly and Brendan Coyle (Downton Abbey) will play Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell. Fiona Shaw is to play Countess Markievicz. Liam Neeson's son Michael is to act as Michael Collins. There is talk that Sean Penn is interested in playing Thomas Clarke.

Hopefully if it gets a multi-million dollar budget a three hour epic with the Dublin of 1916 and the events of the Rising recreated faithfully.
I am a big fan of the 1977 movie A Bridge Too Far which is one of the best war movies ever made and sticks closely to the historic record of the ill fated Market Garden operation in WW2. Also the more recent movie Downfall faithfully reconstructed the final days of the Third Reich.

If the same rigorous attention to detail is used in this production I have no doubt it should be a classic in which high hopes are similarly dashed by cruel military realities and the terrible price paid by civilians, soldiers and rebels alike. For the main stars there is much scope for stoic stiff upper lip heroics and scene stealing tear jerking death scenes.

There are numerous excellently researched historical books both narratives and collections of eye witness accounts. published in recent years about the events of 1916 so the film makers have no excuses not to knit together a compelling drama.
The excellent TG4 drama documentary series about the 1916 leaders should be good material to draw on also.

A good visual style to imitate is the famous artwork by William Paget in "Birth Of The Irish Republic."

LuckyLloyd

The material is there to make a great Downfall style movie, and the option to focus on the drama and decision making within the GPO could lesson the budgetary pressures.

There is no doubt though that even a very good film on the subject will be ripped apart in terms of its politics (irrespective of whatever was actually intended on that score).

josephryan1989

LuckyLloyd wrote: »

The material is there to make a great Downfall style movie, and the option to focus on the drama and decision making within the GPO could lesson the budgetary pressures.

There is no doubt though that even a very good film on the subject will be ripped apart in terms of its politics (irrespective of whatever was actually intended on that score).

There is a lot to work with.
Thomas Clarke, an aged man with glasses who ran a tobacco shop, was a hardened embittered republican traumatized by years in brutal prisons and the mastermind of the rebellion and after Pearse read the proclamation at the GPO turned to him and said whatever happened afterward he could now die happy. He went into the Rising with his eyes open knowing he was going to his death.
The handsome Sean McDermott was Clarke's right hand man and something of heartthrob to women in radical circles despite using a cane because he was stricken with polio.
Patrick Pearse and his brother Willie were rather effeminate possibly gay middle class mammy's boys who were practically bankrupt as a result of their failed St. Enda's School venture and probably out of suicidal despair went from supporting Home Rule to becoming ardent republicans.
Countess Markievicz was from a haughty landowning Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry family who rejected her class and turned native by becoming a republican socialist feminist and suffragette and ultimately a revolutionary. From what I have read about her she was psychopathic and maybe a lesbian.
James Connolly grew up in poverty joined the British Army and then became a socialist agitator bent on the overthrow of imperialism and the capitalist system while struggling to support a wife and young children. He was wary of Irish nationalist and republicans who would simply change the color of the flag but change the economic status quo.
Michael Collins worked with the Royal Mail before 1916 and was radicalized while mixing in hardline Irish circles in London where he joined the IRB. He was a cunning young man who didn't think much of the half crazed leaders of the rebellion but supported the rebellion on principle. After they were shot he sought to take control of the movement and decided in future to fight a hit and run guerrilla campaign rather than a useless set piece battle.
So dramatically you have characters coming from different paths and with different agendas and you can already see how idealism is going to clash with pragmatism and blood sacrifice with military reality in later years.

Dirty Dingus McGee

Surely it should be completed by now if they are going to have it out in time for the 100th Anniversary.

I'll be avoiding every review of it in Irish media as i'm sure a lot of opinion on it will be based on whether it's historically accurate etc rather than whether it's an entertaining film.

josephryan1989

Dirty Dingus McGee wrote: »

Surely it should be completed by now if they are going to have it out in time for the 100th Anniversary.

I'll be avoiding every review of it in Irish media as i'm sure a lot of opinion on it will be based on whether it's historically accurate etc rather than whether it's an entertaining film.

Why can't it be both historically accurate and entertaining?

There's nothing I despise more when script writers needlessly insert invented episodes or characters instead of just telling the story.

Neil Jordan's Michael Collins doesn't even have Michael Collins's hair parting on the right side, has Ned Broy die (he lived to be the Garda Commissioner) after he is discovered as a spy (a spy who plants a car bomb in the yard of Dublin Castle), invents a story about the assassin who killed Collins acting as a go-between Collins and De Valera during the Civil War (the man who shot Collins was one Sonny O'Neill from West Cork) and barely includes the Treaty negotiations when Collins went toe to toe with Lloyd George and Winston Churchill and on Bloody Sunday has an armored car machine gun the crowd at Croke Park ( I have heard idiots in the pub ranting about what the British did in Croke Park based on this utterly invented scene!)
The main plot is the love triangle of Collins, Kitty Kiernan and Harry Boland.
Boland dies in the movie after fleeing through a basement warehouse and then swimming a river when he is shot from above by a rifleman while Collins races in his car to save his life (he was actually shot dead in a hotel room!).

Dirty Dingus McGee

josephryan1989 wrote: »

Why can't it be both historically accurate and entertaining?

There's nothing I despise more when script writers needlessly insert invented episodes or characters instead of just telling the story.

Neil Jordan's Michael Collins doesn't even have Michael Collins's hair parting on the right side, has Ned Broy die (he lived to be the Garda Commissioner) after he is discovered as a spy (a spy who plants a car bomb in the yard of Dublin Castle), invents a story about the assassin who killed Collins acting as a go-between Collins and De Valera during the Civil War (the man who shot Collins was one Sonny O'Neill from West Cork) and barely includes the Treaty negotiations when Collins went toe to toe with Lloyd George and Winston Churchill and on Bloody Sunday has an armored car machine gun the crowd at Croke Park ( I have heard idiots in the pub ranting about what the British did in Croke Park based on this utterly invented scene!)
The main plot is the love triangle of Collins, Kitty Kiernan and Harry Boland.
Boland dies in the movie after fleeing through a basement warehouse and then swimming a river when he is shot from above by a rifleman while Collins races in his car to save his life (he was actually shot dead in a hotel room!).

Sure it can but the point I'm making is a hate films being dismissed because they aren't 100% historically accurate.