Author Archives: brogen

About brogen

I have been obsessed with film since I saw ET in the cinema. I must have been about three years old. I blog at http://brogenmusings.wordpress.com and twitter under @brogenhayes

Easy A

  By brogen | October 15, 2010 - 9:30 am | Movies & TV, The Culch
1 Comment

Olive Prenderghast (Emma Stone) is your typical teenage girl. She feels passed over by guys and never was one of the popular kids. In fact, she is completely unseen by her high school peers until she tells a white lie about losing her virginity to a community college student. Next thing you know, Olive is faking having sex with a bullied gay student – to throw the bullies off the scent for a while. One thing leads to another and Olive ends up lying to help a lot of people’s reputations, but when everything is at stake, who is going to tell the truth for her?

Machete

  By brogen | October 13, 2010 - 9:30 am | Movies & TV, The Culch
1 Comment

After he is betrayed by the organisation that hired him, Machete – an ex-Federale - embarks on a bloody rampage of revenge against his former boss. In 2007, Robert Rodriguez – among others – made a fake trailer to play between the Planet Terror and Death Proof, the Grindhouse double bill written and directed by Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. That trailer was for a Mexploitation film called Machete. This film is an expansion of the trailer. Rodriguez originally planned a character called Machete for Danny Trejo in 1993, but apart from a character of the same name in the Spy Kids franchise, this is the first feature length outing for the character… And to be honest, it’s a little disappointing.

Review: The Social Network

  By brogen | October 8, 2010 - 9:00 am | Movies & TV, The Culch, The Internet
3 Comments

In autumn 2003, after being dumped by his girlfriend, Harvard student and computer whizz kid Mark Zuckerberg had an idea. This idea was to create a version of hotornot.com solely focused on students at the university. The site was quickly shut down, but not before it had received 250,000 hits in just a few hours. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss hear of Zuckerberg’s technical know how and invite him to help them create an online community exclusively for Harvard students – the Harvard Connection. Refining the Winklevoss twins’ initial idea, Zuckerberg creates The Facebook, an immediate success. This film tells the story of the early years of Facebook and the accusations Zuckerberg faced about intellectual property theft.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

  By brogen | September 30, 2010 - 9:30 am | Movies & TV, The Culch
2 Comments

In 2001, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is released from prison. Gekko served eight years for insider trading, and when he walks through the gates of the prison, he is alone. Seven years later, as the global economy takes a nosedive, young Wall Street trader Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), learns first hand the devastating effect a drop in share price can have on those invested in a company. Moore teams up with his fiancée’s estranged father, Gekko, to not only take revenge on the company that destroyed his mentor, but to also warn the world of the upcoming financial crisis. It seems that releasing a sequel to films years after the first one is something that Hollywood is banking on for success… If you’ll pardon the pun. Toy Story 3 was released 11 years after it’s predecessor, Tron: Legacy is on the way, 28 years after Jeff Bridges first ventured into … There’s more →

The Screen Cinema- Putting classics back on the big screen

  By brogen | August 6, 2010 - 11:32 am | Movies & TV, The Culch
1 Comment

The Screen Cinema is nearing the end of it’s fantastic season of 80s movies, and to round it all off, from August 6th - 12th, they are showing a week of movies celebrating the director synonymous with 80s teen angst – John Hughes. Hughes captured the teen and preteen market during his career as both a writer and director with a chain of 1980s teen movies. Hughes directed such classic teen movies as The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. These films defined the stifling high school experience and even now, almost 25 years after its release, The Breakfast Club is still appreciated by teenagers. Screen Cinema Programmer, Anna Taylor, is delighted to have the opportunity to be the first Irish cinema to honour Hughes and his cinematic legacy; ‘Many of us were heartbroken when John Hughes died so suddenly last year. Whether you saw his films … There’s more →

It’s Business Time - an evening with Flight of the Conchords

  By brogen | May 8, 2010 - 5:38 pm | Comedy, Gigs, Music, The Culch
6 Comments

Guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk music fans were treated to a fantastic night’s entertainment this week as Flight of the Conchords took to the stage at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. Of course, a gig wouldn’t be a truly good gig unless there was a story to tell, so Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokul, kindly stepped up to the plate and once more spread a plume of volcanic ash into the sky, resulting in Irish airspace being closed. This did not deter the Conchords though; they made it to Dublin on a bus. Troopers. Our very own David O’Doherty, who had just returned from Australia, supported Flight of the Conchords. O’Doherty combined dryly sarcastic comments about the every day and the mundane with tunes played on his miniature keyboard. He well and truly warmed the audience up with his self-deprecating comments about his French trousers and his observations about the rage levels of passengers who … There’s more →

Evelyn Evelyn / Brogen Darren

  By brogen | April 22, 2010 - 3:43 pm | Music, The Culch
4 Comments

Please say hi to Brogen Hayes. She dragged me along to see Amanda Palmer’s gig in the Academy on Monday evening. Here’s her thoughts (and some interjections from me too). - Darren Evelyn Evelyn are a fictional musical duo, made up of Evelyn Neville and her conjoined twin sister, Evelyn. The sisters have lived a harsh, cruel life that would not be out of place in a Victorian melodrama. Of course, Evelyn and Evelyn are Amanda Palmer, who is probably best known as one half of the Dresden Dolls, and her comrade and fellow musician, Jason Webley. Fictional, remember! Palmer and Webley had a whole stage show worked out. They had costumes made. They had wigs. They had worked out how to play guitar with one hand each. They had created a whole back-story for the Evelyn sisters and the tragic events of their lives. Sadly, the conjoined twins of … There’s more →