Arts & Culture

AS a professional photographer, creativity and images are already central to what Paul Corey does and he’s now looking use his talents in a second way.He will be continuing with his business but having written a script and screenplay, he secured a loan and is hoping to begin work on his first film very soon.“I’ve had a dream for most of my life to make a film and I’m after getting a loan of €12,000 for the equipment and I put a few thousand to it myself. The next step is to train a crew of six to eight people and hopefully do casting in the summer,” says Paul. He will be working on it part-time and says it’s something he’s “fairly passionate” about.The film has the working title Ennis and will be the story of a local family over a single weekend.Paul says it will be a dark comedy and while he says it will really be about the …

Invictus DIRECTED BY: Clint Eastwood STARRING: Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge CERT: PG Of all the stories a man could tell about the life of Nelson Mandela, Clint Eastwood has opted for a nice, uplifting one. Or a bland, toothless one, if we’re to be more honest.It’s the story of the World Cup in South Africa. No, not the real World Cup, taking place there this summer, the Rugby World Cup of 1995. That one ended racial hatred in one fell swoop and brought the rainbow nation together to live happily ever after in blissful peace and harmony. You know, that one.It opens with Mandela’s release from prison (exactly 20 years ago today, if you’re reading this on Thursday), where he’d spent 27 years in that famous little cell. On the road, he passes between two sports pitches. On one, a bunch of poor black kids kick around a soccer ball. Across the street and behind the fence, a …

For many people who lived in the land of only two channels growing up, the weekend meant three things: The Late Late Show with Uncle Gaybo on Friday night, Kenny Live on Saturday and Where in the World followed by Glenroe on Sunday night.This was the routine and it was kept with rigour. The Late Late was considered the programme for the whole family. It was the flagship. Kenny Live, meanwhile, was for a slightly younger audience, maybe those in their 20s or 30s, and the neon pink graphic just made it seem a lot more trendy. We’re talking 80s/90s trendy here – so it’s Deirdre Barlow glasses on Pat and a lot of floral headbands on the ladies.Sunday evening was brilliant. I loved Teresa Lowe. She was glamour personified as far as I was concerned. As an eight-year-old I would have given anything to be old enough to don a vibrant pink, green, yellow or blue polo shirt and …

THE Time Traveler’s Wife, Robert Schwentke’s adaptation of the successful 2003 novel by Audrey Niffenegger, is such a slow-moving annoyance that even when watched in fast forward, it’s still a ponderous piece of work.This is not hyperbole. I tried it. It is sloooooooooow. Which is a shame because the story’s premise is interesting and the cast more than capable of turning the sorts of performances that could carry the necessary melodrama.Eric Bana stars as Henry DeTamble, a Chicago librarian with a peculiar genetic deficiency – he slips through time, seemingly at random, finding himself landing, naked, at various points of his life with nothing to do except survive the ordeal and wait for his condition to whisk him back to his normal place in time.As the title suggests, however, the story focuses less on the errant time traveller, but on his wife, Clare (Rachel McAdams), an aspiring artist from a wealthy family who first meets a temporally displaced Henry when …

THE end of the Celtic Tiger and his own return to Ireland from New York has inspired a North Clare-based filmmaker’s latest project.Kilfenora resident Alan Cooke hopes to begin filming The Spirit of Ireland next month if he can attract sufficient backing.Alan won a New York Emmy last year for his writing for the documentary Home, which received three nominations at the prestigious awards.“In 2008, I toured with Home throughout Ireland and I got to sense what was going on in the country and how people felt about their Irish identity. This led me to thinking about the idea of developing a project, which would explore what it means to be Irish and our culture and our spirit in the 21st century,” Alan told The Clare Champion.“I am going to create an epic visual poem about Ireland. The project is titled The Spirit of Ireland. It will be an uplifting and emotional tribute to the meaning of being Irish and …

Music is becoming a major part of the third annual Forge at Gort Festival and further details have been revealed this week for the 2010 festival, which takes place next month.The programme for the writers’ festival has been extended and now features Clare-based violinist Yuki Nishioka and harper Paul Dooley, among others.Yuki will accompany the Clare Three-Legged Stool Writers’ Group in a reading as part of the festival, organised by The Western Writers’ Centre – Ionad Scríbhneoirí Chaitlín Maude. Yuki and the Three-Legged Stool ­Writers’ Group will perform in O’Grady’s Restaurant and Bar, Gort, at 4.30pm on Saturday, March 27. Admission is free. Yuki has been playing classical violin since she was three and has competed at a national level in Japan. She was jointly awarded the Haydn prize for ensemble work with Mùm String Quartet. After graduating from Aichi Provincial University of Fine Arts and Music, she became a member of Aichi Chamber Orchestra and played for a number …

GLASGOW’s Celtic Connections festival is in full flight and Eddi Reader has spent the previous evening performing on BBC Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk with The Alan Kelly Quartet when The Clare Champion gets her on the phone. By the time she’d finished chatting after the gig, she explains, it was already well into tomorrow.

SEAN Nós is the oldest form of Irish dance and it’s now being taught in Ennis by Limerick woman Suzanne Leahy.