johnjredington

I can't claim to know anything specific about Polish culture or Polish-American culture and I'd assume the slating "Polish Wedding" has got, particularly from Poles, is something akin to how some Irish people view Hollywood films about Irish-American families. Some of it is understandable (ever watch "Far and Away" without cringing?) but most times I think critics read too much into the context and not enough into the film itself.

As an outsider, "Polish Wedding" comes across as a film about white working-class Americans. I can see parallels with some of my own relations - an American community that uses the glue of their shared ethnic origin to bind themselves together. In the film's case, that happens to be Polish and there is an authentic ring to the hothouse bonds of a large family with Catholicism always present in the background.

However, despite its very American setting, "Polish Wedding" is far more European in structure and storyline, a record of ordinary events about ordinary people who don't have heroic aspirations and who adapt the best they can to whatever life throws up. In a way, it's almost like reality TV, a chance to peek into the lives of others without having any influence on the outcome.

While not as intense as classics in that tradition like the "Three Colours" trilogy, it is an interesting take on a theme that has rarely been examined by Hollywood and has enough inter-personal emotion to compensate for the lack of complexity in the story.

Seven Ages was a millennium project undertaken by RTE to document the history of the state that is now the Republic of Ireland from independence in 1922 up to 1990. Each of the seven programmes covered a particular decade and contained archival film and television footage together with commentary from politicians, journalists, historians and economists both living and dead.

Visually, it was very interesting as no such presentation was ever broadcast in a single compilation. There was also a continuity to it that allowed the viewer to see modern Irish history in its entirety rather than as a series of specific events. And because they spanned the period before television was available, coverage of the earlier decades was very interesting.

The last two chapters dealing the 1970s and the 1980s were easier to evaluate because there is far more broadcast material available on them. Not surprisingly, much of it centred on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and their effects on life and politics south of the Border. However, for a historical programme, the accompanying commentary was very one-sided, starting from the premise that the IRA were the problem and that, as a result, all actions taken in the name of opposing them were therefore correct.

Apart from Charlie Haughey, the featured politicians would all be noted for their very anti-Republican positions and the two apparently-neutral contributors, journalist Fintan O'Toole and academic Dermot Keogh, would share that opinion. Now, while everyone is entitled to their point of view, Seven Ages should have made some effort to include the opposing view if it is to be an honest record of the period in question. Indeed, the Peace Process only came about when political leaders in the Republic realised that progress could not be made by clinging to the sterile position of not speaking to Republicans.

Maybe Seven Ages difficulty lies in the fact that it was made in 1999/2000 when the legacy of an iron-fisted political censorship up to just a few years previously still hadn't disappeared. Looking at it on DVD seven years later, it is more an uncomfortable reminder of the Section 31 mentality rather than the comprehensive record of modern Irish history that it could have been.

No point in navel-gazing about Twister. The plot could be summed up in a sentence and there are no shades of ambiguity anywhere. It's two hours of almost non-stop action, great special effects and bounding along at breakneck pace. Characters fall neatly into good (Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton), bad (Cary Elwes and his gang in their sinister black cavalcade) and wacky (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jamie Gertz) and they all get their just desserts. The only twist (no pun intended) missing is Philip Seymour Hoffman hitting it off with Jamie Gertz - but then, we can't have everything, can we? So, revert back to your childhood and just enjoy.