Above the Title: A Saoirse Ronan Podcast

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This week, Above the Title celebrates Age Gap April with a look at Amy Heckerling's misbegotten May December romcom I Could Never Be Your Woman, starring Michelle Pfeiffer as an aging, divorced TV executive and Paul Rudd as the younger actor she falls for. We talk the film's lengthy and disastrous production, its poorly aged conception of feminism, and the ways both resonant and unsettling it seem...

This week, season 2 of Above the Title begins with a look at the early television work of our new subject, Saoirse Ronan. First, there's The Clinic, a long running gentle soap opera about the personal lives of healthcare workers. Then, there's the second season of Proof, a gritty and short lived drama about journalists uncovering corruption. Is Saoirse in either of these to any degree more than ju...

After two long years, we've finally reached the end of Colin's filmography, and this week we're taking a moment to collect our thoughts on his career and where he's going from here. But first: we loop back around to cover 1999's The War Zone, Colin's first proper movie which fell outside our initial 21st century limitations. Then, we dive into everything he's done since, finally unveil the Colin F...

This week, the great Jeff Sweeney returns to the show to put up a defense for the Reeves Batmanverse and talk HBO's The Penguin, the first time in Colin's career he's return to a role he's already played. Spoiler alert: two people on this episode thought this show was terrible and the third is just happy to be here. Topics include: live Golden Globes reactions, wildly out of date Oscar predictions...

We're back! This week, the great Sadie Rose Darwish joins us (for an episode definitely not recorded six months ago) to discuss Sugar, a streaming miniseries/maybe TV show in which Colin does a warmed over neo-noir routine while viewers wait patiently for the twist that is the show's entire raison d'être. We discuss that twist and we would have executed it, along with detours into the show's TCM f...

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This week, Mark Tilley returns to the pod to discuss 2022's The Banshees of Inisherin, Colin's reunion with Martin McDonagh, the source of his first Academy Awards nomination, and frankly one of the key reasons we did this podcast in the first place. Is this movie the true successor to Italian neo-realism? Have we as a society properly reckoned with the crimes of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, M...

This week, the great Sean Fahey returns to the show and straps on his diving gear for a discussion of Ron Howard's Thirteen Lives. Starring Viggo Mortensen and our boy Colin as two of the divers instrumental in the famous 2018 Thai cave rescue, the film would have some of the best test scores in MGM history before being unceremoniously dumped by the new Amazon régime. But here's the thing about th...

This week, we inaugurate the year of Colin Farrell and return to the superhero mileu to talk Matt Reeves' dark reboot of the caped crusader, 2022's The Batman. Released to much acclaim as an exciting new vision, two and a half years later (well, June of 2024 when we recorded it) it's time to take a look back with clearer eyes and ask the question: wait, is this thing actually any good? No. The ans...

We're back! This week, we explain what's going on with the show, and then the great Andrew Kinsella returns to discuss the 2021 miniseries The North Water, the story of two men pitted against each other on an ill-fated whaling voyage. Topics include: the career of director Andrew Haigh, the state of the contemporary prestige miniseries, the failed attempt to turn Jack O'Connell into a star, just w...

This week, we are taking a look at 2020's The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie's return to his trademark type of ensemble crime films after a decade of franchise fare and a movie that one of your cohosts thinks is the worst thing we've ever discussed on the podcast. Topics include: the diminishing returns of Ritchie's whole deal, this movie's rancid racist and nationalist politics, the dying art of studio f...

This week, the great Stuart Elmore joins us to talk 2019's Dumbo, a somewhat misbegotten entry in Disney's attempts to remake their animated classics and, to date, Colin's last starring role in a major studio film. We get into our feelings on director Tim Burton and his body of work, the complicated history of the original, Disney's monstrous 2019 and the broader wave of live-action remakes, and t...

This week, the great Johnny Buse joins us to discuss Steve McQueen's 2018 Windy City heist epic Widows. As anyone who's seen it knows, this movie is a very rich text, and as this is a Colin Farrell podcast (and with two Chicago boys on the recording), we mostly focus in on his subplot regarding a contested alderman race for a South Side ward, and the film's broader understanding of Chicago's polit...

Here on Above the Title, we're completionists. We've made the pledge that we are going to discuss every Colin Farrell performance of the 21st century. And if that means we have to talk about a 40 minute Game of Thrones knockoff ad for a quartz company that never mentions quartz, well, that's the task we've set for ourselves. But you, dear listener, you have not made this pledge. You have a limited...

This week, the great Justin Stillmaker returns to the show to close out our look at Colin's run of prestige projects in 2017 with the misbegotten but still Oscar nominated legal drama Roman J. Israel, Esq. The sophomore film from Nightcrawler writer/director Dan Gilroy, the film stars the god Denzel Washington as the titular lawyer, a civil rights activist struggling with a crisis of faith, and Co...

This week, the great Jake Mueller (Cinebums) returns to the show to talk Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled. A remake of the Clint Eastwood/Don Siegel film of the same name, the film stars Colin as a Union soldier in the waning years of the Civil War who is injured and taken in by a Confederate girl's school and all the sexual tension and various romances that follow. We talk the film's racial and gende...

This week, the great Andrew Jagielski joins us for the second and (sadly) final collaboration between Colin Farrell and Yorgos Lanthimos. That's right, it's 2017's postmodern Greek tragedy The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in which Colin plays a hypocritical surgeon whose family is placed under a curse by a teenage boy he once wronged. We delve into how this film works as an expression of Lanthimos' s...

This week the great Colin Hamingson AND the great (and returning!) Saneesh Feisal join us to talk 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the biggest hit of Colin Farrell's career and, seven years later, the most toxic and complicated movie he was ever in. We dig into Warner Brothers' attempts to transform Harry Potter into an MCU of their own, and the weird ways that experiment was both a...

Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in. That's right, this week we're taking a look at Solace, a cat and mouse thriller about a psychic cop (Anthony Hopkins) pursuing a psychic serial killer (Colin Farrell), which had sat on the shelf for several years before getting a quick festival run and alleged theatrical release to cash in on Colin's newly reclaimed stardom. We talk about the...

This week, the great Morgan Garrity joins us to talk the second season of HBO's True Detective, Colin's first serious foray into American television and the continuation of his hot comeback summer of 2015. Playing one of four leads in the highly anticipated series, centering on a group of adrift cops stumbling their way through uncovering a conspiracy in a small California town, we get to see Farr...

This week, the great Genevieve Jacobson joins us, after months in Colin's flop era, to talk about a good movie. That's right, we've finally arrived at The Lobster, Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos' Cannes winning and Oscar nominated English language debut. The film stars Colin as a man in a surreal future forced to find a partner or be turned into the titular crustacean, and we find a lot to dig into...

This week, we're taking a look at Liv Ullman's 2014 adaptation of the August Strindberg play Miss Julie. Starring Colin Farrell alongside an ascendant Jessica Chastain as a servant and mistress engaged in an scandalous flirtation, the film sees Ullman move the location to Northern Ireland and update the narrative with a modern, feminist framing. We get into the psychosexual drama at play and the f...

This week, the great Charlie Schumann joins us for the tenth anniversary spectacular look at notorious bomb Winter's Tale. A sweeping epic in which Colin Farrell plays an immigrant street thief who befriends a magic horse (?) and discovers he's a pawn in the eternal battle between God and Satan (??) and then lives for a century so he can fulfil his destiny (?????????????), the film was received wi...

This week, the great Jeff Sweeney (of the Travolting podcast) joins us to look at failed Oscar contender Saving Mr. Banks, the deeply Disneyfied (and maybe evil?) biopic of Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers and her feuds with Walt over the famous 1963 film version. We grapple with our complicated feelings about the legacy of the Disney corporation, have an oddly contentious debate over Paul Giamatt...