Above the Title: A Saoirse Ronan Podcast

This week, we're playing clean-up on the last of the movies rushed into release to capitalize on Saoirse's Oscar nomination with Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts. An almost entirely fictionalized melodrama set in the last weeks of Harry Houdini's life, the film stars Guy Pierce and Catherine Zeta-Jones at the very tail end of the star runs, and Saoirse Ronan as the latter's plucky con artist daughter. We talk the two leads' A-list careers twenty years on, fancast our own Harry Houdini biopics, argue over which de Havilland sister was better, and devote some time to talking about The Pitt...

The year is 2007. Saoirse Ronan is thirteen years old and four years into her career and has just gotten her first Oscar nomination. This week, Mark Tilley returns to the podcast to discuss Atonement, Joe Wright's sweeping epic of forbidden love and overwhelming guilt. Listen as we heap praise on Wright, discuss the film's Oscar run, debate just how much of this movie is meant to be real, and perform some atonement of our own as we address this podcast's greatest shame.

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not gonna lie gang this one broke us

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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 seems to reflect Heckerling's biography. Plus: a young Saoirse Ronan in her first actual role, deep dives on both Pfeiffer and Rudd, and a lot of MCU talk. A weird amount of MCU talk...

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 just being a kid who can pop into a few scenes? No, not really, but hey, it's a completionist podcast, that's what you signed up for.

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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 Farrell Rushmore, and announce the subject of our next season. Thanks for the memories, kid.

Please note The War Zone deals with sexual assault and incest in extremely...

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, our frustrations with prestige TV storytelling, the show's disinterest in engaging with the larger Batman mythos, whether or not Colin should be winning awards for this, and our thoughts...

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 fetishism, the scorpion jacket from Drive, mononymous stardom, and forgotten Jason Isaacs cop show Awake. Did you ever watch that? God it was good. We used to be a c...

this was a mistake

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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, Missouri? Two years on, is this movie's total shutout at the Oscars deeply embarrassing? Does the Brenan Gleeson Rushmore get so contentious it almost ruins a friendship? Do we all love Jenny the...

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 those test scores? They were right. We talk this movie's quiet sentimentality, the out of nowhere Ron Howard redemption tour, whether or not this is an apology for Hillbilly E...

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 answer is no. Along the way, we talk the film's misguided politics, the crimes of Todd Phillips, Robert Pattinson the movie star, the vestigial nature of Colin's...

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 what voice Colin is doing here, and the shameful secret behind our show's methodology.

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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 fanfare, and the weird legacy of Colin's "pull up your pants" performance in this film. Plus: he's not very good in this, but we still go long on the career of star...

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 the difficulties of integrating subversive or progressive ideology into works released by major conglomerates. Plus: Stuart, no stranger to tackling full actor filmographies himself, prods us to answer the question we've been dancing around...

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 political structure, racial tensions, and social boundaries along neighborhood lines. But we also do touch on other aspects of the film at large, including its misbegotten Oscar chances, the star-studded...

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 time on this Earth and are under no obligation to listen to this discussion. The subject is Legend of Cambria. The guest is Jeff Sweeney. We have fulfilled our...

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 Colin the corporate lawyer he inspires to action. We get into Colin's penchant for taking unremarkable supporting roles in higher profiles of this ilk and his difficulties connecting with strong directors, and discuss the...

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 gender politics and its complicated reception, along with our broader feelings on Coppola, the remaining context from the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, and the wildly different approaches...

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' style and as a star vehicle for Colin, and sort through our feelings on the uglier side of Lanthimos' obtuse worldview on the edge of a populist reinvention. Along the way we touch...

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 success (for this movie) and a disastrous failure (in what followed). Along the way we touch on director David Yates' attempts to (sorry) recreate the magic of the mainline...

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 film's protracted production (including a decade where they were, swear to God, trying to retool it as a sequel to Se7en), attempt to sort through its incoherent narrative...

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 Farrell dip into an old bag of tricks as he attempts to grab onto the redemption narrative that had been so central to Matthew McConaughey in the first season. Did it work? We talk...

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 regarding the film's philosophical underpinnings, aesthetic oddities, and morbid sense of humor. Along the way we touch on the beginnings of Colin's comeback, the odd circumstances that led to...

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 film's stylistic successes and failures (especially in relation to the more acclaimed 1951 Swedish adaptation), plus we take a look at the long cultural tail of Ingmar Bergman and try to sort through our feelings on Chastain's...

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 with much derision and quickly forgotten save for the odd meme or two. We touch on its reputation and general failures, and along the way discuss the legacy of so bad it's good movies, the...

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 Giamatti's entire body of work, and reckon with a moving and close to home Colin Farrell performance as Travers' alcoholic father. Plus: deep dives into the careers of Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson (and...

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 Giamatti's entire body of work, and reckon with a moving and close to home Colin Farrell performance as Travers' alcoholic father. Plus: deep dives into the careers of Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson (and...

This week, we're shrinking ourselves down to insect size to explore a world of wonder (and mostly get distracted by tangents), as we take a look at Epic. A misbegotten franchise starter from now defunct studio Blue Sky (best known for the Ice Age franchise), the film stars Amanda Seyfried as an ordinary woman who discovers a microscopic adventure occurring in the forest by her house and Colin as a general attempting to protect a kingdom from a evil warlord. We talk about celebrity voice casts in animated films of the past twenty years, the project's relationship to Pixar, the...

This week, we continue our journey into the doldrums of Colin's middle period with a look at Dead Man Down, a muddled attempt by original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev to inject European art film flair into the DTV crime thriller mold. We discuss the film's incoherent plotting and tone, once again tackle the question of Colin Farrell in action hero mode, and break down co-star Noomi Rapace's odd run as a failed Hollywood leading lady. Plus, because you try talking about this movie, we get very loopy and really just drift off into whatever tangents...

This week on the podcast it's the Oops! All Rushmores special! The great Sean Fahey joins us, and he wanted to spend the episode playing everyone's favorite game. So join us as we delve into a multitude of careers, from luminaries like Christopher Walken all the way to beloved character actors like Kevin Corrigan. Also we briefly find time to discuss Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh's 2012 follow-up to In Bruges, and try to figure out just what's going on with Colin Farrell's career. Connor feels bullied. Cole holds several grudges. Sean executes a master plan.

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This week, we are very grouchy because we have to talk about the 2012 remake of Total Recall. Join us as we ruminate on Len Wiseman's weirdly short career, rant about the fetishization of fidelity, and remember we have free license to talk about the Paul Verhoeven original. Spoiler alert: we mostly just talk about that one. That movie rocks. How could you not? Cole has a take so spicy he had to cut it out of the episode. Connor can't stop thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger's body.

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This week on the podcast, we're ostensibly talking about Fright Night, the 2011 vampire action thriller remake starring Colin Farrell and directed by Craig Gillespie. But here's the thing: that movie very bad and we don't want to talk about it. You know what movie is good actually? Fright Night, the 1985 vampire horror movie starring Chris Sarandon and directed by Tom Holland. That's the one we want to talk about. Along the way we'll survey the history of vampire movies, eulogize Anton Yelchin, and try to decide if Dave Franco is a good actor. Connor doesn't understand the American West. Cole...

This week, the great Dan Moore joins us to begin our descent into the real nadir of Colin's professional career with Horrible Bosses. A hit ensemble comedy from 2011, we dig into who among the cast is bad (most of them), who among the cast is good (contentious), and just how much worse the cultural landscape was twelve years ago. Plus, long-awaited Rushmores for Donald Sutherland and Jamie Foxx, and a whole lotta tangents - listen, you wouldn't wanna talk about this movie either. Don't get mad at us. Cole is looking forward to Chris Pine's directorial debut Poolman. Connor very...

This week, we're diving into London Boulevard, the directorial debut of The Departed Screenwriter William Monahan. Despite being familiar territory, the film, in which he plays a reformed gangster who falls for a movie star (Keira Knightley), mostly just vanishes the second it's released, and we dig into why, talking the baffling lack of chemistry between the leads, the generic nature of everything onscreen, and the film's callous use of sexual assault. Along the way, we're also praising Colin's fits, looking at the long career of Ray Winstone, and, for some reason, just chatting about James Bond. Connor can't stop...

This week, Mark Tilley returns to the pod to help us discuss Peter Weir's final film, The Way Back, the ostensibly true story of an escape from a Siberian gulag and the long march to freedom. We can't agree if this movie is any good or not, but we can agree that flash in the pan star Jim Sturgess has nothing on Colin's scene stealing Russian gangster. Along the way, we're talking Ed Harris, we're talking Saorise Ronan, and we're arguing over what this movie's politics are. Cole thinks people are pretending to like Master & Commander. Connor tells a bald...

This week, we're taking a look at the beloved, Oscar-winning drama about an aging, alcoholic country singer finding salvation through the love of a single mother - it's Tender Mercies Crazy Heart! The debut film from Scott Cooper, this was sold and received as a powerhouse comeback for Jeff Bridges and, accordingly, that's who we're mostly talking about this week, delving into the ups and downs of his career, and why this movie landed like it did. Along the way we're gonna try to figure out if Cooper actually likes country, how Maggie Gyllenhaal got an Oscar nomination for this...

We're back! The SAG-AFTRA strike is over, and the boys have returned from hiatus to bring you the light hearted look into Colin Farrell's career that you've come to love. This week, we're taking a look at Colin's forgotten 2009 collaboration with acclaimed Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanović Triage, a... dour and miserabilist mediation on the traumas of war and the 1988 Anfal genocide. Well, not everything can be light hearted. Frankly, as dumb as we are, we probably still handle the subject matter with more respect than the movie does. Cole grapples with his feelings on James L. Brooks. Connor somehow compares Z...

The show will be going on hiatus for the duration of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Solidarity forever.

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This week, we're shuffling the release order a little bit to talk about 2009's Ondine. Directed by acclaimed Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, the film stars Colin Farrell as a reclusive fisherman who rescues a mysterious and possibly magical woman from the sea. We talk about the film's origins as a Writer's Strike project, Colin's real life romance with co-star Alicja Bachleda-Curuś, the legacy of mermaids in films, and the career downturns that befall both Jordan and cinematographer Christopher Doyle after this film. Plus - we recorded this on the eve of Barbie and Oppenheimer's release, so you'll get a lot o...