John Sayles
34 connections found
Filmography
Limbo 1999 
Lone Star 1996 
Matewan 1987 
City of Hope 1991 
Honeydripper 2007 
Baby It's You 1983 
Eight Men Out 1988 
Passion Fish 1992 
Sunshine State 2002 
Lianna 1983 
The Secret of Roan Inish 1994 
The Brother from Another Planet 1984 
Return of the Secaucus Seven 1980 
Silver City 2004 
Casa de los Babys 2003 View:
Connections, in both directions
Ondine (2010)
Directed by Neil Jordan
influenced by The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)
Themes Characters Plot
Like John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, Jordan's movie plays with the Celtic myth of the selkie - a seal that can shed her skin and transform into a human.
Like John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, Neil Jordan's intoxicatingly beautiful Ondine plays off the marvelous folklore of the selkie, a seal who sheds his or her skin temporarily and can live on land as a human.
A hybrid creature well known to fans of John Sayles' lovely 1994 movie The Secret of Roan Inish, the selkie sheds her seal coat to venture ashore.
Take a dash of Splash, a generous pinch of The Secret of Roan Inish, and a healthy portion of low-key and very effective Irish charm, and the result is Ondine , a sweet and frankly lovely little film from Neil Jordan .
Half inspired by John Sayles' far superior 1993 film "The Secret of Roan Inish," Jordan sets up a tale about a sheepish Irish fisherman and divorced father named Syracuse (Colin Farrell) who pulls from the sea what he is led to believe is a selkie mermaid named Ondine (Alicja Bachelda).
No, not a mermaid exactly, but perhaps a selkie, one of the seal-women of local legend and John Sayles’s 1994 “The Secret of Roan Inish,’’ whose grounded whimsy this film shares.
This is unashamedly heroic film-making in the mold of the John Ford of "The Grapes of Wrath" and "My Darling Clementine," with perhaps a taste of Sergio Leone.
The three films it suggests most consistently are “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Salt of the Earth” and the 1963 Italian film “The Organizer”; the last shot of “Matewan"--consciously or not--almost directly echoes “The Organizer’s” final shot.
It`s myth without the mythic lift that John Ford brought to ''The Grapes of Wrath,'' or King Vidor to ''Our Daily Bread.''
Hell or High Water isn’t a flashy movie, but it has an undeniably resonant sense of small-scale justice, not to mention an authentic sense of place that will remind you of other Texas-set masterpieces like John Sayles’ Lone Star and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
Playing the lawman, Bridges, looking like Kris Kristofferson from “Lone Star,” shines as a plainspoken man grieving the end of his career.
Song of the Sea (2014)
Directed by Tomm Moore
influenced by The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)
Characters Themes Plot
Fans of John Sayles’ “The Secret of Roan Inish” will see echoes of that 1994 drama in the main character, a shape-shifting “selkie” who abandons her human body in the water to become a seal.
(John Sayles wonderful 1994 film “The Secret of Roan Inish” is another selkie tale.)
Both John Sayles’ “The Secret of Roan Inish” and Neil Jordan’s “Ondine” did so as well.)
"Song of the Sea" begins with the myth of the selkie, a creature (also featured in John Sayles' 1994 "The Secret of Roan Inish") who manages to be a seal in the ocean but a human on land.
(Fans of independent cinema may remember a live-action movie sourced from this legend, John Sayles’ “The Secret of Roan Inish,” in 1994.)
Maybe you’ve caught screen interpretations, like John Sayles’s “The Secret of Roan Inish” (1994) or Neil Jordan’s “Ondine” (2009).
Like Jim Sheridan's and Mike Newell's "Into the West,"…
Much like Into the West the result is exuberant and compelling.
Thus it recalls last year's tale of Irish Gypsies, "Into the West."
The location’s tight connection to the story recalls John Sayles films like Limbo—the story could not be transplanted to a different setting and achieve the same result.
To that film, add John Sayles's The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan's Ondine, and now Jordan's rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora.
While the lack of closure isn’t close to what it was in John Sayles’ Limbo (which caused movie-goers to throw things at the screen in normally staid art houses), it will cause consternation.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
influenced by City of Hope (1991)
Themes
Derek Cianfrance attempts a macro-micro social approach that worked well for projects such as John Sayles’s “City of Hope.”
As I exited the theater, and the moviegoers all around me were talking about how they would’ve “just lost it” and “fought back and killed that evil bastard” — I’m not kidding; I heard that several times — I admit with some embarrassment, dear reader, that I was already thinking back to Alfre Woodard’s scene, and how I really should revisit her extraordinary presence in John Sayles’ movie Passion Fish again.
It resembles John Sayles' brilliant The Secret of Roan Inish not only in subject, but also in the understanding that film has the potential to be the most cogent extrapolation of the oral storytelling tradition.
It's amazing, but films on the opposite end of the spectrum are still being made, films like Babe and Babe: Pig in the City, Fly Away Home, Holes, The Secret of Roan Inish and The White Balloon.
The Return of the Secaucus Seven had two separate New York runs, made appearances on several year-end lists, and became a cause célèbre for snobs "in the know" deriding Kasdan's The Big Chill as a Secaucus rip-off.
Cinematographer Dick Pope gives the tight interior scenes the same kind of heightened realism he used with director Mike Leigh on such films as "Naked" and "Secrets & Lies."
Finally the mists and the cornstalks part, and a Christlike figure appears: Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), baseball's ultimate outsider-hero, and the central figure in John Sayles' "Eight Men Out" and, a few years ago, "The Natural," where he's the inspiration for Robert Redford's Roy Hobbes.
"Eight Men Out" used the soiled Sox to underscore the modern decline of honor.
"The Secret of Roan Inish" is akin to Bill Forsyth's "Local Hero," though the Sayles film is not nearly so enigmatic.
It's all too neat; someone like John Sayles ("Lone Star") could have linked these elements in a far more compelling way.
Interestingly, this is the very opposite of the message of John Sayles' masterpiece, "Lone Star," which told us that, at a certain point, one has to chuck the guilt one inherits and get on with things.
Nevertheless, those who openly hissed at John Sayles' Limbo or declared the finale of The Sopranos to be a tease will not be pleased by how No Country for Old Men elects to wrap up its diverse storylines.
The Red Turtle (2016)
Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit
influenced by The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)
Film fans will detect nods to “The Black Stallion” and “Cast Away” during the film’s initial moments, as well as to such cinematic fables as “ The Secret of Roan Inish ” later on, when the stranded hero finds an unlikely antidote to his loneliness and isolation in the form of a dreamlike, shape-shifting presence.
Gorgeously photographed by Oscar-winner Haskell Wexler ("Bound for Glory," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," "Mate-wan") and perfectly acted by a terrific cast, "The Secret of Roan Inish" is filled with nuance and detail that tells us much about Ireland and its people, their roots and beliefs, and - of course - the great Irish tradition of oral story-telling.