Latest news with #Villagers
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Event Guide: Forbidden Fruit, Swell Season and the other best things to do in Ireland this week
Event of the week Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas Friday-Sunday, June 6th-8th, Borris, Co Carlow, €265/€94/€70, all events sold out (returns only), The words 'all events sold out' rarely apply to festivals where most of guests are writers, academics, journalists, cognitive psychologists, record producers, musicians and actors. This annual gathering shatters the perception that literary events are niche. The line-up is weighty, to say the least, with the likes of Fiona Shaw, Margaret Drabble, Steven Pinker, Rupert Everett, Elaine Feeney, John Banville and Denise Gough chatting across the weekend to anyone who will listen. Music in the onsite venue (aka the Rookery) includes performances by Villagers, Glen Hansard, Kate Ellis, Martin Hayes, MayKay and Jerry Fish. Gigs Morrissey Saturday, May 31st, 3Arena, Dublin, 6.30pm, €68.70, Morrissey celebrated his 66th birthday last week, so we can presume he will continue to write songs that are based, according to his biographer Johnny Rogan, on 'endlessly re-examining a lost, painful past'. Whether or not that's true, the contentious singer-songwriter arrives in Ireland on the back of nine postponed US shows (caused by severe sinusitis) and two unreleased albums (Bonfire of Teenagers and Without Music the World Dies). As ever, fan loyalty remains high. Forbidden Fruit Saturday and Sunday, May 31st and June 1st, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, 1pm, €174/€99/€89, Forbidden Fruit: Jazzy The first open-air festival of the summer returns with two days of contemporary techno, soul, neojazz, electronic, pop, rock and the proverbial whatever you're having yourself. Audience favourites include Jamie xx, Underworld, Caribou, Jazzy and Peggy Gou. Emerging music acts that might be unfamiliar to Irish gig-goers include two treasures from Australia, Mail Grab and Glass Beams, and two acts making their Irish debut, New York's Fcukers and Germany's Bunt. Kudos to the promoters, also, for featuring up-and-coming Irish acts such as Pastiche, Shiv, Negro Impacto, Celaviedmai, KhakiKid, Cliffords and Bold Love. The Swell Season Saturday and Sunday, May 31st and June 1st, NCH, Dublin, 7.30pm, €55, The Swell Season Almost 20 years after they formed as The Swell Season and then appeared as two struggling musicians in John Carney's charming lo-fi movie Once, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová reunite for a European and US tour in support of their forthcoming album, Forward, their first album as a duo in 16 years. Expect to hear new material, then, but also the songs that started it all, including Falling Slowly, When Your Mind's Made Up, and This Low. READ MORE Galway Folk Festival Wednesday-Sunday, June 4th-8th, Monroe's, Galway city, various times/prices, Galway Folk Festival: The Scratch Another round of applause for the Galway Folk Festival, which manages to secure the services of not only noted singer-songwriters but also handfuls of emerging folk/trad/hybrid music acts. Most are performing in various rooms, corners, nooks and crannies of Monroe's pub, so if you're looking for a quiet beverage, best think again. If, however, you're in search of acts that deliver classic songwriting (Lloyd Cole, Wednesday, June 4th, Town Hall, 7.30pm, €40), boisterous behaviour (The Scratch, Friday, June 6th, 9pm, sold out), quality musicianship (Kíla, Saturday, June 7th, 7pm, €25), and rigorous confessions (Martha Wainwright, Sunday, June 8th, 7pm, €35), then you've come to the right place. Many free events are also included in the festival line-up. Stage The Cave Friday, June 6th until Friday, July 18th, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 7.30pm, €50/€45/€33, Any new work by Kevin Barry is worth your attention, and his new play (which receives its world premiere here) is no exception. The brothers McRae, Archie (Tommy Tiernan) and Bopper (Aaron Monaghan) are on the run from the authorities and roughing it in a cave in the mountains of south Co Sligo. They fret about the strength of wifi signals, obsess about an obscure Mexican celebrity, and worry about being discovered by a curious local Garda sergeant (Judith Roddy). Caitríona McLaughlin directs. Following the Dublin run, the play will transfer to Galway's Town Hall Theatre, from Tuesday, July 22nd, until Saturday, July 26th, as part of the Galway International Arts Festival. Falling to Earth – My Summer with Bowie Wednesday and Thursday, June 4th and 5th, Theatre Royal, Waterford, 8pm, €21, ; Friday, June 6th, Everyman, Cork, 8pm, €26, Be careful what you wish for, and other associated hopes might be the core message of this acclaimed one-man show about pub bouncer Scut Kelly (Stephen Jones), whose sole comfort in an otherwise drab, rural existence is the music of the titular songwriter. Also, Saturday, June 7th, Axis, Ballymun, Wednesday June 11th, Civic Theatre, Tallaght, Thursday, June 12th/Friday, June 13th, DLR Mill Theatre, Dundrum (all Dublin); Saturday, June 14th, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow; from Thursday, June 19th until Saturday, June 21st, Lyric Theatre, Belfast. See venues for full details. Comedy Solve-Along-A Murder-She-Wrote Tuesday and Wednesday, June 3rd and 4th, Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, 8pm, €25, Murder, She Wrote poster, from Tony Clayton-Lea for The Guide, Saturday, May 31, 2025. Making its debut at the Pavilion, this successful cult comedy stage show features an interactive screening of Sing a Song of Murder, a much-favoured episode of the television mystery series Murder, She Wrote. Accompanied by a series-related quiz and a race against time to uncover the identity of the TV show's killer, audience participation is welcome if not encouraged. Your host is playwright, author and Murder, She Wrote obsessive Tim Benzie. Still running Emma Rawicz Wednesday, June 4th, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, 8pm, €15, ; Thursday, June 5th, Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo, 8pm, €20, ; Friday, June 6th, Roscommon Arts Centre, 8pm, €20, Emma Rawicz One of the most hotly tipped rising performers in jazz, saxophonist Emma Rawicz steers her band (pianist Elliot Galvin, bassist Kevin Glasgow, and drummer Asaf Sirkis) on a nationwide tour that continues until Friday, June 13th. Visit for full details. Book it this week Jade, 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, October 8th, David O'Doherty, Vicar Street, Dublin, October 10th/11th, These New Puritans, Workman's Club, Dublin, November 10th, Wolf Alice, 3Arena, Dublin, December 10th,
Extra.ie
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
15 years ago this week: Villagers released Becoming a Jackal
Originally published in Hot Press in May 2010: Mentioned in dispatches by Jon Pareles in the New York Times. A glittering Other Voices set. A much-lauded appearance on Later… With Jools Holland. An upcoming slot at the Richard Thompson-curated Meltdown festival. Hailed by Jape man Richie Egan as embodying 'everything I hold dear about music'. Somethings gone very right for Conor J OBrien since the dissolution of his first band The Immediate left him free to hone his skills as a sideman for Cathy Davey before forming Villagers, an ensemble who, before theyd even released their debut album (more of which in a moment), were opening for acts like Tindersticks and Neil Young. 'Every single step of the way, you're constantly a sponge, trying to take stuff from people, how they sing, how they perform,' O'Brien says on an April afternoon in the Brooks Hotel in Dublin. 'I hope that never ends.' Before we proceed, did he get to meet ol' Shakey? 'I didn't speak to Neil Young. He kind of walked by us in a haze of green smoke and wandered to his dressing room. I spoke to his crew; they were all awesome. They are a mafia, but a very friendly mafia, a very helpful crew. You can tell they've all been with him for years, really old dudes. 'I was very excited watching him. I came to him quite late, I was only starting to listen to him properly at the beginning of writing these songs, which was two years ago. I think I just heard Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and On The Beach and Harvest. Vampire Blues was very important, just the general looseness of it. Tommy (McLaughlin), who engineered the record and plays guitar in Villagers, he's a massive Neil Young fan, so he was very happy about my new love of Neil. We were just trying to maintain the space that's in some of his recordings and copy his drum sound, geeky little things like that. The songs had already been written, but it was more how to present them.' The album Conors is talking about is the extraordinary Becoming A Jackal, due for release on the Domino Recording Company. Says label boss Laurence Bell: Villagers is a powerful and brilliant blend of poetry and melody. Conor has the voice of an angel and performs with a rare intensity. I'm glad our paths crossed when they did. Bells Domino colleague Harry Martin recalls the label's first encounter with O'Brien: 'Myself and Laurence had actually seen The Immediate play at the Dublin Castle in Camden many years ago', he reveals, 'and we enjoyed that, it reminded us a bit of Sebadoh in the way they kept rotating as a band. It seemed like a novelty in a way, but a great performance, great songs. We were busy enough and thought no more of it, but when Cass McCombs came to play in Dublin towards the end of 2008, Villagers were supporting, and (Friction PR boss) Dan Oggly mentioned that I should check it out, that Conor was doing his own thing, freed of the band restrictions. I caught a bit of the set and was really impressed by it. 'And then a few months later, Laurence heard the track Becoming A Jackal and thought it was an amazing song, and asked me if I'd heard of Villagers. And I suppose when Laurence picks up on something, you start to think, I should really pay more attention to that. So I went to a show in Whelans last spring with a more attentive head on and was blown away.' Was the scope of the songs evident in early recordings? 'The early demos we heard were Jackal, Set The Tigers Free, quite a few songs he had knocking around, and he had, of course, the Irish seven and EP (On A Sunlit Stage and Hollow Kind). Conor pretty much had mapped out how it would all happen, up to Donegal with Tommy, he took 15 songs and came back with 15 great recordings, and we had to battle and fight and struggle getting it down to ten or 11. There's four amazing tracks left off the album; if you were to hear them, you'd probably weep. Well, get them out at some point. We're here for the long run. We're very excited about the first lap.' Villagers are, it's worth mentioning, the first Irish act to be signed to Domino, whose roster includes like-minded mavericks such as Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys, Bonnie Prince Billy and James Yorkston. 'I remember reading that and going, 'Really?'' O'Brien says of this distinction. 'Maybe it's just a geographical thing.' Maybe it is. There is a strong sense of place about the album, and an even stronger sense of time. O'Brien, a Dun Laoghaire native, found himself looking beyond the pier and into a welter of possible pasts. 'It's a pretty powerful thing, thinking that way,' he admits. 'I think when you're making art, a lot of that can show itself in a really subconscious way that you shouldn't really be aware of. There's a real power in it, but it's dangerous; you have to preserve the individuality of your own writing to a certain degree. But you can't ignore the surroundings and the history of where you grew up.' O'Brien's songs are steeped in atmosphere, most evident on the album's opener, I Saw The Dead, as extraordinary a piece of music as you're likely to hear all year. Indeed, the term song hardly does it justice. The musical equivalent of a Hitchcock or Polanski film, it radiates the eerie magnetism of a fairytale, or maybe the moment in The Sixth Sense where we see what Cole Sear sees hanging bodies in a school hallway ('That's a really good scene in that film,' OBrien concedes). 'The night we signed the contracts, we were in a bar marking the occasion,' recalls Harry Martin,'a great pub called the Cats Back around the Wandsworth area down by the river. And Conor sat at the piano and started playing the melody line, almost to himself, and it hooked into our head, and then about a month later, this demo came through, and it was that song. The whole thing is timeless in many ways. It could be from any era.' Indeed, I Saw The Dead might be an album unto itself, with its ghostly vocal set to a modernist but melodramatic neo-classical piano line. It's a shoo-in for inclusion on the soundtrack of any Hollywood remake of Let the Right One In. 'I was trying to copy Philip Glass with the music,' O'Brien explains. 'I had this piano piece which didn't have any words for ages. The song is a repetitive chord sequence, which was a small part of a bigger musical piece, which had loads of different kinds of slightly dodgy rock opera parts, and I really needed to make myself edit them out. I was thinking, 'that's a good bit, and that's a good bit, and that's a good bit. Everybody should hear all these good bits, and they should all happen in these four minutes.' Which is not the way to write a song at all, I think the simpler the better.' And what of the creepy-crawly lyric? 'The words were… like all the songs, I was just playing with words. The title was the first thing, and I wrote the rest of the lyrics knowing it was going to be the first song, cos it was the last song I wrote for the album. I wanted to write a sweeping introduction. I knew Becoming A Jackal would probably be the second song, so the idea of scavenging… all these human traits that I was exploring, I wanted to make it almost grotesque and physical with I Saw The Dead, the You take the torso/And I'll take the head bit… I don't know why. I find it really hard to do interviews about these songs to be honest, cos they're all just automatic and a bit subconscious. It's that thing, talking about music is like dancing about architecture. That's my current motto right now. But at the same time, I've had good times figuring it out.' And presumably, he's having fun hearing people's interpretations and misinterpretations of the songs? 'Well, that's the thing. If you're writing a song, you're being playful, you're being childish, there's space, and a lot of people have different ideas about it. Someone will say, 'Is that song about a girl? Well, it obviously is for you. You just said it was!' But the artwork for that song is important as well, it's two old ships on which people had perished. In 1804 or something, Dun Laoghaire harbour hadn't appeared yet, and the only reason it appeared was two particular ships had perished on the rocks and hundreds of people had died, and I just had this image in my head when I was doing the artwork. But that was only after I'd written the song.' If Becoming A Jackal wasn't such a strong collection, O'Brien might have had some serious problems following that tune. Fortunately, the rest of the record is as rich in dramatic irony and emotional potency, sometimes digressing into Arthur Lee territory, as well as exhibiting a fair grasp of pre-rock' n' roll song-forms. The Meaning Of The Ritual, The Pact and Pieces all execute the classic David Lynch trick of juxtaposing doo-wop sweetness with pure horror. 'Transcendental darkness and the weirdness,' O'Brien laughs. 'You're onto me! That's what I was trying to go for in some of the songs. Dark imagery or feelings alongside really mundane domestic everyday things. Let them rest beside each other, peacefully. Or not so peacefully. The first time we saw Twin Peaks' Killer Bob was in the doily-like Palmer household. Which was, perversely enough, far more frightening than if we had encountered him in a cabin in the woods. 'That's true, it's got the total childishness of 50s teenage life. There's a sweetness and beauty to doo-wop music that when you put it in a certain context…' Scare the bejesus out of a soul. That other Lynch favourite, Roy Orbison, had it too. O'Brien, as it happens, is a fan of the Big Os' gothic pop operas. You can hear it in songs like Ship Of Promises and That Day. 'The chord changes, the lyrics, everything works with Roy Orbison,' he enthuses. 'He's a master. Although I'm not too sure about Drove All Night! That's kind of weird. But still kind of cool.' O'Brien, for all his impeccable sensibilities, is not afraid to occasionally go OTT. There are moments in his songs when, bizarrely enough, I'm reminded of Richard Harris doing Jimmy Webb's MacArthur Park. 'I don't know that,' he confesses, 'but I saw The Field recently for the first time. Amazing. I'd never read it or seen the play. I thought Harris was phenomenal, I was completely in that film, his acting, the ideas that it raised, it was mindblowing. It gives you really strong ideas about power and lust and the sadness of the whole thing, how it turned him into a complete monster. And that scene where he's fighting the sea, it's like Lear in a storm or something.' If there's an equivalent operatic moment on the Villagers' record, it's at the end of Pieces, when O'Brien abandons language and howls at the moon. A great moment, precisely because it dares to go beyond indie-schmindie notions of restraint. 'I remember recording the demo for that,' he says, 'and it was about three or four in the morning, and I was on a break from touring with Cathy Davey. Pieces was written in about five minutes, but the arrangement took about a year, and when I came upon that doo-wop version with the different time signature on the piano, it opened the song up for me. I remember having this moment of epiphany, howling as I was recording it, really excited and joyous, the most joyful experience I've ever had, which contrasts with the song's meaning or feeling. That jackal howl.' That jackal howl. A phrase to put hair on your chest. And an atmosphere not a million miles away from Elvis' Blue Moon. 'I think it's just blues,' O'Brien concludes. 'A lot of people in interviews have gone, (adopts Euro accent), 'What exactly is Pieces about? What was happening to you in your life at that time?' And I can't remember, it's just like a blues song, you're singing, and you hope whoever is listening to it knows what you mean in their own terms. You're not trying to focus on your ego, you're not trying to get everyone in the room to listen to your problems, you're putting it out there so it can make a general connection. You can just howl. Everyone's going to understand that.' Listen to Becoming a Jackal below:
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Yes, Paul Mescal can sing in 'The History of Sound'
CANNES, France — If you are not perpetually online, you may have missed a TikTok titled 'Paul Mescal Having Pipes for a Minute Straight.' Ardent fans already know that Mescal — jovial Irish lad IRL and incredibly talented sad boy from 'Normal People,' 'All of Us Strangers' and 'Aftersun' — can sing. They've circulated 2012 clips of him playing Javert in 'Les Misérables' and the titular role in 'Phantom of the Opera,' both from when he was 16 and in high school. Occasionally, the actor, 29, has posted videos of himself playing piano and singing at home, including a lovely, impressive duet of 'Nothing Arrived' by Irish indie folk group Villagers alongside Mescal's sister, Nell. He's also been a surprise guest vocalist at a concert of Irish singer Dermot Kennedy, played guitar and sang in a music video for a mostly songless film adaptation of the opera 'Carmen,' and even performed a musical parody of 'Gladiator II' on SNL in 2024 — which may be the first time the public became aware of those pipes. That word, though, hadn't quite gone international, judging from the pleasantly surprised gasps, impressed murmurs and longing sighs that echoed throughout the theater during the premiere of Mescal's singing-infused period epic, 'The History of Sound,' at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday night. Ever since the film — a quiet, heartbreaking gay romance set in and around World War I — was announced as a Cannes selection, there have been two burning questions: How's the chemistry between its co-stars, Mescal and Josh O'Connor — two of the biggest young actors of the moment? And how's Mescal's singing? Reviews have been giving shockingly little space to either of these very important topics, so it seemed imperative to dive in. The sepia-toned film — from South African director Oliver Hermanus ('Moffie,' 'Living'), with a script that Ben Shattuck adapted from his own short story — is told from the perspective of Mescal's Lionel, a farm boy raised on guitar-plucked folk songs in rural Kentucky who has both synesthesia and a voice that lands him at the Boston Conservatory of Music. At a bar, Lionel overhears a fellow music student, O'Connor's David at the piano playing a song Lionel's father used to sing to him. Soon, David gets the entire bar to quiet down and cajoles the much-shier Lionel into singing a traditional ballad for him, 'Silver Dagger,' which is essentially a mother's warning to her daughter about men. The only sound in the scene is Mescal's absolutely angelic voice, until David, listening intently, starts accompanying him on piano. Mescal brings a sense of utter joy to Lionel as he sings; this is what he loves more than anything in the world. And you can tell from O'Connor's face that David is mesmerized. It's hard for the audience not to be, too. David immediately begs Lionel to sing him every folk song he knows. That lesson turns into many other joyous nights around the piano, and eventually a night when David asks Lionel to walk him home and the two take their bond to its natural next step. After being torn apart by war, they embark on a blissful summer together hiking through Maine to 'collect' recordings of American folk songs on wax cylinders. There are long dialogue-free stretches, and even when the men are talking, an economy of words. The end of that summer is perhaps the film's greatest tragedy. Early reviews of the film and singing have been mixed. The film's tone was too 'listless' for some, and the BBC's Nicholas Barber wrote that 'Mescal's singing never sounds any better than anyone else's in the film.' Still, his many plaintive renditions of American heritage songs — which were stuck in this viewer's head for days — are deeply felt. 'The power of the music alone makes it one of the most unabashedly romantic LGBTQ films in recent memory,' wrote David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter. Much of the premiere audience had no quibbles, and seemed primed to love anything Mescal did. The two young women sitting next to this reporter were practically shaking with excitement that they'd scored last-minute seats, and sighed deeply every time Mescal let that lovely voice fly. The actor got a 'We love you, Paul!' shouted from the balcony, and a prolonged standing ovation once the movie ended. Mescal said during Thursday's news conference that he's long been surrounded by the kind of traditional Irish music that influenced so much of the American folk music in the film, 'so it's music that I grew up being familiar with,' he said. (O'Connor couldn't attend the premiere because he's filming Stephen Spielberg's untitled new sci-fi film with Emily Blunt. Rooney accurately describes his charming singing style as 'tuneful' but 'with more gusto than vocal skill.') This film is, bar none, the most of Mescal's singing his fans will hear yet — at least until he finally gets the Broadway musical he's broadcasted wanting to do. As for the chemistry question, the actors are overflowing with it. 'Josh is one of the easiest people to build chemistry with,' Mescal said at the news conference. '[Josh] has a great gift [in that] the person the general public sees is very close to the person we know,' Mescal continued. 'That's a very difficult thing for an actor to do in today's age.' The two men were attached to the film as it developed for four or five years and already came to know each other well. For three or four weeks, they filmed in the woods together, sharing inside jokes and warming up in cars instead of film trailers. On-screen, that gravitational pull is rarely shown with the touching of flesh, but rather through loving, sometimes lustful gazes and dialogue laden with unspoken meaning. More than a few critics brought up parallels to 'Brokeback Mountain,' Ang Lee's celebrated 2005 story of repression and longing among cowboys. Mescal pushed back on that notion in the news conference: 'I personally don't see the parallels to 'Brokeback Mountain,' other than we spend a little bit of time in a tent, but to each their own.' He added, 'To be honest, I find those comparisons relatively lazy and frustrating. For the most part, I think that the relationship that I have to the film is born out of the fact that it's a celebration of these two men's love, not a film about their repressed relationship with their sexuality.' Mubi bought the film out of Cannes and will be bringing it to North America sometime this year. The exact release date is unknown, but it will surely be accompanied by new TikToks of Mescal having pipes, and rightly so.
Belfast Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Sport
- Belfast Telegraph
Two NIFL Premiership clubs chase Loughgall ace
Loughgall midfielder Adhamh Towe looks set to be handed the opportunity to stay in the Sports Direct Premiership, with at least a trio of clubs keen to offer him top flight football next season. Towe, who only turned 20 in March, held down a regular place in the Villagers team, appearing in 35 of their 38 League games and the form that helped him to become almost an automatic choice has caught the eye of other clubs.
Boston Globe
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Jason Momoa shines in ‘A Minecraft Movie'
Jennifer Coolidge in a scene from "A Minecraft Movie." Kristy Griffin/Associated Press If you've never heard of 'Minecraft' — or its denizens like Creepers, Piglins, Villagers and Endermen — you are in big trouble. Consult with the closest 10-year-old immediately. (I have one and he noticed a sweet nod to the late YouTuber Technoblade, an Easter egg of sorts.) The movie is faithful to the world of the game, while adding some things — orbs and crystals — to aid the plot. But if you come in cold and spot pandas and folks punching through earth, you'll likely side with one human character who says: 'This place makes no sense.' Advertisement A scene from "A Minecraft Movie." Uncredited/Associated Press Our travelers — a sweet brother and sister (Emma Myers and Sebastian Eugene Hansen), their nutty real estate agent From left, Sebastian Hansen, Danielle Brooks, and Emma Myers in a scene from "A Minecraft Movie." Uncredited/Associated Press If it does anything, 'A Minecraft Movie' marks the comedic coming of age of Momoa, who has shown glimpses of his chops in the Advertisement 'There's no 'i' in 'team' but there are two 'i's in 'winning,'' Momoa says as Garrett 'The Garbage Man' Garrison, who is fond of fingerless gloves and a A scene from "A Minecraft Movie." Uncredited/Associated Press The screenplay written by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta is as loosey-goosey as you'd expect from five different voices, with a traditional Marvel-style battle at the end fueled by plenty of 'Let's do this!' declarations but with a surprisingly goofball first half. Like countless films before it, 'A Minecraft Movie' is all about the quest to go home, which in this case means navigating zombies, skeletons shooting fire-tipped arrows and a place called The Nether, a perpetually dark hell where horrible creatures mine for gold. For some reason, the ruler there, a piglike witch, has glowing eyes and a British accent. The writers make some 'America's Got Talent' jokes, Black has a few songs — including a bizarre 'Steve's Lava Chicken' — and we spend an inordinate of time focused on Momoa's butt, but it all ends in a dance party. The movie has a 'Dark Crystal'-meets-'Transformers' vibe, a too-subtle message about financial failure and something about friendship. A scene from "A Minecraft Movie." Uncredited/Associated Press The filmmakers do have characters throw eggs — Advertisement Hollywood's embrace of gaming has been yielding hits such as HBO's As for 'A Minecraft Movie,' the advice is this: Come for the Piglins, stay for Momoa, whom you will see spectacularly failing at being bilingual and jujutsu-ing opponents dressed like a member of Skid Row. It's everything you ever needed. ★★½ A MINECRAFT MOVIE Directed by Jared Hess. Written by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta. Starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Sebastian Hansen. At AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, AMC Causeway, Landmark Kendall Square, suburbs. 101 minutes. PG (violence/action, language, suggestive/rude humor and some scary images)
