We start out with
shots of a lovely young lass filling out a postcard. Apparently she’s living in
New York City, but has a hankering to follow that postcard back across the
water to Dublin. Something about missing her some brown bread. I suppose this
is a really important thing that one can yearn for, but I don’t really know and
it didn’t seem an appropriate time to ask questions. The woman (we’ll call her
Katie, that sounds Irish enough) finishes up her dissatisfied missive and then stares forlornly around the room at
things that are obviously not the brown bread that she wants.
This is the cue
for lead singer Danny (more of the Irish fest!) to kick off the sad beginning
lyrics where we don’t know how “we got into this mad situation”. (Poor
recreational drug usage decisions? A really high wireless bill? That really
horrid woman at the corner deli who always gives you the crappy corned beef?)
While Danny warbles in the black-and-white part of the video where the band
lives, Katie turns to gaze upon her boyfriend, who is probably also sad because
he doesn’t appear to own a shirt. He’s rushing around and getting ready in a
hurried manner that indicates some fool hit the snooze bar too many times.
(Probably Katie, mad that it wasn’t a loaf of brown bread making the noise.)
The boyfriend
(we’ll call him Sean) finally manages to snag a shirt and he prepares to leave
the apartment. But before he can head out to wherever it is that Seans go in
NYC, he leans in to give Katie a little smooch. Instead of allowing this little
peck of love, however, Katie makes a face and pulls back. (So she’s one of those kinds of girls, who get into a
funk and wants everyone else around them to suffer as well. These are the same
girls who are completely stunned when their husband/boyfriend/Soviet same-sex
lover gets fed up with it all and starts trolling porn sites.)
Anyway, Sean
eventually gets away from Katie and her co-dependent blues, hopping on his
motorcycle and zipping away to his workplace where he makes things or sells things
or plays Angry Birds all day. As he
travels, the building scenery in this part of town is kind of blurry, so we
don’t know if the pollution has gotten seriously out of control or if Sean has
lost a contact lens. Meanwhile, Danny and the band continue to play the song
over in that place that looks like the first part of the movie Pleasantville. Their story is just not
as interesting as the tale of the estranged lovers, so we can ignore them for a
while and focus on the next episode of All
My Irish Children.
Now we’re at the
part where they’re sucking down “cheap bottles of wine”, (I guess Sean’s job
only lasts 7 seconds and then he’s home again) and it initially appears that
Katie might be in a better mood, because she actually laughs and doesn’t seem
to be looking for any of the questionable and missing bread. They share a
tender moment where they gaze at one another lovingly while a soft light
enhances the fact that neither of them have any body fat whatsoever. It’s very
sweet, but we know that Katie is going to want a sandwich sooner or later.
And there it is,
with Katie back in her sulking room, fighting back tears as she ponders the
painful drawbacks of moving from a city where relatively little happens to a
city where absolutely everything happens, 24-7. She has a flashback to another
drinking session where she was happy, and then she cries some more. (Is she
missing the obvious point that she is much more fun to be around when alcohol
is involved? Perhaps we should text her.)
We roll into a
montage of Sean rushing about town and doing presumably important things, shots
of Katie possibly lying on the grass in a park and staring up at silent trees
that refuse to assist her with the quest for special bread, and images of the
band playing where we now have a bit of color seeping into the cinematography.
(And they’ve turned up the lights a bit so we can realize there are other band
members besides Danny, and not just quick glimpses of disembodied fingers
strumming a guitar or banging on a drum.)
Now Katie has
managed to find a camera, and she’s wandering among the buildings and trying to
get decent shots so she can show the folks back home what a skyscraper looks
like. This leads to a confusing moment where Katie seems to be stuck on a
chain-link fence but isn’t trying very hard to escape. (Girl has some serious
issues.) This is followed by more frenzied images of Sean still rushing about
for his job (some type of messenger service or drug courier, not clear),
actually making a living instead of pining for baked goods while the laundry
goes undone.
Oh wait, we seem
to have zipped back to happier times again, where we have Katie wearing a
fetching hat and smiling while she and Sean pose in front of the Statue of
Liberty across the bay, a picture angle that no one in the world has ever tried before, right? Sean also
appears to be happy, wearing a festive stocking cap of his own, so he probably
hasn’t yet learned that he’s living with a character from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
We take a short break from the drama so
that Danny can do an interpretive dance on his little stage, an energetic bit
of choreography that seems to involve the invention of the helicopter, sharp
objects on the floor that you should avoid, the Running of the Bulls, and an
unsupervised bottle of cooking sherry. The end of his performance signals
another rolling montage, with more of the happy/sad imagery, the buildings that
are still blurry, somebody driving a car down a busy street like a total
dumbass, brief moments of bed aerobics, and Danny kicking over a piano bench
that has displeased him in some way.
Things slow down
a bit as we watch Sean the boyfriend pausing at some shoreline to reflect on
things like what to do with his life, where he might be able to find some
decent sushi, and what the hell are we going to do about the missing bread.
While the band plays out the last part of the song, Sean comes to a decision,
and we see scenes of him selling his beloved motorcycle to a man who apparently
can’t stand all the way up but likes to wave goodbye with one finger. (Is that
man just really tired or what?)
After an another
dancing exhibition from singer Danny, we watch as Sean strolls up to Katie
sitting on the stoop of their building, with her still looking sad despite
wearing a clever little dress. They head into the building as the song fades,
and Sean hands Katie an envelope. She stares at it suspiciously (probably
because it’s not a loaf of bread) and then finally asks what it is. “It’s a
plane ticket. I quit my job and I’m taking you home.”
It’s very
touching and somebody should probably make a Hallmark movie about it. But I can’t help but wonder if Sean
realizes that, if it’s this hard
keeping Katie happy in New York, it’s going to be even more so in Dublin when
Katie is surrounded by her family and they ALL gang up against him when she gets blue over not being
able to see the Statue of Liberty out her parlor window. (Irish families don’t
play when one of their own is not happy.) Sean might have just made a poor life
decision, especially if they get Tori Spelling to dye her hair and play the
role of Katie…
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