Sandra Harris Writes

  ALBA. (2021) BASED ON THE TURKISH DRAMA SERIES, FATMAGUL’UN SUCU NE? DIRECTED BY PABLO GUERRERO, CARLOTA MARTINEZ-PEREDA AND HUMBERTO MIRO. STARRING ELENA RIVERA, ERIC MASIP, CATERINA MENGS, ADRIANA OZORES, ALVARO RICO, POL HERMOSO, JASON FERNANDEZ, FRANKY MARTIN, CANDELA CRUZ AND ANTONIO GIL. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘Our power derives from denying theirs.’ There are almost too many twists and turns in this Spanish psychological drama-thriller, and it could have done without maybe three of its thirteen fifty-minute episodes, but I still really enjoyed this. It reminded me a lot of the English drama series LIAR , which in turn was based on the Spanish drama series LIES AND DECEIT , as drug-rape is the main topic in all three Netflix shows. The thing I’ve noticed with very long, multi-episode series is that they run out of steam a wee bit before the end and as a result get twistier and turnier until some of the twists are, frankly, incomprehensible. Such is the case ...

  LIVE AID, QUEEN, FREDDIE MERCURY AND AIDS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Do you remember where you were when LIVE AID happened? I do. I was just a kid, obsessed with pop and rock, glued to the television on which the biggest benefit concert the world had ever seen was about to kick off with British broadcaster Richard Skinner uttering the immortal words, ‘It’s twelve noon in London (also Ireland, where I was!), seven am in Philadelphia and, around the world, it’s time for LIVE AID.’ It was a gorgeous sunny Saturday in Ireland and I was super-excited about having a day of top quality pop and rock from some of the biggest stars on the planet to look forward to. The legendary concert, organised by rock musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, happened on this day thirty-seven years ago, and it was conceived of after the BBC aired some horrific news reports by Michael Buerk on the 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia. The initial Band Aid project saw the song performed by Various Artists, Do They K...

TWENTY-ONE THINGS I’LL MISS ABOUT THE LOCKDOWNS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, so is that it, then? Two solid years of living in fear, wearing masks to cover our faces, sanitising the top layers of skin off our hands and poking people with a two-metre stick to make sure they didn’t breach our personal defences (or was that last bit just me, lol?) , and now suddenly it’s all over? Throw away your masks and your hand sanitisers and safety signs, and roll around in a big ball of humanity licking people all of a sudden? Okay, fair enough, the global coronavirus pandemic may be approaching end-game, but there are certain things about the various lockdowns- here in Ireland, we had three main ones- that will always make me feel nostalgic when I think about them. Note, by the way, that I’m not saying I’ll miss the pandemic that killed so many innocent people, every single one of them someone’s son, daughter, friend, sibling, parent or neighbour. It’s the lockdowns I’ll miss, and here are the...

  WHEN THEY SEE US. (2019) A NETFLIX TRUE CRIME DRAMA SERIES WRITTEN, CREATED AND DIRECTED BY AVA DUVERNAY. STARRING FELICITY HUFFMAN, VERA FARMIGA, FAMKE JANNSEN AND JOHN LEGUIZAMO. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This is a superb four-part true crime/drama mini-series, but it’s the most harrowing thing I’ve ever seen on Netflix, and all the more harrowing for its all being true, and the fact that the stuff that happens to the young boys in it all actually happened. And, if it’s harrowing to watch, how much worse must it be to have actually lived through all this horrible stuff. Let me tell you the story. On the night of April 19 th , 1989 (can you remember where you were and what you were doing in April of that year, just to put the timeframe into context?), a young white woman, an investment banker called Patricia Meili, went for a run late in the evening in New York’s famous Central Park. Somewhere along the way, she was accosted, raped, beaten severely and left for dead in ...

  THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY. (2016) BASED ON JEFFREY TOOBIN’S 1997 BOOK, THE RUN OF HIS LIFE: THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON. STARRING CUBA GOODING JR., DAVID SCHWIMMER, JOHN TRAVOLTA, NATHAN LANE, SARAH PAULSON, STERLING K. BROWN, KENNETH CHOI AND COURTNEY B. VANCE. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I absolutely loved this gripping ten-episode series, only on Netflix until February 28 th , 2022, which forms the first season of true crime anthology series, AMERICAN CRIME STORY. The writing is brilliant, the acting top-notch and the pacing wonderful. The series is based on the real-life murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman by acclaimed NFL (football) player and sometimes-actor, Orenthal James Simpson, better known to the public as OJ ‘The Juice’ Simpson. OJ was Nicole’s ex-husband, with whom he had two children, Sydney and Justin, and Ronald Goldman was Nicole's then boyfriend. After a widely televised low-speed car chase through Los Angeles (‘The J...

  IN PRAISE OF BACON, AND A GOOD DAY… BUT MOSTLY BACON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Every now and then, you get a lovely day, don’t you? One that shuts your complaining trap for five minutes, lol, and makes you realise how lucky you actually are to be alive. Today was one such day. I had a nice walk in the sunshine with my son, who was off school for an appointment, which got cancelled and left us with some unexpected free time. I love it when that happens, when something just unexpectedly frees you up like that!   I took him for a haircut after we’d done our errands and shopping and such, and, while he was chatting away about football to his barber, I had a bizarre but highly enjoyable conversation with a total stranger, a college student who lives locally. It turns out that this young man, not a native Dubliner, hails from the same place where my mother’s family comes from. I named him all the places where my different aunties lived, he knew them all and furthermore informed...

  VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN IRELAND… WHEN WILL IT END? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © About three weeks ago, a beautiful young school teacher called Aisling Murphy was brutally murdered in Tullamore, while going for a run in the afternoon. It was broad daylight. A man came out of nowhere and strangled her. She was in her early twenties, loved her job as a primary school teacher (and the kids loved her) and was well liked in her community, not to mention loved by her family and boyfriend. She loved playing her traditional music at festivals with her fellow musicians. She seemed like a good, decent person who would have gone on to achieve worthwhile things and contribute something to the world. Last weekend in Cork, a woman was hit in the face and head and left with a broken jaw while walking home alone late at night. A boy of thirteen has been identified as a person of interest in the case. I don’t even know where to begin talking about what’s wrong with this sentence, except to ask th...