Séamas O'Reilly: 'Blackbird' is bad in every way it is possible for a film to be bad

"The script is basically made up of half-remembered lines from films that do make sense, and the plot is garbled to the point of incomprehensibility."

Michael Flatley at the Irish Premiere screening of his film 'Blackbird at the Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin. Picture: Brian McEvoy

The problem with a term like “vanity project” is that it presupposes there is any other form of art. Making a film, or a song, a book, is a staggeringly presumptuous act, in a world so filled with them already.

Take books. I released one of those last year, like a massive, vain child. A 2010 survey suggested 75% of Irish people read six books a year. Extrapolated over 50 years of prime reading age, this amounts to 600 books across a lifetime for the most readerly among us.