High school musical

What would a 21st. century "Grease" look and sound like? Grease was a gritty play and a light-weight film but it was nostalgia even when it was first written. Would a modern musical go back to the 1970's. What about Ireland of that era?

Hollywood Dads

Fathers feature extensively in recent films but normally as dysfunctional or absent fathers.

RomCom

New Yorker has an interesting piece on the "slacker romance" e.g. "Knocked Up" . I can't think of a recent film where there was a good balance between the male and female leads. Of course, the days of "romance" are over - only period pieces like "Sense and Sensibility" can rely on romance to carry the plot. Who cares whether contemporary characters have sex or get married? Perhap soap operas carry this off because the audience builds sufficient rapport with the characters.

The DAFT.IE Rent report makes interesting reading. Are FTBs postponing their house purchases and pushing up rents?

"With high rates of home ownership and a booming economy, it is understandable that much of the focus in the past few years, when it came to the property market, was on house prices. The last six months have seen a shift, though, and the spotlight is well and truly on the rental sector. And while soaring house prices had been grabbing all the headlines, the rental market was also entering uncharted territory. Rents have risen in both absolute and year-on-year terms each quarter since late 2004. Recently, the pace at which rents have been rising reached record speed. As shown in the last Daft Rental report, the first quarter of 2007 saw rent increases of 10.8% compared to the same period in 2006. In the second quarter this figure increased to 12.4%

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Meanwhile, all commentators agree that, when looked at in month-on-month or year-on-year terms, the house price boom is over, something fans of the Daft report have known since mid-2006, when asking price inflation started to slow dramatically. With house prices now static, all eyes are on the rental market to see what next for Ireland’s property market. A healthy rental sector that absorbed a shift in supply from sales to letting would reassure people of the fundamentals and steady the nerves. A faltering rental sector, though, with rapidly rising inventories and tumbling rents, would not augur well for house prices over the next two to three years."

Sub-prime roast

This may be the month when the Irish property bubble officially burst, even though the signs have been obvious for almost a year.

Various property surveys are all showing small declines in average prices. These figures are only the tip of the iceberg but the speculators have fled the market and nothing will sell without a substantial price cut.

The Irish Times is hilariously schizophrenic: the main headline yesterday "Turmoil in financial markets could halt rate rises" - finding a silver lining in speculation by some stockbroker's economist that the ECB may backtrack on signalled interest rate increases. The business section was more realistic and carried a number of articles on property speculation, particularly one by Paul Tansey using CSO statistics on empty housing.