Never Been Kissed (15) General release
Few child stars ever succeed in pursuing their acting careers into adulthood, but Drew Barrymore has emerged as one of the shrewdest survivors. Having made her film debut in Ken Russell's Altered States when she was four, she enchanted audiences two years later as the cute little sister, Gertie, in ET: The Extra-Terres- trial. However, as she entered her teens, Drew drew far more attention for her real-life substance excesses than for anything she did on the screen. Nevertheless, after a string of mostly mediocre movies, she has bounced back in recent years with hits such as Scream, Ever After and The Wedding Singer, and she makes her first venture into production through her company, Flower Films, with Never Been Kissed, a custom-built star vehicle designed to extend her range and display her flair for quirky comedy.
She plays Josie Gellar, a mousy, awkward, 25-year-old copy editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. Her long-held ambition of turning reporter is finally realised when she's assigned to go undercover, posing as a high school student to write an expose on the mores of today's teens. Having had a truly miserable time when she herself was at high school - and having endured such cruel humiliation that she has sworn off men since her prom night - she sets about getting it right second time around, but there are complications, not least when she falls for her English literature teacher (Michael Vartan).
As appears to be de rigeur for American high school movies these days, the screenplay prominently invokes Shakespearean references, as when parallels are drawn between Josie's camouflage and Rosalind's disguise in As You Like It, and the teacher talks about how liberating disguise can be. That's the point of Never Been Kissed, too, up to the stage when Josie finally can be herself. That route towards self-discovery is peppered with amusing throwaway humour in a movie which even gets away with an only-in-America feel-good finale.
Barrymore hasn't been so appealing since she was in ET, and she surrounds herself with such capable players as David Arquette, John C. Reilly, Garry Marshall and Leelee Sobieski. This broad but sweet-natured romantic comedy is directed by Raja Gosnell, the former film editor who made a quite inauspicious directing debut with Home Alone 3.
Michael Dwyer
Chance or Coincidence/Hasards ou Coincidences (members and guests only) IFC,Dublin
Thirty-three years - and almost as many films - after his international breakthrough with Un Homme et Une Femme, Claude Lelouch returns to the principal thematic and stylistic motif of his work in Hasards ou Coincidences. So replete with his preoccupations is the new film that it could be titled Claude Lelouch's Greatest Hits - with all the qualifications this inevitably entails because, let's face it, so many of the cinematic exercises among Lelouch's remarkably prolific output have been no more than exercises which failed to reveal much of substance beneath their sleek, flashy imagery.
While Hasards ou Coincidences does not rank with Lelouch's most satisfying early work - Vivre Pour Vivre and La Bonne Annee, along with Un Homme et Une Femme - it continues the upward turn in his movies which began with his rich 1995 treatment of Les Miserables. Questions of fate again preoccupy Lelouch in his new film, another of his handsome globe-trotting movies which brings characters tantalisingly close to each other time after time only to keep them apart until shortly before the credits roll.
In her fourth consecutive film for Lelouch, Alessandra Martines plays Myriam, a ballerina divorced from her dancer husband and visiting Venice with her eightyear-old son when fate brings her together with an older man, Pierre (Pierre Arditi), an art dealer who paints forgeries, and their relationship is chronicled by the camcorder he gives her as a gift.
The three of them embark on a dream holiday with an itinerary that includes seeing the polar bears of Canada, a Montreal ice hockey star, the death-defying divers of Acapulco, and the whirling dervishes of Turkey. When tragedy strikes, the survivor sets out to continue this quest - until the camcorder is stolen and Marc (Marc Hollogne), a Quebecois history lecturer and performance artist, acquires it and becomes fascinated by the story it reveals. "There is no chance or coincidence, only consequences," observes Marc, who clearly is not up to speed on the Lelouch oeuvre.
It has been said more than once that form triumphs over content in the cinema of Claude Lelouch. Form is dazzling as ever in his new film, which is realised in a series of ravishing wide-screen compositions lit by Pierre-William Glenn, and the on-location round-the-world set-pieces make for irresistible viewing, none more so than the trance-like whirling dervishes.
That sequence is the crowning point in the movie's parallel celebration of the joy of performance and its celebration of his wife, Alessandra Martines, in the central role. His camera positively adores her, and their obvious empathy draws such an expressive performance from her that it regularly transcends the movie's more superficial plotting.
Michael Dwyer
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (18) General release
Yes, it's cheap and nasty-looking. Yes, it's full of jokes about farting, vomiting and sodomy. Yes, many people are likely to find its depiction of religion deeply offensive (and one wonders whether the creaky Irish blasphemy laws will be tested by the sympathetic depiction of Satan and the insults hurled at God).
But South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is one of the funniest, sharpest American films seen in quite some time. Trey Parker and Matt Stone seem to have taken considerably more care with their movie script than with their television series, which to these eyes has always been a hit-and-miss affair. The basic South Park dynamic, of taking an absurd set-up and pursuing it to its even more ridiculous conclusion, works perfectly here, probably because it's exactly the same three-act principle which informs every "high-concept" Hollywood action flick.
In this case, the story revolves around a controversial R-rated Canadian movie, which third-graders Stan, Cartman, Kyle, Kenny and the entire under-age population of the Colorado town of South Park manage to sneak into. Soon, all the kids are spouting the foul language they've heard in the film, and their outraged parents are demanding war against Canada. As hostilities spin out of control, the Canadians order pre-emptive bombing strikes against Hollywood dynasties like the Baldwins and the Arquettes, and the United States comes under the control of a proto-fascist dictatorship led by Kyle's mother, Sheila. Meanwhile, Satan, ensconced in his love nest with Saddam Hussein, awaits the Armageddon which only the South Park kids can prevent.
Southpark: Bigger, Longer & Uncut takes as many liberties as it can - then pushes things further. The "Uncut" isn't strictly accurate, though: Parker and Stone had a long, tortuous wrangle with the American ratings board, the MPAA, before receiving a certificate for their film, which among other things pokes merciless fun at the whole ratings system and the thinking behind it.
If the movie relied solely on confrontational excess, though, it would hardly sustain even its 81 minutes, but it's packed with so many visual and verbal gags that it's often difficult to keep up. Relentlessly inventive and highly original, it's also, somewhat surprisingly, the first really good musical in years - the pastiches of song styles, particularly of the dreaded Disney tearjerkers, are note-perfect. These kids sure know how to put on a show.
Life (15) General release
In this misbegotten attempt at a buddy-movie take on The Shawshank Redemption, Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence play New York bootleggers who find themselves wrongly accused of murder in 1930s Mississippi, and spend the next 60 years in the state penitentiary. A measure of the film's failure is that it seems more like 100 years. Murphy and Lawrence's patter is familiar from too many other two-hander comedies, while the movie glosses over the viciousness of the penal system in case it spoils their jaded schtick. By the halfway point in this tedious, over-extended and self-indulgent farrago, one can't help wishing that the judge had just sent the pair straight to the chair.
Re-issued in new prints at the IFC today are Federico Fellini's haunting and heartbreaking 1957 Nights of Cabiria, which features his wife, Giulietta Masina, in the finest performance of her career; and Godfrey Reggio's trippy 1983 eco-epic, Koyaanisqatsi, featuring a towering score from Philip Glass.
Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, which had been set to open today, has been deferred until September
