Liam McGrath's endearing documentary has a rich subject in Francis Barrett, the young Traveller who represented Ireland as a light-welterweight boxer in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. This emotional chronicle follows his training in the most primitive of circumstances on a Galway halting site, and in the Olympic Boxing Club set up in the city by his close friend, mentor and trainer, the Galway barber Chick Gillen.
It goes on to capture the grinning 19-year-old boxer as he bounds into the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta, proudly carrying the Tricolour as he leads the Irish delegation past a waving Bill Clinton, while his family sits rapt in front of a television set back home. The story swings from the high of Barrett's first bout to the low of losing in the second, and back up to a rapturous reception back home - even though some minor politicians are less than pleased to have a Traveller represent their country.
Barrett's unassuming confidence and entirely unaffected personality shine through this wholly engaging documentary in which the other star is his ever-optimistic, ever-encouraging coach, Chick. Employing minimal narration and some astute observations from sportswriters Tom Humphries and Gerry Callan, the film continues to follow the ups and downs in Barrett's progress in the Irish and English ABA finals.
When Southpaw comes to an end, it really feels like it's just the end of part one - with part two to follow in the summer of next year at the Sydney Olympics, when Francis Barrett goes back into the ring with the aim of taking home gold for Ireland. A rare case of a sequel seeming like a cherishable project.
Meet Joe Black (12) General release
Rarely has a film-maker taken so long to say so little as Martin Brest does in his glossy, sprawling morality fable, Meet Joe Black. It is loosely based on Mitchell Leisen's 1934 movie Death Takes A Holiday, a stage adaptation in which Death materialises as a prince (played by Fredric March) who falls in love with a guest (Evelyn Venable) of an Italian family; it was remade for television in 1971 with Melvyn Douglas and Myrna Loy.
Brest's lavish updating features Brad Pitt at his most cherubic as cinema's most glamorous personification of Death, taking over the body of a chirpy, handsome young man who is killed shortly after meeting an attractive young doctor (Claire Forlani) in a Manhattan diner. Death's mission is to take from this world a fabulously wealthy media tycoon, William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins), whose daughters are preparing an elaborate party to celebrate his 65th birthday. In the original story Death took on human form to discover why he is feared so much by the living. In Brest's version Death seems simply curious to experience an affluent lifestyle, adopting the name Joe Black as he infiltrates the Parrish household. This personification of Death is no gourmet, given the way he rhapsodises over the pleasures of peanut butter - despite the fine food cooked by the Parrish kitchen staff.
Because Death/Joe is a virgin, there are further pleasures to discover in the arms of Parrish's younger daughter, Susan, who just happens to be the dedicated young doctor from the earlier diner sequence. Parrish clearly approves, given his recurring exhortation to Susan to get a life or, as he so quaintly puts it, "to sing with rapture, dance like a dervish".
When the narrative shifts to the conventional tangent of a corporate take-over threatening the dying tycoon, good old Death is there to turn the tables on Parrish's Machiavellian would-be son-in-law (Jake Weber). The only other significant characters in the scenario are Parrish's older daughter (Marcia Gay Harden) and her husband, played by Jeffrey Tambor as a nervy, fawning sycophant not at all unlike Tambor's Hank Kinglsey role on The Larry Sanders Show.
Brest's plans to bring Meet Joe Black to the screen were in gestation for two decades, we're told, and it took at least four screenwriters to pull the script together. The result, however, is closer to soap-on-a-budget than an arresting metaphysical fable, not least because all the characters are drawn so simplistically. That said, the actors give all they can to their limited material, with Hopkins, in a characteristically authoritative performance, generating some audience sympathy for Parrish's fate.
At a full three hours, Brest's contrived film is half-an-hour longer than the combined running times of the 1934 and 1971 treatments of the same source material, and it is seriously over-stretched and long overstays its welcome. Brest started out making brisk action movies such as Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run before succumbing to unwarranted notions of self-importance with his tiresomely inflated - and ridiculously over-praised - remake of an Italian original in Scent Of A Woman. Like the makers of Godzilla, he is learning the hard way that substance matters a good deal more than size, even at the box-office.
Sitcom (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The bright young writer-director, Francois Ozon, who won the short film prize at the French Film Festival in Dublin three years ago with the exuberant Une Robe d'Ete, makes an assured feature film debut with the provocative social comedy, Sitcom. It deals with an apparently contented - but decidedly dysfunctional - suburban French family of four whose bourgeois lifestyle is turned upside down after the father (Francois Marthouret) brings home a rat as a pet. Evelyne Dandry is delightfully deadpan as the materfamilias who looks on aghast as her son comes out as gay and her daughter attempts to commit suicide; to give the material a sharper edge, the offspring are played by real-life siblings, Marina and Adrien De Van. The spirited cast also includes Lucia Sanchez (from Une Robe d'Ete) as the family's truly unpredictable maid; Jules-Emmanuel Eyoum Deido as her avidly bisexual Cameroon-born husband; and Stephane Rideau (who was so impressive in Les Roseaux Sauvages) as the daughter's boyfriend, who contributes the movie's most startling visual revelation.
In this broad farce the consequences also involve incest, and group sex orgies which are left unseen but hilariously suggested. Ozon ultimately leaves himself with so many situations to resolve that he loses his grip on the frenetic material and fumbles its final stages, but getting to that point is all of the fun in this calculatedly outrageous comedy with resonant echoes of Almodovar, Bunuel and John Waters.
