"Sling Blade" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
Finally, just under two years after its US debut at the Telluride Film Festival, and 16 months after it won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay, Billy Bob Thornton's accomplished Gothic drama, Sling Blade, arrives on release here, playing at a single Dublin screen. The wait has been well worth it in the case of this moving and mesmerising movie which represents a tour de force for Thornton, its writer, director and leading actor.
So compelling is the film that it even survives the tired framing device of Thornton's character, Karl Childers, telling his story to a journalist. We learn that Karl grew up in a small Arkansas town where his childhood amounted to suffering a catalogue of cruelty doled out by fanatically religious parents. At 12, Karl found his mother in bed with another man and he killed both of them with the scythe which gives the film its title.
Having spent 25 years incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane, Karl is released into the community at the age of 37, so uneasily and reluctantly entering a world he barely knows that he asks to be re-admitted to the institution where he has spent most of his life. Instead, he is sent back to his home town and given a job as a mechanic.
For the first time in his life, Karl gains a friend, Frank, an innocent local boy who lives with his widowed mother. Significantly, Frank is 12 years old, the age Karl was when he was sentenced to confinement, and it's as if Karl were picking up where his own childhood was cut off. It is equally significant that the simpleminded Karl's surname is Childers - a reference to his child-like nature or, perhaps, to Childermas, the feast of the Holy Innocents. Karl seems to be settling into a new, contented life with Frank, his mother, Linda, and her gay friend and employer, Vaughan - until Linda's alcoholic redneck lover, Doyle, turns more and more abusive. The road to redemption and retribution is signalled long before that path is taken in this slow-burning drama overhung by a dreadful inevitability.
Thornton's unshowy and unobtrusive direction allows the drama and its protagonists to breathe and develop at a precisely sustained pace, while savouring the often off-the-wall dialogue and the dark humour with which the drama is laced. The movie's muted colour scheme and the subtle score by Daniel Lanois enhance the film's low-key, simmering atmosphere as it builds to a powerful climax. The result is as thoughtful as it is disturbing.
There is a hypnotic quality to Billy Bob Thornton's central performance which makes the gravel-voiced Karl simultaneously eerie and engaging. Thornton, a long-time character actor who first made a notable impression with his screenplay for the gripping Arkansas-set thriller, One False Move, surrounds himself with a fine cast hand-picked for their roles while the screenplay was still in development.
They include the country singer, Dwight Yoakam, as the instinctually aggressive Doyle; the expressive child actor, Lucas Black, as Frank; Natalie Canerday from One False Move as the beleagured Linda; John Ritter, cast against type as the gay Vaughan; and in cameos, Robert Duvall as Karl's deranged, ageing father, and the late J.T. Walsh as a crazed, sex-obsessed fellow inmate of Karl.
"The Wedding Singer" (15) NationwideP}The 1980s revival starts here. In Frank Coraci's romantic comedy, The Wedding Singer, the American comedian, Adam Sandler, plays Robbie Hart, a one-time David Lee Roth wannabe who used to be the lead singer with a rock band - aptly named Final Warning - and is now reduced to performing at weddings. As the movie opens, the year is 1985 and Robbie is storming through Dead Or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) at a wedding reception.
Soon he's reduced to tears when his own fiancee leaves him standing at the altar on their wedding day. Solace is provided by Julia (Drew Barrymore), a sweet-natured young waitress who seems to be the perfect match for Robbie, a young man so kind-hearted that he gives singing lessons to an elderly woman who pays him in meatballs. The problem is that Julia is engaged to a two-timing yuppie who drives a DeLorean and dresses in the style of his favourite television show, Miami Vice.
As Coraci and his screenwriter, Tim Herlihy, engineer the bringing of Robbie and Julia closer and closer together, they pepper the picture with cultural references to the mid-1980s. One character tries to figure out a Rubik's Cube, another breakdances, yet another struggles with the new-fangled invention that is the CD player, and a child runs around in a Freddy Kreuger mask and taloned gloves.
Above all there's the soundtrack, an incessant wall-to-wall jukebox of period pop songs which sounds like the playlist for a show in the late Vincent Hanley's innovative television series, MT USA: Kajagoogoo, Hall and Oates, Wham!, Thompson Twins, Cars, Musical Youth, Nena, David Bowie, Psychedelic Furs, Smiths, New Order, B-52s, Huey Lewis and the News. Plus we get Alexis Arquette as Robbie's keyboard player, a Boy George fan who has just one song in his repertoire (Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?); an outrageously funny Steve Buscemi as a drunken wedding guest performing Spandau Ballet's True; and Adam Sandler's Robbie at his most morose performing a slowed-down, misery-racked version of Madonna's Holiday.
Although at times it feels padded to stretch it out to feature length, The Wedding Singer is made with a keen sense of the absurd and features appealing performances from the usually underused Drew Barrymore and from Adam Sandler, who was quite unbearable in Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison. However, the make-up department ought to have worked somewhat harder on making Billy Idol - who plays himself in a cameo - look less haggard and more like he looked back in 1985.
"Touch" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The fast-rising young American actor, Skeet Ulrich, who uncannily resembles Johnny Depp, earned his first leading role in Paul Schrader's belatedly arrived Touch, based on an Elmore Leonard novel. Ulrich plays Juvenal, a Franciscan monk who returns from the Amazon jungle to works at a Los Angeles rehabilitation centre for alcoholics.
A stigmatist who is revealed to have miraculous healing powers, Juvenal quickly attracts the attention of a slick opportunist (Christopher Walken) who moved into selling mobile homes when his gimmicky Georgia church closed down - and of the media, including a controversy-driven chat show host played by an unrecognisable Gina Gershon.
Phoney evangelists and sensationalist media are obvious and easy targets for humour, but Schrader's adaptation of Leonard's novel lays it on with caustic cynicism. Walken refers to a hit CD of Gregorian chants as "guys in hoods mumbling soul music", and notes that the Pope's album made £2.5 million, to which an entrepreneur (Paul Mazursky) replies, "Yeah, but he toured". This is ostensibly untypical material for Schrader, even though he grew up in a strict Calvinist family and he once studied divinity at a seminary. Ultimately not quite as satisfyingly developed as it ought to have been, Touch is enlivened by some sparkling repartee and by a solid cast which also includes Janeane Garofalo, Lolita Davidovich, and Tom Arnold as a fanatically traditionalist Catholic who goes around breaking up guitar Masses.
"Kiss Or Kill" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Bill Bennett's edgy Australian road movie opens on the Dylan Thomas quotation from which it takes its title: "They dance between their arc lamps and our skull/Impose their shots, throwing the night away/We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill/Flavoured of celluloid, give love the lie."
There follows a truly arresting and shocking opening sequence as Bennett sets up the chase which is the core of his film. Matt Day and Frances O'Connor (both from Love and Other Catstrophes) play Al and Nikki, young lovers operating as petty thieves in Adelaide. One of their scams goes seriously wrong when a man she seduces, and whom they plan to rob, dies in his hotel room. With the police in pursuit, they take to the road - and they discover that the dead man's briefcase, which they have stolen, contains a videotape with incriminating footage of Zipper, a former football star, involved in paedophiliac activity. With Zipper also on their trail, Al and Nikki turn nervy and paranoid under the pressure, and the body count escalates as they make their way to Perth across the barren Nullarbor Plain.
Working from his own clever screenplay, Bill Bennett fashions an intriguing thriller from the premises he establishes, regularly confounding audience expectations and shifting suspicions of guilt from one character to another, all the way to the creepy conclusion. The drama unfolds against striking landscapes handsomely captured by cinematographer Malcolm McCulloch. And there is some welcome light relief along the way in the form of the eccentrics the runaways encounter and the quirky cops who are chasing them. The movie marks a welcome return to form for Bennett after the debacle of his American debut with the Sandra Bullock vehicle, Two If By Sea (released here as Stolen Hearts). One of the most neglected Australian talents outside his own country, Bennett was an award-winning current affairs journalist on television before turning to film direction with such commendable movies as A Street to Die, Backlash, Malpractice and Spider and Rose, all of which were relegated to festival screenings in this part of the world. His surefooted comeback with Kiss Or Kill is undermined only by its initially disorienting but ultimately merely irritating resource to jump-cut editing which he employs excessively.
Hugh Linehan adds:
"A Thousand Acres" (18) Nationwide
In the wake of the success of Jane Campion, is it possible to reinvent the Hollywood "women's movie" genre for the late 1990s? Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse, who made an impressive debut with the original and provocative Proof, and went on to direct the disappointingly slushy How To Make An American Quilt, is clearly trying. But her version of Jane Smiley's award-winning Lear-esque novel suggests that the task may be beyond her.
In A Thousand Acres, Jason Robards plays Larry Cook, the patriarchal landowner who decides to divide the family farm between his three daughters, resentful Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), obedient Ginny (Jessica Lange) and headstrong Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Robards's unilateral decision sets in motion a series of conflicts which will ultimately tear the family apart and destroy the "kingdom", as the family's hidden secrets rise to the surface. With Larry as Lear, Rose as Regan, Ginny as Goneril and Caroline as Cordelia the stage is set for a potentially fascinating reworking of the story, privileging the "bad" daughters from a feminist perspective. Unfortunately, all we get is bad melodrama, without even the consolation of high camp. Lange and Pfeiffer are both competent enough (although the former's over-intrusive voiceover becomes a major irritant), but their starry presence in itself mitigates against the story's spikier possibilities and contributes to the film's irredeemable blandness.
The American Gothic potential of the setting is spurned in favour of a deeply conservative visual style, perhaps as an attempt to counteract the story's increasingly frenetic plot twists. Somewhere in here, there's a much harder, more original and interesting film trying to get out, but it remains buried beneath all the bathos.
