Sweety Barrett (15) Selected cinemas
The accomplished Irish actor, Brendan Gleeson, continues to demonstrate his range in Sweety Barrett, an engagingly offbeat morality fable which marks an auspicious feature debut for its Irish writer-director, Stephen Bradley. Shot largely in Balbriggan, Co Dublin, the film is set in a strange, timeless world - the fictional town of Dockery, a run-down port populated mostly by dishevelled eccentrics.
Brendan Gleeson plays Sweety Barrett, a shambling, bewildered-looking man who is one of life's innocents. Losing his sword-swallowing job in a circus, he turns up in Dockery and finds himself working for smugglers ruled by Bone (Liam Cunningham), a ruthless, sadistic and wholly corrupt detective. Sweety befriends a six-year-old boy (promising newcomer Dylan Murphy) and his mother (Lynda Steadman) whose husband (Andy Serkis) is in prison. When Bone's criminal deeds precipitate a catastrophic incident, Sweety, the gentle giant, transforms into the angel of vengeance.
In a role which offers him minimal dialogue, Brendan Gleeson is remarkably expressive with a sensitive, subtle and fascinating portrayal of a naive protagonist who possesses an innate sense of goodness and instinct for survival. In a strong cast, Liam Cunningham is successfully cast against type as the utterly despicable Bone, a character wholly devoid of redeeming features. Displaying an evident cinematic flair, Stephen Bradley imaginatively situates this story of good versus evil in a surreal world which heightens the movie's intriguing aspects and its strange, moody atmosphere. While the inevitable climax is signalled early on in the narrative, its execution retains the simmering tension Bradley builds throughout the film's progress. The film is distinctively photographed by Thomas Mauch, whose many films for Werner Herzog have included Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and it is accompanied by a fine score by Stephen McKeon.
Showing on the same programme as Sweety Barrett is Lipservice, the second short film directed by Paul Mercier after his notable debut, Before I Sleep, which starred Brendan Gleeson. Set in north Dublin community school on the day of the oral Irish exams, Lipservice features the excellent Sean McGinley as the visiting cigire whose presence has the students and the teachers on edge.
Barry Ward (from Family) is nicely deadpan as the school's star Irish speaker who decides to mitch for the day, leaving the poor cigire to interview a succession of fumbling students desperately trying to stretch their hopelessly limited Irish vocabulary, or blankly staring in incomprehension. You will need just a little more gaeilge than they possess to get most of the humour in this witty, keenly observed study in communication breakdown.
By Michael Dwyer
An Ideal Husband (PG) General release
Just as two rival biopics of Oscar Wilde opened within months of each other in 1960 - one starring Peter Finch, the other with Robert Morley - this year sees the release of two movies based on Wilde's play, An Ideal Husband. On the way is an updated treatment featuring James Wilby and Sadie Frost, while here today is an essentially faithful version, adapted and directed by Oliver Parker, for his first film since his interesting debut in 1995 with Othello.
Parker assembles an international cast, with mostly satisfying results. Rupert Everett, in particular, is perfectly cast as the pivotal figure, the devoted womaniser and bon viveur, Arthur Goring, who's described by his best friend, Sir Robert Chiltern (Jeremy Northam) as "the idlest man in London".
Set in 1895, over the course of 24 hours during the London season, it begins on what Goring wearily describes as a busy day with "distressingly little time for sloth or idleness". Somehow he finds it within his pampered self to rise to the occasion when he has to come to the aid of Chiltern, the under-secretary for foreign affairs. Visiting London from Vienna for the week is the scheming Mrs Cheveley (Julianne Moore), who is blackmailing Chiltern. In exchange for his support in parliament for a dubious scheme in which she has an interest, she will destroy the evidence she holds of his exploitation of a cabinet secret for personal gain.
It might appear to be difficult to go wrong with material like Wilde's original play, but it defeated Alexander Korda when he directed it in 1947 and Oliver Parker takes several missteps in his treatment. There is something strained about his efforts to open out the essentially stage-bound structure of a drawing-room comedy. At one point he despatches his principal characters to the theatre, but the play they see - when they're not busy watching each other - is The Importance of Being Earnest, even though that play, Wilde's last, had not been staged before An Ideal Husband.
More grating is Parker's needless indulgence in intrusively abrupt cutting, which disturbs the rhythm he is trying to catch. And when that rhythm ought to quicken as a denouement looms, Parker succumbs to merely flaccid pacing. Fortunately, the movie is buoyed by its elegantly scripted dialogue, which is delivered with elan by Everett, who feasts on lines such as "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance". Julianne Moore, the American actress who was so impressive in Safe, Boogie Nights and Vanya On 42nd Street, plays the malicious Mrs Cheveley with admirable relish, and the Australian star of Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett, is radiant as the idealistic Lady Chiltern. The less said about Minnie Driver's performance as the ninny, Mabel Chiltern, the better.
By Michael Dwyer
Aprile/April (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Although he has yet to achieve anything like the international recognition showered on his contemporary and fellow Italian actor, writer and director, Roberto Benigni, Nanni Moretti is one of Italian cinema's singular talents. Like Benigni, Moretti has the capacity to see humour in just about everything, but in keeping with his less flamboyant personality, Moretti's humour is more subtle and quirky than Benigni's all-out slapstick.
Aprile, Moretti's follow-up to his autobiographical 1993 film, Dear Diary, again features the film-maker as himself and in anecdotal mode for another of his personal diaries. It spans three years of his life, beginning with his dismayed response to the 1994 election of the right-wing party led by the media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi - which prompts Moretti to smoke a joint for the first time in his life.
When that government falls a year later, Moretti defers plans to make a musical about a 1950s Trotsky-ite pastry chef and instead sets out to make a documentary on the imminent elections. However, he is easily distracted from his mission, not least by the impending birth of his son.
In Moretti's characteristically digressive way of things, there are sideswipes along the way at the dumbing down and sleazing up of the Italian media, at Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (which Moretti regrets inflicting on his asyet unborn son), and at the fate of Albanian refugees escaping to Italy.
The deceptively simple Aprile sparkles with warmth, humour and striking imagery over the course of a jaunty 78 minutes which pass all too quickly and build to a quite exuberant finale.
By Michael Dwyer
Slam (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Arriving here laden with awards from Sundance and Cannes, Slam, the first narrative feature by the documentarist, Marc Levin, is a worthy, well-intentioned but overwrought effort which falls well short of expectations. Levin's work in documentaries over the past decade has concentrated on gang wars and Death Row inmates. One of his collaborators as a writer and producer on Slam is Richard Stratton, who served eight years behind bars for smuggling marijuana and wrote the underground novel, Smack Goddess. One of Stratton's fellow ex-convicts, the former mayor of Washington DC, Marion Barry, has a cameo in Slam - as a judge, no less.
Slam features Saul Williams as a gifted black rapper/poet in Washington D.C., who is arrested on a drugs charge, and told that young men of his race and background don't stand a chance. He releases his frustrations through freestyle rap poetry sessions and finds a soul-mate and inspiration in the writing teacher (Sonja Sohn) he meets while in jail. Freedom is a state of mind, even if you're in jail, she tells him.
Levin's film comes to life in the fluid and spirited rapping sessions which are the raison d'etre of an often trite and patronising movie. While Saul Williams persuasively plays the central role, director Levin ought never to have allowed Sonja Sohn to improvise some of her scenes with him to such shrill effect.
By Michael Dwyer
Return to Paradise (15) General release
In Joseph Ruben's crisis-of-conscience drama (loosely based on the 1990 French film, Force Majeure), Vince Vaughn and David Conrad play young American tourists on an extended and leisurely vacation in south-east Asia, who hook up with a travelling companion (Joaquin Phoenix) in Penang, Malaysia for a few weeks of mellow, stoned hanging out. Returning to the US, Vaughn and Conrad have no reason to think anything is wrong until they are approached two years later by attorney Anne Heche, who tells them that Phoenix has been incarcerated in a Malaysian jail since their departure, charged with possession of the hashish the three had dumped before leaving for home. The quantity of drugs found means that Phoenix has been charged with dealing, an offence punishable by death, but if Vaughn and Conrad accept their responsibility for the drugs, all three will receive prison sentences.
Written by Bruce Robinson (a man who has proved his knowledge of South-East Asia and illegal substances with his scripts for The Killing Fields and Withnail and I), Return to Paradise avoids the quasi-racist excesses of other Westerners-in-peril dramas like Midnight Express, and its top-notch cast strives valiantly to wring as much value as possible out of the characters' moral dilemmas. But Ruben, whose previous credits include the dim-witted Sleeping With The Enemy and the under-whelming Money Train, fails to bring any style, flair or surprises to a not very memorable movie.
By Hugh Linehan
Urban Legend (18) General release
The latest in the current wave (threatening to become a deluge) of self-referential slasher movies, Urban Legend faithfully follows the template set by Scream writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven - a dash of teen angst, a dollop of ironic distance, and a bucket of fake blood. Given that the law of diminishing returns has already set in with a vengeance for this particular fad, it comes as no surprise that first-time director Jamie Blanks's effort is so predictable, from its Drew Barrymore-ish opening sequence to its implausible denouement.
Where Scream drew on the horror movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s for its plotting, Blanks's murderer, at large on a New England university campus, bases his crimes on "urban legends" - the sort of apocryphal tales of horrible accidents and killings that always happened to a friend of a friend of a neighbour's cousin. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough of these to last for an entire movie, so Silvio Horta's script soon lapses into a formulaic and tedious stalk-and-stab routine.
By Hugh Linehan
