Congratulations and good luck to Maretta Dillon, who has been appointed as the Dublin Film Festival's new programme director. Best known to Dublin cinema-goers for running the late, lamented Light House Cinema with Neil Connolly, she served as the Dublin Film Festival's manager in 1990 and 1991. She was also one of the organisers of last year's festival of Women In Film and Television. "I'm looking forward to working hard on the programme," she told Reel News this week. "We're going to see distributors next week and we're actively pursuing films." The festival has moved from its early March dates to a mid-April slot, and it will run from April 15th to 25th, spanning two weekends for the first time.
Maretta Dillon is joined in the festival's new, all-woman triumvirate, so to speak, by festival manager Anne Burke and development manager Aine O'Halloran.
Having made 12 movies in three years - and with three of those films opening in London last weekend and a fourth out on video this week - Jonathan Rhys Meyers is one of the most prolific actors in cinema today. But he has some way to go before he catches the truly ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson, the busiest in actor in American cinema today, according to a Variety survey.
With 33 movies to his credit so far this decade, Jackson ranks first ahead of Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel, both of whom have been in 28 films during the same period. They are followed by the late J.T. Walsh (with 25 films), Whoopi Goldberg (24, two of them voiceovers for animated features), Stephen Tobolowsky (23), Robin Williams (23, two as voiceovers), and with 22 each, Robert De Niro, John Turturro, Christopher Walken and Bruce Willis.
The highest-placed Irish actor on the list is Gabriel Byrne with 20 movies to his credit; even the incredibly busy Rhys Meyers is unlikely to top that between now and the end of the decade.
The director Thaddeus O'Sullivan is surrounded by directors on the set of his new movie, the thriller Ordinary De- cent Criminal, which has been shooting in Dublin since September 29th.
Kevin Spacey, who plays the leading role, directed the feature, Albino Alligator, while the cast also includes Peter Mullan, who turned director this year with Orphans, and David Hayman, whose directing credits include Silent Scream and The Near Room. Linda Fiorentino, who has yet to direct her own movie, co-stars in Ordinary Decent Criminal, which has been scripted by Gerard Stembridge, a stage and film director in his own right.
Universal Pictures has bought the film rights to journalist Ron Rosenbaum's book Explaining Hitler for a feature film that will be directed by Jim Sheridan. While the book is a wide-ranging exploration of how Adolf Hitler deceived and seduced Germany into following him, it is believed that the film Sheridan wants to make is crystallised in the third chapter, The Poison Kitchen.
That chapter deals with Hitler's battles with the Munich Post, which recognised in the early 1920s exactly what Hitler was and attacked him in a succession of exposes for over a decade. Hitler sued the paper, but it would not back down until March 9th, 1933, when Hitler used the Reichstag fire, which burned the German Parliament, as an excuse for suspending civil liberties.
Then the Nazis came down on the Post editors with a vengeance. They destroyed its printing plants and began imprisoning editors, dragging the paper's editor-in-chief off to Dachau. He was killed on June 30th, 1934.
Three films from Senegal will be shown at the IFC in Dublin this weekend as part of the city's multimedia Africa Festival 1998.
Showing at 6.30 p.m. today is Ousmane Sembene's satirical 1975 film of post-colonial Africa, Xala (The Curse). Tomorrow at 2.30 p.m. there will be an introductory talk on African cinema by Dr David Murphy of Trinity College.
On Sunday there will be screenings of two films directed by the late Dijbril Diop Mambety: the ground-breaking 1973 avant-garde film, Touki Bouki (at 6.30 p.m.) and its sequel, the 1991 Cannes competitor, Hyenes (8.30 p.m.), which employs magic realism in its parable about political corruption. Most recently seen here in The Object Of My Affection, Paul Rudd has been cast as the US army pilot, Wally Worthington, in Lasse Hallstrom's film of the John Irving novel, The Cider House Rules, which is shooting in Massachusetts. Tobey Maguire (from The Ice Storm) plays Homer Wells, a young man who has grown up in an orphanage and falls in love with a young black woman he meets in an orchard.
Husband and wife Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette are joined by Ving Rhames in the principal cast of Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out The Dead, now shooting in New York. Paul Schrader has scripted the film, which features Cage as a paramedic who has visions of the patients who have died in his care. Tom Sizemore and John Goodman are in it, too. Through his own company, Saturn Films, Nicolas Cage is developing a remake of the 1963 film, The Courtship Of Eddie's Father, which featured Glenn Ford as a widower who struggles to find a new wife who will meet with the approval of his six-year-old son. The boy was played by a very young Ron Howard. The film also spawned a TV series featuring Bill Bixby which ran from 1969 to 1972.
The directors James Cameron, Martin Scorsese and Rob Reiner are all set to play themselves in the new Albert Brooks movie, The Muse, which will also feature Sharon Stone, Jeff Bridges and Andie McDowell. Brooks, who has written and will direct the movie, will play the central role of a down-and-out screenwriter in Los Angeles.
Vincent D'Onofrio will play the Sixties radical, Abbie Hoffman, who helped organise the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chiacgo, in the biopic, Abbie!, which will feature Janeane Garofalo as Hoffman's ex-wife, Anita, and Kevin Corrigan as his fellow Yippie, Jerry Rubin.
Steven Spielberg's regular lighting cameraman, Janus Kaminski, who received an Oscar for his work on Schindler's List, is making his directing debut with Lost Souls, a Satanic thriller, with Winona Ryder. Meanwhile, the celebrity photographer David Bailey is set to make his feature directing debut with the thriller, The Intruder, which starts shooting in November. And screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty, is turning director with The Darkest Light, the story of a young girl's search for a miracle to save her brother's life. It will feature Kerry Fox and Stephen Dillane, both of whom were in Welcome To Sarajevo.
Literary adaptations on the way include: Mike Barker's film of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which is likely to star the Irish actor, Stuart Townsend, with Rhys Ifans; Sara Sugarman's film of Kathy Lette's book, Mad Cows, which will feature Anna Friel, Joanna Lumley and Greg Wise; and Garrison Keillor's Wobegon Boy, which Michael Winterbottom will direct next year from a screenplay by Keillor himself.
The annual Celtic Film and Television Festival, held in Tralee this year, moves to the Isle of Skye for its next edition, running from March 24th to 27th, 1999. The closing date for entries is November 27th. For further information, call (0044)141-3244947.
