The Irish set
AFTER a very thin year for new Irish or Irish made movies in our cinemas, 1998 on paper, at least looks like a vintage year. with new movies from our top directors. First, on February 6th, there's Jim Sheridan's The Boxer, starring Daniel Day Lewis as a Provo who comes out of jail and makes it big in the ring, with Emily Watson as his former teenage lover.
A fortnight later comes Neil Jordan's surreal and richly cinematic treatment of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy with a hypnotic performance from young newcomer, Eamon Owens, in the central role. The terrific cast includes Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Aisling O'Sullivan, Tom Hickey, Brendan Gleeson, Milo O'Shea, Ian Hart, Rosaleen Linehan, Ardal O'Hanlon, Sine ad O'Connor, Alan Boyle and Patrick McCabe himself.
Jordan has already finished shooting his latest film, In Dreams (also known as Blue Vision), which should be in our cinemas much later in the year. Annette Bening, Aidan Quinn, Robert Downey Jr and Stephen Rea star in this US-set psychological horror-thriller which Jordan promises will scare the wits out of audiences.
Likely to be released in late April or early May is John Boorman's eagerly awaited The General, which is in black-and-white and feature Brendan Gleeson as the Dublin criminal, Martin Cahill, with Adrian Dunbar, Sean McGinley, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball and Jon Voight. Producer Noel Pearson anticipates a September release for another hot ticket, Pat O'Connor's film of Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa, adapted by Frank McGuinness. Meryl Streep, no doubt with a perfect Irish accent, heads a cast that includes Kathy Burke, Catherine McCormack, Brid Brennan, Sophie Thompson, Rhys Ifans and Michael Gambon.
This Is My Father is a family affair for the Quinn brothers - actor Aidan, director Paul and cinematographer Declan - and it also features Stephen Rea, John Cusack and James Caan. Young Irish actor Stuart Townsend is dynamic as a psychopathic Belfast sadist in the 1970s in Marc Evan's film of Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man.
Mike Myers, Brenda Fricker and Alfred Molina head the cast of Joe O'Byrne's just finished first feature, Meteor, in which a meteorite crashlands in the backyard of a Dublin family. Made before the current 007 release, Eugene Brady's The Nephew stars Pierce Brosnan, Donal McCann, Hill Harper and Sinead Cusack.Stephen Dillane, Greta Scacchi and Daniel Craig head the cast of the new Cathal Black film, Love and Rage, a drama of lust and revenge in late 19th century Ireland. Newcomer Darren Healy heads the cast of Paul Tickell's inner city Dublin drama, Hooligans. And Jean-Marc Barr, Miranda Richardson and Anna Friel star in the Robert Louis Stevenson story, St Ives, shot on location in Ireland.
We can look forward to at least four movies from the encouraging recent upsurge in Northern Ireland film production. The advance word is particularly strong on David Caffrey's first feature, Divorcing Jack, featuring David Thewlis as a journalist who becomes chief suspect in a murder inquiry. It's based on a novel by Bangor writer Colin Bateman, as is the recently completed Cycle Of Violence. Meanwhile, Toby Stephens stars in Colm Villa's futuristic thriller, Sunset Heights, filmed in Derry, and Julie Walters stars in Roger Michell's film of Anne Devlin's screenplay, Titanic Town, set in Belfast in 1972.
Look out, too, for a number of Irish movies already seen on the festival circuit: Drinking Crude, This Is The Sea, The Last Bus Home, Angela Mooney Dies Again, Snakes And Ladders, How To Cheat In The Leaving Certificate, The Matchmaker and The Serpent's Kiss.
Dramarama
SHAPING up as an Oscar frontrunner, Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting features flavour of the year Matt Damon as Will Hunting, an uneducated young man with a gift for solving the most complex maths problems. It also features Ben Afleck (who wrote the screenplay with Matt Damon), Minnie Driver, and as an Irish-American psychologist, Robin Williams. Martin Scorsese's film of the early life of the Dalai Lama in Kundun, which features a cast of Tibetan exiles, has been condemned by the Chinese authorities, as has the thriller, Red Corner, starring Richard Gere as a lawyer caught up in murder in Beijing.
Jim Carrey turns serious in Peter Weir's The Truman Show, as a man whose entire life is a staged TV show. In the Costa-Gavras film, Mad City, John Travolta plays a security guard who cracks up and Dustin Hoffman is the TV reporter who covers his story. Travolta will also be seen in Mike Nichols's film of Newsweek columnist Joe Klein's Primary Colors, while Hoffman turns up in another political satire, Wag The Dog, as a wealthy film producer, with Robert De Niro as a Washington spin doctor.
Mike Figgis follows an adulterous fling and its consequences in One Night Stand, with Wesley Snipes, Nastassja Kinski and Robert Downey Jr. In Neil Labute's abrasive In The Company Of Men two frustrated young male executives set out to humiliate a female secretary. Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino team up in a story of Satanism and a law firm in The Devils Advocate.
Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez are in the new Oliver Stone picture, UTurn. Emma Thompson and her mother, Phyllida Law, star in The Winter Guest, the first film directed by Alan Rickman. The animated epic, Anastasia, dealing with the Russian princess, is the first for 20th Century Fox from formerly Dublin based animation directors Don Bluth and Gary Goldman.
Return of the 7Os
A raft of 1970s set movies are on the way notably Paul Thomas Anderson's exhilarating picture of decadence and self destruction in the US hardcore porn industry with Mark Wahlberg as the porn actor who does a full "full monty", and Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline and Joan Allen in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, a thoughtful and sensitive exploration of disillusionment dawning on post 1960s suburban liberals at the time of the Watergate crisis.
Staying with the 1970s there's Todd Haynes's picture of the British glitter rock era, Velvet Goldmine, with Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys Meyers; Brian Gilbert's comedy of a 1970s rock band named Strange Fruit in Still Crazy, starring Billy Connolly, Stephen Rea and Jimmy Nail; andtwo New York disco era pictures, 54 (named after the club, Studio 54) with Mike Myers, and Whit Stillman's The Last Days Of Disco.
By the book
The literary adaptations start hitting cinemas from Friday with Helena Bonham Carter getting into (and out of) frocks in lain Softley's film of Henry James's The Wings Of The Dove, and Robert Bierman's treatment of George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying. In another Henry James adaptation, Agnieska Holland's Washington Square, Jennifer Jason Leigh plays spinster Catherine Sloper with Albert Finney as her domineering father and Ben Chaplin as the wastrel who courts her.
Of more recent vintage is Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch which has been turned into one of the most highly anticipated movies of the year - Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, starring Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro. In Clint Eastwood's film of the bestseller, Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, Kevin Spacey plays the gay Savannah antiques dealer who kills his lover (Jude Law) and claims self defence.
Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett take the leading roles in Gillian Armstrong's film of Peter Carey's Victorian love story, Oscar And Lucinda, while Robert Redford directs and co-stars with Kristin Scott Thomas in the movie of Nicholas Evans's The Horse Whisperer. Hot Matt Damon plays the latest in John Grisham's long line of idealistic lawyers in Francis Ford Coppola's film of The Rainmaker, while Kenneth Branagh stars in Robert Altman's movie of Grisham's The Gingerbread Man.
Johnny Depp and Benicio De Toro co-star in Terry Gilliam's sure-to-be-weird movie of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, and in his first film since The Usual Suspects, Bryan Singer directs the Stephen King story, Apt Pupil, with Brad Renfro as a teenage American befriending a former Nazi played by Ian McKellen. Jonathan Pryce and Jonny Lee Miller head the cast of Gilles MacKinnon's touching Regeneration, from the novel by Pat Barker. Richard Kwietniowski's impeccable screen treatment of Gilbert Adair's Love And Death On Long Island features John Hurt on superb form as a reclusive writer infatuated with a teen heart throb (Jason Priestley).
Blockbustering
No one busts the blocks like James Cameron, whose epic, Titanic, sails into cinemas near you next month, trailing horror stories from the set but strong word of mouth. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet head the cast. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the maestro of mayhem, offers both Tony Scott's Enemy Of The State, in which lawyer Will Smith strives to regain his identity when a nasty national security agency deletes it, and Armageddon (no less) with Bruce Willis as a lonely bookworm with psychic powers - and only four days to save our planet from a gigantic asteroid.
John McTiernan brings us Michael Crichton's big Viking adventure, the charmingly titled Eaters Of The Dead, with Antonio Banderas and bridge expert Omar Sharif. Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson are in another Crichton adaptation, the science fiction saga, Sphere, directed by Barry Levinson.
Kevin Costner's second outing as a director after the Oscar winning epic, Dances With Wolves, is the three hour futuristic drama, The Postman, set in the aftermath of a nuclear war with Costner himself in the title role. In Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes, Nicolas Cage is a rogue cop caught in the middle of an assassination conspiracy.
Busy Steven Spielberg has two epics on the way, the controversial slavery drama, Amistad, set in 1839 with Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey and Pete Postlethwaite; and the second World War drama, Saving Private Ryan, partly filmed in Ireland this summer and starring Tom Hanks, Ed Burns and the ubiquitous Matt Damon as Private Ryan. And 20 years after he made Days Of Heaven, director Terrence Malick returns to cinema with the starstudded war movie of American and Japanese combat troops in Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line - the cast includes Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Travolta, Gary Oldman, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson and John Cusack.
Comic cuts
Kevin Kline is on fine form as a smalltown teacher who's outed as gay by a former student (Matt Dillon) - live on the Oscars ceremony - in Frank Oz's In & Out. Woody Allen plays yet another Manhattan writer undergoing emotional turmoil in Deconstructing Harry, which also features (deep breath) Billy Crystal, Eric Bogosian, Judy Davis, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Demi Moore, Robin Williams, Stanley Tucci and Elisabeth Shue, to name but a few.
Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, John Turturro and rocker Flea are among the cast lined up by Joel and Ethan Coen for their characteristically offbeat comedy-thriller of mistaken identity and kidnapping, The Big Lebowski.
The hotly touted romantic comedy, As Good As It Gets, directed by James L. Brooks, may secure Oscar nominations for Jack Nicholson as a romantic novelist, Greg Kinnear as a gay artist and Helen Hunt as a single mother. Rufus Sewell, Monica Potter and Tom Hollander star in the transatlantic romantic comedy, Martha - Meet Frank, Daniel And Laurence. In the DreamWorks comedy Mouse Hunt, Nathan Lane and Lee Evan inherit a mansion - and a mouse. And the Naked Gun team spoof - gangster movies in what's called Jane Austen's Mafia.
In other wordsLess than a dozen new foreign language films opened here during 1997, so things can only gets better. Unmissable is Pedro Almodovar's enthralling melodrama, Live Flesh, loosely based on a Ruth Rendell novel. From Japan comes the hit ballroom dancing movie, Shall We Dance?, and Takeshi Kitano's emotionally involving Hana-Bi (Fireworks), and from China, Zhang Yimou's brash and breezy Keep Cool. In Men With Guns (Hombres Armados), John Sayles employs Spanish dialogue and an unknown cast for an angry picture on injustice in an unspecified Latin American country.
Daniel Auteuil stars in two imminent French films, with Catherine Deneuve in Andre Techine's Les Voleurs, and with Carole Bouquet in Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac. Two Cannes prizewinners on the way are the French road movie Western and the tedious Iranian picture of a would be suicide in The Taste Of Cherries. From Iceland there's Frirdik Thor Fridriksson's Devil's Island, from the former Yugoslavia Pretty Village Pretty Flame, from Norway the agreeably offbeat Junk Mail, and from Russia the excellent Prisoner Of The Mountains.
Do it again
Sequels, TV spinoffs and remakes abound in the 1998 schedules. My favourite sequel title is Babe: Pig In The City, which sounds like "Crocodile" Dundee 2 with a snout. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are together yet again in Lethal Weapon 4, while Wesley Snipes takes over from Harrison Ford as Tommy Lee Jones's prey in US Marshals, a follow up to The Fugitive. Wes Craven has reassembled most of the original cast for Scream 2, which has been wiping the floor with the competition at the US box office this month. Then there's Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau reunited for The Odd Couple 2, and John Goodman replacing the late John Belushi in Blues Brothers 2000. Plus Species 2, Mortal Kombat II Annihilation, An American Werewolf In Paris and Star Trek IX.
Ralph Fiennes plays John Steed with Uma Thurman as Emma Peel and Sean Connery as the villain in the big screen version of The Avengers, while Gary Oldman, Mimi Rogers and William Hurt lead the cast of the hi-tech Lost In Space; Leslie Nielsen plays the myopic Mr Magoo; and David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson take to the cinema screen in The X-Files: Fight The Future.
The blockbuster remake is expected to be Jan DeBont's monster movie, Godzilla, starring Matthew Broderick, while Bill Paxton and Charlize Theron star in Ron Underwood's remake of the 1949 gorilla picture, Mighty Joe Young. Liam Neeson plays Valjean in Bille August's new version of Les Miserables while Gabriel Byrne is joined by Leonardo DiCaprio, Gerard Depardieu and John Malkovich in the latest version of The Man In The Iron Mask. In a very loose spin on The Day Of The Jackal, Richard Gere plays a Provo and Bruce Willis is a chameleon like assassin in The Jackal.
Robert De Niro, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke star in the new Great Expectations, updated to a present day New York setting, and Antonio Banderas plays the dashing protege of an ageing Zorro (Anthony Hopkins) in The Mask Of Zorro. Robin Williams takes the lead in the Absent Minded Professor remake, Flubber; Eddie Murphy takes on the old Rex Harrison role to talk to the animals in Dr Doolittle; and censor permitting, we may finally see Dominque Swain and Jeremy irons in Adrian Lyne's long delayed new Version of Lolita.