ORIGINALLY set to open here in mid March and now brought forward for release on February 23rd, Trainspotting reassembles the Shallow Grave team of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald, writer John Hodge and actor Ewan McGregor for an astonishing screen treatment of Irvine Welsh's novel, set in the underbelly of Edinburgh.
Fulled by an adrenalin pumping score and sharp, rapid fire delivered dialogue, Trainspotting is a Clockwork Orange for the Nineties - a bold and astonishing movie which is, by turns, shocking, surreal, chillingly unsettling, blackly humorous and bursting with energy. Ewan McGregor is riveting in the central role of heroin addict Mark Renton and he's joined in a fine cast by Robert Carlyle (from Priest, Riff Raff and Hamish Macbeth), Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Ewen Bremner and Kelly MacDonald.
For his third feature film, Danny Boyle has been signed to direct the fourth instalment in the Alien series, which starts shooting in early summer. In Josh Whedon's screenplay, Sigourney Weaver returns as Ripley, brought back to life by the cloning of tissue found at the scene of her death in Alien3. Winona Ryder will co star with Weaver in the new instalment.
THE leading Japanese director, Nagisa Oshima, has agreed to give the first Centenary of Cinemalecture at Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast on Wednesday, February 21st. The lecture will be preceded, by a screening of Oshima's recent documentary on the history of Japanese cinema and will be followed by one of the director's best known feature films, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, showing in a new print.
AS programming of the ACCBank 11th Dublin Film Festival goes into its final stages, the organisers have announced some more titles confirmed fob the programme. They include Barry Sonnenfeld's eagerly awaited movie of Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty, featuring John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Rene Russo and Danny De Vito; Michael Rymer's moving Australian drama, Angel Baby, with bravura performances from John Lynch and Jacqueline McKenzie; as lovers with a history of psychiatric illness; John Lynch again, this time with Ian Hart, James Frain and Maria Doyle Kennedy in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Nothing Personal, set during an uneasy ceasefire in Belfast in 1975; and Alfonso Cuaron's very well regarded film of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, starring Liesel Matthews in the title role and the Irish actor, Liam Cunningham.
Look out, too, for Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's superb documentary, The Celluloid: Closet, which features a wide range of actors, directors and wellchosen clips to explore the treatment of gay themes and characters in the movies during the century, of cinema. Helena Bonham Carter and Kate Nelligan star in the Canadian love story, Margaret's Museum, set in the 1940s, and indie film regulars Suzy Amis, Martin Donovan and Etina Lowensohn all turn up in Michael Almereyda's modern take on the vampire movie in Nadja. And five of the first six shorts films in the Short Cuts programme will be shown.
The festival runs from March 5th to 14th. Priority booking opens on February 20th.
AS part of the L'Imaginaire Irlandais cultural programme, five programmes of Irish short films will be shown at the 18th Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival in France, which opens today and runs for nine days. The commendably wide ranging: Irish programmes span the century - from early silents such as The Lad - From Old Ireland and Rory O'More to such recent material as The Long Way Home, Bent Out of Shape, An Bonan Bui and The Pan Loaf.
