WHATEVER happened to Emilio Estevez? He was to the forefront of the 1980s Brat Pack movies and provided ample tabloid fodder when he got engaged to Demi Moore and married Paula Abdul. Last seen on a cinema screen here in D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996), Estevez has been busy directing episodic TV drama (Cold Case, The Guardian, CSI: NY), but now he's ready for his comeback as a film director with Bobby, which is in pre-production and has been snapped up by The Weinstein Company.
Bobby is set on the night in June 1968 when Senator Robert F Kennedy was assassinated in the Ambassador hotel, Los Angeles. The narrative is a tapestry of interwoven stories dealing with 22 people who were in the hotel that night. Unknown actors play Kennedy (Dave Fraunces) and his killer, Sirhan Sirhan (David Kobzantsev), but Estevez has lined up a strong ensemble cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, William H Macy, Helen Hunt, Christian Slater, Heather Graham, Laurence Fishburne, Freddy Rodriguez and Harry Belafonte, along with Estevez himself and his dad. Martin Sheen.
Johnny cashes in
Walk the Line has soared ahead as the biggest Irish box-office hit for the first quarter of 2006. After eight weeks on release, it has taken over €4 million and is still in the top three. Irish cinema takings are, on average, 12-14 per cent of the total box-office for the UK and Ireland, but Walk the Line has made more than 23 per cent of its revenue in the State. It is released here by 20th Century Fox, which has four titles on the Irish top 10 this week, including The Pink Panther, which knocked Walk the Line off the top spot, and Big Momma's House 2, which, amazingly, is the second highest-grossing film here this year, with takings in excess of €2.5 million.
Meanwhile, in the US, V for Vendetta fell short by $4 million of achieving the highest opening weekend box-office of the year to date. That record is held by the low-budget Madea's Family Reunion, which took $31 million over the last weekend in February and now has doubled those takings. African-American women aged 35 and over comprised the largest audience for the film, a sequel to last year's sleeper hit Diary of a Mad Black Woman.There are no plans to release either film here.
Film clubbing in Clare
Access Cinema, the resource organisation for regional cultural cinema exhibition, will hold its annual Viewing Sessions next weekend at Glór in Ennis, Co Clare. Delegates representing film clubs all over the country will spend the weekend viewing new movies for their next seasons. The schedule includes Fateless (Hungary), Lost Embrace (Argentina), Hell (France), One Day in Europe (Germany), Saraband (Sweden), and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (South Africa). The programme will include a seminar addressing the implications of digital cinema for exhibitors and distributors.
For details on setting up a film club, go to www.accesscinema.ie
Great Danes destined for US
Two remarkable Danish films directed by Susanne Bier are set for the Hollywood remake treatment. Zach Braff will follow his directing debut, Garden State, with a US version of Bier's Open Hearts (2002), dealing with the consequences of a car crash for two couples. Braff will write, produce, direct and star in the remake. And David Benioff, the screenwriter of 25th Hour and Troy, will script the US version of Bier's powerful 2004 drama Brothers, in which a woman, believing her husband has been killed in Afghanistan, becomes involved with his brother.
Chicks with sixpacks
Joel Silver, the flamboyant producer of such male-dominated movies as the Matrix and Lethal Weapon franchises, is changing tack with three projects, each starring an Oscar-winning actress, although Silver describes all three as "muscular chick flicks". The Reaping features Hilary Swank as a former Christian missionary investigating what appear to be Biblical plagues in a Louisiana town. The Visiting, the US debut of Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel, stars Nicole Kidman as a psychiatrist unearthing the origins of an alien epidemic. And, in Neil Jordan's imminent production The Brave One, Jodie Foster seeks revenge after surviving a brutal attack.
However, Silver will still have plenty of jobs for the lads in his planned remake of the classic war film The Dirty Dozen.
