Nurse Betty (18) Selected cinemas
Life imitates art, and art, in turn, imitates life in Neil LaBute's often uproariously funny Nurse Betty, a dark-toned comedy which proves radically different in theme and tone from his sour and angry earlier movies, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. The new film is a pertinent and topical commentary on our media age at a time when newspapers and magazines are awash with Big Brother stories and carry headlines about characters in soap operas.
At the film's centre is a wonderfully sweet-natured performance of radiant innocence from Renee Zellweger as Betty, a naive, smalltown Kansas waitress who is so traumatised by witnessing the brutal murder of her philandering, crime-dabbling husband (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) that she confuses real life with the medical soap opera titled A Reason to Love to which she is addicted.
With the killers (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) on her trail - and unaware that she has a stash of drugs in the boot of her car - she sets out for Los Angeles to make contact with a character from the soap, a recently bereaved doctor played by an actor played by Greg Kinnear, with whom she is now convinced she has been involved. From this unlikely premise, LaBute fashions a consistently witty movie which reflects acutely on deceptions, delusions and role-playing. The keen, knowing screenplay by John C. Richards and James Flamberg is full of intricate twists, and earned them an award at Cannes this year.
While it is replete with resonances of other movies - principally, The Wizard of Oz, Being There, Network, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Pulp Fiction - Nurse Betty stands as an assured and imaginative original. Reaffirming LaBute's skills with actors, all of the cast - which also includes Allison Janney, Crispin Glover and Pruitt Taylor Vince - are on rare form.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (15) Selected cinemas
The new movie from Joel and Ethan Coen, O Brother, Where Art Thou? takes its title from the film planned by Joel McCrea's idealistic director in the Preston Sturges classic, Sullivan's Travels - and credits Homer's The Odyssey as the basis of its screenplay (written by the brothers themselves).
Set in 1930s Mississippi, this eccentric tall tale follows the quirky exploits of three escaped convicts - played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson - who are advised by an elderly blind man that they will find their fortune at the end of a long and difficult journey. Along the way they meet a young black musician (Chris Thomas King) who has sold his soul to the devil; a pseudo-homely, bad-tempered state governor (Charles Durning); a Cyclops figure in the duplicitous, one-eyed Bible salesman played by John Goodman; the crazed gangster, Babyface Nelson (Michael Badalucco); and Clooney's estranged wife (Holly Hunter), who is about to wed Durning's election rival, Homer (Wayne Duvall).
The episodic structure of this picaresque movie undermines it as a whole, rendering it less cohesive than the Coens' best work, and it tends to peter out towards the end. That said, there remains enough invention and imagination to sustain it - and its enduring attractions include the delightfully droll George Clooney as the vain convict with the Clark Gable moustache, a lovely bluegrass soundtrack, the gorgeous widescreen location cinematography of Roger Deakins, and such splendid set-pieces as a Ku Klux Klan rally that's choreographed and shot like a Busby Berkeley musical.
Keeping the Faith (15) General release
Arguably the most interesting and intelligent actor to emerge in the past decade, Edward Norton is clearly drawn to playing intense, complex characters in movies such as American History X and Fight Club. It comes as a surprise, then, that for his first feature film as a director, he has opted to make a light, low-key comedy on the familiar theme of a romantic triangle. Norton himself takes one of the leading roles, as a socially concerned young Catholic priest a little implausibly named Brian Kilkenny Finn, with Ben Stiller cast as his long-time best friend, Jake Schram, now a rabbi. Both of them have adopted spirited, unorthodox approaches to their ministries to draw in their congregations, and everything seems relatively uncomplicated until their mutual childhood friend returns into their lives after a 16-year absence.
She is the confident, attractive Anna Reilly (Jenna Elfman from Dharma & Greg), now a straight-talking corporate executive. Rabbi Jake, who is under pressure to marry, falls head for over heels for her, but there is a major complication in the fact that she is not Jewish. Father Brian is drawn to her and is forced to reconcile this with his vow of celibacy and his friendship with Jake.
The screenplay by Stuart Blumberg, a friend of Norton since their student days at Yale, is essentially old-fashioned and feels somewhat over-stretched at stages, but under Norton's assured, unshowy direction it builds into a thoroughly appealing entertainment which treats its characters with sympathy and affection. The humour is peppered with amusing slapstick and the film makes distinctive use of New York locations which are photographed as lovingly as in a Woody Allen movie.
Norton's own performance is unsually understated and he allows ample screen time and much of the best dialogue to his two costars.He surrounds them with a solid supporting cast that includes Anne Bancroft, Eli Wallach, Holland Taylor, and Czech film-maker Milos Forman (who directed Norton in The People vs Larry Flynt) as Fr Brian's mentor, Fr Havel - so named, no doubt, because of Forman's friendship with the Czech president.
Shaft (18) General release
Thirty years ago director Gordon Parks broke the mould of US crime thrillers with Shaft, the first in the genre to feature a tough, sexual black hero in the resourceful private eye played by Richard Roundtree - or as he was so quaintly described in the Oscar-winning theme by Isaac Hayes, "the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks". The movie's success spearheaded a wave of so-called blaxploitation movies and spawned two sequels and a television series. On this side of the Atlantic, the title music was used by Joey the Lips in The Commitments as an accompaniment to his sexual activities.
There's a wave of familiarity when Hayes's vibrant, swelling score kicks in again at the outset of John Singleton's new sequel, Shaft, in which the hero, now played by the redoubtable Samuel L. Jackson, is an NYPD detective doggedly pursuing the case of an arrogant white racist (Christian Bale staying in American Psycho mode) who has murdered a young black student.
Cool, goatee'd and leather-clad, Jackson oozes star quality as he swaggers through the action and attempts to distract from the holes and absurd coincidences in the movie's over-plotted narrative which also involves police corruption, a missing murder witness (Toni Collette) and a colourful Dominican drug dealer, entertainingly played in an outsized, hyperactive performance by Jeffrey Wright. The cast also includes Vanessa Williams as Shaft's sidekick, Busta Rhymes as his streetwise confidante and the original John Shaft, Richard Roundtree, now cast as the central character's uncle.
The original 1971 Shaft goes on re-release at the IFC in Dublin from next Friday.
Timecode (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Director Mike Figgis has made innovative use of the new digital technology in film-making in his latest film, Time Code. While a tad pretentious as a movie, the results of his innovation are fascinating as a cinematic experiment. Four cameras film four improvised and intertwining stories simultaneously over 93 minutes. There isn't a single cut and all four stories are shown at the same time in split-screen format. There is no editing and no break in film rolling-something only now made possible with the new technology.
If four simultaneous stories sound impossible for an audience to follow, Figgis has overcome the problem by fading up the sound on one story and down on the others at different points. This offers the audience an aid to focus in on what's important at any given time. The story itself is set against the decadent backdrop of the Los Angeles movie scene. Stellan Skarsgard plays an alcoholic motion picture executive who is having an affair with an aspiring actress, while his wife, played by Saffron Burrows, remains unaware of the infidelity.
The actress in question, however, has a jealous lesbian lover, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, whose actions bring all the diffuse plots and characters together, and leads the film to its neat resolution. While Time Code is a little demanding on the audience, as a viewer you quickly learn how to watch the film and are kept busy enough by the quadruple-split screen that you rarely become bored. While each of the four stories may be slight on its own, the cumulative effect of the four as one does convince.
In addition, the improvised performances of the cast cannot but impress, fully exposed as they are, unable to hide behind the second take or the editing out of mistakes in the editing room. In the end, however, it is neither the narrative nor the performances that make Time Code worth a look. It is the pure interest of witnessing a technical experiment come off smoothly - plus the fact that the director of Leaving Las Vegas can still experiment at a lower budget, and challenge our understanding of cinema along the way.
