Lone Star" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, UCI Tallaght, Dublin
This accomplished and compelling new film from the gifted American independent filmmaker and screenwriter, John Sayles, marks a return to the US and to form - for Sayles after his forgettable Irish foray for The Secret Of Roan Inish. The new movie is Sayles's most complex land involving since his gritty, multi-layered urban drama, City Of Hope, which Lone Star inevitably recalls in its ambitious scenario - an intricately structured pattern of interconnected characters and overlapping stories.
Sayles goes a step further in Lone Star by cutting between events set in the present day, in the Texas border town of Frontera, to flashbacks 40 years earlier as a sheriff, Sam Deeds (played by Chris Cooper) pieces together a story of corruption and murder involving his father, Buddy (Matthew McConaughey), and the brutal, racist sheriff, Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson).
Sam Deeds lives in the shadow of his greatly admired father's achievements, which notably included running the corrupt Wade out of town back in the 195Os, when Buddy Deeds was Wade's deputy. Sam's own lingering doubts regarding his father's heroic stature take on a greater import with the discovery of skeletal remains and a sheriff's badge on a derelict rifle range, and as the mystery deepens, the narrative draws in disparate characters such as Sam's teenage sweetheart (Elizabeth Pena) and her restaurateur mother (Miriam Colon); an army post commander (Joe Morton), his daydreaming young son and his bar-owner father (Ron Canada); and Sam's manic depressive and baseball-obsessed ex-wife (Frances McDormand).
Highlighting the ethnic tensions of being set in a border town, Lone Star extends that motif to focus on the social, cultural, political and personal borders between its protagonists, and on the weight of history which those divisions bring to bear on all their lives. The developing power of the drama is heightened by the wealth of skill with which Sayles seamlessly integrates the flashback sequences with those set in the present, emphasising the indelible links be tween past and present.
Chris Cooper, in his third film for Sayle after Matewan and City Of Hope, establishes a solid presence as the pivotal character, Sam Deeds, and of an exemplary supporting cast Kris Kristofferson has never been so effective on the screen. The strongly atmospheric soundtrack judiciously blends Mason Daring's original score with recordings of blues, country and Tejano music, and the film is distinctively photographed by the New Zealander, Stuart Dryburgh, who lit The Piano and Once Were Warriors.
"Jack" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
How the mighty have fallen. In his prime Francis Ford Coppola directed such memorable movies as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and the masterpieces, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, both of which will be re-released at the JFC in Dublin next month. After the major disappointment that was the contrived third Godfather movie, Coppola churned out the ludicrous and overblown Bram Stoker's Dracula, and he plunges to what must be the nadir of his career with his latest effort, the wretched Jack.
This naive, meandering and saccharine yarn features Robin Williams as a boy with a fictitious genetic disorder which causes him to age physically at four times the rate of other children. The movie centres on the time when the 10 year-old Jack, who looks 40, goes to school for the first time. The consequences are as improbable as they are cloying, and Williams, after displaying admirable restraint in The Birdcage, is cringe-inducing as he trots out his mawkish, simpering routine.
The movie pales utterly by comparison with Big, which featured Tom Hanks in his finest, most physically detailed performance, as a 12 year old boy trapped in the body of a 35-year-old man. However the sheer inanity and patronising tone of Jack more closely recalls a later Hanks vehicle, Forrest Gump, with its simple-equals-wonderful message. Diane Lane and Brian Kerwin are pitiful as Jack's much-suffering parents, while Bill Cosby mouths platitudes as the boy's tutor, and playing the flirtatious mother of a schoolboy friend, a shrill Fran Deschler looks like she has strayed off the set of Showgirls.
"Heaven's Prisoners" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Phil Joanou, who made an interesting contemporary thriller in State Of Grace, follows the tiresome Final Analysis with the dull and plodding would-be thriller, Heaven's Prisoners, which has taken an inordinately, though- understandably, long time to go on release here. It features Alec Baldwin at his most bland as a former New Orleans detective and recovering alcoholic now living an apparently idyllic life with his wife (Kelly Lynch) renting boats in the Louisiana bayou country.
As this is a movie, something's bound to go wrong and, sure enough, Baldwin and Lynch soon fall foul of unscrupulous criminals. Mary Stuart Masterson, miscast as a boozy stripper, along with a bored-looking Teri Hatcher and a more-pumped-up-than-ever Eric Roberts complete the unfortunate cast in this lumbering yarn.
. Running for eight days from today at the IFC in Dublin is a very welcome re-issue of Jean Luc Godard's acclaimed 1963 movie, Le Mepris (Contempt), showing in a new 35mm print. Set in the film industry, it features Brigitte Bardot as a woman married to a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) who's hired by a crass American producer (Jack Palance) to work on a film treatment of Homer's Odyssey that will be directed by Fritz Lang - played by Lang himself.
. At the Virgin multiplex in Dublin is the reissued Blood Simple, showing uncut in Irish cinemas for the first time. Joel and Ethan Coen's auspicious 1983 debut movie as darkly humorous thriller featuring an impeccable cast led by Frances McDormand, John Getz, Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh.
