"In & Out" (15) Nationwide
Inspired by Tom Hanks's acceptance speech when he won his Oscar for Philadelphia, the often hilarious comedy In & Out is set in the Capra-esque small Indiana town of Greenleaf, where Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) is a respected high school English teacher. Brackett is about to marry another teacher (scene stealing Joan Cusack) when a former student of his (Matt Dillon in blonde hair and a goatee for a Brad Pitt parody), wins the best actor Oscar.
He gets the award for his performance as a gay soldier coming out - and thrown out of the service for writing a letter to another soldier and having an autographed copy of the Bette Midler movie, Beaches, in his locker - in a Vietnam war movie which, from the clips we see, is a spoof of Born On The Fourth of July and A Few Good Men. In his acceptance speech he refers to Brackett as gay, and the media promptly descends upon Greenleaf and the hapless teacher. The evidence mounts up - his students note that he's a bit prissy, teaches English, is well dressed and very clean - and he's a big fan of Barbra Streisand. Brackett's ever-patient fiancee is perplexed and aghast at the story coming three days before their longplanned wedding, and his parents (Debbie Reynolds and Wilford Brimley) are distraught. Although the movie takes a typically Hollywood maudlin turn in the last act, it mostly sparkles with humour in its playing with stereotypes and prejudices. It sharply lampoons the admittedly soft target of US television reportage, where no angle is too trivial or too absurd to cover. And there are some very funny Barbra Streisand jokes.
The sophisticated screenplay was written by Paul Rudnick, whose previous film work was the wretched Jeffrey; Rudnick is also the pseudonymous author of the very witty Libby Gelman-Waxner column in Premiere. The director is Frank Oz, a veteran of The Muppet Show eagerly tackling the best material he's had since Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
In a deft and vigorously physical performance, Kline has rarely - if ever - been better, and Tom Selleck, as a snooping, vain and openly gay TV reporter, smoothly outshines his past work. Supermodel Shalom Harlow gamely plays Matt Dillon's supermodel girlfriend who tells him that she cannot accompany him on a trip because she's doing Isaac's show. "I have to shower and vomit," she explains.
By Michael Dwyer
"This Is The Sea", IFC, members and guests only
Take a girl in a long white dress and place her on a pile of rocks by the shore. An innocent child of nature, she will move from pastoral serenity into a complex, violent world . . . Love will be her initiation into experience, pain and finally adulthood . . . Mary McGuckian's film of love across the divide of the Northern Troubles hinges on themes and images with a mythical resonance: innocence and baptism, birth, death, rites of passage, trials of courage and faith, the triumph of all-conquering love. Unfortunately, these archetypal motifs are the central joints around which the film's plot and exposition is wrapped, rather than being organically embedded in its fabric. The result is self-consciously static. A young woman, Hazel, (Samantha Morton) raised in the Glens of Antrim as a member of the ascetic Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren, meets Malachy (Ross McDade) a Catholic boy from Belfast, at a cattle fair. Their instant attraction and budding romance brings them both into danger. Malachy's brother Padhar (John Lynch) is a Belfast taxi-driver with close connections to the IRA - in the cynical form of the publican, Rohan (Gabriel Byrne). Despite the prevailing ceasefire, tit-for-tat "incidents" are still occurring between Loyalist and republican terrorists and Padhar's cab becomes a target for Loyalist explosives.
When Hazel's neighbour, Old Man Jacobs (Richard Harris) becomes implicated in the violence, the film takes a melodramatic, almost operatic turn, which is amplified by the constant over-use of The Waterboys' songs, such as She Is So Beautiful, A Man Is In Love and How Long Will I Love You? to labour what the images are already depicting. The director's decision to present a timeless Romeo-and-Juliet story rather than a political drama has facilitated the reduction of the Northern background to a series of overwrought cliches. Although for once in a film about Belfast, the urban scenes are shot in real locations, this hasn't resulted in a convincing treatment of the subject. The character of the cool IRA operative, played by Gabriel Byrne on autopilot, is laughably incredible, while Richard Harris's character becomes increasingly demonic until he has metamorphosed into something from a Hammer Horror picture. Other performances, notably that of Samantha Morton (recently seen in Under The Skin), John Lynch, Dearbhla Molloy and Ian McElhinney, are impressive, but not helped by the heavy-handed direction. But that white dress did look lovely.
By Helen Meany
"Downtime", Savoy, Virgin (18)
The romantic potential of a broken lift-shaft is exhaustively tested in this generic fusion of an American action thriller with British social realism. A decrepit Newcastle tower block is the setting for a series of dangerous, tensely dramatic episodes, beginning with the film's opening sequence, in which a depressed young mother is perched on the balcony ledge of an upper storey threatening to jump, while police helicopters circle above. Paul McGann plays Rob, the troubled police psychologist sent in to coax Chrissey (Susan Lynch) to safety, who returns next day to get to know her better. Cue more trouble, from the gang of disaffected teenagers who are terrorising the residents of the towerblock, and who set the lift's control room on fire. The lift is not the only creaking mechanism in the proceedings: these lads, who have to double up as nasty baddies and sympathetic victims of deprivation and dysfunctional families, are a bit of poor plotting, while the closing showdown at gun point seems tacked-on and implausible. Never mind; director Bharat Nalluri has taken a risk here. The hybrid form doesn't work, but there are compensatory flashes of visual and verbal wit as, in two fine central performances, Rob and Chrissey try to shake off their designated roles of social worker and victim. It's a competition, as Chrissey says, to see who has had the most miserable life.
By Helen Meany
"Good Burger" (PG) Savoy, Virgin, UCIs
A witless comedy vehicle for the limited talents of childrens' TV stars Kel Mitchell and Kenan Thompson, Good Burger is the sort of thing that makes Police Academy look profound. Set in a shambolic fast-food emporium which is threatened by the arrival of a brash new competitor, the plot would barely be adequate to sustain a half-hour of television, and stretched over the length of a feature film becomes quite excruciating. To describe the humour as infantile would be unfair to infants, and the mid-term break audience at whom the movie is targeted would be well advised to concentrate on their homework instead.
By Hugh Linehan
