"Velvet Goldmine" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin; UCI Tallaght; Kino, CorkPerhaps inspired by his visit to the Dublin Film Festival a few years ago, Todd Haynes's film of Britain's glitter rock era in the 1970s begins in Dublin - in 1854, with the birth of Oscar Wilde. This contrived opening sequence jumps forward to the schoolboy Oscar being asked in class what he would like to do as an adult. "I want to be a pop idol," he replies.
Having gratingly established his perception of Oscar Wilde as the first pop idol - and the direct antecedent of glam rock singers in all their pomp, theatricality and campness - Todd Haynes fast-forwards to the 1970s and the strutting, extrovert lifestyles and stage personae of two bisexual pop idols.
One is the archly named Curt Wilde, a mascara-eyed, torso-caressing exhibitionist who drops his leather trousers on stage to sing and dance naked before his adoring fans; very loosely based on Iggy Pop, he is played with characteristic passion and lack of inhibition by Ewan McGregor.
The other is the purportedly enigmatic Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who is first observed performing flamboyantly on stage in a skin-tight glitter-suit, a cloak of feathers and bright blue spiky hair, inevitably recalling David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust persona. At the end of the song, Slade fakes his own death on stage.
Moving forwards in time again to 1984, Haynes introduces Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a journalist who left his native Manchester for New York where his stereotypically gruff editor assigns him a story on the 10th anniversary of Slade's faked death. This hackneyed device is made all the more tiresome by flashbacks to Stuart's upbringing by conservative, dull-as-dishwater parents and to his early sexual infatuation with Brian Slade.
Worse still is the film's entirely excessive expository narration, especially the obtrusive voice-over by Janet McTeer (sounding like a Channel 4 continuity announcer) which seems to be there to spell out the period for teenage American cinema-goers too young to remember it.
Coming in the wake of Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm, Velvet Goldmine offers rather more by way of nostalgia than insight into The Decade That Taste Forgot. And Haynes's specific focus on the so-called gender-bending of the period is left largely underdeveloped - and is most effectively handled when he lays off the narration and allow actions to speak louder than words, as in a homo-erotic stage routine between the protagonists which evokes the theatrical stage duels of David Bowie and the late Mick Ronson.
To its credit, Velvet Goldmine aptly captures the fashion tragedies of the period in the outlandish costumes designed by Sandy Powell and the hair and make-up designs by Peter King. The soundtrack blends original recordings (by Cockney Rebel, T Rex, Slade, Gary Glitter) with cover versions of Seventies material (performed by Thom Yorke, Pulp, Teenage Fanclub, Placebo) and new songs commissioned for the film.
Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys Meyers perform three songs each in the movie, and the two actors work earnestly to transcend the limitations of the film's screenplay. While the underused McGregor is off-screen for about half of the movie, it is the prolific and fast-rising young Cork actor, Rhys Meyers, who enlivens it with a glowing star quality.
"Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" (18) General release
Demonstrating the technical virtuosity he gleaned making music videos and commercials, the 29-year-old writer-director Guy Ritchie makes an assured feature film debut with this clever and vibrant black comedy-thriller set among Cockney rebels in Ritchie's native London.
This underworld saga is populated entirely by amoral characters - with the exception of one unfortunate traffic warden who, in the film's only significant excess, is treated sadistically throughout. Promising newcomer Nick Moran plays Eddy, a young work-shy card shark who gambles with high stakes in a game with Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty), a porn magnate with a penchant for antique shotguns - hence the two smoking barrels of the title.
The other half of the title is explained when the card game is rigged and Eddy ends up owing Harry £500,000; if Eddy fails to come up with the money within a week, his bar-owner father (Sting), against whom Harry bears an old grudge, can cancel the debt to handing over his pub lock, stock and barrel.
What follows is a slick, briskly paced tale of multiple duplicity involving rival gangs and amateurs, among them a group of louche public school friends and would-be drug dealers; the violent thugs who live next door to Eddy; a local drugs baron; and a tough-as-nails debt collector (Vinnie Jones).
Ritchie's film is replete with movie references, from Trainspotting in the opening scenes to, most enjoyably, The Italian Job in the closing sequence, with nods to Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction along the way.
That's not to suggest that the movie is short of good ideas of its own. Ritchie's screenplay displays a keen ear for dialogue and engaging throwaway humour, and one sequence of Cockney rhyming slang is helpfully, and humorously, subtitled. The fluid camerawork often operates effectively from the most unexpected of angles, and there is consistently sharp comic timing from an imaginatively chosen cast in which Vinnie Jones acquits himself well as an actor. That cast also includes Jason Flemyng, Jason Statham, Dexter Fletcher, Steven Mackintosh and in a cameo, Irish boxer, Steve Collins.
"Halloween H20" (18) General release
Cinema's sixth sequel to John Carpenter's inventive and spine-tingling 1978 horror movie begins in the very near future - next Thursday, in fact, according to a caption which advises us that it's October 29th, 1998. We're in pumpkin-adorned Illinois suburbia and the apparently indestructible killer, Michael Myers, is on the rampage yet again, choosing as his first victim the nurse played in the original and again here by Nancy Stevens.
More importantly, the heroine of the first and second Halloweens is back - scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, sister of the maniacal Michael Myers and now an alcoholic and headmistress at an upmarket Californian boarding school. To keep the movie's budget down, most of the students and teachers go away for the Halloween weekend, leaving slim pickings for the masked killer when he inevitably arrives there from Illinois. This is the postmodern, post-Scream world, so Scream 2 plays on video in the background at one stage and the star's mother, Janet Leigh, a scream queen herself back in Psycho, pops up in a cameo. Most of the time, however, the chilling suspense of Carpenter's original is sacrificed in favour of poorly attempted irony.
Logic is lacking, too - in these days of cellular phones, cutting the land lines dead just doesn't wash any more. There are no surprises and no twists in this formulaic effort as Laurie finally, after all these years, gets down to doing what a woman's gotta do. The best thing about it all is the driving, dramatic music by Usual Suspects composer John Ottman, who ought to have saved his music for a more deserving movie.
Divorcing Jack has a 15 certificate, not 18 as listed here last Friday.
Patrick Bergin will present three short films, for which he provided a donation to have them preserved, at the IFC on Sunday at 4.30 p.m. The films are Dublin Of The Welcomes (1935), Funeral Of Lillie Connolly (1938), and a 1950 newsreel from Irish Pictorial. Admission is free.
