"Hamlet" (PG) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
In a previous film as a director, the wretched and feeble In the Bleak Midwinter, Kenneth Branagh followed the tedious misadventures of a third rate theatre troupe staging Hamlet. Meanwhile, Branagh himself was preparing for the real thing, honing his own screen adaptation of, Hamlet, an epic treatment which would retain the entire text on screen for the first time and would be shot on 70 mm. The resulting film, which arrives here today, runs for a full four hours and two minutes, making it the longest narrative feature since Cleopatra 35 years ago. And the only bad news is that we are deprived of the movie in all its 70 mm glory and have to make do with a 35 mm print.
With the setting transposed to the mid 19th century and with Elsinore played by the magnificent Blenbeim Palace, Branagh's highly ambitious epic treatment of Hamlet is respectful and thoughtful, intelligent and imaginative, and makes for vigorously cinematic drama. There are very few longueurs and even fewer lapses of artistic judgment to be found in this robust and handsome production which actually manages to breathe new life into the great play.
Branagh refreshes the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, for example, by speaking it directly into a mirror, and he creates a Hamlet who is, if anything, even more volatile and contradictory than he traditionally has been played. A bleached blond Branagh takes the central role and it hardly matters that he's a bit old for the part, given the physicality of his performance and the passion with which he delivers the dialogue.
Scenes suggested or inferred by the play are dramatised as asides or flashbacks - such as cuts to Hamlet and Ophelia making love in bed - as are some wild imaginings.
Just as he had Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington riding over the Tuscan landscape of his exuberant Much Ado About Nothing, so does Branagh populate his screen Hamlet with a stellar cast, and while there is a distracting element to Jack Lemmon turning up in a cameo as Marcellus, Gerard Depardieu popping up briefly as Reynaldo and Richard Attenborough speaking a few lines as the English ambassador - not to mention Robin Williams's high camp Osric and Ken Dodd's Yorick, whose skull comes complete with the Diddyman's prominent front teeth - there are many compensations.
Chief among these is Derek Jacobi's brilliantly judged Claudius, which precisely catches the cunning malevolence of the homicidal king, cloaks it with a sinister charm and yet betrays the underlying fear of being exposed. Richard Briers's fine Polonius is much less of a caricatured buffoon than is usually offered, while Kate Winslet's Ophelia is more realistic than ethereal and her growing torment is palpable.
Julie Christie is intense as a traumatised Gertrude, Charlton Heston seizes upon his smallest but best role in many years, as the Player King, and Billy Crystal brings some well timed light relief as the first gravedrigger.
In this opulent production dazzingly photographed by Alex Thomson, the principal set is a vast, ornate throne room with a floor designed like a chess board and walls of mirrored doors. As the shadow of doom hangs over the final scenes and Fortinbras and his army loom on the horizon, this is the stage for the dazzling sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes as the body count escalates. What a piece of work is this.
"The Eliminator" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin.
This week's other new release by a director from Northern Ireland, The Eliminator marks the no budget debut feature for the 21 year old Armagh film maker, Enda Hughes, who draws on a vast knowledge of movies and how they work in this riotous pastiche of a variety of genres through a wild and crazy narrative which somehow manages to hang together despite its many diversions.
An opening frame advises us that the story is set in the future at a time when this country is "torn bye conflict and strife" - and "the green soil stained red will spit forth the very dead and give rise to further abominations". There is quite some distance to go before we reach that climactic sequence which wickedly parodies Night Of The Living Dead.
First there's the story of John O'Brien, who is captured by British intelligence for reasons all too complicated to start explaining here. What follows is a succession of inventively staged action sequences involving cars, a plane and a futuristic vehicle called the VIPER. Hughes regularly steers the film off into tangents of which a spoof of Vietnam war movie cliche's is the most hilarious before the delirious finale in which Fionn MacCumhal, Cu Chulainn and St Patrick rise from the dead.
The Eliminator is propelled all the way by the wildly exaggerated acting, a very knowing irony, a profusion of visual gags, a great deal of energy, and an exemplary resourcefulness. The movie sags from time to time but gels again by the end when the Stiff Little Fingers classic, Alternative Ulster, blasts out over the credits. It's an entirely apt choice of closing song for a movie that unlike anything we've seen from the North of Ireland - or the Republic.
"Carla's Song" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin:
Hispanic revolutionaries have a fascination for the English director, Ken Loach; his last two films, Ladybird, Ladybird and Land And Freedom, and this, his latest, feature attractive Spanish speaking characters, courageously opposing oppressive regimes, with whom the English protagonists fall heavily in love.
There are some similarities between Carla's Song and the much more coherent drama of the Spanish Civil War, Land and Freedom.
Both deal with the political education of a working class English man through emotional entanglement. Here, the love story that unfolds between a free spirited Glaswegian bus driver, George (Robert Carlyle) and a traumatised Nicaraguan refugee Carla (Oyanka Cabezas) is comfortably located in familiar Loach territory - the texture of ordinary life revealed through naturalistic, character driven exposition - and is initially quite touching. It sits very uneasily, however, with the second half of the film, in which the action shifts from 1980s Glasgow to Nicaragua, which is being torn apart by the conflict between the Sandinistas and the US backed Contras.
Here the limitations of using English speaking characters as a window on to the complexities of this war become apparent; everything is simplified and reduced to what is explicable in Carla's broken English, and comprehensible to the horrified, bemused, politically naive George - and that isn't a lot.
The drawbacks of Loach's filming method are also revealed. His penchant for shooting in sequence, using an improvisational technique in which the actors perform without a script, means the sense conveyed by George of not knowing or understanding what's going on, is all too real. Everyone - participants and viewers - is in the dark, except Loach, and he's got some points to hammer home. The film is, in fact, crying out for a coherent script and tighter editing. It is disappointing - to see it collapse into an amorphous mess, in which the didactic message overwhelms the drama.
Fulfilling the promise of his performance in Trainspotting, Carlyle has an affecting intensity and convincingly expresses George's emotion and distress and the violence we witnesses - but this is not, enough. We are left with a films that has the rough, "authentic" feel of a documentary but gives no real analysis of Nicaraguan history and politics; and the sketchy contours of a drama that doesn't compel or convince and a love story that needs a different, more intimate treatment.
"She's the One" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Writer/director/actor Ed Burns first came to public attention a couple of years ago with his low budget debut The Brothers McMullen, one of the most commercially successful American independent movies of recent times, and keeps to similar terrain with his second effort, a romantic comedy revolving around the emotional trials and tribulations of Irish American brothers in New York. However, the addition of a proper budget and a few middle ranking stars shows up deficiencies partially masked by the previous film's rough and ready charm.
Burns himself plays Mickey, a laid back, unambitious cab driver whose love hate relationship with his materialistic, arrogant brother Francis (Mike McGlone) is amplified by overlapping romantic relationships with their wives (Maxine Bahns and Jennifer Aniston) and with "bad girl" Cameron Diaz. As their relationships unravel, the two brothers are forced to face the unrealistic expectations of life they have inherited from their happy go lucky father (John Mahoney).
There's a considerable amount of male wish fulfilment going on here - it stretches the bounds of credibility to believe such attractive women would give more than a sideways glance to this gormless pair, but Burns is too concerned with his witless male protagonists to use his three actresses as much more than window dressing.
That's bad enough, but it's impossible to give a damn about the self obsessed male angst of these cardboard cut out characters. McGlone's cliched portrayal of a Wall Street yuppie is an early contender for worst performance of the year, and Burns's supposedly wry observations on masculine self deception are too fatuous to raise much of a chuckle.
"In Love and War" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Will nothing ever stop Richard Attenborough? From Young Winston to Chaplin, the grand old man of middlebrow movies has plodded his way through three decades of dull and worthy biopics and, even at the age of 70, shows no sign of calling a halt. Attenborough's last film, Shadowlands, showed he was at his best when working to a smaller scale, but In Love And War sees him back at his worst. Based on the experiences of the 18 year old Ernest Hemingway in Italy at the end of the first World War, this drab offering features Chris O'Donnell as the wounded young novelist to be, recuperating in a sanatorium run by the Red Cross. where he falls in love with an American nurse (Sandra Bullock) eight years his senior.
Hemingway drew on his experiences on the Italian Front for Farewell To Arms, which was memorably adapted for the screen by Frank Borzage in 1932, but Attenborough has none of Borzage's understanding of cinema (and O'Donnell is certainly no Gary Cooper). The producers are careful to state, presumably for copyright reasons, that none of the dialogue is based on Hemingway's own writings, but that is already obvious - the characterisation and storytelling in In Love And War have all the depth and texture of the blandest kind of American TV mini series.
Bullock has a thankless task with her under developed role, and O'Donnell's chipmunk cheerfulness seems more appropriate to a John Hughes style high school movie. As usual, Attenborough's directing completely lacks a strong narrative drive, while Roger Pratt's chocolate box cinematography doesn't help matters much. It's quite an achievement to be this bloodless on the subjects of youth, passion and death, but this ponderous bore of a movie manages the feat.
"Powder" (12) Virgin, UCIs, Dublin.
A strained fable on the pointlessness of prejudice, Victor Salva's heavy handed Powder features Sean Patrick Flanery, the star of the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, as a young man known as Powder because he is hairless and has startlingly white skin. Raised in a basement by his grandparents, the young man encounters intolerance and cruelty when he finally emerges into the outside world, a small town in Texas. Powder's "otherness" is emphasised by his extraordinary mental ability and his powers of telekinesis.
The creepiest thing about the movie is not what the special effects wreak but how Powder, with his pallor, hat and tremulous voice, eerily resembles Michael Jackson.
The wasted cast also includes Mary Steenburgen and Jeff Goldblum. All the characters are reduced to cliche in this tired and obvious effort, which crawls along.
"Fierce Creatures" (PG) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.
Nine years after the surprise international success of A Fish Called Wanda, the core quartet of John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin reassembles for another comic outing in the production plagued Fierce Creatures. Originally set to open a year ago, the movie fared so poorly with American test audiences that the final third was reshot, with director Freg Schepisi replacing the original film maker, Robert Young.
The revamped movie jointly credited to Young and Schepisi, is set in a London zoo which has been acquired by an avaricious Australian mogul (Kline). Cleese plays the zoo's new director, a former police officer who decides to boost the zoo's earnings - in the belief that people only want violent entertainment, he vows that the only animals in the zoo will be violent predators. Curtis plays an American executive with her own plans for the zoo, while Palin plays a pedantic beekeeper and Kline has a second role as the mogul's stupid and lecherous son.
The comedy is closer to the cruder Carry On movies than to the overrated Wanda, while Cleese's bossy and uptight character recycles Basil Fawltey in a valiant performance which cries out for a wittier script. For that, Cleese can blame himself and his co writer, the former Sunday Times film reviewer, Iain Johnstone. The relentless slapstick and jaded innuendo of their slender, padded and only intermittently, amusing screenplay does a disservice to all four leading actors and a cast that also includes Robert Lindsay and Ronnie Corbett.
"Harriet the Spy" (PG) Savoy, Virgin, Oniniplex, UCIs, Dublin.
At last, the truth about writers and hacks: they're a nasty, nosy, heartless lot, making notes about their friends, without loyalty or shame. Ten year old Harriet (Michelle Trachtenberg) is shaping up nicely snooping around the neighbourhood and filling her spy notebook with sharp observations - until she's obstructed by philistines who just don't understand.
Louise Fitzhugh's best selling, American children's novel from the 1960s has been adapted into an action comedy and given a smart, quirky, contemporary feel by the director Bronwen Hughes and designer Lester Cohen. It's only when Harriet's notebook is discovered by her insufferable classmates, however, that it all begins to take off; the first half of the film is slackly paced and repetitive, saved only by the presence of Rosie O'Donnell as Harriet's quietly wacky nanny.
It's worth sticking out though the war between Harriet and her classmates becomes extremely nasty. It's called suffering for your art.
