Michael Dwyer on his first visit to Cannes for In Dublin magazine in 1982, with actor Katrine Boorman on the balcony of Hotel du Cap, at a party for Neil Jordan's Angel
Irish TimesFilm Correspondent Michael Dwyer died a week ago today after an illness. He had been reviewing films on a weekly basis in the newspaper for 21 years, and sharing his enthusiasm for cinema through his interviews and reports from around the world. Here we reproduce extracts from some of his articles
THE REVIEWS
Michael joined The Irish Timesin November 1988. Below we quote from his first and last reviews for the paper, and a few in between.
Powerful elegy made for a jazzman
Friday, November 25, 1988:
Bird (over 16s)
ANYONE whose image of Clint Eastwood is limited to his monosyllabic roles as avenging cowboys and reactionary cops will be taken by the sheer power and style of his excellent new movie, Bird. It is Eastwood’s 13th film as a director, and only the second of these in which he does not star.
Birdtakes its title from the nickname of Charlie Parker, the gifted, influential alto saxophonist who is its subject. It is a screen portrait which is simultaneously harrowing, enthralling and musically invigorating.
[An addendum the same week dealt with one of the most controversial films to open in Ireland in recent decades]
Despite, or perhaps because of, the enormous media attention it attracted, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christhas proved to be a major flop at Irish cinemas. After a mere fortnight at the 289-seater Carlton 3 in Dublin, the controversial film has been taken off because of attendances which Adelphi-Carlton manager Michael Hussey describes as "dismal".
Eating people is wrong
Friday, June 14, 1991: The Silence of the Lambs (over 15s)
EMERGING from an early morning preview of The Silence of the Lambs a fortnight ago, my mind was spinning and my legs like jelly. For two hours I had been wholly immersed in this rich, fascinating and heady movie which amounted to a deeply absorbing and quite unforgettable experience. The fact that I sat through it with just three other people in the vast 780-seater Savoy 1 auditorium perhaps added to the eerie nature of the event. There is so much to reflect on and admire in this outstanding film, that I am going back to see it today, this time to share the experience with a full house.
A joyous musical journey through Dublin
Friday, September 20, 1991:
The Commitments (over 15s)
OOZING with energy and vitality, Alan Parkers film of Roddy Doyle's The Commitmentstakes on one of the most tired genres in cinema; cutting through the clichés, it invigorates it and refreshes it, breathes an abundance of new life into it. Although the movie adheres closely to the formula of the genre, it gleefully turns it on its head for one of the best, most entertaining movies of recent years.
The film is a compassionate, hopeful and uplifting experience with a marvellous pace and rhythm which makes the just-under-two- hours running time fly by so fast that it’s over all too soon.
And if Bord Fáilte doesn’t like the gritty, atmospheric images captured by director of photography Gale Tattersall, that’s their problem.
Habits and hustlers
Friday, February 23, 1996:
Trainspotting (18)
Trainspotting employs a remarkably bold visual style to form a movie that is, by turns, shocking, chillingly unsettling, blackly humorous, bursting with energy and startlingly surreal.
Fuelled by sharp, rapid-fire dialogue and vividly played by an exemplary young cast, this is a Clockwork Orange for the 1990s – a reference most explicitly evoked in the antihero’s voiceover narration and in the set constructed for the movie’s nightclub sequence.
Dynamic, thrilling, epic cinema
Friday, November 8, 1996:
Michael Collins (PG)
WRITING about Neil Jordans Michael Collinswhen I first saw the film back in August, I described it as the most important film made in or about Ireland in the first century of cinema. Seeing Jordan's riveting film for the second time last week only reinforces that view. Never before has any film spoken quite so eloquently and quite so powerfully to Irish audiences.
Chancer in the dark?
Friday, October 20, 2000:
Dancer in the Dark (15)
THE promotional campaigns for Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, which inexplicably won the Palme d’Or for best film and the best actress award for Björk at the Cannes Film Festival in May, have been proving more interesting than the movie itself.
Daft as a brush, and about as visually interesting as one for most of its extended duration, Dancer in the Dark is a pointless and deeply self-indulgent exercise.
Yawn of the Dead
Friday, June 12, 2009:
Doghouse (15A)
IN A scenario that inevitably recalls the recent, wretched Lesbian Vampire Killers, six male friends leave London for a weekend break in the country. Their destination is a village that just happens to be overrun by “an army of pissed-off, man-hating feminist cannibals”.
These apparently indestructible “zombirds” are mostly dressed in low-cut uniforms. “Now is not the time to stop objectifying women,” one of the men unexpectedly remarks in one of the screenplay’s few complete sentences.
This schlocky horror show trundles along its blood-splattered way and we wonder if better roles are so hard to find for the movie’s more than capable leading actors.
Michael worked out that he had spent more than a year of his life in Cannes, having reported on the film festival for a variety of publications, every year from 1982 to 2009.
OUR MAN IN CANNES
Streep fever on the streets of Cannes
Monday, May 15, 1989
FAME and its consequences can be frightening, as Meryl Streep discovered when she arrived at her press conference for the world’s media on Saturday morning at the Cannes Film Festival. Large numbers of international photographers awaited her arrival at the main festival venue, The Palais, and hysteria broke out when the actress stepped out of the lift.
Finally, her path was cleared but she was still shaking as she took her seat flanked by her colleagues from the movie A Cry in the Dark.
“I don’t have to encounter that very often,” she commented with a quiver in her voice. “In fact, I’ve never had to encounter that in my life.”
Goodbye and good riddance
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
BRAVO to the jury of the 56th Cannes Film Festival. They deserve to be saluted more than most of the movies inflicted on them, and the audience, day after day of an exceptionally weak year for the festival.
The official selection reeked of geographical tokenism and of propping up a jaded old boy network.
‘Brokeback’ gets Minister’s seal of approval
Saturday, May 27, 2006
MINISTER for Arts John O'Donoghue is a regular filmgoer, generally taking in a night at the cinema once a week, he told me when we talked in Cannes on Sunday. His favourite recent film? "I would say that Brokeback Mountainis the best I've seen in the last five to 10 years," he said, and we would not disagree with that. He was underwhelmed, however, by Mission: Impossible III.
He congratulated me on spending 25 consecutive years covering the Cannes festival, but he quipped that he could top that, having attended the Listowel Races for 33 years on the trot.
Loach scoops the Palme dOr at Cannes with Irish-made film
Monday, May 29, 2006
AN IRISH-MADE film took the top prize at the 59th Cannes Film Festival last night when the coveted Palme d’Or was presented to English director Ken Loach for the Irish War of Independence drama, The Wind that Shakes the Barley. This is the first time a film made in Ireland has taken the world’s most prestigious film festivals top award.
“This is extraordinary,” Loach told The Irish Times last night, after accepting the award. “I hope that Ireland feels that it’s their film. It is their film.”
THE OSCARS
Michael reported often from the annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles, including these two reports on Irish victories.
“The makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin”
Wednesday, March 28, 1990
ASKED about her chances on her way into the auditorium, best supporting actress nominee Anjelica Huston expressed her admiration for a rival nominee. “I think Brenda Fricker is a wonderful actress,” she declared, expressing a view held by many when actor Kevin Kline announced the winner of the best supporting actress award.
“I don’t believe this,” was Brenda’s first comment when Kline handed her the gold-plated statuette.
Almost two hours passed before Jodie Foster announced that Daniel Day Lewis had won the best actor Oscar for My Left Foot. "You've provided me with the makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin," he declared, as the audience gave him a standing ovation.
The two My Left Foot winners, Oscars in hand, made their way into a celebratory party at the plush Beverly Hills Hotel, the Entertainment Tonight crew still on Brenda’s heels. Belfast-born actor director Ken Branagh turned up to congratulate the My Left Foot team, as did Roger and Me director Michael Moore, along with what seemed to be every Irish person who was in Hollywood on the night, including singers Bono and Bob Geldof.
The evening was permeated by a strong sense of pride and good humour. It was a great night to be Irish.
For Once, all smiles on the big, big stage
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
WHEN it was announced that Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová had won the Best Original Song award for Falling Slowly, they clasped their hands to their faces in shock, and he hugged his mother, before the duo went on stage.
“Go raibh míle míle maith agat,” Hansard said. “This is mad. We shot this on two Handycams in three weeks for 100 grand. We never thought we would be up here tonight.” He concluded with the exhortation, “Make art. Make art.”
Just as Irglová was about to speak, she was drowned out by the orchestra, who had been instructed to cut off speakers after 45 seconds.
Then, in what is surely unprecedented at the Oscars, compere Jon Stewart brought her back on stage after the ad break to give her acceptance speech. “This is such a big deal,” she said, “not just for us, but for all independent musicians.”
AN APRIL FOOL
If you've been scouring the web for the DVD of this film, reviewed by Michael in 2005, you can stop now.
Inscrutably brilliant
Friday, April 1, 2005:
Sail-Proof Lady
Two cinema legends return in triumph for Sail-Proof Lady, an extraordinary meditation on reality and illusion suffused with Bressonian austerity, Joycean opacity and Marxist humour.
Mystery has shrouded the whereabouts of its visionary director, the former Brazilian child star Khonne Ortitz, since his 1969 French existentialist epic, Incroyable (Would You Believe?). There are rumours that he was in a monastery in Paris – in the company of another less than prolific director, Terrence Malick.
An even more reclusive figure than Greta Garbo, Eve Channing turns up for the first time since her incomparable portrayal of Marguerite Wyck, the adulterous wife of Laurence Olivier in the 1972 thriller Sleuth. Channing is sublime as the enigmatic woman known only as Sail-Proof Lady. In Ortitz's deliciously teasing screenplay, various clues to her name are offered, mostly in references to dates, as she embarks on a complex quest for meaning in her life.
While cynics may claim theres less to the film than meets the eye, sharp-eyed viewers may detect layers of hidden meanings.
