Irish cinema over the past 25 years will be celebrated throughout the Brussels International Film Festival, which marks its own 25th anniversary this year with a bumper edition running for 12 days from next Tuesday. The centrepiece of the Irish season will be a complete retrospective of Neil Jordan's work, and Jordan will discuss his work with the festival audience following the screening of Angel next Wednesday evening.
Later on Wednesday night the festival will host a special Irish party to greet the 50 Irish film-makers who have been invited to Brussels. The Irish programme spans productions from Bob Quinn's Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoire to the recent I Went Down and includes a wide-ranging selection of short and feature films supplied by the Irish Film Archive. On Sunday, January 26th, the Irish Film Institute and Bord Scannan na hEireann will host a drinks reception in Brussels, and a seminar on film financing in Ireland will be held on the following day.
The festival's guests of honour, Neil Jordan and Dennis Hopper, will be presented with a Crital Iris, the official prize of the Brussels region, to mark their achievements in cinema. The festival's international guests also will include Oliver Stone, Catherine Deneuve, Julie Delpy, Bertrand Tavernier, Ben Gazzara and Morgan Freeman. The festival's opening presentation will be Brian Gilbert's Wilde and the event will close with Steven Spielberg's Amistad, one of three new movies featuring Morgan Freeman and showing in Brussels. All three will open in Ireland over consecutive weekends beginning on February 20th with Hard Rain, followed by Amistad on February 27th and Kiss The Girls on March 6th.
With the Golden Globes to be presented in Los Angeles on Sunday night, the last major US critics' group, the National Society of Film Critics (NSFC), has announced its 1997 awards. In an unusually rare show of unanimity, the society agrees with the New York, Los Angeles and Boston critics' circles and the National Board of Review by naming Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential best film and best director. Hanson's movie also took the best screenplay prize from the NSFC. The only time in the last 10 years when all of the groups agreed on the best picture award was in 1993 when they opted for Schindler's List, which went on to win the Oscar for best picture.
In its other awards the NSFC named Julie Christie best actress for Afterglow and Robert Duvall best actor for The Apostle. Best supporting actor and actress went to Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore for Boogie Nights. Roger Deakins was named best cinematographer for Martin Scorsese's Kundun, and the Belgian La Promesse took the award for best foreign-language film.
While Titanic continues to dominate the US box-office, Kevin Costner's The Postman is faring ignominiously. Having taken just $15 million after two weeks on release in America, Costner's futuristic epic has been described by the trade paper, Screen International, as a "catastrophic flop". The film, which runs for three hours and eight minutes, reportedly cost more than $100 million. Costner's second outing as a director after the Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves, it is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war with Costner starring as a man who dons a postman's uniform and delivers mail to some of the survivors.
Four films from Irish directors are among the 15 selected for The Talent, the showcase of short films to be screened by BBC 2 on January 23rd, 24th, 30th and 31st. The Irish productions are Damien O'Donnell's Thirty Five Aside, Stephen Burke's 81, Tim Loane's Dance Lexie Dance and Brendan Byrne's Puddy Cat. The series, to be hosted by Mark Lawson, will culminate with one of the 15 directors receiving an award of a £5,000 development deal with BBC Films. The jury will consist of writer-director Alan Parker, actor-director Phil Davis and producer Sarah Radcylffe, and they will deliver their verdict in the January 31st programme.
The year-end issue of Entertainment Weekly invited dozens of showbiz folk to select their "hits and pits" of 1997. Richard Gere, a staunch devotee of the Dalai Lama, not surprisingly picked Martin Scorsese's Dalai Lama film, Kundun, as his hit; the pits for Gere was "inhumanity". Helen Hunt, who stars in the TV sitcom Mad About You and with Jack Nicholson in the movie, As Good As It Gets, thought "Mrs Brown was pretty great", but regretted that "we don't have the Olympics every single day of every year".
Proving that there's more to him than directing Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven's hit was "Puccini's Tosca at the L.A. Opera". His pits? "I was a bit disappointed in the universe," he said. "I saw the photos from the Hubble telescope, with all the galaxies and planets being destroyed - I think the universe could have been more efficient."
The hit for Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus was "Christine Lahti on Chicago Hope" and the pits for her was that "The Seventies are back". That was before she heard of the imminent demise of Seinfeld. For actress Jada Pinkett, the hit was "getting engaged to Will Smith - he's the best".
For Shannon Tweed the pits was "The Full Monty - you're waiting the whole movie for the full monty, and it didn't come until the end. And it wasn't that good of a story to keep you waiting." Jennifer Tilly disagreed - her hit was "The Full Monty - a really unlikely candidate for a moneymaking movie", while her pits was, "I think there's been an unhealthy preoccupation with porn stars and strippers".
Paul Thomas Anderson, director of the porn-preoccupied Boogie Nights, said the pits was paying "$7.50 see a certain movie with Nicolas Cage on an airplane", while Sister Act actress Kathy Najimy said she "went to this movie and I renamed it Seven Years In My Seat".
Producer Lawrence Bender's hit was "Danny Elfman's score for Good Will Hunting", a movie which, coincidentally, Bender produced, and his pits was "getting stuck for two hours in the parking lot of the Fleetwood Mac concert in L.A. and missing half the show". Honestly. And what can one say about Denzel Washington, for whom the pits was: "I watched that L.A. Confidential and, man, am I dumb, or was it confusing?".
