Two hot young Irish actors have landed leading roles in new movies about to go into production for Hollywood studios. Cillian Murphy, who was wonderfully natural in the Irish-American Sunburn, shown at Galway Film Fleadh in the summer, has been given the leading role in The Smiling Suicide Club, to be directed by John Carney, who made November Afternoon, Just in Time and Park with Tom Hall. The film, which is produced by Jim Sheridan and Arthur Lappin's Hell's Kitchen company for Universal Pictures, starts shooting next Monday. Cillian Murphy, who made his mark on stage in Enda Walsh's soon-to-be-filmed Disco Pigs, was most recently seen in Garry Hynes's production of The Plough and the Stars at the Gaiety in Dublin.
Meanwhile Colin Farrell, who plays Danny in Ballykissangel, has won out over several US actors to star in the new Joel Schumacher movie, Tigerland, which is set among young American soldiers in a Louisiana boot camp weeks before they go off to war in Vietnam. Schumacher's films include Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, St Elmo's Fire, Flatliners and, most recently, 8MM. Colin Farrell, who also featured in Falling For a Dancer on television, will be seen next in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal, which stars Kevin Spacey and opens here in January.
There is a major gap in Dublin's cultural calendar with the bad news that the annual French Film Festival - which had been tentatively set to run from November 25th to December 5th - will not go ahead this year because of insufficient funding. Programme director Marie-Pierre Richard and her team worked wonders on a small budget over the years, bringing a wealth of French-language cinema and many notable actors and directors to Dublin. It is a great shame that such a quality event which had attracted a substantial dedicated audience should fail to attract the sponsorship crucial to keep the festival alive. We can only hope that an enlightened sponsor will step in to help revive the event next year.
Six of the 12 screens in the new IMC multiplex opens in Dun Laoghaire today and the other six will open next Friday. Situated at the Bloomfields Centre on Lower George's Street, the complex spans three levels and includes a wine bar and cafe with seating for 60 people. With three interconnecting escalators and a lift, the cinema is completely wheelchair-accessible.
The IMC complex brings the total number of screens in Dublin city and county to 97. And more are on the way.
In a diary for the New Statesman last week Barry Norman observed that it is increasingly rare to find "grown-ups with a knowledge of, interest in and care for the cinema" being asked to review movies. "In future," he believes, "film criticism on television will be handed over to bouncing bimbos of both sexes whose qualification is that they once saw an animated Disney with their parents and, in newspapers and magazines, to people who have proved they can write nicely, have heard vaguely of David Lean, just about know the difference between Einstein and Eisenstein and will use the job as a stepping-stone to another column. Look around you - it's happening already."
Norman adds that he knows of "one reviewer on a serious national publication who took up his post convinced that the Cannes Film Festival was devoted exclusively to French movies".
As he begins his second season at Sky, Norman says he is enjoying it very much - and not because of the money, although he admits that the money is better than at the BBC. "When I left the BBC I didn't fall, I wasn't pushed, I jumped - just as Des Lynam has done since," he writes. "I can't speak for Des, but I hope he is now rediscovering in his new berth, as I am in mine, the almost forgotten pleasure of working among people who are both enthusiastic and happy."
Last Sunday night The Buena Vista Social Club broke the house record for box-office takings at the IFC in Dublin - a remarkable achievement for a documentary. The record has been held by Martin Scorsese's Kundun since it played the IFC in April of last year. The Buena Vista Social Club screens at the Foyle Film Festival in Derry where its director, Wim Wenders, will give a public interview next Wednesday. The film opens at the Kino in Cork next Friday.
The producer and soundtrack consultant David Donohue will present a seminar on the role of the soundtrack in contemporary film at Cinematek in Triskel Arts Centre next Tuesday at 6 p.m. It will be followed at 8.45 p.m. by a double bill of music documentaries produced by Donohue: Words For the Dying, featuring John Cale and Brian Eno at work on an orchestral album of Dylan Thomas interpretations, and Put Blood in the Music, an account of the New York avant-garde scene featuring Sonic Youth, John Zorn, Lydia Lunch, John Cale and Glenn Branca.
Eight feature films have been nominated for Best European Film of the Year at the European Film Awards, which will be presented in Berlin on December 4th. They are Roger Michell's Notting Hill, Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, Tim Roth's The War Zone, Istvan Szabo's Sunshine, Alexandr Sokurov's Moloch, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne Rosetta, Lukas Moodysson's Fucking Amal (aka Show Me Love) and Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune.
Competing for the European actor award are Rupert Everett (An Ideal Husband), Ray Winstone (The War Zone), Goetz George (After the Truth), Anders Berthelsen (Mifune), Philippe Torreton (Ca Commence Aujourd'hui/It Happens Today) and Ralph Fiennes (Sunshine). The nominees for the European actress award are Cecilia Roth (All About My Mother), Penelope Cruz (The Girl of Your Dreams), Nathalie Baye (Une Liaison Pornographique), Iben Hjele (Mifune) and Emilie Dequenne (Rosetta).
Five films have been nominated for the Screen International award for best non-European film: The Straight Story (David Lynch), American Beauty (Sam Mendes), Boys Don't Cry (Kimberley Peirce), Not One Less (Zhang Yimou) and The Cup (Khyentse Norbu). The nominees for best screenplay are Sasa Gedeon (The Return of the Idiot), Istvan Szabo and Israel Horowitz (Sunshine) and Ayub Khan-Din (East is East).
More evidence that truth is stranger than fiction: in the week that The Guardian reported that Andrew Lloyd Webber is writing a musical set in Northern Ireland and dealing with The Troubles, Screen International advised readers that there are plans to make a film of Frederic Raphael's recent book, Eyes Wide Open, dealing with Raphael's (limited) contact with Stanley Kubrick when they collaborated on the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut.
Amazingly, Raphael is being considered to play Kubrick in the proposed movie of his tedious, name-dropping and generally unilluminating book, and Tom Conti is tipped to play Raphael. The film will be directed by Stanley Donen who, the book tells us, introduced Kubrick and Raphael at a dinner party in the 1970s. Now 75, Donen, whose credits include Singin' in the Rain, Charade and the Raphael-scripted Two For the Road, has not directed made a film for 15 years apart from a TV movie based on the two-hander stage play, Love Letters.
