"The Hanging Garden" (Members and Guests) IFC, Dublin The Canadian writer-director Thom Fitzgerald's impressive debut feature is set in a Nova Scotian community whose Celticised accents, customs and music will seem very familiar to an Irish audience, but in style and tone it's very much part of the wave of striking, slightly surreal film-making which has come out of Canada in recent years (the last example being Lynne Stopkewich's necrophiliac romance, Kissed). Like his peers, Fitzgerald impressively integrates the kind of visual formalism and non-realist symbolism which can often seem embarrassingly out of place in a feature film narrative into an affecting and memorable story.
Chris Leavins plays Sweet William, a 25-year-old gay man returning to visit his family after an absence of 10 years for the wedding of his abrasive, strong-willed sister Rosemary (the excellent Kerry Fox). Over the course of his visit, he talks obliquely with his mother, Iris (Seana McKenna) about the events which led to his departure, and meets 10-year-old Violet (Christine Dunsworth), the sister he never knew he had. The characters' names offer some indication of Fitzgerald's willingness to play with symbolism - the recurring imagery of the garden serves as an overt metaphor for this dysfunctional, damaged family's wayward history. But such devices as the overt colour-coding of the characters' wardrobes, the chapter headings which intersperse the narrative, or the intrusion of earlier, younger versions of these people into the frame of the main contemporary narrative, never seem forced or arch. What Fitzgerald has to say about families is sympathetic but never sentimental, and the structure he devises to express the constant intrusion of the past into the present makes for compelling viewing, as different parts of this complex emotional jigsaw fall into place.
"Blues Brothers 2000" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Santry Omniplex, UCis, Dublin It took John Landis 18 years to come up with a sequel to his 1980 comedy hit The Blues Brothers, and you have to wonder why he bothered. It's not as if the original, with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as music-obsessed hipsters being chased around by cops while meeting assorted r'n'b legends, was much good, although it did have a certain cult status among the kind of people who had never heard of Aretha Franklin or James Brown (both of whom reappear here, along with Wilson Pickett, BB King and other luminaries). With Belushi long gone to that great all-night party in the sky, John Goodman has now donned the black suit, hat and shades to partner Aykroyd for an unoriginal reprise of a not particularly original movie. Dated, lazy and boring, it serves merely to mark another step in the decline of Landis, who used to make enjoyably trashy movies once, but seems to have lost the knack.
