Just over a year ago the prospect of Titanic becoming the biggest box-office hit of all time seemed as remote as the likelihood of Jim Carrey giving a delicately understated performance in a serious, intelligent and thoughtful movie. However, just as Carrey confounded expectations with his engaging and restrained performance in Peter Weir's superb The Truman Show, so did James Cameron's Titanic defy all the many prophecies of doom which had been made by the media and the film industry. Throughout the first 11 months of 1997, predictions abounded that Titanic would go the way of its subject and sink to the bottom of the box-office. The film was originally set to open in the summer of last year, and when it failed to meet its release date and was postponed for five months, the worst was feared. The movie had gone way over schedule and over budget, and with a 192-minute running time was perceived as a liability in the busiest release season of the year in the US, the weeks before Christmas.
Then it opened. The reviews were almost unanimously positive, and many of them were raves. And from the first day on release it began breaking box-office records, in the US and then all over the world. Jaws dropped and eyebrows were raised as it sailed past the £1 billion mark at the international box-office. And that was only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak - it went on to pass the £2 billion mark. At the Oscars in March it equalled the all-time record of 11 Oscars set by Ben-Hur in 1959. It turned Leonardo DiCaprio into the most sought-after movie star in the world. And it had an extraordinary impact on audiences everywhere, with some ardent devotees going to see it week after week.
In Ireland - where Neil Jordan's Michael Collins scaled unheard-of box-office heights just two years ago when it took over £4 million at Irish cinemas - Titanic went through the roof, finally docking with takings in excess of £7.5 million. Trailing well behind with £2.3 million in second place, There's Something About Mary, nevertheless, became the surprise hit of this year - a crude and relatively low-budget comedy which cost $25 million and has already taken over 12 times that at the international box-office.
Critically and commercially, it was a very good year for Irish films. In 1997 only one Irish film, I Went Down, made any significant impact on Irish audiences, taking over £500,000. This year four Irish films comfortably exceeded that figure.
The subject of a good deal of controversy when it opened here, The General proved to be John Boorman's best film in years and he received the best director award at Cannes for his work. The film featured a superb central performance by Brendan Gleeson, who goes from strength to strength, and it made over £1.3 million at the Irish box-office.
Close behind came Neil Jordan's remarkable adaptation of Pat McCabe's apparently unfilmable The Butcher Boy, which earned Jordan the best director prize at Berlin and a special mention from the jury for his remarkable young star, Eamonn Owens.
Jim Sheridan's timely Northern Ireland drama, The Boxer, chalked up a healthy £800,000 at the Irish box-office, although it failed to attract substantial audiences elsewhere, while Pat O'Connor's film of Dancing At Lughnasa has so far taken over £650,000 here. As many as 12 features and two short features went on release here during 1998, some of them on a club basis at the IFC. It was a good year for short films, with Tim Loane's Dance Lexie Dance securing an Oscar nomination, Martin Mahon's Happy Birthday To Me selected for competition at Cannes, and Kirsten Sheridan's Patterns collecting several awards in Ireland. Meanwhile, a number of Irish feature films are collecting dust as they await belated release.
After a pitifully small selection of notable new foreign-language movies released here last year, the international choice offered in 1998 was altogether stronger, with some fine films from Japan (Hana-Bi and Shall We Dance?), Russia (Prisoner of the Mountains and The Thief), France (The Dream Life of Angels and Les Voleurs), Spain (Live Flesh), Hong Kong (Happy Together), Austria (Funny Games) and Norway (Junk Mail).
In American cinema it was a year of some notable comebacks - from Steven Spielberg, with Saving Private Ryan compensating for the tedium of Amistad and the two forays into Jurassic Park; Stephen Soderbergh with the immensely entertaining Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out Of Sight; Robert Foster and Pam Grier in another Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown; Julie Christie in Afterglow; Burt Reynolds in Boo- gie Nights; Peter Fonda in Ulee's Gold; and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting and What Dreams May Come.
There were many disappointments, however - Velvet Goldmine, Lucie Aubrac, Mrs Dalloway, The Edge, Oscar and Lucinda, Ponette, The Ginger- bread Man and Mad City - and more than a few wildly overpraised pictures, such as As Good As It Gets, Buffalo '66, The End Of Violence and Henry Fool.
The nadir of the year had to be The Avengers, a truly unspeakable farrago. Not too far behind were some worthless sequels (The Odd Couple II, Blues Brothers 2000, Halloween H20 and Lethal Weapon 4), pointless reworkings (Great Expectations, Godzilla and the amazingly popular Dr Do- little), misfired adaptations (Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and Resurrection Man) and sheer piffle (Mimic, Kissing A Fool, The Jackal, Sphere and Stiff Upper Lips).
Choosing the outstanding performances of the year was particularly difficult when it came to best actor and meant the omission of such memorable performances as Brendan Gleeson (The General), Peter Mullan (My Name Is Joe), Kevin Kline (The Ice Storm and In & Out), Derek Jacobi (Love Is The Devil), John Travolta (Primary Colors), Jim Carrey (The Truman Show), Daniel Day-Lewis (The Boxer) and John Hurt (Love And Death On Long Island).
Many of those movies were reluctantly left off my top 10 films of the year, as were What Dreams May Come, Out Of Sight, In The Company Of Men, Boogie Nights, Sling Blade, The Spanish Prisoner, The Object Of My Affection, Mulan and Kundun. As it happened, there were more than 40 titles on my first shortlist for the films of the year - more than a fifth of the 200 or so movies released here during the year. And when there is such a formidable output of movies to consider, it's got to have been a very good year.
Happy Christmas.
