Savour a rare story about French local government in these pages. The pretty little town of St Marc sur Mer gained iconic status as the venue for Jacques Tati’s mishaps in the untouchable Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.
You’d think the stuffed shirts in L’Hotel de Ville (or whatever it’s called) would be running up T-shirts and tea towels. Not so. It seems that the authorities in St Nazaire, of which St Marc sur Mer is officially a suburb, rather object to their satellite’s independent status and have begun removing the resort’s name from road signs.
“St Marc is the place where Tati chose to film and . . . it is a name which deserves to stay,” fumed local politician Jean-Louis Garnier.
Harry Potter and the swine flu
Ron Weasley has a cold! Stop all the presses. Health authorities throughout the world finally got what they wanted this week when a movie star caught swine flu and conspicuously didn’t die. “I did have swine flu, but it was just like any other flu I’ve had before,” Rupert Grint, the best actor in the Harry Potter troupe, explained. Perhaps people will calm down now.
Last hurrah for TJ Hooker?
Miami Vice? The A-Team? Starsky and Hutch? They'll be making TJ Hooker into a movie next. Ha, ha! What's that you say? They are making TJ Hooker into a film.
As older readers may recall, the only thing that distinguished that 1980s cop show from all others was that it starred William Shatner. He didn’t live on a boat. He wasn’t in a wheelchair. He was just William Shatner. Could the great man, now an amazingly lively 78, still squeeze into an LAPD uniform more than 20 years after the show ended?
New Irish films opening
Reel News is at the Galway Film Fleadh, where films such as Conor Horgan's One Hundred Mornings and Ken Wardrop's His Hers are about to unspool before the lucky guests. Next Thursday, Tom Hall's Wide Open Spaces, based on a script by Arthur Matthews, will have its unveiling at the Light House in Dublin's Smithfield. Ardal O'Hanlon and Arthur Matthews are expected to be in attendance.
A doc a month
Stranger than Fiction, the Irish Film Institute's esteemed documentary season, is spreading across the calendar. From next week the institute will give over one evening a month to a documentary selected by the festival team.
The project kicks off on Thursday with Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, an examination of the Democratic Voice of Burma’s responses to media clampdowns in their country. Beginning at 8.20pm, the event will take in a live satellite introduction from Vivienne Westwood, who, rumours suggest, will have a movie star by her side, and a post-screening discussion with the film-makers.
dclarke@irishtimes.com
