There was one high-profile no-show - Shane MacGowan, who missed his flight from LA for the world premiere of Sarah Share's documentary on him, If I Should Fall From Grace - but the guest list over the opening weekend of the Miller 16th Dublin Film Festival was considerably stronger than last year. Director Share and producer Larry Masterson were present for the packed screening, as were director Declan Lowney, screenwriter Colin Bateman and star Brendan Gleeson earlier the same evening for the Irish premiere of Wild About Harry.
American film-maker Stacy Cochran was in Dublin for the festival screenings of her two features, My New Gun and Drop Back Ten, and her short documentary on director Richard Lester. And the loudest applause was saved for Ireland's fastest rising young actor, the 24-year-old Dubliner, Colin Farrell, who flew in from the Prague set of Hart's War, in which he costars with Bruce Willis, for the Irish premiere of his breakthrough movie, Tigerland, Joel Schumacher's tight, gritty drama set in a pre-Vietnam boot camp. Farrell charmed the audience with anecdotes and background information during the half-hour public interview which followed.
As for the festival films themselves, a good deal remains to be seen between now and the closing presentation of the Australian comedy, The Dish, next Sunday night. The event got off to a mixed start with Wild About Harry, the first cinema feature from Declan Lowney, the Wexford-born director who has extensive experience in television comedy. The Belfast-set screenplay by Colin Bateman features the excellent Brendan Gleeson as Harry McKee, an obnoxious celebrity TV chef notorious for his womanising and heavy drinking. His wife (Amanda Donohue) is about to divorce Harry when he is attacked by four men (for no clear reason), goes into a coma and loses his memory of everything that happened over the previous 25 years of his life. Suddenly, he's 18 again, and even playing Deep Purple guitar solos, but his wife and her pushy solicitor (a thickly lipsticked Bronagh Gallagher) suspect it's all a ruse.
The first half-hour of Wild About Harry is regularly hilarious, especially when the concussed Harry on his live daytime TV show exposes the sex life of an adulterous, bisexual MP (James Nesbitt). Although Bateman continues to pepper the picture with sharp one-liners, it takes on an uneasy air of schmaltz which feels at odds with the material and with Bateman's characteristic hard-edged humour. Drop Back Ten, the new film from writer-director-producer Stacy Cochran, similarly promises more than it finally delivers. It takes its title from a controversial book on professional football written by Peter (James Le Gros), a journalist whose need for work leads to an assignment to interview a popular teen movie star (Desmond Harrington) on the set of his new movie. The young star is surrounded by a protective phalanx of producers, the smarmiest and most obnoxious of whom (played by Tate Donovan) is obsessed with controlling what's published and what isn't. Nevertheless, several chance encounters land the big story on Peter's lap - that the teen star, who is really 27, regularly beat his ex-wife and their little daughter.
Cochran's film is at its most satisfying as it pokes wicked fun at the absurdity of the movie business in which vanity, obsequiousness and perma-smiling publicists abound. The director of the film-within-the-film is a woman who is treated with indifference and contempt by the producers, which prompts one to assume that Stacy Cochran is drawing on personal experience for her own movie - which is saddled with torrents of dialogue which ought to be have been reined in, and with a final half-hour which ought to have carried a much stronger dramatic charge.
However, it is a masterpiece compared to the other new US indie I caught over the opening weekend, Thomas Bezucha's Big Eden, a slender and meandering picture, so plodding and hesitant that it feels like it's in slow motion - all of it. It features a wimpy central performance from Arye Gross as Henry Hart, a gay New York artist who has long put his smalltown Montana origins behind him - until his grandafther suffers a stroke and Henry goes home to see him and stays for over nine months. And, shucks, who should return home to the same town just a week earlier but Henry's longtime teenage crush, Dean (Tim DeKay) who has two young sons but is now divorced from his wife.
Will Henry and Dean finally get it together, or will one or other be distracted by the Native American storekeeper who reacts ridiculously nervously at every contact with either of them? As the movie crawls to its resolution it depicts an idealised world of a squeaky-clean, touchyfeely, goody-goody community which is secretly fascinated by this emotional gay triangle and its prospects for consummation. It proved impossible to share their fascination. Just as tedious, and with a strong whiff of Europudding, and ladling on the pretentiousness, The King is Alive, the fourth film certified under the Dogme 95 manifesto, is directed by commercials-maker Kristian Levring, the last of the four Dogme signatories to make a film under the manifesto's rules.
The premise of Levring's absurdly contrived movie bears a striking resemblance to, of all things, the hoary old disaster movie formula: take a disparate international group of travellers and throw them together in adversity when they get airplane trouble. So it goes in The King is Alive which strands 11 tourists and their African driver in a ghost town in the Namibian desert when they finally realise his dashboard compass isn't working - after they have veered 500 miles off course. The twist in the genre is that they decide to perform King Lear as a form of group therapy. No kidding.
There is always something unbearably smug about watching professional actors self-consciously playing amateurs who act badly, and that is the case in this highminded, heavy-handed exercise which brings together as dull and irritating as bunch of fellow travellers as anyone could ever fear to encounter. They are played without distinction by, among others, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Davison, Janet McTeer, Romane Bohringer and the late Brion James, all of whom are subjected to some truly arch dialogue.
It was a great relief a few hours later to immerse oneself in the heady Mexican movie, Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch), the dynamic first feature directed by a popular rock radio station deejay, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. This movie rocks all the way from the frantic car chase which opens it and builds to a bloody crash which has far-reaching consequences. These are revealed when the crash is shown again and again from different perspectives as it meshes together the three film's interlinked narrative strands which constitute the picture.
The first concerns a young man who exploits the fighting skills of his dog to raise the money that he hopes will make a new life for him and the mistreated wife of his gruff, domineering brother. In the second story, a publisher has just left his wife and family to move in with a supermodel when she is seriously injured in the linking car crash - and then loses her beloved pet dog through a hole in the floor. The final chapter features an embittered former terrorist now working as a contract killer and longing to be reunited with the daughter he abandoned many years ago to pursue his political convictions.
Running over 150 minutes, Amores Perros allows its firm grip on the viewer to slacken at times in the third and longest segment, and it suffers from the alienation problem common to portmanteau pictures when they have to replace interesting, well-established characters with new protagonists as one story segues into the next. That said, it positively bristles with kinetic energy, vibrantly capturing the atmosphere of Mexico City through pacy, evermobile camerawork and sharp editing.
It has to be said, however, that many viewers may be repelled by the film's prominently featured - and quite superfluous - footage of dog fighting which appears so graphic that it's hard to swallow the closing disclaimer that "the animals used in this film were in no way mistreated and all scenes in which they appeared were under strict supervision with the utmost concern for their handling."
The Dublin Film Festival continues until Sunday night. Information from: 01-677 2866. Booking: 01-677 2838.
Michael Dwyer concludes his Dublin Film Festival reports in The Ticket next Wednesday.
