"Heat" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs. Dublin
"How ya doin'? What d'ya say I buy ya a cup of coffee?" So begins the memorable, first, on screen conversation between two of America's finest actors, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, both at the top of their form in the terrific new thriller, Heat. What follows is a philosophical exchange on crime between two single minded men on opposite sides of the law, and this is one of the few times the two men meet during the course of this three hour drama which proceeds at a precise, unhurried pace.
The movie opens in downtown Los Angeles as De Niro's character, the goateed Neil McCauley, and his gang carry out their meticulously planned robbery of an armoured car holding bearer bonds. McCauley's regular partners in crime, the pony tailed gambling addict, Chris (Val Kilmer), and the unflappable Michael (Tom Sizemore), ensure that all goes according to plan - until the gang's new recruit starts shooting and three security guards are killed.
Pacino plays the detective on the case, Vincent Hanna - a nervy cynical and disillusioned man whose obsession with his work is causing his third marriage to fall apart. By chance, he gels a lead which puts him, on the path of McCauley whose precision he grows to admire and is the basis for his aforementioned invitation to coffee.
Like McCauley, Hanna is shrewd, intuitive, methodical and obstinately self sufficient. Determined never to, return to prison, McCauley takes that self sufficiency to further extremes. "I'm alone, not lonely," he insists. He lives in a minimally furnished beach house and avoids personal, family or romantic entanglements - until a chance meeting with a lonely woman (Amy Brenneman) whom he invites to join him in New Zealand.
First, however, in the great tradition of the crime thriller, he has to do One Last Job, and in keeping with the conventions of the genre, that final job goes wrong, this one culminating in a sustained and ferocious gun battle on the streets of Los Angeles. Were the movie fully conforming to the genre, that virtuoso shoot out sequence would serve as the climax, but there is much more on the agenda of this thoughtful and fascinating meditation on the conflict between good and evil.
The movie is written and directed with great skill and flair by Michael Mann who mirrors his central characters, Hanna and McCauley, in his, remarkable attention to detail. Perhaps it is because he has been stuck with the tag of "creating" the flashy but, influential TV series, Miami Vie, that Mann's all too sporadic output for the cinema has been so often overlooked or neglected: the sturdy prison drama, The Jericho Mile (made for US television but released in cinemas here) the brooding crime drama, Thief (released here as Violent Streets) which featured James Caan's best acting; the disturbing first Hannibal Lecter movie, Manhunter, which was overshadowed by The Silence of the Lambs; and most recently, the thrilling treatment of The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day Lewis.
Mann's perfectly judged Heat moves smoothly between low key and intimate moments and brilliantly orchestrated set pieces. Just as the powerhouse shoot out sequence echoes the work of the gifted Sam Peckinpah, Heat as a whole registers with the power of a classic Peckinpah western remodelled in the present day. Yet Heat remains a true original which revives and refreshes the much abused thriller genre with an uncommon depth and complexity, and a visual style which makes highly effective use of landscape and architecture.
Mann has assembled an exemplary cast for this stunning film and De Niro and Pacino's vividly etched performances never overshadow the sterling work of Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Wes Studi and a startlingly aged Jon Voight, and even though the women's roles are not as strongly developed, they are very well played by Diane Venora, Ashley Judd and Amy Brenneman.
Like that other outstanding recent American thriller, Seven, Michael Mann's Heat was completely ignored in the nominations for the Golden Globes. There's no justice if the Oscars electorate do not remedy that anomaly when their nominations are announced on Tuesday week.
"Angels and Insects", (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
When an earnest Victorian naturalist turns his attention to the mating habits of an aristocratic English family, his, findings are more unsettling than anything he has observed on his travels in the Amazon. Mark Rylance brings a sombre dignity to the role of William Adamson, caught in the web spun by his most coveted specimen, the golden haired daughter of the house, Eugenia Alabaster (Patsy Kensit), whom he marries.
With flair and intelligence Philip Haas has rendered the elaborate Darwinian metaphors of A.S. Byatt's novella, Morpho Eugenia, into striking visual conceits, dispensing with the naturalism of most costume drama, to create a highly stylised, detached chamber piece.
Frequently shot from above, the women circle around the men in garish, arachnomorphic costumes, with the camera pulling back to view these configurations from a distance as figures in a landscape, while black clad servants scurry in and out. Haas is playing with contrasts, with class and gender conflicts and the uncertainty caused by new scientific ideas, preoccupations that are mirrored by the light and shade of Jennifer Kernke's production design, which moves from a white summer haze to long shadows in gloomy, claustrophobic corners.
Apart from scenes in the conjugal bedroom, from which he is banished for months at a time, Adamson is never shown spending time with Eugenia and, unsure of what his function is other than to serve her sexually, Rylance convincingly conveys the character's lack of connection with his wife, and his sense of estrangement from the brood of plump, milk and honey infants she produces at regular intervals.
While he is repeatedly drawn to Eugenia's light by the blinding power of sex, the clever, angular, impoverished relation, Matty Crompton, is emerging from her chrysalis. Kristin Scott Thomas is in fact far too beautiful for this homely governess role but she plays it with subtlety, her long fingers moving busily towards the moment when they can seize their liberty Hampered by a stilted, highly literary script, which is too faithful to Byatt's text, and by some uneven pacing and overacting, in particular from Douglas Henshall, as Eugeni's brother Edgar this is a film rich in ideas about species survival, sexual selection and eugenics, which are communicated visually with unusual coherence.
"The Kingdom" (members and guests only) IFC
In the"normal run of events a 280 minute long Scandinavian epic showing in a limited run at the Irish Film Centre might be presumed to be heavy going. But Lars von Trier's surreal drama, originally made as a four parter for Danish television, is the most delicious and entertaining slice of small screen subversion since the first instalments of Twin Peaks.
The Kingdom is a huge, hi tech hospital built on top of marshland used in medieval times as bleaching ponds. Its modern brutalist bulk is under threat, both from the corrosive vapours rising from its foundations and from the ghosts of past victims of its corrupt doctors. An elderly"lady, determined to confront the spirit of a young girl who haunts the elevator shaft, resists all attempts to discharge her. Meanwhile, there are strange goings on within the hospital staff, with a pathological pathologist initiating medical students into the "community of the dead, an abrasive Swedish brain surgeon covering up the evidence of his negligence, and mysterious goings on with a severed head.
Part social satire, part horror story, The Kingdom is a highly impressive achievement by von Trier, whose last film, Europa, was a visually extravagant tour da force which divided audiences and critics. The cinematic style here is much more restrained using a mixture of long, hand held shots and unsettling editing which manages both to parody and to compete with glossy TV shows like er and Hill Street Blues. One word of warning, though the IFC was not able to arrange a cinema preview of The Kingdom, which has been transferred from video to film. Given the television origins of the piece, what looked fine on the preview videotape may not be so satisfactory on a big screen.
"Father of the Bride 2" (PG) Savoy, Ambassador, Virgin, UCI, Omniplex
Charles Shyer's 1991 re make of Vincente Minelli's sparkling family comedy was harmless stuff, but Shyer's new version of the 1951 sequel, Father's Little Dividend (which was weak enough the first time around) is unmitigated rubbish with no redeeming features. Steve Martin, Diane Keaton and the rest of the cast from the first movie sleepwalk their way through this turgid tale of double pregnancy in the Banks family. There is not one good joke in the entire film, and the relentless, cloying sentimentality is only lifted briefly with an offensively racist caricature of an Arab property developer. Avoid like the plague.
