Sleepy Hollow (15) General release
When kindred spirits collaborate, the results are often as self-indulgent as they are inspired - or somewhat less than what the sum of their parts might have promised. When the ostensibly other-worldly spirits of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp join forces, however, something very special happens, capturing a sensation that's as weird as it is wonderful.
Ten years ago, in their first film together Edward Scissorhands, they achieved a haunting, deeply touching picture of a man-made creature with shears instead of hands. In 1994 Burton's Ed Wood proved an infectiously affectionate picture of the transvestite, angora-wearing Z-movie director who was played in a superb, flamboyant performance by Depp. For their third collaboration, Sleepy Hollow, Depp again plays an outsider who's essentially one of life's innocents.
This adventurous treatment of the story by Washington Irving begins towards the end of the 18th century, as the pallid Ichabod Crane (played by Depp), an eccentric, idealistic New York police constable is dispatched upstate to Sleepy Hollow, a small village populated largely by Dutch settlers mostly inter-connected through blood or marriage.
Three gruesome murders have taken place in Sleepy Hollow, and as each ended in decapitation, the finger of guilt, so to speak, is pointed towards the troubled ghost of a headless horseman, a German mercenary (the redoubtable Christopher Walker) killed over 20 years earlier while fighting for the British in the War of Independence. This theory does not wash with Icahabod Crane who, for reasons explained later in disturbing flashbacks, has forsaken religion in favour of a purely rational approach towards understanding and explanation. There is an inevitable conflict between the by-the-book young constable and the Sleepy Hollow locals who are steeped in superstition, spells, curses and witchcraft. Arriving there at Hallowe'en, Crane is welcomed by the village's wealthiest man, Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon) who describes himself as "a simple farmer who has prospered". He lives with Lady Van Tassel (Miranda Richardson), the nurse who did not nurse his first wife well enough and took her place, and his curious daughter, Katrina (Christina Ricci) who is drawn to Crane in a mutual attraction.
A work of the utmost confidence and unity of vision, Tim Burton's film of Sleepy Hollow, artfully scripted by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, was conceived by Burton as a conscious tribute to the Hammer horror films of the 1950s and 1960s. To this end, the film was shot on elaborate sets and locations in England and the cast features Hammer alumni Christopher Lee and Michael Gough.
However, what Burton achieves transcends anything Hammer produced - and not just because the new film was made with a level of technological and financial resources of which the Hammer team hardly could have dreamed. Burton's genius as a visual artist has never been employed to such painterly effect as it is in the precisely planned and sumptuously realised imagery which permeates Sleepy Hollow with a windswept, eerie beauty. Impeccably designed by Rick Heinrichs, and with striking costumes by Colleen Atwood, this visually arresting film is lit by Emmanuel Lubezki in a stylised, desaturated colour scheme which borders on monochrome and fuels the spookiness of its milieu. This rich imagery exists on a thin line between the dreamy and the nightmarish, and can be tilted in either direction with a mere flick of Burton's unerring sense of the macabre. These breathtaking compositions can just as easily explode into life as Burton orchestrates one of the many vigorous action set-pieces, the Steadicam furiously following characters on horseback through the woods while Danny Elfman's sweeping score stirs the soundtrack. Aptly, this enthralling fantasy is viewed with an almost childlike sense of humour through the quizzical expression of Depp's delightfully deadpan Ichabod Crane.
The prospect of the next collaboration between Depp and Burton is getting all the more tantalising already - their planned biopic of Liberace.
Run Lola Run/Lola Rennt (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin; Kino, Cork
It has taken 17 months for the dazzling German movie Run Lola Run to reach here since I emerged giddy with enthusiasm after first seeing it at the Toronto Film Festival. The third feature from the bright young German director, Tom Tykwer, it commendably doesn't waste a second getting down to business, and it pumps up the adrenaline right from its opening shot of a policeman kicking a ball high in the air to get the game under way. From an overhead shot we see a throng of extras form the movie's German title, Lola Rennt; then the animated credits roll, with Tykwer's own pulsating techno score setting a frantic pace on the soundtrack, and we're off.
The narrative is simplicity itself. The setting is present-day Berlin and the eponymous Lola - played by the athletic Franka Potente with formidable presence - has 20 minutes to raise 100,000 Deutsche marks, to replace the money lost by her inept minor criminal boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). His life is threatened if she fails. The clock is ticking but her moped has just been stolen, so she has to travel on foot. Lola runs, and runs and runs, her shock of flaming red hair blowing in the wind as she races on her quest. Then, about 20 minutes into the movie, something startling happens, followed by something even more unexpected, and that's as much as anyone needs to know before surrendering to the exhilarating pleasures of Tykwer's ingenious and innovative movie. It deftly employs split screen, video, still photographs, animation, jump cuts and a whole lot more in its precisely planned scheme of things, and it impishly throws in for good measure that old standby of workmen carrying a vast sheet of glass across the road while a chase is in progress. A huge hit in its native Germany, this invigorating and very witty entertainment makes for even more satisfying viewing the second time around.
Bringing Out The Dead (18) General release
After excursions to Las Vegas for Casino and into Tibet for Kundun, the new Martin Scorsese movie, Bringing Out The Dead, finds the accomplished New York film-maker back on his home turf of Manhattan, and reunited for the third time with screenwriter Paul Schrader. It's another journey down those mean streets and another gritty exploration of the themes which preoccupied their collaboration on Taxi Driver - frustration, guilt and the possibility of redemption.
As in Taxi Driver, Bringing Out the Dead takes place primarily against a threatening nocturnal landscape of mindless violence, drug overdoses and sex for sale. This time the setting is the early 1990s, the driver is an Emergency Medical Services paramedic, and many of his passengers are as strung-out and desperate as in the earlier film. Paul Schrader adapted the screenplay from Joe Connelly's book of his harrowing experiences as an EMS worker for 10 years. Nicolas Cage plays the principal character, Frank Pierce, a paramedic collapsing under the pressure of his job in a system that is over-stretched and under-resourced, and tormented by his inability to save more lives. "It was enough that I showed up," he reflects dolefully at one point. "I was a grief mop."
This intense, uncompromising film follows the red-eyed, insomniac, haunted-looking Frank over three eventful nights, on each of which he has a different partner.
One (John Goodman) approaches his work with a certain detachment, another (Tom Sizemore) is a self-confessed sociopath, and the other (Ving Rhames) has learned to adopt the spiritual approach.
In the movie's least plausible strand Patricia Arquette plays the Irish-American reformed junkie with whom Frank tentatively gets involved. The film suffers further from an excessive reliance on voiceover, although not to the extent of swamping the movie as Scorsese allowed to happen in The Age of Innocence, and from the overstated replaying of ghostly images of the teenage girl whose death still haunts Frank.
That said, Bringing Out the Dead is charged with a restless energy that's heightened by lighting cameraman Robert Richardson's fluid, dextrous work within claustrophobic constraints, and a rhythm and atmosphere enhanced both by Thelma Schoonmaker's editing and a soundtrack that intersects Elmer Bernstein's original score with aptly employed tracks from Van Morrison, REM and others. And the inescapable bleakness of its scenario is leavened by unexpected outbursts of mordant humour.
Ordinary Decent Criminal (15) General release
It happens that some movies look far more interesting on paper than when they eventually on the screen. Take Ordinary Decent Criminal. Its director, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, has been responsible for two strong dramas of Northern Ireland conflicts, set in the early 1900s (December Bride), and in 1975 (Nothing Personal). The Oscar-winning American actor Kevin Spacey heads an impressive cast that includes Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane, Helen Baxendale, David Hayman and a slew of Irish actors. The film's screenwriter is the versatile Irish playwright, satirist and director in his own right, Gerard Stembridge. At the root of the problems besetting Ordinary Decent Criminal is the sheer familiarity of its story. This is the third feature film within two years to chronicle the exploits of the murdered Dublin criminal, Martin Cahill, after The General and Vicious Circle, and while the new film strives to distance itself from its real-life source material - naming the protagonist Michael Lynch, for example, and giving him a much smarter line in attire - it adds few fresh perspectives, and adheres so closely to the outline of the Cahill story that it merely registers like deja vu all over again.
It's all the same old routine, with some minor variations: the gangster's sexual relationship with the sisters who are the mother of his children; the luring of detectives into the Dublin mountains, where they run out of petrol while he draws on extra supplies; barricading himself into his flat until the corporation (in the form of a gaudily dressed lord mayor kneeling in mud) offers alternative accommodation; robbing the jewellery firm (this time with the gang singing Molly Malone as they leave with their loot); the daring art robbery (the stolen painting becomes Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, to encompass a Judas reference); and torturing a minion suspected of cheating. And on, wearisomely on and on.
Anyone who thought the Garda came off like Keystone Kops in The General will think again after Ordinary Decent Criminal, which depicts the guardians of the peace mostly as buffoons led by a particularly stupid and inept commissioner. Only the ending is radically different, and staged with more verve than what precedes it, as Damon Albarn's brassy, jazzy score - reminiscent of Quincy Jones's early movie soundtracks and much the best thing about the film - comes into its own.
With very few exceptions (Stephen Dillane, Colin Farrell), the clearly capable cast is seriously off-form, and none more so than Kevin Spacey, who is gratingly miscast and whose Irish accent takes in the whole 32 counties along the way, with quite a few stops to sound uncannily like one of D'Unbelievables.
Lovers of the Arctic Circle/Los Amantes del Circulo Polar (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The fourth film from the inventive Spanish film-maker Julio Medem, Lovers of the Arctic Circle marks a heartening return to the form of his earlier Vacas (Cows) and The Red Squirrel after the disappointment of his meandering Tierra. The new film is a quite magical and thoroughly engrossing love story structured in chapters and told from the alternating points of view of its palindromically named protagonists, Otto and Ana, as the film follows them from the ages of eight to 25.
They are drawn to each other as schoolchildren, sharing the back seat of a car after school every day as a parallel relationship develops between Otto's mother and Ana's father. Medem tantalisingly dripfeeds the viewer with information regarding their circumstances and their fates as he cuts between their individual observations, and he imbues this story of fate, hope and tragedy with a Truffautesque warmth and compassion.
Photographed in beautiful widescreen images in Madrid and on Finnish locations, Lovers of the Arctic Circle features compelling performances from the three pairs of actors who portray Otto and Ana at different ages, and in particular from Fele Martinez and Najwa Nimri who play them in their twenties. This is original, intriguing and emotional cinema that is rooted in coincidences which seduce the suspension of disbelief.
The Cup/Phorpa (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The first feature film from Bhutan, the first made entirely in the Tibetan language and the first directed by a Buddhist monk, Khyentse Norbu's engaging comedy was a popular success at the Cannes and Toronto festivals last year. Inspired by a true story, it is set in 1998, in a Tibetan monastery-in-exile at the foothills of the Indian Himalayas as two Tibetan boys are sent there to receive their ordination and orientation into monastic life.
However, the natural playfulness of boys cannot be suppressed by the strict religious codes of the monastery, especially when the youngsters become gripped by World Cup fever. One of them, the football-obsessed 14-year-old Orygen (Jamyang Lodro) wears a Ronaldo shirt under his robes and organises clandestine trips to a nearby village to watch the games. He supports France because, he says, France is the only country which supports Tibet's independence, and when a France v. Brazil final looms, he sets about organising a television set and satellite dish for the monastery - to the bemusement of the abbot, who has never heard of soccer, but is relieved to hear it has nothing to do with sex.
The Cup is directed by Khyentse Norbu, an apparently revered 38-year-old lama who gained his film apprenticeship as an assistant to Bernardo Bertolucci on Little Buddha. The ostensibly slender storyline offers telling insights into the monastic lifestyle and catches the sadness of the exiled monks, who long for news from home and a return to Tibet. The film's gentle spirit is bouyed by its humanity and by the naturalistic performances of its non-professional cast.
