The opening days of the newly resurgent Dublin International Film Festival was awash with big stars and great drama - not to mention a cinema full of happily miserable people, writes Donald Clarke.
It must have been a daunting experience for Gráinne Humphreys, the new festival director of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, to address the crowd at the opening night of this year's event. Since Michael Dwyer, this paper's film correspondent, rekindled JDIFF from the ashes of the defunct Dublin Film Festival five years ago, the jamboree has grown into the busiest movie beano in the country.
Well, if star power counts for anything, the festival has got off to a blistering start. In the first few days, punters have already enjoyed the company of such assorted luminaries as Daniel Day-Lewis, Colin Farrell, Charlize Theron and Brendan Gleeson. As the weekend progressed, the foyer of the Savoy cinema increasingly resembled the chill-out area of some celebrity ski resort.
Events kicked off on Friday night with the Irish premiere of In Bruges, the first feature to be directed by the playwright Martin McDonagh. Fans of The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Pillowman will be delighted to hear that McDonagh's savagely profane dialogue transfers successfully to the big screen.
The picture finds Gleeson and Farrell playing two hitmen stranded in Belgium's quaintest medieval city. While Gleeson's characters soaks up the sights, Farrell's troubled idiot stews miserably like a psychotic version of Father Dougal. Amusing and exciting as the film undoubtedly is, it remains a slightly disquieting experience to watch the cinematic influences that so impressed viewers of McDonagh's plays being reintroduced to the medium from which they originally sprang.
Following the screening, Farrell - hairier than usual - presented a Volta Award, the festival's honour for career achievement, to a visibly chuffed Gleeson.
"To be home in Dublin and to open the festival with a film like this makes me very proud," Gleeson told a capacity crowd. "And to get this award on top of it all is even better. The notion of having a career is always a bit silly to me. It's always been about the work to me."
The second volta of the weekend was presented to Daniel Day-Lewis on Saturday night following a screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's extravagantly lauded There Will Be Blood. So much has already been written about this strange, eccentric epic - Day-Lewis plays an increasingly deranged oil prospector in early 20th century California - that it seems superfluous to offer any further praise.
Suffice to say that, as the credits rolled, the stunned audience, which included such figures as Barry McGuigan and Ken Doherty, looked as if it had just been collectively slapped round the head with a great big fish (in a good way).
Day-Lewis received a deserved standing ovation before being interviewed by Todd McCarthy, chief film reviewer for Variety, and receiving his Volta from veteran producer Arthur Lappin.
Earlier the same day, Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend, one of the world's glitzier couples, made their way to the Savoy to present a screening of Townsend's directorial debut Battle for Seattle. The loosely structured drama, which goes among various people involved in the protests surrounding the 1999 World Trade Organisation's meeting in Seattle, is to be commended for attempting to paint a balanced picture of confusing events. Theron plays the wife of a policeman. Ray Liotta turns up as the conflicted mayor.
The film is ultimately a little shrill - at least two characters experience improbable political epiphanies - but it seemed to go down very well with a receptive audience.
"You should run for the Green Party, Stuart," somebody shouted. "Well if I did, I would have stopped the M3 running through Tara," the Howth man replied. THERON PROVED TO be equally impassioned and articulate on the politics of globalisation, but, clearly a good sport, was also happy to discuss the location of her Oscar. She keeps it in a corner office next to the loo, apparently.
Similarly good spirits were in evidence in the Irish Film Institute at the screening of Dearbhla Glynn's agreeably meandering documentary Dambé, The Mali Project.
The film follows Liam Ó Maonlaí, beloved Hothouse Flower, and Paddy Keenan, Uilleann piper of genius, as they make their way to the Festival au Desert, a wild musical jamboree, in the heart of Africa. The similarities between Irish traditional music and African timbres and melodies have often been noted, but the vista of the two men - often draped in ill-fitting robes and unusual hats - exchanging ideas with their Malian counterparts was unexpectedly moving.
"Did it change your Life?" Ó Maonlaí was asked.
"It certainly did," he replied. "As every day changes your life. People like these people - people all over the world - are keeping the sky from falling on our heads. They are keeping the poison from getting in our bones."
Write that down, Liam. You've got the seeds of a great lyric there.
As ever in this admirable festival, there were pleasures to be had in unexpected corners. Matthias Luthardt's low-budget Pingpong, a notably creepy cuckoo-in-the-nest drama, proved that there is a great deal of energy still bubbling around German cinema.
In similar narrative territory, but more unsettling still, we had Michael Haneke's English-language version of his infamous 1997 thriller Funny Games. What an odd beast this is. The "new" picture, which stars Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as a bourgeois couple held hostage by cynical tearaways, proves to be a virtual shot-by- shot remake of the original.
But, strange to relate, transferring the action to the United States alters the tone of the piece in very interesting ways. The invaders - played icily by Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt - now take on a patrician quality, and the digs at American popular culture, which somehow still seems foreign, lead the film towards surrealism.
Those who found Funny Games insufficiently depressing could join many men and women of a certain age - all those long coats; all those furrowed brows - at a screening of Grant Gee's fine documentary Joy Division. The footage of the legendary Manchester band was grainy. At least four of the main players - manager Rob Gretton, producer Martin Hannett, singer Ian Curtis, label boss Tony Wilson - are now dead. The industrial music remained laced with despair.
Manchester looked bleak.
How much grimmer could you get? We loved every second of it.
The Jameson International Film Festival runs until Feb 24.
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