HERE comes summer, in name at least, and the Hollywood studios are set to unleash an armoury of star power and a barrage of blockbusters to lure Irish cinema audiences away from a television schedule top heavy with sporting attractions. Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage will be battling it out against Euro 96, while Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey take on Wimbledon and Arnie Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone go into action against the Olympics.
The counter attractions on television are nothing to the fear struck in Irish cinema owners by the prospects of another summer of glorious weather. To get the season off to a good start, tomorrow is National Cinema Day when, to mark the centenary of cinema, ticket prices at every cinema in Ireland will be just 100 pence throughout the day. And over the next 100 days or so you can expect to see all of these, although some release dates may change along the way.
BLOCKBUSTERS
FIRST off the blocks is Michael Bay's action packed The Rock on June 21st, hot on the heels of its world premiere on Alcatraz next Monday night. Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage join forces when a disgruntled general (Ed Harris) seizes control of Alcatraz and threatens to launch poison charged rockets on San Francisco.
A huge hit in the US where it opened last weekend, Brian De Palma's big budget transposition of Mission Impossible is due on July 5th with Tom Cruise heading an international cast that includes Emmanuelle Beart, Jon Voight, Jean Reno and Vanessa Redgrave, with Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen from U2 revamping the familiar signature tune on the soundtrack.
Not so strong on star power - the cast is headed by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton - but reputedly jam packed with special effects, Twister, an epic tornado thriller from Speed director Jan De Bont and written by Michael Crichton opens on July 26th. Two weeks later comes another hi tech epic, Independence Day which, the press release says, features "a new level of ground breaking effects techniques and spectacular, never before seen images in this epic science fiction tale".
Roland Emmerich, who made Stargate, directs a cast led by Will Smith, Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum.
It's Arnie's day on August 23rd when the mega budget new Schwarzenegger vehicle, Eraser, pulls into cinemas here. He plays a specialist in erasing the identities of key witnesses whose testimonies put them in danger. Chuck Russell, who made The Mask, directs. On the same day, The Frighteners, the first US movie directed by Peter Jackson, who made Heavenly Creatures, arrives with Michael J. Fox on the comeback trail as a phoney psychic faced with truly malevolent spirits.
DRAMA
DEMI Moore plays a single mother doing jury service in the trial of a powerful mobster in Brian Gibson's The Juror (June 14th). It co stars Alec Baldwin, who two weeks later plays a Louisiana detective in Phil Juanou's long delayed thriller, Heaven's Prisoners, which also features Teri Hatcher, best known for playing Lois Lane in the current Superman TV series.
In between (on June 21st) comes John Schlesinger's drama, An Eye For An Eye, in which Sally Field plays a woman seeking vengeance when her daughter is murdered. On a similar theme Sean Penn's thoughtful psychological drama, The Crossing Guard (July 26th) features Jack Nicholson as a man confronting the drunken driver who killed his young daughter.
A pallid Sharon Stone plays a death row prisoner in Bruce Beresford's Last Dance (August 16th), which co stars Rob Morrow and regularly recalls Dead Man Walking. On the same day comes Mark Wahlberg (the actor formerly known as rapper Marky Mark) as a psychotic young man in Fear. And on August 30th there's Lee Tamahori's Mulholland Falls, a thriller set in Los Angeles in the early 1950s and starring Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, John Malkovich, Michael Madsen and Rob Lowe.
COMEDIES
OPENING next Friday is Vampire in Brooklyn with the fast fading Eddie Murphy in another spin on Dracula. Angela Bassett co stars in the film, which is directed by Wes Craven. Andy Garcia plays the dual role of feuding twins in Andrew Davis's Steal Big, Steal Little (June 21st), and Kelsey Grammer, star of Frasier, takes command of a rusty submarine in Down Periscope (June 28th).
The big summer comedy is sure to be Ben Stiller's The Cable Guy, for which its star, Jim Carrey, set a new Hollywood record when he pocketed a salary of $20 million for it. He plays a lonely cable TV technician who invades the life of a subscriber played by Matthew Broderick. On the same day (July 12th) comes the new film from Carrey's Dumb and Dumber director, Peter Farrelly - Kingpin, featuring Woody Harrleson as a bowling con artist.
The dumber and dumbest trend continues on August 9th with The Stupids, featuring Tom Arnold and Jessica Lundy, and a week later with the lamentable team of Chris Farley and David Spade reunited for Black Sheep. More subtle humour is promised in The Great White Hype (August 30th) starring Samuel L. Jackson as a charismatic hustler hyping up a boxing match.
FAMILY FILMS
SET among young girls in 1970, Now and Then, which opens next Friday, features child stars Christina Ricci and Thora Birch, with Demi Moore and Melanie Griffith as their grown up selves. Kermit the Frog duels with Long John Silver (Tim Curry) and Miss Piggy is the Queen of the Warthogs in The Muppet Treasure Island (July 5th).
This year's major Disney animation feature is The Hunchback of Notre Dame (July 19th) with the voices of Tom Hulce as Quasimodo and Demi Moore as Esmeralda, and new songs from multiple Oscar winner, Alan Menken. Richard Dreyfuss and Susan Sarandon are among the voices, and Randy Newman supplies the songs, in James and the Giant Peach, Henry Selick and Tim Burton's animated feature based on a Roald Dahl story of a boy's adventures with colourful insects.
The problems of an overweight 16 year old boy are chronicled in Angus (July 19th), and yet another old TV series is stretched out for the big screen in Flipper (August 2nd) featuring Paul Hogan, Elijah Wood and the eponymous dolphin.
ROMANCE
MICHELLE Pfeiffer plays a rising TV news journalist with Robert Redford as her mentor and lover in Jon Avnet's Up Close and Personal, which opens next Friday and is followed a week later by Joycelyn Moorhouse's romantic serious comedy, How to Make an American Quilt, starring, among many others, Winona Ryder, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Claire Danes and Jean Simmons. And rock star Jon Bon Jovi has his first leading role in the romantic story, Moonlight and Valentino July.
Warmly received in the US, The Truth About Cats and Dogs (July 19th) is a new spin on Cyrano de Bergerac, with Uma Thurman as a model standing in for a lonely veterinarian (Janeane Garofalo) whose radio voice attracts a photographer (Ben Chaplin). Rising talent Liv Tyler plays a young American who comes to Tuscany, finds her biological father and loses her virginity in Bemardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (August 23rd) which also features Jeremy Irons, Sinead Cusack and Donal McCann.
ART HOUSE
Having opened Robert Lepage's superb The Confessional yesterday, the Lighthouse in Dublin will follow it next month with Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds, and the documentary The Celluloid Closet, which looks at the depiction of gay and lesbian characters throughout the first century of cinema.
Due in August is Jim Jarmusch's offbeat western Dead Man, (August), starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum and Gabriel Byrne.
Fresh from winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Mike Leigh's spellbinding Secrets & Lies opens in the Screen at D'Olier Street next Friday. A week later comes Claude Lelouch's epic treatment of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, re located to German occupied France and starring Jean Paul Belmondo.
Stonewall, directed by the late Nigel Finch and set in the emerging gay scene of late 1960s Greenwich Village, follows on June 28th, with Gilles MacKinnon's nostalgic Scottish coming of age movie, Small Faces, following in July.
The Irish Film Centre opens Claude Chabrol's chilling Ruth Rendell adaptation, La Ceremonie, on Friday - accompanied by four earlier Chabrol films, including Les Biches and Le Boucher and Todd Haynes's unsettling Safe, featuring a remarkable performance by Julianne Moore, follows a week later.
A comprehensive season of Nicolas Roeg's movies will coincide with the June 28th opening of his new film, Two Deaths, with Michael Gambon and Sonia Braga. Many notable recent movies make up an Australian film week starting at the IFC on July 1st, among them Romper Stomper and The Sum of Us. The US independent gay movie, Jeffrey, opens on July 12th, and a week later there's a chance to see - in new prints - the late Kieslowski's magnificent Three Colours trilogy.
August attractions at the IFC will include The Tit and the Moon from Bigas Luna, director of Jamon Jamon, and a Hitchcock season including such classics as Rebecca and North By Northwest.
FESTIVALS
RUNNING from July 11th to 16th, the Galway Film Fleadh has a new programme director (Anthony Sellers) and two new venues (the Town Hall Theatre and the Omniplex cinema). It opens with the world premiere of David Keating's The Last of the High Kings, co written by Keating and Gabriel Byrne, who will attend, and closes with Terry George's H Block hunger strike drama, Some Mother's Son, fresh from the fuss it caused in Cannes.
Visitors including Anjelica Huston, Ethan Coen and Antonia Bird are the subjects of this year's tribute programmes, which will include Huston's directing debut, Bastard Out of Carolina, which Ted Turner's network has refused to screen in the US. There will be a premiere of a new Irish film every night of the fleadh along with programmes of romantic comedies, contemporary Brazilian cinema and films on the theme of emigration and displacement.
Opening on August 1st and continuing for eight days, the annual Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at the IFC will showcase over 40 international feature films and shorts. Look out for David O. Russell's hilarious comedy, Flirting With Disaster, which closed Cannes last month, and Man of the Year, a quasi documentary about a Playgirl centrefold model.