Fast-rising Irish star Stuart Townsend begins filming in Australia this week on his biggest movie to date. Queen of the Damned is based on the third novel in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, but is only the second instalment to be brought to the screen. Townsend will be slipping on the fangs last worn by Tom Cruise as Lestat in Neil Jordan's Inter- view with the Vampire. The role of Lestat was originally meant for American Beauty star Wes Bentley, who dropped out of the project in a flurry of publicity earlier this year. Directed by Michael Rymer, who cast another Irish actor, John Lynch, in his powerful 1995 drama, Angel Baby, the film follows Lestat as he becomes a rock star whose music wakes up the queen of all vampires - to be played by the singer, Aaliyah.
Most of the filmed versions of Samuel Beckett's plays produced for RTE and Channel 4 will be premiered at this year's Venice Film Festival in early September, according to their co-producer, Alan Moloney of Parallel Films. Audiences in Venice will have the first opportunity to see the films, directed by internationally acclaimed directors such as Anthony Minghella, David Mamet and Karel Reisz. They will be shown the following week during the film festival in Toronto, the home city of two other directors in the series, Patricia Rozema and Atom Egoyan. There is no word as yet of plans for an Irish premiere for the films, but under the terms of its agreement with the Beckett estate, RTE is obliged to broadcast them before the end of this year. With such a glittering array of talent on view, it would be a shame if this requirement precluded an appropriate cinema showcase in advance of the broadcast dates.
Almost 60 years after RKO mutilated Orson Welles's masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, the mini-series version about to start filming in Dublin aims to right that wrong. Rather than going back to Booth Tarkington's original novel, the series will use the script for the 1942 film, including the famous "lost scenes" - 42 minutes of footage hacked off by the studio when it panicked at negative test-screening reactions. With an impressive cast, including Madeleine Stowe, Jennifer Tilly, James Cromwell and Jonathan Rhys-Myers, and a respected director in Alfonso Arau (Like Water for Chocolate), the finished drama should be well worth seeing, although one wonders if it can ever approach the brilliance of Welles's bowdlerised but still superb film.
With summer drawing to a close, Hollywood's spirits are drooping at the prospect of a relatively disappointing box-office total from this year's blockbusters. Already, the tally for August is being unfavourably compared with the equivalent period in 1999, when titles such as The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense kept audiences flocking to cinemas for weeks after their initial release. By contrast, films such as X-Men and Nutty Professor 2 have slumped badly after impressive opening weekends, leading to a 16 per cent drop in takings compared with the same period last year. It may be no coincidence that this year hasn't seen one of those "sleeper hits" - often romantic comedies - which usually help to mop up disaffected female moviegoers who want something other than superheroes and car crashes.
Reel News has received queries from some readers regarding the whereabouts of the second World War submarine drama, U-571, which opened two months ago in the UK. The film's belated release in Ireland next Friday reflects the policy of the London-based distribution company, Entertainment, which has done the same thing with other much-anticipated titles, such as Magnolia, in the past couple of years. Now another distributor, Pathe, has yanked two of its films from the Irish release schedules. The British coming-of-age drama, There's Only One Jimmy Grimble, starring Robert Carlyle, and Neil LaBute's critically-acclaimed Nurse Betty, starring Renee Zellwegger, have both been held back until late September, despite being released next week in the UK. The main cost benefit for distributors in all this is that prints can be used on the British circuit before being shipped to Ireland. But this second-hand release policy hardly benefits Irish audiences, who are being fed stale goods for the sake of a few pounds' savings. None of the other major distributors do this, so why Entertainment and Pathe?
hlinehan@irish-times.ie
