Ireland is well-represented in the 44th London Film Festival which opens on Wednesday and runs until November 16th. The programme includes Conor McPherson's Saltwater, Gerry Stembridge's About Adam, Declan Lowney's Wild About Harry, Kieron J. Walsh's When Brendan Met Trudy, Kevin Liddy's Country, and Nick Grosso's Peaches which, though set in London, was filmed mostly in Dublin. The festival's programme of European shorts will include Ian Power's Buskers, which won the jury prize and the audience award for best Irish short film at the 45th Murphy's Cork Film Festival last Sunday.
The opening film in London on Wednesday is Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, dealing with his teen experiences as a reporter for Rolling Stone and starring Billy Crudup, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand, Jason Lee, Patrick Fugit and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
CAMERON Crowe is set to follow Almost Famous with the romantic thriller, Vanilla Sky, which will begin shooting in New York next month. This US remake of the stylish Spanish film Abre los Ojos (Open your Eyes) will star Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz and Jason Lee, who plays the vain leader of the fictitious rock band in Almost Famous. Penelope Cruz also featured in the original Spanish version of Abre los Ojos.
CATE Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi take the leading roles in the first English-language film from Tom Tykwer, the German director of Run Lola Run. The new film, Heaven, is based on a screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, which was part of the Heaven, Purgatory and Hell trilogy they was developing before Kieslowski died. One of the producers on Heaven is director Anthony Minghella.
TO mark the publication of Fleshpot: Cinema's Sexual Myth Makers and Taboo Breakers, writer and film historian Jack Stevenson will present a one-off screening of excerpts and trailers - which will include Birth of the Nudes, Naked Amazon and Glen or Glenda - at Triskel Cinematek in Cork on November 28th.
It will be accompanied by The Drug Scare Show, in which Stevenson looks at substance abuse moments in movies from US navy training shorts to cult classics. This programme will be followed on November 29th by a screening of Curt McDowell's notorious mixture of bad taste and sexual melodrama in Thundercrack!
CINEMA owners and film distributors celebrated the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic earlier this month with a day of free movies at cinemas in Belgrade. Among the movies screened were Hollow Man, Gladiator and Mission Impossible II.
KEVIN Spacey is at the centre of a race row over his latest film, Pay It Forward, in which he plays a facially-scarred schoolteacher. African-Americans are protesting that in the book on which the film was based Spacey's character was black. "It's very sad that a novel that has been so well-received had to change to colour of a major character for the film version," Tanya Kersey-Henly, the publisher of Black Talent News, says. "It's a missed opportunity for a black actor. It's also a missed opportunity to portray a positive black male character who makes a contribution to our children." The film also features Haley Joel Osment and Helen Hunt.
SHIRLEY Jones - who won an Oscar for Elmer Gantry in 1960 and later played the mother in The Partridge Family on TV - joins Tom Arnold and rapper Coolio in the latest US horror movie spoof, which is titled Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th. "It's a scream," promises the poster. We'll see.