The Unlimited Cinema loyalty scheme operated by UGC Cinemas at their multiplexes in Britain and Ireland has led to a dispute over the reduced financial returns made by their cinemas to one of the largest film distribution outlets, United International Pictures (UIP). As a result, none of UIP's three most recent releases - The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, The Road to El Dorado and Rules of Engagement - has played UGC Cinemas, and the dispute may also deny UGC imminent UIP releases such as Shaft, Billy Elliot, Rat, Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and Road Trip, all due to open over the coming six weeks.
The loyalty card costs £9.99 a month on the basis of a 12-month purchase and entitles the bearer, whose photograph appears on the card, to unlimited access to movies playing at UGC. "It's ridiculously good value," one regular cinema-goer told Reel News this week. "If you see just one film a week, it works out at £2 a time, day or night. Why shouldn't we be rewarded for our good business, for supporting cinemas so much?"
The loyalty card had been a huge success in France, where UGC is one of the major exhibitors, before it was banned by the country's culture minister in May. France's Competition Commission has now ruled that the loyalty pass did not constitute unfair competition, and other French exhibitors are planning to follow the UGC model.
Set in London, but filmed primarily in Dublin, writer-director Nick Grosso's first feature film, Peaches, is set to have its world premiere at the Cork Film Festival next month, followed by a prestige West End slot in the London Film Festival a month later. An "ultra-low-budget" film, in the words of its producer, Ronan Glennane of the Dublin-based Stone Ridge Entertainment, the film was adapted by Grosso from his own successful stage play, which one critic said had "the style of a latter-day Oscar Wilde on speed".
The film, which observes a group of young Londoners over one eventful summer, stars the fast-rising Matthew Rhys, who played Benjamin opposite Kathleen Turner in the recent London theatre production of The Graduate and will be seen shortly in the movies, Titus, Sorted and Very Annie Mary. Joining him in the cast of Peaches is Kelly Reilly, who featured as Mrs Robinson's daughter in the same production of The Graduate.
Matthew Rhys returns to Ireland next week to take the leading role in writer-director Bill Britten's first feature film, The Abduction Club, which begins a nine-week shoot in Dublin and Wicklow on September 11th. The film is a romantic drama set in Ireland in 1780 and dealing with young men who raid the great houses and take the daughters away. Joining Rhys in the cast are Daniel Lapaine, Sophia Myles and Liam Cunningham. Financed by Pathe Pictures, the film is produced by Gruber Films, which made Shooting Fish and Waking Ned, and by David Collins of the Irish company, Samson Films.
The Abduction Club will be Collins's second film to go before the cameras this month. Shooting began last Tuesday on Morlang, a co-production between Samson Films and the Dutch company, Phantavision. Recently seen as the title character in Nora, Susan Lynch takes the lead in Morlang, which is directed by Tjebbo Penning. It will be shot over four weeks in counties Meath, Clare and Kerry, followed by four weeks in the Netherlands.
After months of battling the movie studio which said he was too old for the part, two-time Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey, who is 41, has landed the leading role in the long-planned biopic of the singer and actor, Bobby Darin, who was 37 when he died. Meanwhile, Sam Mendes, who made his film-making debut with American Beauty, which earned Spacey his second Oscar, has chosen The Road to Perdition as his next project. Based on a 1930s gangster comic-strip novel and set in Chicago during the Depression, the film will feature Tom Hanks as a character who is a hitman by day and an upstanding father and husband by night.
First filmed in 1958 by Joseph Mankiewicz, with Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave in the central roles, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, set in Vietnam during the 1950s, is about to go before the cameras again in an adaptation by Christopher Hampton which will be directed by Philip Noyce and will star Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine.