This time last year there were potentially stimulating new movies on the way from established or rising directors such Jane Campion, Danny Boyle, Barry Levinson, Ken Loach, Robert Altman, Milos Forman, James Ivory, Mike Leigh, Hal Hartley, Luc Besson, Alan J. Pakula, Bertrand Blier, Richard Linklater, James Foley, John Dahl, Mira Nair, Robert Zemeckis, John Duigan, Ridley Scott, Roger Donaldson and Jean-Jacques Annaud. Unfortunately, all of those filmmakers delivered new work that was well below their highest standards, with Campion's The Portrait Of A Lady the most deeply disappointing and Boyle's A Life Less Ordinary falling far short of the achievement that was Trainspotting.
Yet there was much worse on view during 1997, chiefly Joel Schumacher's vacuous and vastly over-hyped Batman & Robin. Not to mention the feeble British effort, Up On The Roof; the cringe-inducing Michael with John Travolta as a chain-smoking angel; the over-stretched Whoopi Goldberg in Eddie; the Fish Called Wanda team on auto-pilot for Fierce Creatures; and Bertrand Blier's resolutely offensive Mon Homme.
Blier's film was the nadir in a pitifully small collection of new foreign-language movies released here during the year. Apart from a solid trio from France (A Self Made Hero, L'Appartement and Ridicule), the only non-English-language releases of significance were Ma Vie En Rose, Drifting Clouds, Temptress Moon and Kolya. In Ireland film production continued busily apace, with new movies due in 1998 from such heavy-hitters as Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, Pat O'Connor and John Boorman - and there was an encouraging burst of film-making activity in Northern Ireland, with four features shooting there in the last months of this year.
However, with the admirable exception of Paddy Breathnach's I Went Down, it was a very thin year for Irish or Irish-made movies in our cinemas. Breathnach's film, which introduced two exciting new screen talents in writer Conor McPherson and actor Peter McDonald, scored at the box-office with takings in excess of £500,000. Takings were very substantially less for Gold In The Streets, The Disappearance Of Finbar, Moll Flanders, Space Truckers and The Eliminator. Meanwhile, a number of other Irish films are collecting dust as they await belated release.
There was no single box-office success to approach Neil Jordan's 1996 blockbuster, Michael Collins, which holds the Irish record with takings in excess of £4. However, it was a very solid year for the cinema business with the top four releases of the year taking over £9 million between them. Six years ago, The Commitments made history when it became the first movie to pass £2 million at the Irish box-office; this year several films which had made over £1 million (among them Batman & Robin, Matilda and Space Jam) failed to make it into the top 10.
Still on release and sure to pass the £3 million mark here over Christmas, The Full Monty was the biggest and most surprising hit of the year. Turned down at script stage by Channel 4 and made for just $3 million, this stripping steelworkers' story is heading for worldwide takings well in excess of $150 million. An amiable, well acted fable, it caught the public imagination and sustained its remarkable success through strong word-of-mouth.
An unusual feature of last year's end-of-year lists was that four of my 10 favourite films of the year were also on the Irish box-office top 10. "Maybe there's a message in there somewhere," I wrote at the time. Well, if there was, it's forgotten now - there isn't one film common to my choice and the public choice for 1997.
Among the movies which were most reluctantly left off my top 10 this year were L'Appartement, Big Night, Long Day's Journey Into Night, I Went Down, The Funeral, The English Patient, Drifting Clouds, Kolya, Inventing The Abbotts, Chasing Amy, Mrs Brown, Everyone Says I Love You, Ma Vie En Rose, When We Were Kings and two from the box-office chart, My Best Friend's Wedding and Jerry Maguire. And there were some marvellous reissues in new prints, especially the masterpieces, Vertigo and It's A Wonderful Life, both starring the great James Stewart who died in early July, a day after the passing of another screen legend, Robert Mitchum.
Meanwhile, as so many established and rising directors were foundering in 1997, Curtis Hanson, a film-maker much underestimated in the past, delivered the cinematic treat of the year in the terrific L.A. Confidential - a complex, intelligent and dynamic thriller adapted from the pulp novel by James Ellroy. It had its world premiere in May at the Cannes Film Festival, which marked its 50th anniversary with the weakest competition line-up in decades. Shamefully, L.A. Confidential went entirely unrewarded at Cannes, presumably because of the jury's anti-Hollywood snobbery, but I believe that Hanson's movie will be remembered long after the forgettable films which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year - the Iranian Taste Of Cherries and the Japanese Unagi. Chacun a son gout.
Happy Christmas.
