In sharp contrast to the traditional movie image of Irish immigrants to the US, 2 By 4, a low-budget picture of young Irish immigrants in the Bronx, involves drugs, mascara and male hustlers. The film "won't win over the Far And Away date crowd," critic Greg Lovell confidently predicted in Variety this week, reviewing the movie at the Sundance Film Festival where it took the best cinematography award for the very talented Irish-American lighting cameraman, Declan Quinn.
Starring and directed by Jimmy Smallhorne who is from Ballyfermot in Dublin, 2 By 4 was described by Lovell as "a bracing, beautifully shot upstart drama", although he feared for its commercial prospects - "saddled with brogues so thick they cry out for sub-titles, (it) will have a tough go of it, even at houses that favour ethnic originals."
Jimmy Smallhorne, who also scripted the movie with Terrence McGoff, stars in the film as Johnnie, "the foreman of a construction crew poorly run by his hard-drinking, sexually conflicted uncle" - the uncle is played in his final screen role by the Irish actor, Chris O'Neill, who died last year.
Smallhorne's character, Johnnie, has a girlfriend, but the movie begins to deviate from the conventional picture of the Irish abroad when Johnnie is revealed to be bisexual, putting on his make-up and feather boa for an S/M night on the town. Whatever about those thick brogues, 2 By 4 sounds refreshingly different enough to warrant a release here.
Shooting is now under way in Dublin on Sparrows Trap, which marks the film directing debut of Brendan O'Carroll. He also plays the lead in the movie and wrote the screenplay, which is based on his own book of the same title. Set in Dublin over the month of December in 1996, the film features O'Carroll as a failed boxer, a one-time Olympics contender, who has drifted into the city's criminal underworld.
The eclectic cast includes Bryan Murray, Gerry Brown, Don Baker and 2FM deejay Simon Young. O'Carroll's trainer for the fight scenes is Steve Collins. The film is shooting on locations all over Dublin, including Finglas, Cabra, Collins' Barracks, Pheonix Park, the National Stadium and St Stephen's Green.
The latest movie to fall foul of the American ratings board, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is James Toback's Two Girls And A Guy, in which Robert Downey Jr impressively plays a smooth-taking actor heavily involved in simultaneous love affairs with women unaware of each other's existence. They are played by Heather Graham (from Boogie Nights) and Natasha Gregson Wagner, the daughter of Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner.
Having seen the movie at the Toronto festival last September, I was puzzled that the MPAA could be so concerned. But they are so concerned about an eight-minute, silhouetted sex scene between Downey Jr and Graham that director Toback and the film's US distributors, Fox Searchlight, have had to submit the film in nine re-edited versions to qualify for an R (Restricted) rating. The MPAA is still not satisfied and the film was submitted in a tenth version last week.
Leading France's Cesar nominations this year is the musical comedy, On Connait la Chanson, directed by Alain Resnais, which collected 12 nominations, including best picture, director, actor (Andre Dussolier), actress (Sabine Azema), supporting actress (Agnes Jaoui) and best supporting actor (Jean-Pierre Bacri). The other contenders for best picture are Robert Guediguian's Marius Et Jeanette, which will shown in next month's Dublin Film Festival; Manuel Poirier's Western, which closed the French Film Festival in Dublin last year; Philippe de Broca's swashbuckler, Le Bossu; and, incredibly, Luc Besson's blockbuster, The Fifth Element. Rounding out the nominees for best actor are Charles Berling (Nettoyage A Sec), Alain Chabat (Didier), Patrick Timsit (Le Cousin) and Daniel Auteuil (Le Bossu). The other best actress nominees are Miou-Miou (Nettoyage A Sec), Sandrine Kiberlain (Le Septieme Ciel), M arie Gillain (Le Bossu) and Ariane Ascardie (Marius Et Jeanette).
The Cesar nominees for best foreign film are The English Patient, The Full Monty, Hana-Bi, Brassed Off and Everyone Says I Love You. The awards will be presented in Paris on February 28th and Irish viewers will have an opportunity to see the ceremony that night on TV5.
The fifth annual James Joyce Film Festival takes place tomorrow at the James Joyce Cultural Centre, 35 North Great George's Street, Dublin. The programme begins at 3 p.m. with Nora, Sean O Mordha's documentary on Nora Barnacle, followed by a screening of Fionnuala Flanagan's James Joyce's Women, and a panel discussion with Luke Gibbons, Pat Murphy and Muiris Mac Conghail. The Triskel in Cork will present four Mike Leigh movies over consecutive nights beginning on February 14th with Life Is Sweet, followed by High Hopes, Naked and Secrets & Lies. A double bill of Doug Liman's entertaining Swingers and Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout De Souffle (Breathless) will play the venue from February 21st to 24th. A horror programme of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and David Lynch's four-minute 1968 short, The Alphabet, will run at Triskel from February 28th to March 3rd.
The winners of the 1998 Galway Film Centre/RTE Short Script Awards are Tina O'Rourke for Paper Dolls, which "reflects the idiosyncrasies of one old woman by capturing three moments of her life on screen", and Colette Cullen for Home, "a study of different personalities as they view the one house which could become their home". Each receives a grant of £7,000 and the use of the facilities and equipment of Galway Film Centre.
Mick Jagger is planning three movies as a producer, starting with The Map Of Love, which deals with the relationship between Dylan Thomas and his wife, Caitlin. Casting is now under way for the project, which shoots in the spring under the Welsh director Christopher Monger, who also wrote the screenplay. "It's not at all a BBC period production," says Jagger. "The script is very non-linear, very modern."
Jagger is also producing the wartime love story and espionage drama, Enigma, which Tom Stoppard is adapting from the novel by Robert Harris and which Michael Apted will direct. And David Duchovny will star in Jagger's production of All The King's Horses, which the Rolling Stone describes as "a kind of mainstream thriller".
Meanwhile Jagger will be seen on screen shortly in Sean Mathias's film of the Martin Sherman play, Bent, which stars Clive Owen and Lothaire Bluteau as gay prisoners in a German concentration camp. Jagger has a cameo as Greta, a cross-dressing chanteuse who swings from a chandelier in an Berlin nightclub. "I'm quite happy in drag," says Jagger. "It's a serious film, but my part is comedic. And I love dressing up, finding the right costumes. I started off with short dresses, which I knew I wouldn't get to wear. But I looked a lot better in the short dresses, to be perfectly honest."
Oops! The London Independent last week said that Kate Winslet "is likely to star with Glen (sic) Close in a film of Brian Friel's play, Dancing At Lughnasa" - even though neither actress is in Pat O'Connor's film of the play, which is now in post-production.
Oops again. On the same day The Guardian reported that "soon you can see Gabrielle Byrne as Rohan in Mary McGuckian's This Is The Sea". Gabrielle? I think we should we told.
