MICHAEL Moore has posted "a quick note" on his website with an update on the progress of Sicko, his first documentary since the highly controversial Fahrenheit 9/11.
"Back in February, I asked if people would send me letters describing their experiences with our health care system, and I received over 19,000 of them," Moore writes. "To read about the misery people are put through on a daily basis by our profit-based system was both moving and revolting. We've spent the better part of this year shooting our next movie, Sicko. As we've done with our other films, we don't discuss them while we are making them. If people ask, we tell them Sicko is 'a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on earth.' But like my other movies, what we start with (General Motors, guns, 9/11) is not always what we end with.
"That, I can say with certainty, is happening now as we shoot Sicko. I don't think the country needs a movie that tells you that HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies suck. Everybody knows that. I'd like to show you some things you don't know. So stay tuned for where this movie has led me. I think you might enjoy it. At this point, we've shot about 75 per cent of Sicko and will soon begin putting it together. It will be released sometime in 2007."
A romcom for Cillian
Cillian Murphy plays a film noir buff and Lucy Liu a "femme fatale with trouble in mind" in the romantic comedy Watching the Detectives, which starts shooting in New York this week. It marks the feature film debut of writer-director Paul Soter.
Meanwhile, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the Ken Loach film starring Murphy, continues to power away at the Irish box-office with takings passing €1.7 million by last Sunday night. Even though the film doesn't open in France until August 23rd, the French distributors ran a full-page colour ad in Le Monde last Tuesday, announcing the release date for Le Vent se Lève (as it is re-titled there) and trumpeting its Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Still more Movies@
The number of cinema screens in Dublin city and county will rise to 126 in October with the opening of 11 screens in the new Movies@Swords multiplex. It will be operated by the team behind the Movies@Dundrum complex, which opened last autumn and is already advertising on its website for staff at the Swords complex.
Hoist the Jolly Roger indeed
The very good news for cinema owners on both sides of the Atlantic has been the remarkable opening business for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. In the US the film took $132 million in its first three days, breaking one record after another. That figure is $17 million more than the opening weekend for the previous record-holder, Spider-Man.
Pirates took over $55 million on its first day of US release, more than any film has made on a single day. And it passed the $100 million mark the next day, the first to reach that landmark in two days. In Ireland and Northern Ireland it made just under €1.4 million, the highest weekend opening for a Buena Vista release here (including prevews).
World to critics: drop dead
To paraphrase this year's Oscar winner for best film song, it's hard out here for a critic, with the profession taking quite a bashing in recent weeks. The producers of the stage musical The Lord of the Rings, blamed the critics for the show's imminent closure on its debut in Toronto, while starlet Hilary Duff had a go at veteran New York Times film critic Stephen Holden, who described her as "talent-challenged". Duff's response: "He doesn't really fit the demographic. So I could really care less. Look at me, and look at where he is - sorry!"
Authors Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright, in a public interview at last month's Dublin Writers Festival, agreed that there are no good literary critics in Ireland and that "the film critics are even worse". And word on M Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, which opens here next month, is that the film takes a swipe at a film critic.
"It's one person's concept of what a film critic is like," according to a critic who attended an early preview. "It's a funny character, and it dovetails with the popular conception of effete, snide film critics."
