"Sex Please, We're Irish" is the theme in the January/February edition of Film Ireland magazine, featuring Colin Farrell on the cover with a Playboy bunny covering one eye and an 18 cert on the other, and someone else's lip-licking tongue.
Actor and screenwriter Mark O'Halloran (Adam & Paul, Garage) is the guest editor of this lively issue, and he chose sex as the theme because there has been so little of it in Irish movies.
A "sex survey" for the magazine lists Nora (starring the reliably uninhibited Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch as James Joyce and Nora Barnacle) as the sexiest Irish film. It's indicative of how rarely sex has made it into Irish-made movies that second place goes to the relatively chaste Ryan's Daughter from 1970.
The issue begins with Dave O Mahony's overview of how Irish cinema has dealt with the erotic. There are features on the treatment of gays and lesbians in home- produced movies; on how three directors (Paddy Breathnach, Lenny Abrahamson and Colm McCarthy) dealt with shooting sex scenes; on female desire and contemporary Irish cinema; on "the slippery question of Irish porn"; and an interview with "the lord of the ratings", film censor John Kelleher.
The man behind the The Wire
Award-winning US producer David Simon will give a masterclass in Dublin next Thursday afternoon on developing and writing television drama. Drawing on his experience as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Simon wrote some 100 episodes of the outstanding 1990s Baltimore-set crime series, Homicide: Life of the Street. In 2000 he received Emmy awards as producer and writer of the drugs war mini-series, The Corner. He then created The Wire, the multi-layered HBO crime series rooted in gritty realism and featuring Irish actor Aiden Gillen.
Simon's masterclass has been organised by Fás Screen Training Ireland and will be held from 2 to 5.30pm at the Fitzwilliam Hotel, Dublin. To apply for a place, go to www.screentrainingireland.ie
WGA militants still mad as hell
While last Sunday's Golden Globes show was reduced from glitzy extravaganza to low-key press conference, striking Writers Guild of America members were elsewhere in Los Angeles as guests of the Union Solidarity Film Festival. The programme featured Harlan County USA, Norma Rae and Network, all dealing with trade union struggles or protagonists with the gumption to confront corporate power.
They are legend
As the film of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men opens here today (see review, page 9), Charlize Theron has joined Viggo Mortensen in the cast of The Road, based on McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. British playwright Joe Penhall has written the screenplay, set in a post-apocalyptic world where a father and son struggle for survival. The film will be made by John Hillcoat, the Australian director of The Proposition.
A convenient untruth
A recent edition of BBC1's Celebrity Mastermind perpetuated the myth that Al Gore is the second person, after George Bernard Shaw, to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.
However, while Gore did hold the best documentary Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth at last year's ceremony, the academy's official site lists the film's director, David Guggenheim, as the sole recipient of the award. Shaw won his screenplay Oscar for Pygmalion (1938).
Young actor's death
Brad Renfro, who was found dead at his LA home on Tuesday, was one of the most promising US actors of his generation. He was 25. Director Joel Schumacher discovered him when he was
12 and gave his first screen role opposite Susan Sarandon in The Client. Renfro worked extensively in the 1990s, most memorably in Bryan Singer's Apt Pupil, and Larry Clark's Bully.
Renfro, who had several convictions for possessing drugs, returned to work on a recently completed film, The Informers, with Winona Ryder.
Irish director David Gleeson, who had cast Renfro in Joe the Engineer, to be shot this summer, told Reel News: "Brad was a very charismatic, hugely talented actor. It's such a tragedy he died so young. He is a huge loss."
