Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (15) General release We've had the Force - now feel the (very broad) Farce. Astutely attaching itself to the coat-tails of Star Wars: the Phantom Menace, Mike Myers's spy spoof sequel is as interesting as an example of astute marketing as anything else (in fact, apart from that, it's not very interesting at all). By now, we all know that Myers knocked George Lucas's epic off the top of the American box office charts - hardly much of a feat, five weeks after Star Wars was released, but an easy tagline for silly season features pages.
In fact, The Spy Who Shagged Me (a title which doesn't sound quite so exotic on this side of the Atlantic) is just another typical sequel, reprising many of the jokes of the original movie without adding much to the mix, except by including a few of the gross-out touches which are now de rigueur after the success of There's Some- thing About Mary. Otherwise it's familiar stuff, with swinging super-agent Powers sent back to his beloved 1960s England to retrieve the essential "mojo" which makes him what he is from his nemesis, Dr Evil.
Dr Evil, of course, is also played by Myers, as is a new addition, a 500-pound flatulent Scotsman called Fat Bastard, who stretches the bad taste envelope to breaking point without being particularly amusing. Many of the gags, such as the spoof Jerry Springer Show in which Dr Evil is confronted by his resentful son, Scott, already seem contrived and dated - does anyone find Springer particularly funny any more? There's nothing so inspired as the original film's interviews with the distraught families of Evil's faceless and expendable minions, while the best moments come with the film's own self-referential nods to its own shabby tackiness. "Doesn't England look remarkably like Southern California?" muses our hero at one point, and indeed it does, with the Hollywood Hills rising incongruously behind the unconvincing Carnaby Street set.
In the Wayne's World movies, Myers managed to mine some inspired comedy out of such nudge-and-wink silliness; here, though, the wackiness has become stale, and the one-liners uninspired. The first Austin Powers film passed relatively quietly through our cinemas a couple of years ago, before becoming a surprise hit on video, and that's where The Spy Who Shagged Me really belongs - a late-night rental to be viewed in a semi-stupefied state, where its many flaws may be less apparent. Hugh Linehan
Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin, from Tuesday
The Seventh Dublin Lesbian & Gay Festival opened last night with the low-budget American indie, Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, the first feature from the writer-director Tommy O'Haver. It features Sean P. Hynes as the eponymous Billy, a gay man who is as unlucky in love - the man he's seeing has a steady boyfriend of his own - as in his aspirations as a Polaroid artist. Then Billy spots Gabriel (Brad Rowe), a handsome and friendly musician who's working as a waiter and of indefinable sexuality. Despite all his references to a girlfriend in San Francisco, there's something about Gabriel that makes Billy believe that this could be the love of his life. Billy's two principal interests in life, sex and photography, converge when Gabriel agrees to pose for Billy's project of stills based on Hollywood screen kisses.
Replete with elaborately employed movie references and musical numbers from a drag queen, Tommy O'Haver's kitschy romantic comedy is at its most effective in charting the sexual tension between Billy and Gabriel, and never more so than in the awkward, tentative sequence when the two men end up sharing a bed together for a night.
Good-natured as it is, this bittersweet tale is rather slender for feature length, and its screenplay ought to have been a good deal sharper and wittier. It is not surprising, then, that the movie is described in the credits as "a Tommy O'Haver trifle". Michael Dwyer
Touch of Evil (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin, from Tuesday
Already re-edited twice for re-releases, Orson Welles's immensely stylish and influential 1958 thriller Touch of Evil can finally be seen in a version close to Welles's original intentions. Working from a 58-page memo written by Welles - describing in detail his suggested changes to a studio cut of the film - producer Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch, the Oscar-winning film editor and sound mixer of The English Patient, have reconstructed the film as it was intended to be seen.
The movie opens on a stunning crane shot across the American/ Mexican border and features Welles himself and Charlton Heston as conflicting police officers from opposite sides of the border. The stylish black-and-white lighting is the work of cinematographer Russell Metty, and the film is accompanied by a hot Latin score composed by Henri Mancini.
