The Spice Girls will be taking on James Bond for the box-office spoils at Irish cinemas this Christmas, with further competition from a flabby Sly Stallone, a Tarzan spoof, another Alien sequel, and a Culkin-free free Home Alone episode. With release schedules now nailed down for the last six weeks of 1997, the competition heats up next Friday when seven movies open. Among them are Michael Winterbottom's Cannes entry, the anti-war Welcome To Sarajevo, which has its Dublin premiere to benefit Cradle on Thursday night, and Pat O'Connor's engaging romantic drama, Inventing The Abbotts, which closed the Dublin festival in March. There's also Brad Pitt in Jean-Jacques Annaud's controversial Seven Years In Tibet, Tim Robbins and Martin Lawrence in Nothing To Lose, Alicia Silverstone and Benicio del Toro in Excess Baggage, Sam Rockwell in John Duigan's Lawn Dogs and the reissue of Rene Clement's 1959 Plein Soleil.
On November 28th Sigourney Weaver is grittier than ever in her fourth outing as Ripley in the dark and scary Alien Resurrection, co-starring Winona Ryder and directed by Delicatessen stylist Jean-Pierre Jeunet. On the same day there are Wesley Snipes, Nastassja Kinski and Robert Downey Jr in Mike Figgis's One Night Stand, Joe Pesci in yet another mobster role (yawn) in 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag - and, after all this time, David Cronenberg's Crash.
December releases begin on the 5th with James Mangold's Cop-land, starring a fattened-up Sylvester Stallone with Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel; Peter Hewitt's movie of the children's classic, The Borrowers; Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins and Juliana Margulies in the prison camp story, Paradise Road; Helene Louvart's French drama, Will It Snow For Christmas?; and a reissue of Frank Capra's truly wonderful It's A Wonderful Life.
A week later Pierce Brosnan returns as 007 in Tomorrow Never Comes, which has Jonathan Pryce as the villain and Sheryl Crow trilling the title tune, and due on the same day is the recent surprise hit in the US, I Know What You Did Last Summer from Scream writer Fred Williamson.
Another surprise hit is on the schedule for December 19th - Brendan Fraser in the good-humoured Tarzan spoof, George Of The Jungle, which has taken over $100 million in the US - along with Home Alone 3 (with Alex Linz replacing Macaulay Culkin) and Free Willy 3, and Tom Conti in Goran Paskaljevic's Someone Else's America.
Finally, on St Stephen's Day comes Spice World The Movie, laden with quickie cameos, and a day later at the IFC, Carine Adler's award-winning British drama Under The Skin, with Samantha Morton and Stuart Townsend, and the Danish thriller, Pusher.
Where, outside of Dublin, can you see the latest movies from Peter Greenaway, Aki Kaurismaki and Lars Von Trier? On the Federation of Irish Film Societies (FIFS) circuit which celebrates its 21st birthday this year. To illustrate the range of movies available on the FIFS circuit, here's a look at what's screening in the week ahead.
On Monday, members in Galway may see Kaurismaki's Drifting Clouds, while Al Pacino's Looking For Richard is at the Belltable in Limerick and Bigas Luna's Golden Balls plays Triskel-Odeon in Cork. Tuesday sees screenings of Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book in Sligo, Mira Nair's Kama Sutra in Waterford and Scott Hicks's Shine at DTI Bolton Street, Dublin.
On Wednesday the choice includes When The Cat's Away in Dundalk, The White Balloon in Cavan, Looking For Richard in Kilkenny, Ridicule at Roscrea/Birr, The Last Supper in Tinahely, Co Wicklow, and The Blues Brothers at University of Limerick (UL).
Thursdays' selections include Breaking The Waves in Bray, Flirting With Disaster in Tralee, Johnny Suede at RTC Cork, Shine in Bantry and The Rocky Horror Picture Show at UL. And on Friday Ridicule is in Kenmare, Looking For Richard at UCD, The Pillow Book in UL, and Shine at Sulan, Macroom.
For information on your nearest film society, or on how to set one up in your area, contact FIFS, 6 Eustace Street, Dublin 2. Tel: (01) 679-4420; fax: 679-4166.
John Boorman, who recently completed shooting his Dublin crime drama, I Once Had A Life, will be among the awards recipients at this year's Guinness Film Ball, to be held at Ardmore Studios on Friday, December 5th. The ball is organised by the Film Institute of Ireland in association with Ardmore Studios, and the beneficiaries are the Irish Film Archive and the UCD Film School. For further information, contact Jennifer Moonan at the IFC. Tel: (01) 679-5744.
Happy birthday to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut which went into its second year of principal photography this week, making it one of the longest shoots in history for a feature film. Characteristically for Kubrick, the movie is being made in the strictest of secrecy - so much so that when Bob Daly and Terry Semel, the two power-brokers at the head of Warner Bros, the film's financiers, visited the set Kubrick made them return script pages before they left.
Written by Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Shut features Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as married psychiatrists who becomes obsessed with two of their patients. The film also features Jennifer Jason Leigh and actor-director Sydney Pollack, who joined the cast this year when Harvey Keitel walked out.
When will it all end? "It's wrap when he's done!", a Warners spokesman told Entertainment Weekly. The magazine also quotes "a producer close to Kubrick and Cruise" as saying: "probably the first week of December", adding that crew morale has been low during the marathon. "They think it's a nightmare. Everybody's hoping to get fired."
The writer-director Anthony Minghella looks set to follow his multiple Oscar-winner, The English Patient, with a very different literary adaptation - based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley. Coincidentally, Rene Clement's 1959 film based on the same source - Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), starring Alain Delon, is re-released at the IFC next Friday.
Minghella's movie is likely to star the fast-rising young American actor and writer, Matt Damon, who stars in such imminent features as Francis Ford Coppola's John Grisham adaptation, The Rainmaker, Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting, which Damon wrote with Ben Afleck, and Steven Spielberg's wartime saga, Saving Private Ryan, partly filmed in Wexford this year.
Emily Watson, who earned an Oscar nomination this year for Breaking The Waves and co-stars with Daniel Day-Lewis in Jim Sheridan's The Boxer, is to play the violinist Jacqueline Du Pre in the biopic, Jackie. The screenplay is by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who wrote Welcome To Sarajevo, and the film co-stars James Frain from Nothing Personal. It will be directed by Andy Tucker.
Meanwhile, Ken Loach has finished shooting My Name Is Joe on location in Glasgow. Peter Mullan (from Bogwoman) plays a recovering alcoholic with Louise Goodall as the health worker who becomes involved with him.
Oops! Last Friday's piece on Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line omitted one very important word. It's a $50 million epic, not "a $50 epic", as reported!
Hugh Linehan adds: At the closing ceremony for the Carte Noir Ninth Dublin French Film Festival in the IFC last night, the award for Best Short Film was presented by Jacky Evrard of the Paris Cote Court Festival to Alexandra Rojo for her film Une Nouvelle Douceur.
