As we approach the mid-way point of 1999, it's significant that movie stars are conspicuously absent from the top of the Irish box-office for the year to date. Leading the field with takings of £1.73 million is Disney's animated feature, A Bug's Life, followed by the Isle of Manmade Oirish comedy, Waking Ned, which stars veterans David Kelly and Ian Bannen and made £1.68m at the Irish box-office despite scathing reviews from some critics. And in third place with £1.5m is another animated feature, the TV spin-off, The Rugrats Movie.
Boosted by its Oscars victory, Shakespeare In Love takes fourth place with £1.48m, followed by the hi-tech pursuit picture, Enemy Of The State (£1.36m), featuring Will Smith and Gene Hackman - the closest to a star-power-driven movie in the top five.
About to break into that top five is the romantic comedy, Notting Hill, with takings of £956,000 in its first three weeks. After just 10 days on release, The Matrix is seventh with £700,000 and looks certain to pass the million mark. In eighth place is the Adam Sandler comedy, The Waterboy, with £668,000. A relative box-office disappointment here, the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan star vehicle, You've Got M@il, is ninth with £586,000, and it's followed by the Mel Gibson thriller, Payback, with £557,000.
Just outside the top 10, the highest ranking Irish film of the year is This Is My Father, which has taken a very respectable £508,000, while the other Irish success of the year has been A Love Divided, which has made over £415,000 in six weeks and is still on wide release across the country.
The movie expected to streak ahead of everything on the top 10 is, of course, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, which opens on July 16th. Coinciding with that film's release will be a major expansion in the Irish cinema-going audience with the opening of the country's biggest multiplex to date, the 14-screen, South African-owned Ster Century complex in Liffey Valley.
THE actor Robert Carlyle, director Antonia Bird and television presenter Mark Cousins have joined forces to form 4Way Pictures, a new production venture which is developing a range of projects. Their first film will be Rebekka, a semi-documentary to be directed by Bird and produced by Cousins which tells the true story of a young American woman who went from being a Playboy centrefold model to an AIDS activist after she was diagnosed HIV-positive.
It will be followed by Benny Lynch, written by the Irish screenwriter, Frank Deasy, and dealing with the eponymous Scottish boxer who hit the skids after becoming world champion in the 1930s. The company's other projects include the provisionally-titled, music-driven movie, On The Town In Glasgow, with Carlyle as one of four men on a stag night in Scotland; and Ninety Days, the factually based story of a young British single mother who moves to San Diego and stumbles into poverty and homelessness.
Mark Cousins, who is from Belfast, introduces Moviedrome on BBC 2 and is a former programme director of the Edinburgh Film Festival. Robert Carlyle has featured in four films directed by Antonia Bird - Safe, Priest, Face and Ravenous, which opens here in September. Blur's lead singer, Damon Albarn, who acted in Face and contributed to the soundtrack of Ravenous, is developing a musicled project for 4Way Pictures.
IN a radical shift of tone and form from his acerbically scripted, quasi-autobiographical pictures of young Americans in Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco, writer-director Whit Stillman is preparing a film set during China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on Anchee Min's memoir, Red Azalea, it follows the true story of a young woman who escapes her gruelling existence on a collective farm to become the star of a propaganda film based on an opera by Madame Mao.
Stillman, who is now based in Paris, is writing the screenplay. "If you're an autobiographical filmmaker, it's interesting to work off someone else's autobiography," he says. This new film will be his first of two under a new deal he has signed with Film Four in London. All he will say for now about the second project is that it's another "foreign story" and will mark another new creative direction for him.
Four years after the release of The Neon Bible, writer-director Terence Davies is back behind the camera for the Edith Wharton adaptation, The House Of Mirth, a tragic love story set against a background of wealth and social hypocrisy in turn-of-the-century New York. Despite its setting, the movie is shooting this summer in Scotland and the South of France.
In a stretch from playing Dana Scully in The X-Files, Gillian Anderson takes the central role in Davies's film, as Lily Bart, a ravishing socialite at the height of her success who quickly discovers the precariousness of her position when her beauty and charm attract unwelcome interest and jealousy.
"We live in a world of surfaces, and Edith Wharton's world is no different," Davies comments. "Lily is an unsuspecting and almost Hitchcockian heroine so caught up in the society of hypocrisy and concealment that she does not see the danger she is in until it is too late."
The cast of The House Of Mirth also features Eric Stoltz, Dan Ackroyd, Laura Linney, Anthony LaPaglia, Elizabeth McGovern and Jodhi May.
