Myers hits Ireland

Mike Myers, star of Austin Powers and Wayne's World, is coming to Ireland to star in Meteor, a low-budget drama written and directed by Irish writer Joe O'Byrne. Myers will play an ex-junkie in the story of three children in a Dublin slum whose lives are changed when a meteor crashes into their back garden. The film also stars Brenda Fricker - who was in So I Married an Axe Murderer with Myers - and Alfred Molina.

Meteor will be produced by John Lyons, who produced Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight (aka Sydney) and Boogie Nights, with Liam O'Neill of Paradox Pictures as its Irish producer. Filming gets underway on November 10th, after Myers finishes his role as New York discotheque founder Steve Rubell in the current production, 54.

Shooting is now under way in Westport, Co Mayo on the television adaptation of John McGahern's novel, Amongst Women. Tony Doyle, most recently seen in I Went Down, plays the widower father of the Moran family with Ger Ryan, Susan Lynch and Anne Marie Duff as his daughters and Brian F. O'Byrne and Damien McAdam as his sons. The screenplay is by Adrian Hodges, who wrote Tom and Viv and the imminent Metroland, and the director is Tom Cairns. To be screened in four 50-minute episodes, the series is being produced by the Dublin-based Parallel Films for BBC Northern Ireland in association with RTE and Bord Scannan na hEireann.

The new Irish movie, I Went Down went up the Irish boxoffice charts with a bullet, taking over £87,000 on its first three days of release last weekend. Showing on 46 screens, including nine in Dublin, the film was expected to have reached a very healthy first-week total of over £160,000 by last night, according to Brendan McCaul, vice-president and general manager of Buena Vista International (Ireland), the movie's Irish distributors.

"There is huge word of mouth emanating from the film," he told Reel News. "We are happy with the level the picture has attained and we're quietly confident that it's in for a long run." Rod Stoneman, chief executive of Bord Scannan which backed the movie with BBC Films and RTE, said that "the realisation of I Went Down represents a powerful new departure for Irish cinema - witty, dramatic, modern". He added: "I Went Down going down so well at the box-office is a tremendous achievement in itself. It is also a boost for the prospects of new Irish cinema overall." I Went Down is one of three Irish productions selected for next month's London Film Festival, along with Mary McGuckian's This is the Sea and Brian Willis's documentary, Setanta: A State of Independence.

An excellent season of classic MGM movies in new prints will be screened at the IFC over the next nine months, beginning today with a four-day run of Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, Raging Bull. The restored version of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Norman Jewison's In the Heart of the Night will be shown next month. Later presentations will include such outstanding movies as Sweet Smell of Success, 12 Angry Men, Manhat- tan, Annie Hall, Some Like It Hot, West Side Story, Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris. And each movie will be preceded by appropriate cartoons and newsreels.

Another season of golden oldies, the Kilkenny Irish Beer Classic Film Screenings, kicks off at the IFC next Wednesday night with Sam Peckinpah's riveting original 1972 version of The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. Future presentations will include Apocalypse Now and Rear Window.

The 29th season of Belltable Film Club in Limerick continues on Sunday with Patrice Leconte's Ridicule. The programme between now and Christmas promises such diverse attractions as Jacques Audiard's A Self-Made Hero, Hettie MacDonald's Beautiful Thing, Stacy Title's The Last Supper, Al Pacino's Looking For Richard, Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book, David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster and Jan Sverak's Oscar-winning Kolya. For further information call (061) 319709.

With his third feature, Jackie Brown, now in postproduction and set to open in the US at Christmas, Quentin Tarantino is preparing for, believe it or not, his Broadway debut - as an actor. Even though his screen performances to date have been rather less then impressive, Tarantino has been cast as the psychopathic villain who terrorises a young blind woman in Frederick Knott's play, Wait Until Dark. She will be played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

In Terence Young's tense 1967 movie of Knott's play - which contained one virtuoso scene which had audiences screaming and leaping out of their seats - the leading roles were played by Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin. The new Broadway production, to be directed by Leonard Foglia, goes into reheasal on January 26th and will have a pre-Broadway run at the Wilbur theatre in Boston.

Mel Smith's Bean, starring Rowan Atkinson, is shaping up as the biggest surprise hit of the year having taken over $100 million at the international box-office - even before it opens in the US, Canada, Japan, Italy and France. In Britain it had the highest opening figures registered by a British production. In Germany it had the sixth biggest opening of all time, and in Norway, Denmark and Finland, it was the strongest opener of the year. In Serbia Bean had the best opening ever and it registered twice as many admissions as The Lost World which was released at the same time.

Working Title, the company which made Bean, has acquired the movie rights to Helen Fielding's best-seller, Bridget Jones's Diary, which Fielding will adapt for the screen with advice from Richard Curtis, writer of Bean and Four Weddings and a Funeral. No word yet on who will play Bridget Jones in this alcohol-soaked, nicotine-stained account of a thirty-something single woman.

Meanwhile, Roger Michell, who is set to direct Notting Hill, the latest screenplay by Richard Curtis, is now shooting Titanic Town, a comedy set in Belfast in the 1970s and starring Ciaran Hinds and Julie Walters.

For reasons best known to themselves, Working Title has abbreviated the title of their current production, Elizabeth I, to just Elizabeth. In the title role, Cate Blanchett heads an eclectic cast that includes Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Richard Attenborough, Christopher Eccleston, Kathy Burke, Fanny Ardant, Jean-Pierre Leaud and Eric Cantona. The director is Shekhar Kapur, who made Bandit Queen.

Arts Editor Victoria White adds: While we wish the 42nd Cork Film Festival every success, we must draw readers' attention to an error in festival director Mick Hannigan's introduction to the programme. In the context of a plea against censorship in this country, he writes: "A recent Irish Times review of the Irish Film Centre's first five years shamefully called for increased censorship."

The reference seems to be to an article by Paul Cullen in our editions of August 29th. Paul Cullen here made no call for increased censorship. Rather, he questioned the showing of Trigger Happy because it was "clearly without virtue, critical acclaim or local popularity" and went on: "Like so many of the other `indie' films shown by the IFC over the years, its main distinguishing feature is a devotion to explicit and casual violence. Acceptance levels of onscreen violence vary between different people, but the threshold levels of the IFC programmers are clearly set higher than mine."

The state of critical debate on film in this country must be far from healthy if criticism of the level of violence in a film is immediately construed as a global call for increased censorship.