Controversy? Not a picket in sight

EVERYONE in the stand by queue got in to see David Cronenberg's controversial auto erotica, Crash, when it had its first Irish, screening at "the ACCBank 12th Dublin Film Festival on Saturday morning. There was a mere handful of walkouts from the movie, which still awaits a certification decision from the Irish and British censors, and as Cronenberg commented after the movie opened in France, the traffic statistics appear to have remained constant here.

When the abortion melodrama, If These Walls Could Talk, featuring Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and Cher, was shown at the Screen on Sunday night, there was not a picket in sight. And beyond the odd snore, there was not a murmur from the Friday afternoon audience attending Pianese Nunzio, 14 in May, a disjointed Italian picture of an affair involving a left wing priest and a 13 year old boy, which caused consternation at the Venice festival last autumn.

While everyone who saw Crash had an opinion to express - its visual style was widely admired, but most were bored rather than shocked by it - the movies which generated the most enthusiastic conversation over the weekend were a documentary on a 1974 boxing match; a cinematic valentine to traditional Italian food; a Woody Allen comedy with song and dance; and a literary adaptation laden with Oscar nominations - respectively, When We Were Kings, Big Night, Everyone Says I Love You and The English Patient.

Leon Gast's superbly researched and assembled When We Were Kings is a highly entertaining and wholly engrossing chronicle of the heavyweight championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire on September 25th, 1974. The star of the movie is indisputably the immensely charismatic Ali himself, whose career up to that point is succinctly synopsised and whose trademark humour is demonstrated time and again in his loquacious and witty outbursts.

Gast intersperses impeccably used archival material with present day reflections by, among others, Spike Lee, who emphasises Ali's firm political views, and by writers Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, who were in Kinshasa for the fight and provide telling insights into his personality and tactics. The first hour of the movie documents, the build up to the rumble in the jungle, as it was dubbed, and the final half hour concentrates on the fight and its aftermath with Plimpton and Mailer articulately providing a fresh, analytical voice over commentary on the action in the ring.

An effectively used still photograph vividly captures their open mouthed reaction at the outcome.

Tunes from 1930s musicals have regularly figured prominently on the soundtracks of Woody Allen's movies and they come to the forefront in his 26th feature, Everyone Says I Love You, an exuberant song and dance romantic comedy. Following the often inter related romantic complications among different generations, the movie features Allen himself as an uptight, sexually frustrated New Yorker. So what else is new?

Well, in addition to the obligatory Manhattan, there is location footage shot in Venice and Paris. There's even some sparingly used special effects - and a large, capable and ostensibly unlikely Allen cast led by Goldie Hawn as Allen's ex wife who remains his best friend. There's Julia, Roberts, as the new object of his desire, and the scenes where he attempts to seduce her by blowing on her neck are hilarious.

The gifted young Edward Norton - an Oscar nominee this year for Primal Fear and one of the stars of Thursday's festival presentation, The People Vs. Larry Flynt - delivers a sharp performance precisely modelled on Woody himself. And there's also Tim Roth, Drew Barrymore, Lukas Haas and Alan Alda, the only leading player from an earlier Allen picture. The result is a beguiling entertainment which invests a great deal of fun into his singing and dancing numbers.

The fist rising young American actor, Skeet Ulrich, who uncannily resembles Johnny Depp, gets his first leading role in the new Paul Schrader movie, Touch, based on an Elmore Leonard novel. Ulrich plays Juvenal, a Franciscan monk who returns from the Amazon jungle to work at a Los Angeles rehabilitation centre for alcoholics. A stigmatist who is revealed to have miraculous healing powers, Juvenal quickly attracts the attention of a slick opportunist (Christopher Walken) who moves into selling mobile homes when his gimmicky Georgia church closed down - and of the media, including a controversy driven chat show host played an unrecognisable Gina Gershon from Bound.

PHONEY evangelists and sensationalist media are obvious and easy targets for humour, but Schrader's adaptation of Leonard's novel lays it on with caustic cynicism. Walken refers to a hit CD of Gregorian chants as guys in hoods mumbling soul music and notes that the Pope's album made 2.5 million, to which an entrepreneur (Paul Mazursky) replies: "Yeah, but he toured". Untypical material for Schrader to tackle and ultimately not as satisfyingly developed as it ought to have been, Touch is enlivened by a solid cast that also includes Janeane Garofalo, Bridget Fonda and Tom Arnold as a fanatically traditionalist Catholic who goes around breaking up guitar Masses.

Skeet Ulrich and Drew Barrymore turned up again among the hip young cast of last Friday's late night movie Scream, a postmodern parody of horror movies by one of the most prolific exponents of the horror genre, Wes Craven. Set in a town where, predictably enough, there's a serial killer on the loose, Scream is punctuated with knowing humour and littered with reference's to the genre's narrative cliches, invoking Prom Night, Craven's own Nightmare on Elm Street, and most explicitly, Hallowe'en, which plays on video for much of the movie's final stages. Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Liev Schrieber and David Arquette are also featured in this busy and ironic romp.

Campbell Scott turns director, sharing the duties with another actor, Stanley Tucci, in the tender and bittersweet Big Night, one of the festival's most popular successes this year, and Scott himself, now filming Sweeney Todd in Dublin, turned up for the screening. And he turned up on screen again the same evening, as did Tucci, in Greg Mottola's disarming and cleverly scripted serious comedy, The Daytrippers. It begins with a young Long Island woman (Hope Davis) discovering a letter written by her husband and quoting Andrew Marvell's, love poems. This triggers off an intricately structured chain of unexpected events and revelations as her family heads for Manhattan to learn the truth behind the letter.

QUIRKY humour and the offbeat employment of old pop songs are, it would seem, almost de rigeur in Australian movies nowadays, and Shirley Barrett's assured first feature, Love Serenade, which won her the Camera d'Or at Cannes last year, is no exception. Set in a remote small town, it deals with two sisters (Miranda Otto and Rebecca Firth) who are, smitten by the thrice divorced, middle aged disc jockey (George Shevtsuov), who moves in next door. Playing one off against the other, he has his way with each of them until matters finally must come to a head in this diverting tale which features just five characters with speaking parts (one of whom is incidental) and a soundtrack that blends Barry' White, Alvin Stardust et al performing the oldies that radio forgot.

David Arquette the fourth of that clan to make it into movies, gives a gritty and convincing performance as John, a sexually ambivalent young man living on his wits as a male prostitute in a seedy Los Angeles milieu injohns, a low budget independent production written and directed by Scott Silver. The film takes place over the course of a single day, Christmas Eve, as he struggles to raise the money to organise a birthday treat for himself, a night in an upmarket hotel, and to avoid the drug dealers he swindled out of money.

Echoes of My Own Private Idaho abound as we learn that he is loved secretly by Donner (Lukas Haas again), a young man who took to walking the streets when his doctor father threw him out because he was gay. Silver's film does not have the depth or ambition of Idaho, but in its episodic way is, at times, funny, touching and edgy. Its music score is over the top and out of place.

The gay relationship at the centre of the British Indian Summer involves a gay ballet dancer (Jason Flemyng) who is HIV positive and an older, hard drinking therapist (Anthony Sher) who counsels people with AIDS. Directed by the American, Nancy Meckler, who made Sister, My Sister, this earnest, well intentioned drama scripted by the playwright of Bent, Martin Sherman, unsubtly lays on its sloganeering and suffers from some arch dialogue. It is, redeemed by a good cast and by the upbeat closing sequence of a passionate and imaginatively filmed ballet performance.