REEL NEWS: The Front Line, the second feature from Irish writer-director David Gleeson after Cowboys & Angels, will be the closing film of the 18th Galway Film Fleadh on July 16th.
A thriller set in Dublin, it features Eriq Ebouaney as a Congolese immigrant working as a bank security guard and James Frain as the ruthless criminal who forces him to help arrange a heist.
The Galway programme is awash with new and recent Irish movies, including Middeltown, Brian Kirk's Northern Ireland drama; John Carney's musical Once, featuring Glenn Hansard as a Dublin busker; and Niall Heery's Small Engine Repair, with Iain Glen as an aspiring country singer in his 40s. The Irish line-up also features Marion Comer's 48 Angels, in which a young boy with a serious illness seeks a miracle; Johnny Was, Mark Hammond's thriller with Vinnie Jones and Samantha Mumba; and Ronan Glennane's Dublin family drama, Pride and Joy, which is in competition at the Monte Carlo TV Festival this week.
The fleadh opens on July 11th with Steen Argo's Czech black comedy, Shut Up and Shoot Me. www.galwayfilmfleadh.com
All football, all the time
Now that the World Cup is into the quarter-finals, fans will have more time to catch Shoot Goals! Shoot Movies! This season of 45 short films about football, which continues at the Goethe-Institute, 37 Merrion Square, Dublin until next Friday, was organised by host country Germany as part of the artistic and cultural programme for the World Cup. The season includes animation, documentary fiction and experimental films. Screenings are from 10am-2.30pm on Fridays and 10am-6pm Tuesday-Thursday. Admission is free. www.goethe.de/dublin
Sound+Vision = music+film
Celebrating Music in Film is the theme of the Sound + Vision festival in Ballina, Co Mayo, which runs from tomorrow until Wednesday. It opens with a double bill of films on a seminal band: Curious - The Velvet Underground in Europe, made when the group reformed for a 1993 tour; and Velvet Redux, filmed at their 1993 Paris concerts. David Heffernan, who made both films with his brother Gerard, will introduce the Ballina screenings.
The programme also includes François Girard's The Red Violin, Krzysztof Kieslowski's stunning Three Colours: Blue and, as part of Planxty Night next Tuesday, the RTÉ No Disco documentary on the band. There will be workshops on making music videos and on acting for the screen. For further information, send an e-mail to ballinaartscentre@eircom.net
Gone star still very much here
As Olivia de Havilland turns 90 tomorrow, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, of which she is the longest serving member, has organised a tribute to her in Hollywood. De Havilland received her first Oscar nomination for Gone with the Wind (1939), but lost out to co-star Hattie McDonald as best supporting actress. In 1941 she was nominated as best actress for Hold Back the Dawn, but the award went to her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, for Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion.However, by the end of that decade, de Havilland achieved the rare distinction of winning the best actress Oscar twice, for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949).
Cave's bizarre proposition
Following the acclaim for his screenplay for John Hillcoat's The Proposition, singer-songwriter Nick Cave has reunited with the director for Death of a Ladies' Man. Taking its title from Leonard Cohen's song, it will star Ray Winstone as a sex addict working as a travelling salesman along the south coast of England. "It's a different take on the English kitchen sink," Cave says. "I bring an Australian sense of humour to it. I find a lot of English films are desperately trying to make the English cool. I don't have that agenda."
It transpires that Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott invited Cave to write a sequel to Gladiator, specifying that they wanted something radically different. Cave obliged with a screenplay that "finished with a 20-minute war sequence throughout history, ending up in a toilet at the Pentagon, with Russell as this rage-filled eternal warrior." Now that Scott has decided it would be impossible to finance, Cave declares, "It's a waste of fucking time, and I have a lot to do."
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