"Emma" (Gen) Virgin, UCI Tallaght and Coolock, Omni Santry, Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
The neck has it. For all the handsome costumes and locations on view in Douglas McGrath's, new version of Jane Austen's Emma, it is the neck of its bright young American star, Gwyneth Paltrow, which has been attracting the most admiration. She is "swan-necked", gushed one reviewer. Hers is a "formidable neck" declared another. An "elegant neck", enthused yet another. Seen only briefly before it was severed in Seven, the much-discussed Paltrow neck is revealed in all its creamy, perfectly-formed beauty in Emma, in which Paltrow plays the title role.
"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence," began Austen in her novel, "and had lived hardly 21 years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." However, distress and vexation are soon visited upon the well-intentioned but hapless Emma when, instead of pursuing her own romantic agenda, she meddles in the love lives of others and sets about some unsolicited match-making for the gauche Harriet Smith, played by Toni Collette, who redefined gaucheness as Muriel in Muriel's Wedding.
The most pertinent recent comparison point for this faithful treatment of Emma is not Emma Thompson's recent adaptation of Sense And Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee, but Amy Heckerling's admirably acute and spirited transposition of Emma to present-day Beverly Hills in last year's comic gem, Clueless. The American writer, Douglas McGrath, who makes his directing debut with the new Emma, is too in awe of his material to give it any of the cutting edge that permeated the agreeably brash Clueless. McGrath is a satirist who worked on Saturday Night Live and as a New Republic columnist before turning screenwriter with the dire Born Yesterday remake - "widely hailed as a mistake on everyone's part," he is honest enough to admit - and Woody Allen's Bille's Over Broadway.
McGrath's respect for his material pays off in the movie's felicitous use of Austen's sparkling dialogue, and he elicits vivid performances from his eclectic international cast, most notably Ewan MeGregor as the dashing Frank Churchill, Jeremy Northam as the confident and cute Mr Knightley, Greta Scacchi as Emma's newly married former governess, Alan Cumming as the calculating Mr Elton and Juliet Stevenson as the snob who becomes Mrs Elton. In the absence of Emma Thompson, her sister, Sophie, plays the loquacious Miss Bates, with the Thompsons' mother, Phyllida Law, as Mrs Bates. And regardless of the awesome beauty of that neck, Gwyneth Paltrow, clearly a star in the making, displays a radiant screen presence.
"Hollow Reed" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
After making her film debut with Captives, in which a separated middle-class woman falls in love with a violent man, director Angela Pope tackles an initially similar theme in Hollow Reed. Pope turns on the tension from the very beginning of her new movie and does not release it until the final scene of this harrowing and moving contemporary drama.
Filmed on distinctive locations in Bath, Hollow Reed tackles a complex case: a doctor (Martin Donovan) has left his wife (Joely Richardson) for another man (Ian Hart), and he learns that the wife's new lover (Jason Flemyng) is physically abusing their young son (Sam Bould).
Hollow Reed evokes both in theme and approach Aline lsserman's sensitive French film, Shadow Of Doubt (shown at the IFC last year), in which a man was sexually abusing his own daughter with the mother's silent complicity. The difference this time is that the abuse is physical, not sexual. The further complication of Hollow Reed is the prejudice which so easily could prevent a gay couple winning a custody battle for the abused boy. If it all seems too idealistic to be true, Paula Milne, who wrote the screenplay for Pope's film, says that her story was inspired by a real-life gay custody case in Britain.
The road to resolution is fraught with problems, but ultimately convincingly negotiated in Hollow Reed, which precisely catches the silent fear of the helpless young victim and the sly cunning used by the abuser to excuse himself. The drama is acted out by an exemplary cast, with Martin Donovan - a regular actor in Hal Hartley's films - deftly disguising his American accent, and young Sam Bould remarkably expressive as the boy; coincidentally, his father, Chris Bould, directed the recent Irish feature, My Friend Joe, which also dealt with a physically abused child. Joely Richardson's performance survives the distraction of her striking resemblance to the Princess of Wales.
"Striptease" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
While Demi Moore seems to need little encouragement to take her clothes off for the camera, the makers of this film are a lot more coy about it. Not only is Moore's character, Erin Grant, a stripper with a heart of gold, a devoted mum just trying to earn the money to regain custody of her daughter, but she has a razorsharp intellect as well. And she's not a stripper, she's a dancer, right?
Having come up with the failsafe audience-lure of the Demi-naked Moore, director and screenplay writer Andrew Bergman tries to distance himself from such unabashed calculation with a lot of partially digested, misunderstood feminism. It's hard to exaggerate how confused and dishonest this film is in its messages about women's bodies and men who like to pay to look at them.
Based on a bestselling novel by Carl Hiaasen, which is, by all accounts, highly comic, Striptease is no more than laughable, providing an indulgent vehicle for Moore. Among the many men transfixed by Erin's dancing talents is a hypocritical, pathologically lecherous Republican congressman (Burt Reynolds), the butt of most of the humour, whose presence in the club sets off a chain of blackmail and murder.
In the end, the strip club scenes are subsumed to the awkward blend of family drama-cum-political satire, but not before we have had ample opportunity to marvel at Demi Moore's athletic form, as she cavorts in a Florida strip club in a range of costumes and dramatic moods that reflect Erin's inner turmoil. If three extended, artfully choreographed stripping sequences are not sufficient, there's an extra scene showing her practising at home in front of the mirror, just to reinforce how professional she is about it. Casting agents take note.
"Escape From L.A." (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
The blurb informing us that this film's producer (Debra Hill) is "also an environmentalist who drives a natural gas-powered vehicle and does not eat red meat" is the sort of thing that would send you running out of L.A., but is not in fact, what the director, John Carpenter, has in mind. His film is a sequel, of sorts, to his 1981 Escape From New York, and presents a futuristic nightmare in which Los Angeles has become separated from the rest of the US by a massive earthquake. The island is used as a detention centre to which deviants from the fundamentalist, puritanical mainland are sent, in perpetuity.
When the US President's daughter Utopia (A.J. Langer) becomes involved with a resistance force on the island of L.A., he recruits the notorious hitman Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) to hunt her down and rescue the Black Box that is always at the heart of this kind of plot. Enter our anti-hero, Snake, laconic and macho, wandering among the rubble of the post-apocalyptic city - strikingly realised as a series of shanty encampments and bonfires by the designer of Blade Runner, Lawrence G. Paull.
Despite a battery of snazzy special effects and computer graphics, this yarn seems tired, repetitive and lacklustre. Of course it's all tongue in cheek, but if it's really intended to be some sort of ironic commentary on late 20th-century America, it would need a much sharper, more focused script, more coherence and less of those leaden, heavy-handed gags. Oh, and maybe drop Kurt Russell.
"The Great White Hype" (18) Virgin, UCIs, Dublin
The world of modern professional boxing may seem beyond parody, but The Great White Hype makes an honest attempt, mingling satire with slapstick in a helter-skelter comedy which hits as often as it misses. Samuel L. Jackson plays the Reverend Fred Sultan, an outrageous manipulator who bears more than a little, resemblance to a certain real-life boxing promoter. Dressed in extravagant costumes and sporting a ridiculous wig, Jackson hams it up as the manager of the world heavyweight champion (Damon Wayans). Jackson and Wayans area faced with a difficult problem; attendances and pay-per-view profits are tumbling because audiences are getting bored with "brothers fighting brothers". What's needed is a white contender, and Jackson manufactures one in the shape of "Irish Terry Conklin" (Peter Berg), lead singer of a grunge metal group called Massive Head Wound. Lurking in the background is the sleazy journalist Jeff Goldblum, who is trying to film an expose of Jackson's dubious business practices.
This is all handled at a frantic pace and with minimum subtlety by director Reginald Hudlin, whose previous claim to fame was the comedy House Party. The result is wildly variable, with some very funny lines and sharp observations on racial politics in America ("This is boxing - it just means you're white," the shamrock-festooned Berg is told when he protests that he's not really Irish). There's also a lot of sloppy direction and weak gags, despite the presence on the script writing team of ace sporting screenwriter Ron Shelton (whose golfing comedy, Tin Cup is due next month). The finale is an almighty let-down, but then that's an accurate reflection of the way these things end in the real world. Overall, though, The Great White Hype is an enjoyably trashy affair, with enough good jokes to make it just about worthwhile.
