Travolta will be Divine in gender-bender

REELNEWS

Michael Dwyer

THE FILM of the stage musical of the exuberant 1988 John Waters movie Hairspray is starting to gel, so to speak. In the most adventurous casting coup since Meryl Streep played a bearded rabbi in Angels in America, John Travolta has been cast as flustered housewife Edna Turnblad, the role memorably played by Divine in the original. Queen Latifah will play Motormouth Maybelle, the civil rights activist and dance show host. A casting quest is underway for the role of Edna's overweight daughter, Tracy, first played by Ricki Lake.

The unpromising news is that the director of the new version is Adam Shankman, who made the insipid Steve Martin vehicles, Bringing Down the House and Cheaper by the Dozen 2. Shooting starts in September.

Big films bypass Ireland

As the number of new cinema releases grows annually, distributors are becoming more cautious about expending budgets on marketing, advertising and censorship fees for the Irish market. Eight moves opened in Dublin last Friday, most concurrently with their UK release, but they didn't include Stay, a new psychological thriller from Monsters Ball director Marc Foster. This despite a cast led by Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, Ryan Gosling and Bob Hoskins.

Stay is the third recent UK release from 20th Century Fox that will go directly to DVD here, following the romantic mystery Separate Lies, starring Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson and Rupert Everett, directed by Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellowes; and the spelling bee drama Bee Season, starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, directed by Scott McGehee and David Sigel, who made Suture and The Deep End.Welshspotting at IFI

Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh will be the first guest in a series at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin where well-known people will present screenings of their favourite films. Welsh's favourite Irish film, Lenny Abrahamson's Adam & Paul, will be shown at noon on March 19th, followed at 4pm by his favourite international movie, Charles Laughton's masterful 1955 thriller, The Night of the Hunter, after which he will discuss his choice in a public interview with my esteemed colleague, Donald Clarke.

No talk, just bark

China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has ruled that any new movies and TV shows featuring human actors with animated companions will be banned, although this will not affect films already passed, such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The state-run Xinhua news agency says that featuring CGI and 2-D characters alongside human actors jeopardises "the broadcast order of homemade animation and misleads their development". This coincides with the Chinese government's plans to increase the production of Mandarin-language cartoons and to reduce the amount of foreign animated TV programming.

"Chinese regulatory authorities are notoriously skittish regarding broadcast and film themes that include the supernatural or fantasy, including talking animals," notes Variety, citing the example of Babe, which was banned in China on the basis that animals can't talk and some viewers would be confused.

If It Ain't Broke . . .

There now are more than 30 Brokeback Mountain parody trailers available to view online, following the Back to the Future spoof, Brokeback to the Future. The latest crop includes The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction and even March of the Penguins, along with a lesbian spin on Charlie's Angels. The wittiest new parodies are based on Point Break (Point Brokeback), The Lord of the Rings and Fight Club.

The latter opens with a play on the standard US ratings board advisory: "The following preview has been approved for viewing by immature audiences". The most comprehensive selection of the parodies is available online at www.dailysixer.com

Oscars lose face

The last words on this year's Oscars: Although it's already available on DVD, Crash, the surprise winner of the Best Picture award, gets a re-release at selected Irish cinemas from today. Gaffe of the night has to be the captioning error when the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees popped up on the screen. For Munich, a photograph of two gentlemen was captioned as screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. In fact, the image showed Kushner and his husband, Entertainment Weekly film editor Mark Harris.

mdwyer@irish-times.ie