Father Geek here with the extra special CHRISTMAS DAY 2000 edition of our Euro-AICN column. Ozymandias is due a round of pats on the back (and a few liters of stout too) for getting the reports up and out to all of us while Edgard is off for the holidays. Speaking of the holiday... The entire Austin staff wishes all our spys, reporters, editors, etc... the very, very best this holiday season; and that goes for all our readers out there too. Have a great time doing whatever it is you do this week, and we'll see you all again in 2001. Dave... Dave... I can feel it... I can feel it, Dave...

Where do I start? First off in Edgard's absence this week (in bloody Denmark with his (presumably) gorgeous girlfriend for Xmas!!!!?!?!?!) 'tis I, Ozymandias, putting together a special Xmas Day edition of Euro AICN for your post turkey perusal! (our devotion to you knows no bounds!!!)

Personally I want to say a huge "Ya boy ya!!!" as we say in my part of the world to the head geek himself, the big H, for the stunning reports from the LOTR shoot. Personally I have no real experience of the books up until now - yesterday I went out and bought The Hobbit to get me started based on Harry's unfailing enthusiasm for the subject. Anything that's good enough for the big guy is good enough for me.

You'll be glad to know H that the jealousy doesn't get any less even with those of us who work in the media and have access to movie types and things on a regular basis - yours has truly been the ultimate lig and the most compelling piece of online journalism I've read in a long, long time.. Well hey! I'm allowed be a fanboy sometimes too aren't I?!?!?!?

Anyhew.

This week let's see what I got for ya.

IRELAND (My own patch - yahoo!!)

Accelerator is a brand new low budget sort of Cannonball Run meets Trainspotting (I'll review in here in a couple of weeks) but the website that Clarence Pix have put up is the first dedicated website for a low budget Irish movie of the type. You can see for yourself the sort of thing we're talking about at Their Site

www.iftn.ie - the site of the Irish Film & Television Net - has a geansai-load of stuff including:

DFF Application Deadline

The 16th annual edition of Dublin Film Festival is planned to take place in March 2001. This international, non-competitive, showcase event is programmed on an invitational basis: nonetheless the festival is happy to receive unsolicited viewing material, which in itself may prompt a subsequent invitation. The organisers will send out official entry forms only upon the acceptance of a film into the Festival.

Formats

feature films on 35mm only; short films on either 35mm or 16mm. Only with Irish-originated short material will screenings on tape be entertained.

Deadlines

Submissions of viewing tapes (VHS/pal) may be made from 1 September 2001 until 10 January 2001; which will be an absolute deadline. Tapes will only be returned if pre-payment is arranged.

Full details from: Dublin Film Festival, 1 Suffolk Street, Dublin 2, Ireland.

Tel: +353 1 6792937.

Email dff@iol.ie

Web: www.iol.ie/dff

And:

Production News - December 2000

The most exciting news at the moment is that one of Ireland's largest ever productions, 'Reign of Fire' from World 2000, is due to start shooting early next year. Starring Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey, this big budget production will use every available stage at Ardmore Studios as well as other locations in Co. Wicklow.

Subotica Entertainment have made an eight part TV Drama called 'Random Passage' set in the 1830s, about Irish and British settlers in Newfoundland. This is currently in post-production and will be released next year. 'On the Nose', also from Subotica has been completed and is due for release next year.

The German-Irish project, 'Kaos' is shooting at the moment and should wrap before the end of December. Geraldine McCreede is directing Irish actors Jason Barry and Lindsay Harris together with a German cast including Peter Lohmeyer.

After shooting in Ireland over the summer, 'The Count of Monte Cristo' finished filming in Malta recently and is currently in postproduction in London.

Grand Pictures' 'Piece of Earth' has been renamed 'Mapmaker' and the company hopes to begin shooting this and 'Waiting for Godofsky' in 2001. Also from Grand Pictures, 'Life in the Fast Lane' and 'Day One', both Short Cuts projects are due for completion by Christmas.

In pre-production at the moment with Samson Films and Temple Television is 'Bachelor's Walk', a romantic comedy written by Tom Hall, John Carney and Ciaran Carney. Set in present-day Dublin it features the lives of three men looking for love in the millennium. Two of Samson Films' co productions, shot this autumn have wrapped and are in postproduction. 'Morlang' is a thriller developed and produced by Phantavision, Holland, and written and directed by Tjebbo Penning. 'The Abduction Club' is a period action drama set in Ireland in the 18th Century. Written by Bill Britten and directed by Stephan Schwarz it was produced by Gruber Films (UK) and Samson Films for Pathé Pictures.

In animation news, Treasure Films are set to go into pre-production in the new year with 'Ape', a twenty six minute project and 'Duck Ugly', the Terraglyph production will continue shooting here until mid 2001.

Thanks to Paolo DiCanio for the original tip that lead me to this one...

From popcorn.co.uk:

Irish singing star Samantha Mumba is rumoured to have nabbed the leading female role in 'Blade 2'.

According to Yahoo UK the singer nailed her screen test earlier this week. It's thought she would play a character called Nyssa, a pure-blood vampire and martial arts expert.

IGN FilmForce reveals that Nyssa is the single female member of the Bloodpack, a hot team of vampires, led by Blade, who are recruited to seek out and destroy a nasty type of vampires called reapers.

Mumba spoke of her screen test before the event occurred saying, "it's very exciting. I'd love to do an action movie and I want to be a bad girl that kicks ass, so this would be perfect."

It remains to be seen whether any official word is given on her involvement in the project.

Meanwhile, Wesley Snipes is already attached to return to his role as Blade, while Kris Kristofferson has confirmed he will also make a comeback as Whistler.

From showbizireland.com:

The Irish based director John Boorman (The General and The Tailor of Panama) has been hired by Mel Gibson to bring journalist Simon Winchester's best-seller The Professor and the Madman to the screen. Boorman is working on an rewrite of the script, which centres on the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Gibson, whose production company has bought the film rights, has yet to decide whether he will also star in the story. It depicts the friendship between Professor James Murray and William Chester Minor, a murderer who helped Murray write the dictionary while an inmate at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

Boorman has just finished filming The Tailor of Panama in Ireland with 007 star Pierce Brosnan and Oscar winner Geoffery Rush.

The director lives in a remote house in County Wicklow in Ireland near the homes of Daniel Day Lewis and singer Chris De Burgh.

UK

First off John Innes from the BFI mailed me this week with a little good news as a result of the BBFC's current redefining of the censorship categories in the UK:

Hi Ozymandias,

A little bit of news from the bfi on Salo

Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom, (Pasolini | It/Fr | 1975) has for the first time received an 18 certificate from the BBFC for release - uncut - on video/dvd. This paves the way for bfi Video to release the title on both formats in March 2001.

Best,

John

From: www.empireonline.co.uk

Notorious shock-rocker and America's favourite social scapegoat, Marilyn Manson may soon be presenting his nightmarish vision of the world on the big screen if his immediate plans for the future are anything to go by. In an interview conducted by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk in yesterday's Sunday Herald (17 December 2000), Manson said: 'The natural thing for me is to be involved in movies, but it really has to be on my terms. I think I feel more suited as a director than an actor, although I like to act.'

Manson, who made his feature film debut as a porn star in David Lynch's Lost Highway, is currently in talks with El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky. 'He's a Chilean director who worked with [Salvador] Dali,' said Manson of his potential cinematic collaborator. 'He wrote a script called Able Cain and it's a fantastic thing. He's had it for about 15 years, and he hasn't wanted to do it, but he contacted me because I was the only person he wanted to work with. And the character is very different from what people know of me, and that's the only reason I'm interested.'

However, given that Jodorowsky's El Topo contains scenes of self-immolation, dismemberment, Christ imagery and excessive violence, don't expect Manson's involvement with Abel Cain to be too much of a departure from his satanic rock star image.

From Popcorn.co.uk:

The Internet and television might bring you movies in the comfort of your own home, but the good old cinema isn't going anywhere. Cinema attendance in the UK is expected to reach 143m this year - the highest figure since 1974.

The figures have been predicted by the Cinema Advertising Association (CAA) and are expected to peak by the end of the year, despite a 30 percent drop in attendance in November.

That's not really surprising though, considering the only major release in November 2000 was 'Charlie's Angels', which just crept over the £10m mark. November 1999, in comparison, provided a slew of blockbusting movies, including 'The Sixth Sense', 'The World Is Not Enough' and 'The Blair Witch Project'.

131m tickets have so far been sold in the UK and predictions suggest that the continued success of 'The Grinch', 'Meet The Parents' and the forthcoming Nicolas Cage movie 'The Family Man', should shunt the number up to 143m. Final admissions for 1999 reached 139m.

The highest grossing movie of this year was, unsurprisingly, 'Toy Story 2', which picked up an enormous £43.4m. That was followed by 'Gladiator', which raised £30.9m.

2000 also proved to be the year the blockbuster went pop, with only 'X-Men' and 'Mission: Impossible 2' making it into the top ten. Even then they were pushed down the lower end of the chart by movies like 'Chicken Run' and 'Stuart Little'.

Also:

The U.K. online site The Register, which tracks news about the Internet, claimed Tuesday that Warner Brothers continues to intimidate kids who register Harry Potter domain names -- without bothering to protect itself by buying up the most obvious domain names itself, "which would cost far less than one lawyer's letter each." The register noted, for example, that the owner of www.harrypotterisawizard.co.uk has been forced to abandon his URL "but EVERY OTHER domain, including .com, .net, .org etc etc etc is still available." It also noted that every Internet address form is available for www.harrypotterwizard.***. The Register commented: "We can't decide whether it's maliciousness or just plain stupidity that have (sic) stopped the multi-billion pound company from picking up these domains."

FRANCE

In what some critics described as a doomed effort to protect French movie theaters, France's Culture Minister, Catherine Tasca, on Tuesday barred the sale of U.S. movies on DVDs before the movies are shown in theaters. Although DVDs of movies contain regional codes that prevent them from being played before a certain release date in various areas of the world, DVD players can easily be modified to defeat the codes, and indeed many retailers in France and elsewhere feature ads for "region-free" or "multi-zone" players. Critics of the new government decree noted that the effect of the law will be to cause DVD owners to buy the discs from retailers outside the country. The French daily Liberation editorialized Tuesday that the measure was like France's Maginot Line, the ill-fated line of fortifications that the country erected on its border with Germany prior to World War II. (The Germans simply went around it.)

REVIEWS

And some reviews I knocked off this week just to finish off. I know that Unbreakable has already made its bow in the US but given that it doesn't open in most of Europe until next week at the earliest I thought I'd give a Euro eye view of M Night's new effort (was at a video press conference with him in London recently - lovely lad! - and he confirmed that he most definitely doesn't see Unbreakable as part of a trilogy as previously reported. If he comes up with another set of situations for DD and Mr. Glass then well and good but it's not part of a master plan according to him!)

Don't know if Peter Sheridan's version of Borstal Boy will ever make it to US screens, The Golden Bowl (the new Merchant/Ivory) gets a limited US release on April 27th. Unbreakable - Review by Ozymandias

I don't know where to start on this one and that's not like me. You should first off know that I hated M Night Shyamalan's last movie The Sixth Sense. Thought that Oscar nominating it in any category was a travesty. Didn't get why people raved about it. With Unbreakable I'm through the looking glass - I've been phoning up my friends, family and stopping strangers on the street to rave about what I believe is a genuine contender for the best film of 2000.

Normally in this part I'd give you a quick summary of what the movie's all about - not this time. I went to see Unbreakable almost completely blind. All I knew of it was that it was M Night's new movie and that it starred Sam Jackson and Bruce Willis. That's it. I advise you do the same. We have so few surprises as cinemagoers these days - this will be an astonishing one for you.

Unbreakable lights the fires within me I had so hoped Sixth Sense would and never did. It's beautifully shot by Eduardo Serra (Funny Bones, Jude, What Dreams May Come, La Veuve De Saint-Pierre) in shades of cold blue and grey, framed by M Night with a dispassionate almost voyeuristic feel to even the most public scenes and played with laser sharp precision by Willis and Jackson.

Its real trump card on top of this royal flush is the screenplay. Intelligent, astonishing, tight, gripping, unpredictable and above all really, really original. Then there's the ending. So few directors would have the balls to end Unbreakable the way it does - we should thank the moviemaking gods that M Night does. It takes the film up a notch from brilliant to candidate for film of the year. I have a problem, as do many of the people I've spoken to, with the text at the very end detailing what eventually happens to the protagonists. It's unnecessary and taints one of the best endings to any film in recent memory.

But who are we to quibble with genius because that's what Unbreakable is - a brilliant work of a filmmaker at the very top of his game. It takes a special screenplay and director too to bring a performance out of Samuel L Jackson on a par with his Jules in Pulp Fiction - M Night does that and more creating a towering shattered Shaft in Mr. Glass. It'll be a real travesty if a supporting actor Oscar doesn't head home with him in March.

Yeah it has its weak points like any other movie - Robin Wright is underused and if you don't suspend your disbelief for the central premise of the movie then you'll be on really shaky ground but they're pedantic in the face of all the great work done here in the names of art and entertainment.

Hype is a dangerous thing so ignore it and just focus in on one immutable fact; Unbreakable doesn't need its predecessor's coat tails to ride in on - it's a thousand times the film the Sixth Sense ever was.

Borstal Boy - Review by Ozymandias

It should be noted (and has already been by many Behanophiles) that the new film is "inspired by" Borstal Boy so I've chosen to look at the film as a completely separate entity to Brendan Behan's autobiographical novel. (Phew! Less work for me!)

American actor Shawn Hatosy (Down To You, Anywhere But Here, The Faculty, In & Out) is Behan, a young Republican arrested at the age of 16 in Liverpool during the Second World War with a briefcase full of explosives and sent to Borstal in East Anglia. There he's befriended by sailor Charlie Millwall (Danny Dyer from Human Traffic) and warden's daughter Eva Birthistle and finds himself being torn between both of their charms in between escape attempts.

All anyone here ever wants to know of any American actor when they play a prominent part in an Irish movie (particularly when it's an historical figure) is whether they had a decent crack at the accent. Shawn Hatosy does and he looks like a young Behan too so that's half the battle. From the rest of the cast the always excellent Eva Birthistle does a very passable English rose and Danny Dyer makes a very watchable Charlie Millwall but poor, poor Michael York. This is his 102nd movie in a 33 year career and every time I saw him on screen here all I could see was Austin Powers boss Basil Exposition. Probably just me.

The major problem I had with the screenplay was the depiction of the actual Borstal itself. Instead of being a draconian institution of brutal sassanach savagery it looks a bit more like a Butlins on a particularly wet October Bank Holiday weekend. All we're short of is Governor Joyce (possibly THE nicest overseer of a penal institution in the history of cinema!) switching on the PA system every morning, playing three notes on a xylophone and squeakily intoning "Hi-de-hi campers!" (English readers will get this!)

All in all Borstal Boy is watchable "TV Monday night" style drama punctuated by a few decent performances.

The Golden Bowl - Review by Ozymandias

I'm not going to waste too much of my time reviewing the latest Merchant/Ivory production (their third Henry James adaptation - The Golden Bowl) as it's already robbed me of 2 ¼ hours of my life that I'd gladly take back.

Jeremy Northam and Uma Thurman are lovers from way back when in turn of the century England who meet again when he gets married to her best friend from childhood who just so happens to be the daughter of America's first billionaire, who then marries Thurman (with me so far?) So son in law and mother in law continue their on again, off again thing behind the backs of a father and daughter who appear to only want to spend time with each other. Yup, I fell asleep at that point too.

The film's problems are many - the casting is convoluted to say the least (Americans Thurman, Nick Nolte and Angelica Huston all play Americans in England but Northam is an Italian prince (!) and Kate Beckinsale an American heiress), the performances unconvincing and either Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's adaptation or James novel (I really couldn't bear to find out which) is melodramatic, turgid, boring, slow, drawn out, bereft of any real dramatic tension and well overlong. The first third of the movie is so patchy and episodic in its attempts to set up the rest of the story that you feel you're watching something much longer with some of the bits missing (thank God we're not!) The film does have at least one good quality for me though - it did allow me to catch up with some much needed beauty sleep.

The criticism may seem harsh but Jefferson In Paris, Surviving Picasso and now this are well below the standard of the team who re-popularised "period" with Remains Of The Day, A Room With A View and Howard's End. I suppose it just goes to show that you can't make a Golden Bowl out of a pig's ear.

Hokay - that's it for this week. Have a Xmas you only really remember half of and if you come across anything Euro-movie of interest for next week mail me. A huge thanks here to ALL of our contributors all across the continent and beyond since the first ever Euro AICN last March 13th Click Here To Visit It (jeez has it only been that long?!?!?!)

I was just thinking that Father Geek's words then are just as appropriate now as the Euro office heads into 2001.

FATHER GEEK QUOTE!!!!!

"This is a great opportunity for all of us here at AICN and for all of you that live on the Eastern shores of the Atlantic, an opportunity to greatly expand our International Film coverage. Its starting as a modest once a week column, but if you our Euro-readers give these guys the news, invite them to tour your sets and studios, give them the passes to your festivals just as though they were one of our top American editors/writers then this will grow. I can see a future where Euro-news could have it's own daily section of the site, but you have to help it work."

END FATHER GEEK QUOTE!!!!!!

True story..

Remember that if you just want to get involved with Euro AICN in the new year (or invite us to your sets or festivals!!) mail me at ozymandias@dublin.com

Have a cool yule from Dublin town......

L8r, Ozymandias

Ain't It Cool News - Ireland/UK Office, Penthouse Suite, Ozymandias Towers, Dublin, Ireland.

Mail me with your UK/Ireland bits - ozymandias@dublin.com