"The X-Files" (15) Nationwide
Opening in prehistoric Texas, where two unwary cavemen come into contact with a mysterious, transformative alien organism, The X-Files quickly flashes forward to the present day, to find the long-dormant alien coming back to life and threatening modern civilisation. The nod to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is clear, but unfortunate, as it just serves to underline the many weaknesses in this big screen version of Chris Carter's popular television series. Presumably, a hard core of Mulder and Scully addicts out there will flock to this movie regardless of its merits (although reports from the US indicate that they'll be disappointed by its X-Files-for-beginners exposition), but for non-fans like this writer, the lumbering plot, uncertain pacing and wafer-thin characterisation should prove too much to bear. There's also something deeply distasteful about the way in which Carter deploys the paranoia of the American far right for his big set-pieces. A bomb attack on a Dallas skyscraper is an almost exact reproduction of the Oklahoma City atrocity, while an international conclave of elderly conspirators planning to take over the Federal Government recalls the New World Order so beloved of fascist fruitcakes. But the depiction of these shadowy forces is so risible that it's impossible to take them even slightly seriously. The conspiracy seems capable of hacking immediately into every phone on the planet, with the exception of Mulder's humble mobile (prominently displayed in some of this year's most shameless product placement). The battle for the soul of humanity, it would appear, is taking place between opposing forces of equal stupidity.
The usual Hollywood strategy of covering up such shortcomings with a patina of irony is not available here - there's no Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage to tell us when to laugh. In fact there are no laughs - The X-Files is so po-faced it makes Kevin Costner look witty. The relationship between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson is played out in extended, wooden dialogue - one of the many ways in which the movie fails to make the transition from the small screen.
Despite the broader canvas available in the larger format, Carter's screenplay (directed without much distinction by Rob Bowman) frequently resorts to the shortcuts, evasions and deus ex machinae of cost-conscious episodic television to move its narrative along. Every time Mulder's investigations are stalled, mysterious men appear in dark alleyways to provide vital information, while the unexciting cliff-hangers and effects moments are flogged to death by that irritating theme tune. Given this failure to escape the confines of TV, it might have been a good idea to break the tedium with a few entertaining commercial breaks.
"Firelight" (12s) Screen, D'Olier Street, Dublin
William Nicholson's directorial debut is the latest in a long and not very impressive line of 19thcentury melodramas with feminist twists which have emerged in the wake of Jane Campion's The Piano. Campion, unlike most of her imitators, is a highly sophisticated film-maker with a keen and provocative understanding of the female imagination, but Nicholson's film suffers from heavy-handed symbolism and excessive sentimentality; its central character is a meaningless cipher. Sophie Marceau plays a Swiss governess who agrees to bear a child for English aristocrat Stephen Dillane for money. An attraction develops between the two over the course of the few days they spend together in order to conceive, but nine months later the baby - a daughter - is taken away, leaving Marceau obsessed with finding her again. Seven years later she succeeds, becoming governess to the child (Dominique Belcourt) against Dillane's initial wishes. Gradually winning over the troubled Belcourt, who doesn't know that she is her mother, Marceau also becomes closer to the cold, repressed Dillane, whose wife has been in a coma for many years.
Nicholson, who wrote the screenplay for Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands, seems out of his depth directing here. The metaphor of different kinds of light - the frozen world which Dillane has created for himself against the warm firelight of the title, representing, it would seem, Marceau's femininity and humanity - is crudely drawn and simplistic. Though the structure occasionally yields dividends - the hallucinatory strangeness of the child's private world, in particular - it is fundamentally flawed by Marceau's character, a paragon of such implausible goodness that the film sinks slowly under the weight of her many beautifully photographed close-ups.
"Kurt And Courtney" (Members and Guests) IFC, Dublin
Like The X-Files, Nick Broomfield's latest documentary plays on modern America's fascination with conspiracy theories, but manages to do so far more entertainingly and productively than Mulder and Scully ever could. Kurt and Courtney sets out on the trail of the story of the most famous rock'n'roll death of recent years, the apparent suicide of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain in his Seattle home in April 1994. As often happens with Broomfield's work, the course of his documentary changes along the way, and while the finished product contains much that will be of interest to fans of Cobain, the film is finally about the struggle to make the film against the wishes and machinations of the star's widow, Courtney Love. Some pretty bizarre creatures crawl out of the rock'n'roll undergrowth, many of them making serious accusations against Love, who becomes Broomfield's prey in the same manner as earlier victims like South African Naxi Eugene Terreblanche and Hollywood "madam" Heidi Fleiss.
Broomfield makes great claims for his role as noble defender of free speech, but his film really functions as an excavation of the weirder crevices and subcultures of America - low-rent paparazzi, drug-soaked ex-"friends", sadomasochistic rock stars, and even Love's father, who makes some of the most shocking accusations against his own daughter. On one level, therefore, this is all pure freakshow (and very funny at times). On another, though, it's a fascinating parable about the noxious side-effects of fame. In that sense, and despite Broomfield's self-aggrandisement, Kurt And Courtney is in the best tradition of muck-raking exploitation, and retains a certain shambolic integrity.
"Gadjo Dilo" (Members and Guests) IFC
Irish people who may wonder about the origins of the Romanian immigrants, most of them from the Gypsy community, who have been arriving on our shores recently, could hardly do better than go to see Tony Gatlif's superb, moving film, the last in a trilogy about a race of people who have been alternately romanticised and persecuted over the several centuries they have lived in Europe. Gadjo Dilo means "crazy stranger" in the Romany language, and the stranger here is a young Frenchman (Romain Duris) who travels to a Gypsy village near Bucharest in search of a famous singer who recorded his father's favourite song. Regarded with deep suspicion by the villagers, Duris is adopted as a friend by a master fiddler (Izidor Serban) whose son has been imprisoned. Living in the village, he gradually overcomes the hostility of the community and enters into their lives.
Gatlif, himself originally of Gypsy extraction, has declared his objective as being the recording of a culture which has no written history, and which he believes may vanish in the not-so-distant future, and his film hovers fascinatingly between fiction and ethnographic documentary. With a cast composed almost entirely of non-actors, he paints a picture of Romany society which is often bleak, always harsh, but vibrantly alive - the unabashed saltiness of the language used about sex is particularly startling. Gadjo Dilo ends on a tragic note which avoids simplistic politicking but helps shed some light on the complexities which lurk beneath labels such as "refugee" or "economic migrant".
