"Mad City" (15s) Nationwide
Once regarded as a master of politically-motivated film-making, Costa Gavras has done little to justify that description in quite some time, with the likes of the ridiculously melodramatic Betrayed pointing up the limitations of his method. In his first new film in several years, he turns his attention to the modern media, again with unimpressive results - very few good films have been made about the world of television, and this isn't one of them.
Mad City stars Dustin Hoffman as Max Brackett, an aggressive TV journalist exiled to a small-town station for indiscretions he committed at the network. Pining to get back to the centre of things, Hoffman sees his chance of a big story when a former security guard (John Travolta) shows up at the town museum brandishing a shotgun and demanding his job back. Travolta takes a group of visiting children hostage and sets in train a "siege drama" which becomes a major media event, with Hoffman as his conduit to the outside world.
Echoing two classic paranoid dramas of the 1970s, Dog Day Afternoon and Network, Mad City is obviously (too obviously) trying to offer a critique of modern media values in the era of the "live" 24-hour news channel, but the tone veers so unconvincingly between tragedy and comedy that it's impossible to take the message seriously. There's no delicacy or shading in the depiction of any of the key players; Hoffman appears to be just going through the motions, while Travolta has surely rolled out his nice-but-dim blue collar persona once too often by now. The over-schematic script asks us to accept some implausible plotting - Hoffman's trainee assistant (Mia Kirshner) is promoted from the bottom of the heap to network honcho in the space of a few days so she can represent the amoral new generation, and Alan Alda, as Hoffman's long-time rival, is pure cardboard.
"The Land Girls" (15s) Selected Cinemas Nationwide
David Leland's gentle, rather sentimental film, set in Dorset during the second World War, stars Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel as three young women, members of the Women's Land Army, who arrive to work on local farmer Tom Georgeson's land. From disparate backgrounds, they gradually become friends over the course of a year, as they cope with romance and loss of loved ones.
Leland's tone is more elegiac here than in Wish You Were Here, his black comedy about a young woman growing up in 1950s Britain, but The Land Girls shares that film's interest in female sexuality in an innately conservative society. The three central performances are well drawn, with Friel as a cheerfully promiscuous hairdresser, Weisz as a naive young Oxford graduate, and McCormack as the quietest of the group, engaged to a naval officer. All three become sexually involved at one point or another with the farmer's son (Steven Mackintosh), who gratefully accepts their attentions despite his own engagement to be married.
Though beautifully photographed by Henry Braham, The Land Girls, despite the competence of all involved, is little more than an exercise in nostalgia, fetishising landscape, costumes and props in a manner familiar from other examples of so-called British Heritage Cinema. The harshness of rural war-time life is portrayed as picturesque rusticity; a surprisingly soft-focus point of view from Leland, who has written and directed some of the most original British drama of recent years. With its leisurely, meandering narrative, you also find yourself wondering, like the protagonists, if the war will ever end.
"Species II" (18s) Nationwide
As Scream 2 gleefully pointed out, there are certain immutable laws to the making of sequels, not least that they should be inferior to the originals. Given that the first Species was a forgettable and not very clever piece of trash, this bodes ill for Number Two, and so it proves. Mutant aliens intent on breeding their way to global domination was the original formula, rigidly adhered to here, except that there's more than one of them this time (another sequel requirement). Natasha Henstridge, who played the sex-mad extra-terrestrial in the first film, returns as a cloned version of that character, and Justin Lazard is the alien-human hybrid on the loose. Michael Madsen also makes a reappearance, although he looks as if he wishes he hadn't. There are exploding stomachs and slimy tentacles a-plenty, but not much tension or wit to be seen. Director Peter Medak's previous credits include the British films The Krays and Let Him Have It, but there's no sign of an identifiable voice or vision at work here.
"Point Blank" (Members and Guests) IFC
Long regarded as one of the definitive American movies of the late 1960s, John Boorman's masterful and startlingly original psychological thriller has, if anything, grown even further in stature in recent years, its influence visible in many of the more interesting films of the 1990s. All the more appropriate and welcome, therefore, for it to be re-released in a new print only months after the first run of Boorman's The General. Critics have pointed out how Boorman's reinvigoration of the American gangster genre owes much to his adoption of techniques and styles developed by the directors of the French New Wave, but Point Blank is far more than an exercise in style. In the hallucinatory odyssey of his antihero, Walker (the superb Lee Marvin), Boorman anticipates the fascination with dream, myth and the unknowable which has continued throughout his career. It's for this reason that the film now stands as far more than just an icon of American pop art (although it is also that - the use of colours in particular is extraordinary), and that he experience of seeing it in a cinema should not be missed.
Tara Quirke plays a woman who receives a late-night call from a policeman in Another Day, a beguiling seven-minute exercise in style from the former Dublin Film Festival director, Martin Mahon, showing with Point Blank. Mahon, whose previous short film Happy Birthday To Me was selected for competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, has been remarkably prolific in the last year, and the results can be seen in his increasingly assured handling of the medium.
Next Monday sees the official opening of Cinematek at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork with a screening of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris, introduced by the critic and author, Colin McCabe. Now with 35mm facilities, the cinema will be offering such titles as Metroland, Clubbed To Death and Western. The autumn season begins on Tuesday with Bruno Dumont's acclaimed La Vie de Jesus, ahead of its release in the UK or rest of Ireland. Dumont's remarkable film, an examination of racism and nihilism among young Europeans, won the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo this year and has been hailed as the latest voice in the new wave of French cinema initiated by La Haine. For further information, telephone 021 272022.
