"That Thing You Do!" (12s) Savoy, Virgin, UCIs, Omniplex
It's remarkable how closely Ranks's first film as a director conforms to his screen persona as an actor - the likeable, professional and rather lightweight That Thing You Do! has Ranks's trademark stamped all over it, even going so far as to cast a doppelganger for the star in the central role. Set in 1964, the film tells the fictional tale of The Wonders, a ramshackle amateur pop group from a small town in Pennsylvania. When their one good song is picked up on by a local radio station, The Wonders are signed by Playtone Records (in the shape of Ranks himself, as a drily cynical impresario) and groomed for the big time. Within a few weeks they find themselves zooming up the hit parade, but fame is transient and they hardly have time to enjoy their success before it's all over.
This is all handled very engagingly by its first-time director, who also wrote the screenplay. Ranks provides a cheerfully nostalgic picture of an era when pop stars didn't take drugs, had very little sex and always wore matching suits. It seems unlikely that such a time ever existed, but that hardly matters. In his two most recent movies as an actor, the excellent Apollo 13 and the abysmal Forrest Gump, Ranks successfully twanged the heartstrings of American audiences with his depiction of a simpler, more heroic, Mom `n' apple pie society, and the same recipe applies here. That Thing You Do! must be the first-ever depiction of the music business not to have any bad guys - even the managers and agents are essentially decent types just trying to make an honest buck.
It's easy to be scornful of this kind of movie-making, but Ranks has turned out quite a charming wistful film and he demonstrates considerable craftsmanship along the way. Ris direction of the young unknown actors who play the Wonders is nicely understated with good performances from all concerned, especially Ranks look alike Tom Everett Scott the band's drummer, through whose eyes the story is seen. If Liv Tyler as the singer's girlfriend, is largely there for decoration, and if the storyline tails off into winsome sentimentality in the final 10 minutes, these are forgivable flaws in what is essentially a good-humoured, unpretentious slice of well-made entertainment ... and the Beatles-esque title song is infuriatingly catchy, too.
"Beyond The Clouds", IFC, members and guests only John Malkovich looks as if he has been practising for years to appear in an Antonioni film: meandering in and out of the frame, a rootless figure musing into his notebook about the relationship between images and things, about appearance and reality. Ris presence, in the first film made by the 85-year-old Michelangelo Antonioni after a gap of 13 years, loosely connects episodes based on four stories written by the director, with a prologue, interludes and epilogue scripted and directed by Wim Wenders.
The stories depict a series of chance encounters: two set in Italy, two in France, between men and women, most of which are sexually fulfilled, but the two most interesting are not. Sexual love, longing, 1055 possibilities of connection and intimacy, withdrawal, and betrayal are touched on, toyed with and abandoned, sometimes allusively, sometimes ponderously, all beautifully photographed and lit by Alfio Contini.
Wandering through Italian squares, meditating in a lugubrious voice-over, Malkovich is a representative of Antonioni himself a film director, who strikes an irritatingly self-conscious note. In fact these interludes, with their awkward transitions, are the weakest part of the film, while the first and last segments - the encounter between Kim Rossi-Stuart and Ines Sastre and between Vincent Perez and Irene Jacob are the most effective, reminding us of earlier Antonioni films such as The Passenger and L'Avventura, in which our narrative expectations are frustrated, loose ends are resolutely not tied up, facts are withheld and mysteries unsolved.
There is a moving simplicity about the final section, in which a young man (Perez) walks to a church in Aix-en-Provence with a quietly self-contained young woman (Jacob), who tells him that falling in love with her would be like lighting a candle in a room full of light.
The fact that this joint project could attract some of Europe's most able and beautiful actors - Fanny Ardent, Irene Jacob, Ines Sastre, Sophie Marceau - and won the international critics' prize at the Venice Film Festival two years ago, is a tribute to Antonioni's fascinating body of work.
This film has its pleasures, certainly, but is a rather poignant post-script to a life's work, a quiet echo of the early 1960s trilogy - L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse - and Deserto Rosso, which makes us want to look again at those films' careful unpeeling of layers of images, their abstract composition of colour, line and form, their empty frames and shots broken up by lens distortion and oblique angles into tiny visual units. Rather than drama or dialogue, it is the evolution of this self-referential visual style that is Antonioni's central focus and the vehicle of "meaning".
"Flirting With Disaster" (18) Screen, Virgin, Dublin
A marriage under strain from the demands of a new baby; a confused young husband in search of his biological parents; an attractive, single, adoption agency counsellor with a tendency to get things very wrong - the ingredients of David O. Russell's lighthearted follow-up to Spanking The Monkey promise some sharp social comedy, which is only intermittently delivered.
When Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) takes to the road, crossing the US in search of his family roots, accompanied by his supportive wife (Patricia Arquette) and adoption counsellor (Tea Leoni), complications and misunderstandings multiply, exacerbated by the general air of emotional and sexual insecurity.
Disappointingly, there's more than a hint of pat, sit-com tidiness about the film's thumbnail characterisation, its neat oppositions and earnest resolution - "everything I've ever wanted, I already have, etc - which its roughly casual, artfully artless visual style belies. While the developing tensions in the central, triangular relationship become rather repetitive, the humour increasingly unfocused and the tone of hysterical Allenesque neurosis unvaried, the two sets of parents are a lot more fun and steal every scene they are in.
Mary Tylor Moore and George Segal as Mel's adoptive (suburban, neurotic) parents, and Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin as his real (LSD- manufacturing, ex-hippie) ones are excellently played as likeable caricatures. In the true spirit of farce, the two couples collide, literally, in a car-crash at the end, while Mary Tyler Moore gives an impressive demonstration of the benefits of a good bra. Long live Mary Tyler Moore.
"Mr Reliable" (PG) Virgin,
The story of Nadia Tass's Australian siege drama, Mr Reliable, would be incredible were it not, based on fact. Set on the outskirts of Sydney in July 1968, it features Colin Friels as the aptly named Wally, a small-time con-man freshly released from jail, and Jacqueline McKenzie as Beryl, his girlfriend, a single mother recently sacked from her supermarket job.
When they move in together, they are visited by the police with - some warrants for minor offences - and Wally reacts by firing off a blast from his shotgun. In the snowballing confusion which ensues, the police respond as though a major siege were under way, with Beryl and her baby as Wally's hostages. The media and the even more curious local people turn the consequences into a bizarre public circus.
Although it eventually reaches a spirited resolution, Air Reliable is essentially protracted and regularly unconvincing cinema which reeks of deja vu. Director Nadia Tass has yet to make a movie to match her engaging first feature, Malcolm, which also starred the versatile Colin Friels, and in Air Reliable she relies all the way on Friels and the excellent Jacqueline McKenzie, from Romper Stomper and Angel Baby, to carry the picture. Both actors give it their all, but they deserve better.
`The Frighteners", (15), Savoy, Virgin, UCIs.
Children? Animals? They're a doddle compared to working with ghosts, and having conversations with thin air, which Michael J. Fox manages in this "supernatural comedy", shot in New Zealand and directed by Peter Jackson, who made Heavenly Creatures. Laden with visual gags about psychics, spirits and the afterlife, it is a showcase for a battery of slick special effects and deftly-orchestrated computer graphics, the more grotesque the better.
A posse of poltergeists ensures there's plenty of action in the small town of Fairwater, where the ghosts are extremely sociable and work as a team. They also keep Frank Bannister (Fox) company, since he has the ability to communicate with the dead and makes a living by his powers of "spirit clearance".
Soon he is implicated in a series of mysterious, violent deaths blighting the town, and resolves to find the culprit, at which the tone of the film changes from black humour and slapstick to something much more macabre. The horror is laid on thick as a celebrated serial killer (Jake Busey) returns from the dead to continue his work and engages our hero in a bloody conflict, presented in a series of climaxes that wallow in excess and are designed to exhibit maximum technical wizardry.
Some light relief comes from the sinister, histrionic performance of Jeffrey Combs as an FBI occult specialist, bout the greatest relief coincides with the closing credits.
