"Swingers" (15s) Screen at D'Olier Street, Vir- gin, UCI Tallaght, Dublin Given that Los Angeles and its inhabitants are probably the most-filmed subjects on the planet, it's remarkable how fresh, beguiling and funny the portrait of the city is in this engaging, low-budget ensemble comedy. Swingers follows a group of aspiring young twentysomething actors as they obsess about their stalled careers and unhappy love lives. These are no slackers or Gen X-ers, though -
their role models are the Vegas Rat Pack of the early 1960s - martini-swilling, cigar-chomping, card-playing hedonists, whose style is faithfully copied by these 1990s admirers down to the detailing on their retro leisurewear. Whether or not this is a real LA fashion fad is irrelevant (although if it is now, this movie is probably to blame) because it's the disjunction between these glitzy fantasies and the reality of their McLives that makes the characters and their predicaments so entertaining. Embarrassment and failure are constant companions as they struggle to get a break in showbiz.
Mike (Jon Favreau) is a stand-up comedian who has come to California to try to make the big time, and has broken up with his long-term girlfriend in the process. Stricken by grief, he finds it impossible to get on with his life, despite the best efforts of his friends, especially the unabashed hedonist Trent
(Vince Vaughn), to get him to snap out of it.
This is all portrayed with the unerring eye of someone who has lived it for real - Favreau, who also wrote the screenplay, is himself an East Coast emigre.
The sympathetic wit of his script is greatly enhanced by director/cinematographer Doug Liman, who makes an auspicious debut, framing his subjects so as to emphasise their brittle relationships with the unfriendly outside world and with each other. Made for only $250,000, Swingers looks terrific, using hand-held cameras and available light to evoke the hip bars and night-time streets of twentysomething LA. As usual with American indie films these days, there are the obligatory intertextual references to other movies
(including a very funny sight gag based on the famous Steadicam shot in
Goodfellas), but the best jokes are in the details of the protagonists' lives.
In the midst of all the heavy-handed blockbusters dominating the screens at this time of year, Swingers is a welcome summer treat, and shouldn't be missed.
"Space Truckers" (12s) Nationwide The first-ever big-budget science-fiction movie shot in Ireland (unless you count John Boorman's 1973 film Zardoz),
Spacetruckers is a curious mish-mash of styles and genres, ranging from country-
and-western comedy to Alien-style horror. Directed none too subtly by Stuart
Gordon, it's hardly likely to appeal to sci-fi connoisseurs, while for a generation reared on digital special effects, its big setpieces will look embarrassingly shabby. It's exactly this shabbiness, though, along with a cheerfully juvenile sense of humour, which some may find endearing.
Dennis Hopper plays a grizzled old intergalactic space trucker, shipping everything from grand pianos to genetically-engineered square pigs across the universe. Faced with the prospect of losing his ship, he hooks up with brash young Stephen Dorff and good time girl Debi Mazar to ship a sealed mystery cargo back to Earth. Along the way, they encounter asteroid storms, space pirates (in the shape of Charles Dance, as a cyborg villain), and ultimately, their own dangerous freight, the deadly Bio Mechanical Warriors.
The pick'n'mix approach of Gordon, who directed the cult splatter movie Re-
Animator, could have been great fun, happily poaching ideas from every space opera of the last 20 years. The problem with Space Truckers, though, is that it falls between too many stools - its B-movie ethos and aesthetics would probably have worked much better either as a real cheapie, a la John Carpenter's Dark
Star, or else as an effects extravaganza like Independence Day. As it is, the sets and cinematography just look rather old-fashioned, like one of those forgettable sci-fi movies made in the late 1970s in the wake of Star Wars. As for the film's Irish elements, they are restricted to blink-and-you've missed-
them appearances by the likes of Olwen Fouere, Pat Laffan, and most notably
Birdy Sweeney as Mr Zesty, the first ever interstellar smuggler with an Northern accent.
