February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Michael Gray
The Film Society of the Lincoln Center continues its role as New York’s premier showcase for Irish film with a festival entitled “Coming Times: The New Irish Cinema.” Starting this week, on May 28, and running until June 10, the Society presents more than a dozen feature films and a selection of shorts at the Walter Reade Theatre.
Five years ago, the Society screened the most comprehensive survey of Irish cinema ever seen in this country, from the pioneering works of the silent era up to the international successes of the 1990s. The current festival takes up where the last one left off, with a broad selection of recent features, plus a few favorites from the 1980s by director Neil Jordan. The festival pays special tribute to Jordan, presenting half a dozen of his best films, and the Academy Award-winning director will attend a screening on June 7 of his darkly comic masterpiece “The Butcher Boy.” He will also appear at a panel discussion on June 6 with Sheila Pratschke of the Irish Film Institute, Festival Curator Kathleen Murphy, and Paul Power, editor of Independent Film and Video Monthly.
The Jordan tribute will include “The Miracle,” “The Company of Wolves,” the epic drama “Michael Collins,” and his studies of love and violence in Northern Ireland, “Angel,” and “The Crying Game.”
The North of Ireland has provided some of the best talent and the most potent subject matter in the Irish cinema of recent years, and the province is well represented in the upcoming festival. Featured works include “Nothing Personal,” directed by one of Ireland’s top visual stylists, Thaddeus O’Sullivan. This hard-edged, bloody urban drama deals with the culture of violence and the power that gunmen hold over their community, shown from the seldom-seen viewpoint of the loyalist paramilitaries.
On a lighter note, “The Uncle Jack,” by maverick Northern Ireland director John T. Davis, presents a loving tribute to his uncle, a dreamer and an inventive modelmaker who devised palatial movie theaters and model airplanes in the post-war years.
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“Coming Times” will also feature several U.S. premieres — “Separation Anxiety,” a complex romantic comedy about the amorous intertwinings of a group of young Dubliners, set on the day that the first Irish divorce is granted by a Dublin court, and “Sunset Heights,” a futuristic thriller about the hunt for a brutal child-murderer.
Paul Tickell’s “Crushproof,” set in Dublin’s deprived western suburbs, deals with the lives of teenagers who defy the law by keeping horses in the city and riding them around the local housing estates. The film is of particular interest in light of new legislation in Ireland that further restricts ownership of horses in Dublin, and likely will soon make the urban pony culture virtually extinct.
No festival would be complete without its share of clunkers to counterbalance the quality, and occupying this unenviable position is “Frankie Starlight,” a film about a dwarf astronomer, his dreary, clairvoyant French mother, and her various boyfriends. This Noel Pearson production has so few saving graces that it makes a compelling argument for developing new ways to recycle celluloid. Slightly better, though not much, is “Gold In The Streets,” an unconvincing tale from the same producer about Irish immigrants in New York that does little justice to the Janet Noble play on which it is based.
The same territory is explored with a good deal more verve in another festival presentation, Jimmy Smallhorne’s “2BY4.” In his directorial debut, the actor and screenwriter gropes the sleazy underbelly of the Irish immigrant experience in New York, without flinching from the nasty bits we only hear about and never get to see in movies. Beautifully shot by award-winning cinematographer Declan Quinn, the film tracks the lives of a bunch of Irish construction workers who come to New York not to mope about how much they miss home, but to drink, shag and get stoned. The film gives a slap around the head to the “Irish abroad” film, a sub-genre usually inclined toward sentimental mush, and has an impressive visual style that belies its lean budget.
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Fans of Irish film who would like to find out more about the films and themes covered in the festival can do so in the current issue of Cineaste magazine. A special supplement on Irish cinema provides a comprehensive analysis of the current state of the industry, with lively and insightful contributions from Roddy Doyle, Gabriel Byrne, Fintan O’Toole and a host of top Irish filmmakers. Copies of Cineaste will be available on May 27 at the Barnes and Noble (66th and Broadway branch) panel discussion on Irish Cinema with Aidan Quinn and festival curator Kathleen Murphy. It can also be found at better newsstands throughout the city.
And for those who would like to see some of their favorite Irish films again and again, Clarence Pictures in Dublin will be making available on video a wide range of Irish classics in the coming months. “Trojan Eddie,” “Nothing Personal,” and “Crushproof,” all featured in the Coming Times Festival, will be available from Clarence in the autumn, for sale or rent through Blockbuster. Among the other titles in their catalogue will be Jim Sheridan’s “The Field,” and “My Left Foot,” Martin Duffy’s “The Boy From Mercury,” and Paddy Breathnach’s debut “Ailsa.”
Breathnach’s hilarious second feature, “I Went Down,” is a must-see in the Lincoln Center festival for anyone who missed its theatrical release last year.
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Films featured in the Coming Times series will be shown at the Walter Reade Theater, at 165 West 65th St., NYC. Tickets are available from the box office at (212) 875 5600.
The following is the film schedule:
€ “Separation Anxiety”
(Mark Staunton, 1997; 91m)
Friday, May 28, 2 p.m.
Tuesday, June 1, 3 p.m.
€ “Trojan Eddie”
(Gillies MacKinnon,1996; 105m)
Friday, May 28, 4 p.m.
Sunday, May 30, 5:50 p.m.
€ “Sunset Heights”
U.S. premiere
(Colm Villa, 1998; 97m)
Friday, May 28, 6:15 p.m.
Sunday, May 30, 8 p.m.
€ “2BY4”
(Jimmy Smallhorne, 1998; 90m)
Friday, May 28, 8:15 p.m.
Saturday, May 29, 6 p.m.
Sunday, May 30, 4 p.m.
€ “Gold in the Streets”
(Elizabeth Gill, 1997; 94m)
Saturday, May 29, 4 p.m.
Thursday, June 3, 3 p.m.
€”The Last Bus Home”
US premiere
(Johnny Gogan, 1997; 93m)
Saturday, May 29, 8:15 p.m.
Thursday, June 3, 1 p.m.
€ “Korea”
(Cathal Black, 1995; 87m)
and
“Horse”
(Kevin Liddy, 1993; 31m):
Monday, May 31, 2 p.m. and 6:15 p.m.
€ “I Went Down”
(Paddy Breathnach, 1998; 107m)
Monday, May 31, 4:20 p.m. and 8:40 p.m.
€ “Moondance”
(Dagmar Hirtz, 1995; 92m)
Tuesday, June 1, 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.
€ “Crush Proof” aka “Hooligans”
(Paul Tickell, 1998; 91m)
Wednesday, June 2, 1 p.m., 4:40 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.
€ “Nothing Personal”
(Thaddeus O’Sullivan, 1995; 85m)
Wednesday, June 2, 2:50 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.
€ “The Uncle Jack”
(John T. Davis, 1996; 80m)
Tuesday, June 8, 1 p.m., 4:45 p.m. and 8:50 p.m.
€ “Frankie Starlight”
Tuesday, June 8, 2:40 p.m. and 6:45 p.m.
Thursday, June 10, 2:45 p.m.
€ “Stranded”
(Ian Fitzgibbon, 1998; 25m)
and
“Boys and Men”
(Se_n Hinds, 1996; 40m)
and
“Navigato: Atlantean II
(Bob Quinn, 1998; 60m)
Wednesday, June 9, 1 p.m. and 5:15 p.m.
€ “The Fifth Province”
US premiere:
(Frank Stapleton, 1997; 89m)
Wednesday, June 9, 3:30 p.m. and 7:45 p.m.
Thursday, June 10, 1 p.m.
€ “The Crying Game”
(1992, 112m)
Friday, June 4, 1 p.m. and 5:50 p.m.
€ “Michael Collins”
(1996, 132m)
Friday, June 4, 3:15 p.m. and 8 p.m.
€ “Angel” aka “Danny Boy”
(1982, 92m)
Saturday, June 5, 4:30 p.m. and 8:45 p.m.
€ “The Miracle”
(1991, 97m)
Saturday, June 5, 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 6, 9:30 p.m.
€ “The Company of Wolves”
(1984, 95m)
Sunday, June 6, 4:30 p.m.
Monday, June 7, 3:50 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.
€ “The Butcher Boy”
(1998, 147m)
Sunday, June 6, 6:30 p.m.
Monday, June 7, 1 p.m.