A couple of newcomers - Nuala O'Neill and Ciaran McMenamin - fall poignantly in love. The world of bungling assassins and galumphing British soldiers lives credibly enough. Roger Michell whips 1972's bloody comings and goings on the Anderstown estate into a neat blend of black comedy and sudden death. Some incidents, we're assured, are true and some, equally, are not.īut the deepest truth of the lot, alas, is probably that, without the National Lottery and the Northern Ireland Arts Council, it would never have been made: and that nobody would have much felt the loss. Thus it lives uneasily in the half-world of docudrama. Titanic Town is an oddity - a very free adaptation (by Ann Devlin) of the eponymous novel by Mary Costello about her mother's days as a battling Belfast peace campaigner a quarter of a century ago. Some of the English dubbing is a bit dodgy, and Bardem's too much of the good, simple soldier to play flesh-creeping (or eating) menace - but, if you like Tex-Mex with added chillies and unlimited tequila slammers, you'll probably survive. Rosie Perez, in various states of undress, and Javier Bardem do the slaughtering and will probably bump off Andreas Whittam Smith next. More references to movies past than Halliwell: more fancy flourishes than El Cordobes. Alex De La Iglesia (from Accion Mutante on) is the most dynamic of Spain's young directors, and this road movie from Barry Gifford's novel is David Lynch, late Almodovar and Peckinpah mixed in a viscous Mexican brew of disembowellings, voodoo, rape and assorted carnage. The deleting in Perdita Durango comes thick and fast by blade and bullet. This one has made a lot of tired, stressed people happy. You can, of course, pick any butterfly romantic comedy to death one wing at a time. How are we supposed to fall in love with a plum-dumb blonde? She is required to be terminally stupid: a horrible mistake, because she is fundamentally bright, bright, bright, and she can't hide her intelligence. But here, she's just ditzy, the last girl on the block to realise that it's Tom who's sending her mail. In Seattle, she was power woman crumbling around the edges. The wonder when she was Sally, meeting Harry, was her fake orgasm: she was knowing and witty. She's bone thin and etched: she begins to make Calista Flockhart look like Kate Winslet.Īnd Ryan especially is cast against type. As Ryan ploughs far into her thirties, the girly stuff begins to grate. As Hanks goes deeper into his jowly forties, the innocence of the juvenile lead slips away. Naggingly, too, the characters don't quite fit. The hinge mechanism - barely developed, because nobody else around seems to know how to use it - is the microchip. ![]() How do you make e-mailing a big-screen event? (You can't: you have Meg and Tom recite the lines while they pump at the keys.) Nobody gets on a plane to Seattle, so nothing much happens visually. Ephron isn't a skilled enough director to get over the fundamental problem of her own plot. ![]() But little things keep getting in the way. This should, then, be a treat of a Friday night movie. They're a fit, worth the price of admission alone (before you throw in Parker Posey and Greg Kinnear making hay as their discard partners). Ephron provides her usual barbed script: they deliver it with a relaxed rapport which spreads a real enjoyment. Hanks and Ryan may not be Tracey and Hepburn, but they're the next best pre-millennium thing.
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