Christmas Movies in Meeting House Square

‘Christmas on the Square’ takes place this year in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar from December 17^th – 21^st. 11 festive screenings over 5 days will play Old Hollywood gems such as Some Like it Hot and Holiday Inn alongside more recent classics like Annie Hall and Die Hard and perennial family favourites such as Elf and The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Online booking is now open at www.entertainment.ie/meetinghousesquare. Free blankets will be handed out to keep warm and a selection of hot drinks (including traditional mulled wine, hot chocolate, tea, and coffee) and festive food will all be available for purchase.

Tuesday, December 17^th

How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 5pm

Ron Howard’s remake of the classic cartoon about a creature intent on stealing Christmas throws a ton of CGI and crazy sets at the screen and elides a good deal of the absurdity of Dr Seuss’ original rhymes, but Carrey’s improvisations impress.

Cast: Jim Carrey and Taylor Momsen

Running time: 104 mins

Cert: PG

Holiday Inn, 8pm

At an Inn which is only open on holidays, a crooner and a hoofer vie for the affections of a beautiful up-and-coming performer. Based on a story idea by Broadway song-writing legend Irving Berlin this flick also includes an animated sequence mocking FDR.

Cast: Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds

Running Time: 100 mins

Cert: G

Wednesday, December 18^th

Elf, 5pm

After inadvertently wreaking havoc on the elf community due to his ungainly size, a man raised at the North Pole is sent by Santa Claus to the U.S. in search of his true identity. Can he romance a cute colleague (Zooey Deschanel) and reconnect with his father?

Cast: Will Ferrell and James Caan

Running Time: 97mins

Cert: PG

Some Like it Hot, 8pm

When two musicians witness the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, they flee 1920s Chicago in an all female band disguised as women, but complications set in when they meet singer Sugar Kane… Think of it as Billy Wilder doing Shakespeare’s cross-dressing rom-coms.

Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis

Running Time: 120 mins

Cert: PG

Thursday, December 19^th

Polar Express, 5pm

On Christmas Eve, a doubting boy boards a magical train that’s headed to the North Pole and Santa Claus’ home. Director Robert Zemeckis uses motion capture to allow Tom Hanks play multiple roles but the uncanny valley phenomenon sinks scenes that aren’t spectacular musical numbers.

Cast: Tom Hanks and Chris Coppola

Running Time: 100 mins

Cert: PG

Bridget Jones, 8pm

A British woman is determined to improve herself while she looks for love in a year in which she keeps a personal diary. King of the British rom-com Richard Curtis pens the screenplay for this incredibly commercially successful contemporary riff on Jane Austen scenarios.

Cast: Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant

Running Time: 97mins

Cert: 15

Friday, December 20^th

The Muppet Christmas Carol, 5pm

The Muppet characters tell their idiosyncratic version of Charles Dickens’ classic tale of an old and bitter miser’s redemption on Christmas Eve. Michael Caine is rather good as Scrooge, but this is all about Kermit, the Great Gonzo and Miss Piggy as Dickensian characters.

Cast: Michael Caine and Dave Goelz

Running Time: 85

Cert: G

Trading Places, 8pm

A snobbish investor and a wily street con artist find their positions reversed as part of a bet by two callous millionaires. Writer/director John Landis came to this off a streak of classic comedies that included Animal House and The Blues Brothers.

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis

Running Time: 116 mins

Cert: 15

Annie Hall, 11pm

Neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer falls in love with ditzy singer Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s classic 1977 breakthrough. The many highlights include the Marshall MacLuhan cameo, Christopher Walken’s crazed monologue, and Alvy’s flashbacks to his Brooklyn childhood; depressed by the universe’s finite expansion.

Cast: Diane Keaton and Woody Allen

Running Time: 93 mins

Cert:  PG

Saturday, December 21^st

Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 8pm

Brian (Graham Chapman) is born on the original Christmas, in the stable next door to Jesus. He spends his life being mistaken for the messiah, but along the way gets lessons in Latin from a centurion, and ponders Roman’s rule’s good points.

Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Michael Palin

Running Time:

Cert: 15

Die Hard, 11pm

Vacationing NYPD cop John McClane tries to save estranged wife Holly Gennaro when her office party is taken hostage by German terrorist Hans Gruber during a Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles. Director John McTiernan spectacularly orchestrates arguably the ultimate action film.

Cast: Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman

Running Time: 131 mins

Cert: 15

Ticket prices:

Adults: 5 euro

OAP/Student: 4 euro

Child: 3 euro

Family (2&2): 15 euro

Group of 10 people: 45 euro

Meeting House Square (MHS) is a unique outdoor space and venue in the heart of Temple Bar, Dublin’s Cultural Quarter. You can simply turn off the rain at the flick of a switch as the new bespoke retractable canopy blooms on Meeting House Square.

‘Christmas on the Square’ is presented by Temple Bar Cultural Trust and Dublin City Council.

Conspiracy Cinema at the IFI

The IFI is presenting a season of films this June playfully titled High Anxiety. As ‘filmnoia’ these are meant to encapsulate the post-Vietnam post-Watergate zeitgeist of chastened 1970s America. Invariably there is much idolatry of the faultless New Hollywood that was tragically killed off by Star Wars in this positioning, which regular readers of this blog will know I have little truck with. The truth is there are some great films here, some over-rated but good films, and by far the best film is the most defiantly Old Hollywood: The Manchurian Candidate, which is oblique in its violence, sexually charged without being sexual, and whip-smart and heart-breaking in its scripting; the kind of thing that Hitchcock might have directed on one of his darker days at the office. Let’s briefly trot thru the line-up of films in the season.

The Manchurian Candidate June 1st & 2nd @ 6:25pm

The pick of the bunch is the first out of the blocks. Catch this tonight if you can. A superb Laurence Harvey stars as Raymond Shaw, an unpopular soldier who unexpectedly returns as a war hero from the Korean War to the political machinations of his terrifying mother Angela Lansbury, a witch-hunting Senator’s wife. Frank Sinatra is his old army c/o trying to work out the mystery of just what happened in Korea that fills his men’s nightmares, and director John Frankenheimer ratchets up the tension as George Axelrod’s script satirically skewers McCarthyism while breaking your heart along the way.

Klute June 4th & 5th @ 4.50pm

Sex, lies, and audiotape. Widely regarded as the film that legitimised profanity as a hallmark of serious movies Alan J Pakula’s 1971 exercise in paranoia sees Donald Sutherland’s enigmatic small-town PI John Klute travel to the big city to investigate the possible involvement of his friend with Jane Fonda’s nervous call-girl, and her possible involvement in his mysterious disappearance. The sound design is extraordinary as ambient noise swamps the possibilities of recording the truth, and this arguably established the house-rules for all subsequent 1970s filmnoias. Keep an eye out for Roy Scheider’s ridiculous outfit in his cameo as a pimp.

The Parallax View June 6th @ 3.00pm & 7.05pm

Alan J Pakula again, this time Warren Beatty is the lead in a 1974 thriller about a journalist investigating the possibility that the powerful corporation the Parallax Organisation has been behind not only a political assassination allegedly carried out by a conveniently dead lone gunman, but the clean-up murders of all the witnesses of the assassination. The dazzling and famous highlight comes when Beatty is subjected to a test to see whether he fits the criteria for maladjusted misfit that Parallax likes to use for its lone gunmen. You know, people like say Lee Harvey Oswald, or James Earl Ray…

Chinatown June 8th @ 2.10pm & 6.30pm

If Roman Polanski’s film was just a little less self-regarding it would be a far better film noir. Jack Nicholson gives a terrific performance as the cock-sure PI suddenly out of his depth against Faye Dunaway’s ambiguous femme fatale and John Huston’s monstrous patriarch, and there are wonderful moments and lines throughout. The enormous self-importance of Robert Towne’s screenplay sinks the film from its potential heights but is unsurprising given that he reputedly told anyone who would listen that the success of the 3 hrs plus The Godfather was entirely attributable to his dialogue polish on one 3 minute scene…

The Conversation June 9th @ 6.45pm

Francis Ford Coppola’s small personal movie between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who finds a simple job developing into something much more disturbing, which eventually pushes him to the very limits of his sanity. Walter Murch’s sound design is extraordinary and best appreciated on a big screen, but I’ve never thought that Coppola’s script was good at making us care about the possible murder plot Hackman stumbles upon; the physical distance his camera maintains from the camera being sadly replicated as an emotional distance maintained by the audience from the characters.

Night Moves June 12th @ 5.00pm

A staple of late-night TV schedules (TV programmers can be very easily amused sometimes) this 1975 movie sees Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunite for a more subdued outing than their 1967 collaboration Bonnie & Clyde. Hackman is a defeated PI who discovers his wife in adultery, but is unable to satisfactorily resolve that situation or any other case he is working on. Perhaps a lament for the lost idealism of the New Frontier in the age of Watergate, or perhaps just another deconstruction of American myths by Penn that has aged far less well than his Bonnie & Clyde.

Rollover June 18th @ 3.15pm

Yes, Alan J Pakula for a third time. He never stopped making paranoia movies, and this 1981 effort may have had the amazing good fortune to become relevant thirty years after being dismissed as pessimistic and incomprehensible, because of the second defining event of the last decade, the credit crunch. Jane Fonda stars as a company director’s widow who romances Kris Kristofferson’s financial trouble-shooter, brought in to steady the corporation, who ends up involved in an extremely risky deal with Saudi Arabia that goes belly-up in such spectacular fashion that it leads to the meltdown of the entire Western economy.

Winter Kills June 25th & 26th @2.00p

Adapted from another book by Manchurian Candidate novelist Richard Condon, this thriller stars John Huston as Not Joe Kennedy, who after 19 years is told by his son Jeff Bridges that he finally has a good lead on who really assassinated Huston’s other son, the President Not John F Kennedy. Winter Kills had an extremely troubled production, with director William Richert having one of his producers murdered, so this is a welcome chance to belatedly see Huston chewing scenery in such a ripe scenario of what could be classified alongside Inglourious Basterds as the genre of fantasy historical revenge movies.

Missing June 25th & 26th @2.50pm

Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek star as the father and wife of an American missing in Chile, in acclaimed Greek director Costa-Gavras’ first American film. An attack on Henry Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik, here masked by hypocritical mutterings about truth, justice, and the American Way, this vividly recreates the feel of Pinochet’s Chile; a regime enabled by CIA connivance in the overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected socialist government. There is a sense of kicking a dead donkey about this as Nixon was already out of power, but Costa-Gavras at least clothes his political points in empathetic flesh and blood characters.