![]() ![]() Waiting at the bus stop after his first nerve-racking night of rehearsals for a production of Hamlet, he experiences a moment of profound self-realisation: “I had been so lonely, this new sense of belonging overwhelmed me.” He had stumbled on his vocation. Out of desperation, he turned to amateur dramatics on the advice of a friend. “I felt a failure – a failed plumber and priest.” “They ate their sandwiches away from me,” he recalls of his workmates. He chose, of all things, plumbing, and that, too, ended in ignominy. A seeker and something of an outsider, he spent four years in a seminary in England preparing for the priesthood, before returning to Dublin and embarking on an equally fruitless attempt to master a trade. I had 10 lines in six countries.”īefore he touches on the movies that made his name – Excalibur (1981), Miller’s Crossing (1990) and The Usual Suspects (1995) – Byrne lingers long on the travails of his youth. ![]() Or, at least, I’d get to watch them work. “And I would be working with some of the greatest stars in the world: Burton, Richardson, Olivier, Gielgud and Redgrave. “It was money and we were broke,” he writes, neatly summing up the aspiring actor’s lot. The film that took him there was a biopic of Wagner in which he only fleetingly appears. One moment, for instance, he is on the dole and living with his girlfriend in a spartanly furnished flat in London the next he is drinking whisky with Richard Burton in a ritzy hotel suite overlooking the waterfront in Venice. Check out the original instead.For a start, Gabriel Byrne’s childhood landscape is urban not rural, and his style, though lyrical, is also characterised by the marked shifts in tone that his nonlinear narrative demands. I'm afraid there are no real thrills or creaks in this old haunted house monstrosity.only groans. Everything in The Haunting is overdone and overblown. And the climax is a phantasmogoric mess.but things had gone terribly wrong long before that. No, we get some visual effects to SHOW US what we're supposed to be afraid of.and you know what? As wonderfully realized as they are.the visual effects come off as sort of silly. We can no longer use our imaginations, feel that horrible dread of fear of the unknown. But, the crime of all crimes is that the horror is shown to us. ![]() In the end, the always wonderful Lili Taylor is the only performer to escape with some dignity.and that's just barely. But, the script puts it's fine actors to the test.asking them to deliver the kind of stilted dialogue that is only spoken in movies. Yes, Eugenio Zannetti's production design is jaw-dropping the movie is wonderfully photographed and composer Jerry Goldsmith can never EVER do wrong. Well, subtlety, where are you now!!? My fears have manifested.a promising movie has gone wrong. Surely, with such a talented cast intact.De Bont and company will not ruin a film, who's original was a fantastic and frightening movie that understood the delicate art of subtlety. When I first heard news of a remake of Robert Wise's 1963 film, "The Haunting", I had a fear that it would be ruined by an abundance of summer-movie sized visual effects. ![]()
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