Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page D03

Zone: FullRun PAGE: D3 Typesetter: GUSS50BQueue: 68 Date: 17:42 Plate: CMYK CMYK THEHARTFORDCOURANT FRIDAY, APRIL6, 2007 D3 CURTAIN EVERY FRIDAY FOR PHOTOS AND TRAILERS OF THIS RELEASES, GO TO WWW.CTNOW.COM/MOVIES Clifford Irving earned a reputation as greatest liar more than 30 years ago. So you take his account of the way he concocted his of Howard Hughes rendered into a movie as that seriously. But, boy, you want to believe it. is a very entertaining of desperate Vietnam War-era grab for fame, his cunning, moxie and sheer luck in getting that Hughes book almost into bookstores. even more fun is how Irving connects the story to events bigger than his little book, big events that his act of fraud put in motion.

Richard Gere makes Irving an engaging rogue, a would-be novelist who get his latest work of fiction into print. Facing financial ruin, or at least obscurity, he notices how the public seem to get enough of that Howard Hughes magazine covers, tabloid stories. Hughes avoids the press, the public, even being out of doors. He has become so pathologically shy, Irving reasons, that he might just get away with it. is a Hughes biography, but not just biography.

He will write an told autobiography, in the own words. be most important book of the he crows to a publishing contact (Hope Davis). All it takes is a lot of research. Irving strong-arms his author pal, played by Alfred Molina, into helping. He throws in some clever for the book deal (the publishers have any direct contact with Hughes, only through Irving).

He masters hand-writing and writing style, puts it into rambling letters that give Irving the power to tell his story. Irving lands his book deal. want to make some money and not get he tells his friend. that Irving counted on publicity shyness, his phobias and the publishing secrecy to pull this off. He stumbles into luck when he meets longtime lieutenant, Noah Dietrich (Eli Wallach), a man who had written his own Hughes biography that he wanted Irving to proofread for him.

Meanwhile, events outside of the scam conspire to either make it workor bring down the whole house of note-cards. Hughes is in a snit with the Nixon White House. And Nixon, as we know, was paranoid about what Hughes knew and could to do him. Just plain paranoid. Gere gives Irving a king-of-the-world swagger, a man willing to risk everything on a con, willing to cheat on his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) with an ex-flame (Julie Delpy), to blackmail his friend and to lie, lie and lie again, brazenly covering one lie with the next, bluffing, always bluffing.

Gere looks and acts like a man made 15 years younger by the role, by the sort of game Irving made out of this quest. his most likable turn in ages. Lasse film is an amusing bounce through an unhappy period in American history, recalling the attitudes, fashions, politics and paranoias of the day. is not edgy or important or a piece of history we need to remember, unless you buy wholly into version of causes and effects. What it amounts to is a giggling gallop through one of our gullible more gullible eras, an age before our most famous millionaires were media hogs angling for that next TV show, when a lot more of what went on in Washington and New York went on behind closed doors.

The message in that? The more secrets kept from you, the more likely you are to fall for THE HOAX is a Miramax Films release directed by Lasse from a script by William Wheeler based on Clifford novel. Running time: 115 minutes. Rated for language. Opens today at area theaters. An Entertaining Re-Enactment Of RICHARD GERE gives an engaging performance as Clifford Irving in "The Hoax." MIRAMAX FILMS By ROGER MOORE ORLANDO SENTINEL FILM REVIEW QQQQ QQQQQ Classic; QQQQ Excellent; QQQ Good; QQ Fair; Poor; bother Gere Convincing In Role Of Greatest Liar In the language of soccer, to be offside is to have gone too far, to have crossed an invisible line past which it is forbidden to go.

As the exceptional Iranian film demonstrates, if you are a woman in Iran, just attempting to go to a soccer game puts you over that line and into territory that is completely out of bounds. Across between socially conscious cinema and the irrepressible It Like is a charming, character-driven film that conveys enormous feeling for its people. These include both the determined young women for whom soccer is important than and the over-matched soldiers whose heart really in keeping them away from the World Cup qualifying match they are determined to see. is the latest film by director Jafar Panahi, whose previous works (including White and have won major awards and stood unmistakably apart from the work of his countrymen. All films have a realistic quality, but is a triumph of documentary-style Much of it was actually shot, using small cameras and nonprofessional actors, inside packed Azadi Stadium on the day of the 2006 match between Iran and Bahrain to determine which country would qualify for the World Cup.

This was a tremendous risk for Panahi not only for logistical reasons but also because the film would have been impossible if the game turn out the way the script intended. opens not at the game but with a distraught father searching minibuses full of raucous stadium-bound fans chanting winner! Bahrain He has just found out his daughter will try to get into the game, and he fears dire consequences for her if she is busted. Much of takes place in a makeshift holding area on an outer rim of the stadium. There six girls are brought together, exiled to a kind of Pisgah view of the proceedings they can hear the shouting of the fans but see what is going on. In some ways these young women, who range in temperament from demure to devious to confrontational, be more different.

But they share a passion for the sport and are a match for the soldiers guarding them in both personal soccer experience a dribble one announces defiantly) and knowledge of team. Much of drama comes from the often-humorous confrontations between the girls and the not-much-older soldiers, many of whom come from rural areas and are at aloss as to how to defend a system that keeps women from stadiums but allows them into movie theaters. The great virtue of however, is that it never degenerates into an situation. Panahi is as sympathetic to the overmatched soldiers, especially in a wryly farcical going-to-the-bathroom subplot, as he is to the women. He believes that a repressive system victimizes the oppressors as much as the oppressed.

Besides providing a sense of what day-to-day life is like in Iran, captures the mass hysteria of fandom, of an addiction so intense that even a blind man feels compelled to attend the game in person rather than listen on the radio. Finally, and not surprisingly, is not about sports at all. It is, in its own quiet and entertaining way, about the value of freedom, dignity and individual choice. By its close we care as much as the captive six do about both soccer in general and the all-important fate of national team in particular, and that is no small thing. OFFSIDE is a Sony Pictures Classics release directed by Jafar Panahi from her script written with Shadmehr Rastin.

Running time: 93 minutes. Rated PG for language throughout, and some thematic elements. In Farsi with English subtitles. Opens today at Cinema City in Hartford. Iranian Girls Risk Penalty For Trying To Watch Soccer Game FILM REVIEW QQQQ QQQQQ Classic; QQQQ Excellent; QQQ Good; QQ Fair; Poor; bother GOLNAZ FARMANI plays a soccer fanatic barred from seeing the big game because a female in SONY PICTURES CLASSICS By KENNETH TURAN LOS ANGELES TIMES NEW YORK Irish dancers bounce and kick; pirates cross swords with English soldiers at sea; pipes lilt; love blossoms, withers and reblooms; cries for freedom resound; and a splendorously attired Queen Elizabeth I warbles in an operatic soprano, her red hair laced with pearls.

But all this and more cannot save Pirate from foundering on the stage of the Hilton Theatre. The new musical from Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel which opened Thursday night, is the misbegotten brainchild of Moya Doherty and John McColgan, and their Riverdream productions. The book by the French collaborators, aided by the American director and lyricist Richard Maltby weaves a patchwork tapestry around a real Irish pirate queen, Grace popularly known as Grania, who led her crews against the English and did, in fact, win an audience with Gloriana (Elizabeth)herself. The plot centers on the love of Grace for two men, her father Dudhdara and her clansman Tiernan. But when the alliance demands it, Grace gives in to the political need to marry Donal who turns out of be a worthless boozer, as underlined in the romping pub ditty, Be which sounds very like of the from the greatest hit, now back on Broadway.

Lovers of may well be the best audience for Pirate which employs many of the same tricks in adapting an epic tale to the stage. But the sources this time, Morgan She-King of the Irish falls far short of Victor great chronicle of the struggles of the saintly Jean Valjean and his relentless pursuit by the diabolical Inspector Javert. Pirate lacks that pivotal personal conflict between a poor ex-convict who becomes rich and an unyielding symbol of authority. Beyond that, there is nothing here to compare with the heart-wrenching saga of Fantine, or the love of Cosette and her Marius, or the unrequited passion of Eponine. And despite musical phrases that evoke the flag-waving anthem on the barricades, You Hear the People nothing in this look back at the 16th century rises to the patriotic thrill of that faux Before arriving on Broadway, the new show endured a troubling baptism in Chicago last fall.

Maltby was summoned to repair the damage, and Graciela Danielecame aboard to rework the musical staging, though the program credits Frank Galati as director. In fixing the show, initially expected to cost $12 million, the husband and wife producers of poured even more of their personal fortunes into it, raising the investment to $16 million, according to the New York Post. The present incarnation, as designed by Eugene Lee (scenery) and Martin Pakledinaz(costumes), has an epic feeling, what with a deck on stage flanked by masts, but it looks far less lavish than, say, across 42nd Street. Only the fashion show of royal vestments worn by Linda Balgord as Elizabeth I bespeak opulence. A black velvet gown, ornamented in gold, is especially queenly.

For the Queen, who is rarely absent from film or television these days, and his lyricists have created mini-operas in the manner of Henry Purcell. These prove the most musically engaging passages as sung in a potent high soprano by Balgord, ramrod straight and looking every inch the Virgin Queen. But the intrigues at Court, mostly involving William manipulative Sir Richard Bingham, a crafty schemer, fail to generate much drama. Perhaps Doherty and McColgan should have taken on Tom Stoppard to insinuate William Shakespeare into the proceedings, as in in The story, as reshaped by Maltby in consultation with Boublil, cuts back and forth between Grace and the Irish and London until the Pirate Queen and the Virgin Queen at last come face to face. Initially the play focuses on the making of a natural and on her love for Tiernan.

Grace, embodied with vigor by the striking Stephanie J. Block (who playedLiza Minnelli in Boy From first turns up at the wheel of a ship. She and Tiernan, acted and sung with great feeling and force by the English musical star Hadley Fraser, first duel, then embrace, all to the tunes of a piper. Then sailors with oars arrive in the town on Clew Bay and proceed to pound away, in the manner of Jeff lustily sung Dubhdara leads the crew in the title number. And, except for the songs of the English queen, with their harpsichord underscoring, Pirate becomes a reprise of more or less.

With Lee providing seascapes and rugged stone walls of castles and dungeons, as well as the ornate Tudor architecture and hangings of court, Pirate looks almost Shakespearean at times. But there is little high drama in this saga. The direction by Galati, Daniele and the uncredited Maltby attempts to replicate the clustered movement patterns of Trevor Nunn and John Caird in and J. Steven White has staged some bristling duels. But overall, Pirate earns the label coined by the Broadway musical chronicler, Ethan Morden.

Doherty and McColgan have invested their millions in a THE PIRATE QUEEN is running at the Hilton Theatre, 213 W. 42nd New York, N.Y. PIRATE RESEMBLES COMPOSING MASTERPIECEBUT FALLS WELL SHORT PIRATE stars, from left, Stephanie J. Block, Jeff McCarthy and Marcus Chait. The $16 million musical has been long in the making, but may be short in the running.

JOAN MARCUS Miserable Reprise Of By MALCOLM JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE COURANT NEW YORK STAGE.