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From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.

Tuesday 12/18/07

Midnight Flix
Wetherby (1985 GB): A top drawer cast is the highlight of this complex drama written and directed by playwright David Hare. Taking place in the eponymous Yorkshire town, Wetherby stars Vanessa Redgrave as Jean Travers, a schoolteacher struggling to put an old and tragic love affair behind her. Bad memories flood back after an uninvited guest to her dinner party (Tim McInnerny) kills himself in her living room, and his death forces the locals to re-examine their own wretched lives. Amongst those affected are the Pilboroughs (Judi Dench and Ian Holm), P.C. Braithwaite (Tom Wilkinson), and Karen Creasy (Suzanna Hamilton), as well as Travers herself, represented by flashbacks featuring daughter-of-Redgrave Joely Richardson as a younger iteration of down-in-the-dumps Jean. According to Hare, Wetherby is primarily about the English penchant for repressing one's feelings, and the film accurately depicts the quiet despair of its characters, who have kept too many secrets for far too long. If you're familiar with English reticence, you'll appreciate all this, but those who unashamedly air their dirty laundry by chatting loudly into their cell-phones whilst on the bus may find the proceedings a wee bit slow and depressing.

11am Sundance
Grbavica: Land of My Dreams (2006 OST-BOS-CRO-GER): If you head south from Wetherby, turn left at Gibraltar, and head due east, you'll eventually arrive in Grbavica, a neighborhood within the city of Sarajevo. The feature film debut from Bosnian director Jasmila Zbanic, Grbavica takes place during the late 1990s, a time when the newly independent nations constituting the former Yugoslavia were struggling for stability, and stars Mirjana Karanovic as Esma, a single mother trying to care for her stroppy daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic). When Sara is invited on a school field trip to visit the graves of Bosnian war heroes, Esma is forced to reveal the less-than-complimentary truth about her daughter's father, a truth that threatens to re-open the freshly healed wounds of ethnic and religious strife. The winner of the Golden Bear at 2006's Berlin International Film Festival (as was Wetherby in 1985), Grbavica is a well-acted but clumsily structured drama with a dénouement that undoes much of the good work preceding it.

6:30pm Sundance
Somba Ke: The Money Place (2006 CAN): If you've never heard of Somba Ke before, you're far from being alone, but this remote Canadian region just south of the Arctic Circle has actually played an important role in world history. Somba Ke (in the native aboriginal tongue, The Money Place) provided the Manhattan Project with its start-up uranium, without which an American atomic bomb would not have been possible. Today, the area is still a source of uranium, and with the nations of the world scrambling for energy resources is currently undergoing a gold rush of sorts as prospectors try to stake claims to its remaining undeveloped riches. This documentary takes a look at the atomic legacy left behind by the pioneers of the 1930s and ‘40s, whilst casting a jaundiced eye on the deleterious effects of current efforts to mine radioactive gold. Also airs 12/20 at 9:30pm.

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