New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

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

Tuesday 11/2/10

2:30 AM Flix
Betrayal (1983 GB): An infrequently seen British drama, Betrayal gets a rare airing on Flix this morning. Written by the great Harold Pinter (and based on one of his less well-known plays), the film stars Jeremy Irons as fashionable literary agent Jerry, a handsome rake cuckolding his best buddy, publisher Robert (Ben Kingsley). The film tells its story in reverse, beginning with Jerry’s pub reunion with paramour Emma (Rumpole of the Bailey’s Patricia Hodge) two years after the fact and re-tracing the end and the beginning of their relationship, in that order. Directed by David Hugh Jones, Betrayal is classic Pinter: incisive, intelligent, and never showy.

8:30 AM Flix
Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972 USA): Hubba, hubba! Fans of a very different kind of playwright - in this instance, wry comic Neil Simon - will want to check out the widescreen television debut of this memorably titled sex farce. The great Alan Arkin plays middle-aged restaurant operator Barney Cashman, who’s not getting quite everything he wants out of his marriage to wife Jeanette (Renee Taylor). When Barney realizes that his mother’s apartment is always vacant one day a week, he decides to test the waters and see if he can find sexual satisfaction with other partners, including Paula Prentiss and Sally Kellerman. Unsurprisingly, his flings have unexpected and hilarious consequences. Directed by Gene Saks and scored by Neal Hefti (!), Last of the Red Hot Lovers is good, old-fashioned fun from one of America’s most beloved and prolific writers.

4:30 PM Cinemax
Black Sunday (1977 USA): I always found the premise of this film more enjoyable than the film itself. As someone who can’t stand football, the idea of a psychologically scarred Vietnam vet (played in suitably twitchy fashion by Bruce Dern) plotting to disrupt the Stupor Bowl by detonating a bomb with a dart shot from the Goodyear blimp seems…strangely attractive. Though director John Frankenheimer tries valiantly to make this ridiculous idea work on screen, the end result is rather flat, with Robert Shaw offering one of his poorer performances as Israeli secret agent Kabakov and normally reliable Fritz Weaver merely so-so as FBI agent Corley. All in all, Black Sunday is a good (if implausible) idea executed with a distinct lack of vim and vigor. Also airs at 7:30 PM.

6:05 PM Sundance
No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009 IRN): The fledging and deeply underground Iranian indie music scene gets a look-in in this brave feature from filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses). Shot in what weren’t the easiest of conditions in Tehran (arrests were made), No One Knows About Persian Cats stars Nagar Shaghaghi and Ashkan Koshanejad as Nagar and Ashkan, a nu-folk duo hoping to spread their wings and fly to London for a series of concerts. Getting visas, however, is a daunting affair - as is staying one step ahead of the police, who are determined to break up any unapproved concerts taking place in the Islamic Republic’s capital city. This Kafkaesque drama, enlivened by an amazing array of Iranian musical talent, was the final straw for Ghobadi, Koshanejad, and Shaghaghi,who have since gone into self-imposed exile. Sometimes life does imitate art.

Continued:       1       2       3       4