TiVoPlex
By John Seal
May 9, 2005
From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.
Tuesday 05/10/05
4:50am Starz! In Black
Unstoppable: A Conversation with Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, and Ossie Davis (2004 USA): Not to be confused with the Wesley Snipes action epic of the same name (barring, of course, the subtitle), this is a brief but hugely enjoyable documentary featuring interviews with three of the grand old men of African-American cinema, including the recently-deceased Ossie Davis. Davis, still hard at work till the day he died, proves to be the most engaging subject, but Peebles and Parks have great war stories to tell, too. Fleshed out with plentiful clips and the usual star-struck commentary from acolytes Julie Dash and Mario Van Peebles, Unstoppable is a fine tribute to the work of these groundbreaking artists. Also airs 5/11 at midnight and 5/15 at 4:30am.
9pm More Max
The Mother(2004 GB): The Mother ended atop my best of the year list in 2004, but hardly anyone else saw it. That’s an understandable fate for any small-scale British film, but doubly so considering the subject matter of this one: the sex life of the senior citizen. Anne Reid plays May, a new widow getting on in years who happens to have the hots for handyman Darren (Daniel Craig), who also happens to be engaged in an affair with May’s daughter-in-law, Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw). Directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette), this is a brutally honest exploration of the damage done to a family suffused with dysfunctional relationships, where no one seems willing or able to tell the truth and everyone ends up extremely unhappy. This isn’t an easy film to watch, and it’s certainly a hard one to like, but The Mother goes places few other films have dared go, and for that it’s to be both commended and strongly recommended.
Wednesday 05/11/05
5:30am Turner Classic Movies
The Runaway Bus (1954 GB): Hidden this morning amidst a raft of familiar Margaret Rutherford films comes this amusing farce about stranded airline passengers, a robbery, and the vagaries of British weather. Rutherford plays one her typically frosty grand dames, a traveler who insists that hapless bus driver Percy (Frankie Howerd) transport his fogged-in busload of passengers from Heathrow to a nearby aerodrome. Also onboard is a mysterious master criminal who has just lifted 200,000 pounds sterling from London’s main airport, and is naturally intent on making a clean getaway. Is it shady George Coulouris, sprightly Petula Clark, or even the blustery Ms. Rutherford? Written and directed by Val Guest before he found a home at Hammer Films, The Runaway Bus is lowbrow ‘50s fun at its best, though sadly it doesn’t allow Petula time to break into song.
6am HBO
A Question of Miracles (1999 USA): When there were no more old movies to watch, no more cartoons to see for the umpteenth time, and no wrestling on the air, there was one other thing this adolescent television addict could usually rely on: the miracle-working televangelist. This HBO original documentary takes a look at the phenomenon, with particular emphasis on the strangely-named, voluminously-coiffed, and oddly-accented Benny Hinn. Hinn, who learned his trade at the hem of Kathyrn Kuhlmann (Lamp Unto My Feet), is a Texas-based preacher who continues to attract massive audiences at tent revivals across America. Following the lives of five of Hinn’s donating disciples, A Question of Miracles comes to the astonishingly unsurprising conclusion that Hinn’s babbling in tongues and laying on of hands is about as efficacious for cancer as it is for arthritis: not at all. It’s been several years, of course, since this film was produced, but there are just as many desperate folks today as there were then, and Hinn continues to plough this lucrative field all the way to the bank. Also airs at 9am.
6am Starz! In Black
The Girl with Brains in Her Feet (1997 GB): Years before Bend It Like Beckham, this obscure indie feature had the “young British person of color beating the odds on the playing fields of Eton” genre all to itself. The film features spunky Joanna Ward as Jacky, a 13-year-old on a mission to overcome racism in 1970s-era Leicester whilst preparing for an important track meet, keeping an eye out for the boys, and listening to lots of T Rex and Slade. Included this week as much for its obscurity as its quality, The Girl with Brains in Her Feet is an unexceptional but enjoyable period comedy/drama with a good cast. Also airs 5/12 at 2am and 5/16 at 3:45am.
Thursday 05/12/05
5pm Turner Classic Movies
La Perla (1948 MEX-USA): I must admit complete ignorance about TCM’s selection of Mexican cinema classics this evening, as I’ve never heard of (much less seen) any of the films on offer. First up is an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl, a Mexican-American co-production partially financed by RKO and shot in both English and Spanish (It’s not clear which version is being aired tonight, but I’d bet money it’s the Spanish one). La Perla was produced with the full support of Steinbeck, who helped write the screenplay, and features Pedro Armendáriz as a diver whose life takes on unwelcome complexity when he finds the titular object reclining on the seabed. Directed by social realist Emilio Fernandez and shot by the great Gabriel Figueroa, the film was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2002. It’s followed at 6:30pm by Maria Candelaria (1944), featuring Armendáriz and Dolores del Rio as star-crossed lovers threatened by greedy capitalists, at 8:15pm by Enamorada (1946), which reunited Armendáriz, Figueroa, and Fernandez in what has been described as a “Mexican Taming of the Shrew”, and at 10pm by Dona Barbara (1943), featuring the beautiful Maria Felix as a suspected witch who crosses swords with a lawyer (Julian Soler) during a land dispute. These films were produced at the height of Mexico’s cinematic Golden Age, and are undoubtedly beautifully produced, well-crafted, and well-acted features. Considering none of them are available on home video, you’re best advised to set your timer this evening and record the lot.
10:10pm Flix
Zatoichi: the Blind Swordsman (1989 JAP): IFC has had a dozen or so early- to mid-period Zatoichi films in heavy rotation for a few years now, but leave it to Flix to unearth the final entry of the Shintaro Katsu series. For those unfamiliar with Zatoichi - and who missed the recent Beat Takeshi revival feature - he’s a blind, itinerant wanderer leading a lonely life spent rescuing children, protecting the sick and elderly and the honor of women in distress from sea to shining Sea of Japan. Actor Shintaro Katsu made the character his own over the course of 26 features, culminating with this film, which appeared 15 years after the previous entry. It’s not terribly different from its predecessors - no series can last for 26 episodes by rocking the boat TOO much - but it’s notably bloodier and sexier than what had come before, with gouts of blood and the occasional naked breast on display. Perhaps more surprising is the film’s aspect ratio, which forgoes the series’ standard wide-screen Daeiscope in favor of a comparatively frugal 1.85:1 format.
Friday 05/13/05
12:35am Starz!
I’m Not Scared (2003 ITA): This Italian thriller was heavily promoted in art-house cinemas, but its trailer tended to undersell it, portraying it as a run-of-the-mill melodrama with a Tuscan twist. It’s actually an intelligent and insightful exploration of the fears and wonders of childhood as seen through the eyes of Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), a ten-year-old boy who stumbles across a nasty little secret beneath some sheet metal near an abandoned farmhouse. Set in bucolic rural Italy at the height of that country’s kidnapping wave of the 1970s, I’m Not Scared is a subtle blend of scares and pastoral beauty and will have panicked mothers and fathers checking their children’s beds after the movie is over. Starz! is airing a pan-and-scan print, which will lessen the film’s impact, but it’s still worth watching. Also airs at 3:35am.
8pm IFC
Naked Lunch (1991 CAN): Eww, icky! David Cronenberg’s ooey gooey film adaptation of William Burroughs “unfilmable”, semi-autobiographical novel returns to television in wide-screen this evening. Peter Weller stars as “Bill Lee”, an exterminator whose addiction to bug spray leads to murder and some extremely unusual and unpleasant hallucinations. Brilliantly lensed by Peter Suschitzky, Naked Lunch will have you reaching for the Raid or the remote in record time. The sterling supporting cast includes Ian Holm, Roy Scheider, and Judy Davis. Also airs at 11pm.
11pm Turner Classic Movies
Westfront 1918 (1930 GER): Tantalizingly hard to see for many years, G. W. Pabst’s heartbreaking wartime drama finally gets the wide airing it deserves as part of TCM’s Friday Night Imports. Produced in Germany whilst Lewis Milestone was preparing the similar All Quiet on the Western Front back in Hollywood, Westfront 1918 explores the numbing front-line experiences of four German soldiers, beset by constant terror in the trenches and threatened by poverty and starvation behind the lines. Pilloried on release by politicians of all stripes and suppressed by the Nazi regime that took power in 1933, this is an unrelenting anti-war classic that eschews the pornography of massive battle scenes in favor of the daily grind of trench-bound realities. It also capably utilizes montage, natural sound, and other then-recent artistic developments, and was brilliantly lit by Fritz Arno Wagner, whose chiaroscuro effects also created shadowy magic in films such as Nosferatu, M, and the Dr. Mabuse series. Don’t miss this rare treat.
Saturday 05/14/05
9am Encore
A View to a Kill (1985 GB): The worst (and last) of the Roger Moore Bond flicks makes its wide-screen premium cable debut this morning. There’s not much to recommend here - Tanya Roberts just doesn’t cut it for me as a Bond girl - and Duran Duran’s title song definitely qualifies as one of the worst 007 themes ever. Still, it’s got its share of impressive action sequences, including a decent chase through the Eiffel Tower that will assuage all but the pickiest of fans. A View to a Kill features Patrick Macnee and Grace Jones as baddies, and also marked the final outing for Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny. Also airs at noon.
7pm IFC
Heaven’s Gate (1980 USA): Otherwise known as the film that killed United Artists, Heaven’s Gate was director Michael Cimino’s epic-length follow-up to his award-winning, if overrated, 1978 feature The Deer Hunter. It’s a bloated tribute to excess, and doesn’t come highly recommended by me, but it does make for an interesting compare-and-contrast case with Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), which also crashed and burned after extensive studio revisions failed to improve its commercial prospects. The recipe for this particular disaster included endless re-takes, a massive cast, and a producer who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say no every time Cimino got on the phone requesting more money. The director bounced back with his next film, The Pope of Greenwich Village, but has since disappeared from view, still burdened by the terrible onus of having driven a studio out of business. If you can stand it, here’s one of the films that helped make “the biz” what it is today, a business with a capital B, where the whim of the artist takes a backseat to the pen of the accountant. Thanks, Mike!
Sunday 05/15/05
12:15pm IFC
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945 FRA): Enigmatic French auteur Robert Bresson helmed this romantic tragedy about a woman (Maria Casares) who spitefully spurns her one true love (Paul Bernard), driving him into the arms of a former streetwalker (Elina Labordette), whose past life is a closely-held secret. Written by Jean Cocteau, the film was a bomb when it was released in the austere ruins of post-war Europe, its sophisticated tale of unrequited upper-class love distinctly out of tune with the times. It’s since acquired a better reputation, but action fans are advised to avoid this one.
3:30pm IFC
Overlord (1975 GB) : War-movie buffs should be in ecstasy about the chance to see this unusual feature. Shot in a vérité style reminiscent of Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here, it’s the story of one soldier’s life in the period leading up to and including the invasion of Normandy in 1944. The film deftly intertwines fact and fiction, with stock film skillfully inserted into the contemporaneous black-and-white footage. Unseen in the United States until it put in an appearance at last year’s Telluride Film Festival, Overlord makes its American television debut this afternoon.
9 pm Turner Classic Movies
Exit Smiling (1926 USA): Canadian stage actress Beatrice Lillie made her screen debut in this silent MGM comedy about a servant whose stage aspirations take a wacky turn thanks to her inebriated mistress. Directed by Sam Taylor, who helmed some of Harold Lloyd’s best features, Exit Smiling is a very enjoyable silent comedy, though Lillie held it in great disdain and promptly returned to the theater. Look for TiVoPlex favorite Franklin Pangborn in a supporting role.
9:15pm IFC
That Most Important Thing: Love (1975 FRA): What’s going on at IFC? The channel that loves to show the same movies over…and over…and over again must have had its programming director’s cocoa spiked, because this is the THIRD worthwhile and/or interesting new feature to pop up on the channel today. I must confess complete ignorance regarding it, but any film produced on the Continent during the 1970s holds interest for me. This one stars Romy Schneider as a soft-core porn star offered a Shakespearean role by producer Fabio Testi. She soon falls in love with the hunky Testi, whose über-masculinity trumps Schneider’s loyalty to her damp squib husband (singer Jacques Dutronc). Based on a novel by Christopher Frank (Les Passagers), the film was directed by Polish exile Andrjez Zulawski, whose next film was the horror oddity Possession. Added bonuses for true Eurotrash fans: Klaus Kinski in a straight role, and the voice of a disembodied Howard Vernon! Also airs 5/16 at 1:10am.
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