TiVoPlex
By John Seal
August 22, 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 08/23/05
10:05pm Encore Dramatic Stories
King of Hearts (1966 FRA): Philippe de Broca's comedic fable about the inanity and insanity of war would have been a midnight movie smash if it had come out five years later. As it was, it became one of the great hits of repertory cinema, filling theater seats with regularity throughout the 1960s and '70s until the advent of the video age eventually killed its drawing power. Alan Bates plays a World War I British soldier sent to disarm a bomb in a desolate French village populated only (and unbeknownst to him) by the inhabitants of the local insane asylum. When Bates falls for their innocent charms (personified most elegantly by a pixie-ish Geneviève Bujold), he attempts to lead them to safety, but soon finds the path blocked by the advancing German army. Reflecting the guileless innocence of the flowering counterculture, King of Hearts is perhaps viewed best through tinted granny glasses, as its love conquers all, hearts-and-flowers message occasionally crosses the line into cloying territory. It's still thoroughly entertaining and is a perfect film for budding adolescent cineastes looking to find something substantial (if a little obvious) to enliven their film intake.
Wednesday 08/24/05
6pm Sundance
Veronika Voss (1982 BRD): Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a workaholic German director who helmed a remarkable 43 films over a 16-year period, and this is his penultimate effort, a black-and-white period piece starring Rosel Zech (Aimee and Jaguar) as the titular character. She's a film actress at Germany's renowned UFA Studios, where the wheels of her career are rumored to be greased by an affair with renowned family man and propaganda master Joseph Goebbels. The film takes place in 1955 and chronicles Voss' personal and professional post-war decline, fueled by an escalating drug addiction encouraged by a doctor who isn't overly familiar with the Hippocratic Oath. Reflecting Fassbinder's middle-aged obsession with Germany's Wirtschaftswunder, Veronika Voss is a solid piece of work, and though clearly the product of an artist either past his prime or simply exhausted from overwork, remains a decent introduction to Fassbinder's oeuvre. Watch for the director's cameo appearance as a cinema patron. Also airs 8/25 at 2:05am.
Thursday 08/25/05
1am Turner Classic Movies
Brass Target (1978 USA): This clunky spy flick comes laden with an all-star international cast that no doubt helped to secure production funds but sadly couldn't supply a decent screenplay. Amongst the embarrassed-looking actors are Sophia Loren, Patrick McGoohan, Robert Vaughn, Max Von Sydow, Bruce Davison, Edward Herrmann, Eurotrash vet Brad Harris, and the ubiquitous George Kennedy as (believe it or not) General George S. Patton. The story revolves around Patton's efforts to move a large cache of German gold and there's an assassination sub-plot and some gratuitous homophobia thrown in for good measure. Hardly a classic, Brass Target gets the TiVoPlex nod thanks to its complete and utter unavailability on home video and its appearance this morning in wide screen.
11pm Showtime
The Truth About Demons (2000 NZ): It's not often that a non-Peter Jackson Kiwi film comes to America's shores, so it's important to take note when one does. Here's a New Zealand feature starring future Elf king Karl Urban as an academician pursued by a Satanic cult who aren't too keen on the debunking job he's engaged in. We're soon deep into Night of the Demon territory, albeit with a bloody twist, as the inhabitants of "The Black Lodge" send all sorts of ghosties and ghoulies after our hero and his loyal gal pal (Katie Wolfe). It's nothing you haven't seen before, but director Glenn Standring's screenplay thankfully doesn't take the mickey, and you gotta love those Antipodean accents. Also airs 8/26 at 2am.
Friday 08/26/05
12:30am Sundance
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988 USA): And here's another horror film about a university professor who takes the supernatural with a grain of salt...until it's almost too late! Based on Wade Davis' best-selling non-fiction book about Haitian practitioners of vodun (popularized in the Christian West as voodoo), The Serpent and the Rainbow came to the screen courtesy of director Wes Craven, and unsurprisingly leaves no chicken ungutted. Filmed to great effect on location in Haiti - surely a foolhardy decision in 1988, and unimaginable today - the film features lovable Bill Pullman as a smarty-pants Harvard researcher investigating rumors of drug-fueled zombies running amuck in the poverty-stricken Caribbean republic. Brief flavor of the month Cathy Tyson (The Long Good Friday) appears as love interest/potential victim, and the perennially-miscast Paul Winfield drops in as a local strong man. Airing in wide screen, the film looks great courtesy of the camera work of John Lindle (Pleasantville, The Core) but doesn't quite qualify as a must-see fright flick. Nonetheless, it's worth a look if you haven't previously seen it, especially in its correct aspect ratio.
7am Turner Classic Movies
A Successful Calamity (1932 USA): The great George Arliss stars in this rarely-seen Warner's drama, and that's really all the recommendation you need. Few actors owned the screen as completely as the avuncular Arliss, who always seemed to be winking at the camera when he wasn't delivering superb, Academy Award-quality performances in films such as Disraeli (1929) and the thoroughly enjoyable Green Goddess (1930). Here he plays a rich man determined to win back the love and respect of his family - who are taking him for granted after years of luxurious living - by plunging himself into an artificial financial crisis. Beautifully lensed by the great James Van Trees and, naturally, featuring a wonderful Arliss performance, A Successful Calamity was based on a hit stage play by Clare Kummer.
11:45am IFC
The Emerald Forest (1985 GB): This one's a bit of a mixed bag. The film features Powers Boothe - surely one of the most underrated American actors of the late 20th century - as an engineer whose son (Charley Boorman) disappears into the jungles of Brazil, kidnapped by "The Invisible People", a tribe bent on Luddite revenge against those bringing deforestation and modern technology to their land. Raised Tarzan-style by this tribe of indigenous people, the lad begins to shed his Western ways and has acclimated to their primitive lifestyle by the time (*spoiler alert*) the Great God Daddy finds him ten years later. Can Pops reclaim the love of his son, or must he make a sacrifice at the altar of modernity? Though heavily laden with Gods Must Be Crazy cultural imperialist baggage - those noble savages do live the simple life, don't they? - The Emerald Forest remains a cracking good adventure yarn on the surface, and with any luck will be getting the wide-screen treatment on IFC. It also features the most non-gratuitous nudity I've ever seen in a major studio production. Also airs 8/27 at 9:15am and 8/29 at 1:15pm.
Sunday 08/28/05
2am Sundance
How to Draw a Bunny (2000 USA): This week's best title belongs to this crudely-made but captivating documentary look at the life of Ray Johnson, an obscure pop artist and Warhol acolyte who drowned himself in 1995. One of Johnson's signature images (along with Warholian icons such as the Lucky Strike logo and Elvis) was a crudely-drawn bunny head; hence the film's title. Johnson never explained the significance of the bunny during his lifetime, and this film doesn't exactly clear up the mystery, but it's a fascinating look at a prankster who left his mark on the New York art world.
10:50pm Encore Love Stories
The Sea is Watching (2002 JAP): Though lacking the visceral thrills of your average Hollywood blockbuster, The Sea is Watching is a beautiful and engaging look at streetwalking in medieval Japan. That description makes the film sound like a scholarly monograph or someone's dissertation, but that's actually pretty far from being the case. The final screen credit for Akira Kurosawa (produced four years after his death), this surprisingly lighthearted look at the sex trade features stellar performances by Nagiko Tono (as a hooker who can't help but fall in love with all her customers) and Misa Shimizu (as the worldly-wise older woman who runs the cathouse). The film is rather long and ultimately doesn't provide much of an emotional pay-off, but there's an extremely well-shot typhoon sequence to cap things off, and cinematographer Kazuo Okuhara's work is exemplary.
Monday 08/29/05
3am Turner Classic Movies
Son of the Gods (1930 USA): Oh my. This early non-PC talkie features the great Dick Barthelmess (Heroes For Sale) as what was then inelegantly called a "Chinaman", in this case the son of a wealthy businessman who has the misfortune of falling in love with a rich white woman (the wonderful Constance Bennett). When Bennett discovers that her lothario is actually an Oriental, she gives him lashings from both her tongue and her riding crop, but can true love really be torn asunder by the vagaries of skin pigmentation? Though Barthelmess avoids the physical grotesqueries required of his Asian character in 1919's Broken Blossoms, his characterization here also lacks the emotional power of the earlier film, perhaps due to Son of the Gods' offensive Dickensian denouement. As long as you're prepared for the ride, this deeply offensive little feature is a fascinating glimpse at white America's attitudes towards "the other" at the dawn of talking pictures.
3:30pm Encore
Once Upon a Time in China (1991 HK): Encore has been airing three of the four films in this series separately throughout the month of August, but this afternoon has them scheduled back to back to back. These elegant and well-mounted martial arts epics were directed by action maestro Tsiu Hark and star Jet Li as a Chinese hero battling the encroachments of Occidental civilization and the closer-to-home depredations of the White Lotus Clan, as well as Rosamund Kwan as his Westernized aunt. The first entry in the series is followed at 5:10pm by Part 2 and at 7:05pm by Part 3. One caveat: these appear to be the dubbed and/or cut versions prepared for the domestic American market, so temper your expectations accordingly. And would it be too much to ask Encore to give the same treatment to the wonderful Chinese Ghost Story series?
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