Archive for the ‘Friday Feeling’ Category

Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

Whilst Heath Ledger may have stolen the show with what would be his last major screen outing in The Dark Knight, Jack Nicholson’s turn as Batman’s most famous nemesis the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 outing still stands up. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any decent superhero movie being made were it not for this film, the first of it’s kind to take Batman away from the much loved but very silly 1960’s Adam West territory - no Batman in 1989, no X-Men in 2000, no Dark Knight in 2008.

Along with Jack Nicholson, the cast features Michael Keaton as the titular caped crusader, veteran actor Jack Palance as crime lord Carl Grissom, Star Wars legend Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent (although not as Two Face) Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale and Hammer Horror star Michal Gough as Bruce Wayne’s loyal assistant Alfred.

Visually, the film is typical of what was already Burton’s trademark; dark and atmospheric sets shrouded in dry ice, with a gothic (small ‘g’) edge to it, lit up by occasional riots of colour. Burton’s Gotham City is a unwelcoming and forbidding metropolis; rain streaked buildings lurch like stumbling drunks, and the city doesn’t look any better in the daytime either.

Burton and Keaton would reunite for a sequel - 1992’s Batman Returns - which was just as good as its predecessor, featuring the same visual style and the stunning prosthetics of Danny DeVito’s Penguin, not to mention Michelle Pfeiffer in a figure-hugging leather costume.

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an adaptation of the short story by F Scott Fitzgerald about a man who ages backwards, topped the list of Oscar nominations announced yesterday. The film starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett picked up 13 nominations including best film, best director for David Fincher, best actor for Brad Pitt and best supporting actress for Taraji Henderson. Pitt will be accompanied to the ceremony by his wife Angeline Jolie, who received a nomination in the best actress category for her leading role in Changeling.

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the tale of an impoverished orphan in Mumbai who goes on to win the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, continued its own rags-to-riches story with a whopping 10 gongs. The film had already taken best drama at this month’s Golden Globes.

Dev Patel, who played the leading role, exclaimed “It’s just amazing! For Slumdog Millionaire to be included in the nominations for the Oscars is a huge honour. When we first began working on the film I don’t think any of us ever imagined that we might end up attending the Oscars ceremony as a result.”

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One to watch over on the terrestrial channels this weekend is Mel Brooks’ satirical send up of the Western genre Blazing Saddles over on Five at 10:45pm this Sunday.

Though the film principally pokes fun at the classic High Noon in terms of music, costumes and set design, Blazing Saddles is a send up of pretty much every Western film ever made, and makes several jokes at the expense of Hollywood itself. Gene Wilder’s character Jim ‘The Waco Kid’, boasts that he’s “killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille,” and villain of the piece General Hedley Lamarr is a pun on actress Hedy Lamarr, who actually threatened to sue - ingeniously, the film makes fun of this with one character telling the General “What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874, you’ll be able to sue her!”

The film also ‘tippenz die hut’ to the Brooks’ Nazi-themed musical send up The Producers by using the theme for the fictional show ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and, loosely, through the name of Madeline Kahn’s character Lili Von Shtupp - ‘Shtup’ is apparently Yiddish slang for doing the nasty, as in the ‘you had to shtup every little old lady in town’ bit from The Producers.

Blazing Saddles is also notable in that it is the first film to feature the sound of someone farting, which I guess has to count for something.

Throughout the film, horses get punched out, religious groups are openly mocked, and a certain racial slur is used repeatedly throughout (17 times by our count). Films referencing rape, murder, arson and rape usually aren’t very funny. This one is. Politically cor-what?

Blazing Saddles airs at 10:45pm this Sunday on Five - available on Freeview, Sky, Virgin and on practically every TV format everywhere.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is a frothy, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes plain moronic romantic comedy which relies on the witty charm of its two leads Kate Hudson and Matthew McConnaughey. Good looking, intelligent and deceptive, both have a hidden agenda as they start dating each other.

Hudson plays the implausibly named Andie Anderson, a columnist for air-headed women’s mag Composure. Sick of writing about handbags and facials, Andie is looking for her big break into political journalism, but will only have the chance if she nails an article on the classic dating mistakes that women make. She has been given 10 days to date a guy and then ‘lose’ him by committing every relationship faux-pas in the book, reporting her findings to her desperate readers.

Then, at a party, she meets advertising exec Ben Barry whose boss has promised him a diamond account if he can make a woman fall in love with him in – you guessed it – 10 days. Of course neither knows about the other person’s wager. Andie creates scenarios that no man could stomach – like naming Ben’s penis Princess Sophia or allowing her dog to pee on his pool table – whilst Ben tries to grin and bear it and simultaneously win the dappy reporter’s heart.

I find these bet plots really annoying. Any intelligent woman who found herself in Andie’s shoes would surely have a quiet word with the man who was supposed to dump her, maybe offering him half her first month’s wages to go through with it. But these sorts of tactics never occur to our two hopefuls, and so we have to go through all their awkwardness and guilt with them until their ulterior motives inevitably come to the fore.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days will be showing on FilmFour at 9pm, Saturday 6th September.

Keep On Running

The minute “Run Lola Run” kicks into action, you’re swept along at lightning speeds as the unstoppable red-haired Lola (Franka Potente) sprints through the streets of Berlin, dodging cars, window panes and a host of nuns, driven by desperation, always running.

The story goes as follows: Lola receives a phone call from her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who is due to give his gang boss 100,000 Deutsche Mark at 12 noon but accidentally leaves it on the underground after bolting from two ticket inspectors. The bag of cash is then picked up by a tramp. The couple have 20 minutes to come up with the cash, somehow, somewhere, or Manni will be killed.

The film then plays with three alternative realities. We see the same scene three times. Lola sprints past the same people, but in each version some tiny turn of events changes the course of Lola’s fate massively. Cleverly, whenever Lola runs past (or into) a person, we see several snapshots of their life to come. In the first scenario for example, Lola bumps into a poor woman who kidnaps a baby after her child is taken from her by social services. In the second version, the woman wins the lottery, and the third time around she experiences a religious conversion. The message is that tiny events can have enormous consequences.

Film is ideal for exploring alternative realities, and certainly director Tom Tykwer makes the most of his medium. The throbbing, hypnotic techno music, co-written by Tykwer, perfectly matches the film’s adrenaline-fuelled rush.

Refreshingly the film does not explore any moral themes, nor does it judge the violence and greed of gang members. Rather it is an introverted film which focuses almost exclusively on the running itself.

Run Lola Run is showing at 9pm tonight (Friday) on Fiver

The Ring Two and The Silence of the Lambs

This Saturday sees a double whammy of psychological horrors in the form of The Ring Two (11:45pm, BBC1) and Silence of the Lambs (11:00pm, ITV2) hitting our screens.

The Ring Two is the follow up to the well-received American remake of the Japanese horror classic Ring, which concerns a cursed video tape which causes anyone who watches it to inexplicable die seven days after watching it. Big budget Hollywood remakes of cult items tend not to go down well, sometimes due to studios not comprehending the source material and making something which alienates hardcore fans (Tank Girl) and confuses the hell out of mainstream audiences not familiar with the subject (Tank Girl).

However, the 2002 version of The Ring was so successful, that Hideo Nakata, director of the original Ring movie, agreed to sign on as director for the spin-off sequel, which follows an entirely original storyline, based six months on from events at the end of the first movie. This atmospheric follow up traces the origins of the ghostly, mute Samara Morgan and explores the mother-son relationship between Rachael (Naomi Watts) and Aidan (David Dorfman).

Over on ITV2, we are treated to (yet another) repeat of the now-classic film which made both Sir Anthony Hopkins and Dr. Hannibal Lecter household names. The eminently quotable The Silence of the Lambs caused outrage upon its initial release for its violence, liberal application of bodily fluids and unsympathetic presentation of transsexuals – look closely and you’ll see that Buffalo Bill’s mattress is decorated with swastikas. The Fall also make an appearance on the soundtrack, with the track ‘Hip Priest’ underscoring the claustrophobic endgame sequence. Whilst not a sequel per se, it’s release followed on from the celebrated Manhunter, the first of the Hannibal novels to be given a film treatment. Manhunter, of course got remade as Red Dragon, with Hopkins reprising the role of Lecter.

On a side note, Film Four seem to be running a kind of Angelina Jolie tribute evening tonight, showing her fairly recent screen pairing with Brad Pitt Mr. & Mrs. Smith (9:00pm, Film Four) in between CGI-centric Saturday Matinee homage Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (7:00pm, Film Four), and the emotional drama Girl, Interrupted (11:15am, Film Four), for which Jolie bagged herself an Oscar for her performance.

Devil’s Advocate vs Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Homeboy starts off alongside Alex Winter in his mainstream cinema debut Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Saturday, 7pm ITV2), which sees the duo travelling back in time to fetch notable figures from history including Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc and Classical Greek philosopher So-Crates (Socrates) in order for them not to flunk their history class; dropping out would see them not saving the world through the divine medium of Rock and Roll in the future.

The 1991 sequel was also good, but sucked a little bit by way of the inclusion of KISS on the soundtrack. FAIL.

Later that night he reappears as up and coming lawyer Kevin Lomax, in The Devils Advocate (9pm, LIVING) who after representing a highly suspect teacher in a child abuse case, undergoes a severe conscience scouring after relentlessly pursuing the American Dream; money, wealth, power. Charlize Theron and Al Pacino also star – if you’ve got Sky or Virgin and have nothing better to do this Saturday night, check it out.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Saturday the 29^th of March, ITV1 10:10pm

With the success of The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Virgin 1, it was only a matter of time before one of the TV networks got round to broadcasting the best Terminator movie of the bunch – Five showed T3 last month, but we won’t go there.

The film, which cleverly plays with the character roles of the first Terminator move sees future governor Arnie inadvertently trashing urban California as he fights to protect future resistance leader John Connor from the molten metal melty T-1000 assassin, played by a pointy-eared Robert Patrick. 

The movie is also notable for the pioneering use of CGI, which, despite the film being well over a decade old does not look hackneyed or obtrusive, which is more than can be said for more recent releases. T2 is also broadcast post watershed on ITV1, so we should get to see the nuclear annihilation of the playground scene in all its bone-liquefying glory.

Judgment Day is this Saturday the 29^th of March at 10:10pm (ITV1).

Borat, Saturday the 22nd of March, Sky Movies Comedy, 8pm

Seeing as it’s the Easter weekend, we’ve had to pitch our votes a day early as we’ve got the Friday off – and so, until the next time there’s a Bank Holiday, we present the Thursday Theeling instead.

When the votes were cast the organised proletariat spoke as one voice, and elected faux Kazakhstani documentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan to the top spot for this week. The film follows Sacha Baron Cohen around his supposed homeland and the “US and A”, the “Greatest Country in the World,” where he gets into scrapes with a string of misogynist, homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic comments – none of which are as shocking or offensive as some of the responses he inadvertently extracts from his interviewees.

Not at all PC, Borat isn’t for everybody, but worth watching for the ‘Kazahk’ slang employed throughout, the ‘marriage proposal’ to Pamela Anderson, and the singing of ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well‘ to the tune of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at a rodeo.

Borat is broadcast at 8pm on Sky Movies Comedy.

This one’s a keeper

Austin Powers in Goldmember, Friday 29th Feb, FilmFour 9pm

Possibly the best of the Austin Powers series sees the Wayne’s World and Shrek star indulge in more casual Europhobia via simultaneously mocking the culture and people of both Great Britain and the Netherlands.

Featuring more unsubtle product placement, a rhyming slang exchange complete with subtitles, the ‘Mole’, a genius performance from British screen legend Michael Caine as Austin’s father Nigel Powers, and a pre-custody battle meltdown Britney Spears, Goldmember is the clear winner when compared to the rest of the cinematic guff on the telly this weekend.

Choice quotes from the film include:

Mini-Me: “Are you sure you don’t have a little clone in you?”

Beyonce: “Yes I’m sure.”

Mini-Me: “Would you like to?”

Dr. Evil: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my submarine lair. It’s long, hard and full of seamen… No? Nothing? Not even a titter?”

Nigel Powers: “Do you know who I am? Have you got any idea how many anonymous henchmen I’ve killed over the years? I mean, look at you. You don’t even have a name tag. You’ve got no chance. Why don’t you just fall down?”

The shoosting begins at 9pm tonight on FilmFour.