Upcoming Movies on TV (UK)

[colinr0380]

The New York Review of Books: A 50 Year Argument, co-directed by Martin Scorsese, is showing on BBC4 this coming Sunday at 9pm.

That was a fantastic run through a half century of discussion about the major politicial and cultural topics and commentators of the era. Very inspiring to anyone who likes to write and have discussions that it is a worthwhile practice to do! In terms of Criterion Collection connections, Ian Buruma gets interviewed here (he turns up on the Criterion edition of The Last Emperor giving a history of China). And for film fans in general the film ends perfectly with a clip from the ending of Francois Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451!

[colinr0380]

Very glad to see Film4 showing Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum on Friday 11th July at 00.55 a.m. - that hasn't been on UK TV since January 1998! A must see for anyone doing the 80s list project!

Next week on BBC4 (Sunday July 6th, 10.40pm) is a screening of Velorama, the latest compilation to be made up from footage held by the BFI National Archive...

A new film created from stunning British Film Institute archive film about a Century of the Bicycle.

Velorama, is a specially-commissioned new feature-length documentary directed by award-winning filmmaker Daisy Asquith. Created using over 100 different titles from the BFI National Archive (including footage from Mitchell & Kenyon, Topical Budget, COI and British Council), it shows a Century of the Bicycle on film, from the invention of the modern bike to the gruelling pursuit of Le Tour, all set to dreamy electronic music by Bill Nelson. Velorama will take you on an unmissable two-wheeled journey.

For this original soundtrack Bill will form collaborations with young Yorkshire musicians. Produced by Crossover, who complete a trilogy after the much-loved From The Sea To The Land Beyond (British Sea Power’s lyrical meditation on a century of the British Coast) and The Big Melt.

And on Thursday 10th July at 11.00 p.m. BBC4 are continuing their bicycling season by showing A Sunday In Hell, a 1977 Danish documentary film by Jørgen Leth. (Is this its UK TV premiere?)

[antnield]

And on Thursday 10th July at 11.00 p.m. BBC4 are continuing their bicycling season by showing A Sunday In Hell, a 1977 Danish documentary film by Jørgen Leth. (Is this its UK TV premiere?)

BBC4 have shown it before in August 2004 and July 2005. Terrific film.

[colinr0380]

Interestingly Channel 4 are premiering the film Heli, the Cannes 2013 Best Director winner next Monday 25th August (or rather the early hours of Tuesday 26th at 00.25 a.m.), which is the same day the film gets released on DVD and Blu-ray.

And Film4 are premiering the very strange-looking film R100 on Sunday 24th August at 11.15 p.m., which isn't due to be released by Yume Pictures (on DVD only) until 15th September! Starring Nao Omori (who is probably best known in the West for playing Ichi from Ichi The Killer).

In terms of films which already have a UK DVD release, BBC4 is premiering Café de Flore on Sunday 24th August at 10.05 p.m., and Channel 4 is premiering Our Children on Thursday 28th August at 1.10 a.m.

[colinr0380]

Early advance notice: Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt is getting its first TV showing on the Horror channel on Saturday 13th September at 10.45 p.m.

[colinr0380]

And Film4 are premiering the very strange-looking film R100 on Sunday 24th August at 11.15 p.m., which isn't due to be released by Yume Pictures (on DVD only) until 15th September! Starring Nao Omori (who is probably best known in the West for playing Ichi from Ichi The Killer).

Spoilers:

Um, wow, this was an utterly insane bondage-cum-comedy film. To describe this film think sort of Audition meets The Game, but instead of turning into a horror or thriller film this becomes a very strange broad comedy!

Our main character is a salaryman who visits a bondage club that specialises in randomly throwing domineering women at him during his daily life. You have to sign up for a year and can't get out of the contract early, which really should have set the alarm bells ringing straight away! The early sections of this film play quite low key but also with moments of amusement, as the dramatic scenes showing our lead's family life with young son and grandfather taking care of him, his sales assistant job in a furniture store, and his visits to his comatose wife in the hospital, alternate with various women attacking him on the street or in a sushi restaurant!

The juxtaposition in these early scenes is extremely amusing and I felt as if I could understand why someone would get involved in this kind of club to add a bit of unpredictability and excitement to their life, along with a kind of self-castigation for their passivity.

There is also that weird CGI ripple effect that various characters have happen to them at moments of pure excitement, which seemed as if it were tying in with various other characters breaking off in mid-flow to check if an earthquake was going on, before getting back to business. I wonder if the suggestion there was that there were so many people having all these 'ripples of satisfaction', raptures of self loss, or sexual climaxes, whatever they were, that they were actually what was causing all the earthquakes in the world!

So to this point the film wasn't exactly down to earth, but it did seem grounded and surprisingly touching. Then comes the next half...

The disappointment comes early, in the way that inevitably suddenly the domineering women start invading the main character's home life and workplace (with a hilarious moment as he is being whipped in the toilets of his workplace, begging for mercy and to stop before anyone walks in, for the woman to break off whipping for a moment to allow someone who was in the stall the chance to leave!). This is where the film jumps into psychological thriller territory, as we get visits to the police who cannot do anything because a contract was signed, and our lead character's life slowly gets ruined. I found this disappointing as during the first section of the film I had been waiting for this inevitable turn of events and was sad to see it arrive in the wake of showing how the bondage club actually did seem to be helping our character!

Anyway after an amusing but kind of disgusting sequence involving "the Queen of Saliva" spitting various fluids at our trussed up character ends with a bizarrely edited music video dance number and an unfortunate miscalculation of the stability of the bannister of some stairs to hold the dominatrix's weight, suddenly the entire bondage club is on the warpath demanding vengeance on both our lead and the rest of his family. This is where the film goes from crazy to outright insane...

...at this point though I should mention the great third-wall breaking moments (did they happen in real life as well?) in which a group of film critics?/film producers?/financiers? tumble out of a screening of the film in progress and debate all of the current action in steadily more despairing tones. I particularly loved the guy who points out all of the plot flaws up to this point (particularly how they knew how to mimic the comatose wife's voice so precisely, which had annoyed me five minutes previously!) and destroys the film but is powerless in the face of the director apparently being 100 years old and it being his 'signature visionary work' that he had been aiming towards all his career! I wonder if there is a bit of a cheeky jab at a Kaneto Shindo or Seijun Suzuki in the 'elderly, kinky director' characterisation!...

...back to the film, which at this point has gone off on a free associative track all of its own. Our lead has lost his son in the woods somewhere, his father has been literally eaten whole by "the Queen of Gobbling" like the grandmother in Red Riding Hood, a couple of dominatrices get shot in the head whilst relaxing around a kitchen table with a couple of Pot Noodles, and we get ever more bizarre cutaways to the bondage club that seems to involve a giant pool in which the dominatrices lounge around in full leather gear like swimsuit bunnies! Particularly funny are the ladies in the black leather rubber rings gliding about aimlessly in the middle of the pool (the film falls apart again for another atrium break at this point so the financier/critic/executive can rant about where the hell a pool came from!)

Eventually everything climaxes once the foul mouthed, ranting, American CEO of the bondage club arrives by private jet, lets off pent up steam by doing a few angry belly flops into the pool (think a chubbier Courtney Love - perhaps the most believable depiction of a CEO in all of cinema!) and begins to supervise like a samurai general a charge of (robot?) ninja dominatrixes in a Night of the Living Dead style isolated farmhouse assault in which our hero conveniently finds a stash of hand grenades. He also ends up destroying his father's well tended garden full of cabbages too, which was mentioned as being his pride and joy early on in the film, though I'm not sure whether there is meant to be any irony in having done that!

This siege ends with our lead being dragged off into a shed by the neck by the American CEO, after which a voice over talks about masochism and domination being the same thing, one giving birth to the other, and the ripples from earlier return, start playing on musical stave on the side of the shed and eventually start playing the Ode To Joy! (Slavoj Zizek would be aghast at this film!)

And THEN, we get an even more bizarre sequence of what I can only describe as a weirdly specific parody of those pregnant Demi Moore fashion shoot spreads, as our male hero poses delightedly with his young son for a fashion photographer proudly displaying his eight month pregnancy bump!

An utterly crazy film. I was a bit disappointed that the film goes into such bizarre territory after a fascinating first third or so, and I never found the wacky stuff as purely hilarious as I did the sight of our lead character wandering home, then suddenly lying on the street being kicked by a lady in leather gear, then picking himself up and dejectedly wandering off again! But I was glad that the hackneyed 'psychological thriller' aspect that turns up halfway through immediately gets negated by the spiral into insane wildness that almost immediately follows! I'm not entirely sure either that after the first 45 minutes or so the film has much to say about domination or submission (is even the threat of the final sections of the film, like The Game, all simply staged for his benefit as part of the service?), or why people get involved in such, but it was an interesting journey to take.

And I loved the meta-sections! Of course post end credits there is a brief scene of the small group in the atrium of the cinema again, just dumbfounded and bewildered (and seemingly exasperated!) by everything they've witnessed!

[colinr0380]

Film4 is premiering Boris Barnet's 1936 film By The Bluest Of Seas at 11.00 a.m. on Thursday 9th October.

EDIT: And Outskirts at 11.00 a.m. on Thursday 16th October. Both of these Barnet films are also available in the Ruscico Hyperkino DVD packs, but it is great to see them getting an extremely belated first UK television screening.

[GaryC]

The BBC Genome site has now gone live here - BBC TV and radio listings (derived from Radio Times) between 1923 and 2009. I've done the thing where people look up what was showing on the day they were born (I arrived during a repeat of a still-existing episode of Z Cars) . But other than that, I predict this will be both invaluable research material and a massive timesink. It does allow some of my memories to be precisely dated, and does answer some questions which I hadn't found answers to.

Firstly, my first subtitled foreign-language film, the Egyptian The Night of Counting the Years, broadcast for the first and only time on 13 November 1976. I remember the enthusiastic review in Radio Times which made me watch it, though I had to use a black and white portable because no one else wanted to. I do remember the trail for the following Saturday's Film International - Pasolini's Theorem, which I didn't see, just as well as I was twelve at the time! I'd forgotten it was as long ago as that...

The film which really started me watching non-anglophone cinema was The Lacemaker on 9 May 1981, which turned me into the Isabelle Huppert fan I am still. (I also have a copy of the original novel or novella in French, which I'm planning to read soon.) My parents agreed to watch that one, so I got to see it on the colour TV throughout. Next week's offering was the Hungarian film Angi Vera, which I had to watch on the black and white portable. I don't remember much of it at all, other than that I watched it.

Last year, we wondered if The Gay Diplomat (1931) was a TV premiere, though Radio Times didn't say it was. It appears to have been one, unless a channel other than the BBC showed it, which is unlikely as it's a RKO film. Similarly, no one remembered Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) being shown on TV, and it appears that it has not been, and again it's RKO so the BBC would have the rights. (The 1978 five-part TV miniseries did get a showing in 1981.)

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

The BBC Genome site has now gone live here - BBC TV and radio listings (derived from Radio Times) between 1923 and 2009.

Type in World Cinema for BBC2. Scroll through the 10 or so pages and be prepared to weep.

[aewb]

Film 4 are showing Hong Sang-Soo's In Another Country next sunday night/monday morning.

[colinr0380]

Even more than that, there's a whole week of Hong Sang-soo films showing on Film4! Most haven't been released on UK home video yet (I only have The Day He Arrives from this schedule and that is on the US Cinema Guild disc)

In Another Country (2012): Monday 3rd November at 12.00 midnight
Like You Know It All (2009): Tuesday 4th November at 1.10 a.m.
Oki's Movie (2010): Wednesday 5th November at 1.35 a.m.
The Day He Arrives (2011): Thursday 6th November at 1.30 a.m.
Hahaha (2010): Friday 7th November at 1.00 a.m.

Also the documentary Leviathan is showing at 11.00 a.m. on Thursday 6th November.

[colinr0380]

On BBC1 at 10.35 p.m. on Tuesday 25th November there is going to be a 100 minute episode of the Imagine... series interviewing Mike Leigh about his entire career.

[colinr0380]

I guess the biggest news from the Christmas schedules is the BBC's ongoing premiering of classic Disney movies. This year it is Cinderella from 1950 at 4.00 p.m. on BBC1 Monday 22nd December, only 64 years since it was made. In comparison the 1960 One Hundred and One Dalmatians at 4.45 p.m. on BBC1 Chrismas Eve is pretty recent in only taking 54 years to reach network television!

Other than that, the only really interesting rarity on show is the premiere of Duel In The Eclipse on 5USA at 11.10 p.m. on Monday 29th December, which is a Spanish/Italian spaghetti western that features an early role for Marisa Paredes, who would go on to become one of Almodovar's regular actors.

EDIT: Duel In The Eclipse is on the 5USA channel rather than ITV4.

[Jonathan S]

Maybe this is old news for others, but I was pleasantly surprised to find (on a Freeview re-tune) the movies4men channel, which doesn't seem to be listed in Radio Times. Besides a lot of major RKOs - presumably supplied by the BBC - their schedules include Italian sword and sandal epics and plenty obscure American and British B movies, the latter often from the Renown group.

Highlights over the next couple of weeks include noir Westerns like Hellgate and De Toth's Ramrod, Freddie Francis' The Brain, the Peter Lorre rarity Double Confession (once on BFI's "Most Wanted" list) and Mann's Men in War. Maybe nothing you can't buy on DVD but this kind of stuff rarely turns up on the main channels now.

The primary genres covered are crime, horror, war and Westerns, but the fact they also include something like Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris ("an English charwoman sets her heart on owning an exclusive Dior gown from a boutique in Paris") suggests a commendably flexible definition of "movies4men"...

It's channel 48 on Freeview.

[tojoed]

Thanks for that, Jonathan. I've always ignored that channel because I thought it was, you know, movies for men, and I'm just a boy.

[perkypat]

Moviesformen also has Bullet for the General and Django quite regularly as well as a couple of lesser spaggers.

[GaryC]

On Sunday 25th, Monday 26th and Tuesday 27th ( or rather late on Sunday and in the early hours of Tuesday and Wednesday) Film Four will be showing three Werner Herzog films. They're clearly benefiting from the recent restorations, as they'll be showing them in HD. They are, respectively, a fairly obvious pair, Aguirre Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser...and the UK TV premiere of Land of Silence and Darkness, only forty-four years after it was made!

[jlnight]

Sunday 1st Feb - Nosferatu the Vampyre
Monday 2nd Feb - Heart of Glass

Both Film4.

Has Heart of Glass ever been on UK TV before?

[antnield]

Full Herzog season details here.

Next week also sees a screening of the BFI National Archive's restoration of The Epic of Everest (BBC4, 10pm, 29th Jan).

[Jonathan S]

Shoah is on BBC4 over the next two Sundays (25 Jan/1 Feb) at 7pm.

[colinr0380]

For some reason there is an explosion of film premieres next week after a couple of quiet post-Christmas weeks (though Film4 did premiere Shogun Assassin last Friday!)

I'm still just reeling from the shock of Channel 4 showing the Evil Dead remake next Sunday, which I thought would have had difficulties getting screened given the gruelling first two thirds. Although I suppose if the Saw films and Hostel can get television screenings then this can too! But I had assumed that the first Human Centipede movie would have had more of a chance of a TV screening than this!

Next week also sees a screening of the BFI National Archive's restoration of The Epic of Everest (BBC4, 10pm, 29th Jan).

BBC4 are also screening an hour long documentary just before The Epic of Everest on the same subject which also sounds worth catching.

[Dr Amicus]

And don't miss San Demetrio, London on BBC2 tomorrow morning at 6am - one of my orphans from the recent war project and one of Ealing's finest.

[GaryC]

Sunday 1st Feb - Nosferatu the Vampyre
Monday 2nd Feb - Heart of Glass

Both Film4.

Has Heart of Glass ever been on UK TV before?

I vaguely remember a showing on C4 in the 1980s, which I didn't see, but I could be wrong.

My first viewing of Kaspar Hauser was an 80s C4 screening. Also in the season is Stroszek, which infamously was the film Joy Division's Ian Curtis watched just before hanging himself.

[colinr0380]

Also in the season is Stroszek, which infamously was the film Joy Division's Ian Curtis watched just before hanging himself.

With the scene recreated for that 24 Hour Party People film.

[GaryC]

Also in the season is Stroszek, which infamously was the film Joy Division's Ian Curtis watched just before hanging himself.

With the scene recreated for that 24 Hour Party People film.

And in Control.