Upcoming Movies on TV (UK)

[Altair]

I just watched the Mapplethorpe film on the Iplayer and was wondering if anyone can confirm if it was uncut or not?

[colinr0380]

Only one notable film next week, but its the premiere of the Israeli film Fill The Void at 1.40 a.m. of Friday 18th August on Film4.

[jlnight]

Blue Suede Shoes, a 1980 music documentary, Mon 14th August, London Live.

Primitive London, late Sat 19th August, London Live. You'll have Something About You by the Zephyrs in your head for days to come.

[colinr0380]

The biggest film next week is tucked away on Film4 on a weekday morning: the premiere of When Marnie Was There in its English dubbed version at 11 a.m. on Wednesday 23rd August.

It rarely happens but the main BBC1 channel also has a film of note: Thomas Vinterberg's 2015 adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd, which they've neatly fit into the channel's usual Sunday evening period drama slot at 8 p.m.

I can't vouch for any of them beyond the trailers so far but the Horror Channel has a lot of first showings of films over the next week: X Moor at 9 p.m. on Friday 18th August; Cherry Tree at 10.50 p.m. on Saturday 19th; Hangman (very Paranormal Activity-looking!) at 10.55 p.m. on Sunday 20th; and then there's the unsubtly named Deathgasm at 9 p.m. on Friday 25th August.

[colinr0380]

It's pretty packed next week, probably because its Bank Holiday week: BBC2 is repeating the Agentinian film Wakolda, aka The German Doctor at 1.00 a.m. on Sunday 27th August and the Swedish crime drama Echoes of the Dead at 00.35 a.m. on Monday 28th August

Pacific Rim is on ITV2 at 7.55 p.m. on Sunday 27th August, and The Theory of Everything is on the main ITV1 channel at 9 p.m. on Bank Holiday Monday.

The Horror channel has a few things: Confined (with Jason Patric!) at 2.35 a.m. on Sunday 27th August, and AfterDeath at 9 p.m. on Sunday 27th August. Though the big film is the premiere of Eli Roth's Italian cannibal homage The Green Inferno at 10.50 p.m. on Saturday 26th August!

Film4 is not to be outdone though with the first showing of Hungarian dog uprising film (The Incredible Journey meets Amores Perros, mixed with the social grittiness of the Dardennes, as filmed by John Milius, with a bit of slasher horror in there too) White God at 11.35 p.m. on Tuesday 29th August (Here's our forum discussion on it), and the film that I'm most excited about getting the chance to see: the premiere of Police Story: Lockdown on Film4 at 11.10 p.m. on Friday 1st September! (The first entry into that series in over a decade)

[jlnight]

Whitney: Can I Be Me, Sat 2nd September, BBC2. I'm So Excited! is on later.

Best Pair of Legs in the Business, Sun 3rd September, London Live.

The Nutcracker, Thu 7th September, London Live.

Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (repeat), late Thu 7th September, Film4.

The Big Sleep, Michael Winner's 1978 version, Fri 8th September, London Live.

[colinr0380]

Not too much next week but there is one big decision to be made: should I watch Ridley Scott's film about a bunch of explorers running into trouble while trying to figure out the history of their people, Promethe-, I mean Exodus: Gods and Kings, on Channel 4 at 9 p.m. Sunday 3rd September. Or at the exact same time over on Channel 5, should I brave the kinky contract law-laden world of Fifty Shades of Grey?

[jlnight]

Invaders from Mars, the Tobe Hooper version, starts Weds 13th September, Horror.

Legend, the Kray twins film with Tom Hardy, Thu 14th September, Film4.

[Mr. Deltoid]

A couple of items on BBC News 24

Wednesday Morning 3:30 AM
From Out of Town: Historian Adam Smith explores the great American divide between the small town and the big city - as anatomised in classic Film Noir.

Saturday Afternoon 2:30 PM
Ronald Reagan's Last Movie: Historian Adam Smith tells the extraordinary story of Ronald Reagan's last movie. Would things have been different if The Killer's (1964) had been shown on TV as planned?

[GaryC]

Two recent Australian films have their TV premieres on Sky Premiere next week.

Ivan Sen's sequel to Mystery Road, Goldstone, is on Tuesday 12th at 10pm. This appears to have bypassed UK distribution entirely up to now - I saw it at the London Film Festival last year.

The next night at the same time is Australia's first Best Foreign-Language film Oscar nominee Tanna, which did get a very limited cinema release.

Both definitely worth seeing.

[colinr0380]

Wednesday Morning 3:30 AM
From Out of Town: Historian Adam Smith explores the great American divide between the small town and the big city - as anatomised in classic Film Noir.

I caught this over the weekend and thought it was quite interesting. David Thomson turns up to go through Shadow of a Doubt in detail (and then Smith takes over to expound on the story being about the 'myth of small town life against encroaching urbanisation even back then'). Orson Welles' The Stranger, about an ex-Nazi being hunted down in his new small town life, gets used for a comparison to recent Neo-Nazi militia groups. There's a bit of time spent on the 50s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its fears about sleepy small towns being infiltrated by those with different world views, such as Communists! Out of the Past and The Killers get equated together with their "if you want to escape to a new life, don't work at the local gas staton where outsiders will stop first" openings. No mention of the shift in society from the 1946 to 1964 versions of The Killers (which makes sense if it was going to be dealt with in more detail later on), or the Hemingway short story though.

Its an interesting piece, though Adam Smith does appear to have only just discovered film noir as a genre, and slightly bizarrely treats it as if everyone was specifically conscious of making a 'film noir' piece at the time, rather than it being a term created later to group bleaker worldview post-war films together. Plus there's a kind of unnecessary sense of surprise that such 'old films' have any relevance to modern day America (while seeming unaware that the greatest films deal with timeless issues, albeit rooted in their period). If Adam Smith ever gets told about the 'neo-noir' period from the 80s to the mid 90s (The Postman Always Rings Twice to The Usual Suspects say, encompassing Body Heat, Kill Me Again, The Hot Spot, One False Move, After Dark My Sweet, The Last Seduction, Red Rock West etc, etc) I get the impression that it might blow his mind!

Saturday Afternoon 2:30 PM
Ronald Reagan's Last Movie: Historian Adam Smith tells the extraordinary story of Ronald Reagan's last movie. Would things have been different if The Killer's (1964) had been shown on TV as planned?

Apropos of nothing, this reminds me of those J.G. Ballard short stories about Reagan. Of course there's the provocatively titled "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan" which gets amusingly literalised in the only way it could in the 2001 film version of The Atrocity Exhibition with the main couple having sex in a car that is the replica of the getaway car in The Killers (and Reagan getting a concerned/disapproving reaction shot in stock footage from the film!), with the heroine being taken from behind, hanging halfway out of the passenger window (very resonant with Crash) whilst having a photograph of Reagan taped to her face!

Though of course the most relevant Ballard short story featuring Reagan at the moment is 1988's "The Secret History of World War 3", which kind of anticipates 24-hour news being on celebrity death watch through its very Kagemusha-like story of moment-to-moment coverage of every particular bodily function of the President being streamed to the general public, like the ultimate reality TV show!

This was only the beginning. During the next few weeks, thanks to the miracle of modern radio-telemetry, the nation's TV screens became a scoreboard registering every detail of the President's physical and mental functions. His brave, if tremulous, heartbeat drew its trace along the lower edge of the screen, while above it newscasters expanded on his daily physical routines, on the twenty-eight feet he had walked in the rose garden, the calorie count of his modest lunches, the results of his latest brain-scan, read-outs of his kidney, liver and lung function. In addition, there was a daunting sequence of personality and IQ tests, all designed to reassure the American public that the man at the helm of the free world was more than equal to the daunting tasks that faced him across the Oval Office desk...I and my colleagues at the paediatric clinic were well aware of the old man's ordeal in submitting to this battery of tests. However the White House staff knew that the American public were almost mesmerised by the spectacle of the President's heartbeat. The trace now ran below all other programmes, accompanying sitcoms, basketball matches and old World War 2 movies. Uncannily its quickening beat would sometimes match the audience's own emotional responses, indicating the President himself was watching the same war films, including those in which he had appeared.

...In the second week of February 1995 I watched him on television as he presided over an American Legion ceremony on the White House lawn. His aged, ivory face was set in its familiar, amiable grin, his eyes unfocused as he stood supported by two aides, the ever-watchful First Lady standing in her steely way beside him. Somewhere beneath the bulky black overcoat the radio-telemetry sensors transmitted the live print-outs of pulse, respiration and blood pressure that we could see on our screens. I guessed that the President, too, had forgotten that he had recently launched the Third World War. After all, no one had been killed and in the public's mind the only possible casualty of those perilous hours had been Mr Reagan himself as he struggled to survive his cold.

..Searching the print-outs below the TV screen, I saw at once that the President's blood pressure had collapsed. The erratic pulse had levelled out into an unbroken horizontal line, and all respiratory function had ceased. It was only ten minutes later, as news was released of an unsuccessful assassination attempt, that the traces resumed their confident signatures.

Had the President died, perhaps for a second time? Had he, in a strict sense, ever lived during his third term of office? Will some animated spectre of himself, reconstituted from the medical print-outs that still parade across our TV screens, go on to yet further terms, unleashing Fourth and Fifth World Wars, whose secret histories will expire within the interstices of our television schedules, forever lost within the ultimate urinalysis, the last great biopsy in the sky?

[colinr0380]

An interesting film is tucked away in next week's schedule: the Indian film Aligarh, based on a true story about a university lecturer suspended for his homosexuality is on Channel 4 at 2.25 a.m. in the early hours of Tuesday 12th September.

[perkypat]

Do you know if this is another Indian film season, Colin? Googling doesnt turn up anything. Ive enjoyed C4s previous Indian seasons.

[colinr0380]

They don't say its the start of a season in the Radio Times, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is the start of a new run of recent Indian cinema. They've not missed a year yet!

[antnield]

Do you know if this is another Indian film season, Colin? Googling doesnt turn up anything. Ive enjoyed C4s previous Indian seasons.

Full list - a bit skimpy on details so you'll need to cross-reference with the IMDb.

[colinr0380]

Interesting, though the Guru Dutt film, 1957's Pyaasa, has been shown on UK TV before. But its always good to see it get another airing!

The only sad thing about this is that this will be the first season of Indian films shown since Channel 4 started applying its logo to the corner of the screen all the time across all programmes (only removed for those all important adverts!). In some ways I'd be happier if the season went to the currently DOG-less Film4 channel instead.

[perkypat]

Thanks for that. Missed Pyaasa last time, so good news its on again

[colinr0380]

Its documentary-focused next week. At 10 p.m. On Sunday 17th September BBC2 is showing Risk, the Laura Poitras vs Julian Assange piece. Simultaneously on the other channel BBC4 is showing Cinema Through The Eye of Magnum, a 55 minute French documentary about the "70 year symbiosis between the movie world (Hollywood and beyond) and photo agency Magnum".

Then at 9 p.m. on Monday 18th September BBC4 are showing Letters From Baghdad, which is the dramatised-documentary version of the life of Getrude Bell (which also inspired the recent Werner Herzog film starring Nicole Kidman, Queen of the Desert)

Fiction film-wise the Indian film season continues at 2.15 a.m. on Tuesday 19th September with The Threshold (the write up from the Radio Times has this description; "as the guests depart following their son's wedding, a woman shocks her husband with a momentous decision"). And Film4 have a rare repeat showing of the Anthony Mann directed, James Stewart starring film Thunder Bay at 12.20 p.m. on Wednesday 20th September.

[jlnight]

They Came From Beyond Space, starts Sun 17th September, Horror.

The Raging Moon, Mon 25th September, London Live.

The Pillow Book, Weds 27th September, Film4.

Also something labelling itself Listen to Britain 2017: "Kevin Macdonald introduces a night celebrating the 1942 documentary Listen to Britain, with 12 new short films capturing the diversity of contemporary Britain." Sunday 24th September, BBC4.

[colinr0380]

That's the same weekend that Keith Richards took over BBC4 last year. Maybe this has been designated the 'theme night' week of the year by BBC4 schedulers!

[colinr0380]

The Listen To Britain 2017 piece runs from 9 p.m. to 11.10 pm. on BBC4 on Sunday 24th September and apparently features "Kevin McDonald introducing Humphrey Jenning's wartime documentary Listen To Britain and 12 short features commissioned to mark the film's 75th Anniversary".

Also on Sunday 24th September at 6.50 p.m. the Horror channel has the apparent first UK TV showing of The Skull with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

The Indian film season continues on Channel 4 on Tuesday 26th September at 3.30 a.m. with Jugni, a musical road movie about "a music director seeking out a celebrated folk singer".

And most excitingly on Monday 25th September at 9 p.m. BBC4 is screening the first two parts of the Ken Burns documentary series The Vietnam War.

[MaxCastle]

The Skull actually had a handful of BBC screenings in the 1980s, but I don't think it's been screened since then.

[GaryC]

Another recent Australian film has its first TV showing on Sky Premiere - Girl Asleep, Tuesday 26th, 6.30pm.

[colinr0380]

Invaders from Mars, the Tobe Hooper version, starts Weds 13th September, Horror.

I finally caught up with this! I’ve had a strange history with this film as I have really strong memories of my mum renting it when I was really young (7 or 8, around the time the film was first out on VHS in the late 80s) and then turning it off in disgust part way through. Not at the infamous shot of Louise Fletcher eating the frog (though I remember that didn’t go down well!), but the shot of the alien probes coming out of the back of a couple of soldier’s necks that actually occurs late on in the final section of the film. That was my mother’s breaking point but stopping the film at that point, combined with never having seen the film again for almost thirty years, seared that image into my memory! So let this be a warning to parents of potentially traumatised young children – let the horror play out and deal with it after the film is finished, as shutting off an alien invasion film in the middle with no resolution only makes the imagery even more powerful! Having now seen the film through to the end, it would have made far less of a lasting impact than the partial childhood viewing did! For one thing it is impossible to take this remake seriously at all, even if tonally the goofiness (like its day-glo companion piece Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) is the most disturbing thing about it!

Its all a bit off-kilter from the very beginning as the opening titles do a blatant and borderline litigious riff on the Superman title sequence. It did make me think that those single titles whoosing past are probably the most slow and laborious (not to mention bombastic and pretentious) way to do an opening credit sequence ever devised! Just about acceptable in the first Superman film, but for little after that (though I’ve always been partial to Supergirl’s opening credits, with its jaunty theme tune!) No wonder many modern films don’t bother with them anymore! As with so much in the film (set design, performances) it is played straight-faced but one-note and amped up/drawn out to such an extent that it feels completely unrealistic (which of course anticipates the final act twist!).

It seems as though it would have been fun to do all of the acting in this. Everyone chews the scenery with gusto, from Louise Fletcher’s harridan of a teacher constantly raising suspicion of her alien status even without the frog sequence by barging into the nurse’s office and demanding that the recalcitrant child “be handed over immediately”! Karen Black’s ‘heroine’ of the film is almost completely useless, even at running about and screaming, almost like a parody of a dim-witted heroine in peril! James Karen plays an army general who similarly is reduced to screaming at various members of the cast not to stupidly run into the quicksand, only for them to do just that! (Watching this reminded me of how good James Karen is in supporting roles in many films, even currently. I always enjoy his presence, and while he’s as strident as anyone else in this film, it was fun to be reminded of his much better frantic role as the supervisor seeing events snowball around him in Return of the Living Dead!). There’s even the stereotype of the quisling figure in the form of a bratty little girl with pigtails who is obviously the true monster of the film!

The parents turning into creepy weirdos is probably the most disturbing element though. Its there in the (much, much better) 1953 original film too, but the way that remake lingers on scenes just a bit too long for comfort (very similar to the radio station terrorisation scenes in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), where its blatantly obvious that the dad is now an alien if it wasn’t already from the very first moment, adds a, perhaps unintentional, underlying theme of child abuse to the action, where both parent and child are trapped in superficial normality but both are obviously aware of the unspoken truth being imperfectly hidden beneath that façade. That paranoid feeling is there in the teachers and police too, but of course its heightened when living in the same house!

That is part of the tonal shift from the original film that makes this 1986 version so disturbing even whilst it is so ludicrously over the top and throwing in special effect sequences all over the place (where the spectacular light show of an alien ship visitation equivalent to the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind occurs in your back yard, yet apparently nobody else is blinded by the light, or even woken up by it!) that make the metaphorically creepy bluntly and unavoidably explicit. I keep coming back to comparing Invaders From Mars to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but it seems impossible to see them apart from each other as they’re both ‘crudening’ (or Cannon Film-ing!) effective original horror pieces into bluntly disturbing comic pieces (you could even throw LifeForce in there too, as a more special effect laden take on a Quatermass film, though I think that’s the only film of the three that stands up in its own right)

I think that ‘explicitness’ is probably what made my mum turn the film off all those years ago more than anything else. The idea that there was no subtlety on display but instead everything visualised in bright colour and latex right there on screen, with the alien tentacle probe thingies appearing out of the back of the soldier’s necks after they are killed being sort of the last straw for her! I can sympathise to some extent with that, but that kind of ‘visualisation of the previously unseen’ as well as general special effect laden ‘body horror’ element is all over 1980s cinema (for example my mum always loved the remakes of The Thing and The Fly, and who would disagree! But they were both also doing the 'explicitly special effects visualised remaking of a 1950s original' approach, albeit with a bit more skill and a less abrasive tone!), and I am kind of growing to appreciate these mid-80s Tobe Hooper Cannon Films as charting sort of the extreme edge of that kind of trend.

The Invaders From Mars remake is too goofy to really appeal to adults, yet still quite disturbing in its off-kilter sense of atmosphere to really work as kid fare too (plus there’s a bit of swearing in there too from some of the main character’s classmates, which luckily the Horror Channel left in despite the early afternoon timeslot!). Like the original version of the story (and Invasion of the Body Snatchers), its all about the ultimate childhood nightmare of losing the protection of parents and other authority figures, even being about to fundamentally betrayed by them before you wake up to the danger just in time. But getting woken up to the danger leaves you in a horrible new uncertain world where many of your previous colleagues and classmates have themselves been changed sides and joined the new regime, and suddenly you’re the alien in your own community! The 80s remake pushes that theme to such an extent that even when the heroes mount a fight back they seem to succeed more by luck than judgement and with a lot of unnecessary screaming and shouting, arms flailing and running about! But (and this is where I think my mum turning the film off with just twenty minutes to go did the wrong thing in searing the story into my memory without any conclusion!) there is time paid in the climax to ‘save’ the parents from the alien mind control and make sure that they are OK (which weirdly makes this more of a ‘feel good’ film in the end than many of the bleaker 1950s B-movies that it is supposedly updating for the modern day!). Maybe if I had seen that finale as a child, I would have relaxed and entirely forgotten about ever seeing this film!

Then of course there’s the de rigueur “Phew! It was all a dream. Oh no, it was actually a premonition! The cycle is starting all over again!” ending.

While I think that I will always vastly prefer the 1953 original over it (whereas with the Body Snatchers films say, I think I like the 50s, 70s, even the slightly iffy 90s versions just as much as each other), but it is not a total mess and is expressing a particular point of view, especially if viewed from either a Cannon Films or ‘Tobe Hooper as auteur’ perspective (the family unit here looks especially cartoony compared to the perfectly realised family unit in Poltergeist, or even the first Texas Chain Saw Massacre film!).

Plus, of course, it has got Louise Fletcher emoting wildly with the back legs of a frog wobbling about in her mouth, so there’s at least one unforgettable image in there!

[jlnight]

Big Trouble in Little China, starts Sat 30th September, Horror.

Whilst watching The Skull, there was a trailer during one of the ad breaks on the Horror channel for an upcoming Stephen King season, including Thinner, Children of the Corn, Maximum Overdrive and Cat's Eye, which itself is scheduled for Sat 7th October.