Upcoming Movies on TV (UK)

[Robin Davies]

Nice to see The Ice House getting a rare repeat.
It's roundly hated by fans of conventional ghost stories but I think it's a neglected masterpiece.
Fans of the enigmatic work of Robert Aickman may find it very much to their taste.

[colinr0380]

Oh, also if anyone is a complete masochist BBC4 has you covered by having the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures this year delivered by government health advisor Jonathan Van-Tam to teach us all about virology and about some kind of virus that has been going around during the last couple of months in case anyone was not aware. I'd probably just recommend The Royal Institution's YouTube page instead for more fun lectures about the heat-death of the universe or everyone getting sucked into a black hole (all handily illustrated by a lucky kid in the audience either blasting a hairdryer at an apple or having to roll a marble around a funnel), or suchlike.

In more interesting news however on Thursday 30th at 9 a.m. the edition of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 has Melvyn Bragg and guests discussing the career of Fritz Lang.

[jlnight]

A Christmas Story (1983), Sat 18th Dec, BBC2.
Calamity the Cow (CFF), Sat 18th Dec, Talking Pictures.
Broken Lance, Sat 18th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 28th Dec.
American Utopia + Mo' Better Blues, Sat 18th Dec, Sky Arts.
Eyewitness (1981), Sat 18th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Mon 20th Dec. Or...
Burn! (Queimada), Sat 18th Dec, London Live.

In Celebration, Sun 19th Dec, London Live.
Anna and the King of Siam, Sun 19th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 21st Dec.
Wild at Heart, Sun 19th Dec, Sky Arts.

The Doors, Mon 20th Dec, Sky Arts.

Let's Make Love (1960), Tue 21st Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Fri 31st Dec.
Cape Fear (1962), Tue 21st Dec, Sky Arts.

The Last Temptation of Christ, Wed 22nd Dec, Sky Arts.

Paris Blues, Thu 23rd Dec, London Live.
Big Business, Thu 23rd Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Fri 7th Jan.
Chaplin, Thu 23rd Dec, Sky Arts.

The Tales of Beatrix Potter, Fri 24th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 4th Jan.
Come to the Stable, Fri 24th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 28th Dec.
Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Fri 24th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Wed 29th Dec.


Could Vivarium have been pulled because of recent events? Not sure about Charlotte Gray or Topsy-Turvy though.

[colinr0380]

A Christmas Story (1983), Sat 18th Dec, BBC2.

It is nice to see Bob Clark's other seminal Christmas film (after Black Christmas of course) turning up after a few years of being absent from the Christmas schedules. Though if I had been in charge I personally would have loved to have scheduled a Peter Billinglsey themed season with The Hoboken Chicken Emergency and especially the fascinating looking Death Valley which looks like it would make for a fun double bill with Funny Games! (Maybe Paul Le Mat actually was an actor we needed to see more of? :-k )

[domino harvey]

A Christmas Story (1983), Sat 18th Dec, BBC2.

It is nice to see Bob Clark's other seminal Christmas film (after Black Christmas of course) turning up after a few years of being absent from the Christmas schedules.

Never have I seen a post so immediately identifiable as not being American! Colin, this movie is so popular here that every year, at least one channel shows it on a loop for 24 hours (not kidding)

[knives]

No joke this month I’ve had at least twenty ads about the musical version playing here. It has to be the most popular non-animated Christmas movie here?

[colinr0380]

Don't they also do that with Groundhog Day now too?

Here its the perennial The Snowman which Channel 4 has aired every Christmas since the channel began in 1982 and has produced so many half hour spin off animated programmes in recent years that they now show them all in an inescapable block so that it takes up most of Channel 4's schedule on the day they air it. (I do like the original and Father Christmas, though the rest leave me a bit cold. The other animation that I particularly like that has fallen pretty much into obscurity now is Famous Fred). It is hard to imagine Channel 4 ever celebrating something that ends in such a brutally bleak and heartbreaking manner now unless it was 'too big to fail'! And that's probably why they had to make a sequel to it in recent times with The Snowman and the Snowdog.

Channel 4 does shy away from showing the other Raymond Briggs classic When The Wind Blows that often (last shown in 1998), for some inexplicable reason.

And while we are on the subject, and having been so addled by the Christmas TV movie onslaught, I need to ask a question: what exactly is eggnog? Is it the same as Advocaat?

[colinr0380]

Well I have finally sat down and watched A Christmas Story and it was very cute with a surprisingly dark edge to all the cynical adults (especially the nightmarish visit to the toy store Santa!). I wonder if that adult-looking-back voiceover was any influence on the narration in The Wonder Years?

It was particularly nice to see Les Carlson in a small scene as the shady unshaven Christmas tree vendor, the same year that he was the slick and smarmy Optician CEO Barry Convex in Videodrome and the newspaper guy threatening to bring down Martin Sheen's Senator in The Dead Zone!

I guess that the film has fallen off the radar (at least in the UK) in the last few years because the idea of kids desperately wanting their own guns (albeit toy ones) is somewhat frowned upon these days, especially when having a toy gun around even at home apparently now gets you reported to the authorities! I was also very surprised that nobody forewarned me about the brutal beating of the school bully, which was obviously a major influence on the later scene in Irreversible! Although the most amusing thing about that situation is the way that the mother does not particularly make a big deal about it, especially in contrast to all of the fuss made over the "Ohhh..fuuuudddggge!" (except it wasn't "Oh, fudge"!) comment earlier on!

[colinr0380]

Here's another fun find from Channel 5's Christmas TV movie deluge - the currently airing Surviving Christmas With The Relatives is written and directed by James Dearden who along with writing the screenplay for Fatal Attraction (as noted in that trailer with the standard stock 'record scratch' sound effect for emphasis) also directed the 1991 remake of A Kiss Before Dying and 1999's Nick Leeson biopic Rogue Trader (NSFW, because its a Ewan McGregor film in the middle of his naked period), which is the film that introduced me to the "Aw, Nick" trope as coined by Mark Kermode of moping female supporting characters who seemingly only exist to moan at the main character about his antics but do precious little else.

Maybe that heritage is why the cast of characters of Christmas With The Relatives all seem utterly horrible (though Joely Richardson is great, perpertually holding a glass of wine and making bitchy comments!), and as if things are constantly on the edge of tipping into murderous psychological thriller territory, full of characters beating up children as if they were remaking The Slap and conversations unfortunately eavesdropped on over baby monitors! Sort of Festen meets Love Actually masquerading as a Christmas comedy!

[Mr. Deltoid]

Here's another fun find from Channel 5's Christmas TV movie deluge - the currently airing Surviving Christmas With The Relatives is written and directed by James Dearden who along with writing the screenplay for Fatal Attraction (as noted in that trailer with the standard stock 'record scratch' sound effect for emphasis) also directed the 1991 remake of A Kiss Before Dying and 1999's Nick Leeson biopic Rogue Trader (NSFW, because its a Ewan McGregor film in the middle of his naked period), which is the film that introduced me to the "Aw, Nick" trope as coined by Mark Kermode of moping female supporting characters who seemingly only exist to moan at the main character about his antics but do precious little else.

Maybe that heritage is why the cast of characters of Christmas With The Relatives all seem utterly horrible (though Joely Richardson is great, perpertually holding a glass of wine and making bitchy comments!), and as if things are constantly on the edge of tipping into murderous psychological thriller territory, full of characters beating up children as if they were remaking The Slap and conversations unfortunately eavesdropped on over baby monitors! Sort of Festen meets Love Actually masquerading as a Christmas comedy!

Funny, but only today I was looking at upcoming listings for our local theatre and noticed that James Dearden's stage adaptation of his own Fatal Attraction is playing in the new year! Wish the BFI could sort out the rights to his original short Diversion, which Fatal Attraction was a big budget remake of (and which Dearden claimed Paramount tried to supress!) It's been on YouTube for years.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aGjBESLFVUQ

[colinr0380]

I wonder if any theatrical production of Fatal Attraction will be like Alan Ayckbourn's Smoking/No Smoking and play out with a different ending on alternating nights of the production!

(I did love the way that Surviving Christmas With The Relatives quite literally wheels James Fox in for his cameo appearance and then brusquely straight back out again!)

[jlnight]

The Christmas Tree (1966, CFF), Sat 25th Dec, Talking Pictures. (on before)
Steptoe and Son Ride Again, Sat 25th Dec, Talking Pictures.

Beyond Tomorrow, Sun 26th Dec, Talking Pictures.
The Shootist, Sun 26th Dec, ITV4.
Daddy Long Legs, Sun 26th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Thu 30th Dec.
Heavenly Pursuits, Sun 26th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Thu 30th Dec.
American Graffiti, Sun 26th Dec, Sky Arts. (been on loads before)

Blame it on the Bellboy, Mon 27th Dec, Talking Pictures. Also Wed 5th Jan.
Human Traffic, Mon 27th Dec, Great Movies.
Rumble Fish, late Mon 27th Dec, Sky Arts.

Sugarland Express, Tue 28th Dec, Sky Arts.
Scarface (which version?), late Tue 28th Dec, Sky Arts.

Ghostbusters II, Thu 30th Dec, ITV4. (been on the old Sony movie channels)

The Family Way, Fri 31st Dec, London Live. (been on TPTV)
One Man's Madness, Fri 31st Dec, London Live.
Curse of the Fly + The Great St Louis Bank Robbery + The Black Torment, Fri 31st Dec, Talking Pictures. (Cellar Club)


Sugar and Spice was actually the Shadows of Fear episode that played on the most recent Cellar Club.
Panic is the Dearden short that needs the home video release! I think it is tied up with Paramount and I don't believe that BFI Flipside has released anything from them. Maybe Indicator might have more luck including it on one of their releases.

[colinr0380]

The football was cancelled on BBC2 yesterday afternoon and replaced with a repeat of the 2008 film adaptation of Noël Coward's play Easy Virtue, which I finally sat down and watched. Not being very familiar with the work of Noël Coward, I found it to be quite a surprisingly acerbically black comedy and made for a very interesting contrast to the Julian Fellowes style of nostalgia for the ruling classes that occurs in Downton Abbey that is the current trend, although I assume that this film was only able to be made (as with the same year's Brideshead Revisited film) because of the Gosford Park effect inspiring a run of country house-set period comic-dramas. I suppose that illustrates the difference between someone with a nostalgic eye looking back with fondness on upheavals safely preserved in the past and a play that was actually written in the 1920s about contemporaneous events! Kristin Scott Thomas here is sort of in the equivalent of the Maggie Smith role in Gosford Park/Downton Abbey of spitting out withering invectives at everyone surrounding her, who have to just soak the abuse up with good humour, but the character in Easy Virtue seems to be doing that as a defence mechanism (and a way of proving that she rules the roost) more than anything else.

Easy Virtue's story involves the son of the family returning to his country pile with famous American race car driving wife (with a dark secret from her past regarding the ending of her previous marriage) in tow. Naturally this devolves into lots of sharp-tongued culture clash situations as tensions escalate over their stay as the American wife throws a spanner into the works of the plans that the matriarch (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) has for the son to take over the running of the estate (and the debts).

I particularly like that what starts out as a rather broad comedy of manners (including a scene of a tiny, annoying, yapping dog getting accidentally crushed by our heroine's far too petite to have possibly been able to cause such damage derriere when she sits down on the sofa too quickly without looking, which turns into a farcical situation when every time she jumps up to survey the damage yet another person walks in to demand that she umpires their tennis game, forcing the heroine to sit back down onto the dog, with added bone crunching sounds on the soundtrack with every squash! This happens at least three times in succession before she is able to smuggle the remains into a cushion cover and get the butler to aid her in burying it), at the mid-point becomes surprisingly generous in trying to understand the matriarch's side of things as just trying to keep up appearances of a respectable and well to do family in the face of it being undermined from all directions.

From her husband (played by Colin Firth) being a WWI Captain responsible for merrily leading into and then overseeing the deaths of all the local men in the village, and from that trauma having remained in France to debauch after the war with the matriarch tracking him down and forcing him home again, with the spin put on the situation that he returned of his own accord rather than having been forced by her to return. To her son making plans to move to London with his American wife and not take care of the estate either, the matriarch is becoming a bitchy harridan not because she is a monster but through fear of losing everything she has. This story, being entirely sympathetic to the American wife, still has the matriarch and her three lovelorn daughters as the butt of every joke (quite literally in one knickerless can-can theatrical performance for an ecstatic crowd!), but there is enough nuance there to at least see beyond the Wicked Stepmother and Stepsisters brush that they are being broadly painted with on the surface to a much more tragic sense of desperation (with the expectations that they have of the men in their lives, with the way society is changing in the wake of the war, with the loss of conventional modes of behaviour and manners) beneath.

And I particularly like that (spoiler) the marriage inevitably falls apart under the strain as son feels the family ties and obligations to his mother stronger than those even to his wife (only intensified by his inability to understand the reasons for her murder trial for the assisted suicide of her previous husband when one of the stepsisters locates the paper cuttings from the time to muddy the situation even further), and that we end with the American wife being forced out by the matriarch throwing invectives at her as she departs. But the invectives and slurs, whilst always incredibly witty and cutting, by this point have a much more brittle and hysterical edge to them, as if the matriarch knows that they might have gotten rid of the interloper from their family and retained possession of her son, but things will never be the way they were. As perhaps shown by the son letting go of his wife so that she can escape this repressive family in a way that he will never be able to, yet also (finally!) telling his mother to shut up as well.

Spoiler

And then we get the ultimate f-you to the matriarch as just as the American wife is leaving the otherwise feckless patriarch of the family leaps into her car and they both depart for new horizons! So the matriarch kept her son, but at the cost of her husband running off with the wife instead!

Anyway, it was interesting to go into a film expecting Downton Abbey and end up thinking of films like The Rules of the Game (with the flighty overly naïve and romantic pilot swapped for the similarly worldly yet naïve in many respect roaring racer, and given a happier ending than in Renoir!) and Lucrecia Martel's La Cienaga (with the feckless drunken lothario of a husband lying around the place in a sozzled mess in that film instead in Easy Virtue being elevated into a mournful guilt-ridden and traumatised figure seizing one last opportunity for freedom) instead! Although I hasten to add that I don't think Easy Virtue is quite as good as the Renoir or Martel films, which are outright masterpieces! But it certainly has new unexpected resonances for the Harry and Meghan era!

[colinr0380]

Pretty quiet in the New Year week with an eye to the bygone days of knowing one's place in front of Queens, the upper classes and whilst seafaring. Amusingly after unfavourably comparing it to Easy Virtue earlier, the 2019 film of Downton Abbey is showing on ITV1 at 8:30 p.m. on New Year's Day. I presume this "Carson" fellow being so trumped up in the trailer is the highly skilled assassin being brought in to murder the Queen during her stately home visit?

The 2018 remake of Mary Queen of Scots is showing on BBC2 at 9 p.m. on Sunday 2nd. Long after the holidays have finished the Ron Howard film In The Heart of the Sea premieres on BBC1 at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday 6th.

But the most exciting film of the week is the horror film Sea Fever showing on Film4 at 11 p.m. on Friday 7th.

[colinr0380]

While many big names got a single film aired for the first time, the filmmakers who share the 'win' for number of films premiered this year on UK television (i.e. they each helmed two) are an eclectic bunch:

Takashi Miike with Blade of the Immortal and First Love;
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead with The Endless and Spring;
Damien Chazelle with Whiplash and First Man;
David Leitch with Deadpool 2 and Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw;
Amy Force with two TV movies Olympians At Heart (albeit co-directed) and Dashing Home For Christmas;
Viktor Kossakovsky with Aquarela and Gunda
and arguably Niels Arden Oplev with the 2017 remake of Flatliners and the extended mini-series version of the original 2009 Swedish adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

(Though we must spare a thought for Ron Howard who in a technicality has two premieres within a fortnight of each other with Pavarotti and In The Heart of The Sea but each fall either side of the New Year!)

[colinr0380]

Applemask is back with his rundown of the Christmas idents for 2021. As usual S4C wins the day! Although I like the Channel 5 idents enough not to be upset at their re-usage. I had also completely forgotten about the BBC's 'rebranding' until the video reminded me!

[jlnight]

Our Exploits at West Poley (CFF), Sat 1st Jan, Talking Pictures. (been on London Live)
One Million Years B.C., Sat 1st Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Mon 3rd Jan.
Lilies of the Field (1963), Sat 1st Jan, London Live.
Brokedown Palace, Sat 1st Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Mon 3rd Jan.
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Sat 1st Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 4th Jan.

Anna and the King, Sun 2nd Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Thu 6th Jan.

The Guns of Navarone, Mon 3rd Jan, Great Movies Action.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Wed 5th Jan, London Live.

Croupier, late Thu 6th Jan, Film4.

Curse of the Crimson Altar + The Trial (1962) + Shadows of Fear (At Occupier's Risk), Fri 7th Jan, Talking Pictures. (Cellar Club)

The Outer Limits starts on Fri 7th Jan, Talking Pictures.
The Freeview EPG suggests the 1932 version of Scarface will be on Sky Arts. The other listings insist it's the DePalma version but it doesn't fit the timeslot!

[colinr0380]

Ready Player One is showing on television tonight so I thought that I should do a small post to detail the two most important lessons that this film teaches us about the future:

1. If you want your resistance organisation to remain undercover, do not send the person with visually distinctive facial tattoos out to shop for your gang's groceries at the local market; and
2. Haptic feedback suits need to provide pain limitation protocols as a standard inbuilt feature straight out of the box. Maybe provide a separate suit for purists/masochists who may desire the full experience, but ensure that the customer signs a few waivers first to show that they know what they are literally getting into!

[jlnight]

Sammy's Super T-Shirt (CFF), Sat 8th Jan, Talking Pictures. (on before)
She (1965), Sat 8th Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Fri 14th Jan.

Nickelodeon (1976), Sun 9th Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 11th Jan.
The Sisters Brothers, Sun 9th Jan, BBC2.

Topsy-Turvy, Mon 10th Jan, Film4.

Sirens, Tue 11th Jan, Great Movies Classic.

Vivarium, Thu 13th Jan, Film4.

I, Monster + The Haunted House of Horror + Shadows of Fear (The Death Watcher), Fri 14th Jan, Talking Pictures. (Cellar Club)

[colinr0380]

Very quiet next week, with Film4 attempting again to repeat Topsy-Turvy and premiere Vivarium. Will it happen? Fingers crossed!

Aside from Vivarium ( [-o< ) the big premiere of the week has also been noted by jlnight, with Jacques Audiard's The Sisters Brothers (which kind of sounds more poetically rhyming as "Les frères Sisters"!) on BBC2 at 10 p.m. on Sunday 9th. That actually clashes against the other premiere of the week that is tucked away on the 5Star digital channel, as Bruce Willis stars in Marauders at 11 p.m. from the director of notorious sequel Escape Plan 2: Hades! (It may be an ominous sign that it is playing as a second half of a double bill with A Good Day To Die Hard!)

Then both The Sisters Brothers (on BBC4) and Marauders (still on 5Star) are repeated on Thursday evening at 10 p.m. and clash together again, this time together with Vivarium on Film4!

___
Repeat-wise, at midnight on Saturday 8th BBC1 has Midnight Special and BBC2 has After The Storm clashing together. How The West Was Won gets shown both on BBC2 on Saturday afternoon and on BBC4 on Thursday evening (which is usually shown in widescreen but not the Cinerama ratio). Presumably as a fast tribute to Betty White Lake Placid is shown twice on Saturday 8th, first on the Horror channel at 9 p.m. and then at 12:40 a.m. on the 5Star channel!

And BBC4 is doing a Rolling Stones evening on Friday 14th which includes a showing of Crossfire Hurricane at 9 p.m., followed by The Rolling Stones: Totally Stripped at 10:50 p.m.

[jlnight]

Go Kart Go (CFF), Sat 15th Jan, Talking Pictures. (on before)
The Man in the Sky, Sat 15th Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 18th Jan.
Yuli: The Carlos Acosta Story, Sat 15th Jan, BBC2.

The Homecoming (1973), Sun 16th Jan, London Live.

Loving Vincent, Mon 17th Jan, Film4.

Seize The Day, Tue 18th Jan, London Live.

Concrete Plans, Wed 19th Jan, Film4.

Family Life (1971), Thu 20th Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Sat 29th Jan.

Song for a Raggy Boy, Fri 21st Jan, London Live. Or...
The Crucible (1996) + Shatter (1974) + Shadows of Fear (Come Into My Parlour), Fri 21st Jan, Talking Pictures. (Cellar Club)

[colinr0380]

Quiet again next week but there are a couple of exciting things turning up as the schedules rev up again post-Christmas. jlnight has noted the premieres but I'll add the trailers:

Yuli - The Carlos Acosta Story is showing on BBC2 at 10 p.m. on Saturday 15th, although it is following the live snooker semi-final which inveitably overruns considerably, so I would plan for it to be shown later or cancelled for a future date. (EDIT: It did get shown but only started at 11:45 p.m.!)

BBC4's Saturday night at 9 p.m. foreign language crime drama series begins a double bill of the first two episodes of a six part Belgian-Irish(?!) series Hidden Assets (that also features Michael Ironside in a supporting role?!?)

On Sunday 16th BBC4 has a tribute to the late Anthony Sher with a 2015 interview at 7 p.m. and at 8 p.m. a screening of the 2014 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry IV, Part I with Sher playing Falstaff. It may be expecting too much to have Henry IV, Part 2 shown next week, but this is something at least! Then afterwards at 10:45 p.m. there is another archive interview with Sher by Mark Lawson.

(I would also have scheduled a repeat of Sher's great performance in the adaptation of the J.G. Ballard short story Home as well)

Film4 has a couple of premieres with Loving Vincent at 11:45 p.m. on Monday 17th and Concrete Plans at 9 p.m. on Wednesday 19th (in an amusing thematically related double bill as it is followed by a repeat of Shallow Grave at 10:50 p.m.!)

___

Repeat-wise BBC4 is showing Paint Your Wagon at 8 p.m. on Thursday 20th followed by John Ford's Wagonmaster at 10:30 p.m.

The Horror Channel has a really good run of repeats across the week with Nightbreed at 10:55 p.m. on Saturday 15th, Xtro at 11 p.m. on Monday 17th, Tales That Witness Madness at 2:35 a.m. on Tuesday 18th, W∆Z (with Stellan Skarsgard and Melissa George) at 10:50 p.m. on Tuesday 18th, the Psycho remake at 9 p.m. followed by Hellraiser at 12:40 a.m. (and the John Cusack film Identity at 2:30 a.m.!) on Wednesday 19th, and Jeepers Creepers at 12:40 a.m. on Friday 21st.

Film4 is showing My Man Godfrey at 3:15 p.m. on Monday 17th and Darren Aronofsky's Pi at 2:20 a.m. on Thursday 20th. But the film that I most want to highlight of the repeats on FIlm4 is a very rare showing of Vincenzo Natali's great 2002 sci-fi noir thriller follow up to his film Cube Cypher showing at 1:40 a.m. on Friday 21st. Its another rather overlooked 'cyberpunk' film (certainly better than Johnny Mnemonic! And Natali has apparently directed the first episode of a series based on William Gibson's novel The Peripheral coming out this year) and would probably also make a good double bill with this week's premiere of Vivarium!

[jlnight]

Soapbox Derby (CFF), Sat 22nd Jan, Talking Pictures. (on before)
West of Zanzibar, Sat 22nd Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Tue 25th Jan.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Sat 22nd Jan, Film4.

The Raiders of Leyte Gulf, Sun 23rd Jan, Great Movies Action.
Gray Lady Down, Sun 23rd Jan, Great Movies Action.
The Souvenir (2019), Sun 23rd Jan, BBC2.

She's Funny That Way, late Mon 24th Jan, Film4. (on before)

Little Joe, Wed 26th Jan, BBC2.

Rancho Notorious, Thu 27th Jan, BBC4. Or...
Old Boys (2018), Thu 27th Jan, Film4. Or...
Woman Times Seven, Thu 27th Jan, Talking Pictures. Also Sat 5th Feb.
An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, late Thu 27th Jan, Film4.

A Shock to the System (1990), Fri 28th Jan, London Live. Or...
The Abominable Dr. Phibes + The Man Who Cheated Himself + Jail Bait (1954), Fri 28th Jan, Talking Pictures. (Cellar Club)


Vivarium - a couple of scenes where Eisenberg knocks over the kid and the bit where he locks him in the car might be considered near the knuckle in terms of the news stories that were around at the time of the original broadcast date. In the context of the film however they are perfectly acceptable actions.
EDIT: The Homecoming was pulled and replaced by Hidden Agenda.

[colinr0380]

Quite a lot of stuff next week. jlnight has noted most of the premieres but I'll add the trailer links.

Channel 4 is showing the 2019 Roland Emmerich remake of Midway at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday 22nd.

Film4 is showing The Autopsy of Jane Doe at 11:25 p.m. on Saturday 22nd. Then on Thursday 27th Film4 has Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation Old Boys at 9 p.m. and An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn at 1 a.m. in the early hours of Friday 28th ("From the director of The Greasy Strangler"! The fashion sense looks similar!)

The biggest film of the week is BBC2 showing The Souvenir at 10 p.m. on Sunday 23rd, although that does clash with the premiere of Jean-Claude Van Damme comedy(?) Welcome To The Jungle at 9 p.m. over on the 5star channel.

BBC2 is also showing Little Joe at 11:15 p.m. on Wednesday 26th, although this clashes with BBC4 showing the Third Reich documentary Final Account at 10 p.m. for Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Horror channel is showing the sequel to Stake Land, The Stakelander, at 9 p.m. on Saturday 22nd, and The Wretched at 9 p.m. on Sunday 23rd.

I also want to note that E4's Adult Swim block is starting to show the series Smiling Friends at 1:50 a.m. tomorrow, Thursday 20th.
___
Repeat-wise BBC2 is showing Personal Shopper at 1:25 a.m. on Sunday 23rd, Peter Bogdanovich's She's Funny That Way is showing on Film4 at 2 a.m. on Tuesday 25th, the Fritz Lang film Rancho Notorious is showing on BBC4 at 8 p.m. on Thursday 27th (Film4 is showing Ministry of Fear at 11 a.m. the same day) and BBC2 is showing the Boulting Brothers 1957 film of Lucky Jim at 1 p.m. on Friday 28th.

[colinr0380]

Major spoilers:

The Autopsy of Jane Doe has to have been one of the most frustrating films I have seen in a while. Great acting, fantastic set design and interesting (and disgusting at times) set up... until unfortunately nothing really happens in the second half. Or rather everything generically unsurprising happens which upsettingly undermines all the good elements that are there.

The film has quite a simple premise: a father-son team of coroners own a morgue/cremation service in their family home. The son is reticent about carrying on in his father's footsteps and has a girlfriend urging him to tell his dad that they are going to leave to start a new life together elsewhere. The father for his part never says anything about this situation, but seems well aware of the situation and sort of heartbroken about it whilst not wishing to stand in his son's way. The main ways the father's frustration comes out is in the couple of moments where he tells his son to leave and he will finish things up by himself, but always seems visibly happy when his son returns to be by his side. We find out later with the mysterious death of the elderly cat (yes, the film does the cliche of 'the pet is the first to sense the danger and get killed' trope!) that the mother died relatively recently and that has affected both the son staying around for longer than he planned and the father feeling pangs as he has to say goodbye to parts of his life one by one. Which as he is getting on in years and with his son on the cusp of telling him that he is leaving (so on the cusp that there is a tense, unspoken obvious awareness of this in the early scene between father, son and girlfriend) will eventually mean the family business will pass on too.

This is a really great set up (almost like that farmer father and son section of Code Unknown) and its all played so well by the three actors so that nobody in that situation comes across as the 'nasty one' (i.e. the father who is too possessive of his son and needs to let go / the callous son unaware of the consequences of his actions / horrible girlfriend stealing the son away, any of whom could become the figure that needs to eventually die, sacrifice themselves or be killed in order to 'solve' the situation. In fact this leads to the few nicely subversive moments later on where the accidental mistaken axe murder of the girlfriend isn't going to bring father and son together, the eventual sacrifice of the father to save his son is futile and not something which the son wanted, and the son himself on trying to finally escape the whole situation never can and dies looking as if he has gone crazy and murdered the other two before slipping on the stairs and breaking his neck). I love that set up scene more than any set up scene in a horror film for a while. It is well written to have all these subtle nuances in it, there's a jump scare moment but it actually works because its a moment of fun and lightness between two characters breaking the tension in a grim environment, and all the actors play everything perfectly. I like Brian Cox generally but was surprised at how good Emile Hirsch was too, being more than capable of holding the screen.

Then the Sheriff wheels in a mysterious and seemingly unblemished young female body and asks for a cause of death the same evening, the son decides to help his father with this final autopsy of the night and tells his girlfriend to come back later on (which was a bad move!), and they proceed to do their final father-son tag team evisceration of the latest cadaver on their slab.

This section is still pretty good (the entire first half is - even the cat stuff!) because it is so closely tied to these two characters and their interactions with each other. After the relaxed early 'off duty' scenes with the girlfriend now the pair have to get back into clinical dispassionate mode. The woman in the situation gets exchanged from a living and breathing girlfriend into a (seemingly) lifeless body that gets immediately stripped naked and examined all over, with every orifice probed and noted. It goes rather un-noted by the characters in the film, because they are (rightly) just considering it as their job and nothing more, but the film is obviously wanting the audience to feel uncomfortable and queasy from the very start by having Brian Cox in the same shot framed with a pair of breasts or performing a vaginal examination, whilst all the wounds uncovered are noted on the blackboard in the corner of the room and a storm begins to whip up outside, and is reported on the radio, as they perform more acts of seeing on the body.

Whilst this theme gets rather muddled in the second half once the supernatural stuff starts happening, I kind of liked that this seems the main point the film is trying to get to. The dignity of bodily integrity and that even the most clinical and detached actions performed on a (seemingly) dead body are a form of violation of a person. Sure it is violation for a reason (of establishing cause of death), but it is still intrusive all the same. Even when treating a body with respect, it is just seen as a body, no longer as a person.

And this may be reading far too much into the film (in a maybe futile attempt to find something of interest in the second half) but I like at the end when they decide to finish the autopsy despite the supernatural stuff because that might uncover the clue to why the woman died the son saws through the skull and takes a sample of her brain (thereby damning himself in his actions by doing some of the more visceral stuff that his father otherwise carried out) to study under the microscope but, aside from discovering that the blood is inexplicably still alive and pumping, the message appears to be that you can cut a person into every component part, access every bit of their internal organs and yet still have no idea what is truly going on inside them.

This is still a pretty good section of the film, raising a lot of interesting ideas. I also have a bit of a fondness for claustrophobic horror films in single locations or with a couple of characters for the majority of the time, and this film captures that feeling well. I even liked the way that the autopsy turns slightly investigative as the pair move to cutting into the body and start to find awful wounds under the skin that belie the unblemished nature of the outside surface. And I even like the build up of the supernatural stuff, as the storm picks up and the radio starts going haywire (I love Local 58-style creepy broadcasts, and there was scope for the radio here to have pushed into more of that territory in the second half, but nope) and with every scalpel cut and bone saw used the storm intensifies until eventually the pair reach the contents of the girl's stomach, remove the 'paralysing flower' that had been forcibly fed to her as part of a ritual, and all hell breaks loose.

This begins the second half of the film, and the most disappointing one, as the power sporadically goes out and the characters start running back and forth down the eerily lit corridor whilst reanimated corpses (with tinkling bells attached to the foot of one - because the father is 'old fashioned' - in order to provide a creepy moment of audio suspense) stalk them. Father and son keep having conversations about doing something (and particularly frustrating is that Brian Cox is playing the father character as understanding of the bizarre situation but we still have to have the scene where the father does not understand that events have gone too far into the supernatural for logical thinking and the son needs to spell it out to him), but never do (except for accidentally killing the girlfriend, who just appears out of nowhere. I know that her being a fan of performing jump scare pranks was nicely set up in that first scene to pay off here, but really that is a character who would have been in danger of getting an axe in the neck by scaring the wrong person even at the best of times!) and just keep rubber-banding back to the body on the slab to complete their roles in the situation. The zombie stuff is all rather boring and unnecessary padding, to be frank. And that should never be the case!

So our main characters through removing the objects from her stomach that had been paralysing her are responsible in some ways for reviving the woman, who is eventually figured out to be an actual witch from the Salem witch trials. The film (through the Brian Cox character) does acknowledge that those witch trials were all shams, but then proceeds on to say that the trial and torture were responsible for turning an innocent woman into an angry and wronged supernatural being (a little like Mimiko from One Missed Call 2!) amping up the anger towards everyone who would dare to cut, mutilate and attempt to burn her body (as our main duo have unfortunately been doing throughout. Oops!).

In some ways the climax here mashes together those two Nacho Cerdà short films from the 1990s Aftermath and Genesis: Aftermath in the clinical autopsy scenes turning horrific; Genesis in that the finale involves a kind of transference of wounds from statuesque woman to flesh and blood man, as they exchange roles.

Although even that idea of unleashed vengeance on those who wronged you, which could have been the ultimate destination of all of the creepy, subtly implied 'men studying the body of women to dominate them and neutralise their power' theme of the film, is instead twisted further into The Ring/The Grudge/One Missed Call territory of ironic winking as the witch remains a lifeless (seeming) corpse whilst the sheriff cleaning up the carnage just states that her body should be taken to the coroner in the 'next town over' so they can complete the task on the Jane Doe safely outside of his jurisdiction. So in that coda there seems to be the somewhat comic idea of the witch now playing dead so that she can move from town to town as a corpse that 'tempts' (rather than has it imposed on her?) coroners to cut her up so that she can indignantly inflict the same things on them in return? I think I would much rather have had "Jane Doe" fully come alive with the exchange of lifeforce with the father and go on to walk out of the film to go about her business more consciously from that point forward, rather than simply just going back to her body still on the slab 'playing dead' to dupe the next hapless coroner who comes along.
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So its interesting but feels muddled, sags badly in the middle, and has an ending that I think betrays some of the most interesting themes that it sets up in its first half. But I don't want to disregard it entirely. The performances here are so good that its worth recommending it just for that, the autopsy scenes are disgustingly explicit and wince-worthy (as they should be), and the set design is truly spectacular.

But it is as if the filmmakers want to maintain the sense of mysterious ambiguity around the central figure occupying the table, yet do not seem to realise that you cannot do that once the dark forces inside are unleashed and start possessing the other corpses in the mortuary, making them come to life! Having made that choice to heighten everything to the next level with that first moment of actual inexplicable threat the film really has to shift registers at that point into something less subtle and more grand guignol (as, say, the 2013 Evil Dead remake does superbly) but it seems to want to keep one foot in the grounded aspects of the story too, which it just cannot now that everything has overbalanced to that supernatural extreme. Really the filmmakers needed to have gone with the flow at that point and have everything collapse into chaos, but unfortunately the film just degenerates into two (well played to remain sympathetic) characters running futilely back and forth down a (beautifully spooky) darkened corridor between the morgue and their attempts to get the lift upstairs working. Maybe an extra draft or two could have smoothed out the second half?