SATURDAY FEBRUARY 4
The Accidental Husband (TV2, 8.30pm). Griffin Dunne! You ex-actor-turned director. How could you reduce Colin Firth to the wet sop of a fiancé he plays in this by-the-book romcom – to be made to look prissy and boring while Jeffrey Dean Morgan gets to play the tough-guy New York fireman who you just know Uma Thurman is going to fall for, even though he has married her without her knowledge. Unforgiveable. And the critics hated it even more than The Unborn (see below). Ha ha. (2008) 3
Avatar
The Unborn (Four, 9.00pm). Oddly, Idris Elba – Stringer Bell from The Wire, the TV series some critics called the best ever – chose to appear in this lame thriller when the show finished. So did Gary Oldman. Unfortunately for them, it was ridiculed by nearly everyone who saw it: “painfully clueless”, “scares that border on silliness” and the really nasty “should have been aborted” were some of the comments. (2009) 4
Saving Grace (Maori TV, 9.30pm). A completely, er, potty comedy about a hard-up homeowner who grows dope to supplement her income. But it stars Brenda Blethyn who, for at least some of this, is having a high old time instead of being catatonically depressed in a Mike Leigh film. (2000) 6
Waist Deep (TV3, 10.30pm). No, that would require at least some depth. (2006) 5
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 5
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (TV3, 7.00pm). These animated movies usually have a moral. This one? Stranger danger: if you steal dinosaur eggs and the mother catches you, you will become extinct very quickly. More of the same, with dinos. (2009) 6
School of Rock (Four, 8.30pm). A movie was born after writer Mike White encountered his neighbour Jack Black running naked through the halls of their apartment building while playing songs from this film at full volume. Ewwww. (2003) 7
Super Size Me (Maori, 8.30pm). Consider the takeaway to be a weapon of mass destruction. America should be invaded repeatedly by every country in the Middle East and pelted with soggy burgers and “freedom fries” until everyone in it learns to bloody-well cook. If Morgan Spurlock’s documentary about existing solely on McDonald’s for a month – tagged “a film of epic portions” – doesn’t put you off, you deserve to be a very sick puppy. And you probably will be. (2003) 8
Epic Movie (TV3, 9.00pm). Epic overestimation of a cute idea, more like. A spoof of blockbusters that can only dream of their success.
(2007) 2
District 9 (TV2, 10.20pm). South African-born writer/director Neill Blomkamp got a huge leg-up from Peter Jackson, who, like an old-fashioned impresario, is billed on the posters as “presenting” this thriller. He’s also credited as a producer, but what he also did was offer Blomkamp $30 million to make whatever he wanted, after the Halo film, which Blomkamp was to direct, fell over. The result is an extraordinarily self-assured first feature-length debut about a ragtag community of aliens who have been corralled in a Johannesburg slum since crash-landing 28 years earlier. Now they are being evicted by an organisation headed by a clueless bureaucrat … District 9 looks amazing – thanks, in part, to Weta Workshop’s contribution – and all the other elements come together to make this a terrific sci-fi movie with a hard vein of satire running through it. Blomkamp, of course, was inspired by his childhood in South Africa during the apartheid era. (2009) 8
WAITANGI DAY
Avatar (TV3, 7.30pm). Feeling a bit blue? It’s safe to say that even if you don’t enjoy James Cameron’s magnum opus, you’re going to be impressed by it. Avatar is the biggest special-effects juggernaut ever to hit the highway: it makes all that has gone before look like a Noddy car that’s out of gas. From the beautiful execution of the pastel world of the Na’vi to the over-the-top shoot-’em-up wizardry of the bad humans who try to destroy them, this is two hours and 41 minutes of eye-straining sensory methamphetamine. Cameron chucks it all in – an environmental issue, corporate greed and a love story, wrapped around an old-fashioned space adventure. Some crap dialogue, but an artwork to marvel at, nonetheless. (2009) 9
Sweet Home Alabama (TV2, 8.30pm). Louisiana-born Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon is so gosh-darned purdy you won’t care that this is a steaming pile of been-theredone-that. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s still the old “left my perfect life and found a better one”, even if in this case the new life is in fact the old one. Our Melanie Lynskey plays Lurlynn – a chick so larded in Southern anti-ambition she can probably get pregnant just by thinking about it. (2002) 5
Stuck on You (Four, 8.30pm). Conjoined twins – “We’re not Siamese. We’re American!” – get plenty of Farrelly brothers laughs as two extremely close brothers who want to pursue different interests. Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear are quite sweet, and Cher is a good sport. (2003) 6
Kaikohe Demolition (Maori, 8.30pm). Florian Habicht might be New Zealand’s most charming and cheeky filmmaker. He has a knack for doing the opposite to everyone else and getting away with it: his recent success with the offbeat Love Story, where he asked New Yorkers what they thought should happen next, is a perfect example. Here, he was supposed to be making a tourism doco, but he only got as far as shooting the Kaikohe demo derby, then somehow forgot to make the original film! The characters are strangely delightful: the best scenes are candid pieces to camera of the locals up to their necks in the steaming stink of the Ngawha hot pools – a weirdly seductive tourist attraction on their own. There’s Uncle Bim and his clapped-out Super Minx: “I want to thank my uncle for leaving me this legacy. Wish it had been a Subaru Legacy, eh!”; huge doorman Ben Haretuku who runs anger-management courses; family man John Zielinski … Lovely stuff; endearing and hilarious in places. (2004) 8
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 8
Die Hard 4.0 (TV3, 8.45pm). Just to prove he’s the toughest dude in the world, John McClane is dying another day (oh no, that’s James Bond, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a singlet). Here, things get high-tech when an internet-based terrorist organisation tries to shut down the whole of the US. Cliff Curtis, for once not playing a terrorist, is the FBI’s deputy director. Fast and seemingly quite fresh for a fourth instalment, and there’s another in the wings for 2013. (2007) 7
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 10
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Four, 8.30pm). ’Ard men and nasty geezers get into all sorts of bovver. That bleedin’ Guy Ritchie is The Man. (1998) 7