TV films
Lennon read a book on Marx
by Philip Matthews
SATURDAY MAY 29
American Pie, TV3, 8.30pm
This horny-teen gross-out will look like Porky's 3 to anyone aged over about 30, but its true model is There's Something About Mary. That classic of romantic humiliation managed a subtle blend of the sweet and the gross that this film tries and fails to mimic – it's also indirectly responsible for such crimes against humanity as Road Trip, Not Another Teen Movie, Freddy Got Fingered and the career of Ashton Kutcher. The key scene involves the sordid debasement of an item of baked food. Nice comic performance from Eugene Levy (A Mighty Wind) as the awkward dad, though. Two sequels inevitably followed. (1999) 5
SUNDAY MAY 30
The Ladykillers, Prime, 10.30am
"To be frivolous about frivolous matters, that's really boring," said director Alexander Mackendrick. "To be frivolous about something that's in some way deadly serious, that's true comedy." And in this classic Alec Guinness black comedy, the subject is death itself. A gang of criminals, headed by Guinness and including Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom, pose as a classical music group and find their devious plan destabilised by the, er, landlady. In its evocations of pettiness and sadism – and maybe the point where they meet – this film seems very much a product of the British postwar atmosphere. That may be one reason why the new Coen brothers remake – with Tom Hanks in the Guinness part as "the professor" – has, by all accounts, not improved on the original. This was Mackendrick's last film in the UK before he decamped for the US, where he directed another classic, crueller than this or anything else he made at home: Sweet Smell of Success. For Guinness, this was one in a series of great Ealing comedies including The Lavender Hill Mob, and Mackendrick's The Man in the White Suit. William Rose wrote the screenplay. (1955) 8
Zoolander, TV2, 8.35pm
There's a lot of hostility in Ben Stiller's comedy, even within a character as seemingly innocuous as Derek Zoolander. Stiller directed this film and he takes the title role as an airhead male model. It's a part that was expanded from a sketch for an awards show and that origin isn't hard to spot – although the character is nicely conceived (he has just the one, pouting expression and an endearing tendency to mangle and mispronounce his words), the plot is flimsy stuff about a fashion designer's brainwashing/assassination conspiracy. In other words, it's a braindead Manchurian Candidate. Stiller's smartest move was to bring in his pal Owen Wilson, whose air of vague, near-autistic abstractedness plays terrifically against Stiller's desperation and neurosis – and this is their best film together. Wilson is Hansel, the supermodel who threatens Zoolander's long reign as the world's most handsome man; in Wilson's hands, Hansel is a Eurotrash extreme sports adventurer and space- cadet philosopher. Fashion victim cameos include Paris Hilton, David Bowie, Fabio and Lenny Kravitz; the film's best set piece includes the following elements: a gas-station accident, a round of orange mocha frappuccinos and Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go". Recommended. (2001) 6
MONDAY MAY 31
Mission to Mars, TV3, 8.30pm
Close encounters of the worst kind. This Brian De Palma-directed sci-fi film is so boring, risible and confused that you come away wondering if it is all some elaborate, post-Ed Wood bad-movie satire and whether the cast, which includes the generally reliable Tim Robbins and Gary Sinise, was ever in on the joke. From the looks of things, it's doubtful. The screenplay, credited to four writers, is derivative of 2001 and Close Encounters (so don't be surprised when New Age life-forms show up to impart the big secrets of the cosmos), but instead of wonder, whether mystical or childlike, De Palma can only offer banality on an epic scale. Avoid. (2000) 2
THURSDAY JUNE 3
Desert Blue, TV2, midnight
This undistinguished slacker movie missed its socio-cultural bus by a good five years at least. The plot has a pop culture professor (John Heard) and his daughter (Kate Hudson) stranded in a small desert town after a major cola spillage (they were visiting the site of the world's largest ice-cream cone; as we said, it's an early 90s idea). As the locals, Christina Ricci, Sara Gilbert and Casey Affleck work on their apathy. (1998) 4
FRIDAY JUNE 4
His Kind of Woman, TV1, 11.15pm
The reason that this number begins in conventional noir-land and ends up in far stranger regions is that, according to its star Robert Mitchum, much of it was made up as they went along. There's nothing at all wrong with that – there's an agreeable looseness to it, especially in Mitchum's scenes with Jane Russell, loaded as they are with seemingly improvised innuendo. Raymond Burr co-stars as a criminal that Mitchum's character, a gambler, is paid handsomely to handle, but the most memorable support work comes from Vincent Price, hilarious as a self-absorbed, Shakespearean actor. "Not unlike a taut, sadistic thriller peppered with incursions from the Monty Python crew," was the verdict of Time Out critic Geoff Andrew. One of a kind, then. (1951) 8
A Room for Romeo Brass, TV3, 11.15pm
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