TV Films
TV Films
by Sarah Barnett
SATURDAY JULY 5
The Last Mimzy (Sky Movies, 5.10pm). Adapted from Lewis Padgett’s sci-fi short story Mimsy Were the Borogroves, this is a kids’ movie that doesn’t patronise. A brother and sister find a box of mysterious toys that have been sent from the future. Mimzy is a stuffed rabbit on a mission to return to her time with something to save future humanity. And then it gets trippy. When the kids gain mysterious abilities – a talent for guiding spiders to spin architectural webs; floating just above the ground – the old-fashioned special effects are unobtrusively lovely, and the performances from all involved, especially The Office’s Rainn Wilson as a hippie teacher, likewise. (2007) 7
Scooby-Doo (TV2, 7.30pm). Why the director of Big Momma’s House and Home Alone 3 thought he could succeed where so many others had failed – making a decent live-action remake of a Hannah-Barbera cartoon – is anyone’s guess. With the pesky kids played as two-dimensionally as their inspiration by the likes of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr, Roger Ebert thought its only saving grace was the animated Scooby himself – “an island of amusement in a wasteland of fecklessness”. (2002) 2
Just My Luck (TV3, 7.30pm). Lindsay Lohan plays Ashley – the luckiest girl in the world – living a New York dream where she has the perfect job, the perfect apartment and the dry cleaner delivers- Sarah Jessica Parker’s couture by accident. Sadly, she kisses the unluckiest guy at a masked ball, and her golden run comes to an end. After a series of unfortunate events, she finally figures it out – of course! It must have been that guy I pashed! – and sets about looking for him to reverse their fortunes again. The target tween-girl audience will enjoy the fantasy of a harmless grown-up life where the worst bad luck is just a pratfall rather than, say, a scary letter from the IRD. (2006) 4
The Human Stain (TV1, 8.30pm). Anthony Hopkins plays a respected professor who is fired after an offhand remark he makes about some students is construed as racist, but writer Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) exposes a more significant, and more damaging, story than that. This adaptation of Philip Roth’s polemical novel gets the nuts and bolts right, but holds the fury, almost sacrificing the author’s cranky sensibility. Nonetheless, it’s a film for intelligent grown-ups, with solid performances, as you’d expect from Hopkins, Sinise and (the professor’s much younger love interest) Nicole Kidman. (2003) 7
Con Air (TV2, 9.20pm). A riotous action adventure, which is actually written to be so, rather than winding up funny by trashy accident. The trick – some very smart actors in a classic Jerry Bruckheimer plot. Steve Buscemi, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames and others play some of the worst crims the US has ever seen, all put on the same plane for transport to a maximum security prison. Nicolas Cage, a good guy who’s been released after an unjust prison term, joins them for the ride home. The bad guys hijack the plane, the authorities are surprised, Cage is caught in the middle: it’s as though Snakes on a Plane went through the Being John Malkovich portal. Or something. (1997) 7
Planet of the Apes (TV3, 9.35pm). About the only thing of note in the pointless Tim Burton remake of this classic is for sharp-eyed viewers, who will spot Charlton Heston’s cameo as one of only two apes on the planet to own a gun. Talk about aping irony. (2001) 1
My House in Umbria (TV1, 10.40pm). The title might bring to mind the insipid offerings Under the Tuscan Sun and A Good Year, but this HBO production is far more vibrant. After a terrorist attack on a Spanish train, four survivors convalesce in the country home of an English romance novelist (Maggie Smith), who invites the other three after meeting them in hospital. With Ronnie Barker, Timothy Spall, Giancarlo Giannini and Chris Cooper, there’s more substance here than in the other two films put together, as a fragile makeshift family begins to bond and then fall apart. (2003) 8
SUNDAY JULY 6
The Dukes of Hazzard (TV2, 8.30pm). The latest evidence, wrote the New York Times’ AO Scott, “that, for Hollywood studios at least, there can never be too much of a mediocre thing”. When even American Pie’s Seann William Scott looks too good for the material, you know the General Lee has probably taken one jump too far. (2005) 2
New Jack City (C4, 8.30pm). A smart film masquerading as an action flick, New Jack City is a gangster epic set in Harlem, with a big tip of the Kangol hat to Scarface. Wesley Snipes is a charismatic drug lord, exploiting everyone he possibly can to build a crack empire on the backs of the poor and vulnerable people of his ’hood. Street cop Ice-T, with partner Judd Nelson, gets on the case and, whenever Snipes is somewhere else, sermonises about how Drugs are Bad – a jarring flaw in a movie Snipes makes his own. (1991) 7
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