| TV Films
A Guide to the Week’s Viewing
SATURDAY JULY 14
The Debt (Three, 10.30pm). Superb performances in this remake of an Israeli thriller about Mossad agents in 1965 (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and New Zealander Marton Csokas) searching for a Nazi war criminal (Jesper Christensen). Their mission doesn’t exactly go to plan, and there is a tangled love triangle, with ramifications in the present (where they are played by Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds and Tom Wilkinson). (2011) What Really Happened: Votes for Women (TVNZ 1, 11.10pm). As we celebrate the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the Sunday Theatre docudrama about Kate Sheppard and the historic vote in September 1893 gets another go-around. Sara Wiseman makes an excellent Sheppard, working feverishly in Fendalton for equal votes for women – and temperance – as she carries on a “love affair of the mind” with married printer William Lovell-Smith (Craig Hall), father of 10. We mustn’t forget she had help: there’s the outspoken Tailoresses’ Union organiser Harriet Morison (Bronwyn Bradley) and the hilarious Fabian, radical and “knicker costume” wearer Katrine Walker, played with gusto by Antonia Prebble. (2012)
SUNDAY JULY 15
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (TVNZ Duke, 7.00pm). The first and the best, partly because Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth was exciting and new and partly because this is a perfect melding of the grandiose and the human (or halfling, or dwarf, or elf …). There are soulful performances from Elijah Wood, Sean
Astin, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett and Sean Bean, and when Frodo puts on the ring for the first time, it’s dazzling. (2001)
Man of Steel (TVNZ 2, 8.30pm). Superman is just a lonely guy in Zack Snyder’s version: Clark Kent’s childhood is not the usual idyllic one of the comic
books, and after Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) is killed in a tornado, Clark/Kal-El (Henry Cavill) wanders the Earth, growing a beard and working on fishing boats (what, no Daily Planet? Shame!). When Zod (Michael Shannon) arrives, Clark is just another dangerous alien, according to the Pentagon, until he can convince them otherwise. Snyder is working from a script by David S Goyer, who wrote Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, but Man of Steel has even less levity and the fight with Zod is just another boring crash-and-bash spectacle. (2013)
Kingsman: The Secret Service (Three, 8.30pm). A slightly jarring mix of comic-book action and spoof from director Matthew Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman, whose collaborations include Stardust, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class (and Goldman has just been tapped for the Game of Thrones spin-off). There’s a bit of John Steed and Harry Palmer and quite a lot of Bond in agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) of the secret Kingsman intelligence organisation, and there are spy tropes for days when Hart recruits Taron Egerton’s working-class Eggsy, the son of a deceased agent. Samuel L Jackson hams it up as a lisping tech tycoon, but the absurdly high body count, done for laughs, is unpleasant. (2015)
High Noon (Maori TV, 8.30pm). The 1952 western seems to have been interpreted at the time as variously a metaphor for the Korean War, the Cold War and McCarthy-era blacklisting (indeed, screenwriter Carl Foreman was blacklisted and moved to Britain). Gary Cooper is the stoic town marshal who can’t get any help from the townsfolk when he receives word that a gang of outlaws is arriving on the noon train. Even his Quaker wife (Grace Kelly) wants him to run. Cooper won a Best Actor Oscar and Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’, sung by
Tex Ritter, won Best Song.
John Wayne, who had been offered the role, considered it un-American and later collaborated with Howard Hawks to make the much more heroic Rio Bravo. (1952)
The Place Beyond the Pines (Choice TV, 8.30pm).
You can’t fault Derek Cianfrance ( Blue Valentine) for his ambition in this sprawling story about the links between two families over a stretch of 17 or so years. It begins with another cool Ryan Gosling performance. Like Elvis in Roustabout, his tattooed motorbike-stunt rider takes on the wall of death in a travelling fair, but his life is marked by violence and crime and he inevitably comes into the orbit of Bradley Cooper’s college-educated cop. It’s a heist movie, a family saga and a story of ambition and corruption. It’s just a shame about its length, which inevitably makes it drag. (2012)
Dunkirk (Movies Premiere, Sky 030, 8.30pm). You’ll need at least 55 inches of screen for Christopher Nolan’s epic about the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk in 1940. In fact, Imax is really the format to get the full scope of Nolan’s sweeping three perspectives: soldiers on the beach; pilots Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden in the sky; and, in the water, the ships that took them back to England, including the famous fleet of civilian craft as represented by Mark Rylance in a pleasure boat. It’s an extraordinary feat of film-making. Nolan famously eschews CGI and, as in old-fashioned Hollywood epics, there are thousands of extras, as well as period boats and planes, but the film becomes one long action scene. (2017)
TUESDAY JULY 17
American Sniper (TVNZ Duke,
8.30pm). God, country, family, hooah! US audiences may have seen a patriotic military superiority as soldiers put down the “savages” in Iraq, but Clint Eastwood doesn’t hold back on the effects of war on Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, who was the deadliest marksman in US military history. In Eastwood’s lengthy film, Kyle is at once the American ideal of the protector of family and country and the haunted soldier who can’t settle back into civilian life. Bradley Cooper beefs up for the role; Sienna Miller is also excellent as his wife, Taya, although she has little to do except scold. (2014)
THURSDAY JULY 19
Becoming Bond (Rialto, Sky 039, 8.30pm). A clever, lighthearted documentary in which George Lazenby tells the story of how he became Bond for one film and why he walked away. Some of his stories, if true, are Bond-level saucy, and director Josh Greenbaum cheekily stages “reconstructions” of Lazenby’s life that include former Bond girl Jane Seymour, Dana Carvey as Johnny Carson and Josh Lawson as a young Lazenby. (2017) Films are rated out of 5: (abysmal) to (amazing).