A few interesting films on TV this week.
TODAY
TV2 occasionally stumbles across a very good film and then, apparently confused and intimidated by having to show anything in which characters react to plausible situations in recognisably human ways, chucks it on after midnight, hoping that no-one notices the lapse in its usual programming policy.
Playing The Savages at 1.20am is a perfect example. The film stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brother and sister, much estranged, who are thrown together to nurse their dad as the old man slides into dementia. All of which sounds like resolutely depressing stuff. Trust me, it’s not.
The Savages is a pitch perfect family drama, with a generous streak of black comedy running through it. Hoffman and Linney are wonderful, and the script is a joy. Luckily, most people have some sort of recording wotsit attached to their telly now, so you’ll be able to save a copy of this to watch at a sane hour.
Earlier on TV2, Mr Woodcock (11.40pm) is an alleged comedy, which despite having Billy Bob Thornton and Susan Sarandon in leading roles, couldn’t raise a laugh to save itself. Seann William Scott is the young man who is horrified to discover that his mother is dating his tyrannical old gym teacher. Nothing of any wit or consequence ensues.
And on TV One at 9.40pm, From Russia With Love was the second James Bond film to be made, and a good one it is too. Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig, who are probably the two best actors to ever play Bond, both consider this their favourite of the 50-year-old series.
TOMORROW
Teaming up Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist (TV2. 8.30pm) was supposed to produce box office gold. But, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark ( The Lives of Others) tried to make a drama, while the writers had supplied him with the script to a comedy.
Depp plays an apparent innocent abroad, Jolie the woman he loves, but the film never generates the fun or thrills the genre demands. Every promising thing about this film – the leads, the story, the direction – is cancelled out by something else.
There’s far better on Maori TV at 9.30pm, with Marion Cotillard playing Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. This is a superb film, as intelligent and moving as a film of Piaf’s tragic and incandescent life should be. Cotillard won the best actress Oscar, the first time the award had been given for a nonEnglish language role.
BEST OF THE WEEK
Blank City (Rialto, 8.30pm, Friday) is a documentary on the filmmakers who worked and played alongside the nascent New York punk rock scene of the early and mid 1970s. Director Celine Danhier interviews Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo, Jim Jarmusch, Debbie Harry, Thurston Moore and Fab Five Freddie, among others. If you’ve any interest at all in independent film-making over the past 30 years, you’ll love this.