Upcoming Movies on TV (UK)

[colinr0380]

Very quiet next week with only a couple of items of note. BBC2 is showing the first two (of eight total) episodes of Dopesick at 10 p.m, with an impressive cast headed by Michael Keaton. Both of these episodes are also directed by Barry Levinson.

And after an otherwise fallow week, Film4 has a premiere with Jethica at 12:35 a.m. in the early hours of Saturday 4th May.
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In terms of repeats, nothing too notable although Film4 has a good run of late night repeats of films throughout the week with The Assistant at 1:55 a.m. on Sunday 28th, Wild Nights With Emily at 2:10 a.m. on Monday 29th, the 2021 French film Happening at 1:50 a.m. on Wednesday 1st May and the 2019 French film Les Miserables at 1:10 a.m. on Friday 3rd.

[jlnight]

City Lights (1931), Sat 4th May, Sky Arts.
Kill Your Friends, Sat 4th May, London Live. Or...
Red King, White Knight (1989 TVM), Sat 4th May, Talking Pictures. Also Thu 9th May.

The Mood Man, Sun 5th May, Talking Pictures. (Baim archive short)

Alibi Breaker (1937), Mon 6th May, Talking Pictures.

The PSI Factor, late Tue 7th May, Talking Pictures.

Dead Presidents, Fri 10th May, Film4.


Re: the late Michael Verhoeven - My Mother's Courage was apparently shown on 25/01/2005 on BBC2. As far as Killing Cars is concerned you'd need to go back to the second day of 1990 to find it on late-night ITV.

[colinr0380]

A weird week. The single big premiere is M. Night Shyamalan's Old showing on Channel 4 at 9 p.m. on Saturday 4th. That clashes against BBC4 beginning a new 'world television' series with the first two episodes (of six total) of Romanian drama Spy/Master also at 9 p.m.

In TV series terms, Dopesick continues on BBC2 with episodes 3 and 4 from 10 p.m. on Sunday 5th (though its coming after the snooker, so expect considerable delays or outright cancellation). And in the most bizarre occurrence since the BBC picked up all five seasons of The Wire five years late and then blew through them all in one go, the BBC has picked up all nine seasons of the Meghan Markle-starring series Suits and is starting to show the first 2011 series on BBC1 in double bills of episodes at 10:40 p.m. on Friday 10th (plus the third episode immediately follows on BBC3 that evening too). This has been a bit controversial, with the boss of ITV complaining about the BBC buying up American shows, although I suppose the counter-argument would be to ask where ITV's bid for the show was for the last thirteen or so years?
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So that's it for new stuff. Film repeat-wise, jlnight has noted the big one of Dead Presidents on Film4 on Friday 10th at 11:10 p.m. - I can't remember the last time that one aired! (Hopefully it augurs well for an upgrade from the old Criterion Laserdisc! Hint, hint!). Which got qualified praise from Siskel and Ebert back in the day, but the kind of review with reservations that left me wanting to see the film for myself.

Repeat-wise, BBC4 is doing a lot of tributes to Alan Bennett as he is turning 90 on Thursday 9th. Sunday 5th has one of the more notable screenings, of Sunset Across The Bay from 1975 and directed by Stephen Frears, at 10 p.m., which is followed by a couple of classic episodes of his Talking Heads series with A Cream Cracker Under The Setee at 11:10 p.m. and Her Big Chance at 11:45 p.m., followed by a 2014 interview between Bennett and Nicholas Hytner at 12:20 a.m.

As exciting as Sunset Across The Bay is BBC4 beginning to show Bennett's three part 1995 series about Westminster Abbey from 8 p.m. on Monday 6th.

Then BBC4 devotes another night to Bennet on his 90th birthday itself with a 2009 Mark Lawson interview at 8 p.m, the inevitable repeat screening of The Lady In The Van film at 9 p.m. and then three more of the Talking Heads episodes with the also Maggie Smith starring A Bed Among The Lentils at 10:40 p.m., the Thora Hird starring Waiting For The Telegram at 11:30 p.m., and the Patricia Routledge starring Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet at Midnight.

And BBC4's 'archive television' strand on Wednesday 8th is showing the other John Le Carré series A Perfect Spy with an new introduction with Peter Egan at 10 p.m. followed at 10:15 p.m. by a triple bill of the first three episodes (of seven total, so the next four will probably turn up next Wednesday)

[jlnight]

William at the Circus (episodic version), Sat 11th May, Talking Pictures.
Modern Times (1936), Sat 11th May, Sky Arts.
Homeboy (1988), Sat 11th May, London Live. Or...
A Matter of Choice (1963), Sat 11th May, Talking Pictures. Also Thu 16th May.

York (1972), Sun 12th May, Talking Pictures. (Baim archive short)

They Made Me a Fugitive, Wed 15th May, Legend. (recently on TPTV)

Blue Bayou (2021), Thu 16th May, Film4. Or...
Commandos (1968), Thu 16th May, Legend.
Tangled Evidence, late Thu 16th May, Talking Pictures.

A Violent Man (2022), Fri 17th May, Legend.

[colinr0380]

After a few fallow weeks there is an explosion of interesting stuff next week. In a counterprogramming move against the final of the Eurovision Song Contest over on BBC1 at 8 p.m., Channel 4's premiere of the weekend is Joe Carnahan's Copshop at 9 p.m. on Saturday 11th (a repeat of Carnahan's 2010 film version of The A-Team turns up on ITV4 at 8 p.m. on Wednesday 15th), which clashes up against Channel 5 showing another one of its "too hot for 2:15 p.m." TV movies with The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story at 10 p.m. (followed by a swift repeat of that Judd Nelson starring "Girl In A Basement" film from back in March straight after at 11:40 p.m., which is great since I had to forsake that one for recording Undergods on Film4 back then. Throw in a repeat of the An Invitation To Murder film at 8 p.m. to create a triple bill of films and that makes Channel 5 the surprising winner of the weekend!)

On Sunday 12th there is the third in the "Read" series (following Christopher Eccleston with Kes and Alex Kingston with Frankenstein) with Steve Pemberton doing an hour long reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day at 9 p.m., which is followed by a repeat of the 2021 profile of Ishiguro at 10 p.m. and a 2015 interview between Ishiguro and Mark Lawson at 11:20 p.m.

The big news of the week is that on Tuesday 14th BBC1 starts the second season of Tokyo Vice with a double bill of episodes 1 and 2 at 10:40 p.m., although that unfortunately clashes with BBC4's Storyville documentary of the week, Praying For Armageddon, at 10 p.m.

Film4's one premiere of the week is Blue Bayou at 9 p.m. on Thursday 16th. Which clashes against a repeat of the Dustin Hoffman directed film Quartet at 9 p.m. on BBC4, which gets regularly shown but however is more excitingly followed by a very rare showing of the 1986 documentary Tosca's Kiss at 10:30 p.m. - the Grey Gardens of Italian opera singers? I may have to forsake Blue Bayou in the hopes that it will be repeated again later in order to pick that one up.
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Repeat-wise, nothing too notable although it is amusing to note just how packed the evening of Saturday 11th is: aside from the three channels above BBC3 is repeating the first three episodes of that Suits series from 9 p.m.; BBC4 is also showing episodes 3 & 4 of Romanian drama Spy/Master at 9 p.m. ; BBC2 is showing Mr Holmes at 8 p.m.; ITV1 is showing the 2006 Casino Royale at 8 p.m.; ITV2 is showing the 2020 The Invisible Man film at 9 p.m.; ITV4 is showing Twister at 6.45 followed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes at 9 p.m.; and the 5Star channel has Jupiter Ascending at 5:25 p.m. followed by Kong: Skull Island at 9 p.m.

It's almost as if the Eurovision Song Contest drives the other channels crazy in trying to provide alternatives!

And Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? is showing on BBC2 at 11:15 p.m. on Tuesday 14th, thereby clashing with both Tokyo Vice and Praying For Armageddon!

[jlnight]

A Woman of Paris (1923), Sat 18th May, Sky Arts.
Dog (2022), Sat 18th May, Channel 4. Or...
90 Minutes (2019), Sat 18th May, London Live. Or...
Notorious, Sat 18th May, Talking Pictures. (on before)

Reserved for Animals, Sun 19th May, Talking Pictures. (Baim archive short)
The System, Sun 19th May, Talking Pictures. Also Mon 20th May. (last on London Live in 2016)

Traitor (1971 Play for Today), Wed 22nd May, BBC4.

Three Thousand Years of Longing, Fri 24th May, Film4.
A Banquet (2021), Fri 24th May, Film4. Or...
The Girl in a Swing, Fri 24th May, London Live.

[Mr. Deltoid]

Finally, a rare chance to see Dennis Potter's Traitor. Been wishing to see that for years, but no off-air copies have been uploaded to the usual Internet channels (or if they have, they've been taken-down pretty f@cking quickly!).

[GaryC]

Finally, a rare chance to see Dennis Potter's Traitor. Been wishing to see that for years, but no off-air copies have been uploaded to the usual Internet channels (or if they have, they've been taken-down pretty f@cking quickly!).

Last on in 1987, during the BBC's Potter retrospective, and I missed it as well. It's preceded by the documentary on John Le Mesurier, It's All Been Rather Lovely.

Play for Today was on a roll back then - two in consecutive weeks, the first two of series two, contained the BAFTA winners for Best Actor and Best Actress - Le Mesurier for Traitor and the following week Patricia Hayes for Edna the Inebriate Woman.

[colinr0380]

Sorry to take things off track for a moment, but I caught a repeat screening of Luzzu over the weekend and wanted to throw up a few thoughts whilst it was still fresh in my mind:

Luzzu is an interesting if relentlessly bleak slice of miserable life neorealism. Its probably the closest I have seen a modern film come to capturing the Vittorio De Sica Bicycle Thieves-style atmosphere, although instead of someone increasingly desperately searching for a vehicle to be able to make a livelihood, in Luzzu it is about a man having to divest himself of the titular fishing boat and all of the associated generational ties in order to provide for his (somewhat unsympathetic) family.

The main theme of this film is about a sense of community and belonging being unwillingly replaced by mercenary rootlessness. Our main character, Jesmark is the latest in a long line of Maltese fisherman with an inherited old-style Luzzu wooden boat (with the mark of his baby footprint from the 90s on its paintwork), and we begin with a few really brief nice neo-realist Rossellini style scenes of the world of the fishermen, with the local Priest blessing the boats going out to sea and the groups of (ominously mostly older) men happily chatting away and telling their stories whilst Jesmark listens along as part of the group.

But the rather idyllic atmosphere is immediately under threat from two forces of the family and the globalist hegemony. Jesmark’s wife complains about what a waste of time fishing is as opposed to a ‘proper’ job, and takes their young baby son miles away to stay with their mother-in-law for the majority of the film. The mother-in-law herself is brusque and unsympathetic toward Jesmark (as if his job was over at the point of conception, especially since he is ‘just’ a fisherman) and mostly superficially focused on consumer goods (as in the baby shower where she belittles the father in front of everyone and once he storms off followed by the daughter to have a row, she herself happily begins opening the presents without them!). The daughter is entirely on her side, and we also get an inevitable ‘sickly baby needing expensive medicine’ subplot in there to force the financial issues to a head.

And the other factor is that through the first half of the film we see the other fisherman starting to drift away from the community, sell their boats and take a payout from the European Union as part of a globalist initiative to ‘transition’ fisherman away from making individual livings and into the more officially monitored jobs market. Which is made extra ironic by the need to find extra money forcing Jesmark into trying to find work for the ‘official’ fishing industry which is rife with corruption and corner cutting (as in passing off different cuts of fish as scallops) until it is literally about running illicit goods hidden under the fish into the island. Jesmark himself goes from an independent fisherman occasionally enjoying group chats on the beach with other fishermen as they fix their nets into working under the cover of night with a mercenary foreign migrant (who apparently lives on his boat as he is not allowed legally to set foot on land; as compared with Jesmark saying at one point that he has never left the Maltese island on which he was born and raised, and is trying to raise a family himself, on), all in English, and with the regular friendly refrain of “Fuck you” thrown towards him for a job well done. That’s globalism for you, I suppose!

Everything is building towards the inevitability of Jesmark taking up the offer himself in the final stages of the film, as the pittance payout (7,000 for not only giving up the fishing boat that has been in your family for generations, and your livelihood, but also ensuring it gets destroyed as part of the deal before payout), and the film is at its best in the final stages, as we get deeply into Jesmark’s mindset as after he has accepted the deal he returns to the beach and sees the now pointlessly fixed Luzzu that his fishermen friends have been helping him with restoring, only for in ironically unfortunate timing the Priest to come along and obliviously offer to bless the newly fixed but doomed boat! (Which itself resonates with the baptism of Jesmark’s son by the same obliviously happy Priest post-Luzzu destruction, which is such a bad omen that it suggests at best that the family itself is doomed, and at worst that they are actively cursed now!)

The absolute best scene of the film (and the one which elevates it into being worthy of comparison with those neo-realist films of the 40s and 50s) is the moment of taking the Luzzu boat to the scrapyard and we get that moment of after the brightly coloured and decorated with a face boat is put next to other boats of the same design, Jesmark leaves to finalise the deal and we as the audience are just left with the ‘faces’ of the boats being edited between, both as if these inanimate objects are in communication with each other in the last moments of their ‘lives’, and also showing the incredible utility of these beautifully decorated boats within the context of the scrapyard they now reside in. And then as Jesmark comes back into frame with his envelope of cash and walks away, we get the brutally crunching sound of the ‘execution’ occurring behind him.

And then the final section of the film occurs, of Jesmark wandering through his life detached from any sense of meaning to his role in society, even whilst everyone else is happy that he has buckled down and got a proper job. The superficiality of ‘being normal’ and doing what is expected whilst knowing that beyond the surface there is no deeper meaning to the action (as in the baptism scene) is the most heartbreaking thing. Jesmark has been deigned to be allowed to be a part of his baby son’s life at the end of the film, but only at the cost of giving up any ties to his bloodlines, any skills, or even just an object that he could pass down to his son as a legacy that could ground and connect him to his culture or environment. Anything that could make him feel a sense of belonging and worth as a man has been discarded (this film is really about how a job can at its best be more than a pay cheque, and wrecking that for someone and forcing them to become a serf just because it suits your regime better that way may be the ultimate sin of all), and we get to that heartbreaking final scene of Jesmark leaving his wife and son to walk home by themselves, as he forlornly wanders to the beachfront, watches the remaining fishermen chatting from a distance, steals a fishing rod and then (despite someone passing saying that “nothing is biting”) goes to the shore and tries casting off from there, as if he just wants to connect to a lost part of himself again.