A good week for setting the record button, putting the feet up and catching some movies on the small screen, says Richard Lutz.
Let’s kick off with today (Sunday) and I have to repeat that last year’s best film Winter’s Bone (Sun; Sky Arts1, 22.00 and other times) is the one to catch. It’s about the illegal speed factories in worn out poverty plagued Appalachia and one young woman’s fight to stay honest. Jennifer Lawrence is the star- she has now captured a lead role in the soon-to-open The Hunger Games in multi-things near you. Winter’s Bone was just too bleak to Oscar awards, just too good.
For lighter fare today sit back and have a chuckle with Homer and the gang in The Simpsons Movie (Sun;Ch4,17.40) Laughs a minute but they don’t come close to that other US comic satire South Park which gets edgier and more honest each season. Still, fun to watch.
Sunday really is fertile movie ground it seems because the Dolly Parton/Jane Fonda comic vehicle, Nine to Five launches (Sun; Film4, 21.00) Great performances about office girls who kidnap their tyrannical boss. And a gold plated title song too from La Dolly.
Panic in the Streets is a gripping noir film from 1950. (Mon; film4, 14.40). Richard Widmark plays a New Orleans cop who has 48 hours to find a killer with a plague. An obvious metaphor for the Red Scare, it has a young Jack Palance as the inevitable bad guy and Zero Mostel as his sappy sidekick.
Stick around for a Stanley Kubrick classic, Clockwork Orange (Mon; ITV4 22.00) which was taken off the UK screens by the director Stanley Kubrick because of the outrage it caused. It is violent surreal vision of a Britain gone mad.
A different vision of the world comes up the next day with Days of Heaven (Tues, TCM 6.35 am) Some say this Terrance Mallick film is one of the most beautiful ever shot as Richard Gere bums his way round the Texan landscape taking in big skies, unending farmland and long shots of big scenery. Mallick is the best post war director in America.
Jaws (Fri,ITV12.40am, really Sat) rounds things off and starts the weekend right by ensuring you don’t go swimming this summer.
One final thing: try to ignore Thunder over Arizona (Mon, More4, 11.55), maybe one of the worst cowboy films ever made. It stars Skip Homeier (who?) and seems to be on every day on every cable/sat station going. I saw it…and barely lived.
