Coming to a Small Screen Near You

@DJBogTrotter’s Films on TV Picks

Pick of the Week: The Godfather Part II, Fri 22nd June 21:00, Film4

The best one sentence film review I ever read was for The Godfather Part III. It simply said, “Lightning didn’t strike three times.” It sums up all you need to know about that particular movie (it’s not fit to stand beside the first two) but also puts into sharp relief  just how extraordinary it was that the first two films were as good as they were. Coppola’s examination of Michael Corleone’s abandonment of his ideals and descent into corruption continues with a darker and even more chilling film than the original. Coupled with Michael’s journey to amoral mob magnate is the story of how Michael’s father, Vito, got started in America and began to sow the seeds for his family’s ultimate fall. Robert De Niro completely inhabits the role of the young Marlon Brando as he begins a white hot streak of leading roles that would go on to include Taxi Driver, Deer Hunter and peak with his turn as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. Coppola initially planned to have these two threads of the story as separate halves of the film and it was only in post-production that the decision was made to intertwine them and thus heighten the tragedy as the twin tales of violence, greed and betrayal spiral around one another. Gordon Willis’s cinematography pushes the limits of just how gloomy a shot can be before you’re just left staring at a black screen. It perfectly reflects the murky world that these characters inhabit.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Sat 23rd June 09:30 & 14:20, Dave

How long can you deadpan your way through an entire film that basically consists of just one joke? If you’re a young Steve Martin on top of his game, then ‘for the full length of the movie’ is the correct answer. Using, what were for the early eighties, groundbreaking special effects, Martin has been cut and pasted into a variety of classic Hollywood film noirs. The Big Sleep, The Killers, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Notorious are amongst the twenty or so films stitched together for this pitch perfect spoof. Martin and director Carl Reiner realise that as long as the men are all hard bitten cynics and all the woman scheming vamps, then it doesn’t really matter if, like in The Big Sleep, the plot is an unintelligible labyrinth of dead ends and red herrings. Martin pitches his dumb guy persona (established on Saturday Night Live and The Jerk) into the role of the Bogartesque private detective Rigby Reardon and lovingly sends up all the world weary clichés of the genre. A bit of a one-off (although Griff Rhys Jones famously nicked the idea for a series of lager adverts) and another chance to remind ourselves of how funny Steve Martin can be.

Guilty Pleasure: Die Hard, Sat 23rd June 22:00, E4

I’ve always preferred my heroes to be just regular people who are managing the best they can in difficult circumstances (think Indiana Jones, Dirty Harry or Ripley from the Alien films) not pre-ordained and destined for greatness (think Luke Skywalker, Neo from The Matrix or pretty much any superhero) and has there ever been such a regular guy stuck in such difficult circumstances as John McClane trapped in a forty storey skyscraper with a bunch of expertly-trained, well-armed and highly motivated terrorists/bank robbers? It’s easy to forget now, but with this role, Bruce Willis rescued a waning film career (his post-Moonlighting box office glow was fading quickly) and drastically altered his image from roguish romcom leading man to all-out action hero. And the action in Die Hard has been rarely bettered. A witty script keeps quickly sketched characters from sliding into cliché and the cinematography by Jan De Bont (who went on to direct Speed, another classic of the genre) heightens the thrills and set a new bar in how visceral action movies could be. And even though he plays a German, Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber open the floodgates for British actors to secure regular employment as the de facto baddie in Hollywood over the next few decades. Any other nation that was so regularly portrayed as evil and immoral as the British are would be up in arms about xenophobia and racism but we just see it as a job opportunity. Well done us.

What I’ll Be Watching: Attack The Block, Sun 24th June 22:00, Channel 4

Not much to say on this one as I haven’t seen it yet, but the buzz around Joe (of ‘Adam & Joe’) Cornish’s directorial debut was very positive. It concerns the efforts of a gang of council flat kids trying to defend their turf from an alien invasion. And don’t let Cornish’s whacky output with Adam Buxton fool you into thinking it’ll be a weirdly sweet tale of kids and monsters – it’s meant to be proper scary.