Film of the Week
Unforgiven, Monday 23rd & Saturday 28th, 9pm, ITV4
Before Deadwood and before the Coen brothers’ True Grit, Clint Eastwood dragged the Western out of the mire of cheesy genre flick and embued it with the serious tone of historical drama. He dusts off the type of cowboy that he made famous – the steely-eyed, cold-hearted killer who plays by his own rules – for one more trip around the homestead, but this time he undercuts the very myths of the west that he helped to create. Eastwood, as gunslinger William Munny, Gene Hackman, as the cowardly sheriff and Richard Harris, as a ruthless mercenary, deflate the idea of the West as being a struggle between good and evil fought by rugged independent men and show it to be an unseemly and morally dubious slog in a quagmire. Towards the end of the film Eastwood emerges from the debris of another bloody shootout. It’s the fourth of July and he’s standing under the Amercian flag. He says, “If anyone shoots at me, I’ll kill them. If anyone shoots at me and hits me, I’ll kill them, all their family and anyone they’ve ever met.” – as succinct an expression of Ameican foreign policy as I’ve ever heard.
Guilty Pleasure
Iron Man, Monday 23rd & Sunday 29th, 9.00pm, Film4
The first (and so far, best) step in Marvel’s masterplan to conquor the world. They’ve now also made movies with Thor, the Hulk and Captain America in preparation for combining them all in the summer cinematic juggernaut that will be The Avengers (clumsily re-titled Avengers Assemble over here, just in case people show up expecting to see Rober Downey Jr in a bowler hat twirling a deadly umbrella whilst Scarlett Johansson kicks arse whilst sporting a skin tight leather outfit – don’t worry if you are expecting this, as you’ll only be half-disappointed anyway). Iron Man was the first film to show that a success could be forged from a lesser known comic book character. Indeed, not having to please a horde of pedantic, nitpicking fans proves to be a definite advantage as Iron Man has a lightness of touch missing from some of its contemporaries (I’m looking at you, Superman). And in Tony Stark, the boozy, arrogant yet ultimately charming arms dealer, Robert Downey Jr has found the role he was born to play. It’s hard to think of anyone else who would have been able to make such a potential douchebag of a character so likable.
The Classic
Get Carter, Thursday 26th 10.35pm & Sunday 29th 10pm, ITV4
A classic of the British gangster genre which, despite the distinct paucity of readily avaialble guns, has always managed to be darker, grittier and just plain nastier than its American cousin. Get Carter has been falsely lionised as an exercise in pre-PC cool by the Loaded generation, when, in fact, it’s a black-hearted revenge drama driven by a relentless Michael Caine. He is heedless of the choas he reeks for others, and eventually himself, as he returns to Newscastle to uncover the truth behind his brother’s death. His performance is so good, we don’t even mind that he happens to be a Geordie who sounds exactly like a Cockney, just because he’s lived in London for a bit. Mike Hodges sparing direction reminds us that the seventies were never really a decade of luridly coloured wallpaper and cheesy flares, just a beige-flavoured trudge through interminable grimness. It also slots neatly alongside other extreme British films, such as Peeping Tom, that were mauled in their own time by short-sighted, prudish, narrow-minded critics and which, only later, were given the recognition they so richly deserved.
Another Guilty Pleasure
Total Recall, Tuesday 24th 10pm & Friday 27th 12.30am, ITV2
It looks like the eighties is Hollywood’s next stop on its journey towards total and utter artisitic stagnation, as it starts to plunder the decade of Reagan, red braces and really bad hair for the next slew of unnecessary remakes. First out the door will be Total Recall – the original is a hokey but enjoyable sci-fi Mars-based romp that served as yet another action vehicle for Arnie when he was riding high on the success of Terminator. Based on a Philip K Dick story (also of Blade Runner, Minority Report etc, so you know the drill – the blurring of lines between reality and fantasy, the unreliability of memory, and so on). This was also the second of director Paul Verhoeven’s unofficial trilogy of blackly comic dystopian sci-fi satires – begun with the supreme Robocop and rounded off with the much underrated Starship Troopers. Robocop is also getting the remake treatment and that is a travesty, as it’s already a note perfect B-movie classic. The new one will probably CGI any of the charm away and completely miss the sly undertones of the original – you mark my words. But I actually think a remake of Total Recall might be worth a shot as, fun as the original is, Colin Farell may well make a better fist of a character that always seemed a bit of a stretch for Arnie’s rather simplistic virtues.