Film of the Week
Dead Man’s Shoes, Sunday 13th May, 11.20pm, Film Four
Shane Meadows’ nightmarish examination of small-town violence. Paddy Considine stars a soldier returning to his midlands hometown to begin a campaign of revenge on a group of local bully’s who did something (it’s not immediately clear what) to his younger brother. What begins as series of unnerving scare tactics soon descends into a something altogether more gruesome. Considine’s sense of brooding has never been put to better use and ex-boxer Gary Stretch provides able support as the leader of the bully’s whose initial bravado soon disintegrates as they realise what they’re up against. As ever, Meadows expertly pinpoints the insecurities and cowardice that underpin male machismo and, because there’s little of his dark humour to lighten the proceedings, it’s an even more gruelling watch than usual. But well worth the effort if you’ve got the stomach for it.
The Classic
Lawrence Of Arabia, Saturday 12th May, 12.40pm, Five USAProbably one of those films that, over the years, you’ve seen all of without having ever actually sat down and watched from beginning to end. Time to rectify that if you’ve got a quiet Saturday afternoon available. Make sure you’ve gone to the toilet beforehand, taken the phone off the hook and maybe even turned the heating up a bit just to give those glorious desert shots a little bit more edge. I won’t bore you with plot details or try to write anything meaningful about a film that’s already inspired a thousand articles. I’ll just add that, as an editor myself, the famous cut from the burning match to a desert sun is my favourite in cinema history (and yes, I am sad enough to have a favourite cut and I don’t care who knows it). And I find that my enjoyment of the exhilarating ‘Raid on Aqaba’ scene is heightened by remembering that, in order to be able to film the scene, Peter O’Toole got absolutely pissed and was then strapped on to his camel. It is quite impossible to imagine anyone in Hollywood attempting to make a film like this today.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Friday 11th May, 11.55pm, Channel 4
Sacha Baron Cohen pushes prankster comedy to breaking point and beyond. As Borat, a moronic TV presenter from Kazakhstan, Cohen is hilariously inept and shockingly un-PC, but, more importantly, he understands that other people, in the presence of such an imbecile, will drop their guards and expose their own stupidity and prejudice. Unlike most prankster shows which consist mainly of Oxbridge twats sneering at people they deem to be beneath them, Cohen actually has something to say, as he exposes the thin veneer of civility that barely covers most people’s writhing collections of phobias, fears and, in some cases, just plain racist convictions. Oh, and it also has the funniest naked male wrestling scene ever committed to celluloid.
The Truman Show, Sunday 13th May, 7.05pm, Film Four
A fabulous satire on reality TV, media and the age of the video camera. Jim Carrey thankfully keeps is rubber face safely locked away and plays it pretty straight as Truman Burbank, the man who is unaware that his entire life is a reality show. Although the film neatly skewers the attempts of TV to fake reality, like all great films, it goes much beyond that and poses questions about how we are all implicit in the construction of the reality of our own lives. Personally, I like to read it as one man’s journey from religion to atheism as he slowly begins to question the most fundamental truths about his existence and (SPOILER ALERT) finally confronts the show’s creator, a man called Christof who speaks to him as a disembodied voice in the sky. For Truman. it comes down to a choice between a comforting lie where he is, quite literally, the centre of the universe and everything has been created to give his life meaning or the cold, harsh truth that he lives in a universe that is, at best, indifferent to his presence