Andrew Worsdale
It’s a premium week for movies on television, especially on Friday with Thelma and Louise on SABC3 on Friday March 6 at 9pm. This exhilarating thriller is Ridley Scott’s best movie since Blade Runner. It stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, who set out on a holiday trip. A drunken dance- floor flirtation at a roadside bar turns nasty and they end up as fugitives. The two leads are dazzling and the script dishes out a funky, sassy dose of avuncular feminism.
On the Waterfront, screened on M-Net at 10.45pm, is Elia Kazan’s ground-breaking macho masterpiece that has Marlon Brando caught up in a battle between dockworkers and corrupt unions. It was a multiple Oscar- winner that features Brando in his densest and most fully realised role as an informer who is transformed – directorially – into a Christ-like icon. Electrifying stuff.
Saturday March 7 finds Michael Apted’s astute thriller Blink on SABC2 at 9.15pm. Madeleine Stowe is a blind musician whose sight is restored. She finds herself experiencing random flashbacks about a murder.
On SABC3 at 10.30pm catch Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which features Charlie Sheen as a young infantryman in Vietnam dealing with bastard superiors like Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe.
Sunday March 8 has Multiplicity on M-Net at 8pm, a likeable comedy with Michael Keaton as a stressed-out husband who clones himself into four selves in order to cope with his marriage.
Easy viewing, compared with Roman Polanski’s classic Chinatown, that follows at 10pm. Possibly the best thriller of the last three decades, it features Jack Nicholson as a private detective who, while investigating a routine infidelity case, is drawn into a scandal about corruption involving water. It is one of my personal top ten flicks of all time.
M-Net has another gem on Monday March 9 with Burnt by the Sun at 10pm. Nikita Mikhalkhov’s movie focuses on one summer’s day in the life of a war hero, played by the director, who is assassinated by an old friend and ex-lover of his wife.
For the rest of the week M-Net dominates with the hip Things to Do in Denver when You’re Dead on Tuesday at 8.35pm, an acclaimed film that I thought was trite, Mr Wonderful on Wednesday March 10 at 10.30pm – a feel-good romantic comedy, Oliver Stone’s blustering Nixon on Thursday March 11 at 8pm, followed by Second Best at 11.30pm with William Hurt as a shy schoolteacher who wishes to adopt a young boy.
SABC1 screens Throw Momma from the Train at 10.15pm. Danny De Vito’s directorial debut, it has him conspiring to murder the wife of his college teacher (played by Billy Crystal) in exchange for his teacher knocking off his intolerable mother. It’s uniquely black, camp and funky by far the best work diminutive De Vito has produced yet.