Navigating the contemporary world leaves a lot of people baffled. Luddites will decry the techno-philia, slackers the capitalism, intellectuals the lack of reading and the common man the daily struggle. It all comes down to the same level of frustration. Whether the world is really a worse place than in previous times is open to debate there will always be naysayers and, as many say, history repeats itself.
Examining these nuances through an entertaining mix of intellectual musings, humour and bawdy sexual repartee is Canadian director Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions (Thursday: M-Net, 22:15). Reuniting the characters from his earlier film, The Decline of the American Empire, the intellectual friends reunite around Rémy Girard’s death bed and continue their nattering from the previous movie.
Two children of the group are included as new characters — Rémy’s son, a stock-broker living in capitalist splendour, and another’s daughter, a young junkie, immobilised by the pressures of capitalism. The two contrast their elders’ cerebral nostalgia.
The capitalist rat race has often emphasised the zombie quality of today’s worker bees. Following last week’s Dawn of the Dead, this week catch Shaun of the Dead (Friday: M-Net, 21:15). Described as a ‘romantic zombie comedy”, the movie amazingly lives up to each of those genres in a fully respectable and amusing way. One of the best scenes is when Shaun, still unaware that zombies have taken over the world, assumes that the undead are just rude commuters on their way to work.
For a more visceral look at modern society, an inside into the drug trade is provided by director Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (Saturday: e.tv, 22:35). With issue-oriented storytelling, Soderbergh works hard for the epic to resonate on a personal level. He’s helped by his stable of performers: Michael Douglas as a conservative Ohio judge, Catharine Zeta-Jones transforms from a pampered housewife to hard-edged schemer, Erika Christensen is an addict-daughter, Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman are buddy-cops, and Benicio del Toro is a cunning, straight-arrow cop.
Also on the more mainstream block-buster tip is I, Robot (Sunday: M-Net, 20:00). Action funny man Will Smith surprisingly makes this bastardised interpretation of Isaac Asimov’s tale enjoyable with double-gun action, jumping robots and witty quips driving the pace.
For romance, Shakespeare’s timeless romantic comedy Much Ado about Nothing (Friday: SABC3, 22:30) is a charming reinterpretation by writer-director-star Kenneth Branagh. The story is wonderfully updated to include color-blind casting (Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves play brothers) and real-life pairings (Branagh and co-star Emma Thompson were married at the time).
For more lyrical, image-driven romance than the talky wit of Shakespeare, catch Days of Heaven (Wednesday: e.tv, 22:15), about the tragic love triangle between a migrant worker couple and a wealthy landowner. The tale is pieced together through brief, cryptic incidents and a child’s jaded, distant voice-over. The expressive sequences of nature’s radiance and brutality allude to the emotions brewing beneath the adults’ cool surfaces.