East is East (Saturday: SABC3, 21:30) is a perceptive, sometimes broad, examination of the multiracial family structure and its unsteady nature. The British film is about a fish-and-chip shop owner in 1971 who expects his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, see themselves as British and start to reject their father’s rules on dress, food, religion and living in general.
The film features an excellent performance by Om Puri in the lead role as the brittle, hypocritical but endearing patriarch. This anchors a truthful, occasionally piercing, dissection of the film’s themes — themes that have recently regained topicality with the fuss around religious tolerance.
On the other extreme of the religious scale is Angela’s Ashes (Friday: SABC3, 22:30). Assiduously capturing the filth and squalor of impoverished family life in Catholic Ireland, the film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir by Frank McCourt. It is powerful and downbeat, although the stark adaptation unfortunately often fails to depict the wit and humour of McCourt’s descriptions.
Sam Peckinpah’s classic Straw Dogs (Thursday: M-Net, 22:15) examines the instinctual capacity for violence in humans. To avoid the Vietnam-era social chaos in the United States, a mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) and his wife (Susan George) move to an isolated British town, but their presence provokes antagonism among the village’s men.
Another examination of violence is Collateral (Wednesday: M-Net: 22:35). A taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) is coerced into driving a hitman (Tom Cruise) around as he makes five hits. It is a negotatiation in which the driver discovers that the hitman’s practical nihilism offers him a way out of the rut in which he finds himself.
Director Brian de Palma’s cult classic Carlito’s Way (Sunday: e.tv, 20:00) is a sequel to his controversially violent Scarface. But, while Scarface starred Al Pacino as a character whose driving ambition leads him to sink deeper and deeper into the underworld, in Carlito’s Way he plays a world-weary character seeking only to get out.
Finally, in keeping with the excitement surrounding the Academy Awards this week M-Net brings us four-times Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby (Sunday: 20:00). Hilary Swank underwent a serious training schedule, gaining about 9kg of muscle for her role. Violence has to be authentic — so authentic in fact that she did not tell director Clint Eastwood or the producers about a bacterial infection from a blister she developed during training, even though it threatened to hospitalise her for three weeks, as she didn’t believe it was in character.