Have you ever wondered if your house’s air vents contain secret cameras or if your friends are paid actors reciting word-perfect scripts — that your life is actually a television show?
Welcome to Jim Carrey’s world in The Truman Show (Saturday: SABC3, 19:30). Director Peter Weir creates the ultimate TV celebrity-victim in this mockumentary comedy drama. Truman Burbank (Carrey) is unaware that his life is a 24/7 TV series in which every moment of his existence is captured by concealed cameras and telecast to a giant global audience. While commenting on rampant media consumerism, the movie also subtly evokes that brain-in-the-vat existentialism that is in all of us: What if, like in The Matrix, we’re living in a pod and all life is a hallucination?
Or Plato’s cave-dream: that we’re watching shadows on a wall, unable to turn around and see who the projectionist is? While the absurd animation The Triplets of Belleville (Sunday: M-Net, 11:00) is told through the tender eyes of an old lady, the images are often eerily disturbing — especially the scene with cyclists riding a video projection of a road, which invokes Plato’s cave.
Raymond Carver’s take on all this is one of minimalist nihilism. As a result, a pervading sense of unavoidable melancholy underpins Robert Altman’s adaptations of Carver’s stories in Short Cuts (Thursday: e.tv, 23:00). The stories, set in the suburban underbelly of Los Angeles, wind around each other with tenuous threads holding the tapestry together. As usual, Altman has assembled a superb cast.
The underbelly of suburbia is also evoked in One Hour Photo (Thursday: M-Net, 22:45). Robin Williams plays a man who works at a photo-development store who becomes obsessed with an ordinary family through the photos they develop.
Director Sam Peckinpah, a master of exploring the underbelly of social conventions, surprisingly made only one war film: Cross of Iron (Sunday: SABC1, 23:00). It is an intense and belligerent film based on the book by Willi Heinrich about a disillusioned German sergeant during World War II. Although flawed, Peckinpah’s touch makes the film a worthwhile watch.
Besides war, another common social convention to explore in films and pop culture is sexuality. But this is thanks to Alfred Kinsey who in 1948 published Sexual Behavior and the Human Male, after a survey that remains the most comprehensive sexual enquiry to date. Kinsey (Sunday: M-Net, 11:00) offers compelling insight into this pioneer’s life and studies.
The world has come a long way since the conservative times described in Kinsey and Vera Drake (Monday: M-Net, 20:30). Directed by Mike Leigh, Vera Drake seems on the surface to break from his tradition, offering an ennobling portrait of a saintly woman who performs abortions. However, Imelda Staunton’s masterful performance makes it clear that, for all her charity, Vera is a naive woman unsuited for the negative consequences of her good intentions.
Also hailing from Britain is Last Orders (Friday: SABC3, 22:45), based on Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning novel about lifelong friends coming to terms with one of their mate’s death. A strong cast includes Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Tom Courtenay