Being fat in Hollywood is unforgivable. The celluloid dream-machine has fixed stereotypes it likes to propagate: skinny, beautiful women falling in love with tall hunks sporting chiselled features. If you don’t look like that, you can’t be cast.
Sure, there are exceptions: Tom Cruise is short, but he allegedly performs on a box to give him extra height; and Kathy Bates is overweight, but she’s usually cast as the foil, never the lead.
When Kirstie Alley’s weight ballooned, her sitcom career choked. But now she is taking the bull by the horns with Fat Actress (Tuesday: M-Net, 22:30), sending up her own image as well as Hollywood’s obsession with weight and beauty. Taking its cue from reality comedies such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, Alley acts a version of herself, seeking love and castings.
Eschewing other Hollywood stereotypes is the daunting Monster’s Ball (Friday: SABC3, 21:00). For the first time since Losing Isaiah in 1995, the film sees Halle Berry stepping into a role she’s shown reluctance to play: a working-class woman of limited intelligence or refinement, who speaks with a dialect and vocabulary that invokes cruel stereotypes. In the dreadful comedy BAPS and the wicked satire Bulworth, she offered spoofing variations on that character type, but only here does she stare it down. Victorious in her challenge, she won a number of best-actress awards, including an Oscar. Billy Bob Thornton also excels in the role of a racist prison warden.
Equally disturbing is the classic anti-war drama The Deer Hunter (Monday: e.tv, 22:15). Although there are disputes over the authenticity of the Russian-roulette scenes, these are a powerful metaphor for warfare and its atmosphere of sudden, random violence. As with Monster’s Ball, the film also invokes a profoundly ambiguous message.
While ambiguity is sometimes criticised as being a weak approach to film, when used well it creates tantalising drama — and terror. Take The Blair Witch Project (Wednesday: e.tv, 00:30), which, through its publicity build-up and mockumentary style, generated much of its chill through the ambiguity of whether it was actually true or not.
On a more uplifting note is the documentary about the remarkable survival of two mountain climbers, Touching the Void (Monday: M-Net, 20:30). Using a mix of interview footage and dramatic re-enactments of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’s ordeal in the Peruvian Andes, director Kevin Macdonald creates an absorbing film.
Other commendable documentaries this week include Citizen King (Tuesday: SABC2, 21:30), about Martin Luther King, and Back from the Killing Fields (Thursday: SABC2, 21:00), about the minefields of Africa.
Finally, if Steve Martin’s revival of the classic physical-comedy detective series currently on circuit doesn’t quite do it for you, enjoy the original The Pink Panther (Saturday: SABC3, 22:00), with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.