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COMEDY
THE PRODUCERS (15) 88 min (Optimum DVD retail)
LG " Mel Brooks' classic and surely — with full respect to High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles — his greatest film still stands up brilliantly forty years on. For those unfamiliar with its plot, we meet a rapacious Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) and a timid accountant (Gene Wilder) who hatch a plan to make a fortune from an unredeemable flop. Things don't go to plan, and in Springtime for Hit/er they find an unexpected hit, which promises to ruin them.
In the package which accompanies this release. there's also a fascinating documentary on the making of the film, with interviews with Brooks, Wilder, Kenneth Mars. and almost all of the surviving cast members and crew. (Steve Cramer)
CRIME/DRAMA TROUBLE IN MIND
(15) 108min
(Nouveaux Pictures DVD retail) mo
* O ‘A little bit of everybody belongs in hell' say Kris Kristofferson's former cop. a man who's recently served time for killing a mobster. Then there is Keith Carradine's man on the make who changes his image from country boy to androgynous gangster, and whose recklessness is evident when he says ‘I just
want some goddamn money. I don‘t care who gives it to me.’ His partner replies, ‘I was afraid you'd say that.‘ There is also Genevieve Bmddasa Kristofferson’s blast from the past. and Lori
; Singer as Carradine‘s
long-suffering girlfriend
: 5 who is left quite literally
holding the baby. Can the good. the bad and the ugly survive in Rain
City?
Alan Mrs Parker and
the Vicious Circle
Rudolph's futuristic cum nostalgic film noir can best be summed up by
1 his claim that he hoped ; to ‘celebrate the artifice ‘ of the Surface of things‘.
It is the sort of film where nothing should be taken seriously except the emotional sincerity of the
characters. The film still works in some small
truths. Extras include revealing interviews with Rudolph and Carradine. (Tony McKibbin)
DRAMA
THE LION IN WINTER
(12) 129min (Optimum DVD retail)
Still looking good 40 years on, this bawdy,
witty chamber piece confined within a
medieval French f chateau revolves around -
' King Henry ll's
. obsession with choosing an heir to his throne, and the efforts
of his scheming wife
Eleanor of Aquitaine and their three loveless sons to usurp the old man's
rule. Peter O’Toole was nominated for an Oscar for his blustery performance as the irascible monarch. Katherine Hepburn got her third playing a part
. she was herself a
descendant of, and Welshmen Anthony
' Hopkins and Timothy
, Dalton made their film
debuts. Anthony Harvey.
previously Stanley
30 THE LIST 21 Aug-4 Sep 2008
Kubrick's editor. directed from a screenplay by James Goldman, brother of William, who won an Oscar for adapting his own play. John Barry provided the Oscar- winning score. and the marvellous widescreen. deep-focus photography is by the veteran Douglas Slocombe. who went on to shoot the original Indiana Jones trilogy. No extras. (Miles Fielder)
DRAMA/ROMANCE UNDER THE BOMBS
(1 5) 90min
(Artificial Eye DVD retail) 0...
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This piece from former documentary maker Philippe Aractingi speaks loudly of his own artistic origins in reportage. In it, a mother returns to Lebanon at the end of the Lebanese-Israeli war of 2006 in order to find her son, who has disappeared amidst the violent anarchy in the South. A pragmatic, black marketeering Christian taxi driver agrees. for a heavy fee. to undertake a search of the bombed out territOry with her. After that, this piece becomes a powerful semi- documentary road movie travelling through the ruins of the countryside.
Shot on location within a few days of the end of the war. using its real victims as extras, this is as powerful a piece of anti-war film making as you're likely to see this year, bound together by an uncertain kind of love story. The film doesn't really take a position between Lebanon and Israel, nor Christian and Shi'ite, yet it's capacity to awe with the sheer scale of the waste of this event will leave you thinking long and hard. Well worth the watch. (Steve Cramer)
DRAMA PIERREPOINT ITV1, Mon 25 Aug, 9pm 0000
Every now and again, the general public, as represented by the reactionary tabloid press, will rise up and demand a debate on the return of capital punishment. Fortunately, the process has never gone any further than some screeching headlines and perhaps, with the showing of films such as Pierrepoint, the calls will never come to much. Following in the ghoulish footsteps of his uncle and father, Albert Pierrepoint became the most well- known hangman in British history. The Usain Bolt of his day, Pierrepoint took special pride in breaking the record for the time taken between entering the prisoner’s cell and having them dangling through the trapdoor.
In his two-decade long career, he put to death Nazi war criminals, Ruth Ellis, Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans, but his feelings towards state- sanctioned murder seemed to turn when he took an old pal to the gallows for a crime of passion. Timothy Spall is as splendid as ever as a man slowly seeing the error of his chosen career while Juliet Stevenson excels as his arch wife forced to remain cold to his calling and subsequently has little humanity left to comfort him when his belief systems break down. Required watching for the Daily Mail set. (Brian Donaldson)
COMEDY
THE WRONG DOOR
8803, Thu 28 Aug, 10.30pm 0
There's only one thing worse than a really bad sketch show. And that's a really bad sketch show that has had absolutely loads of money thrown at it. So much dosh has been set aside for the special effects in The Wrong Door that no one seems to have stopped to think for a single minute that perhaps some resources should have been ploughed into that traditional element of the sketch show format: the writing.
So. we have set-ups such as a genetic experiment that goes horriny awry to create the World's Most Annoying Creature. a 50ft robot terrorising London in order to locate its keys. and a woman who starts
dating a dinosaur. What's most upsetting is seeing the talented likes of Matt Berry popping up in such dross. The Wrong Door is another bad move by the once infallible BBCB.
(Brian Donaldson)
DOCUMENTARY SCULPTURE DIARIES Channel 4, Sun 31 Aug, 7pm 0000
Dead Ringers once made a big impersonating deal of the rivalry between TV historians Simon Schama and David Starkey. Maybe one day we'll see small screen art guys Waldemar Januszczak and Matthew Collings doing some doppelganger bitching at one another. but for now we get this compelling series on sculpture from Mr Januszczak.
The aim of his three-
part documentary series is simple: to show that sculpture is not, as one eminent gallery owner told him. the thing you fall over when you Step back to look at the paintings. For Januszczak. it‘s the exact opposite and he sets Out to prove that sculpture is the single most important genre in visual art. The opening episode has him focussing on how women have been portrayed from the Venus de Milo to Marc Quinn's controversial Trafalgar Square statue of the pregnant Alison Lapper via African art. Most of the show's exhibits are things of beauty until he touches on the sinister work of surrealist Hans Bellmer whose construction of sexualised dolls may have tickled The Beatles but clearly sends shudders down Waldo's back. (Brian Donaldson)