Upcoming Movies on TV (UK)

[colinr0380]

Just a couple of premieres next week. jlnight has noted the only fixed premiere with 80 For Brady at 11:20 p.m. on Film4 on Thursday 2nd. Unfortunately I only really know Tom Brady from his Family Guy appearance, but it appears that its in the same vein of Brady apparently being a hot sexual stud that particularly appeals to the older ladies(?)

The other two premieres of the week are on BBC1 and are going to be affected by whatever goes on with the football (the BBC and ITV sort of share coverage so if one channel shows a match, then the other does not - ITV has placeholders of the first two Downton Abbey films in case they have no football). It seems that Guy Ritchie is going to be the winner of the filmmaker for most UK television premieres in a single year for 2026, as only a couple of weeks after 2020's The Gentlemen 2024's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is showing on BBC1 at 11 p.m. on Sunday 28th.

The big premiere of the week is the other film affected by football with Blink Twice showing on BBC1 at 10:40 p.m. on Thursday 2nd (i.e. clashing with 80 For Brady)
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Repeat-wise jlnight has noted the big news which is Film4 getting hold of John Carpenter's Big Trouble In Little China and showing it at 9 p.m. on Monday 29th. (followed by a repeat of the Kurt Russell starring Bone Tomahawk at 11 p.m.)

There are two Empire States showing next week, presumably in the run up to the 250th anniversary of something happening in America, with 1987's Empire State showing on Film4 at 1:35 a.m. in the early hours of 4th July (directed by Nighthawks/Strip Jack Naked) director Ron Peck); and the 2013 Empire State showing on the "Legend Xtra" channel at 9 p.m. on 27th June.

The other notable repeat on the "Legend Xtra" channel is a surprisingly rare showing of the Mel Gibson The Patriot film, showing at 11:55 p.m. on Wednesday 1st.

[jlnight]

Storm Over the Nile, Sat 4th Jul, Talking Pictures.
The Wild Ride (1960), late Sat 4th Jul, Talking Pictures.

Ferda la Fourmi (1942 short), Sun 5th Jul, Talking Pictures.
Blade Runner, Sun 5th Jul, BBC2.
The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968), Sun 5th Jul, Talking Pictures.

In Glorious Devon (Baim short), Mon 6th Jul, Talking Pictures.
Army Days (1956 short), Mon 6th Jul, Talking Pictures.

Red Rooms (2023), Wed 8th Jul, Film4.

[colinr0380]

Only two premieres next week. The first showing of the relationship horror film between two obviously terrible people Anyone But You is on BBC1 on Saturday 4th July, which is going to be affected by whether the channel shows football by either staring at 10:20 p.m. (if no football) or 12:30 a.m. in the early hours of Sunday 5th (if football is shown).

And as jlnight has noted, the big premiere of the week is the uplifting French film about people learning to emotionally and physically connect with each other over the internet, Red Rooms showing on Film4 at 11:10 p.m. on Wednesday 8th. That 'Red Room' concept of live streamed snuff sites has been around a while, so it must be part of that trend, although the big test will be how it compares to Olivier Assayas' demonlover, which tangentially dealt with the same themes.
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Repeat-wise, the big event of the week is BBC4 showing the 2017 full album performance of the Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar collaboration, Passages, at 8:50 p.m. on Sunday 5th.

The 1943 Orson Welles starring Jane Eyre is showing on BBC2 at 9:25 a.m. on Sunday 5th. And there is a rare showing of Danny DeVito's Death To Smoochy on Film4 at 1:25 a.m. in the early hours of Saturday 11th.

The "Legend Xtra" channel is showing The Patriot again at 9 p.m. on 4th July, which I guess is appropriate!

[colinr0380]

I saw Zoe Kravitz's directorial debut, 'Blink Twice' yesterday, starring Channing Tatum and a strong cast of 'what happened to...' like Geena Davis, Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, etc. The female lead is Naomi Ackie, a British actress, who was in the Whitney Houston biopic. And Adria Arjona, from Hit Man, plays a supporting role too. Blink Twice is a very odd and unsettling psychological drama and satire (not that there are many laughs) about men's psychological and physical control over women, and is no doubt inspired by MeToo and the Epstein affair. Brief spoilers if you want them

Spoiler

Tatum plays a tech bro, who after a scandal, goes through the usual public mea culpa and retreats to a private island for therapy, but invites other women along for the experience....

I wouldn't say it's a wholly successfully executed film - but you leave the cinema feeling worse than when you went in, so it must've worked, right?

I had a weird experience with Blink Twice, as it showed a day earlier than scheduled for some reason, probably because of the football throwing the schedules into disarray, with it airing on Wednesday night instead of Thursday. I only watched to about the 50 minute mark before having to turn in for the night, and kind of hated the film based on that, with the fun times the characters were having seeming almost sarcastically parodical early on. Luckily it was repeated again on the intended evening a little earlier and on BBC3 instead, and I reluctantly watched the rest, which I ended up really enjoying!

Its sort of a film about making sure that the mind-wiping drugs that you use to roofie the coterie of women on your private island into submission every night does not have an antidote to them, because you will suffer the consequences of great vengeance and furious female anger if they don't! Much as a totally impermeable blanket of silence regarding certain real life events was essential because even a glimmer of doubt brings the whole house of cards down immediately and irreversibly. There is no in between or ability to transform the situation into a more palatable one once the truth is out (or the memories regained), because it just looks even more like you are just going through the apology tour motions once you have been caught out, rather than being at all contrite (which is the reason for that moment of Channing Tatum screaming "I'm Sorry! I'm Sorry! I'm Sorry!" at the main character with bitterness and anger more for having been caught out for his hideous actions than for anything else)

It is rather interesting that both the sex and the violence are used as the transgressions. Once the (violent) sex begins each night, that is the turning point from the men on the island playing cutesy games with their food to actually eating it. Perhaps even more condemnatory of the men on the island isn't just the acts they commit whilst knowing that they can get away with it, but the utter contempt they show by coming back for more over and over again. Returning their victims back to a 'despoiled' state of innocence pre-violation for the thrill of being able to do it all over again the next evening. Brings a whole new meaning to the concepts of 'sustainability' or 'recycling', I suppose!

I had The Stepford Wives come to mind a little, and Blink Twice maybe shows an interesting development of the Stepford Wives concept, in the sense that aren't robotic simulacras of women rather passée when real flesh and blood women can be abused without consequence instead? But I also felt the film really came to life when it inevitably had to show its hand of being an modern rape-revenge thriller in the same vein as I Spit On Your Grave!

And it may have been going through all of the Jean Rollin vampire films that made me think this, but I kind of loved the final evening's dinner scene where the other women beyond our main character also start to regain their memories of previous iterations of the same evening (signified by a nosebleed) and we get these bleeding nosed women in ethereal white dresses turning like zombies and beginning to attack the men that they were just dancing with only moments before. That moment of the worm turning was very cathartic and made the film work, I think. Especially because this is one film where, after years of it cropping up in random moments of Hollywood films, you actually can have someone brutally smashing another person's head to a pulp with a marble chess table in the manner of Irreversible!

(It is also surprisingly blackly comically funny in that final ‘revenge’ section too, including a Friday The 13th Part IV-style corkscrew to the hand; and what must have been a knowing allusion to the phallic sculpture in A Clockwork Orange being used to knock someone out!)

There is a lot of barely, diaphanously veiled allusions to the Epstein situation. The island setting in particular, but also the early scenes of our naive, starry-eyed heroines being groomed at a swanky event they were actually supposed to be catering, which is interestingly getting into that idea of these women who ended up being abused having willingly put themselves into the lion's den through wanting to be close to fame and power. That is getting into ideas of complicity that were also explored in The Assistant, which was something I found kept pushing me away from the characters in that first half of the film, because whilst they did not deserve to be in the situation they found themselves in, that first half is building up a lot of hubris that our main character does not deserve to have to pay for having, but becomes a more sympathetic character by doing so, if that makes any sense. More than in the main character’s arc (and we will get into that in a moment), I felt that this theme worked better particularly in the moments of the ethnically native staff on the island just looking on with a detached and dispassionate amusement at whatever antics were occurring, whether it be laughing at the naive, lambs to the slaughter women in the first half (though the old lady does give the snake venom antidote); or the libidinous men getting their much deserved comeuppance in the second half. They don’t care either way. Although, much like the groundskeepers left tending Epstein’s abandoned island now, they may need to find other employment unless another rich millionaire buys what is left of the property!

I also agree with thirtyframesasecond’s previous comment that this has an astonishing supporting cast underpinning it, all of these well known 80s and 90s actors turning up as representatives of elite establishment baddies! Geena Davis is particularly good here as a Ghislaine Maxwell stand-in of a Personal Assistant who is constantly on edge with a fake Stepford Wife smile and doing all of the messy behind the scenes tasks of keeping the situation running, whilst steadily drink and drugging herself more and more to get through what she has to do. She is portrayed as just as subservient to the Channing Tatum character as all of the other women, though as the connection between the ‘Real World’ and the Island for the Guests who come to partake of the illicit activities, she has to remain aware and fully complicit rather than having the get out clause of having her memory of events wiped from her. I really like the way that her character gets used which leads into the darkly ironic abrupt ending that I could see upsetting quite a few people who might just want an easy I Spit On Your Grave-style conclusion to the story:

Spoiler

Basically the Geena Davis Stacy character gets replaced by our main character Frida. Frida both stabs Stacy, symbolically taking out the Ghislaine Maxwell fixer figure, and then in the ending she saves the Channing Tatum Slater character from the firery inferno.

We then get the amusing conclusion of Slater and Frida back in the ‘real world’ at another swanky party (that takes place in the same ‘white room’ as the opening party did), where the power dynamics have shifted and instead of the Geena Davis character being nervous and jittery, instead Slater is now the nervous and jittery one in the presence of the self-assured Frida controlling him!

There is a little bit of a get out clause that Frida may just be doing this to get revenge on a wider circle of figures such as the Kyle Maclachlan character who is the representative of the elite figure who Frida meets at the party at the opening; then assaults her on the island when he is told that she will not remember it; then who is surprised and upset to see Frida out of captivity and back in the real world again at the party at the end, with Frida making sure that he knows that she remembers him!

But what makes that ending work so well is that it is ambiguous enough to suggest that Frida is not after revenge at all. After all, she was ambitious and driven from the very start. What better way to make up for having been assaulted and her friend murdered than to have the man who facilitated her assault, not dead, but instead fully under her thumb as the White Male figurehead of an empire she now controls. But controls not to bring down, but to run it for herself. The suggestion the film leaves us with is not that the events that occurred on the Island were heinous violating acts, but more that Ghislaine Maxwell’s worst quality may have been that she was just too unambitious!

So that is kind of an audacious, bordering on bad taste, finale that is almost up there with the one from Strip Nude For Your Killer! (or a bit like the situation from the end of that other Katherine Ross starring film that came after The Stepford Wives, The Legacy!)

Also, in the end the film condemns everyone for being so addicted to substances of all forms that land them in these situations in the first place, or at least make them easier to subdue! When even the Elite are addicted to vaping or downing handfuls of Smartie-like drugs because even their excesses are not enough for them to enjoy on its own, that is perhaps the most cutting comment on the vapidity of the culture underpinning the entire film!