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Friday 12/12/08

1:30 AM Sundance
Only Human (2004 ESP): Jewish families are as funny in Spain as they are in the United States. That's the lesson taught by this periodically amusing comedy from the filmmaking husband and wife team of Dominic Harari and Teresa Pelegri, who share writing and directing credits for Only Human. It's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 21st century style, as daughter Leni (Marian Aguilera) brings home Palestinian hubby Rafi (the mighty Guillermo Toledo, fresh off El Crimen Ferpecto) to meet the folks. The film treads treacherous ground, but its screenplay thankfully never descends into lecture mode, and the end result is watchable if hardly revelatory.

8:05 AM Encore Mystery
Firestarter (1984 USA): Most Stephen King screen adaptations suck. This one, somewhat surprisingly, does not. Little Drew Barrymore stars as the titular tyro pyro, a terrifying tot who can rub two brain cells together and start an unholy inferno. David Keith and my old school chum Heather Locklear play her parents, who, not too surprisingly, consider her behaviour well out of order. The outstanding supporting cast includes Freddie Jones, Moses Gunn, Art Carney, George C. Scott, Antonio Fargas, Louise Fletcher, and Martin Sheen. I wish Firestarter would show up in widescreen sometime, but as it hasn't shown up recently in ANY format, we'll give it a mulligan this time.

5:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
The Holly and the Ivy (1953 GB): Ten years ago this Christmas, we got our first satellite dish. The first thing I recorded from it was The Tomb of Ligeia. The second was the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol — but I botched the job and only got half the film. Never mind, I thought — TCM probably airs it every holiday season. I'll get it next year. And sure enough, almost every year since, TCM has aired the 1938 version, or 1970's Scrooge, or A Christmas Story — but the Sim Christmas Carol has never returned. Not once. This is a very roundabout way of getting to The Holly and the Ivy, another British holiday classic from the same period that has, of late, made only infrequent appearances on American television. A tale of family reunion at the most wonderful time of the year, it stars Ralph Richardson as a Norfolk pastor and Celia Johnson, Margaret Leighton, and Denholm Elliott as his offspring. The drama is refreshingly complex and reasonably realistic, at least by the standards of the time, and it's great that TCM is giving us an opportunity to watch a film that used to pop up occasionally on PBS but rarely elsewhere. It's decent compensation for my annual disappointment, but I'm still going to write a Christmas letter to Santa Claus. Or Robert Osborne.

11:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
Beyond the Fog (1972 GB): More widely known as Tower of Evil, this low budget British thriller makes its widescreen television debut this evening in the TCM Underground. The film features Bryant Haliday (Devil Doll, Curse of the Voodoo) as a private dick hired to solve the mystery of The Horror of Snape Island, which involves the gory death of Robin Askwith at the end of a lance. (Anyone familiar with the collected works of Mr. Askwith will attest to the justness of this punishment.) If breasts and blood are your thing, Beyond the Fog is your film: it's a very minor genre entry, however, and unlikely to change anyone's mind regarding Haliday's utter incompetence in his chosen profession.

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