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Friday 12/19/08

9:00 PM IFC
Face of Another (1966 JAP): A Japanese take on the Eyes Without A Face trope, The Face of Another stars legendary Tatsuya Nakadai (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) as Okuyama, a laboratory worker horribly disfigured by a chemical explosion. After undergoing therapy, he's fitted with a mask to disguise his hideous features — but his new face also disguises his personality in strange and unpleasant ways. It's based on a Kobo Abe novel, was director Hiroshi Teshigahara's follow-up project to Woman In the Dunes, and features a Toru Takemitsu score, so you know it's good. Also airs 12/20 at midnight.

11:30 PM Turner Classic Movies
The Road to Ruin (1934 USA): Most film fans are familiar with some of the hysterical anti-drug films of the 1930s (Reefer Madness, Assassin of Youth, etc.), but here's one that's not quite so well known. Produced by Willis Kent, The Road to Ruin is decidedly exploitative in nature, but comes by its attitude honestly: co-director Dorothy Davenport had lost husband Wallace Reid to heroin in 1923, and spent much of the rest of her life railing against substance abuse. In this roadshow epic, Helen Foster stars as sweet young innocent Ann Dixon, who falls in with the wrong crowd and ends up smoking gage, drinking booze, and making mad passionate love with all around louse Tommy (Glen Boles). It all leads to disaster: skinny-dipping, strip craps, a dose of the clap, and (of course) pregnancy and a backstreet abortion. She shoulda moved to Bucharest. It's followed at 1:00 AM on Saturday morning by the not nearly so sleazy Escort Girl (1941), in which a crusading DA tries to put the kibosh on the Hollywood Escort Bureau.

Sunday 12/21/08

4:15 AM Sundance
Blind Flight (2003 GB): Ian Hart (Days and the Hours, Backbeat) stars in this sadly overlooked drama set in civil war-era Lebanon. He plays Brian Keenan, an Irish teacher kidnapped and held for ransom by a Beirut militia for almost five years in the company of English journalist John McCarthy (Linus Roache). As similar as cheese and chalk, the protagonists slowly come to terms with both their captors and each other, and the film plays like a less hysterical Midnight Express. Based on the real life experiences of Keenan and McCarthy, Blind Flight never received an American theatrical release but comes strongly recommended for Hart's performance in particular, which won him the Best Actor honors at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival.

9:00 PM Sundance
Cinderella (2006 ROK): Most definitely NOT to be confused with the Disney animated classic of the same name, this Cinderella is a Korean thriller about plastic surgery gone bad. (Facial modifications are this week's back-up theme, apparently.) Do Ji-won stars as "body sculptor" Yoon-Hee, who makes a living remaking and remodeling the physiogs of her daughter's friends. Alas, her good work begins to come undone when a lank-haired ghost shows up demanding the return of her original face, and Yoon-Hee's customers begin to experience buyer's remorse in the most gruesome way imaginable. It's a pretty average Asian thriller with some good photography, but it probably makes more sense to Korean viewers more in tune with the cultural phenomenon it addresses.

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