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1:30 PM Sundance
This is England (2006 GB): My favoritest film of all 2007, Shane Meadow's study of working class adolescents in 1980s Britain makes an encore appearance on Sundance tonight. Young Thomas Turgoose stars as Shaun, a small-for-his-age kid trying to find a place for himself amidst the Nottingham yoof scene. He befriends some of the local (multi-racial) skinheads, gets a crop and braces, and hangs out in the neighbourhood caff. Things change for the worse, however, when hard man Combo (Stephen Graham) comes home after doing a stretch in HM Prisons, flexing his street cred and dragging his easily manipulated pals to meetings of the racist National Front. Meadows avoids the predictable good/bad, black/white paradigms, and though Combo is a deeply unpleasant fellow, he still has enough shades of grey to make you sympathize with him — to a point. The film's Falklands War coda doesn't completely gel with what has gone before, but this is still a very powerful, superbly acted coming-of-age drama. Here's hoping Meadows' latest, Somers Town, gets a big screen American release soon - so far, it's only made it to a couple of Stateside film fests.

8:00 PM Sundance
My Winnipeg (2007 CAN): Cinema gadfly Guy Maddin takes the semi-autobiographical route in My Winnipeg, his most recent theatrical release. This being Maddin, however, things are apparently far from normal in backwoods Manitoba, where a soap opera entitled Ledge Man - featuring a man contemplating suicide in every episode - has just been cancelled after a good 50 year run. But don't worry: there's plenty of hockey, ice-skating, and horse-head eating, as well as Detour-star Ann Savage's first screen appearance in 20 years! Also airs 7/23 at 2:30 AM and 7/26 at 1:00 PM.

Thursday 07/23/09

1:05 AM HBO Signature
El Bano del Papa (2007 URU): I must plead ignorance regarding this film, but c'mon...you know you want to see a Uruguayan movie! It's a drama about Pope John Paul II's South American tour in 1988, and scooped up almost a dozen awards at various and sundry Latin film festivals. Apparently, the title translates into English as "The Pope's Toilet", which doesn't make it sound all that enticing, so I think I'll keep calling it El Bano del Papa.

5:00 PM Sundance
Comedy of Power: (2006 FRA): Japan has Takeshi Miike, Spain has Jesus Franco, and France has Claude Chabrol. I'm talking about filmmakers who just keep churning the stuff out, ad infinitum and sometimes ad nauseam. Sundance is offering a Chabrol double bill tonight, featuring two of the busy director's most recent features. Chabrol is revered for his crime films of the ‘70s, many of which have earned recent US home video releases, but his 21st century fare doesn't have a particularly good reputation. Comedy of Power, however, is a reasonably sprightly affair, and features Isabelle Huppert as a fearless magistrate out to nail some white collar miscreants, including shameless CEO Humeau (Francois Berland). Success comes at a price, however: her marriage starts to suffer and company goons threaten to let the air out of her tires. And there's a mole involved, which is more than you can say for most French films! Comedy of Power also airs 7/24 at 1:00 AM, and is followed at 7:00 PM by Chabrol's very next film, Girl Cut in Two, about a TV weather woman (Ludivine Sagnier) being wooed by two very different men.

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