New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Sunday 03/27/11

7:15 PM Turner Classic Movies
Accident (1967 GB): Dirk Bogarde stars as a man in the middle of a mid-life crisis in this sterling ensemble piece directed by Joseph Losey and penned by Harold Pinter. Dirk plays Stephen, a married Oxford professor who foolishly falls for sultry Austrian student Anna (French actress Jacqueline Sassard). This, unsurprisingly, doesn’t sit well with either Stephen’s wife Rosemary (Vivien Merchant) or with Anna’s aristocratic toff fiancée William (Michael York), and bitter recriminations and cutting looks are soon the order of the day. As with all Pinter pieces, however, the dialogue is spare and to the point, so don’t expect any Burton/Taylor-style pyrotechnics. Also on hand: Stanley Baker as one of Bogarde’s academic colleagues and Delphine Seyrig (Daughters of Darkness) as another of Stephen’s lovers. What a naughty boy.

11:05 PM Starz
Micmacs (2010 FRA): Dany Boon stars in this surreal Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children) fantasy as Bazil, a French everyman who (in the film’s masterful opening sequence) loses his father to an anti-personnel mine in the Western Sahara. Years later, Dany’s late night video store shift (which seems to involve naught but eating candy and watching Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep) ends abruptly when a criminal’s stray bullet finds its way into his forehead. After a lengthy hospital sojourn in which a surgeon flips a coin to determine whether the bullet stays or goes (it stays), Bazil finds himself both homeless and unemployed. Tipped off to the existence of an encampment at a nearby scrap-yard, he is soon adopted by the commune’s quirky crew of outcasts: cook and den mother Mama Chow (Yolande Moreau), math whiz Calculator (Marie-Julie Baup), wordsmith Remington (Omar Sy), contortionist Elastic Girl (Julie Ferrier), human cannonball Buster (Dominique Pinon), professional thief and guillotine survivor Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle) and diminutive inventor Little Pierre (Michel Cremades). When Bazil discovers that the armaments companies responsible for both his father’s death and his own misfortune carry out their trade on opposite sides of a nearby street, he and his friends plot revenge. In best Topkapi fashion, they insinuate their way into the belly of the beast, turn the company chairmen (Andre Dussolier and Nicolas Marie) against each other, and give them a taste of the deadly gruel they’ve been serving for decades to their Middle Eastern and African customers.

Despite its deadly serious denouement, in which the horrors of "extraordinary rendition" are recreated to darkly comedic effect, Micmacs also has its share (though by no means an overabundance) of Amelie-style whimsy. (The crowd-pleasing Amelie was directed by Jeunet.) Jeunet is, as usual, a visually audacious director unafraid to acknowledge his influences: in addition to the excerpts from The Big Sleep and the use of numerous Max Steiner cues throughout the film’s score, there are numerous references to popular films of the past, including Marcel Carne’s Le jour se leve, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Buster Keaton’s The General, and Jacques Tati’s Play Time. Also airs 3/28 at 2:05 AM.

Continued:       1       2       3