Your Night In: Every movie on Melbourne TV tonight rated
It’s one of the best underdog movies of all-time, and while it may be screening for the 1234th time on free-to-air it’s hard to go past The Shawshank Redemption for tonight’s viewing options. But if Morgan Freeman’s classic isn’t to your liking, here’s what else you should be watching.
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THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
****
8.30pm Ch. 7
The 1234th free-to-air screening of every living sportsperson’s favourite underdog movie of all-time. In footy terms, poor old Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) should never have been selected for this gruelling away fixture at Shawshank State Penitentiary in the first place. Early doors, there is every likelihood this dubiously convicted draft pick won’t even be staying alive until halftime. Thank heavens, then, for the intercession of wily defensive coach Red Redding (Morgan Freeman), who has a few set plays up his sleeve that are sure to get up the nose of the League Warden and other corrupt club officials. All roads (and tunnels) lead to Andy lining up for an impossible shot on goal deep into time-on.
I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK & LARRY
*
8.30pm GO!
Sometimes things just are what they are. And this is, quite simply, an irredeemably rotten movie. Adam Sandler and Kevin James play haplessly hetero firemen forced to pretend they’re hopelessly, homosexually hot for each other so they can speed up a monster superannuation payout. As we already know from Paul Hogan’s Strange Bedfellows, the concept of burly blokes letting their wrists go limp for fun and profit is mighty hard to laugh at. Avoid.
CAROL
****
7:30pm WORLD MOVIES
First comes the falling in love. Then comes the fallout. So it goes in Carol, an exquisitely composed and deeply felt romantic drama that will speak to anyone who has ever lost their heart, or lost their way living in fear of the consequences. Cate Blanchett excels as always in the title role, a 1950s wife and mother unable to suppress an instant and intense same-sex attraction to a young aspiring photographer (Rooney Mara). The mere fact a relationship will take hold (and then, take over) the lives of two women may seem rather ho-hum by 2016 standards. However, writer-director Todd Haynes (working from the seminal novel The Price of Salt, penned by best-selling author Patricia Highsmith under a pseudonym over 60 years ago) keeps his film anchored by the heavy moral suppression that underpinned American life in the 1950s. Achingly precise (and unexpectedly poignant) performances from Blanchett and Mara keeps the whole thing well away from soap-opera territory.
MARY SHELLEY
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9:40pm WORLD MOVIES
“I was brought into this world to be abandoned,” states Mary Shelley at one of many ponderously inane junctures in the movie which bears her name. And wouldn’t you just know it? This blousy, drowsy biopic sleepwalks right past this fascinating young woman, leaving her high and dry in our imaginations as little more than a pouty doom magnet. Having packed quite a lot of living, loving and literary brilliance into her short prime, Miss Shelley (played blankly by a miscast Elle Fanning) deserved much better than the drab treatment meted out to her here. This is someone who cranked out one of the most sophisticated, influential and enduring novels of the 19th century in Frankenstein. She started work on this masterpiece as a teenager! During a tempestuous affair with rock-star poet of the early 1800s, Percy Shelley! Yet all of this (and so much more, including the tragic lack of recognition that came Mary’s way) is reduced to a dour collection of dim lowlights from a vivid life story.
THE EAST
***1/2
8:30PM VICELAND
Fascinating drama set in the shadowy world of ecoterrorism. Brit Marling stars as a corporate spy who infiltrates an anarchist group that regularly takes drastic action against companies they believe are harming the public. The film is at its strongest tracking the extreme lines of thought that go into mounting an organised attack on commercial interests. Definitely worth tracking down if you’re after something with a little substance. Co-stars Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page, Patricia Clarkson.
THREE MOVIE PICKS FOR STREAMING OR RENTAL
THE AFTERMATH
**1/2
STREAM via FOXTEL or RENT
This one goes out to those who can’t get enough of Keira Knightley dressed to the period-era nines, slinking about well-appointed mansions while stealing well-rehearsed glances at well-built males. In a rickety romantic drama that often goes comically close to collapsing, Knightley plays Rachel, a British woman who has just moved into lavish new digs in the German city of Hamburg. The year is 1946, and Rachel’s army officer husband Lewis (Jason Clarke) has commandeered the swank premises while he works on finetuning the ongoing Allied occupation of the region. Fatefully, Lewis allows the former resident of his new home to go on living there. Stefan (Alexander Skarsgard) just happens to be the hunkiest widower in Hamburg, a fact not lost on Rachel whenever her spouse ain’t around. Bedroom eyelids will be batted. Shirts slowly unbuttoned. Longing looks will be deployed through windows and into fireplaces alike. Based on the novel by Rhidian Brook.
LORO (MA15+)
**1/2
SBS ON DEMAND
A sumptuous, yet ideologically blurry portrait of the infamous Italian political leader Silvio Berlusconi (played by veteran actor Toni Servillo). Dodgy financial deals, steamy sex parties and a flagrant abuse of the political process have all been conducted by Berlusconi in full view of an Italy either powerless to stop him, or kind of tickled by his moxie for getting away with it (almost) all of the time. The movie is a lavish, lewd and casually caustic depiction of Berlusconi’s love of sleazy good times. These include a high-rotation roster of willing (and/or well-paid) young women, a gilt-edged garbage dump of gauche rich-fella trappings, and some rather puzzling adventures with plastic surgery.
WALKABOUT (M)
****1/2
FOXTEL, AMAZON
One of the most haunting and unworldly films ever shot on Australian soil extracted a performance of an extraordinarily rare calibre from a then-unknown Indigenous dancer. The great David Gulpilil was still a teenager when he debuted before the camera in 1971, quietly exuding a grace, strength and sorrow that has the viewer glued to his every move. Gulpilil plays a young Indigenous man who stumbles upon two British children lost in the outback after a horrifying tragedy separated them from their father. A towering work, painted from a palette of feelings and instincts words cannot do justice to.
Originally published as Your Night In: Every movie on Melbourne TV tonight rated