Your Night In: Every movie on Melbourne TV tonight rated
Settle in for a night of great viewing, with films like The Devil Wears Prada, 300: Rise of an Empire and The Gunman on TV screens tonight.
Leigh Paatsch
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300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE
**
8:30 pm 7MATE
Duck and cover, all you ancient Greeks! Them peeved Persians are back, and they’re lookin’ to kick some serious Athens. There will be burly men. There will be biceps. There will be barrels of baby oil applied to those biceps. And of course - sorry, no prizes for guessing - there will be blood. Billions of litres of the red stuff, in fact, spurting out of veins in hi-def-slo-mo, just the way 300 fans like it. Though a surprising amount of action transpires on the high seas, the same amount of he-men are being hacked to bits as before. Never all that boring. Never all that coherent. Just the way 300 fans like it. Stars Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Headey.
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
***1/2
8:30 PM 7FLIX
This one goes out to anyone suffering the whims of a tyrannical employer. For you, this will be so much more than a fun, fashion-conscious comedy. It will be therapy. For the rest of us, it’s all about the brilliant performance of Meryl Streep, who plays a psychotically driven fashion-mag editor with the delightful hobby of tormenting her staff to breaking point. Anne Hathaway (Princess Diaries) co-stars as the independent-minded ingenue who goes to water under the heat-seeking gaze of her spooky boss.
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
****
10:50 PM 7FLIX
You might know the set-up inside-out - comically dysfunctional family shoehorns itself into cramped vehicle for road trip to destination Discovering Yourself - but rarely has it been done in such a lively and entertaining fashion. Once this unruly mob arrive at a hideous pre-teen beauty pageant, the slow-burning mix of light comedy and poignant social drama ignites spectacularly. The most unlikely (and effective) feelgood movie you might ever see. Stars Toni Colette, Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear.
THE SENTINEL
***
7:30 PM GO!
There is a mole inside the Secret Service linked to assassination attempt on the US President, and an agent having an affair with the First Lady is the prime suspect. An enjoyably frenzied pulp thriller, not unlike the scripts for an entire season of TV’s 24 being fed through a shredder over at The West Wing. Stars Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, Eva Longoria.
THE GUNMAN
**1/2
9:45 PM GO!
Everyone’s gotta take a job to pay the bills once in a while in today’s movie game. Even a decorated practitioner of the acting crafts like Oscar-winning method man Sean Penn. Once you get over the novelty of seeing him in the lead of a pulpy, globe-trotting action affair, you can’t help but hope the film will suddenly lift its game to match the best of Penn’s past endeavours. This never comes to pass, but the star does keep some good company (co-stars include Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone and Idris Elba) while striding confidently across some dodgy shoot-’em-up terrain. Directed by Pierre Morel (Taken).
OCEAN’S 8
**1/2
8:45 PM CH. 10
A markedly average all-female reboot of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise meekly fizzles when it should intensely sizzle. For a production harnessing a star power of considerable luminosity - from Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett through to Anne Hathaway, Rihanna and a roving pack of cameo-ing couture queens - it is disappointing to see how little a glow comes off happenings here. Bullock stars as Debbie Ocean, the brains of the new movie’s jewel-snatching outfit. Lou (Blanchett) is her second-in-command, and all-round cynical sounding board. All roads lead to New York’s fabled Met Gala, where these law-breakin’ ladies will be looking to lift a $150 million necklace off the throat of a trend-setting celeb (Hathaway). The heist itself is functionally satisfying, but not all that exciting. The stakes just never seem very high.
GAUGIN
*
9:30 PM WORLD MOVIES
The makers of this asleep-at-the-easel portrait of famed French post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin insincerely hope you know nothing of his years island-hopping and bed-hopping around Polynesia. If so, you might be dazzled enough to assume this fanciful yarn is a legit biopic. However, with a few Gauguin facts at your recall - particularly regarding his self-confessed predilection for (very) young teenage girls - you’ll see this dubious fantasy as the balderdash it undoubtedly is. A sketchy screenplay hazily focuses on Gauguin’s initial foray to Tahiti in the early 1890s, where after abandoning his struggling family back in Paris, he hooks up with a local lass who soon becomes his wife and muse. The movie delicately fudges her age to be around the 18-year-old mark, whereas Gauguin’s own memoirs state she was 13. Such shonky rewriting of history - simply to bolster seductive notions of the artist as some kind of intrepid adventurer of the creative spirit - amounts to nothing more than a cynical confidence trick. Starring Vincent Cassel.
THREE MOVIE PICKS FOR STREAMING OR RENTAL
MY DINNER WITH HERVE (M)
****
FOXTEL, BINGE
This fine HBO-produced biopic of the late Herve Villechaize has been a passion project for Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage for several years. He has certainly left nothing on the table in terms of throwing his full range of talents at portraying the mercurial Villechaize, best remembered here in Australia for his years fronting the cheesy TV series Fantasy Island. Life was anything but cheesy away from the cameras for French-born Villechaize, whose diminutive height of 1.2 metres (or 3 foot 11 inches for you old-timers out there) was more a curse than a blessing in a world that treated “little people” as a big joke. The movie is framed around the last press interview Villechaize gave before his tragic death at age 50 in 1993. Jamie Dornan (the male lead of the Fifty Shades flicks) plays the writer who hears out the angst-ridden, excess-prone Villechaize over the space of one colourful, action-packed week in Los Angeles.
BLOODSHOT (M)
**1/2
rent via FOXTEL STORE, GOOGLE, ITUNES, YOUTUBE MOVIES
Weird to think a highly respected thespian of Vin Diesel’s calibre has never graced a superhero movie until now. Vinny D ain’t exactly making up for lost time here. In fact, he barely makes any effort at all. Which is not to say Mr Diesel’s low-to-no energy levels hurt the chances of a rather bonkers, always watchable action movie. Vin plays Ray Garrison, a decorated Marine who starts the movie getting assassinated while on a fancy European holiday with the missus. She also was dispatched to an early grave, something which becomes a real sore point for Ray when he is jump-started back to life by a top-secret team of scientists. They’ve pumped Ray full of creepy-crawly nano-tech devices which can repairs the human body as soon as you blow it to smithereens. Now an indestructible killing machine, Ray spends time between official assignments looking for whoever murdered him and the wife back in the day. A middling burst of mindless mayhem for those wanting such a thing. Co-stars Guy Pearce, Elza Gonzalez.
AMERICAN ANIMALS
***1/2
SBS ON DEMAND
Heist movies typically leave no incriminating tracks whatsoever. We get bedazzled by the moving parts of a complicated job going like clockwork. The notion of the law being broken is always forgiven and often forgotten. American Animals is not your typical heist movie The ‘big job’ here has all the efficiency of a broken watch. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, inviting a different level of tension into the mix altogether. This is the true(ish) story of a bunch of Kentucky college kids who hatched a plan to lift a few million bucks’ worth of priceless books from a local library. These fresh-faced perps are not rocket scientists, it is fair to say. In fact, it is a miracle they even got their (im)perfect crime off the launchpad at all. The movie is structured as an odd, yet effective blend of staged dramatic re-enactments mixed with interviews with the older-but-no-wiser participants in the scheme. A fine movie which would also make for a ripping multi-part podcast. Stars Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters.