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Tonight at 00.40 a.m., Film4 are premiering the Icelandic family comic-drama Rams.

Tomorrow Never Comes, Thu 8th June, London Live.

The Raid 2, Fri 9th June, Film4.

Saturn 3, Sat 10th June, London Live.

Punk in London and Rude Boy, both Mon 12th June, London Live.

On the Game, late Thu 15th June, London Live.

Power Play, Sat 17th June, London Live.

The Boxer From Shantung and The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter are getting repeats on Film4 (17th and 16th respectively).

Only one notable new film next week but its the premiere of A Touch Of Sin, on Film4 at 00.55 a.m. the early hours of Tuesday 20th June.

And there is an interesting rarity getting a repeat: In Name Only from 1939 with Cary Grant and Carole Lombard, showing on BBC2 at 6.25 a.m. on Saturday 17th June. (According to the trivia section on imdb this was apparently going to be a re-teaming between Grant and Katharine Hepburn after Bringing Up Baby but Hepburn was replaced with Lombard here after the relative failure of Bringing Up Baby and Hepburn getting the notorious 'box office poison' label led her to leave RKO)

(There's also a repeat of Leos Carax's films Boy Meets Girl, the Mr X documentary on the director and The Night Is Young on Film4 from around 1 a.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings)

The Disappearance (Stuart Cooper), Thu 22nd June, London Live. They never did screen This Sporting Life.

Red Army, Sun 25th June, Film4.

Jubilee, late Sun 25th June, London Live. I was going to pose the question of the last Jarman film to be on TV then remembered that War Requiem was on this channel already and on BBC2!

Reggae in a Babylon, Mon 26th June, London Live.

jlnight wrote:Red Army, Sun 25th June, 11 a.m., Film4.

Film4 are also quickly cheekily repeating this documentary about Russian hockey players on Tuesday 27th June as the second half of a late night double bill following Goon!

The Horror channel is also showing Retreat at 9 p.m. on Saturday 24th June, with Cillian Murphy and Thandie Newton as a couple menaced on an isolated island by Jamie Bell. Unless there are some really dramatic twists I'm not sure that it will be able to escape the inevitable comparisons to Dead Calm that the trailer brings to mind, but it sounds interesting.

Jamie Bell never strikes me as remotely menacing.

Interestingly, Sir David Frost was a producer on this film.

Hannie Caulder, starts Sat 1st July, London Live.

Mahler, Sun 2nd July, London Live.

They actually did show Jubilee on Monday, after the Wolfgang Buld films British Rock: Ready for the 80s and Women in Rock.

The Goob, Sun 9th July, BBC2.

A Bigger Splash, the Jack Hazan film on David Hockney, Mon 10th July, London Live.

Reggae in (a) Babylon is apparently on tonight but more interestingly on Monday night London Live showed something called Who Killed Bill? The Sex Pistols in the News, which was a feature length compilation of archive interviews (seemingly sourced from ITN's archives) where after a while you notice something - there was no Sex Pistols music whatsoever! It was like the opposite of Temple's The Filth and the Fury in approach and execution. There must be a sub-genre of these type of docs that don't quite deliver what you might expect!

A couple of interesting films getting their first showing this evening - BBC4 has the fictional adaptation of the Thor Heyerdahl expedition Kon-Tiki at 9 p.m., and the Horror Channel also at 9 p.m. are screening the 'found footage with the twist that it is set in a radioactive wasteland' Chernobyl Diaries. I wrote a bit about it in the horror thread a while back (with spoilers) and really enjoyed it. Just go in expecting a more interestingly set Paranormal Activity film than something in the tradition of Stalker, as that could only lead to disappointment! Although 'Stalker featuring the young and beautiful kids of The OC' could be a promising pitch for the film! (Also the found footage thing keeps doing strange perspective jumps that could be a bit disorienting. Its less that one of the characters is filming everything and more that the camera seems to take the point of view of another unacknowledged character in the group at times, or moves outside to be the spooky antagonist p.o.v. That's either a problem or an interesting development depending on your feelings about the whole faux veracity of the found footage subgenre and its constraints on narrative!)

Film4 have a few premieres next week: Moomins On The Riviera on Sunday 2nd July at 3.35 p.m., Monsters: Dark Continent at 9 p.m. on Monday 3rd July (the original Monsters is on Sunday evening. I have a sneaky suspicion from the trailer that this sequel is some sort of political allegory. The monsters = ISIS? :-k ), and the film I'm most interested in this week Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story at 11.20 p.m. on Tuesday 4th July (directed by Michael Almereyda).

One of the best programmes in BBC4's recent Japan season has (likely briefly) turned up on YouTube: the three episodes of Handmade In Japan which focus on the making of a samurai sword, a kimono, and Mingei pottery.

Phantasm, starts Sat 15th July, Horror.

Inception, Sat 15th July, ITV.

Wonderwall, Mon 17th July, London Live.

I had been wondering for a while when Inception would turn up (seven years is a long time for a big film to not turn up somewhere) and was expecting it to do so over the last Christmas period. But saving it for around the time Dunkirk gets released (and on a channel which will likely run lots of adverts for Dunkirk in the commerical breaks!) makes a lot of sense!

It's a strangely sci-fi week in the run up to Inception too. ITV2 is premiering Gravity at 7.10 p.m. on Sunday 9th July. Although this is vying with Film4's premiere at exactly the same time of the found footage sci-fi film Europa Report at 7.15 p.m.! (with an interesting cast including Anamaria Marinca. Embeth Davidtz and the late Michael Nyqvist). Even BBC2 gets in on the act by doing another screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey on the evening of Saturday 8th July (Europa Report is also getting repeated on Friday 14th July too). Is it just because school holidays have started, so all of these films are getting shown together, or is there some sort of big space-related event going on next week to tie all the sci-fi in with?

There are a couple of other things: at 9 p.m. on Saturday 8th July BBC4 are showing the French/Belgium crime thriller Mea Culpa. And at 9 p.m. on Sunday 9th July BBC2 are premiering Foxcatcher.

Also, that Talking Pictures TV channel are apparently showing the fantastic 1932 version of The Most Dangerous Game at 8 p.m. on Monday 10th July! Its the film that so many action and horror films have taken their cues from over the decades, even when they have not been outright remaking its central premise, but it still towers above them all! And of course it was sort of a dry run, smaller scaled story for the cast and crew before they moved on to the much more elaborate King Kong!

House of Whipcord and then The Beast in the Cellar, both Thu 27th July, London Live.

The Comeback, Fri 28th July, London Live.

Did you see Inception on ITV? They barely made it to 15 minutes before the first ad break and you were spot on; Dunkirk was the first thing advertised!

Yes, but the advert breaks were not too annoying, aside from emphasising that there's no really good part to cut away from (they usually cut DiCaprio off in the middle of one of his many expository sentences!). I think they were trying to fit a few advert breaks into the early section of the film before the intercutting action became relentless in the second half, and the last thirty to forty minutes were adless (it helps that the film ran until 12.30 in the morning, so maybe the ad rate drops off after a certain time in the evening). There was another ad for Dunkirk later on but I was surprised that it wasn't more relentlessly plugged: one of the middle commercial breaks didn't mention Dunkirk at all!

My main annoyance though was that I have noticed that the main ITV and Channel 4 channels have begun putting channel ident bugs in the corner of the screen all the time now. I suppose its inevitable for a digital world with hundreds of channels that even the 'main' stations have to constantly impose an awareness of their brand onto the viewer, but its still annoying. At least the bugs don't twirl around or fade in and out of the screen distractingly! And it would be a disappointing development if either channel still showed obscure or rare films! (I haven't watched ITV1 in years, the last time being in 2012 when they premiered Inland Empire(!) of all things, so they could have been doing this for a long time!) But if something like that turns up on Film4 I'll be really grumpy!

On Inception itself I still love the hotel room fight scene being the violent equivalent of Fred Astaire's transcendent Royal Wedding dance number! (I say this a lot about the Hong Kong kung fu films, but violent action thrillers and musical numbers have a lot in common in general. It's all about positioning, flow and interaction with a partner! And choreography for the camera) And it hit home to me more on this viewing the way that Cobb begs Mal to come to her senses and stay on the 'right' level of reality during her suicide scene, only to have the limbo version of Mal (who's most explicitly a part of Cobb's psyche of anyone) use the same phrasing to beg him to stay down there with her!

Next week BBC2 is premiering Cronenberg's Maps To The Stars at 10 p.m. on Sunday 23rd July (and repeating Cosmopolis at 11.45 p.m. on Saturday 22nd July).

And as part of their crime film season Film4 have the first screening of a film apparently taking the French perspective on the French Connection story, just called The Connection, at 11.10 p.m. on Monday 24th July

These are upcoming television series, but Channel 4 has been running teaser trailers for Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, which is a co-production with Amazon Video and looks to be the sci-fi anthology series to replace the gap Black Mirror left in their schedule (looking at the wiki page for the ten episodes it seems to have quite a cast list over what look to be standalone episodes, including Bryan Cranston who also co-produces, and it also lists the stories that each episode is based on, although I'm not familiar enough with Philip K. Dick to be able to place them).

And there's a new four part drama by Peter Kosminsky coming up at some point and set inside ISIS, The State.

Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, Sat 29th July, BBC2. Beware, this is showing under the 'Imagine' banner.

Pride, then Lilting, both Sun 30th July, BBC2.

jlnight wrote:Beware, this is showing under the 'Imagine' banner.

So it'll be more about Alan Yentob looking at the pictures!

jlnight wrote:Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, Sat 29th July, BBC2. Beware, this is showing under the 'Imagine' banner.

I'll be interested to see if BBC2 can show this uncut. The film contains at least two of the images which had to be removed from the walls of the Hayward Gallery when I went round their Mapplethorpe exhibition in the 1990s. Presumably not illegal now, because the BBFC passed the film without any cuts at 18, but we'll see...or not see, as the case may be.

The second series of Jane Campion's Top of the Lake series is starting at 9 p.m. tomorrow on BBC2.

Lots of films next week: At 9 p.m. on Monday 31st July Film4's crime season is continuing with the first showing of Child 44. At 11.10 p.m. on Tuesday 1st August Film4 is screening the recent Force Majeure film.

ITV2 is having a good run of new Hollywood films recently. After the recent premiere of Gravity, they have the premiere of This Is The End at 12.25 a.m. in the early hours of Monday 31st July. And The Hangover Part II at 9 p.m. on Friday 4th August. Apparently from their trailer for this 'Summer season' of films Pacific Rim is going to turn up at some point during August too.

With These Hands, Sat 5th August, London Live.

This Sporting Life, Sun 6th August, London Live.

Oooh, now this is good:
Permissive, late Sat 12th August, London Live.

Was the Mapplethorpe documentary uncut? There were quite a few images that might be considered objectionable but the thing I'll remember was his apparent direction of a Natrel TV ad. Kind of like when Ken Loach did those adverts for Nestle and McDonald's!

jlnight wrote:Was the Mapplethorpe documentary uncut? There were quite a few images that might be considered objectionable but the thing I'll remember was his apparent direction of a Natrel TV ad. Kind of like when Ken Loach did those adverts for Nestle and McDonald's!

I've recorded it but haven't and won't have a chance to watch it for a while. I saw it on release (well, Curzon Home Cinema) last year.

All I can say is that when I went to the Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (London) in 1996, three pictures were unable to be displayed on the walls and were removed from the exhibition catalogue, for legal reasons. "Rosie" was removed entirely. Two of the three were kept in a small display case in the exhibition, and they're both shown in this documentary - one depicting fisting, the other urolagnia. Presumably the BBFC took legal advice before passing these images, so there is no legal reason to suppress them. Showing them on free-to-air TV is possibly another matter, but we'll see.

Incidentally, "Rosie" has been seen on television, in the documentary Damned in the USA, shown on Channel 4 as part of its Banned Season in 1991.