DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
We're currently watching Treat Williams and Kevin Pollak in an 'inspired by true life events' TV movie on Five USA called The Staircase Murders. Leaving aside that the film is predicated on the notion of doubt around a single death at the start of the film - so the title is a big fat clue - it's quite watchable.
The director, Tom McLoughlin, also knocked out the more-than-bearable quickie DC Sniper: 23 Days Of Fear, featuring Charles Dutton as Maryland police chief Charles Moose.
Recently on Five USA we also caught a pleasantly saccharine tale (courtesy of Hallmark) called Our House, about a rich old widow (the grandmother from Everybody Loves Raymond who takes in a bunch of homeless people (including Carla from Scrubs) into her big, empty mansion, and Learns A Lot Of Lessons About Life.
In my time I've also seen my fair share of torn-from-the-headlines TVMs about children trapped down wells, but there are also stacks of really good quality, well-acted, efficiently-directed titles out there, and yet all seem tarred with the same brush. I mean, come on:
HBO in particular has banged out some corkers:
And in Blighty, be it on the Beeb, ITV or C4, there have been all sorts of decent made-for-television feature-length films - with the likes of Paul Greengrass, Jimmy McGovern and others ploughing the furrow of drama-documentary to good effect with the likes of Hillsborough, Sunday & Bloody Sunday, Omagh, Dockers...
So, let's hear it for TVMs
The director, Tom McLoughlin, also knocked out the more-than-bearable quickie DC Sniper: 23 Days Of Fear, featuring Charles Dutton as Maryland police chief Charles Moose.
Recently on Five USA we also caught a pleasantly saccharine tale (courtesy of Hallmark) called Our House, about a rich old widow (the grandmother from Everybody Loves Raymond who takes in a bunch of homeless people (including Carla from Scrubs) into her big, empty mansion, and Learns A Lot Of Lessons About Life.
In my time I've also seen my fair share of torn-from-the-headlines TVMs about children trapped down wells, but there are also stacks of really good quality, well-acted, efficiently-directed titles out there, and yet all seem tarred with the same brush. I mean, come on:
- Noah Wyle and Anthony Michael Hall as Jobs and Gates in Pirates Of Silicon Valley
- The American analogue of Threads, The Day After, with massive amounts of Midwest nuclear death and the breakdown of society
- Gabriel Byrne and Ben Kingsley as media moguls battling it out in Weapons Of Mass Distraction?
- Michael Madsen as a tired cop in the ensemble actioner 44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shootout
- Hutch minus Starsky but plus Ronny Cox in another kicking-the-Feds-ass true crimer, In The Line Of Duty: The FBI Murders
HBO in particular has banged out some corkers:
- Stephen Rea, Donald Sutherland, Jeffrey DeMunn & Max von Sydow in Citizen X, about the hunt for a Soviet-era serial killer, which far outstripped the theatrical release Evilenko
- James Woods as McCarthy aide and all-round unpleasant shithead Roy Cohn in Citizen Cohn
- Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci and pretty much every British bit-part player ever in a near-realtime reconstruction of the Wannsee conference which nailed the details of the Final Solution in Conspiracy
- The history of HIV/Aids in And The Band Played On
- A young Angelina Jolie as a troubled supermodel in the surprisingly rather gripping biopic Gia
And in Blighty, be it on the Beeb, ITV or C4, there have been all sorts of decent made-for-television feature-length films - with the likes of Paul Greengrass, Jimmy McGovern and others ploughing the furrow of drama-documentary to good effect with the likes of Hillsborough, Sunday & Bloody Sunday, Omagh, Dockers...
So, let's hear it for TVMs
