Friday, March the 5th, 2004

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Films on Television

In addition to the detective drama Gruesome & Turgid (see yesterday), the Hooting Yard television empire is pleased to announce that it has acquired the rights to an astounding collection of films. All of these listed below will be shown on the Crunlop Channel over the coming months. Our cinema critic, P. B. Totnes, will be reviewing as many of them as he can. As he views each film, his doubtless astute and piercing comments will be added, indicated by a hyperlink.

Rusty Flasks; The Apothecary's Safety Pin; The Subfusc Gargoyle; Hand Me That Chaffinch; Topiary & Miscegenation; The Gutta-Percha Pail; The Vivid Swamp (for me, Barbra Streisand's finest hour); The Pitiful Teacup; To Smooch & Smooch Again; The Baleful Rhinoceros; Four Hundred Wooden Hens; Plankton Nightmare (I particularly liked the grainy, black & white opening shot of a flock of bitterns); The Crumpled Ships; The Queasy Hotel (spooky!!!); The Pathetic Ornithologist; The Flapping Windsock; Ointments of Incomprehensibility; I Wore My Hats Ineptly; Custard Gas Attack; Flailing Shibboleths; Journey to the Planet of Indigestion (superb!); The Wretched Spoon; A Placebo for Istvan; The Hideous Orchard; The Marooned Squirrel (surely the film of the decade); Pencil Cases in the Antarctic; Thousands upon Thousands of Wrens; The Pointless Torch; Corncrake! (“Melvin Gibson's Braveheart pales in comparison”, said Vanity Fair); The Tatterdemalion Hobbledehoy (which ought to have won a prize for its matchless animal-handling, what with all those stoats, weasels, bison, panthers & geese); The Big Magnetic Robot; The Antiseptic Xylophone; Snip Those Auburn Locks; I Was Puny Vercingetorix; The Chuckling Maniac (appalling—not a bit scary); The Cantankerous Optician; Jimmy Connors in Hell (nothing to do with the tennis player, apparently); Forty Years In A Bauxite Mine (my favourite foreign-language film of the year, despite the lack of subtitles); The Ridiculous Sponge; Rubber Beelzebub; Tea-strainers in Jeopardy; The Tall Nun Goes West (the finest Gerard Manley Hopkins adaptation I've ever seen); Stalin Wore A Cardigan; Ornate & Lavish Buoys (tiresome four-hour documentary); The Tiny Cakes; The Incredible Case of the Disparaged Chutney Recipe; Splendid Muck; and Weird Birds (a remake of the Van Heflin masterpiece).