INSTEAD of trying to find a film to recommend I would do better to look for a weather girl with good diction. Renee Chow is half way there, but Alice Ho is still having problems. Rumour has it that she insists on saying 'temp' because she finds 'temperature' too difficult. But for $300 a night, what are we to expect? And whatever's happened to Merry Everest, the obvious successor to Gloria Wu? The best of a mediocre bunch is probably Waterloo (World, 9.35pm), in which Napoleon meets his (Waterloo, that is). The last hour of the film is the 1815 battle and looks both exciting and splendid. The preamble is a mixed blessing, with an exceptional cast - Rod Steiger, Christopher Plummer, Orson Welles and Virginia McKenna - struggling with the complexities of history.
IN Hear No Evil (Pearl, 9.30pm) Gil Gerard does a hearing-impaired Dirty Harry routine as an independent cop - aren't they all? - who wants to nail members of a motorcycle gang called the Bay Riders who he believes are heavily involved in drugs. When they blow up his car he survives, but goes deaf. Mimi Rogers is the hearing counsellor who teaches him how to cope.
WHICH leaves Why Would I Lie? (World, 2.10am), a film that inspires the question, why should I watch it? There is no reason, apart from seeing what happens when jokes fall as flat as a cow pat. Treat Williams plays Cletus Hayworth, a child welfare officer who specialises in telling outrageous lies in an effort to make his life more interesting. When his parents die he and his three siblings stand to inherit a small fortune, but no one can touch a cent until the insufferable Cletus swears in writing that he will use his share wisely.
IN a normal lifespan of 78 years a person will devote around 50,000 hours, or six years, to dreaming. The rest, for the average expatriate, is taken up with drinking and waiting for the Rugby Sevens to come around again. The Power Of Dreams (Pearl, 8.30pm), a three-part series, travels from ancient Greece to the latest dream-imaging labs to put dreams in historical perspective and to examine their potentials.
THE English think they invented it, but these days they don't play soccer so well. England bit the dust early in the World Youth Championships, leaving Brazil and Argentina to contest the Eighth FIFA World Youth Championship Final (Jade, 12.20am) in Qatar. It's a final that promises to feature some Latin histrionics along with any goals.
THERE is no escaping Kurt Russell as a wandering clockmaker in Winter People (TDM Channel 2, 8.30pm). This is one of those all-purpose films often shown by Hong Kong's terrestrial channels when they are stuck for something else to show, which is often. Now it is Macau's turn. It's frenzied, it's old-fashioned and Russell looks terribly uncomfortable in the 1930s, getting involved in a feud between two families in a back-woods community.