JANE March, the Sinner from Pinner, and Bruce Willis, both go in for a spot of bottom-baring in The Color Of Night (Pearl, 9.30 pm), an erotic thriller notable for its high degree of hamminess.
Not even the possibility of seeing Ms March's posterior - and there is a chance that even that will be cut by the censors - could induce me to watch this again. She plays a woman called Rose who leads Willis, a traumatised New York psychologist, into the kind of maze of sexual obsession and deceit that made Madonna so difficult to watch in Body Of Evidence.
'Maze of sexual obsession' has become the public relations person's standard epithet for films that have no real ideas and no proper story. Color Of Night has good intentions. But what should have been a sensuous Hitchcockian drama of homicide and betrayal becomes nothing of the sort. Instead it is a mish-mash of cliches - a film that spends too much time being pleased with itself to ever be thoroughly engaging. Willis is average. He said of the film: 'It was a little confusing having to do a whole movie without a gun in my hand.' EVEN Tom Cruise cannot spoil Rain Man (World, 9.30 pm). It is sharply-written, smartly-directed and sensitively-performed by Cruise (as a sharp-talking salesman who discovers he has an autistic older brother) and by Dustin Hoffman, as the older brother who has been left a fortune in trust by their father.
Cruise reckons Hoffman will be a pushover for half the cash ('He's inherited three million dollars and can't understand the concept of money? It's poetic, isn't it?' he says). But he has not realised his brother is an idiot savant, unable to tie his own shoelaces and go to the toilet, but able to memorise and recite bizarre facts THE rest of the day's films: Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter (Pearl, 12.15 pm). It is fashionable to knock Keanu Reeves, but in this film you can see just how limited his range is. He plays a young journalist who is manipulated into an affair with his elder aunt (Barbara Hershey) to provide material for a writer of radio serials. It is a comedy, based on a sharp-fanged novel by William Boyd, but without the novel's wit. Peter Falk does well, but to no avail.
The King Of Love (Pearl, 2.05 pm). Tiresome made-for-television film about a war photographer (Nick Mancuso) who rises to become a Hugh Hefner-like magazine magnate. It spans five decades - one can't help but wonder why.
Below The Same Roof (Pearl, 12.20 am). Not a film, but a Japanese drama series about a man on the verge of wedlock who decides to visit every member of his family to break the news.
