Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine fight the battle of the one-liner in the hilarious comedy Postcards from the Edge (Pearl, 9.30pm). This is most definitely not a biopic, or at least that is what director Mike Nichols and writer Carrie Fisher, who wrote the novel on which the movie is based, have said.
It would be simplistic to suggest that a story of a movie star with an addiction problem who is also the daughter of a movie star with a drink problem, written by a movie star (Fisher) with an addiction problem who was also the daughter of a movie star (Debbie Reynolds) could in any way have been inspired by real life. But, whatever the truth, in between the wisecracks it is hard not to think: 'God, was life in the Fisher home really like this?' Streep was not an obvious choice to play Suzanne Vale, a blowsy, drug-raddled starlet - no difficult accent to master, no period costume to wear, no tragic love story to act out, none of the Streep standards at all. But Streep turns out to be as good at comedy as she is at everything else, spitting out some splendid one-liners.
When her ghastly mother tells her she could have had a worse time, she could have been the daughter of one of the two notoriously awful screen-idol mums, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, Suzanne snaps: 'Those are the options? You, Joan or Lana?' It is a good thing Streep has so many of these kind of cracks (she got an Oscar nomination for this part) because this movie has nothing else going for it. Although the two main characters have serious drugs and drink problems, those issues are made the excuse for quips, and nothing else.
Even romance is never allowed to get in the way of the jokes. Suzanne gets a sweet letter and flowers from the doctor who pumped her stomach out after one painful episode. 'I'm tempted to marry him,' she tells a friend, 'just so I can tell people how we met.' On one side a movie about women fighting; on the other, boys with guns. Cast a Giant Shadow (World, 9.30pm) is an enjoyable gung-ho account of the life of David 'Mickey' Marcus, an American colonel who in the late 1940s led the Jewish underground against the Arabs. He later became the first Jewish general in 2,000 years, commander of the new Israeli Army.
Kirk Douglas, himself the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, is very watchable as Marcus, a professional soldier never easy unless he has a military objective. John Wayne, Frank Sinatra and Yul Brynner all have cameos, and British character actors such as the late Gordon Jackson and Michael Hordern are good, too, as British diplomats struggled to maintain the British mandate in Palestine.
This afternoon we also have the chance to hear Omnibus: The Last Voice (RTHK Radio 6, 1.30pm) about a remarkable old South African woman named Elsie Vaalbooi. Elsie is 96, and the very last person in the world who can speak !Auni, a 30,000-year-old language that linguists assumed had died out 60 years ago.
