Lange and Turner take the lead
MOVIES with females as their central characters are still a relative rarity. Even more so, when the women involved are of mature (in Hollywood terms) years. Yet tonight, the main films on both terrestrial channels feature such ''veterans'' - Jessica Lange (now 44) and Kathleen Turner (39). Sadly, neither film is anything to write home about, but in both cases the central performances rise above their mediocre surroundings.
JESSICA Lange is particularly good in The Music Box (World 9.30pm, Original Running Time 123 mins), playing Chicago lawyer Ann Talbot who leaps into court to defend her Hungarian immigrant father, Mike Lazlo, when he's accused of committing war crimes37 years earlier.
Wisely, director Constantin Costa-Gravas (Missing) avoids those sepia flashbacks too often considered essential in this type of movie, and he leaves the audience, as well as Ann, to judge Mike Lazlo's guilt or innocence for themselves.
Where it all falls down is in the plodding approach - witness the trial scenes - and its failure to answer any of the moral questions it raises.
The strengths are all in the performances: Lange's increasingly doubt-filled Ann; German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl in his US film debut as Lazlo; and Frederic Forrest as the war crimes investigator.
ON its cinema release in 1991, V.I. Warshawski (Pearl 9.30pm ORT 89 mins) received a severe roasting from critics. Much of it was undeserved: while by no means a great film, it's an okay detective story, and it translates to the small screen well.
Kathleen Turner plays tough-talking private eye Warshawski as a more sardonic version of Joan Wilder (her role in Romancing the Stone) with added street cred. And she gets to say some great lines. When a man boasts to her of his numerous sexual conquests, V.I. replies: ''Just can't get the hang of it, huh?'' V.I. (initials which she says at different times stand for ''Virtuous'' or ''Very Inquisitive'') is hired by a teenage girl to ferret out her father's murderer. The trail leads her to uncover a massive conspiracy. Don't look too closely, just enjoy.
PRIME Sports moves into the world of professional American basketball with the start of NBA Game of the Week (8pm), comprising one full match per week throughout the 1993/94 season. Tonight's is Orlando Magic v Miami Heat.
From tomorrow, there will also be highlights from the week's games on Inside Stuff (every Friday at 4pm).
ANYTHING named Sex on the Reef has got to arouse the interest, but don't get carried away: it's less on the reef than of the reef. This episode of Man's Heritage (Pearl 8.30pm) was a four-year labour of love which reveals the underwater sex-life of a coral reef. Apparently, for just a few hours once a year ''an orgy of reproduction takes place . . . an act of such magnitude that it transforms crystal-clear water into a dense fog of new life''.
THE best of the late night viewing is D.O.A. (Pearl 12.05am, ORT 97 mins) a rather muddled 1988 remake of Rudolph Mate's 1950 film noir. That film's staggering opening scenes had the hero stumbling into a cop station to announce a murder: his own.
Directors of the new version, Rocky Morton And Annabel Jankel, evidently liked this scene so much that they shot it in black and white and added more than a hint of deja-vu.
Confusing, but interesting, and it stars now husband and wife Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan.
