THE flak that flew when Heartbreak Ridge (Pearl, 9.30pm) was released must have surprised its producer/director/actor, Clint Eastwood. Some busybodies actually thought Eastwood was endorsing the US invasion of Grenada with this movie. But Eastwood never really makes movies that dabble in politics. At the heart of this film, no pun intended, is not the invasion but the man, and the man is Tom Highway, a gruff and foul-mouthed marine who is nearing retirement age and wants to go out the way he came in, with his old outfit.
There, he finds he has to train a group of lazy misfits who feel they have been duped by the slick military advertising on television. It is not hard to guess what happens next; he whips them into shape and is then forced to put them to the test when a Marxist government backed by Cuban troops gets bolshy on a small Caribbean island - Grenada.
I HAVE no idea what I was doing on Friday, November 22, 1963 - the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot - probably lying on my back having my nappy changed, because I was not yet one-year-old. Yet everyone else has a story to tell.
And since then nearly everyone has had a theory to put forward, if not about his death then about the man himself, who was just as flawed and as fallible as the next man. The Kennedys (Pearl, 10.0am), a British production, continues its long, hard look at why JFK and his siblings turned out the way they did.
Is there anything new to be said? Perhaps not, but at least The Kennedys, a four-part series, takes a new tack, concerning itself less with the nine children of Joseph Kennedy and more with Joseph himself, a man who drove them towards their tragic destiny.
WHEN we last saw Clive James in Japan (Star Plus 8.30pm) he was enjoying the company of three Geisha Girls, who do almost everything except what Geisha Girls are widely believed to do. Beforehand he had done all the things tourists to Tokyo always do:spent the night in a Love Hotel, been served tea by a female robot and got lost for a day or two in a subway station.