TURKEYS do not come any bigger or with any more stuffing than The Bonfire Of The Vanities (Pearl, 9.30pm). What is it about Brian De Palma that makes him veer so drunkenly between the noteworthy and the abysmal? In Scarface in 1983, starring Al Pacino, he did things that were so brash, so shocking and so unique that it became one of the finest gangster movies ever made.
In The Bonfire Of The Vanities he does things that are so crass, so naive and so unfunny - it is allegedly a comedy - that it is difficult not to wonder if he might have been feeling unwell during production.
This mess is based on the book by Tom Wolfe, and a decent book too, about a New York bond dealer whose life crumbles when he is arrested for injuring a black youth in a street accident.
But the film sheds everything Wolfe went to a vast amount of trouble to include; the power, the politics, the nuances, the humour.
De Palma put together a heck of a cast for The Bonfire Of The Vanities, but wasted them all. Among the unfortunate are Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman and F. Murray Abraham.
Wolfe wanted nothing to do with the end result, which Variety magazine famously summed up in its review as ''a misfire of inanities''.
WORLD plays things safe with Every Which Way But Loose (9.30pm), an easy-going 1978 action comedy that was liked by nobody but the public.
