movie watch

Desperado

Pearl, 9.35pm

Spanish actor Antonio Banderas and the film's stylish swagger saves this Robert Rodriguez-directed picture from being a mediocre action drama. A gringo drifter (Steve Buscemi) enters a cantina full of rough characters and terrifies them with the tale of a mysterious mariachi player (Banderas) with a guitar case full of guns. The stranger just wiped out a dozen foes in a neighbouring town. He has a vendetta against a local drug lord named Bucho (Joachim De Almeida), whose underlings killed his sweetheart. And he is coming their way. During a brilliantly choreographed close-quarters shoot-out in a bar - in which almost every interesting character Rodriguez just introduced ends up riddled with bullets - Banderas is wounded. He is nursed back to health by a beautiful bookstore owner (Salma Hayek, above with Banderas). The rest of the movie is a series of gunfights, love scenes, humorous interludes and wild escapes, all shot in the same deliriously confusing manner. Critics have pointed out that unlike Sam Peckinpah, or even John Woo, Rodriguez can't figure out how to torque up the picture's emotions so that they match his marvellously overheated action scenes. Desperado, the director's reworking of his inventive and more successful debut El Mariachi, has plenty of blood and flame in total mayhem, but it's short on brains and soul. (1995)

Man's Heritage: The Living Edens

Pearl, 8.30pm

Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Andrew Young takes viewers to south Alaska (above), a land still in the clutches of the last Ice Age. There are more than 100 glaciers here - massive rivers of ice that flow from the mountains down to the sea. But in no single spot do the forces of ice and ocean come together as they do in Glacier Bay.

The cameras follow a pair of courting eagles as they bank and weave over snow-covered peaks before descending beneath the icy surface to find a clutch of pink eggs writhing in the gravel. Within, tiny salmon struggle to break free.

What Have I Done To Deserve This?

Movie 2, 10.30pm

This comedy has nothing to do with the Pet Shop Boys, who had a hit of the same title in the early 1990s. One critic says this is one of the most bizarre and surprising black comedies ever made by the acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar (above). The heroine is a lower-middle-class Madrid housewife named Gloria (Carmen Maura) with a dysfunctional household. Her 12-year-old son is a precocious hustler who seduces older men; her 14-year-old son pushes smack; her best friend is a prostitute; another friend has a clairvoyant daughter who can move objects at will; and her stingy, semi-crazed mother-in-law collects lizards and cupcakes. Gloria's ultra chauvinist husband (Luis Hostalot) drives a taxi and his wife to distraction by playing a cassette of a singer for whom he used to work as a chauffeur. The acting is superb. Maura uses a crooked half-smile in most of her scenes to suggest an acceptance of fate that verges on madness. Chus Lampreave is wonderfully dotty as the mother-in-law, and Veronica Forque is endearingly bubble-headed as the prostitute next door who invites Gloria to help her with a particularly demanding client. A fresh, original film, featuring a feminist heroine of classic proportions. (1984)