One of the drawbacks of checking which films to talk about here by using my vote history on imdb is that I don't vote on that site for tv movies, so one that I saw the other week I haven't talked about before. It was called The Russell Girl, it was on Sky Premiere and I didn't know it was a tv movie until I went on imdb afterwards (although due to the plot it was rather obvious it would have been). The set up is that a girl (Amber Tamblyn) is diagnosed with leukemia and goes home to tell her parents. Before she can she gets accepted into college and they're so happy about that she doesn't tell them. All this is set against the backdrop that there is a past with the family over the road which the woman (Jennifer Ehle) is still very angry about.
Obviously I watched this because a/ it was on and b/ it had Ehle in it, she's absolutely superb in it and is becoming increasingly reminscent, physically, of Meryl Streep. There are some nice supporting turns by Henry Czerny as Ehle's husband and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Tamblyn's mother. Tamblyn is fine, she does a solid job and holds it together when Ehle's not around. A subplot involving Tamblyn and her high-school sweetheart is rather limp, but the nuts and bolts of the story showing Tamblyn's guilt about the past and confronting her present situation is handled well and is rather affecting. Very nicely shot and a good soundtrack, far better than this kind of thing usually is and that's mainly down to Ehle.
Also on Sky, I caught a classic the other day, the Raoul Walsh version of Captain Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck. Given the time it was made, the casting of Peck is absolute perfection. It's one of those performances where he doesn't do an accent, he's always Gregory Peck, but his Peckness fits in with Hornblower so well it doesn't matter at all: the perfect synthesis of character and the actor's persona. One big surprise with this film was just how well done the action sequences were. In recent years we've been spoiled with the likes of Master and Commander, but the action, though over 50 years old, really worked. Virginia Mayo didn't have much to do and the film ends faster than the average episode of Scooby Doo, but this is a very watchable, fun little film.
There was one more to write about, what was it ... *checks* ah yes, Flawless. Have wanted to see this for a few years now, being intrigued by Philip Seymour Hoffman's Screen Actors Guild nomination years before his oscar recognition came. It's a story about a retired, homophobic cop (Robert De Niro) who, following a stroke, gets speech therapy from Hoffman's drag queen in the form of singing lessons. The tone from Joel Schumacher is all over the place, it's fairly uneven and chops and changes between thriller, farce and gentle drama. What remains though is an extremely solid turn from De Niro, which allows Hoffman to disappear completely beneath all the camp mannersims and steal the show. It's one of those rare performances which is very over the top, but in terms of character rather than actor. Big Phil nails it and delivers one of the finest performances in 1999 in the process. Not a great film, but a good one, with lots going for it.