Right I'll take these in the order that I saw them rather than the order of the title. Carrying on from the last entry where I'd seen a US TV movie on Sky Movies Premiere, I caught another one in the form of Sweet Nothing in My Ear. This is a treatise on the pros and cons of giving a deaf child a cochlear implant, with Marlee Matlin as the deaf mother against the idea, and Jeff Daniels as the hearing father who wants this for his son. Nothing revelatory here, it cuts between a court case for custody of the child and the downfall of the relationship when the father becomes aware of the advances in medicine.
Daniels is the pick of the bunch, very believable, very natural. Matlin sleepwalks through it though and there are only glimpses of the natural talent she showed 20 years earlier in winning her oscar for Children of a Lesser God. Overall, this is an issue-movie, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a decent watch and a solidly made film, but nothing out of the ordinary or something which would have been worth actively going out of my way to find.
After that I had a mooch through one of my favourite uploaders on youtube's profiles and found The Dawns Here Are Quiet. It's a war film about a Russian soldier during the second world war who finds himself in command of a group of all-female anti-aircraft gunners. The most startling thing about this film is the job the director did, there are scenes of fantasy/memory/dreaming which many characters have and they are all shot (in colour) in a very surrealistic style and it gels together with the (black and white) realistic bulk of the film very nicely. The contrast of reality and the internal mind is starkly drawn and it works on multiple levels.
The basic plot is that two German soldiers are seen in the woods nearby and the man in charge takes five of the women out with him to capture them. What then ensues is what is described as "a small, local fight" and that the Russians themselves put it in those terms when you've seen the characters for a couple of hours puts everything into perspective wonderfully. If there is a flaw with this film it's that about three-quarters of the way through they start to portray the Germans as sub-human and the overt propaganda purposes of the film shine through. That said though it is a very stylish, surprisingly moving, beautifully made film I'd more than recommend seeing any way possible: cracking stuff.
Lastly, having been a fan of E.R. since pretty much day 1, I decided to check out Parminder Nagra's TV movie with Ray Winstone, Compulsion, on ITV's new ITVplayer online service. Firstly, purely technically, ITV are way behind the BBC and Channel Four with their showing of thier content online. The player itself was terrible, continually pausing and buffering which you just don't get on the iPlayer or Channel 4's Freeview.
The film itself, well, I made 6 notes on a newspaper that was on my desk as I was watching it - "Simplistic, 2D, Trashy, FREQUENTLY unintentionally funny, Condescending exposition of themes, RIDICULOUS finish" and that pretty much sums it up. It's a story about a girl who, returning from University, resorts to a devil's bargain with her father's chauffeur in order to escape a potential arranged marriage. The material is beneath both performers, who I enjoy greatly, but somehow in spite of itself it was watchable in that "so bad it's entertaining" kind of way. An awful script with some truly laughable lines (how Parminder kept a straight face whilst uttering the words "I can't do this anymore ... I need you inside me" I'll never know), it's just pure trash which only shocks in the knowledge that they got the people involved that they did.