I possibly should have called this “the short notice blog”, but anyway, I just noticed that Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is on free to air TV tonight (in Adelaide at least). Since it goes from 12:10 to 4:30 it’s looking like the proper version too. It has the reputation of being a major disaster (and I believe that financially it was), but the panning from the critics was mostly directed at a shorter version which apparently made very little sense.

I was fortunate enought to see the full length version at the Adelaide Film Festival a couple of years ago, and it really was rather good. I’m not sure that it really does need to be quite so long, but on the other hand I never really felt that it dragged. It’s an epic anti-western starring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt and Christopher Walken. Hardly the first movie to put the old west in a different light (Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller comes to mind), but overall a fine film and not deserving of it’s poor reputation. So if you weren’t planning on sleeping tonight, check it out. Can’t help but wonder if these means that they’ve run out of infomercials though.
Whilst on the topic of TV I’d like to put in a favourable mention for the Shakespeare Retold series currently showing on the ABC on Monday nights. I really enjoyed last week’s retelling of Macbeth, with an excellent performance from James McAvoy (who is also appearing in the repeats of the superb “State of Play”, but not the new series of “Shameless”), and word has it that this week’s “Much Ado About Nothing” is even better. Being an uncouth cretin I’m not actually familiar with that particular play, I think I’ll go into it without looking up the plot to see what I make of it, which will make a change from last week when I was constantly wondering how they would interpret various aspects of Macbeth (incidently I thought the “pigs will fly” was a bit of a weak point)