SATURDAY
Oscar Wilde (1959)
TVO, 8 p.m. "I adore acting," says Oscar Wilde to his good friend (wink, wink) Lord Alfred Douglas. "Shall I tell you the great drama of my life?" With the tart-tongued one narrating, this tale of scandal and sodomy (the script's word, not mine) is a fine if depressing look at the playwright's many trials, including those that unfolded in courtrooms. On one level, it's "the story of a tragedy that began in England at the turn of the century," says Wilde (a portly and suitably pompous Robert Morley). But it's also shot through with good laughs: When Wilde sues Douglas's father -- the homophobic and ironically titled Marquis of Queensbury -- for slander, his rat-a-tat witness-stand retorts make Judge Judy look like an amateur. But ultimately the smallmindedness of the day prevails, Wilde himself must stand trial, and one of the most original voices of Victorian England is found guilty of being himself.
SUNDAY
The Nasty Girl (1990)
TVO, 8 p.m. Before we can learn from the past, and long before we're doomed to repeat it, comes the part where we stomp all over anyone who wants to give it an honest assessment. When Bavarian braunnoser Sonja, played by Lena Stolz, starts sniffing around for subject material for an essay contest, she heads into the town archives and finds some very stinky laundry. It seems the locals, who are taken to touting their lack of collaboration during the Nazi era, were only too happy to do their part for the Third Reich. Suddenly, the nuns who gave Sonja straight A's are greasing up the kid's slide to hell, and even her family divides over just how deep she should dig. Based on the true story of another young woman in the city of Passau, The Nasty Girl's biggest surprise is that it's funny, doling out lots of laughs to humanize its heavy themes.
MONDAY
Basquiat (1996)
Bravo!, 3:45 a.m. Jean Michel Basquiat, so goes the legend, stumbled out of his cardboard-box home in New York's Thompkins Square Park sometime in the early 1980s, and proceeded to take the Manhattan art world by storm. What's fact and what's fiction in this rendering of his story, directed by fellow art phenom Julian Schnabel, is never really clear. Did Andy Warhol exploit him? Did the city's art dealers really believe in him or just see his colour (black) and his background (poor) as the perfect fit for a cynical industry on the lookout for novelty? What is clear in this near-epic feature starring David Bowie (as Warhol), Dennis Hopper, Parker Posey, Tatum O'Neal, Willem Dafoe, Gary Oldman and Traffic's Benicio Del Toro, is that any artist who wants to make the leap from Prince Street darling to household name first has to let his soul take a major drubbing.
TUESDAY
Frankenstein Unbound (1990)
Space, midnight Director Roger Corman is not known for highbrow anything. The closest he came to what might loosely be called cinema was probably The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, but he's best remembered for a string of 1960s Edgar Allen Poe/Vincent Price horror screeds as well as for producing such 1980s screamers as Humanoids From the Deep. (On-screen, he showed up just last year in Scream 3, playing a studio executive loosely connected to heroine Sidney Prescott's long-dead mom). In this outing, his first behind the camera in two decades, he directs John Hurt, Bridget Fonda, Jason Patric and the late Raul Julia in a mishmash of a tale about a weapons researcher in 2031 who manages to rip a hole in time and ends up in 18th-century Switzerland. There, he meets a Shelley named Mary and a doctor named Frankenstein. With his future-gleaned knowledge, can he save them from their monstrous fates? Tune in, if you dare.
WEDNESDAY
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
Showcase, 10 p.m. With Dolly the sheep currently under quarantine during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that some activists attribute to high-tech factory farming, there's a distinct whiff of farmyard verité to this otherwise far-fetched story brought to you by director John Frankenheimer, who's helmed such earlier animal-infested outings as 1962's Birdman of Alcatraz and last year's Ben Affleck film, Reindeer Games. Based on the H.G. Wells novel, it stars David Thewliss as a castaway who finds himself on a South Pacific island where a diabolical madman (Marlon Brando reprising his Apocalypse Now forehead creases) genetically alters animals to resemble humans. Val Kilmer tries hard as the doctor's drugged-out assistant, but in the end, unsettling genetics debates must battle with overwrought F/X, and in the end the latter win the day.
THURSDAY
84 Charing Cross Road (1986)
Bravo!, 1 a.m. It's not just in Jane Austen flicks that men and women flirt for years by mail, their lust reserved for the licking of stamps and the unsealing of envelopes. In 84 Charing Cross Road, Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins carry on a decades-long correspondence, rife with romantic subtext but displaying mostly intellectual sparks, as he (a British bookseller) and she (a New York script-reader) exchange books and bon mots. In the current era, when long-distance relationships unfold by e-mail and seem to end up with one of the correspondents finally visiting the other only to get their head lopped off, this mid-century love affair, carried out on the best vellum paper, is the very model of restraint. Best of all, it makes for a sentimental movie, as the pair's fondness for language and each other carries us away.
FRIDAY
Guess Who's Coming
to Dinner (1967)
Bravo!, 12:45 a.m. I remember as a young kid in the late '60s flipping through an issue of Life magazine and coming across a picture of a white woman and a black man walking hand in hand. It was a completely exciting thing to see: a major taboo captured with the ease of a camera's click. Considering the era in which it appeared, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a revolutionary film. Devoting not just a single frame but an entire motion picture to the subject of inter-racial marriage, it blends social commentary, dramatic scandal and the trademark Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comic chemistry (for the last time ever; he died soon after shooting wrapped). It's also a sobering lesson for all those yuppies out there raising their kids to be tolerant of others: Be damn sure you're ready to smile and nod when they morph into "the people we must learn to accept."