This Weekend on Cable: Mad Mel by Proxy

Sorry, no notable Mel Gibson this weekend on cable -- but there are plenty of sociopathic character portraits, suggesting that a Mel biopic of the shining-rise-and-hair-raising-fall-in-Hollywood type should be on somebody's table by now. And if anybody wants to talk to me about it, since it's my idea so far, I'm right here...

Bad Lieutenant (IFC, Saturday @ 10:05 PM, 3:45 AM)

Forget the Herzog-Cage hardy-hars. A belly-crawl through the urban gutter, Abel Ferrara's willfully icky 1992 movie traces a day in the life of a monstrous wretch of a cop whose depraved behavior is a simple but gut-roiling reflection of his environment. Ferrara was reportedly determined to earn an NC-17 from the MPAA even if it meant shooting more scenes; he needn't have worried. The self-immolating Harvey Keitel is a fallen prince of the city with a drug ingestion rate that could power Washington Square for a full late-night hour, indulging in abusive sexual combat, compulsively self-jeopardizing gambling, hapless violence, and the aforementioned ingestion of every chemical he can find, most commonly crack -- all while investigating the rape of a nun. By the time the Lieutenant moves on to shooting smack (in close-up), and visions of Christ begin appearing, we're set up for a full-scale catharsis.

Raging Bull (Cinemax, Sunday @ 12:00 noon)

What can be said? Hardly on cable enough, this definitive boxing biopic is the career acme for Robert De Niro (who displayed the self-sacrifice of a penitent in his bodily abuses) and quite possibly the best American film of the '80s (as it was voted by critics and filmmakers once the decade ended). Director Martin Scorsese earned a place in heaven with this very difficult, very unpleasant trip through the pathetic life of wife-beating neanderthal middleweight champ Jake LaMotta; it's filmmaking as aria. In fact, the film has been something of a puzzle to many: Why lavish such gorgeous, devotional, arresting art on the life of such a miscreant? The climactic Bible quotes are a hint: Made at a crisis time in Scorsese's own life, Raging Bull could be said to be itself an act of contrition, a struggle toward Christian sanctity, where even this abusive, malevolent hump is deserving of a heartrending biopic. Even him, among the martyrs and saviors and heroes of pop culture.

Shanks (TCM, Friday @ 2:00 AM)

A cable rarity: William Castle's 1974 act of self-defying weirdness, in which Marcel Marceau (the mime) plays two roles: a mad scientist who can resurrect the dead, and a mad puppeteer who uses the invention to fulfill his own battered dreams. With so little dialogue it's practically a silent movie, it's an authentic piece of underground-ish pathology, genre-less and creepy and forecasting, in some ways, Being John Malkovich. If it had been made by anyone beside the B-movie industry's most famous schlock showman, it would've found a cult.

Manhunter (IFC, Friday @ 12:00 midnight)

Still the best Hannibal Lecter film/Thomas Harris adaptation, Michael Mann's 1986 serial-policier was remade years later as Red Dragon, but stick to this one, where the filmmaking is diamond-concise, and Brian Cox makes a Lecter many times more convincing and creepy than Anthony Hopkins's showboating version.

Southpaw (Indiepix, Friday @ 2:35 AM)

Liam McGrath's 1999 doc focuses in on light-welter Irish boxer Francis Barrett, the piercingly modest and Wahlberg-mugged Galway teen who at 19 qualified for the Olympics and fought in Atlanta in '96. Francis's handicaps are formidable: not only is he diminutive and short-armed (his same-weight-class opponents often loom over him), but he's a Traveller, having grown-up in a trailer park with no electricity or plumbing, and the stigma of belonging to what is apparently the most loathed minority in Ireland. Barrett's trajectory is exciting, but his tribe is hilariously, dryly Irish about the experience -- when Francie trounces his first Brazilian opponent in Atlanta, the crowds back home barely manage to crack a smile. Whether the Barrett clan are of actual Rom descent or tied to the "lifestyle" (as it's called), is not clear, but there was some ambivalence for Barrett in carrying the Irish flag in the Atlanta ceremonies, for, as an Irish journalist puts it, "the only country in the world that would discriminate against him."

China 9 Liberty 37 (Encore Westerns, Saturday @ 8:00 PM)

Here it is again -- Monte Hellman's rare, neglected 1978 post-spaghetti western, with Fabio Testi as a wisecracking pawn, Warren Oates as Warren Oates, and Jenny Agutter as the occasionally nude object of frontier desire. Even Sam Peckinpah shows up as a pulp writer. Step up.

Mary & Max (Sundance, Sunday @ 10:00 PM & 3:15 AM)

A masterful and wryly depressive Claymation masterwork from Australia's Adam Elliott (an Oscar winner for animated shorts) that was never released in the U.S. Hardly surprising -- for all of its wit and wisdom, it's an all-true saga of a long-distance friendship between beleaguered misfits (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette) and ropes in child neglect, alcoholism, Asperger's, loneliness and death. Unfailingly inventive and beguiling -- just watch the eyeballs.

Videodrome (WMax, Saturday @ 11:35 AM)

David Cronenberg's 1983 horror-meta-fable about media-to-person corruption and control could not be, still, any more inflammatory, and any less outrageous. In the nascent days of video ubiquity and jaded viewership, James Woods is a sleazy cynical programmer looking for the ultimate thrill, and getting instead reprogrammed himself. All hail the New Flesh!