www.filmfour.com
To tie in nicely with the on-air launch of the channel, FilmFour is the subject of this week’s website of the week.
Michael Jackson wants the new launch to be ‘The best film channel in the world. Bar none’, Derek Malcolm (Guardian film critic) calls it ‘a chink of light in a darkening landscape’, and it looks set to win the Guardian’s ‘Dish of the Day’ everyday for ever, or until Sky Movies goes up-market or Radio Four goes digital!
In regards to its website, the design is suitably slinky – swish colour scheme, loads of down-loads, pretty little flashing pictures , Adam and Joe’s Toytanic and none of those over-complicated backgrounds that designers put in when they’re trying too hard to be impressive and forget that you’re trying to read text over it. There’s a complete programme schedule, and they’ve set up the web site as something that will actually be used, rather than as the expensive and pointless stationery that so many companies carry on blighting the Internet with.
Film Four answers all the bitter complaints of anyone tired of Bruce Willis and James Bond, by showing foreign language films, obscure and just odd movies, like tonight’s Kathryn Bigelow flick, ‘Near Dark’ with vampires travelling the Midwest in a Winnebago van. It’s the television version of that scene in ‘Clerks’ where the film buff kneels in adoration of the video megastore: all those movies you never manage to see, compacted onto one channel.
Or at least that’s the theory -in practice FilmFour isn’t quite that elitist – the November schedules’ highlights would look fine on BBC 1, if not quite on ITV: Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Madness of King George, and the collected works of Ewan McGregor are hardly unknown flicks rescued from crumbling eastern European archives , and the Tarantino theme night is more sixth form than film school.
But next to that there’s Man Bites Dog and a Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective, and I want to see almost everything they’re showing – yes, including Four weddings – elitism is far too self-sacrificing a posture to be worth holding on to.
Both the channel and the website are definitely worth looking at, and the latter is the perfect compliment to the former. Informative to the max and stylish to boot, you can even get to win a year’s subscription if you’re unhealthily obsessed with Ewan. (Typical question: what is Nagiko’s father’s profession in The Pillow Book?). No light sabre jokes, please.
Reviewer: Anne Fielding
