I, Tonya
Farce, RTL 2, Sunday, 10:15 p.m
People love being able to cheer for one and hate another. Figure skater Tonya Harding’s role in the 1990s was clear. Even judges rejected her because she exuded the elegance of a wrecking ball that was too ZZ Top-Music ran and jumped. But was she rightly despised? What role did her family play? And was her competitor Nancy Kerrigan, who was maltreated with an iron bar by the Harding camp, really an angel? The answers of this wild adventure are not as clear as expected. Director Craig Gillespie (Cruella) chose the genre of the “mockumentary”: the corruption of a documentary film with different perspectives. So will I, Tonya to a farce with a second floor. A crater opens up behind the laughter, showing us a different America than usual.
RoboCop
Action satire, Arte, Sunday, 11 p.m
Who would have thought 35 years ago that RoboCop would one day run on Arte during prime time? What many viewed as rowdy prolo action was actually Dutchman Paul Verhoeven’s razor-sharp satire of what made America the most powerful nation on earth: greed, ruthlessness and guns. You think you can feel the dirt of the Moloch Detroit on your own body. Good cop Murphy (angel-faced: Peter Weller) is wiped out by villains but patched together as a RoboCop. What its creators and opponents didn’t realize is that Murphy’s soul is stronger than any program. Encouraged by his success, Verhoeven happily and shamelessly broke other taboos (also Basic instinctt and Starship Troopers are absolutely Arte suitable), only Las Vegas bit the Dutchman show girls the teeth out.
Bravados
Western, Servus TV, Sunday, 8:15 p.m
Revenge is a fundamental driving force in westerns. She’s even more upsetting when a star is out for vendetta. In Bravados good Jim doesn’t think twice about what to do with the bandits who are suspected of having violated and killed his wife. The fact that the vigilante is Gregory Peck – that is, Mr. Cleanman himself – is what makes the film so uncomfortable. Even stranger is the aura of Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (BR, Saturday, 8:15 p.m.): A short march, accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s operatic heavy metal music, a pinch of chewing tobacco and a revolver are enough to blow away Fonda’s decades-old image of the exemplary American – Mr. Cleanman II. Unforgettable the outrage when the obituary for Fonda’s death in the daily News was illustrated with this scene in 1982.
The War of the Roses
Black comedy, ZDF Neo, Saturday, 10:25 p.m
The weekend is all about couple gossip in many shades. Danny De Vito directed War of the Roses (Original title) had a blast blasting the romantic duo Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner. With all the suffering that’s being ignited, it’s worth knowing that a scene added due to crowd protests showed that the house cat hadn’t ended up in the cooking pot. In It doesn’t get any better (ZDF Neo, 8:15 p.m.) Helen Hunt makes Jack Nicholson a better creature. In The Incredibles (Disney, Saturday, 8:15 p.m.), a married couple tries not to forget their family despite their heroic duties. Only between Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington does it go smoothly in the strong political thriller The file to (Arte, Sunday, 10.45 a.m.) – simply because Washington was never sexy in his career, never allowed to be.