A British reboot, an American classic, a Welsh poet
The UK series ‘Cold Feet’ returns in a new season.
By HANNAH BROWNThe UK series ‘Cold Feet’(photo credit: PR)
The British series Cold Feet is returning to television, about 13 years after it ended. The new season, which catches up with the characters in the present day, is showing on YES LONDON and YES VOD, and all five previous seasons are now available on YES LONDON.While Britannia no longer rules the air waves in terms of quality TV, the Brits are pretty much untouchable when it comes to intelligent comedy/drama. Cold Feet is about a group of friends in Manchester. Adam is played by James Nesbitt, one of the hardest working actors in England, who was in the harrowing series The Missing and played Bofur in the Hobbit movies. Having moved to Singapore after the death of his wife, Adam is about to marry a 30-year-old woman he has known only a few months. He goes to Manchester for a quick visit before the wedding to try to persuade his teenage son to attend the event, but the son would rather appear in a school play.The other friends have weathered a lot of changes in their own lives as well. The rest of the cast is a kind of all-star list of English television players. John Thomson is Pete, who has been laid off and now works driving a cab and taking care of the elderly. Fay Ripley is his wife, Jenny, who is extremely skeptical of the wisdom of Adam’s upcoming marriage, and the two debate how they will be able to afford the trip to Singapore. Robert Bathurst is David, who is now divorced from Karen (Hermione Norris), and although he is remarried, the exes contemplate traveling to Singapore together for the wedding.Although I did not see the earlier seasons, this reboot is pure fun.If you need to recover from all the election madness, there are some good movies coming up this week.On November 12, you can see The Edge of Love on HOT Drama at 4:45 p.m., a romantic literary drama about two women who captivate the poet Dylan Thomas during World War II.Matthew Rhys, who plays Philip on The Americans, is Thomas, and he is instantly believable as the madly charming, dissolute poet.Keira Knightley plays his mistress, while Sienna Miller plays his wife.The twist in this story is that the wife and the mistress become friends. Cillian Murphy plays a soldier who starts romancing Thomas’s wife. It’s not a great movie, but it features some good performances and a lot of literary references.Mean Streets, the great 1973 film by Martin Scorsese, will be showing on YES 3 on November 13 at 10 p.m. It stars a very young Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel as two young men on the fringes of the Mafia crime world in New York City’s Little Italy. Keitel plays Charlie, who is obsessed with his sense of sin, struggling with guilt over the fact that he works as a collector for a loan shark, but also over all the ways in which he is not a good Catholic. He tries to help his wild, impulsive friend, Johnny Boy (De Niro, in the performance that made him a star), who seems headed for disaster.
It’s an atmospheric movie that lays out all of Scorsese’s obsessions: Catholic guilt, New York City, crime and music. In spite of periodic scenes of violence, it’s more of a low-key movie than Scorsese fans might expect but essential viewing for any movie buff.Keitel, although he has played characters of many ethnicities, is Jewish, but not many people know he is married to a Canadian/Israeli artist/actress, Daphna Kastner, and even fewer know that they wed in a ceremony on the roof of Beit Shmuel in Jerusalem in 2001.Keitel was attending the Haifa International Film Festival at the time, where he was promoting The Grey Zone, a movie about the Sonderkommando in which he played a Nazi. I interviewed him a day or two before the wedding, and he spoke about how much he was looking forward to going to Jerusalem, although he didn’t say why.