MI-5
Britain’s security agency, MI-5, is turning an Arab American terrorist over to the CIA when the terror mastermind is snatched away on the London streets in a daring rescue. It’s an adrenaline-driven opening to MI-5, a film based on a briskly paced British television series that was considerably more stylish than its American analogues. While the agency’s youthful, multicultural operatives are glued to their high-tech tools, MI-5 shows that there is no substitute for human intelligence.
n Elvis Costello: Detour Live at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall
Joking around between songs, Elvis Costello wears the role of all-around entertainer at this show. A solo concert until the arrival of Rebecca and Megan Lovell from the American roots band Larkin Poe, Costello achieves the power of a full rock band on some songs, singing like a jazzman making the most of his vocal limitations. Costello sings a few hits—(“The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”—but sticks mostly to wonderful obscurities (“Shipbuilding”).
Delirious
As the Oliver Hardy of the ’80s and ’90s, John Candy carried on the slapstick legacy of the rotund funny man. In Delirious (1991), Candy plays a soap opera producer and magnet for mishaps. Awakening after an accident, he finds himself in his own soap opera, surrounded by intrigue, infidelity and a dodgy hospital staff. Delirious has fun with the idea that a writer can create his own world through the words he sets on paper.
McHale’s Navy / McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force
By the 1960s, enough time had elapsed for World War II to seem funny. These 1964 and ’65 movies, based on the popular television series, depicted the U.S. Navy as a floating craps game—literally. The silly lunacy was given character by a strong cast, including Ernest Borgnine as a jolly PT boat skipper, Joe Flynn as the officious commander and comedian Tim Conway as an ensign whose efforts at control inevitably resulted in chaos.
