Manhattan-based writer Rich falls victim to AIDS in As Is. Virtually abandoned by friends and family, Rich is looked after by his gay lover, photographer Saul. Based on a play by William M. Hoffman, As Is wisely avoids editorial comment on the principals’ lifestyle, nor does it wallow in the tragedy of the situation.
Category: TV Movie
Barbara Wyatt-Hollis is an English professor who begins to fall under the effects of Alzheimer’s. The film documents her decline and the emotional turmoil it causes for her. It also show how the changes impact her husband, George, and their children. The film also looks at the process by which families can be educated and supported to deal with the impact of the disease, as well what is done for those afflicted.
A poet-astronaut is shot through an area of space called the Chronosynclastic Infundibulum. He is duplicated into infinite copies of himself, each of whom finds himself in a bizarre situations on a different world. (These scenarios are all derived from the novels and short stories from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., including Cat’s Cradle, Welcome to the Monkey House, Harrison Bergeron, and Happy Birthday, Wanda June).
Who Was Edgar Allan? is a television adaptation of Peter Rosei’s post-modern thriller of the same name in which a student travels to Venice to study against the wishes of his father and meets a mysterious figure who calls himself Edgar Allan. Mysterious deaths, all-seeing eyes, strange misunderstandings, and odd father figures are elements which structure Michael Haneke’s television-thriller. The director’s later concerns with media, invisibility, surveillance, and the bourgeois family are already present here.
Jimmy is a self-loathing and frustrated musician who works at a candy shop. He takes out his rage on his long suffering wife and his business partner and best friend, who lives next door. Jimmy’s marital problems come to a head when his wife discovers that she’s pregnant and one of her friends, an actress, comes to stay with them. Based on the play, the story takes place in England in the 1950’s.
Charlie is a black New York lawyer who is falsely accused of a crime in a Texas town. Escaping from his tormentors, Charlie takes refuge in a farmhouse. Here he meets unmarried, pregnant Marlene Chambers. Hostile towards each other at first, Charlie and Marlene become friends.
Streetwise, tough cop “Nails” Niles and his partner are lured into a deathtrap from which only Niles survives. Obsessed with finding his partner’s murderer, Niles burrows deep into the underground of the L. A. crime scene to find the guilty parties at any cost.
Ira Davidoff is a successful television writer who pens a tale in which one of the characters commits arson. A young and impressionable boy watches this TV drama–and shortly afterward dies in a fire of his own making. The boy’s attorney, in concert with several politicians and “clean TV” advocates, holds Davidoff’s script responsible for the tragedy.