Television: Best of DSTV

Studio Universal brings us Wednesday night romance this month - so couples can snuggle up to ward off the cold outwardly and watch something heartwarming to heat them up inside, or so their press shpiel goes.

Pick of the week

Kate & Leopold

Studio Universal, Channel 112, Wednesday, 20:30

This might have been more effective if we were still in the middle of winter rather than the back half. But, anyway, the first title in this themed run is pretty good all the same.

Kate & Leopold is a romantic fantasy drama with an interesting gimmick. Hugh Jackman plays a 19th-century nobleman named - brace yourselves - Leopold Alexis Elijah Walker Thomas Gareth Mountbatten. His family fortune has dwindled to almost nothing, so his strict uncle (Paxton Whitehead) demands he must marry a rich woman. He'd rather pursue a career in science.

One night, he pursues a man using a curious device (a camera) and crosses through a temporal portal to modern-day New York. It turns out the man he followed was Stuart Besser (Liev Schreiber), an amateur scientist who discovered the phenomena of time travel.

Leopold has no choice but to stick around for a while. He meets Stuart's ex-girlfriend, Kate McKay (Meg Ryan), who thinks he's a method actor and sets him up with a TV ad gig. The funny scenarios come mostly from Leopold's uptight, priggish ways conflicting with unscrupulous, marketable modernity.

Top movies

Conan the Barbarian

e.tv, Channel 194, Friday, 20:30

You wouldn't think that stories about a tall, muscle-bound meat-head running around in his underpants slaying evil sorcerers and hideous monsters with a big sword would be the subject of any serious analysis, would you?

But you'll find an endless line of critics and nerds willing to discuss the film for hours and hours, reading into it themes of self-belief, feminism, misogyny, fascism, the Nietzschean "übermensch", even Christian themes - and arguing for hours over which of those elements the film does or doesn't possess.

Were any of those things actually intended to be portrayed in this simple fantasy adventure, or are people reading too much into it? The author of the original Conan pulp stories, Robert E Howard, apparently wasn't the most mentally stable of individuals, so should we really infer any serious social commentary from his work?

But this movie, based on the Howard character, is still good fun to watch and it basically kick-started Arnold Schwarzenegger's career. I'll always remember a funny story about it I saw on the DVD "making of" features, where the director tried to placate the producers who were worried about casting the inexperienced Schwarzenegger in the lead role, by telling them: "If we didn't find Arnold, we'd have to build him" - clearly meaning that finding someone who better fit the physical profile of Conan would be impossible.

It also stars James Earl Jones in a very imposing role as the cult leader antagonist Thulsa Doom, and Sandahl Bergman as Valeria, Conan's striking, Valkyrie-like companion.

World War Z

M-Net, Channel 101, Today, 20:05

Here's another one of those movies you'll have to watch for yourself to decide on which side of the fence you fall. The book by Max Brooks, on which the film is based, is apparently pretty good and the audiobook version has a very War of the Worlds radio drama feel to it.

This film, however, had to dispense with many (but not all) of the intelligent bits in favour of telling a more entertaining story. Maybe that's enough for you if you're someone who simply enjoys a popcorn movie now and then - or maybe you're a nerd/gamer/cult-movie fanatic to whom the mere prospect of yet another zombie story is enough to send you running for the hills - no matter how good people claim it is.

At what point did we become so fascinated with these shambling animated corpses? Even harder to believe is when directors attempt to use zombies in some kind of social commentary. Really? We can see what you're doing there, but, ouch. It's really not as clever as you think it is.