IT cannot be long before some enthusiastic television producer makes a programme about the making of all those programmes that explain the making of movies.
There are two on Pearl this evening, The Making Of The Three Musketeers (8.30pm), and The Making Of House Of The Spirits (9.00pm). As if that was not enough they are preceded by Pearl Movie Watch (7.20pm) in which the beautiful but bland Gloria Wu and Oliver Tan talk about the movies Pearl is showing in between the programmes it is showing about the making of the movies. And so on.
The Three Musketeers is being hailed by its producers as a swashbuckling epic, but reports from the West, where it is already showing, indicate it is lacking in swash and buckle. This is a revisionist version of Alexander Dumas' story, designed to appealto people weaned not on Gene Kelly, who played D'Artagnan in the 1948 MGM version, but on MTV, only just stopping short of showing Athos and Porthos in carefully-reversed baseball caps rapping ''all for one and one for all, dudes''.
Kiefer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen are two of the three, although as every schoolboy knows there were actually four.
House Of The Spirits looks like a better movie altogether, starring as it does Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Winona Ryder, Meryl Streep and a cast of dusky Chilean maidens and hard-knock gringo-chasing revolutionaries. Whether or not you are bothered about how they filmed it is something only you can decide.
THE main characters from The Karate Kid return in the aimless sequel, The Karate Kid Part II (Pearl, 9.30pm), but this time in Okinawa, Japan. If the plot is getting tired, change the scenery. And if the budget won't stretch to Japan, try Hawaii, where this was filmed.