Monday, January 26

9:45am – TCM – The Petrified Forest
Bette Davis and Leslie Howard are top billed in this 1936 crime drama, but the thing you’ll remember is Humphrey Bogart in his breakout role as criminal-on-the-run Duke Mantee. They’re all holed up in a remote gas station while Mantee figures out his scheme to escape the manhunt for him. He fairly sizzles on screen.

2:00am (27th) – TCM – From Here to Eternity
There’s the famous part, yes, where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr make love on the beach among the crashing waves. But there’s also a solid ensemble war tale, involving young officer Montgomery Clift and his naive wife Donna Reed, and embittered soldiers Frank Sinatra and Lee J. Cobb.

Tuesday, January 27

9:00am – IFC – Millions (repeats 2:30pm)
A young British boy finds millions of pounds a few days before the UK is set to switch to the Euro. A deceptively simple story because something more, in both style and substance, as director Danny Boyle brings his trademark visual panache and throws in an intriguing series of ethical dilemmas.

Wednesday, January 28

10:15am – TCM – Words and Music
MGM liked to do largely fictionalized composer biopics in the 1940s and ’50s, mostly because it gave them an opportunity to show off their stable of singing and dancing stars. Words and Music is their retelling of the career of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and it’s pretty routine. What isn’t routine is Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen’s dazzling rendition of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” a ten-minute dance number that is 100% worth the price of the film.

Thursday, January 29

4:15pm – TCM – Father of the Bride
Long before Steve Martin kicked of his now-twenty-year run of remaking classic comedies with his version of this film, Spencer Tracy was the Father of the Bride, dealing with the difficulty of letting his only daughter, Elizabeth Taylor, go to some other man. I don’t hate the Martin version, but this one is better. The family’s son is played by a young Russ Tamblyn (of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story).

8:00pm – TCM – Annie Hall
I recommend this film every time. Just ’cause. Although the fact that TCM has played Annie Hall five or six times since I started writing these, and have only played Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters maybe once each? Bothering me a little. Balance, TCM, balance. Must See

11:45pm – TCM – The Apartment
I also recommend this one every time. Because it’s awesome. Must See

4:00am (30th) – TCM – The Clock
In 1945, Judy Garland took a break from doing all those wonderful musicals to do a purely dramatic film (in the capable directorial hands of her then-husband Vincente Minnelli). It worked out quite well, giving us this solid wartime romance between a soldier about to shove off and the girl he meets with only one day to spare.

Friday, January 30

12:45am (31st) – TCM – The Night of the Hunter
Actor Charles Laughton only directed one film in his career, this strange yet mesmerizing Southern gothic thriller. In one way, it’s easy to see why he never got another directing gig – the film is quite weird, and doesn’t fit easily into any genre that studios at the time knew how to produce. In another way, it’s a great pity we never got to see what else he could come up with, because Night of the Hunter is one of the most original and poetic films ever made. It starts off as a relatively straight suspenser, with conman-posing-as-a-preacher Robert Mitchum insinuating himself into a young family whose father died burying a heap load of stolen money (which Mitchum would like to have). Soon, however, it turns into a fantastic fable, rife with symbolism and images that will stay seared into your brain for ever. Must See

Saturday, January 31

1:30pm – TCM – Rear Window
Hitchcock, Stewart, and Kelly mix equal parts suspense thriller, murder mystery, romance, voyeristic expose, ethical drama, caustic comedy and cinematographic experiment to create my favorite film of all time. Must See

6:00pm – TCM – The Pink Panther
Many other film buffs would join me in citing Pink Panther sequel A Shot in the Dark as the best of the series, but the first entry is still well worth watching. Peter Sellers is perfect as bumbling detective Jacques Clouseau, trying to recover a stolen diamond for David Niven.

Sunday, February 1

12:15am – TCM – Network
Peter Finch is as mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. And when he eschews his news script to say so live on national TV, he starts a phenomenon that his network initially fears but soon embraces when they realize that they stand to get more viewers for a deranged newscaster than for the actual news. Finch won the first posthumous acting Oscar for his role – in fact, the only one until Heath Ledger likely wins one this year.

Jim Emerson has been dissecting The Dark Knight on his blog scanners for the past few weeks. He’s not what you might call a fan of the film, and he’s been building, post by post, his argument against Nolan’s choices as a filmmaker. His earlier posts are here, here, here, here, and here – all of them focusing on the framing of the schoolbus getaway scene. The comments are excellent, too, arguing both for and against the film very eloquently.

To my mind, he’s a little nitpicky on that scene, but I’m in complete agreement with his latest post, which highlights several different falling sequences in different films to show how poorly-thought-out a major falling scene in The Dark Knight is. After the examples, he then re-edits The Dark Knight sequence into a sequence that is, to me, more coherent and impactful than Nolan’s original. By a long shot.

This is both an excellent example of hands-on film criticism – not just sitting back and saying “I liked” or “I didn’t like” but being incredibly specific, down to the level of individual shots and angles, and suggesting alternatives rather than simply complaining – and also a perfect illustration of what can be done with video in film criticism and why we need to protect fair use. I don’t always agree with Emerson, but I’d be pleased to be half as observant a critic as he is.

It has come to my attention that the movie channels don’t tend to delay programming for the west coast; I somehow always assumed all stations did that, which was why I was giving EST and CST (figuring MST and PST would be the same as EST), but I suppose when there’s no specific primetime programming there’s no real need. So I’m just going to put up the EST start time from now on; subtract one, two, or three hours depending on where you are, and double-checking the listings for your time zone wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Monday, January 19

Ha, this was today. There wasn’t anything on. It’s nice for me how the networks keep scheduling nothing good on Mondays so I can be lazy Sunday afternoons.

Tuesday, January 20

9:45am EST – IFC – The Cat’s Meow
Slight but enjoyable Peter Bogdanovich-directed period piece, with Edward Herrmann as publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and Kirsten Dunst well-cast as his actress mistress Marion Davies. Based on the real-life events surrounding the mysterious death of wunderkind producer Thomas Ince at one of Hearst’s yacht parties.
(repeats 2:30pm)

8:00pm EST – TCM – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
It’s fitting that Spencer Tracy’s last role was opposite Katharine Hepburn; they play a couple whose daughter plans to marry a black man (Sidney Poitier), a volatile topic in 1967.

10:00pm EST – TCM – Bringing Up Baby
Classic screwball comedy, Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant, Howard Hawks, pet leopards, dinosaur bones, the dog from The Thin Man, cross-dressing, paleontology, broken heels, yada yada yada. It’s amazing, watch it, love it.

2:00am EST (21st) – TCM – The Philadelphia Story
Strangely, after 1938, the year of Bringing Up Baby and Holiday, Katharine Hepburn was declared box office poison and shunted out of Hollywood for a couple of years. The Philadelphia Story marked her return in 1940, and what a return. A sparkling high society comedy that still sets the standard for old Hollywood class.

Wednesday, January 21

Not a thing to watch, oh dear, what shall I do? Oh, right, catch up on all those other things I was supposed to watch…

Thursday, January 22

8:00pm EST – TCM – 42nd Street
By 1932 when 42nd Street came out, the Hollywood musical had already died. So excited by the musical possibilities that sound brought in 1927, Hollywood pumped out terrible musical after terrible musical until everyone was sick of them. 42nd Street almost single-handedly turned the tide and remains one of the all-time classic backstage musicals. It looks creaky by later standards, but there’s a vitality and freshness to it that can’t be beat.

9:45pm EST – TCM – A Star is Born (1937)
This is not the better-known Judy Garland version, but the non-musical version featuring Janet Gaynor in one of her last roles. Gaynor’s not well remembered now, but she won the very first Academy Award for Best Actress back in 1928, and she holds the story of a hopeful ingenue married to a has-been actor together. I still love Judy’s version better (because I can’t get enough of her singing “The Man That Got Away”), but this one is well worth watching as well.

11:45pm EST – TCM – All About Eve
If you wanna talk great movies about Broadway, you gotta start with All About Eve. The titular Eve (Anne Baxter) fangirls her way right into Broadway diva Margo’s (Bette Davis) dressing room and life, but her fawning attention masks her scheming motives. It takes a lot to match Bette Davis on screen, but Baxter holds her own wonderfully, and the rest of the ensemble cast (Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, Thelma Ritter, George Sanders, and a young Marilyn Monroe) plus a brilliantly catty script round this out to one of the best films ever made.

2:15am EST (23rd) – TCM – Sunset Boulevard
I wish I were as big a fan of Sunset Boulevard as I feel like I ought to be. Film noirish? Check. Seedy underbelly of Hollywood? Check. Steeped in cinematic lore? Check. Written and directed by Billy Wilder? Check and check. And yet – it has never quite caught me the way I want it to. You know what that means… Rewatch!

4:15am EST (23rd) – TCM – The Producers (1968)
The original, non-musical version of the recent Broadway hit. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder play theatrical producers who figure out that they can make more money by producing a flop then by producing a hit, and they find the perfect vehicle: a musical titled “Springtime for Hitler.” Absolutely brilliant from start to finish.

Friday, January 23

5:45am EST – TCM – Singin’ in the Rain
You don’t need to be told to see this. So I won’t tell you. I’ll just casually point out the fact that it’s on.

8:00pm EST – TCM – Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Trust Stanley Kubrick to find the funny side of the Cold War. Peter Sellers plays multiple parts, including the President, an insane general who wants to nuke Russia, and the limb-control-impaired doctor of the title. It’s zany, it’s over-the-top, it’s bitingly satirical, and it remains one of Kubrick’s best films in a career full of amazing work.

Saturday, January 24

9:45am EST – TCM – The Big Heat
Director Fritz Lang came out of the German Expressionist movement of the 1920s, so it’s not surprising that he ended up making some of the better noir films, given film noir’s borrowing of Expressionist style. Glenn Ford is a cop working against his corrupt department, but the parts you’ll remember from the film all belong to Gloria Grahame in a supporting role as a beaten-up gangster’s moll. Her performance and Lang’s attention to detail raise the otherwise average story to a new level.

Sunday, January 25

6:00am EST – TCM – Ninotchka
“Garbo Laughs!” proclaimed the advertisements, playing up the comedic factor of the usually implacable Greta Garbo’s 1939 film. True enough, though it takes a while for the charms of Paris and Melvyn Douglas to warm the Communist Ninotchka to the point of laughter. Pairing up director Ernst Lubitsch and writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (who had yet to become a director himself) turns out to be a brilliant move, as Ninotchka has just the right combination of wit and sophistication.

2:00am EST (26th) – TCM – Jules and Jim
Jules and Jim are best friends. Then Catherine falls into their lives like a hurricane – she’s almost a force of chaotic primal nature. She marries Jules, but when Jim reconnects with the couple after WWII (in which the two friends fought on opposite sides), their relationship gets…um…complicated. I keep trying to write more, because I just saw this again in the cinema, and it’s all roiling around in my head, but Truffaut will do that to you. Not as much as Godard does, but then Jules and Jim feels quite Godardian to me, but with more angst. But I won’t go into it all right now. Just know that this is one of the classics of the New Wave, and exemplifies the movement’s realistic style, dispassionate camera and narration, and intellectual pursuits.

“When the history of intellectual property law is written, January 12, 2009 should be marked as a decisive moment. It was the day that my friend, fellow House Next Door contributor and sometime filmmaking partner Kevin B. Lee saw his entire archive of critical video essays deleted by YouTube on grounds that his work violated copyright.”

That’s the opening paragraph of Matt Zoller Seitz’s outstanding post at The House Next Door on Tuesday. On Monday, astute critic Kevin B. Lee of Shooting Down Pictures had his entire YouTube account deleted, along with the hundreds of critical video essays hosted there, due to claims of copyright violation.

I won’t go into all the details because Matt does an excellent job of outlining both the contributions Kevin has made to film criticism via his video essays and the need for a distinction between fair use and copyright violation. I won’t claim to have always been on the right side of copyright law, but the sorts of things that Kevin and Matt (and Jonathan Lapper, and Jim Emerson, and others) are doing with copyrighted content clearly fall into the category of fair use quotation for critical and educational purposes.

Apparently, YouTube is now using digital watermarking to remove copyrighted videos (and audio tracks now, too) without any means of checking whether it’s a legitimate use of the material under fair use or a true copyright violation. Granted, YouTube is ginormous enough that such checking is probably logistically impossible. But cases like Kevin’s need to have attention brought to them, need to be talked about and discussed, and we need to come to some better formulation of copyright law that better defines and protects fair use.

To close back with Matt again:

“I fervently hope some brave, knowledgeable lawyer will see that there’s more at stake here than the ethics of ripping and posting scenes from movies, and make a test case of Kevin’s unconscionable treatment. The circumstances may seem mundane, but the implications are grim as can be. When individuals and governments permit corporations to dictate the terms by which their culture may be examined, the First Amendment becomes just another pile of words.” [my emphasis]

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

A silly, fun featured video this time. Someone who’s never seen Star Wars completely (but has heard about it a lot and seen bits and pieces) tells the plot of the original trilogy. Mash it up with completely ridiculous cutout animation, and it’s quite entertaining. She actually gets pretty close most of the time, and yet…

I am not going to live-blog American Idol this year, for a number of reasons, the most compelling of which is that most people who read and enjoyed the live-blogging are now seeing the show three hours before me (even if I don’t timeshift, and I probably will), so it wouldn’t really be live.

But that’s not to say I won’t have thoughts about the show. Probably what I’ll do, though, is post them in the Tumblr section rather than the main blog section after this post. So look for American Idol stuff over there.

I really like the new judge, Kara (or Kahra, if you’re Simon). She’s sassy. She called Paula (or maybe bikini-girl, I wasn’t too clear on that) a bitch! Plus she’s a songwriter, and I’m cool with that. And Simon is being nicer this year, already. We’ll see how that goes.

As far as the contestants, haven’t seen a winner yet. Arianna Afsar and Stevie Wright are fulfilling my need for jazzy, bluesy singers, and Scott (the blind guy) has an extremely pleasing voice. And Emily Wynne-Hughes, the much-tattooed rocker that came early in the show, is there for the rock side of things. I liked her, but I’m not sure I respect her leaving her band in the lurch like that. In fact, I don’t.

Benjamin Button is different than every one else. He was born old, and grows younger as everyone else grows older. Along the way he lives as an ancient-looking child in an old-folks home, with adoptive black parents, works on a tugboat before and during World War II, has a fling with a diplomat’s wife in Moscow, and carries on an on-again-off-again lifelong true love romance with childhood friend Daisy. As might be expected, this both ends sadly and takes a long time. Not that either of those things is necessarily bad. In fact the main part of the story is handled quite well, mostly well-paced, certainly well performed by Brad Pitt and especially Cate Blanchett, and generally solid.

Unfortunately, Button’s extraordinary story is framed by a present-day narrative of the dying Daisy having her daughter read Benjamin’s diary aloud to her. The film cuts back to this narrative throughout Button’s story, a device which really only works once or twice when certain major surprises are revealed. Beyond that, it’s fluff with little point beyond emotional manipulation. (Even more questionable is the threatening hurricane, which turns out to be Katrina – WHY?) The film would’ve been much tighter without it. Besides the frame story, there’s also another story old Daisy tells about a backwards-running clock, which obviously has a thematic tie-in, but basically never comes up again and has no real significance. I swear, people trying to make important, award-winning films need to learn to hire good editors.

The concept of the film is fantastic – as well as the obvious implications of Benjamin’s backwards life for his relationship with Daisy, the underlying questions of what it would be like to be thirty with the experience of a sixty-year-old (and vice versa) are fascinating. The film only touches on them briefly, and doesn’t try to get too philosophical about it, which is probably good. After all, the focus is the romance, and though it’s strange that everyone seems to just accept Benjamin’s situation with very few questions, leaving the more profound implications as implicit suggestions rather than explicit explorations is a more subtle, more evocative approach.

However, the film is ultimately more interesting in concept than in execution, which is a little disappointing because we’ve come to expect excellence in both from director David Fincher. Once in a while an especially well-lighted scene would remind me Fincher was directing (like the gorgeous shot of Daisy dancing in the silhouette), and one sequence in particular was brilliant on its own – the almost whimsical scene with the car accident. The problem is that the sequence doesn’t fit into the rest of the very standard, very non-whimsical cinematic style. I really would’ve liked to have seen the whole film done with this sort of imagination and stylistic flair. After all, it IS a fantasy.

Of course, Cate Blanchett is perfect, as she always is, in a role that calls for her to age from about 18 to over 60, while Pitt is more than adequate de-aging the same age range. (I don’t mean to sound like I’m dissing Pitt – he just isn’t given quite as much to do, given Benjamin’s general easy-going nature.) The make-up and CGI work is highly convincing, except it did get a little distracting as Pitt’s younger versions kept evoking his earlier film roles – “Look, that’s Pitt like he is right now! And there he is circa Fight Club! And circa Legends of the Fall! And hey, there he is in Thelma and Louise!” But perhaps that’s a failure of my own imagination.

Overall, I did like the film, but it’s easily a half hour too long due to the dumb framing device, and it’s more manipulative than I would like. And the fact that I expect more from Fincher doesn’t help. Above Average

And spoilers, so if for whatever reason you haven’t watched it yet and don’t want to know winners – you’re probably screwed, since it’ll likely pop up in your feedreader, on your TV, in your newspaper, etc. But at least I warned you, so there. Golden Globe spoilers after the jump.

Click here to read on!