2001: A Space Odyssey, playing on TCM at 2:00am on the 22nd

There are several newly featured films worthy of highlight this week. TCM is playing a double-feature of Buster Keaton silents on Monday night, starting with Sherlock Jr. at 8pm. They’re also throwing out some noirs that are new to our listing – the Raymond Chandler-based Murder, My Sweet on Wednesday at 6:15pm and the Bogart-Bacall Key Largo Sunday at 6pm. And don’t miss a couple of really great romances – Two for the Road Friday at 4pm on the Fox Movie Channel, and Brief Encounter Saturday at 7:30am on TCM. Something for everyone this week, as well as the usual crop of repeats in case you missed something in earlier weeks.

Monday, September 21

6:30am – IFC – Howl’s Moving Castle
Hayao Miyazaki has been a leader in the world of kid-friendly anime films for several years now, and while many would point to Spirited Away as his best film, I actually enjoyed Howl’s Moving Castle the most of all his films. Japanese animation takes some getting used to, but Miyazaki’s films are well worth it, and serve as a wonderful antidote to the current stagnation going on in American animation (always excepting Pixar).
2004 Japan. Director: Hayao Miyazaki. Starring (dubbed voices): Christian Bale, Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall
(repeats at 12:20pm)

3:45pm – TCM – The Window
Young boy Bobby Driscoll is a chronic liar, which makes it very difficult to make his family and other adults believe him when he claims he saw a murder being committed. But when the murderer finds out what he knows… A solid little thriller told from a child’s point of view.
1949 USA. Director: Ted Tetzlaff. Starring: Bobby Driscoll, Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Paul Stewart, Ruth Roman.

8:00pm – TCM – Sherlock, Jr.
Buster Keaton is a film projectionist who longs to be a detective so much that he dreams himself into a film he’s projecting so he can become the detective hero of the story. The scene of him entering the film is justly famous, though it’s a smaller portion of the film than its fame leads you to believe.
1924 USA. Director: Buster Keaton. Starring: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Ward Crane.
Must See
Newly Featured!

9:00pm – TCM – Steamboat Bill, Jr.
One of Buster Keaton’s best-known films has him as the city-boy son of a steamboat captain who goes to learn his father’s trade. Many mishaps later, he’s left to rescue his father from a tremendous hurricane – that scene is one of Keaton’s absolute best set-pieces, as he remains implacable while buildings literally fall around him.
1928 USA. Director: Charles Reisner. Starring: Buster Keaton, Ernest Torrence.
Newly Featured!

9:45pm – IFC – Chasing Amy
Kevin Smith’s third film, not as low-fi indie as Clerks, as goofy as Mallrats, as irreverently genius as Dogma, as self-referential as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, or as racy as Zach and Miri Make a Porno, but perhaps sweeter than all of them – Ben Affleck falls for Joey Lauren Adams, with the only slight obstacle being that she’s a lesbian.
1997 USA. Director: Kevin Smith. Starring: Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Lee.
(repeats at 3:15am)

10:15pm – TCM – On the Waterfront
Marlon Brando’s performance as a former boxer pulled into a labor dispute among dock workers goes down as one of the greatest in cinematic history. I’m not even a huge fan of Brando, but this film wins me over.
1954 USA. Director: Elia Kazan. Starring: Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Eva Marie Saint.
Must See

12:00M – Sundance – Man on Wire
I haven’t taken the opportunity to see last year’s highly-acclaimed documentary about high-wire walker Philippe Petit yet, but here it is already on Sundance, so I’m hoping to catch it this week.
Newly Featured!
(repeats at 12:00M on the 22nd/23rd)

12:15am (22nd) – TCM – Dr. Strangelove
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.
1964 USA/UK. Director: Stanley Kubrick. Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott.
Must See

2:00am (22nd) – TCM – 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick’s visually stunning journey through thousands of years of technological evolution and man-vs-machine conflict is still one of the ultimate science fiction films. And it’s aged far better both visually and philosophically than one would expect. I think I watch it almost every time TCM plays it, and it never gets old.
1968 USA. Director: Stanley Kubrick. Starring: Keir Dullea.
Must See
Newly Featured!

Tuesday, September 22

6:30am – TCM – I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
Paul Muni plays an initially optimistic and energetic young man who struggles to find a job during the Depression. Eventually he ends up unwillingly involved in a robbery and sentenced to the chain gang. One of Warner Bros’ best “ripped from the headlines” socially conscious films – they did a lot of them in the 1930s.
1931 USA. Director: Mervyn LeRoy. Starring: Paul Muni, Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson.

8:00pm – TCM – North by Northwest
Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) gets mistaken for George Kaplan and pulled into an elaborate web of espionage in one of Hitchcock’s most enjoyable and funniest thrillers. So many great scenes it’s impossible to list them all.
1959 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau.
Must See

10:30pm – TCM – Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock built the foundation for all future psycho-killer movies with his classic. It’s not as terrifying as it once was, but that doesn’t at all diminish its greatness.
1960 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam.Must See

12:30am (23rd) – TCM – Marnie
Marnie gets something of a bad rap, I think, because it comes right after Hitchcock’s amazing Vertigo-North by Northwest-Psycho-The Birds streak of genius, but I think it’s one of Hitchcock’s most underrated films, despite a few somewhat obvious plot devices and the fact that ‘Tippi’ Hedren can’t act. In some ways, the imperfections in this one are what makes it interesting.
1964 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: ‘Tippi’ Hedren, Sean Connery.

Wednesday, September 23

12:00N – IFC – La Jetée
Very few short films become classics (outside of silent films and arguably Looney Tunes), but Chris Marker’s La Jetee, told entirely in sequences of still photographs, is one of them. In a postapocalyptic future, a man is sent back in time to try and stop WWIII from happening. But he both falls in love and is haunted by a childhood memory – two things that are fatefully interconnected.
1962 France. Director: Chris Marker. Starring: Jean Négroni, Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich.

6:15pm – TCM – Murder, My Sweet
Humphrey Bogart is the screen’s most famous Philip Marlowe, playing Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective in The Big Sleep in 1946, but Dick Powell beat him by two years in this adaptation of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. It’s not the classic that The Big Sleep is, but it’s a solid noir detective film that’s more than worth watching, not least of all for Claire Trevor, who’s pretty much always worth watching.
1944 USA. Director: Edward Dmytryk. Starring: Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger.
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – TCM – The Adventures of Robin Hood
I will state almost categorically that this is the greatest adventure film ever made. Maybe it’s a dead heat between this one and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Errol Flynn is Robin Hood, Olivia de Havilland is Maid Marion, a whole raft of fantastic character actors fill out the rest of the cast, and it’s all done in gorgeous Technicolor (it’s one of the earliest Technicolor films).
1938 USA. Directors: William Keighley & Michael Curtiz. Starring: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, Eugene Pallette, Alan Hale, Patric Knowles, Una O’Connor.
Must See

12:00M – IFC – Pi
Darren Aronofsky’s first feature is this fever dream of a mathematician searching for the numeric patterns that will unlock the secrets of the stock market – paranoid, fearful of human contact, and beset by terrible headaches, he’s also pursued by Wall Street factions and Hasidic Jews, each seeking the results of his formulas. It’s heady stuff, but Aronofsky’s the right guy for that.
1998 USA. Director: Darren Aronofsky. Starring: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman.
(repeats at 4:34am on the 24th)

2:00am (24th) – Sundance – Eraserhead
David Lynch’s first feature is a weird post-apocalyptic dreamscape of a film – what, you were expecting something normal? When you can have industrial decay and mutant babies?
1977 USA. Director: David Lynch. Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart.
Newly Featured!

Thursday, September 24

8:00pm – TCM – 3:10 to Yuma (1957)
The original version of 2007’s highly successful Christian Bale-Russell Crowe western is well worth watching in its own right – a little less actiony, a little more thoughtful, though its story of a peaceful farmer shuffled into the role of law enforcement to get a criminal to the train for his trial without having him rescued by his gang remains largely identical.
1957 USA. Director: Delmer Daves. Starring: Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, Felicia Farr, Leora Dana.

8:00pm – IFC – Gangs of New York
I found this film a difficult one to like when I watched it, but I haven’t seen it for five years – perhaps a rewatch is in order. It certainly is hard to argue with the concept of a Scorsese/diCaprio/Day-Lewis trifecta in a story about Irish gangs at the dawn of New York’s existence.
2003 USA. Director: Martin Scorsese. Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo diCaprio, Cameron Diaz.
(repeats at 2:45am on the 26th)

12:45am (26th) – IFC – The Sweet Hereafter
Acclaimed Canadian director Atom Egoyan directs one of his best-known films, a story of the aftermath of a schoolbus accident that forever altered life in a small Canadian town and a big city lawyer who tries to put together a class-action suit for reasons of his own.
1997 Canada. Director: Atom Egoyan. Starring: Ian Holm, Caerthan Banks, Sarah Polley, Tom McCamus.
Newly Featured!

Friday, September 25

5:30pm – TCM – The King and I
Oklahoma! is my unabashed favorite Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, but I have a lot of admiration for The King and I, if only because it addresses far more serious topics with far less happy outcomes than most musicals ever do.
1956 USA. Director: Walter Lang. Starring: Yul Brynner, Deborah Kerr, Rita Moreno.

5:45pm – Sundance – A Woman Under the Influence
Gena Rowlands gives a tour-de-force performance as Mabel, a woman whose teetering madness threatens her marriage to Nick (Peter Falk). Their relationship edges back and forth between love, frustration, and anger with amazing quickness, yet it’s not clear whether Mabel’s instability is causing the problems, or the other way around. John Cassavetes directs with an unwavering camera, refusing to look away.
1974 USA. Director: John Cassavetes. Starring: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Fred Draper, Lady Rowlands.
(repeats at 12:00N on the 26th)

4:00pm – Fox Movie Channel – Two for the Road
Once in a while a film comes out of nowhere and blindsides me with brilliance. Two for the Road is directed by Stanley Donen, best known for lighthearted musicals, comedies, and mysteries. It stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney; Hepburn at least also best known for lighthearted, whimsical fare. But Two for the Road is one of the most thoughtful and adult films of the 1960s, and I mean that in a good way. It dissects Hepburn’s and Finney’s relationship, cutting back and forth between their meeting, their marriage, and their separation almost as if all three are happening at the same time – every moment of their life together becomes part of who they are and part of the sum of their relationship, and Donen has found the perfect way to depict that.
1967 USA. Director: Stanley Donen. Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney.
Must See
Newly Featured!

3:15am (26th) – IFC – Stage Beauty
Sometime around Shakespeare’s time, theatrical convention changed from having all female parts played by males on stage to allowing women to perform female roles themselves. Caught in this shift were the effeminate men who had made their careers and indeed, their identities, out of playing women. Stage Beauty is about one such man and his crisis of self when he no longer had a professional or personal identity. It’s a fascinating film in many ways.
2004 UK. Director: Richard Eyre. Starring: Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Ben Chaplin.

Saturday, September 26

7:30am – TCM – Brief Encounter
In this quiet little doomed romance, a married woman bored with her dull husband meets a man on a train – and continues to meet him every week, indulging herself in the way he makes her feel, even though she knows it can’t really be. David Lean brings a lushness and depth to this deceptively simple story (by Noel Coward), making into one of the most memorable romances of the 1940s.
1945 UK. Director: David Lean. Starring: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Cyril Raymond.
Must See
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – IFC – The Player
Robert Altman takes on Hollywood in this story of a script screener (Tim Robbins) who gets drawn further and further into a web of blackmail and double-crosses when he’s threatened by a screenwriter whose script he rejected. You gotta love it for the virtuosic opening pan at the very least; the rest of the Hollywood insider references are just gravy.
1992 USA. Director: Robert Altman. Starring: Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopie Goldberg.
(repeats at 2:00am on the 27th)

Sunday, September 27

2:05pm – IFC – Moulin Rouge
Baz Lurhmann admittedly has a love-it-or-hate-it flamboyantly trippy aesthetic, especially in the informal Red Curtain trilogy which Moulin Rogue! closes. And sure, it’s over the top; sure, the story is fairly routine; sure, the acting is so-so. I love it to pieces anyway.
2001 USA. Director: Baz Lurhmann. Starring: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, John Leguizamo.

6:00pm – TCM – Key Largo
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall team up for the final time on this great noirish melodrama of a group of people, including a wheelchair-bound hotel owner, his recently widowed daughter-in-law (Bacall), a war veteran (Bogart), and a ruthless gangster and his girl, forced to take refuge against a fierce hurricane. Among the best films for all involved, and that’s saying something considering who all is involved.
1948 USA. Director: John Huston. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor.
Must See
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – IFC – Fargo
Still one of the Coen Brothers’ best films, despite over a decade of mostly good films in the intervening years. Dark comedy is not an easy genre, and Fargo is the gold standard, blending shocking violence and a noir-ish crime story with comical inept criminals and a perfectly rendered performance from Frances McDormand.
1996 USA. Director: Joel Coen. Starring: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi.
Must See
(repeats at 1:30am on the 28th)

The Cranes are Flying, playing on TCM Monday the 21st at 2:00am (or really late Sunday night, depending on your point of view)

Mostly repeats this week, but a few really cool new additions this week, all courtesy of TCM. First, one of Hitchcock’s most lighthearted thrillers, The Trouble With Harry, is showing on Tuesday. Then Friday night/Saturday morning, don’t miss one of the all-time great so-bad-it’s-good movies, Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. And then The Cranes are Flying, a Soviet classic I’ve never seen TCM run before, is playing late Sunday night/early Monday morning.

Monday, September 14

8:00pm – IFC – Fargo
Still one of the Coen Brothers’ best films, despite over a decade of mostly good films in the intervening years. Dark comedy is not an easy genre, and Fargo is the gold standard, blending shocking violence and a noir-ish crime story with comical inept criminals and a perfectly rendered performance from Frances McDormand.
1996 USA. Director: Joel Coen. Starring: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi.
Must See
(repeats at 2:00am)

Tuesday, September 15

7:15am – IFC – Waking Life
Richard Linklater’s first foray into overlaid animation is a philosophical dreamscape that’ll either leave you cold or inhabit your thoughts for weeks. It’s the latter for me. Like most of Linklater’s films, it’s largely made up of people talking, but with the added interest of the unique ever-shifting, never-solid animation style (which he’d reuse with a slightly more standard sci-fi story in A Scanner Darkly).
2001 USA. Director: Richard Linklater. Starring: Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy.
(repeats at 11:45am and 5:35pm)

8:00pm – TCM – The Trouble With Harry
A group of small-town New Englanders find a dead body (that of Harry) in the woods and, fearing they’ll be murder suspects if it’s found, conspire to hide it. One of Hitchcock’s funniest films, mixing the macabre and the absurd adeptly.
1955 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Shirley MacLaine, Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick.
Newly Featured!
(repeats at 10:00am on the 20th)

8:05pm – IFC – I Heart Huckabees
Not too many films take philosophy as their base, but this one basically does, following a man (Jason Schwartzman) plagued by coincidence who hires a couple of existentialists to figure out what’s going on.
2004 USA. Director: David O. Russell. Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Isabelle Huppert, Dustin Hoffman, Naomi Watts, Mark Wahlberg, Lily Tomlin, Jude Law.

10:00pm – TCM – The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Hitchcock’s second version of this story (the first was 1934) has Doris Day and James Stewart as a couple who discover an assassination plot and have their son kidnapped to try to keep them quiet. It’s a well-done film and worth watching, though not quite up to many of Hitchcock’s other classics.
1956 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: James Stewart, Doris Day, Bernard Miles, Brenda De Banzie.
Newly Featured!

12:15am (16th) – TCM – Vertigo
James Stewart is a detective recovering from a vertigo-inducing fall who’s asked by an old friend to help his wife, who has developed strange behavior. Hitchcock plays with doubling, fate, and obsession, all the while creating one of his moodiest and most mesmerizing films. And watch for a great supporting turn by Barbara Bel Geddes as Stewart’s long-suffering best friend.
1958 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes.
Must See

Wednesday, September 16

7:10am – IFC – A Hard Day’s Night
Richard Lester’s 1964 Beatles-starring film straddles several genres – musical, concert film, documentary, comedy. The good news is that it’s an excellent film in any genre. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any film an exuberant as this one, and with the Beatles right on the cusp of becoming the greatest band of all time.
1964 UK. Director: Richard Lester. Starring: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr.
Must See
(repeats at 12:30pm)

11:45am – TCM – It Happened One Night
In 1934, It Happened One Night pulled off an Academy Award sweep that wouldn’t be repeated until 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, snagging awards for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, and Actress. Colbert is a rebellious heiress, determined to run away and marry against her father’s wishes. Along the way, she picks up Gable, a journalist who senses a juicy feature. This remains one of the most enjoyable comedies of all time, with great scenes like Colbert using her shapely legs rather than her thumb to catch a ride, Gable destroying undershirt sales by not wearing one, and a busload of people singing “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
1934 USA. Director: Frank Capra. Starring: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert.
Must See

3:45pm – TCM – Nothing Sacred
A newspaper offers to give terminally-ill Carole Lombard her dream trip to New York City in exchange for publishing her experiences. Only problem is, she’s lying about being terminally ill. One of the zaniest of all 1930s zany comedies – that said, it can be a little on the shrill side.
1937 USA. Director: William A. Wellman. Starring: Carole Lombard, Fredric March, Charles Winninger, Walter Connolly.

8:00pm – IFC – The Player
Robert Altman takes on Hollywood in this story of a script screener (Tim Robbins) who gets drawn further and further into a web of blackmail and double-crosses when he’s threatened by a screenwriter whose script he rejected. You gotta love it for the virtuosic opening pan at the very least; the rest of the Hollywood insider references are just gravy.
1992 USA. Director: Robert Altman. Starring: Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopie Goldberg.
(repeats at 2:30am on the 17th)

12:00M – IFC – The New World
Terrence Malick may not make many films, but the ones he does make, wow. Superficially the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, The New World is really something that transcends mere narrative – this is poetry on film. Every scene, every shot has a rhythm and an ethereal that belies the familiarity of the story we know. I expected to dislike this film when I saw it, quite honestly. It ended up moving me in ways I didn’t know cinema could.
2005 USA. Director: Terrence Malick. Starring: Colin Farrell, Q’orianka Kilcher, Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer.
Must See
(repeats at 11:35am on the 17th)

Thursday, September 17

10:30am – Fox Movie – How Green Was My Valley
This film won Oscars for Best Picture and director John Ford; it’s a bit overly sentimental at times, perhaps, but by and large its simple story of Welsh mining village is pretty solid, thanks in no small part to great supporting turns by its stellar supporting cast.
1941 USA. Director: John Ford. Starring: Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Anna Lee, Donald Crisp, Roddy McDowall, Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald.

10:00pm – TCM – Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray’s rather strange feminist western has become something of a cult classic – Joan Crawford is Vienna, a tough-but-vulnerable saloon owner that all the other women in town want gone. She calls on old friend Johnny Guitar to help her out, but he many not be quite as advertised either. I didn’t love this the way I wanted to when I first saw it, but I feel like some of that was just not knowing what to expect (also, I had a craptastic VHS copy). Hoping to improve its standing with a second viewing.
1954 USA. Director: Nicholas Ray. Starring: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Ward Bond, Ernest Borgnine.
Newly Featured!

10:00pm – Sundance – Volver
Pedro Almodóvar deftly straddles the line between drama and comedy in one of his more accessible films. Two sisters return to their home at the death of their aunt, only to find their mother’s ghost – or is it a ghost? And as always in Almodóvar’s films, there are related subplots aplenty. Penélope Cruz is incredible as the younger, fierier sister – she’s never been more moving than in her passionate rendition of the title song, nor funnier than when calmly cleaning up a murder scene.
2006 Spain. Director: Pedro Almodóvar. Starring: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanco Portillo, Yohana Cobo
Must See
(repeats at 5:15am on the 18th)

10:05pm – IFC – Moulin Rouge!
Baz Lurhmann admittedly has a love-it-or-hate-it flamboyantly trippy aesthetic, especially in the informal Red Curtain trilogy which Moulin Rogue! closes. And sure, it’s over the top; sure, the story is fairly routine; sure, the acting is so-so. I love it to pieces anyway.
2001 USA. Director: Baz Lurhmann. Starring: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, John Leguizamo.
(repeats at 4:15am on the 18th)

12:15am (18th) – IFC – Bride & Prejudice
Laugh at me if you must for recommending Chadha’s Bollywood-infused version of Pride and Prejudice, but I love it. It’s silly, it’s beautiful, it’s a fun exercise in adaptation of literary classics, and it’s only slightly weighed down by Martin Henderson’s woodenness.
2005 UK. Director: Gurinder Chadha. Starring: Aishwarya Rai, Martin Henderson, Naveen Andrews, Alexis Bledel.

Friday, September 18

7:30am – TCM – Grand Hotel
This 1932 Best Picture Oscar-winner is honestly pretty creaky around the joints these days, but if you wanna see how they used to do ensemble pictures in the studio days, this is it. MGM’s top talent, from Garbo and Crawford to Beery and two Barrymores are all on hand.
1932 USA. Director: Edmund Goulding. Starring: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt.
Newly Featured!

8:25am – IFC – Vagabond
One of Agnès Varda’s best-known films, about the last few weeks of wandering woman’s life as she struggles to make it. I absolutely loved the only Varda film I’ve seen (Cléo from 5 to 7), so I’m anxious to see more.
1985 France. Director: Angès Varda. Starring: Sandrine Bonnaire.
(repeats at 2:00pm on the 18th and 5:15am on the 19th)

7:15pm – IFC – Wassup Rockers
Small film about a group of teenage Latino skateboarders from South Central LA. They go up to Beverly Hills to skateboard, get caught by cops, escape, meet up with some girls, get in fights with preppy 90210 guys, and try to get home. But the moments that’ll get you are when they’re just talking, to the camera, or to the girls, about their life and what it’s like to live in South Central. It doesn’t go anywhere, really, but it’s a wonderful slice of life.
2005 USA. Director: Larry Clark. Starring: Jonathan Velasquez, Francisco Pedrasa, Milton Velasquez, Usvaldo Panameno, Eddie Velasquez.

8:00pm – TCM – Carmen Jones
Oscar Hammerstein takes on Bizet’s Carmen, transposing it into a contemporary setting at a Korean War army base and writing new lyrics to go with Bizet’s operatic melodies. It’s interesting not only for the adaptation of opera to musical, but also its use of an all-African American cast – giving Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and many others lead roles in an era when they were still all-too-often relegated to roles as servants or one-off entertainers.
1954 USA. Director: Otto Preminger. Starring: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey.
Newly Featured!

12:00M – IFC – Trainspotting
Days in the lives of Scottish heroin addicts. Sounds like a downer, and I won’t say it’s not, but it’s also brilliant and searing. Danny Boyle seems to always be able to take stories that could be routine and make them into something special.
1996 UK. Director: Danny Boyle. Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, JOnny Lee Miller, Kelly McDonald.
Must See

2:00am (19th) – TCM – Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Russ Meyer is known for making great trashy movies, and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is one of his greatest. Three girls race their car around the desert, taking a defeated competitor’s girlfriend hostage when they hear about the possibility of scoring a bunch of cash from an old guy who lives nearby. This is one of those films that has you constantly going “they did not just do/say that, did they? OH YES THEY DID” and “it can’t possibly get more messed up than this, can it? OH YES IT CAN.” A gold standard of awesome bad movies, right here.
1965 USA. Director: Russ Meyer. Starring: Tura Satana, Haji, Lori Williams, Sue Bernard.
Must See
Newly Featured!

Saturday, September 19

6:45pm – Sundance – Paris je t’aime
I have a huge soft spot for Paris – basically any movie set there I will like to at least some degree. So an anthology film with eighteen internationally-renowned directors giving their take on Paris with eighteen short films all mashed together? Yeah, instant love. Obviously some sections are far stronger than others – the Coens, Gus van Sant, Alexander Payne, Isabel Coixet, Tom Tykwer, and Wes Craven turn in my favorites.
2006 France. Director: various. Starring: many.
(repeats at 6:25am on the 20th)

8:00pm – TCM – Wuthering Heights (1939)
William Wyler’s moody 1939 version of Emily Bronte’s moody gothic novel, with Laurence Olivier as the moody Heathcliff. It’s moody. Get it? Interestingly, I’m more impressed generally with Geraldine Fitzgerald’s Isabella than Merle Oberon’s Catherine/Cathy, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
1939 USA. Director: William Wyler. Starring: Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Geraldine Fitzgerald, David Niven, Flora Robson.

8:00pm – IFC – Office Space
Anyone who’s ever worked in an office will identify with Office Space immediately – with the paper-jamming printers, the piles of beaurocratic paperwork, and the difficulty of keeping up with staplers if not the plot to make off with boatloads of money due to an accounting loophole. In fact, if you do or have worked an office job, I’m gonna call this required viewing.1999 USA. Director: Mike Judge. Starring: Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston.
(repeats at 2:00am on the 20th)

Sunday, September 20

12:30pm – Fox Movie – The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a classic of 1950s Cold War paranoia sci-fi. Alien Klaatu lands on Earth to warn us to abandon our penchant for war and destruction; seeing the world through his eyes as he lives among us for a time is thoughtful and a little sobering, especially in its original context.
1951 USA. Director: Robert Wise. Starring: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe.
Must See
Newly Featured!

3:00pm – Sundance – A Woman Under the Influence
Gena Rowlands gives a tour-de-force performance as Mabel, a woman whose teetering madness threatens her marriage to Nick (Peter Falk). Their relationship edges back and forth between love, frustration, and anger with amazing quickness, yet it’s not clear whether Mabel’s instability is causing the problems, or the other way around. John Cassavetes directs with an unwavering camera, refusing to look away.
1974 USA. Director: John Cassavetes. Starring: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Fred Draper, Lady Rowlands.

10:30pm – Fox Movie – Die Hard
All John McClane wants to do is get home for Christmas. But plans change, especially when a bunch of terrorists take over his wife’s office building and McClane has to take them out almost singlehandedly. And give us one of the best action movies ever made.
1988 USA. Director: John McTiernan. Starring: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia
Must See

2:00am (21st) – TCM – The Cranes are Flying
Young lovers Boris and Veronika are separated when he volunteers for WWII. Never hearing from him, she marries his cousin, who has an exemption from the draft. Later, she realizes her mistake and continues to hope against hope (and reports from the front) that Boris remains alive and will return to her when the war ends. This Soviet film combines the strength of Soviet montage with the overwrought beauty of expressionism to depict the extremes of peace and war in a very visceral way. And Tatyana Samojlova gives a tour-de-force performance, encompassing both the silly pre-war girl and the strong woman she grows into, a woman battered, but not broken, by war. (More indepth piece.)
1957 USSR. Director: Mikhail Kalatozov. Starring: Tatyana Samojlova, Aleksey Batalov, Aleksandr Shvorin.
Must See
Newly Featured!

Double Indemnity, playing on Thursday the 16th on TCM at 9:00am

A lot of repeats this week, which admittedly makes writing this faster for me, which was nice this week. I’ll try to save enough time to pick out some more varied stuff next week. The films I’d most like to point out are the three Jean-Pierre Melville films Sundance is playing on Tuesday. If you’re interested in French film, crime film, film noir, or the New Wave, these are all three must-see’s.

Monday, July 13

6:15pm – IFC – American Splendor
Harvey Pekar is one of the more idiosyncratic graphic novelists there is (”comic book” doesn’t quite cover his very adult, neurotic art), and Paul Giamatti brings him to life perfectly. This is a favorite among Row Three writers, so check it out.
(repeats at 9:15am on the 14th)

9:30pm – TCM – White Heat
James Cagney in one of his most powerful roles as the slightly (okay, make that more-than-slightly) unbalanced criminal Cody Jarrett. Probably counts as one of the last truly great Warner crime films, too.

Tuesday, July 14

6:00am – IFC – Au revoir, les enfants
A new boy arrives at a French school and becomes close friends with one of the French boys. But it’s the early 1940s and the new boy turns out to be Jewish, and hiding from the Nazis. Louis Malle directs this achingly lovely portrait of schoolboy friendship in an uncertain time.
(repeats at 1:30pm and 6:05pm)

2:00pm – Sundance – Bob le flambeur
Sundance is running a three-film set of Jean-Pierre Melville films, starting with this noirish crime film about an aging gambler/thief who takes on one last job – knocking over a casino. Melville was the master of French crime films, and an important figure leading up to the New Wave – Godard name-checks this film in Breathless, mentioning Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler) as an associate of Michel’s.
(repeats at 12:30am on the 15th)

3:45pm – Sundance – Le doulos
I saw this Melville film a couple of months ago with it was first released on Criterion DVD, and pretty much loved it to death. Jean-Paul Belmondo brings his signature style to the film as a possible police informant working with another criminal on a jewel heist. These two men are played off each other in a sort of doubling motif – it’s often even difficult to tell which is which, due to careful cinematography and lighting work by Melville.
(repeats at 1:00pm on the 15th)

6:45pm – Sundance – Army of Shadows
This Melville film about the French Resistance during WWII wasn’t actually released in the US until 2006 (it was made in 1969), so getting to see it at all is something of a treat. I haven’t had the opportunity yet, but hoping to take it this time around.
(repeats at 4:15am on the 15th)

4:15am (15th) – IFC – Millions
Danny Boyle has a way of making very simple stories into something special, and this is no exception. A young British boy finds a bag with millions of pounds in it; the catch is that Britain is days away from switching to the euro, so the money will soon be worthless. The shifting ethical questions combined with a sometimes almost Pulp Fiction-esque style and a fascinating religious backdrop at the very least means an intriguing couple of hours.
(repeats at 8:30am and 1:05 on the 15th))

Wednesday, July 15

5:45pm – IFC – Moulin Rouge
Baz Lurhmann admittedly has a love-it-or-hate-it flamboyantly trippy aesthetic, especially in the informal Red Curtain trilogy which Moulin Rogue! closes. And sure, it’s over the top; sure, the story is fairly routine; sure, the acting is so-so. I love it to pieces anyway.
(repeats 12:40pm on the 16th)

8:00pm – Sundance – Volver
Pedro Almodovar deftly straddles the line between drama and comedy in one of his more accessible films. Two sisters return to their home at the death of their aunt, only to find their mother’s ghost – or is it a ghost? And as always in Almodovar’s films, there are related subplots aplenty. Penelope Cruz is incredible as the younger, fierier sister – she’s never been more moving than in her passionate rendition of the title song, nor funnier than when calmly cleaning up a murder scene. Must See

8:00pm – IFC – Fargo
Still one of the Coen Brothers’ best films, despite over a decade of mostly good films in the intervening years. Dark comedy is not an easy genre, and Fargo is the gold standard, blending shocking violence and a noir-ish crime story with comical inept criminals and a perfectly rendered performance from Frances McDormand. Must See
(repeats at 1:35am on the 16th)

9:45pm – IFC – Trainspotting
Days in the lives of Scottish heroin addicts. Sounds like a downer, and I won’t say it’s not, but it’s also brilliant and searing. Danny Boyle seems to always be able to take stories that could be routine and make them into something special.
(repeats at 3:15am on the 16th)

Thursday, July 16

9:00am – TCM – Double Indemnity
Quite probably the most definitive film noir film in existence (vying only with The Big Sleep in my head, anyway) has insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) being seduced by bored housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and convinced by her to help murder her husband for the insurance money. Wilder’s crackling dialogue and Stanwyck’s perfectly tuned mixture of calculation and innocence can hardly be beat. Must See

8:00pm – Sundance – Paris, je t’aime
I have a huge soft spot for Paris – basically any movie set there I will like to at least some degree. So an anthology film with eighteen internationally-renowned directors giving their take on Paris with eighteen short films all mashed together? Yeah, instant love. Obviously some sections are far stronger than others – the Coens, Gus van Sant, Alexander Payne, Isabel Coixet, Tom Tykwer, and Wes Craven turn in my favorites.

Friday, July 17

8:00am – Sundance – Ran
Sundance is confusing me with their listings right here. I’m pretty sure this is going to be Akira Kurosawa’s inspired transposition of King Lear into medieval Japan, mixing Shakespeare and Japanese Noh theatre tradition like nobody’s business. Their description on their website site is for a completely other film, though. So let’s just call this a hearty recommendation if it turns out to be Kurosawa’s film.

4:45pm – TCM – Love Me or Leave Me
One of Doris Day’s better roles places her as a singer in an abusive relationship with gangster/career supporter James Cagney. She’s tough yet vulnerable, and her rendition of the title song is suberb.

3:30am (18th) – Sundance – The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
One of the major films in Romania’s current cinematic resurgence – emphasis on realism, slow pacing, and in this case, the failures of the Romanian health care system, which shunts poor Mr. Lazarescu around from hospital to hospital as he gets sicker and sicker. I wasn’t as captivated by this as I was by 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days by a longshot, but if you’re interested in Romanian film, you oughta see it. If you didn’t like 4 Months, though, you almost certainly won’t like this. ;)

3:45am (18th) – TCM – Blow-Up
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first (only?) English-language film, a photographer captures an image in the background of a shot that may or may not be a murder. Sounds like a detective film, but it’s far more abstract and distancing than detective stories can usually afford to be. Full of sixties-ness. Must See

Saturday, July 18

8:00pm – IFC – Mad Max
The first entry in the post-apocalyptic punk-action series that made Mel Gibson a star.

8:00pm – TCM – Tom Jones
The book Tom Jones, written in the late 1700s by Henry Fielding, is usually considered one of the earliest novels, and part of its charm is the way it pastiches earlier literary forms as it tells its story of a rakish young English nobleman and his adventures with women. Though the film version can’t really claim the same place in cinematic history that the novel does in literary history, it’s still quite enjoyable, and manages to convey a similar playfulness by pastiching earlier filmmaking styles – which never fails to earn it a spot in texts on adaptation.

5:00am (19th) – TCM – Fanny and Alexander
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve DVR’d this Bergman film and never managed to watch it before my DVR deleted it for space. :/ Maybe this will be the time I break that cycle?

Sunday, July 19

4:15pm – TCM – Lassie Come Home
Family classic that has every kid wanting a collie at some point in their lives. Hint: Get a border collie. Regular collies are quite high-strung.

6:15pm – IFC – Maria Full of Grace
Once in a while a film comes out of nowhere and floors me – this quiet little film about a group of South American women who agree to smuggle drugs into the United States by swallowing packets of cocaine did just that. Everything in the film is perfectly balanced, no element overwhelms anything else, and it all comes together with great empathy, but without sentimentality.

8:00pm – TCM – An American in Paris
Expat artist Gene Kelly in Paris, meets Leslie Caron, woos her away from rival Georges Guetarey, all set to Gershwin music and directed with panache by Vincente Minnelli. All that plus Kelly’s ground-breaking fifteen-plus-minute ballet to the title piece. Must See

12:00M – IFC – The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Yes, this is still the only Wes Anderson film I haven’t seen. Because though I did record it last week when it was on, I haven’t had time to watch it yet.

12:15am (20th) – TCM – Broken Blossoms
A few years after D.W. Griffith’s controversial Birth of a Nation and epic Intolerance, he made this much smaller, much quieter film about a Chinese man (the non-Chinese Richard Barthelmess – and no, Griffith has not quite got over the racism that plagued Birth of a Nation) who becomes enamored with a young girl (Lillian Gish) whose father abuses her. It’s a really simple yet beautiful story, and shows Griffith at his sentimental best.

Cléo from 5 to 7, playing on IFC at 6:45am on July 4th

Well, TCM’s showcase of great directors is winding down this week, but don’t worry, there’s still plenty of great cinema playing. On Thursday, TCM is running a bit of a tribute to 1939, widely considered one of the best years in filmmaking history, at least in terms of the sheer quantity of great films released that year. Also, IFC really picked up the ball this week, and are showing a bunch of really great films.

Monday, June 29

8:00pm – IFC – Raising Arizona
This relatively early Coen Brothers comedy has Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter as a childless ex-con couple who decide to rectify that situation by stealing one of a set of quintuplets. They’ll never miss him, right? Wrong. Zany complications ensue.
(repeats 2:30am on the 30th)

9:45pm – IFC – The Player
Robert Altman takes on Hollywood in this story of a script screener (Tim Robbins) who gets drawn further and further into a web of blackmail and double-crosses when he’s threatened by a screenwriter whose script he rejected. You gotta love it for the virtuosic opening pan at the very least; the rest of the Hollywood insider references are just gravy.
(repeats 4:05am on the 30th)

Tuesday, June 30

Great Directors on TCM: Anthony Mann
Though Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah and later Clint Eastwood often get well-deserved credit for developing the revisionist western, some of it should also probably go to Anthony Mann. Along with frequent star James Stewart, Mann tapped into a darker side of the quintessential American cowboy hero, showing him as a little more morally compromised, a little more expedient, and a little more personally haunted than most classic westerns.

8:00pm – TCM – The Man from Laramie
Of course TCM is playing the one Mann-Stewart western I HAVEN’T seen. But given the high quality of their other films together, I set my DVR for it immediately.

Wednesday, July 1

7:45am – IFC – Miller’s Crossing
The Coen brothers take on 1930s gangland with this film, and do so admirably well. As they do most things. I have to admit I wasn’t quite as enamored of it as I usually am of Coen films, but it definitely has its moments and I think a rewatch would jump it up in my estimation greatly.
(repeats 2:15pm)

9:45pm – IFC – Mad Max
The first entry in the post-apocalyptic punk-action series that made Mel Gibson a star.
(repeats at 3:45am on the 2nd)

12:00M – IFC – Platoon
Director Oliver Stone won an Oscar for this Vietnam film (as did the film itself). I haven’t seen it, but I’m gonna DVR it and see if I get around to it.

12:30am (2nd) – TCM – The Public Enemies: The Golden Age of the Gangster Film
Warner Bros. basically created the gangster film in the 1930s with a series of great, gritty and hard-hitting (for the time) crime films. This documentary looks to be a nice introduction to the genre.

2:30am (2nd) – 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 first major film 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.

4:00am (2nd) – TCM – High Sierra
Bogart’s breakout role as an on-the-run con man who gets involved with the lame Joan Leslie. (No, I mean actually crippled.) He’d been bumming around for a few years as a Warner second lead or villain, but with 1941’s double punch of High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, he unequivocally arrived.

Thursday, July 2

11:15am – IFC – Maria Full of Grace
Once in a while a film comes out of nowhere and floors me – this quiet little film about a group of South American women who agree to smuggle drugs into the United States by swallowing packets of cocaine did just that. Everything in the film is perfectly balanced, no element overwhelms anything else, and it all comes together with great empathy, but without sentimentality.
(repeats at 4:30pm)

5:30pm – TCM – Rope
Hitchcock is well-known for his formal experimentation. In Rope, he shoots everything from a single camera position – on top of the chest containing the body of the boy that John Dall and Farley Granger killed before inviting several people over for a party. It’s also meant to appear as one take, though the ten-minute max reel length of the time forced him to fudge a bit on that. The story is based on the real-life Leopold-Loeb murder case, where two young men killed an acquaintance just to see if they could pull it off.

8:00pm – TCM – The Wizard of Oz
I’ve simply got nothing bad to say about The Wizard of Oz. It’s been one of my favorite movies for years, and I doubt that’ll change any time soon – one of the great classics of imagination, wonder, and self-fulfillment. Must See
(repeats 6:00pm on the 3rd)

11:15pm – TCM – The Women
Only the cattiest, most man-less film every made (there are no men at all, so of course George Cukor directed it, right?). Several of Hollywood’s greatest female stars, from established divas like Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford to up-and-comers like Rosalind Russell and Joan Fontaine to character actresses like Mary Boland and Marjorie Main (and even non-actresses like gossip columnist Hedda Hopper), give their all to one of the wittiest scripts ever written. Must See

1:30am (3rd) – 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.

Friday, July 3

9:00am – TCM – Bachelor Mother
Slight Ginger Rogers vehicle, but one I always enjoy – she picks up a baby left on the steps of an orphanage just in time for everyone to think it’s hers, including her boss (David Niven) at the department store where she works. So she has to keep it.

9:15pm – IFC – My Life as a Dog
Lasse Hallstrom gives us this simple but effective coming-of-age story, focusing on the every day life of a young boy as he’s sent to live in a provincial village after acting out at home (his behavior is both caused by and threatens his mother’s poor health).
(repeats at 2:00pm)

Saturday, July 4

6:45am – IFC – Cléo from 5 to 7
Almost all New Wave films were directed by men, and there’s a definite undercurrent of misogyny in most of them – or at least a clear lack of understanding of women. Enter Agnes Varda, who took New Wave sensibilities, added in her own painterly touches, and a strong feminine perspective – and you get incredible films like this one, a spare story of a woman who discovers she has cancer. The mix of New Wave detachment and the evocation of the woman’s flittering emotions just under the surface combine perfectly to skyrocket the film onto my all-time favorites list. Must See
(repeats at 1:30pm)

3:30pm – TCM – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Capra puts on his idealist hat to tell the story of Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), an inexperienced young man appointed as a junior senator because the corrupt senior senator thinks he’ll be easy to control. But Smith doesn’t toe the party line, instead launching a filibuster for what he believes in. Wonderful comedienne Jean Arthur is the journalist who initially encourages Smith so she can get a great story from his seemingly inevitable downfall, but soon joins his cause.

5:45pm – TCM – Yankee Doodle Dandy
James Cagney won an Oscar putting on his dancing shoes to play song-and-dance man and Broadway composer George M. Cohan in this biopic. Though it seems strange to think of gangster picture regular Cagney in a musical, he actually got his start in show business as a hoofer, and returned to musicals many times throughout his career, though this remains the most notable example.

9:45pm – IFC – Fargo
Still one of the Coen Brothers’ best films, despite over a decade of mostly good films in the intervening years. Dark comedy is not an easy genre, and Fargo is the gold standard, blending shocking violence and a noir-ish crime story with comical inept criminals and a perfectly rendered performance from Frances McDormand. Must See
(repeats at 3:30am on the 5th)

1:15am (5th) – TCM – The Philadelphia Story
Katharine Hepburn is Tracy Lord, a spoiled socialite about to marry Ralph Bellamy when ex-husband Cary Grant turns up. Throw in newspaper columnist James Stewart and his photographer Ruth Hussey, along with a bunch of great character actors filling out the cast, and you have both rollicking wedding preparations and one of the best films ever made. Must See

Sunday, July 5

12:00N – TCM – The Asphalt Jungle
The Asphalt Jungle was really MGM’s first foray into noirish crime films. Being MGM, it’s more polished and, to me, less interesting than the crime dramas that Warner Bros. and the smaller studios were putting out, but hey. It’s still pretty good. And has a really young Marilyn Monroe.

2:00pm – TCM – War of the Worlds
The 1953 version of H.G. Wells’ classic Martian attack story – the alien ships land mysteriously, then start randomly attacking without warning. The mix of realistic March-of-Time style narration, incorporation of actual war/newsreel footage within the film, and fairly decent special effects for the time make it one of the more interesting of 1950s sci-fi efforts. The ending is a little deus ex machina, but up until that, very enjoyable.

7:15pm – IFC – Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Baz Lurhmann admittedly has a love-it-or-hate-it flamboyantly trippy aesthetic, especially in the informal Red Curtain trilogy which Moulin Rogue! closes. And sure, it’s over the top; sure, the story is fairly routine; sure, the acting is so-so. I love it to pieces anyway.
(repeats 4:30am on the 6th)

8:00pm – TCM – Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
French writer/actor/director Jacques Tati specialized in nearly-silent physical comedy that reminds one at times of Chaplin or Keaton, but with a slightly more ironic French flair about it. In Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, a trip to the seashore turns out to be anything but relaxing.

9:30pm – IFC – Office Space
Anyone who’s ever worked in an office will identify with Office Space immediately – with the paper-jamming printers, the piles of beaurocratic paperwork, and the difficulty of keeping up with staplers if not the plot to make off with boatloads of money due to an accounting loophole. In fact, if you do or have worked an office job, I’m gonna call this required viewing.
(repeats 3:00am on the 6th)

10:00pm – TCM – To Catch a Thief
Not one of my personal favorite Hitchcock films, but certainly one of his classiest, most sophisticated entries. Cary Grant is a notorious cat burglar, Grace Kelly the Monte Carlo socialite he woos. It’s one of Kelly’s last films, and she’s already looking like the princess she was about to become.

12:00M – IFC – Trainspotting
Days in the lives of Scottish heroin addicts. Sounds like a downer, and I won’t say it’s not, but it’s also brilliant and searing. Danny Boyle seems to always be able to take stories that could be routine and make them into something special. (Though I won’t deny he often loses control of his endings – the rest of the film is usually worth it, though.)

Blowup, playing on TCM at 4:00am on May 2nd

Tuesday, April 28th

7:00am – IFC – Umberto D
Neo-realist masterpiece from Vittorio DeSica. I think I’ve talked about the main character and his dog before – have I mentioned the young girl who works in Umberto’s apartment building? Stunning natural performance from a non-actress that DeSica cast from an open audition. She wanted to get acting lessons, but he forbade her. Good move, because she’s great – formal training would’ve ruined her.
(repeats at 12:15pm)

10:15am – TCM – You Can’t Take It With You
Interestingly, this film rather than Mr. Deeds or Mr. Smith or It’s a Wonderful Life got Frank Capra a Best Picture Oscar. I think it’s a bit lesser than any of those, but it’s still quite good.

6:00pm – IFC – Miller’s Crossing
The Coen Brothers do 1930s gangsterland as only they can do it. And by that, I mean AWESOMELY.
(repeats at 4:00am on the 29th)

Wednesday, April 29th

6:00am – TCM – Father of the Bride (1950)
Spencer Tracy is the father, Elizabeth Taylor the bride in the original classic.

9:30am – TCM – The Bad and the Beautiful
Vincente Minnelli directs Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Gloria Grahame, and others in one of the best dark-side-of-Hollywood noirish films this side of Sunset Boulevard.

1:30pm – TCM – Anatomy of a Murder
One of the best courtroom dramas ever made – James Stewart vs. George C. Scott as lawyers on a murder/rape trial that may not be quite what it seems. And that’s aside from the top-notch jazz score by Duke Ellington, which is in itself reason enough to see the film. Must See

4:35pm – Sundance – The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Luis Bunuel takes aim at his favorite target once again, eviscerating the bourgeoisie through absurdity and surrealism.

6:00pm – TCM – Roman Holiday
Audrey Hepburn. ‘Nuff said.

10:45pm – TCM – The Birds
Psycho notwithstanding, this is Hitchcock’s most intense film, for me anyway. Must see

Thursday, April 30th

8:00am – IFC – Millions
Simple story of two brothers who find a whole lot of British pounds (on the fanciful eve of Britain’s switch the Euro) and have to decide what to do with it – but in Danny Boyle’s hands, it becomes much more interesting and unique than any synopsis could convey.
(repeats at 2:30pm and 5:15am on the 1st)

12:30pm – TCM – Mildred Pierce
Exhibit A of what the Hollywood studio system was capable of on a good day. Also Exhibit A of what melodrama can be. Joan Crawford’s best role. Must See

8:00pm – TCM – Glory
Matthew Broderick commands an all-black unit of the Union army during the American Civil War. Director Edward Zwick has made movie after movie that seem to be blatant Oscar-bait, but he’s never bettered this one.

9:45pm – IFC – Fargo
Coen Brothers. ‘Nuff said.
(repeats at 3:30am on the 1st)

10:00pm – Sundance – 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
Oh, just click the tag at the bottom to see how many times I’ve said “Watch this!” Must See

10:15pm – TCM – Philadelphia
Tom Hanks sues his former company for firing him because he has AIDS. Powerful.

11:30pm – IFC – Blue Velvet
David Lynch’s best-known movie, probably, though one I have never been able to get into as much as many of his others. I need to give it another chance. I love the beginning, but then it devolves into pointlessness. Still, it’s Lynch. And thus ought to be seen. :)

Friday, May 1st

8:00pm – TCM – Dr. No
We’re up to, what, twenty-two Bond movies now? Here’s the first, back with the REAL Bond, Sean Connery. (Just kidding, I love Daniel Craig too, actually.) But really, Dr. No still stands as one of the best Bond films.
(repeats at 2pm on the 2nd)

10:00pm – TCM – From Russia With Love
And this second Bond film is also one of the best.
(repeats at 4pm on the 2nd)

4:00am (2nd) – TCM – Blowup
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first (only?) English-language film, a photographer captures an image in the background of a shot that may or may not be a murder. Sounds like a detective film, but it’s far more abstract and distancing than detective stories can usually afford to be. Full of sixties-ness. Must See

Saturday, May 2nd

6:00pm – TCM – A Shot in the Dark
The second and arguably best of the Pink Panther movies. The original ones. The new ones don’t count.

8:00pm – TCM – I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
Paul Muni as a man falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to a chain gang. One of Warner Bros’ best “ripped from the headlines” socially conscious films – they did a lot of them in the 1930s.

Sunday, May 3rd

12:00N – TCM – Kiss Me Kate
Shakespeare (“Taming of the Shrew”). With Cole Porter music. ‘Nuff said? ‘Nuff said.

1:50pm – IFC – The Cat’s Meow
Slight but enjoyably nostalgic Peter Bogdanovich film about the events surrounding silent film producer Thomas Ince’s death – which occurred during a party on the Hearst yacht. Film buffs will definitely get a kick out of it.

9:15pm – IFC – The Cooler
This under-the-radar film is probably not so much under-the-radar anymore for my readers, since I recommend it every time it’s on. But it’s that good, really. A small, quiet gem.
(repeats 4:15am on the 4th)

Sorry I didn’t get last week’s up AT ALL. Didn’t get it done on Sunday, and then wasn’t home for more than ten waking minutes on Monday or Tuesday, and then it just didn’t seem worth it anymore.

Monday, March 30

1:45am – IFC – The Royal Tenenbaums

4:30am (31st) – TCM – Mickey One
I wrote about this film a few months ago when I saw it play at the local repertory cinema as part of a Warren Beatty retrospective. It’s not available on DVD, and I’ve never seen TCM play it before, so you might want to catch it now if you’re at all interested in a pre-Bonnie & Clyde attempt to bring French New Wave styles to American film.

Tuesday, March 31

3:30pm – TCM – Sweet Smell of Success
Ah, the acerbic, cutthroat world of celebrity publicists, back in the days before Perez Hilton and TMZ…Tony Curtis is the hungry publicist trying to get hotshot columnist Burt Lancaster to print his gossip items. It all gets complicated with Lancaster’s sister and her fiance, who Lancaster doesn’t like, and there’s conniving and back-stabbing aplenty, all to the cynically witty dialogue of Clifford Odets.

9:30pm – TCM – Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Classic 1950s sci-fi paranoia, right here. They don’t make them like this anymore, even when they try (2007′s The Invasion).

12:00M – IFC – The Cooler

2:00am (1st) – TCM – Forbidden Planet
The Tempest. In outer space. What else do you need to know?

Wednesday, April 1

6:00am – TCM – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
The silent version of Hugo’s classic, with Man of a Thousand Faces Lon Chaney.

8:00am – TCM – The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
And another Lon Chaney silent horror classic.

9:45pm – IFC – Trainspotting
(repeats 4:00am on the 2nd)

12:00M – IFC – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(repeats 7:15am and 12:45pm on the 2nd)

3:45am (2nd) – TCM – Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Thursday, April 2

6:30am – TCM – The Bridge on the River Kwai

9:35am – IFC – A Hard Day’s Night

6:20pm – IFC – Mighty Aphrodite
Woody Allen’s good at directing women, and here he directs Mira Sorvino to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

8:00pm – IFC – Chasing Amy
Kevin Smith’s third film, not as low-fi indie as Clerks, as goofy as Mallrats, as irreverently genius as Dogma, as self-referential as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, or as racy as Zach and Miri Make a Porno, but perhaps sweeter than all of them – Ben Affleck falls for Joey Lauren Adams, with the only slight obstacle being that she’s gay.
(repeats 2:05am on the 3rd)

10:00pm – IFC – Garden State
(repeats 4:15am, 9:45am, and 4:15pm on the 3rd)

2:00am (3rd) – Sundance – Oldboy
Ultra-violent revenge films don’t get much better than this. Okay, maybe Kill Bill, but that’s a whole other thing. This Korean bloodfest is dark and unrelenting from start to finish. Hollywood’s about to remake it, but they’re gonna screw it up. Mark my words.

Friday, April 3

7:35am – IFC – Miller’s Crossing
The Coens do gangsters, 1930s-style.
(repeats at 2:15pm)

11:30am – TCM – On the Waterfront
Marlon Brando’s signature role, as a blue-collar dock worker caught in a labor dispute. He coulda been a contender, yo. Just sayin’. I need to stop writing these in the middle of the night. I get silly.

1:30pm – TCM – Sayonara
Not as well-known a Brando film as Waterfront or Streetcar, but it’s quite good from what I remember – a sobering post-WWII look at soldiers leaving Japan, including great supporting turns by Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umecki is an interracial couple (both of them won Oscars).

4:00pm – TCM – The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Not my fave Hitchcock film, but any Hitchcock film is better than most other films, right? Right.

6:00pm – IFC – The New World
(repeats 4:00am on the 4th)

8:15pm – IFC – Moulin Rouge!
(repeats 1:45am on the 4th)

2:30am (4th) – Sundance – 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

Saturday, April 4

8:00am – IFC – The Seven Samurai

6:00pm – TCM – Shane
Alan Ladd plays the titular cowboy, idolized by the young son of the family he takes refuge with as he tries to escape Jack Palance.

8:00pm – TCM – Take the Money and Run
A very early Woody Allen movie, when he was mostly focused on being funny and absurd, and this film is both. It’s actually my favorite of the pre-Annie Hall Allen films.

9:45pm – IFC – Fargo
(repeats 3:00am on the 5th)

11:15pm – TCM – Best in Show
Christopher Guest brings his patented mockumentary touch to the world of dog shows, and while I can’t really say I’m that interested in dog shows (and would never have thought of them for spoofing), Best in Show is hilarious.

1:00am (5th) – TCM – This is Spinal Tap
The mockumentary that started it all goes to eleven. Tell you what, I can’t stand eighties hair bands, but I love this film to pieces. Should tell you something about how awesome it is.

Sunday, April 5

Nothing!

Monday, Feb 23rd

Nothing today!

Tuesday, Feb 24th

Probably getting this posted a bit late for the first couple of these, but what the heck. Rent them, because they’re worth it. :)

1:45pm – TCM – The 400 Blows
One of my favorite films, and the one that started off my current love affair with the French New Wave. Director Francois Truffaut’s first film is a tender (and somewhat less sentimental than some of his later films) look at growing up in Paris – it’s a coming of age film, but a very sweet one.

3:45pm – TCM – Au revoir, les enfants
A new boy arrives at a French school and becomes close friends with one of the French boys. But it’s the early 1940s and the new boy turns out to be Jewish. Louis Malle directs this achingly lovely portrait of schoolboy friendship in an uncertain time.

10:00pm – TCM – Rashomon
I’m the first to admit that I don’t “get” Japanese film as much as I should, but even I have to admit the brilliance of Rashomon. It’s pretty much the first film that is absolutely ambiguous – two men and a woman are in the woods, and one of the men dies. But we get three different eyewitness versions of how his death transpired, and the film shows us all three without ever privileging any of them as true – any of them or none of them may be what really happened. With this film, Akira Kurosawa forever banished any sense that what you see on film is the truth (cinematically speaking, I mean – before this, whatever was visually presented could be taken as true within the narrative over whatever any of the characters had to say).

11:30pm – TCM – The Seven Samurai
I’m still working on my appreciation of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, despite how highly it ranks on every single best-of list. I know it’s me, not the film, so I continue to recommend it.

Wednesday, Feb 25th

8:00pm – TCM – Dark Victory
Bette Davis is stricken with a blindness-causing brain disease. This is classic old Hollywood melodrama – not, I don’t think, as well-turned as Mildred Pierce or some of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s work, but still a must-see for Davis fans. Plus a great supporting turn Geraldine Fitzgerald (who deserved more work than she got) and a quite frankly baffling role for Humphrey Bogart as an Irish stable hand. I know, right?

Thursday, Feb 26th

6:00am – TCM – The Gold Rush
Not my favorite Charlie Chaplin film, but it’s still one of the best comedies/best silent films ever. Charlie’s Little Tramp goes to the Yukon and has all sorts of misadventures mixed in with Chaplin’s trademark poignancy.

8:00pm – TCM – The African Queen
I may be the only person in the history of the world who doesn’t think The African Queen is all that. I mean, it’s not BAD, but I wasn’t blown away. Still, you’re not gonna see Kate Hepburn and Bogey together in any other film.

Friday, Feb 27th

7:00am – TCM – Notorious
Alfred Hitchcock. Cary Grant. Ingrid Bergman. One of the best spy movies ever. ‘Nuff said.

9:00am – TCM – North by Northwest
Do I need to do the Hitchcock.Grant thing again? Nah.

8:00pm – TCM – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Jimmy Stewart is the epitome of idealism as a small-town man brought to Washington as a puppet senator – but he takes the Senate into his own hands. Call it Capra-corn if you want, but its hopeful message is still inspiring.

12:15am (28th) – TCM – The Manchurian Candidate
The original 1962 version, not the pale comparison of a 2004 remake. Former soldier Frank Sinatra starts having nightmares about his war experience, then finds that he and his unit were part of a brainwashing experiment – the result of which was to turn his colleague Laurence Harvey into a sleeper agent assassin. A classic of the Cold War era, full of well-honed suspense and paranoia.

Saturday, Feb 28th

Not too much going on today, either…hold onto your hats for Sunday, though.

Sunday, March 1st

11:15am – TCM – Gaslight
Ingrid Bergman won her first Oscar for this film, as the harried wife that psychopath Charles Boyer is trying to drive nuts. It’s possible that the Oscar is partially in recognition of her work in the previous year’s Casablanca and For Whom the Bell Tolls (Oscar’s been known to do that), but Gaslight is a solid melodrama on its own terms.

1:15pm – TCM – Rear Window
My favorite movie of all time. ‘Nuff said.

2:00pm – IFC – Howl’s Moving Castle
All of Hayo Miyazaki’s animated films are worth watching, and a lot of people will put Spirited Away at the top of the list, but I think Howl’s Moving Castle is my favorite. Howl is a prince with a castle (a walking ramshackle building) which can open up anywhere. I was entranced the whole time I was watching it.

3:15pm – TCM – Vertigo
Hitchcock again. Yes, I will always point out all Hitchcock films, because they’re my favorite.

5:30pm – TCM – Close Encounters of the Third Kind
It’s interesting to me to compare the Spielberg of Close Encounters and E.T. (aka “friendly alien Spielberg”) with the Spielberg of War of the Worlds (aka “evil faceless alien Spielberg”). But besides whatever conclusions you can draw from Spielberg’s move from curiosity to fear, Close Encounters is still a film full of wonder and imagination. Plus a fantastic John Williams score.

8:00 – TCM – The Three Faces of Eve
Joanne Woodward portrays a woman with multiple personalities in an Oscar-winning role; Lee J. Cobb is allowed an uncharacteristically sympathetic role as her doctor (usually he’s the villain, or at least antagonist).

8:00 – IFC – Fargo
Still one of the Coen Brothers’ best films, despite over a decade of mostly good films in the intervening years. Dark comedy is not an easy genre, and Fargo is the gold standard, blending shocking violence and a noir-ish crime story with comical inept criminals and a perfectly rendered performance from Frances McDormand.
(repeats at 1:30am on the 2nd)

9:45pm – IFC – The Cooler
I’ve mentioned this one a few times before, but every time it shows up on IFC’s schedule I’m always like “The Cooler! Yay!” It’s just such a sweet, well-done under-the-radar kind of film – great performances from William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, and Maria Bello.
(repeats at 3:15am on the 2nd

10:00pm – TCM – Psycho
It’s on. Watch it.

12:00midnight – TCM – Spellbound
Another Hitchcock (must be Hitchcock day at TCM or something), this one with Gregory Peck as a disturbed individual and Ingrid Bergman as his psychiatrist. Throw in a trippy Salvador Dali dream sequence and you’re made!

A bit late again. Good thing there wasn’t a lot on Monday or Tuesday worth looking at anyway. So we’ll start in on Wednesday. The movie channels apparently decided to dump EVERYTHING they had for the turn of the new year, because the 31st and 1st are jam packed. Craziness. I also threw in some listings from the Fox Movie Channel, since I noticed some great stuff while setting my DVR this week.

Wednesday, December 31

6:00am / 5:00am – TCM – Stagecoach
TCM is apparently doing a John Ford/John Wayne tribute today, and that’s never a bad thing. In this 1939 film, Wayne is an outlaw traveling in a cramped stagecoach along with a prostitute (Claire Trevor, who turns in an amazing performance) and various other staple characters of the Western genre perfectly calculated for maximum uncomfortability.

7:45am / 6:45am – TCM – They Were Expendable
One of the best WWII films made during the war (1945). Wayne is the only one who thinks u-boats have any use in combat, but he proves everyone else wrong. Equal parts action and pathos, this is one that seems fairly routine at any given moment, but put all the moments together (especially the last few) and you get blown away by how good it is.

12:30pm / 11:30am – TCM – The Quiet Man
Ford and Wayne are probably best known for the westerns and war movies they made together, but this romantic drama may be the best of the bunch. Wayne is an American former boxer who travels to Ireland to seek his roots; he finds frequent costar Maureen O’Hara there and wants to marry her, but has to overcome her stubborn streak and her lunkish brother’s objections before he can. Filled with charm and humor, Ford received one of his Oscars for it. One wonders if it would’ve won Best Picture if it had come from a major studio instead of upstart Republic (consider that overblown corker The Greatest Show on Earth won that year). Must See

7:00pm / 6:00pm – Fox Movie Channel – Planet of the Apes
I saw this not knowing anything about the ending. I suggest that if you haven’t seen it and don’t already know the ending that you do the same. One of the classic sci-fi films.
(repeats at 4pm EST on the 1st and 3:30am EST on the 2nd)

8:00pm / 7:00pm – TCM – That’s Entertainment!
If you like musicals, you’ll love That’s Entertainment!, MGM’s celebration of its history of movie musicals. If you don’t like musicals…you won’t. It’s that simple. This was put together in 1974 as a theatrical release in honor of MGM’s 50th anniversary, so it’s really well put together and hosted by many of the stars who were there at the time (and some whose connection to MGM is tenuous at best – like Paramount’s Bing Crosby).

10:00pm / 9:00pm – Sundance – Adaptation
Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s follow-up to Being John Malkovich is slightly less bizarre, but still pretty out there – just in a more subtle way. Nicolas Cage plays a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman who’s stuck in his attempt to adapt a bestseller; it doesn’t help when his successful brother (also played by Cage) shows up. The end feels like it’s going off the rails, but that’s all part of the genius.
(repeats at 5:00am EST on the 1st)

10:30pm / 9:30pm – TCM – That’s Entertainment, Part 2
MGM couldn’t get all their great musical clips into one compilation film, so two years later they made another one. And it’s almost as good, especially because it includes some great non-musical moments as well.

12:00am / 11:00pm – Sundance – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Charlie Kaufman again, this time with Michel Gondry instead of Spike Jonze, and this may be his greatest collaboration – in fact, neither Kaufman nor Gondry apart from each other have matched the perfection of this film. After a painful breakup with his girlfriend Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey decides to undergo a procedure to remove her completely from his memory. But is forgetting the bad times worth losing the good? Must See

12:45pm / 11:45pm – TCM – That’s Entertainment III
This completes the That’s Entertainment! series, really (they did a straight-to-video That’s More Entertainment later), and they are starting to run out of clips. Still. If you liked the first two, it’s worth a watch.

3:00am / 2:00am – TCM – That’s Dancing!
The only downside to the That’s Entertainment series is that it only includes MGM films. That’s Dancing does rectify that, bringing in clips from other studios, but it doesn’t have the panache of MGM’s series.

Thursday, January 1

6:00am / 5:00am – Cartoon Network – Looney Tunes Marathon
Okay, folks, there’s a lot going on today moviewise, and you probably have other stuff going on on New Years, but Cartoon Network is showing like fourteen straight hours of Looney Tunes. This is like a gold mine. These cartoons are like sixty years old, and they’re still among the most hilarious and innovative films ever made, cartoon or live-action, short or feature-length. I’m pretty much going to be parked here all day, since I’ve seen almost all the stuff on TCM today. :) Not that I haven’t seen most of the Looney Tunes…never mind, reasoning broke down.

6:00am / 5:00am – TCM – Nothing Sacred
And TCM is devoting New Year’s Day (during the day at least) to screwball comedy, and that’s hard to pass up. In this one, terminally ill Carole Lombard gets a big newspaper to pay her way to New York and the high society life in exchange for her human interest story. Except she’s only pretending to be terminally ill. Oops.

6:00am / 5:00am – Fox Movie – The Seven Year Itch
I actually can’t remember much about this film (Tom Ewell had a mid-life crisis and dabbles with neighbor Marilyn Monroe), but it is the one with the iconic image of Marilyn’s skirt being blown up as she walks over a grate. So there’s that.
(repeats at 1:30pm EST)

9:00am / 8:00am – TCM – Libeled Lady
Throw William Powell, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Jean Harlow all together in an MGM comedy, and you’re almost guaranteed a winner. And Libeled Lady delivers with a twisty story, fast-talking script, and the best these stars have to offer.

11:00am / 10:00am – TCM – Bringing Up Baby
Poor Cary Grant just can’t get away from delightfully ditzy Katharine Hepburn, especially after her dog steals his museum’s priceless dinosaur bone. Oh, and after her pet leopard escapes (and a dangerous zoo leopard escapes at the same time). Incredible situation follows incredible situation in this zaniest of all screwball comedies. Must See

4:15pm / 3:15pm – TCM – The Awful Truth
Married couple Cary Grant and Irene Dunne can’t stand living together any more and divorce, but they also can’t live apart and end up working overtime to sabotage each other’s new relationships. Epitomizes the battle-of-the-sexes aspect of screwball comedy perhaps better than any other film.

6:00pm / 5:00pm – TCM – It Happened One Night
Spoiled heiress Claudette Colbert runs off to marry against Daddy’s wishes, but gets sidetracked by reporter Clark Gable, who wants her story but ends up winning her heart. (Damn, that was corny. I apologize.) MGM sent Gable to Columbia to make this picture as a punishment for getting too big for his contract’s britches, but it backfired – he won an Oscar for his role, as did Colbert, director Frank Capra, writer Robert Riskin, and the film itself. Must See

8:00pm / 7:00pm – TCM – King Kong
The 1933 special effects are a bit creaky at times, but by and large with a little imagination, King Kong more than holds up to its remakes and imitators. I’m one that didn’t mind Peter Jackson’s version as much as a lot fo cinephiles did, but for the real King Kong, go back to the original.

10:00pm / 9:00pm – TCM – Them!
Atomic anxiety strikes again, this time in the form of radiation-created giant ants that threaten Texas and then California. I was actually far more entranced with this surprisingly solid 1950s sci-fi B-movie than I expected to be. Frankly, I loved it, and I wish we could still manage to make creature feature as simple and as simply great as this one.

11:00pm / 10:00pm – Fox Movie – Die Hard
All John McClane wants to do is get home for Christmas. But plans change, especially when a bunch of terrorists take over his wife’s office building and McClane has to take them out almost singlehandedly. And give us one of the best action movies ever made. The sequels are not that good. Skip ‘em.

Friday, January 2

The networks overcrowded the 31st and the 1st, and ran out of good stuff for the 2nd. But then found a bunch more for the 3rd. Go figure.

Saturday, January 3

10:00am / 9:00am – IFC – The Cat’s Meow
I throw this in here because for a while it was one of my arguments that Kirsten Dunst is actually good if given the right part. Now Marie Antoinette is my argument for that, but The Cat’s Meow remains a fun little Hollywood period piece. Dunst plays Marion Davies, a 1920s actress who’s now better known for being William Randolph Hearst’s mistress – the film is set at one of Hearst’s parties at which producer Thomas Ince mysteriously died. Director Peter Bogdanovich has made 1920s-1930s nostalgia (often with a cinematic twist) his specialty, and while The Cat’s Meow ain’t no Last Picture Show or even Paper Moon, it’s still enjoyable.
(repeats at 4pm EST)

12:00pm / 11:00am – Fox Movie – Two for the Road
Once in a while a film comes out of nowhere and blindsides me with brilliance. Two for the Road is directed by Stanley Donen, best known for lighthearted musicals, comedies, and mysteries. It stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney; Hepburn at least also best known for lighthearted, whimsical fare. But Two for the Road is one of the most thoughtful and adult films of the 1960s, and I mean that in a good way. It dissects Hepburn’s and Finney’s relationship, cutting back and forth between their meeting, their marriage, and their separation almost as if all three are happening at the same time – every moment of their life together becomes part of who they are and part of the sum of their relationship, and Donen has found the perfect way to depict that. Must See

2:00pm / 1:00pm – TCM – Invasion of the Body Snatchers
My favorite thing about this 1956 sci-fi classic is that it can be read either as pro-Left or pro-Right with very little difficulty (which shows just how close totalitarian Fascism and Communism end up being in practice). So it’s politically charged, but never in a way that feels overly heavy-handed and manipulative. Aliens are invading by taking over people’s bodies, turning them into emotionless pod people. They’ve tried remaking it a couple of times, but somehow it never ends up packing quite the punch of the original.

8:00pm / 7:00pm – TCM – Modern Times
Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece (to my mind, anyway) thrusts our hapless Little Tramp into an overly mechanized factory world, brilliantly skewering the industrial revolution and its reduction of humanity to gears and cogs. He escapes with the gamine Paulette Goddard, who shines as much here as in any of her other films. It’s a mostly silent film, despite being made in 1936, but it’s hard to argue with any conviction that Chaplin was behind the times. Must See

8:00pm / 7:00pm – IFC – Fargo
This blackest of black comedies has it all: hitmen, theft, blackmail, murder, and woodchipper-as-body-disposal-mechanism, not to mention an extremely pregnant policewoman to sort it all out. The Coen Brothers spin one of their finest yarns (I place it third behind O Brother Where Art Thou and No Country For Old Men, which still leaves it really darn high in my overall film list), proving why they’re the masters of the everyday macabre. Must See
(repeats at 1:00am EST on the 4th)

11:00pm / 10:00pm – TCM – The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Ooh, I haven’t seen this for such a long time! Let’s see what I remember…it’s based on a Dr. Seuss story about a kid who dreams his piano teacher is an evil prison-master. What I really remember is that it’s just about the most surreal and innovative children’s movie I’ve ever seen. I’d compare it only to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children, except I wouldn’t actually show Jeunet’s film to kids. In any case, Dr. T‘s a trip that’s well-worth taking.

2:30am / 1:30am (4th) – TCM – Shall We Dance
Not one of Fred and Ginger’s best, but hey. It’s still Fred and Ginger.

Sunday, January 4

10:30pm / 9:30pm – TCM – The Red Shoes
Real ballerina Moira Shearer plays an aspiring ballerina in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s version of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale. Actually, the fairy tale is the story within the story – the main story is more Svengali and Trilby, as a producer extraordinaire takes Shearer under his wing, but is outraged when she falls in love with poor young composer instead. In between all this is probably the greatest ballet sequence ever put on film (on a set that would never have fit on any stage), as the Anderson story becomes Shearer’s signature role. The Technicolor is breathtaking, too.

Non-related, probably non-interesting side note. I write a lot more when I’m tired (i.e., longer descriptions of the movies). Apparently the energy-intensive part of writing for me is not the actual writing, but the editing. Or the writing concisely.