Weekly DVD Alert Nine: February 1-8, 2010

Check your local listings; also a lot of these films are shown throughout the month -- some are in a semi-permanent rotation -- so you may want to look at previous DVD alerts for December and January.


Monday, February 1

2AM-3:45AM, TCM: TASTE OF CHERRY, 99m.
TCM's foreign import for the week is a cheerful Iranian film about a man looking for someone to assist his suicide. Now c'mon, how hard is it to help? The poor bastard already dug his grave, all the heavy lifting is already done. Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri and Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari star, Abbas Kiraosatami writes and directs.

9AM-10:30AM, Sun: LUCKEY, 84m.
Laura Longsworth's portrait of sculptor Tom Luckey, his son and wives and their life following Tom's freak fall through a window and subsequent quadriplegia. I only saw a few moments of the film a few months ago, but I was intrigued by the implied question of how power can and should be distributed between collaborators -- specifically, how I think his son decides that Tom's idea for the sculpture they're making is wrong, and ignores the old man's vision for his own. If Tom wasn't dead from the shoulders down, how would the finished piece have turned out? etc. [Reairs at 1:35PM.]

6PM-8PM, FMC: JOHN AND MARY, 92m.
Normally, a 1969 romantic comedy starring Mia Farrow and Dustin Hoffman in New York City would give me hives, but dude -- John Mortimer wrote it [?!?] and Peter Yates directed it. Who cares if it was Bizarro-Earth Mortimer who wrote it and Peter Yates had his AD direct everything except the scenes in cars -- MORTIMER AND YATES! Tyne Daly, Michael Tolan and Olympia Dukakis co-star.

8PM-10PM, FMC: A PERFECT COUPLE, 110m.
This is shaping up to be "Creative Misfire Monday" on the Fox Movie Channel -- this is a long eclipsed Robert Altman movie about a middle-aged Los Angeles man meeting a young torch singer via a dating service. It doesn't boast the cast nor the reputation of NASHVILLE, but I remember it being within name-dropping distance of it. Of all of the absurd number of overlong, underthought movies Altman banged out at the tail-end of the '70s -- you would think that he was going to die, or the ideas were all going to turn into pumpkins if they weren't on film, at the first moment of 1980. Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin star, Altman wrote the screenplay, or whatever they used to shoot the movie, with Allan F. Nicholls.

11PM-12:35AM, IFC: THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART II: THE METAL YEARS, 93m.
I'll never understand how anyone could take one look at any heavy-metal band of the '80s and not start laughing until some time in 1993 or so. Penelope Spheeris, we salute you.


Tuesday, February 2

5AM-6AM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "2007: Diego Corrales vs. Joshua Clottey"
I think this was "Chico's" last fight before his fatal motorcycle accident; I missed it originally, but it's a pretty sure thing that it was an action fight.

8:45AM- 10:20AM, IFC: DOUBLE HAPPINESS, 92m.
Writer/director Mina Shum's debut feature is a little clunky in spots, but it's easy to enjoy its Canadian-ness, early '90s indie feel [the correct word would be "vibe" but I refuse to use it] and the performances of Sandra Oh, Alannah Ong, Stephen Chang and even Callum Keith Rennie, who makes the best of a thankless weenie-white-guy part. [Reairs at 2PM.]

8:55AM-10:35AM, Sun: METROPOLITAN, 98m.
Christopher Eigeman! EIGE-MAN! EIGE-MAN!! EIGE-MAN!!! [Reairs at 10:30PM.]

10:35AM-11:50AM, Sun: THIS IS NOT A ROBBERY
Documentary about J.L. Rountree, a businessman who spent his last five years of life [late '90s-early '00s] robbing banks after losing his fortune in what he apparently blamed on bank errors.


Wednesday, February 3

7:45AM-9:30AM, IFC: HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, 103m.
I don't know, reading the film's synopsis just assassinated my interest in seeing this film again, but you've been spared, so far.[Reairs at 1PM and 4:35AM.]

11:15AM-1PM, Sun: FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO, 95m.
Documentary-style essay about how homosexuality can be reconciled with a literal interpretation of Scripture. Just once, I wish someone would buttonhole these fundamentalist maniacs and ask them A.] Did your God create this universe and all that is in it? B.] If yes, then did your God know what He was doing when he made it? C.] If yes, then your God make teh gays gay on purpose, so where the hell do you get off criticizing/second-guessing His work? [Extra-credit questions: D.] Do you like gladiator movies? E.] How closely have you known my friend, Heywood Jablowme?]

11PM-12:45AM, Sun: CHANGING TIMES, 100m.
Recent Andre Techine-directed romance starring Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. Ooo la la.


Thursday, February 4

6:45AM-8:15AM, Sun: MONSTER IN A BOX, 87m.
I sorta miss Spalding Gray. BOX isn't my favorite of his movies -- GRAY'S ANATOMY is far zippier and has the kind of subject matter that speaks to me -- but this monologue about his struggle to finish writing his novel IMPOSSIBLE VACATION has a lot to enjoy. Has Criterion/Eclipse released a box of the four Gray monologue films? They should. [Reairs at 1:45PM.]

7:15AM-9:15AM, TCM: CAPTAIN BLOOD, 119m.
Olivia de Havilland was an undeniably beautiful woman and had good chemistry with her frequent co-star Errol Flynn, but lately I've been enjoying watching Flynn act off frequent foil/antagonist Basil Rathbone. Michael Curtiz directed this swashbuckler.

9:15AM-11:15AM, TCM: DESPERATE JOURNEY, 108m.
I wish this film had been made a couple of years later than it was; Raoul Walsh is his most enjoyable when he was allowed to be his most ferocious and vivid, and this movie's plot -- "American pilots stranded in Germany fight their way to freedom." -- would probably have been too much for 1942 audiences if Walsh had cut loose. Errol Flynn, Alan Hale and Ronald Reagan star.

10:30AM-11:45AM, Sun: THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED, 71m.
Indie about a day in the life of a young kleptomaniac, from director/writers/stars Joshua Safdie and Eleonore Hendricks -- could be entertaining and engaging, could be self-indulgent shit. At least you don't have to go find the art movie theater's manager to get your money back if it sucks. Cable is awesome.

11:45AM-1:45PM, Sun: FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON, 115m.
Arthouse auteur Hsiao-hsien Hou [THREE TIMES] wrote and directed what sounds like another charming Hou movie, only this one was made in France. Juliette Binoche stars.

10:45AM-12:30PM, FMC: THE LIEUTENANT WORE SKIRTS, 99m.
12:30PM-2PM, FMC: BACHELOR FLAT, 91m.
Frank Tashlin double feature. All hail the Tash.

3:30PM-5:45PM, TCM: ABOVE AND BEYOND, 122m.
I've never seen this 1952 biographical drama about Captain Paul Tibbets, the commander of the Enola Gay, and what's described as his "struggles with the demands of the dangerous mission" to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That the movie has two directors [Melvin Frank and Norman Panama] and goes critically unheralded in a fairly small field -- the number of Pacific War movies are dwarfed by their European brethren -- don't bode well for it, but I'll watch anything about the A-bombings. Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker and James Whitmore star.


Friday, February 5

Midnight-1:40AM, Sun: THEATER OF WAR, 95m.
John W. Walter's documentary about George C. Wolfe's recent staging of Bertolt Brecht's antiwar play MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN sounds like it has a little something for everyone: An appreciation of Brecht's work, a look at how modern [off-]Broadway works, a fly-on-the-wall view of how stars Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline work before the curtain rises, etc.

Midnight-2AM, TCM: THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, 102m.
Or you can rock out to more derring-do from Flynn, de Havilland, Rathbone and Curtiz, filmed in glorious full Technicolor and boasting a tremendous score from Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

6:15AM-7:30AM, TCM: ADDRESS UNKNOWN, 72m.
I had no idea this was ever made into a movie. Seventy-two minutes is an absurdly short amount of time to adapt
Kathrine Kressmann Taylor's ingenious proto-postmodern novella to the screen -- the terror and sadness in the book, which is told entirely in letters between partner art dealers after one moves himself and family back to Germany shortly after Hitler is elected, comes from the bumpy gaps of time between his letters as much as the way that Nazi propaganda twists his mind almost beyond recognition. Well, maybe it's better to have a short running time, so long as the storytelling isn't smooth in the usual Hollywood-studio style. Paul Lukas, Carl Esmond and Peter Van Eyck star; William Cameron Menzies directs from a script by Taylor and Herbert Dalmas.

10PM-Midnight, ESPN2: FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS
The light-heavyweight fight between Glen Johnson vs. Yusaf Mack that headlines this card should be good stuff. So far this year, FNF has been good for at least one fight per broadcast that hasn't made me regret watching it -- I was planning to skip last Friday's show but heard a hilariously overconfident interview with Curtis Stevens just a few minutes before the show started that compelled me to watch him fail in what turned out to be a surprisingly entertaining super-middleweight fight with Jesse Brinkley. [I saw the tail end of the SHOBOX: THE NEW GENERATION broadcast, which did not rock me -- again, I don't know if it's my television or the cable or what, but Showtime's boxing broadcasts look like they're already badly compressed YouTube clips to me. It was very cool to see Nick Charles back on the air following his fight with cancer.]


Saturday, February 6

6:35AM-8:30AM, IFC: LET HIM HAVE IT, 115m.
Peter Medak's dark retelling of the 1952 Derek Bentley Case: Two British boys, one of whom has a handgun, get caught trying to break into to a building. Cop tells the kid with the gun to put it down, the other kid tells him "Let him have it." The debate over what that phrase meant -- "give him the gun" or "lettim have it" like the mugs in some gangster movie woulda lettim have it -- has raged ever since. The boy assumed he meant shoot the cop and was tried, convicted and quickly executed for it. Chris Eccleston and Paul Reynolds star. [Reairs at 1:30PM.]

SHO, SHOWTIME CHAMPIONSHIP BOXING: Edwin Valero vs. Antonio DeMarco
Another sure to be entertaining Showtime fight: The headliners battle for the WBC lightweight title, with hopefully the undercard of the welterweight match between Luis Carlos Abregu and Richard Gutierrez also being broadcast. I'm very interested to see Abregu fight.


Sunday, February 7

10AM-11:30AM, TCM: KIND LADY, 78m.
It's always interesting to see how John Sturges handled material outside of the epic adventure movies he's known for. This 1951 programmer -- con artist Maurice Evans and his gang invade the home of old kind lady Ethel Barrymore and keep her captive -- also requires doing the fun mental calisthenics of remembering that Angela Lansbury was not always the old kind lady in everything she made as an actress.

6PM-8PM, TCM: THE PINK PANTHER, 115m.
Did the Peters Sellers and Ustinov ever make a movie together? Nearly any movie would collapse under the weight of their compulsive scene-stealing, but it would be fun to watch them compete even as the movie failed. Anyway, Sellers was famously Blake Edwards' second choice to play Inspector Clouseau in this farce after Ustinov passed on it; the role and the movie took Sellers to a new level of world fame, so much so that it's easy to forget that the first PANTHER movie is a vehicle for David Niven and Robert Wagner.

8PM-10:30PM, TCM: 8 1/2, 138m.
I don't know if this is Federico Fellini's masterpiece, or just his most popular, but it's a lot of fun to watch even now. Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and Anouk Aimee star.

10:30PM-1AM, TCM: JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, 137m.
Fellini should have filmed an introduction for this film where he said "This one's for THA LADEEEEZZZZZZZZZZ" and then licked a finger, touch his ass and make a sizzling noise. This is why none of my films are in the Criterion collection, or any other. Giulietta Masina, Sandra Milo and Valentina Coretese star.


Monday, February 8

3:15AM-5:30AM, TCM: ON THE BEACH, 134m.
A cheerful post-nuclear apocalypse from that barrel-of-monkeys Stanley Kramer [JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG, INHERIT THE WIND]. U.S. sailors stationed in Australia miss out on the armageddon, struggle to figure out what to do next. Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire star.

[To be a Monday-morning armchair executive producer 50 years later: I would have cast teeny-bopper actors [were Frankie & Annette making movies by 1959?] and set it all to look like a beach movie interrupted by the end of Western civilization by an atomic holocaust at the end of the second reel, then marketed the movie without ever mentioning the world dies screaming about 20 minutes in.]

[Also, It must have been a real pain in the ass keeping track of which director named Stanley was which in the late '50s-'60s, although it is fun to imagine Stanley Kubrick's IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD or Stanley Donen's DR. STRANGELOVE or Kramer making the court-martial scenes in PATHS OF GLORY more exciting than the battlefield chaos.]

7:35AM-9AM, IFC: BANANAS, 82m.
I bet Woody Allen is sick to death of hearing people talk about how much funnier his early movies were. Can you imagine him banging out a short comedy where he goes to Pakistan to impress a woman? Well, anyone can imagine that -- I mean imagine it being really funny. [Reairs at 12:25PM and 5:30PM

8:35AM-10:15AM, Sun: YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME, 91m.
A remarkable and truly moving portrait of Roky Erickson, the singer/guitarist of the 13th Floor Elevators and the Aliens, as he slowly remerges out of a miasma of mental illness, codependent relationships with his family and drug abuse. [Reairs at 1:30PM.]

10:15AM-11:45AM, Sun: AUDIENCE OF ONE, 88m.
A documentary about a Pentecostal minister who claims God told him to form a movie studio and make a huge sci-fi version of the Bible. Presumably Jesus got an Executive Producer credit in return for his dad's initial investment. [Reairs at 3:15PM.]

11:45AM-1:30PM, Sun: A BIGGER SPLASH, 106m.
David Hockney breaks up with his boyfriend and struggles to get back into his painting. I wonder if this was the period when he decided that, as he can't draw freehand as well as the best Renaissance painters, those artists must have used rudimentary tracing tools, like the camera obscura, just as Hockney uses artographs and such. [Reairs at 4:45PM.]

9:15AM-11:30AM, TCM: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, 130m.
Frank Capra may be the unsung master of the core principle that gives termite-art its power: You really can say nearly anything unpleasant but true about whatever you want in popular art so long as you give the audience a decently made happy ending. If you stop this movie or IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE [the most sarcastic title ever?] at the moment where Jimmy Stewart realizes how fucked he and everyone he cares about are, these are some dark, flinty-hearted movies about small-town life and politics. That people only remember Stewart running around yelling with joy or struggling to keep talking in his filibuster just shows how good Capra was at his sleight of hand. Jean Arthur and Claude Rains co-star.

1:30PM-4PM, TCM: HANGMEN ALSO DIE, 134m.
One epically long anti-Nazi Hollywood movie from Fritz Lang, about the underground resistance in Czechoslovakia. Did Lang spend the entire War making these kinds of pictures? I bet Hitler and the boys loved ribbing Josef Goebbels about him offering Lang the directorship of the German Cinema Institute, which went so smoothly that Lang quietly fled Germany for Paris and then the United States. Smooth move, Ex-Lax! Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan and Anna Lee star.

4PM-6PM, TCM: THE SEVENTH CROSS, 112m.
I missed this when it aired a few weeks ago. It sounds nuts: Spencer Tracy stars as a civilian who escapes from a German concentration camp with six other men. As each man is caught, it returned the camp and crucified. You can guess who gets the title.
Signe Hasso and Hume Cronyn co-star, Fred Zinnemann directs.

6PM-8PM, TCM: SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, 118m.
I love John Frankenheimer, but this 1964 movie doesn't sound like it plays to any of his strengths as a filmmaker. Young military man Kirk Douglas uncovers a plot by his superior officers to stage a military coup of the country. I've seen scenes between Douglas and Burt Lancaster in a bumper that TCM often airs where Michael Douglas talks about his dad; the scenes make the movie look like it will be a lot of granite-chinned men standing tall and shooting conflicting platitudes at each other for two hours. I'm hoping I'm wrong.

8PM-10:15PM TCM: A THOUSAND CLOWNS, 118m.
A highwater mark for American films in my favorite subgenre, the my-eccentric-uncle-figure section of coming-of-age movies. Jason Robards Jr., Barbara Harris Martin Balsam and Barry Gordon star in Fred Coe's adaptation of Herb Gardner's play.

8PM-9:40PM, IFC: AMERICAN PSYCHO, 97m.
It's a terrible balancing act -- for most media satires to garner a significant amount of attention, they have to be violent. [When even ostensibly indie/womens movies about weddings feature fistfights and car chases, I think we can mostly agree that virtually everything in our movie culture has to be violent to get that attention.] But that violence makes it easy for the cultural powers that the satire attacks to easily deflect criticism by focusing on the carnage. It's why Congressional hacks will go after video games that have some amount of satire and commentary like GRAND THEFT AUTO [where the player has a remarkable amount of free will and leeway to achieve a lot of the game's goals without much violence] over its violence, but not bellow on about a straight-up smashing game like GOD OF WAR. I'd like to think that somewhere in EB Games' remainder bins is a game that's not incredibly violent but features even more cutting cultural commentary than GTA; I assume those are the games that are still in their original shrinkwrap because no one, including me, bought them.

Anyway, AMERICAN PSYCHO: Bret Easton Ellis [and director Mary Harron] almost made it too easy for cultural conservatives of all stripes to attack this movie for its most irrelevant aspects. It undoubtedly put asses in theater seats to watch it, but the excess weakens the movie's impact and a lot of its jokes. The scene about the business cards kills me every time. Christian Bale stars, with Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Reese Witherspoon, Samantha Mathis, Chloe Sevigny and Guinevere Turner, who co-wrote the adaptation. [Reairs at 1:05AM.]

And there's another week.