TiVoPlex
TiVoPlex for March 16 2010 through March 22 2010
By John Seal
March 15, 2010
From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.
Tuesday 3/16/10
1:05 AM IFC
The Protector (2005 THA): Martial arts hero Tony Jaa stars in this enjoyable Thai action-adventure, which makes its widescreen television debut this morning. Jaa plays Kham, a simple villager who travels to Australia to retrieve his stolen property. Which happens to be a pair of elephants. Can Kham tease out the tuskers, or will the pachyderms remain permanently beyond his purview? Caveat: this will probably be the heavily cut version released to American cinemas by Harvey ‘Scissorhands' Weinstein. That said, there's still enough motorcycle and helicopter chases, chop socky action, and elephanty goodness to keep you engaged.
3:00 AM Turner Classic Movies
The Guilty Generation (1931 USA): Boris Karloff fans will want to make time for The Guilty Generation, a rarely seen Columbia melodrama about ‘John Smith', an architect and fully assimilated Italian-American (Robert Young) whose gangster father Tony Ricca (Karloff) is engaged in a Prohibition-era turf war with the father of John's amour Maria (Constance Cummings). Maria's been educated in a French convent, but can't shake off the disrepute she's inherited from Dad (Leo Carrillo). The young lovers are determined to make a go of their relationship- but will the long-running dispute between the two families allow them to set up house together, or is blood truly thicker than firewater? Karloff's role is actually a rather small one, and his precise diction at odds with the unvarnished roughness of his character, but fans of ‘The Uncanny One' will definitely want to acquaint themselves with this film. Monster buffs should also note the behind-camera presence of director Rowland V. Lee, who worked with Karloff again in 1939 on both Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London.
Wednesday 3/17/10
1:30 AM Turner Classic Movies
I Live in Fear (1955 JAP): Akira Kurosawa Month continues on TCM this morning with two more of the master filmmaker's lesser known productions. I Live in Fear is one of Kurosawa's ‘contemporary' features, and stars—who else?—Toshiro Mifune as Nakajima, an aging businessman who lives in obsessive fear of nuclear annihilation. Nakajima wants to relocate his family to Brazil (presumably because no-one has the bomb there), but his thankless relations decide he's simply bonkers and attempt to have the courts rule him incompetent. Oh yeah, you'd have to be crazy to think one country might drop an atomic bomb on another country. This was Kurosawa's first film after completing Seven Samurai, and though it suffers in comparison remains a fascinating examination of post-war Japanese psychology. It's followed at 3:15 AM by Scandal (1950), a drama about an unlikely couple (Mifune and Shirley Yamaguchi) thrust into the limelight by a tabloid magazine.
10:05 AM Flix
Blessed (2004 GB): Good things about Blessed: it's airing in widescreen, it's got Andy Serkis in it, and it's got David Hemmings in his final role (good that he's here, of course, not so good that he died during production). Bad things about Blessed: pretty much everything else, including Heather Graham. Shot in the low-budget horror kingdom of Romania, the film features Graham as a woman impregnated with...something evil...at the local fertility clinic. Yep, even Rosemary's Baby got outsourced overseas. Also airs 3/18 at 12:55 AM.
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