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From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.

Tuesday 12/21/10

1:30 AM Turner Classic Movies
Alex in Wonderland (1970 USA): Donald Sutherland plays a young filmmaker wracked by guilt and indecision in this amusing if not completely successful Paul Mazursky drama. Sutherland plays the title character, a director whose first film has taken Tinsel Town by storm and become an unexpected success. Handed the keys to the kingdom by his studio, Alex finds that producing an artistically satisfying follow-up is no easy task: in fact, he has absolutely no idea what to do next. The film descends into a series of dream sequences that will strike some as hopelessly over-the-top; others will be reminded of the picaresque visions of Federico Fellini—who, by odd coincidence, makes a brief cameo appearance herein. Co-starring Ellen Burstyn, old-timers Moss Mabry and Angelo Rossitto, and Mazursky himself as Alex’s producer, Alex in Wonderland was the director’s second feature film, coming fast on the heels of his wildly successful freshman effort, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.

2:50 AM Starz
Un Prophete (2009 FRA): Un Prophete actually made its television debut on Monday at 11:50 PM, but I overlooked the little sliver of space dedicated to it in last week’s program guide. Now it’s a tasty morsel on this week’s rather slender TiVoPlex menu. Tipped as the favorite for the Best Foreign Language Feature gong prior to last year’s Academy Awards festivities, but ultimately upstaged by Argentina’s Secrets in Their Eyes, France’s Un Prophete puts the lie to the rumor that all that Gaul can produce is dreary drama and bedroom farce. An epic length tale of prison life set in a Corsican jail, the film features Tahar Rahim as Malik, a young Arab doing time for an unspecified crime. Newbie Malik is assigned the unwholesome task of killing another inmate on the orders of cellblock bigwig Cesar (Niels Arestrup), and though he makes a mess of the job, the murder marks the beginning of his transformation from wet behind the ears rookie to feared behind-bars powerbroker. Enigmatic, relentlessly bleak, and undeniably powerful, Un Prophete won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 2009 and also cleaned up at France’s Cesar Awards.

Wednesday 12/22/10

7:45 AM HBO Signature
Making Love (1981 USA): An extremely controversial film on initial release, Making Love now plays like a bit like a Lifetime or Logo movie-of-the-week. (A good one, mind.) Directed by Arthur Hiller, the film stars Kate Jackson and Michael Ontkean as Claire and Zach Elliott, an attractive middle-class couple living the good life in bucolic Southern California. The inevitable fly in the ointment? When patient Bart (Harry Hamlin) walks into Zach’s office one day, the good doctor finds himself hopelessly attracted to him…and increasingly uncomfortable with his life in the closet. The film seems awfully, awfully tame now, but trust me: this was a big (and spicy) deal in the early '80s.

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