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Sunday 1/30/11

9:45 AM Flix
Across the Tracks (1991 USA): Little Ricky Schroder and Brad Pitt….together for the first (and to date, last) time on the big screen! Now there’s some ballyhoo even Grizzly couldn’t match! Ricky and Brad play dissimilar brothers brought together by competitive running. It’s as exciting as it sounds.

2:15 PM Showtime Extreme
Ed and His Dead Mother (1993 USA): I gave this film short shrift in a recent TiVoPlex column:

“This is the sort of film you wish you could have witnessed the pitch for. “Um, yeah, JB, we have this great concept for a movie: let’s get Steve Buscemi — don’t worry, he’s gonna be a star — to play a guy who loves his deceased mom so much he makes a deal with a traveling salesman to bring her back to life! But she eats bugs and people to stay reanimated and Steve decides he needs Ned Beatty to help him put her back in the grave! You like?” As an added bonus, if you look up this film on IMDb, you’ll see that someone has attached a picture of an Edward R. Murrow documentary to its image file."

Though an encore viewing has not exactly convinced me it’s any kind of comedy classic, Ed and his Dead Mother is a pleasantly droll affair with a well-written script and excellent performances by Beatty, Buscemi, and John Glover as oily re-animator A. J. Pattle. Tune in with expectations suitably low, and you will be pleasantly surprised.

9:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
Pandora’s Box (1929 GER): The most beautiful woman who ever lived, Louise Brooks, stars in this magnificent silent classic directed by G.W. Pabst. Brooks plays, of course, Lulu (no, her character is not named Pandora, and YOU have a filthy mind!), a woman with so much sex appeal she drives both men and women mad with desire. Natürlich, she must die for her sins, and she does so in spectacular fashion (spoilers)—at the hands of Jack the Ripper! Having determined that Pandora’s Box is no proto-feminist precursor to Carnal Knowledge, however, I must profess that it remains an incredible film, and not only for the presence of Our Miss Brooks. Also noteworthy is Fritz Kortner as her primary patron, a wealthy newspaper magnate, Alice Roberts as one of the out-er screen lesbians of silent cinema, and the superb expressionist cinematography of Gunther Krampf, who had cut his teeth—so to speak—on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu a few years prior. Pandora’s Box is followed at 11:00 PM by 3-Penny Opera (1931), Pabst’s Lotte Lenya-starring adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play of the same name.

Monday 1/31/11

2:15 AM Turner Classic Movies
The Spy in Black (1939 GB): This early collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is a much less ‘arty’ affair than much of their later output, but dare I say is all the better for being so. Sorry, gang…I’m not a big fan of The Red Shoes or Black Narcissus. Here, I’ll climb up on the cross myself…would you like me to hold those nails? Careful, you didn’t get enough accelerant on my feet. What can I say…I’m a philistine who’d rather watch Conrad Veidt play a U-boat captain than Deborah Kerr play a bride of Christ.

2:05 PM Encore Action
Cyborg (1989 USA): Jean-Claude Van Damme kicks bleak future ass in this cartoonish action feature also known as Masters of the Universe 2. Produced by our friends at The Cannon Group, Cyborg may not hit the Himalayan heights of a Black Narcissus, but it does hit lots of bad guys. Repeatedly. In the crotch.

3:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
Life at the Top (1965 GB): This forgotten sequel to 1958’s Room at the Top saw Canadian Ted Kotcheff replace Jack Clayton in the director’s chair, whilst star Laurence Harvey returned as working-class lad made good Joe Lampton. Joe’s now married to Susan (Jean Simmons, replacing Heather Sears), the daughter of boss Abe Brown (Donald Wolfit), but finds that class prejudice still runs deep. Though a job and a mistress (Honor Blackman) beckon in the south, Joe’s a northern lad born and bred and prefers to stay close to home—until he discovers Susan is cheating on him, at which point he decides to try his chances in the Big Smoke. Co-starring Allan Cuthbertson, Robert Morley, and Michael Craig, it’s been many moons since Life at the Top graced American television sets, and it’s not available on home video. You know what to do.

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