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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 02/14/06

5:30am The Movie Channel
Staying Together (1989 USA): Things are a little thin on the TiVoPlex front this week, so I'm going to be stretching the parameters a bit and serving up some wholesome but not entirely flavorful gruel as well as the usual tasty offerings. First up for a lukewarm recommendation is Staying Together, one of a handful of feature films directed by actress Lee Grant. The hackneyed storyline revolves around three teenage brothers coming of age in South Carolina and their father's chicken restaurant, a local staple under threat by carpet-bagging developers. We're definitely in Lifetime Movie Network territory here, but the picture's solid cast - including Stockard Channing, Dermot Mulroney, and Sean Astin, as well as the always excellent Levon Helm - move this one into the "if I'm bored enough I'll watch it" column. It's also making its letterboxed television debut this morning and airs again at 8:30am.

7:35am Sundance
Arna's Children (2003 ISR-HOL): Arna Mer Khamis was an Israeli woman from a staunchly Zionist family (she was a veteran of the 1948 war) who married a Palestinian man in the 1950s and spent the rest of her life helping the poverty-stricken Palestinian youth of the West Bank town of Jenin. She founded a children's theatre company in the 1980s, and this documentary - directed by Arna's son Juliano - takes a page from the Seven Up! playbook and investigates the adult lives of the children she worked with in the years leading up to the first Intifada. Arna died in 1997, and sadly, things haven't exactly gone swimmingly for her young thespians in the interim, with many killed during 2002's Battle of Jenin, one dead in a suicide bombing, and the theatrical space she constructed for them destroyed by the Israeli Army. This grim feature won the FIPRESCI Prize at 2004's Canadian International Documentary Festival.

5pm Turner Classic Movies
Benji (1974 USA): 31 Days of Oscar, and this is what we get? Yes, unbeknownst to me, that scruffy but lovable mutt Benji and his eponymous film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, a tune I'm sure we all remember fondly. What's that? You don't remember it? Can't even hum a bar, you say? Well, to refresh your memory, it was entitled Benji's Theme (I Feel Love) and was performed by the Silver Fox himself, Mr. Charlie Rich, then coasting on the considerable success of hits like Behind Closed Doors and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Even if you don't recall the song, though, I'm sure most of you DO remember the film itself, which grossed an astonishing $40 million in 1974 bucks and was required viewing for anyone under 12. The scant story - provided to flesh out about 60 minutes worth of cute doggie footage - revolves around two adorable kidnapped kiddies (Allen Fiuzat and Cynthia Smith), and Benji's pawsworthy - erm, PRAISEWORTHY - efforts to rescue them. Familiar faces in the cast include Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee from the Andy Griffith Show), ‘60s pin-up Deborah Walley, and long time character actor Edgar Buchanan, and, for what it's worth, this is Benji's letterboxed TV premiere.

Wednesday 02/15/06

4pm Sundance
Raggedy Man (1981 USA): Sissy Spacek is first-rate as Nita, a single mother in a dust-blown World War II Texas town, in this excellent drama from director (and Spacek spouse) Jack Fisk. Nita has a boring job as the town telephone operator, a job she can't quit whilst raising Henry and Harry, her fatherless though assonant offspring. When a soldier on leave (Eric Roberts) finds himself in need of phone service, however, things begin to change, and the two dial up a connection in a hurry. Roberts' subtle performance offers further proof that he hasn't had the career he deserved and one must also wonder why Fisk (who met Spacek in 1974 whilst serving as art director for Terrence Malick's Badlands) has maintained such a low profile over the years. Perhaps he's happy enough offering his skills to directors like Brian De Palma, David Lynch, and Malick, who recently employed Fisk as production designer on The New World. Also airs 2/6 at 10:45am.

5pm Encore Westerns
Mustang Country (1976 USA): Sheesh, it IS a slow week. Here's a completely forgotten Western that is primarily notable for featuring one-time matinee idol Joel McCrea in his final screen appearance. Written and directed by John Champion - also responsible for penning Zero Hour!, the film that provided the raw material for 1980's satire Airplane! - Mustang Country (located, I suspect, far, far away from Brokeback Mountain) features McCrea and Robert Fuller as a pair of cow-punching he-men who rescue a runaway boy (Nika Mina, in his only screen role) on the trail of a wild mustang. Though shot in Canada, the film was actually a Universal production and got a very brief theatrical release in early 1976, and co-stars Patrick "Son of Marion Morrison" Wayne.

Thursday 02/16/06

5pm Encore Westerns
Major Dundee (1965 USA): More wide-screen Sam Peckinpah comes our way this afternoon, but is it the recently re-edited version of Major Dundee, spruced up with an additional 12 minutes of footage, or the standard cinema iteration we all grew up with? Encore's near-useless Web site doesn't provide the answer, so you'll just have to tune in to find out, but even should it prove to be old reliable, it's still worth your time, as the film doesn't get aired in its correct aspect ratio all that often. Charlton Heston stars as the title character, a prison warden spending the last days of the Civil War pursuing a group of troublesome Apaches across the border into Mexico. Sorta like George Bush blowing up Pakistani villages from bases in Afghanistan, I guess. As with our modern-day volunteer Army, Dundee finds himself compelled to lower his recruitment standards in order to assemble a large enough war party, and his contentious command includes a motley assortment of guards, inmates, Indians, turncoat Rebs, and general ne'er-do-wells. An anti-Western before the term had been invented, Major Dundee's nihilistic politics and cynical outlook also presaged the almost concurrent arrival of the spaghetti Western. To underline the dovetailing of American and Euro-Western, the film even features Senta Berger as the apple of Dundee's eye, and the supporting cast's testosterone is almost palpable: Richard Harris, James Coburn, Warren Oates, L. Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, and Dub Taylor, all on the same screen, with only Jim Hutton available to provide doe-eyed distraction for the ladies. Also airs 2/20 at 10am.

7pm Sundance
Mobutu, King of Zaire (1999 FRA-BEL): I've been a philatelist (that's stamp-collecting nerd to you, bub) since the age of six, and as a child, some of my favorite stamps came from the central African nation of Zaire. Besides the colorful depictions of exotic animals and such, each stamp also bore the portrait of a handsome man in a leopard skin hat (though sadly, not one of the pillbox variety). That man was Mobutu Sese Seko, the oligarch who ruled his land for over 30 years after helping out with the CIA-supported overthrow of nationalist Patrice Lumumba, and he was rarely seen without his signature toque, which lent him a jaunty air belying his bloodthirsty nature. In other words, he looked a lot nicer on the stamps than he was in real life. This grim but compulsively watchable documentary explores his reign of terror in considerable depth, and is strongly recommended to anyone with an interest in African history. Also airs 2/20 at 11:45pm.

Friday 02/17/06

6:45am Starz! In Black
Heart and Souls (1993 USA): Another feature I would probably overlook under normal circumstances, Heart and Souls is a fantasy comedy about four ghosts (Kyra Sedgwick, Tom Sizemore, Alfre Woodard, and Charles Grodin) whose spirits become "attached" to a baby born at the same time they're dying in a bus crash. The baby is played - as an adult, thankfully - by Robert Downey Jr., who thinks it perfectly normal to chat with his corporeal buddies whom no one else can see. Though the film ain't great by any standard, it's much better than its "invisible best friend" predecessor Drop Dead Fred, and co-stars David Paymer, Elizabeth Shue, B. B. King, and Luana Anders.

5pm Fox Movie Channel
Sicilian Clan (1969 FRA): This superior caper film stars the grand old man of French cinema, Jean Gabin, as a manipulative gangster and handsome young heartthrob Alain Delon (don't we ALL wish we could have his hair?) as the target of Gabin's ire. The two are working together on the same jewelry heist, but each is convinced he can get the better of his co-conspirator whilst also pulling the wool over the eyes of Inspector Le Goff (Lino Ventura). Superbly directed by Henri Verneuil and featuring yet another excellent Ennio Morricone score, The Sicilian Clan remains unavailable on home video and is getting one of its infrequent wide-screen airings on Fox this evening.

Saturday 02/18/06

10:30pm Flix
Hey Babu Riba (1987 YUG): More coming-of-age shenanigans are provided this week courtesy Hey Babu Riba, which give the proceedings a flavorful Iron Curtain twist with its circa 1950 Yugoslavian setting. Actually, I think Marshal Tito had already decided to leave Soviet Union's orbit by the early ‘50s, but you get the idea. Life in the immediate post-war period was harsh for Eastern Europeans, but a nostalgic glow permeates this feel-good feature about four older but wiser Yugoslav émigrés who return to their homeland in the 1980s for the funeral of the woman they each loved as callow youths. Director Jovan Acin, who died in a car crash in 1991, made a short subject with the enticing title Sex, Mao, LSD in 1971. Hey Babu Riba, the title of which derives from the characters' misinterpretation of American pop music, makes its wide-screen television debut this evening.

Sunday 02/19/06

2:45am The Movie Channel
Troll 2 (1990 ITA): And you thought Troll was bad. Troll 2 performs the impressive feat of making other sequels look pretty good, but for fans of bad cinema, this is your holy grail for the week, and it's appearing letterboxed, to boot. For those who like unconvincing and completely non-scary monsters - played by little people in masks - and badly recorded post-synched sound (though shot in the US, most of the crew were Italian), you're going to love Troll 2, which has impressively ascended all the way to number 4 on IMDb's Worst 100 list. Also airs at 5:45am.

3am Fox Movie Channel
Back Door to Hell (1964 USA): This fascinating glimpse at the early careers of two future Hollywood movers and shakers gets a very rare airing tonight. Shot in the Philippines by 32-year-old Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop), Back Door to Hell is a fairly rote World War II story about an American commando team out to make trouble for the Japanese. The three-man team is portrayed by Jack Nicholson (also 32 but looking younger), pop crooner Jimmie Rodgers (the Kisses Sweeter Than Wine man), and John Hackett, a Nicholson drinking buddy whose film career never took off. I think this was shot in CinemaScope, offering further enticement for insomniac film junkies.

9:05pm IFC
Nine Queens (2001 ARG): Back on the subject of philately, this unusual thriller (which shares plot points with Krzysztof Kieslowski's short 1988 Dekalog morality play, Thy Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Goods, and the better-known Cary Grant vehicle Charade), Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) involves a couple of small-time hoods with a batch of counterfeit postage stamps. If they can pass them for real, they'll be set for life...but this being a caper film, you know things aren't going to be that simple. The winner of numerous Argentinean film awards, this is a slick, well-made, and extremely enjoyable diversion.

Monday 02/20/06

3:05pm Sundance
DiG! (2004 USA): Ondi Timoner's fascinating, hilarious, and ultimately heartbreaking documentary about delusional musician Anton Newcombe returns to the boob tube this afternoon. Newcombe, a self-proclaimed musical genius who seems determined to ape psychedelic head cases like Roky Erickson and Sky Saxon, and whose less-than-original rock band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, marauded club stages across America and Europe for a full decade, agreed to have Timoner's cameras follow and film him for eight years. His fractious relationships with family, band-mates, and friends - most notably competing rock band The Dandy Warhols - are explored, as are his problems with substance abuse. If you've never heard of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, you'll still enjoy this film, but if (like myself) you've actually seen the band - and engaged in less-than-witty (and generally abusive) repartee with Newcombe - it may bring back unpleasant memories.