A brief note: This week’s TiVoPlex marks the one-year anniversary of this column. I’d like to send a big thank you to the good folks at BOP for allowing me to indulge myself whilst eating their bandwidth, and even bigger thanks to those of you who have sent kind comments about TiVoPlex over the last 12 months. With your kind permission, I hope to carry on for a long time to come. And now, on with the show:
9:30am HBO
American Standoff (2001 USA): In the mood for a good old-fashioned tale of two-fisted labor negotiating? This HBO original documentary follows a pair of battles: the one between the Teamsters and non-union freight hauler Overnite Transportation, and the one between the ever-so-slightly skunky James P. Hoffa and the embattled Teamster administration of the late 20th Century. Harlan County USA it ain’t, but it’s worth a look for union members, blue-collar workers, and fans of non-fiction cinema.
9pm More Max
Secretary (2002 USA): This one was on my to-do list throughout 2002, but it didn’t get done until now, when it’s scheduled to make its television premiere. Probably not for all tastes, Secretary stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a slightly disturbed young woman hired to be the personal assistant of lawyer James Spader. The two of them proceed to engage in a sado-masochistic sexual relationship, perhaps not a million miles away from the one detailed in Michael Hanecke’s The Piano Teacher (2001 FRA-OST). A solid if unspectacular indie cast, including Stephen McHattie, Jeremy Davies, and Lesley Ann Warren, support them. And I’m going to resist the temptation to make bad puns about taking dictation.
6pm Sundance
Veronika Voss (1982 BRD): Here’s the good news: The Sundance Channel is gracing us with a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film festival during the month of September. Here’s the bad: It consists of only four of the prolific director’s prodigious output, ignoring some of his most essential work. So we don’t get An American Soldier (1970 BRD), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971 BRD), or my personal favorite, The Third Generation (1979 BRD). Still, we mustn’t complain; more than 13 moons have passed since any of his output has appeared over American airwaves. The festival kicks off with his penultimate effort, Veronika Voss, a black-and-white period piece starring Rosel Zech (Aimee and Jaguar) as the title character, a film actress at Germany’s renowned UFA Studios whose post-World War II decline is fueled by drug addiction and a doctor who isn’t overly familiar with the Hippocratic Oath. It’s a solid piece of work, and is a decent introduction to Fassbinder’s oeuvre. Watch for the director’s cameo appearance as a cinema patron.
4:15am Black Starz!
Don’t Play Us Cheap (1973 USA): This one comes with my highest recommendation. It’s Melvin Van Peebles’ follow-up to the wildly-overrated Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (1971 USA), and while it shares some of that film’s anarchic amateur-hour qualities, it’s a far better film overall. Esther Rolle (another alumna of television’s Good Times) stars with a cast of unknowns (indeed, the woeful IMDb entry for this film lacks all but three names) in a folk tale about the devil - resplendent, naturally, in 1970s’ pimp attire - dropping in on a neighborhood house party and causing trouble. This is an essential experience for adventuresome cineastes. It’s followed at 6am by a rare broadcast of Van Peeble’s brief broadside at Hollywood’s treatment of African-American filmmakers, Classified X (1998 FRA-USA).
11:15pm Turner Classic Movies
Earth (1930 USSR): Alexander Dovzhenko’s Marxist agrarian classic is no thrill ride, but serious film buffs will definitely want to make time for it. One of the greatest and most powerful films of the Stalinist era, Earth details the day-to-day struggle of Ukrainian peasants on the newly established collective farms. Like most Soviet films of the period, it’s gorgeously shot (in this case by Danill Demutsky) and brilliantly edited by Dovzhenko himself. It’s a feast for the eyes, the heart, and the mind, regardless of the unpleasant political realities lurking in the background, including the bloody years just around the corner.
8am Sci Fi
Destroy All Monsters (1968 JAP): It takes something pretty special to catch my eye when it comes to stations with commercial interruptions, and a wide-screen broadcast of possibly my favorite giant-monster movie of all time definitely fits that description. The film lives up to its title, featuring an all-star monster bash in downtown Tokyo. Godzilla headlines, of course, but there’s also room for Rodan, Angillas, Ghidorah, Mothra, Manda, Barugon, and others. If watching men in rubber suits step on miniature models of large cities is your bag, you will never see a better film.
9pm Turner Classic Movies
The Sea Hawk (1924 USA): If old-fashioned derring-do is your cup of tea, you could do little better than this silent epic directed and independently produced by Frank Lloyd. The star of the film is Milton Sills, a since-forgotten star whose fame foundered on the rocky shores of talking pictures, resulting in a fatal heart attack in 1930. Sills looks good, though he’s no Errol Flynn (who took the analogous role in the 1940 remake), but for modern audiences, the most recognizable face is that of Wallace Beery, here essaying one of the roguish roles that were his bread-and-butter during the 1920s and ‘30s. The action scenes are particularly memorable, taking advantage of silent Hollywood’s attention to detail and scale, with some truly stunning reproductions of 18th-century galleons.
10am Sundance
Stealing the Fire (2002 USA): No one denies that Iraq at one time possessed the ability to develop nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but the Western world’s complicity in that country’s efforts to develop a deterrent to Israel’s nuclear stockpile has long been shrouded in secrecy or simply ignored by corporate media. Here’s the full story of how Saddam Hussein acquired his radioactive goodies, and no, it wasn’t from North Korea or Libya.