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Friday 12/14/07

8am Turner Classic Movies
Carnival Boat (1932 USA): I've been on a bit of a Ginger Rogers kick ever since the excellent Tender Comrade aired last month, so I'm excited to report that two of her earliest efforts get rare airings on TCM this morning. First up is Carnival Boat, in which Ginger plays Honey, a riverboat singer whose love affair with lumberjack Buck Gannon (an already-past-his-prime Bill Boyd) is causing problems quayside with his father Jim (Hobart Bosworth). Jim's got an important contract lined up that will brook no distractions, and he forbids Buck to spend any more time pitching waterway woo to Honey, but will Buck get the message, or will he remain waterlogged by love? There's an exciting and well-staged dénouement involving a log jam and some dynamite, and Rogers is in top form. Carnival Boat is followed at 9:45am by 1933's Rafter Romance, which features Ginger as a working girl whose unusual living arrangements lead to unexpected love with her absent roommate (Norman Foster).


2pm Sundance
L'Avventura (1960 ITA): A triple bill of Michelangelo Antonioni's best kicks off this afternoon with L'Avventura, the director's existentialist salute to bourgeois ennui. Set on a remote Mediterranean island, the film relates the stories of a group of wealthy Italians searching for Anna (Lea Massari), a friend who has gone missing after taking her morning swim. Amongst the search party are Anna's lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and gal pal Claudia (stunning Monica Vitti), but L'Avventura is less about the search than it is about the empty emotional husks of those partaking in it. As enigmatic a puzzle box as the director's later triumph Blow-Up (1966), L'Avventura provides little in the way of narrative arc but plenty in the way of food for thought...as long as you have the patience to plod through two hours and 24 minutes of unresolved ambiguities. An adventure it surely ain't. It's followed at 4:30pm by what I believe is the wide-screen television premiere of 1975's The Passenger, featuring Jack Nicholson as a reporter on the trail of an elusive story in North Africa; and at 7pm by L'Eclisse, in which Monica Vitti and Alain Delon engage in an empty love affair amidst the ruins of an Italy driven mad by greed and materialism. None of these films pass muster as easy or enjoyable viewing experiences (thanks to Nicholson, The Passenger probably comes closest), but make important and prescient statements about the direction taken by Western societies in the post-war years. Anyone with an interest in cinema as art needs to see all three.

11pm Turner Classic Movies
Suburbia (1984 USA): Penelope Spheeris' 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization was one of the first films to introduce punk rock to mainstream audiences. Three years later, Spheeris examined the movement from a fictional perspective in Suburbia, the story of alienated teen Evan Johnson (Bill Coyne) and his adventures with the only family that will accept him: his fellow Southern California punk outcasts The Rejected, here played primarily by real-life street punks. Though the acting is wildly inconsistent, the heart of the film still beats true, and Suburbia remains the best fictional depiction of the punk subculture produced during the Reagan era. Sadly, it's airing in pan-and-scan tonight, but screen composition has never been Spheeris' strong suit, so it probably won't affect your enjoyment of the film.

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