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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 10/13/09

12:30 PM IFC
Desperately Seeking Susan (1984 USA): It's hard to imagine a time when Madonna was actually hip and not the subject of well-earned ridicule, but this still fresh "punk" comedy caught her at just that moment. Her film career soon went into precipitous and irreversible decline, but Desperately Seeking Susan is proof positive that Madonna Louise Ciccone once showed some onscreen promise. She plays a New York free spirit who finds her fate inadvertently entwined with that of boring middle-class housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette, another actress who soon fell from grace). Director Susan Seidelman had the good sense to film on location with a boatload of Bowery denizens — including Richards Hell and Edson, Ann Magnuson, Rockets Redglare, Adele Bertei, Arto Lindsay, and John Lurie — as well as professional actors such as Victor Argo, John Turturro, and Shirley Stoler. The result is a lively musical comedy of errors cut from the same cloth as Martin Scorsese's After Hours.

Wednesday 10/14/09

8:00 AM Turner Classic Movies
The Scarlet Letter (1926 USA): Lillian Gish stars as Hester Prynne in this excellent silent adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel of the same name. You read it in school, so you know the story — sweet young thing gets knocked up by preacher man and must wear titular adornment as partial penance for her sins. Directed by Victor Sjostrom, this version of The Scarlet Letter co-stars Swedish thesp Lars Hanson as lover-boy clergyman Arthur Dimmesdale and Henry B. Walthall as cuckolded hubby Roger Chillingworth, whilst wonderful Karl Dane provides comic relief as Master Giles. It's one of the unsung masterpieces of the Silent Era: a beautifully made film that still has the power to move an audience.

4:40 PM Sundance
The Lives of Others (2007 GER): 2008's Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award winner makes its widescreen American television debut this evening, making amends for those pan and scan airings on Starz last year. Starring the late Ulrich Mühe as a Stasi agent assigned to listen in on the conversations of a playwright considered a security threat, The Lives of Others is a modern classic that should send a shiver of recognition through American viewers disturbed by our own government's efforts to constantly expand its ability to peek into the most private corners of our lives.

5:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
The Cuckoos (1930 USA): Fans of Wheeler and Woolsey, rejoice! TCM has a quartet of the lads' funniest features on tap for you this evening. For those not in the know, Wheeler and Woolsey were the first vaudeville team to successfully make the transition to the big screen — and because they did so in the early ‘30s, their brand of comedy tended to be a touch naughtier than, for example, Abbott and Costello or The Ritz Brothers. The laughs commence with The Cuckoos, in which our heroes play phony fortune tellers hanging around a Mexican resort in search of easy marks. Wheeler falls in love with Anita (Dorothy Lee), an American-born gal raised by gypsies, but hasn't reckoned on the jealousy of gypsy king Julius (Mitchell Lewis). Commence politically incorrect fun! The Cuckoos also features a couple of early Technicolor sequences, but I don't know whether or not they're included in TCM's print. It's followed at 7:00 PM by Hook Line and Sinker (1931), in which the boys play insurance salesmen turned hoteliers, at 8:30 PM by Caught Plastered (1932), in which they turn an old lady's corner shop into a speakeasy, and at 9:45 PM by Peach-O-Reno (1932), a salute to the Biggest Little City in the World — and the divorce capitol of America.

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