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5:30 PM The Movie Channel
Holy Rollers (2010 USA): In which Jesse Eisenberg gets in touch with his roots. Holy Rollers stars the baby-faced Eisenberg as Sam Gold, a Hasidic Jew whose trilby and side curls allow him to circumvent airport customs and develop a career as a drug mule ferrying Ecstasy tablets from Amsterdam to New York. Apparently based on a true story, it’s an engaging tale of a naïf in Babylon who decides Babylon has a bit more to offer him than Brooklyn. Also airs at 8:30 PM.

11:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
Santa Claus (1959 MEX): This jaw-dropping, so bad it’s incredibly good Mexican children's movie showed up on TCM for the first time last December; understandably, viewers have demanded it make this encore appearance. A kiddie matinee staple of the '60s brought to American screens by legendary showman K. Gordon Murray, Santa Claus imagines the jolly fat man as some sort of Catholic saint engaged in battle with one of the devil’s minions, portrayed by a man in a red body-suit with horns. It’s hard to adequately describe this film, but let’s just say that if you like listening to children sing tunelessly — a lot — and think it’s perfectly normal to leave your six-year-old home alone whilst you go out for a night on the town, you’ll love it.

Saturday 5/7/11

7:20 AM Encore Mystery
The China Syndrome (1979 USA): Remember when this film was considered hysterical science fiction in some circles? After Fukushima Daichi, it suddenly starts to look like pretty level-headed stuff. Jack Lemmon stars as Jack Godell, a supervisor at a nuclear power plant somewhere in sunny Southern California. Jack’s a big proponent of nuclear energy, but when an earthquake hits, he becomes concerned that something deeply wrong is taking place deep within the bowels of his reactor. Sure enough, the water cooling the fuel rods has dropped to a dangerously low level, threatening to melt the floor of the storage facility and potentially set off a devastating explosion that could spread radioactive material across the Southland. Why don’t those tree-hugging hippies realize that could never happen? Meanwhile, two meddlesome TV reporters (Michael Douglas and Hanoi Jane Fonda) are trying to get the story out over the airwaves but find the authorities somewhat reluctant to let the truth be told. Again, this could never happen in real life. When watching The China Syndrome, repeat: it’s only a movie...it’s only a movie...it’s only a...oh, pardon me, my Geiger counter is beeping.

9:00 AM Turner Classic Movies
Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942 USA): Perhaps my favorite 1940s Tarzan film, Tarzan’s New York Adventure does exactly what the title suggests: provide an opportunity to relocate our monosyllabic hero from Darkest Africa to the Big, Bad Apple. After Boy (Johnny Sheffield) is kidnapped by wicked Buck Rand (the great Charles Bickford) and taken west to perform in a circus, Tarzan and Jane (Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan) hop the next flight in hopes of rescuing him and returning to their idyllic jungle treehouse. Unsurprisingly, the Lord of the Apes gets into all sorts of hot water in Gotham, but with the assistance of some circus elephants a happy ending is assured. This was the last film in which O’Sullivan portrayed Jane, and with her departure the series would take a much more formulaic direction (and the budgets would drop, too).

3:15 PM HBO2
Ingelore (2009 USA): I haven’t seen this Holocaust documentary yet, but it sounds pretty interesting. The subject is Ingelore Herz Honigstein, a young, deaf Jewish girl who, after being raped by Nazi cadets, was by great good fortune allowed to escape to America. The film was produced and directed by Frank Stiefel, Ingelore’s son.

Sunday 5/8/11

11:30 PM Turner Classic Movies
Mother (1952 JAP): Mikio Naruse is one of the unheralded masters of Japanese cinema, but perhaps he’s in for a bit of a renaissance — in addition to this airing, his silent films have recently been exhumed on DVD by the excellent Eclipse imprint. Mother is the director’s tribute to the fortitude of the Japanese woman, as exemplified by Masako (Kinuyo Tanaka), a widow who runs a dry-cleaning business whilst caring for her sickly son (Akihiko Katayama), a troublesome teenage daughter (Kyoko Kagawa), and an overly attentive war veteran (Daisuke Kato). It’s not considered one of his best films, but I’ve only seen a couple of ‘em, and Mother seems pretty good to me. Or at least it did when I last saw it, which was probably 30 years ago...

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