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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 01/08/08

9am Starz! Edge
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists: Dirty Old Town (2003 USA): I'm a (very) late-comer to the Ted Leo party and never had much interest in his earlier outfit Chisel, but after some recent exposure to the man's bouncy political pop-punk I'm now a convert. The fact that Leo refuses to sell his very marketable tunes to advertisers makes him all the more praiseworthy from my perspective, but he's not averse to making the occasional concert film, hence Dirty Old Town. Shot during the 2003 Siren Music Festival at New York's Coney Island, the film features wall-to-wall Pharmacists as well as footage of amusement park visitors as they swelter together one hot July day. If you like hook-laden pop songs with lots of crunchy guitar bits, this film will rock your world.

Wednesday 01/09/08

1am Turner Classic Movies
WarGames (1983 USA): My favorite "children cause a nuclear holocaust" movie returns to the small screen this morning. Young Matthew Broderick stars as David Lightman, an über-geeky techno-whiz who inadvertently hacks into the Pentagon's biggest and shiniest secret computer systems and finds himself in control of the nation's nuclear arsenal. When David challenges the mainframe to a game of Global Thermonuclear Warfare, the computer rises to the challenge, and international tensions mount as US and Soviet missiles lock into full-blown World War III mode. Will David beat the system, or will mankind be doomed by the very technology it has created? And will Global Thermonuclear Warfare prove to be even more of a threat than the Y2K bug? Thankfully, this wild and implausible scenario can never REALLY happen, as nuclear weapons are well protected in stable and responsible democratic regimes like Pakistan, Russia, Israel, and, er, the United States, so sit back, relax, and enjoy this outrageous fantasy, preferably in the comfort of your well-stocked fallout shelter.

12:30pm Sundance
The Angelmakers (2005 HUN): What compelled a group of women to poison over a hundred men in the tiny Hungarian town of Nagyrev during the years after The Great War? That's the intriguing question posed by The Angelmakers, an utterly fascinating documentary making its American television premiere this afternoon. The answer isn't all that surprising: the women were sick and tired of their lazy-ass husbands sitting around, drinking beer, and expecting to be waited on hand and foot (with sex-on-demand to boot), so they did something about it. With arsenic-soaked flypaper in hand, three dozen ladies and one male collaborator - inspired and encouraged by a midwife! - served their hubbies agonizing slow death at mealtime. The crimes eventually became too blatant for the authorities to overlook, and in 1929 bodies were exhumed and trials held, resulting in prison sentences and worse for the killers. I think I speak for all men when I say: I'll do the dishes tonight, dear.

Thursday 01/10/08

3am Encore Action
Gas-s-s-s: Or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1971 USA): An underappreciated and late-arriving counterculture gem from director Roger Corman, Gas-s-s-s is the hallucinogenic tale of a group of Texas misfits trying to reach the nirvana of a New Mexico commune. A secret weapon has killed off all the over-25s, leaving oversexed youngsters in sole control of the planet, and our protagonists (including Cindy Williams, Talia Shire, and Ben Vereen) must negotiate a treacherous obstacle course to reach the commune, including a rapacious high school football team and a gang of car thieves. Recently paired on DVD with the less coherent (but equally enjoyable) Wild in the Streets, Gas-s-s-s was also the film that finally convinced me that Country Joe and the Fish weren't the useless hippies I thought them to be, as they put in a memorable appearance in concert at a drive-in movie theatre.

4:40am Sundance
Old Joy (2007 USA): No, it's not Chan-wook Park's Oldboy, it's Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, and you'd be hard-pressed to find another film more antithetical to Park's than this one. In all honesty, I prefer the Korean madman's stylistic overkill to this very quiet, contemplative drama featuring whiny weird-beard folk singer Will Oldham as Kurt, a back-packing grumpy guts off to breathe in some mountain air with his equally dour pal Mark (Daniel London). At least this barrel of laughs only clocks in at a very brief 73 minutes. Also airs at 11am.

7:30am Turner Classic Movies
Siren of Bagdad: (1953 USA): It's so inauthentic, it even misspells the name of the city in which it supposedly takes place! Well, you don't really expect historical accuracy in a fantasy film produced by Sam Katzman, do you? Siren of Bagdad (sic) stars a well past his prime Paul Henreid as Kazah, a magician who teams up with voluptuous maiden Zendi (Patricia Medina) to rescue his troupe of dancing girls, who have been sold into slavery by the evil Hamid (Carl Milletaire). A magic trunk - which "disappears" people with alarming regularity - provides an assist, and Hans Conried co-stars as Ben Ali, Kazah's faithful assistant and reliable comic relief.

7:45am Showtime

District B13 (2006 FRA): I issued a pretty harsh indictment of District B13 when it made its American television premiere a few months back, and while I stand by much of that assessment, the film is not all bad, especially when compared to other Francophone action films. The story is thin and the acting unimpressive, but the parkour sequences are memorable and will look all the better in their original aspect ratio when the film makes its letterboxed debut this morning. Also airs at 10:45am.

Friday 01/11/08

4:30am Turner Classic Movies
A Slight Case of Larceny (1953 USA): The immortal Mickey Rooney (on screen since 1926, and still working!) stars in this crime comedy about the dreams and schemes of small-town businessmen. The Mickster plays Geechy Cheevers, an admirer of the late 19th-century robber barons who dreams of acquiring old money but will settle for new if he has to. Geechy shows up on the doorstep of his old wartime buddy Freddy (Eddie Bracken) one day and convinces him to chuck in his gig as a gas-station attendant, mortgage his home, and go into the petroleum-slinging business for himself. Alas, a competitor gets much the same idea - and starts leeching Geechy and Freddy's business, forcing the pair to decide exactly how far to take the cutthroat capitalism stuff. A delightful-if-slight effort, A Slight Case of Larceny also features Dabbs Greer as a fellow gas jockey and mousy Clifton Webb-alike Charles Halton as a merciless oil executive.

8pm Turner Classic Movies
Cell 2455, Death Row (1955 USA): He's all but forgotten now, but back in the 1950s, convicted rapist Caryl Chessman was quite the cause célèbre amongst the limousine liberal set. Chessman made a name for himself by acting as his own attorney and writing four books (including an autobiography) whilst on Death Row before keeping his date with San Quentin's gas chamber in May 1960 after the appeals process was finally exhausted. Controversy arose because Chessman was NOT a killer, but his rapine was considered a capital crime because he allegedly kidnapped some of his victims. Cell 2455 is a semi-fictionalized take on his story, and stars William Campbell (Dementia 13) as "Whit Whittier", the Lover's Lane Bandit who finds himself caught on the sharp end of the "Little Lindbergh Law" stick. The film is an effective and at times powerful indictment of the American justice system, produced in a long-ago and faraway place where mercy and rehabilitation were not entirely forgotten values. Interestingly, Wikipedia claims Chessman also served as the inspiration for the "man with a hook" urban legend, so in addition to Cell 2455, he's also apparently responsible for a whole bunch of crappy slasher flicks (as well as the infamous punk single Do the Caryl Chessman by Texas band The Hates).

11pm Turner Classic Movies
Death Race 2000 (1975 USA): Sadly airing tonight in pan-and-scan, Death Race 2000 is an outrageous bleak future comedy from the directorial king of camp, Paul Bartel. This is the notorious film wherein drivers engaged in the eponymous competition score points by killing pedestrians, and stars David Carradine as Frankenstein, the current Death Race champion who must fend off the competition, including Machine Gun Joe (Sly Stallone), Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), and a host of others. Some might consider it a bad-taste classic, but as usual, Bartel's astute observational eye and Charles Griffith's tart screenplay render it a surprisingly fresh and prescient piece of entertainment. Co-starring Martin Kove, Roberta Collins, and Harriet Medin, Death Race 2000 is definitely not to be missed by fans of the psychotronic and outré.

Sunday 01/13/08

Noon More Max
The Painted Veil (2006 USA): Take two of my least-favorite thespians (Naomi Watts and Ed Norton), stick ‘em in a frock flick based on a W. Somerset Maugham story, stir rapidly, and you should get a pretty noxious blend. The actual result, however, is surprisingly Not Entirely Unwatchable After All, a tribute to the efforts of director John Curran and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner. Watts and Norton play an unhappy married couple feuding with each other and fending with a cholera epidemic in 1920s China, and the film adeptly blends the personal and political themes without succumbing entirely to the nostalgic pull of 20th-century imperial fantasy. If frock flick you must have, here's a good one.

Monday 01/14/08

8pm Showtime
American Cannibal: The Road to Reality (2006 USA): The extremes of reality television are taken to their logical conclusion in this disturbing docu (some claim mocku) mentary about the benighted production of one such television program. Focusing on the efforts of a pair of writers pitching their idea to a sleazy porn producer, the film follows the show into production and eventual collapse when cold feet develop around the "eat someone on a desert island" scenario, climaxing with a comatose contestant being airlifted to safety. For those wondering how low the bar can be set by this most unedifying of boob tube genres, here are two answers: American Cannibal and the show it ultimately replaced, Virgin Territory. The Decline of Western Civilization ends here. Also airs at 11pm.