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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 09/22/09

5pm Encore
Children of the Corn (1984 USA): The film that launched a thousand sequels - none of them even remotely good - returns to the small screen this evening after the passage of many harvests. Based on a short story by the fecund Stephen King, the story unfolds in Gatlin, a small Nebraska town dominated by child preacher Isaac (John Franklin). Isaac is a fire-and-brimstone sort whose flock of pre-pubescent followers has murdered all the local adults and now worship at his altar of mystic maize. Into this madness arrive an unsuspecting couple (Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton) in transit to a new job in Seattle, but destined to reap what others have previously sown in the cornfields of America's heartland. Though he seems to owe fealty to some sort of animistic idol, Isaac's motivation is never really explained and the film plays out like a very low-rent Wicker Man. Compared to the rest of the films in the series, however, this is Oscar-worthy material. Also airs at 8pm.

5pm Encore Westerns
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943 USA): I've recommended this one in the past, but as it may well be my favorite American-made Western of all time, I don't feel too bad about giving it another plug. I've only ever read two Western novels in my life: this one, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and the decidedly pulpier Destry Rides Again, by Max Brand. Their cinematic adaptations match the aspirations of their print precursors, with Destry being a solid, big-budget piece of Golden-Age Hollywood entertainment, and The Ox-Bow Incident being a bleak, existential look at justice - or the lack thereof - in the Old West. Henry Fonda and Harry (Henry) Morgan star as a pair of cowhands caught up in a fever of lynch-mob justice after a local farmer is murdered. Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, and William Eythe are the threesome accused by vigilantes of the crime whilst Fonda fills his regular role as the conscience of the crowd, but this relentlessly downbeat and grimly realistic film doesn't provide much, if any, catharsis for its audience (unless, of course, you're on the side of the lynch mob). Directed by the great William Wellman, and co-starring Jane Darwell, Leigh Whipper, and Marc Lawrence, it's one of the finest American films of the 1940s, and an artistic triumph that has never really received the recognition it deserves.

Wednesday 09/23/09

11:15am IFC
Max (2002 USA): A somewhat controversial art-house hit in 2002, Max returns to television in wide-screen this morning. Starring Noah Taylor (who played an ambitious Jewish peasant in 1999's Simon Magus) as Adolf Hitler and John Cusack as his art-dealer friend during the immediate post-World War I years, the film generated critical heat for presenting Hitler as less than the fully-formed monster he was to become by the 1920s. If you missed its week-long run at the local art-plex, here's an opportunity to make up your own mind: is Max a tasteless example of historical revisionism, or a bold statement about the power of art?

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