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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 3/9/10

2:00 AM Sundance
Let's Get Lost (1989 USA): Like many jazz musicians, Chet Baker had substance abuse problems. Those problems eventually killed him, but before they did, he carved out a remarkable career as both singer and trumpet player, and that's the focus of Bruce Weber's gauzy hagiographic documentary, Let's Get Lost. Featuring interviews with many of Baker's relatives, contemporaries, and admirers, as well as rare and revealing footage of the man himself, the film is a visually stunning tribute to this incredibly talented and deeply troubled Adonis.

Wednesday 3/10/10

Midnight Turner Classic Movies
Hakuchi (1951 JAP): TCM shines the spotlight on Akira Kurosawa this month, and amongst the usual suspects (Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, etc.) are some rarities that you probably haven't seen. Heck, I certainly haven't seen them all, either, so this is terrific news for admirers of the great director. Hakuchi, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, is the first of the "overlooked gems" on offer this month, and stars Rashomon's Masayuki Mori as a guileless veteran struggling to regain his soul and find his place in post-World War II Japan. Though the film also features Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune, it's not entirely successful, thanks in part to production company Shochiku's ruthless cutting of 99 (!) minutes of footage. Still almost three hours in length, Hakuchi surely isn't the adaptation Kurosawa intended, but it remains a fascinating if flawed attempt to bring a great book to the screen. It's followed at 3:00 AM by the more familiar The Lower Depths (1957), another Kurosawa adaptation of a Russian story - this one by Maxim Gorky.

5:30 AM IFC
New World Order (2009 USA): The world of right-wing conspiracy theorist and alternative medicine enthusiast Alex Jones is examined in this non-judgemental but revealing documentary. Jones, who runs the website Prisonplanet.com, believes that 9/11 was an inside job, that the participants in the annual Bilderberg conference are our real masters, and that the gubmint is coming for us so we'd better buy lots of guns and ammo, but New World Order doesn't examine the merits or demerits of each theory, preferring to concentrate on the obsessive behavior of its subject. As director Luke Myer has noted, this isn't a film designed to make people believe one theory or another: it's a film about those who resolutely reside far outside the parameters of the dominant paradigm and, right or wrong, have the courage to tell the world what they think it needs to hear. Also airs at 10:15 PM.

5:00 PM HBO 2
An Omar Broadway Film (2008 USA): No, not Omar Bradley, Omar Broadway. Omar is an inmate doing time for a carjacking, and this HBO original documentary is his story - and the story of his fellow inmates in Newark, New Jersey's brutal Northern State Prison. Gleaned from footage shot on a camera illegally smuggled into Northern with the assistance of a sympathetic guard, An Omar Broadway Film is the stuff of verite dreams, and a damning indictment of our laughably mis-labeled correctional facilities. Also airs at 8:00 PM.

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