May 2008 Archives

FLICK PICKS: Family film classics

May 30, 2008 7:04 AM

THE ESSENTIALS - Sunday at 8 p.m., Turner Classic Movies

Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin and Kit Kittredge costar Chris O'Donnell host Turner Classic Movies' new weekly film series The Essentials Jr., designed to get kids cinema-literate.

All summer long, we'll see family-friendly classics like the first one, at 8 p.m. this Sunday, June 1: National Velvet, starring a child Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney and a real purty horse. (Watch a clip here or trailer here.)

Upcoming entries include 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Courtship of Eddie's Father and Harvey. More at TCM's Essentials Jr. page.

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WEIRD & WILD: Pee-wee Herman bio

May 28, 2008 4:42 PM

BIOGRAPHY: PEE-WEE HERMAN
Thursday at 10 p.m. ET, BIO Channel

So is this new Biography hour a profile of the retro kiddie character or of his actor-portrayer Paul Reubens? Either way, it's a wild ride.

Reubens started in comedy 30 years ago with L.A.'s influential improvisation group The Groundlings, where he created his Pee-wee character of a big kid in a small suit with a perpetual snit. Stand-up sellouts and a hit HBO special led to his 1980s CBS cult crossover Pee-wee's Playhouse, a color-riot of a Saturday morning children's series with enough pure strangeness (and sneaky double entendres) to lure a sizable adult following.

But "adult" proved the operative word in another sense in 1991 when Reubens was arrested in an X-rated movie theater while visiting his family in Florida. His kiddie career on the skids, the actor reinvented himself by playing an ever-changing roster of characters in Murphy Brown, Ally McBeal and memorably last season in 30 Rock and Pushing Daisies -- a show almost as DayGlo fluorescent as Reubens' old kiddie fave.

And now there's another Pee-wee Herman movie on the horizon.

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TUBE TIP: The Spelling Bee

May 28, 2008 8:55 AM

The hit documentary Spellbound brought into the mainstream what we cultists have known for years: Spelling bees are cool. The 2008 National Spelling Bee finals make their way into network prime time this Friday (8-10 p.m. ET on ABC), but you aren't some latecomer, so be sure to catch the preliminary rounds carried elsewhere.

The Washington, D.C., quarterfinals are covered online at espn360.com Thursday 2-5:30 p.m. ET. Then the semifinals move to cable TV, aired live Friday 11 a.m.-2 p.m. ET on ESPN.

Dare we hope to see 'em sweat in HD?

Bonus movie: Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne star in the related family film Akeelah and the Bee, about an underprivileged girl who discovers her own gift for spelling. Look for it On Demand on some cable systems, and on TMC The Movie Channel Saturday at 6 a.m. and 1:15 p.m. ET.

Watch the Spellbound trailer here.

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DOWNLOAD THIS: HBO now on iTunes

May 27, 2008 6:52 PM

No HBO? No problem. The cabler has finally posted episodes for download at iTunes -- for a price, and then some.

While series like "The Wire," "Flight of the Conchords" and "Sex and the City" are the standard $1.99 per download, HBO jacks up the price to $2.99 per ep on "The Sopranos," "Deadwood" and "Rome."

Surely it's a coincidence those are the shows showing the most skin.

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FLICK PICKS: John Wayne westerns

May 23, 2008 2:17 PM

JOHN WAYNE WESTERNS

Sunday night at midnight
through Monday night at midnight,
Encore Westerns

While other Memorial Day marathons spotlight John Wayne's war movies (They Were Expendable at 9:45 a.m. ET on TCM, The Longest Day at 8 p.m. ET on AMC), Encore Westerns celebrates not the military holiday but The Duke's birthday (May 26, 1907).

Its 24 hours of Wayne westerns reach from his early talkie cheapies to his 1950s John Ford masterpiece The Searchers [right]:

12 a.m. ET - Riders of Destiny (1933)
1 a.m. ET - The Lucky Texan (1934)
2 a.m. ET - West of the Divide (1934)
3 a.m. ET - Blue Steel (1934)
4 a.m. ET - Randy Rides Alone (1934)
5 a.m. ET - The Star Packer (1934)
5:50 a.m. ET - The Trail Beyond (1934)
6:50 a.m. ET - The Lawless Frontier (1934)
7:40 a.m. ET - 'Neath The Arizona Skies (1934)
8:35 a.m. ET - Texas Terror (1935)
9:30 a.m. ET - The Desert Trail (1935)
10:30 a.m. ET - The Dawn Rider (1935)
11:30 a.m. ET - Paradise Canyon (1935)
12:30 p.m. ET - Overland Stage Raiders (1938)
1:30 p.m. ET - Three Faces West (1940)
2:50 p.m. ET - In Old California (1942)
4:20 p.m. ET - Angel and the Badman (1947)
6:05 p.m. ET - Legend of the Lost (1957)
8 p.m. ET - The Searchers (1956)
10:10 p.m. ET - The Horse Soldiers (1959)

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FLICK PICKS: The first Oscar winner

May 23, 2008 9:22 AM

WINGS
Monday at 6 a.m., Turner Classic Movies

Wow. That's the way it still feels to watch Wings, even though it was made 80 years ago. The spectacular air combat and free-fall flight sequences retain their thrills, especially since we know they were filmed the old-fashioned way -- by people really performing dangerous stunts, without special effects or computer imaging.

Director Howard Hawks [correction: William Wellman -- see comment below -- DW] knew how to shoot this 1927 World War I saga because he'd been there himself, in the Army air corps. He clearly put all his oomph into the aerial sequences, which fly head and shoulders above the pedestrial love triangle/quadrangle that shifts from the United States to France as the war heats up.

Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Richard Arlen are the buddies with whom Clara Bow and Jobyna Ralston get entangled, while Gary Cooper has a key supporting role in this enduring classic -- recipient of the first best picture Academy Award, at the dawn of movie sound, making it the only silent feature to receive that honor.

Watch a vintage Wings trailer here.

(If you miss the Memorial Day showing, Wings repeats on TCM the night of July 27.)

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WEIRD & WILD: 'The PJs' on TV One

May 22, 2008 7:40 AM

THE PJs
Friday 11 p.m.-Saturday 11 p.m., TV One

The tube's all glitz and glamour now, from pretty surgeons to sleek "housewives" to top models and TV executives. So it's no wonder this foam-animated comedy set in the projects didn't exactly set the Nielsens on fire during its 1999-2001 run on Fox and The WB.

But The PJs has a lot to recommend it, including sharp scripts by producer Larry Wilmore (Bernie Mac), Steve Pepoon (Roseanne), Les Firestein (Wanda at Large) and Bill Freiberger (Drawn Together). The voices include Eddie Murphy (as projects superintendent Thurgood Stubbs) and Loretta Devine (as wife Muriel), in adventures finding humor and heart in everything from homelessness to "saving" the local porno theater.

You won't see that on The Office.

TV One airs all 43 of the series' episodes, in order, followed by some bonus repeats.

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SITE TO SEE: TVParty.com

May 21, 2008 7:09 AM

You can hear the bebop, smell the incense or feel the disco beat -- whatever tube era you'd like to revisit, you can immerse yourself at the video-and-memory-crammed site TVParty.com.

Primitive kiddie shows? Check. Perverse commercials? Double check. Goofy game shows? "Banned" programs? Big-time flops? Old-time wrestling? Strange celebrity deaths? Singalong jingles? Even local shows. You want it, you got it, with mind-boggling video streams, nostalgic photos, astute essays, and so much affection for the tube, it's practically suffocating.

So smother me, already, I'm a TVParty hound. I can burn hours on end wandering the site's backroads (they call 'em the TVParty Plus "archives"), which you can access for two months at a one-time charge of $5. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet -- you don't wanna go there all the time, but when you do, time to pork out! TVParty Plus offers an additional 50 hours of streaming memories and strangeness.

Not that there isn't plenty to gobble for free at the regular TVParty page, which has been delighting tubeheads like me for the past 14 years. Among the recent hallucinatory thrills:

Wade in and wallow!

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FLICK PICKS: Alfred Hitchcock and a Big Invisible Bunny

May 19, 2008 7:14 AM

JAMES STEWART FILMS
Tuesday 6 a.m.-Wednesday 7 a.m. ET, Turner Classic Movies

Don't panic. They're not together. The fearmongering director and the fantasy creature simply share James Stewart in common.

Tuesday would have been Stewart's 100th birthday -- if only I could celebrate by composing the kind of doggerel poems Stewart used to bring to The Tonight Show -- so TCM goes all out with an all-day all-night marathon.

Here's the lineup:
6 a.m. -- The Stratton Story (1949): Stewart plays the one-legged baseball pitcher, with June Allyson as his wife.
8 a.m. -- The Mortal Storm (1940): Stewart and Margaret Sullavan under Nazi terror.
9:45 a.m. -- The Shop Around the Corner (1940): Stewart and Sullavan again, as secret pen pals, under Ernst Lubitsch's sparkling direction.
11:30 a.m. -- The Philadelphia Story (1940): Jimmy was on a roll this year, costarring here with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in a breezy romance among the rich.
1:30 p.m. -- The Glenn Miller Story (1954): Another biopic, about the big band leader lost in a wartime airplane.
3:30 p.m. -- The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956): Stewart costars for Hitchcock with Doris Day.
5:45 p.m. -- Vertigo (1958): Jimmy's got it, and Kim Novak's got "it," in this spellbinding Hitchcock suspenser.
8 p.m. -- Rear Window (1954): Laid up with a broken leg, Stewart witnesses a murder across the way. Hitchcock masterpiece costars Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr.
10 p.m. -- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): John Ford's elegiac western with John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and that great Gene Pitney theme song.
12:15 p.m. -- Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Otto Preminger's courtroom tale.
3 a.m. -- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939): Frank Capra-corn at its finest, with clever cookie Jean Arthur shepherding Stewart's new hayseed senator through Washington's political cesspool.
5:15 a.m. -- Harvey (1950): Jimmy's a rich loon (or is he?) hanging out with the title character, a six-foot invisible rabbit.

Read more about Stewart and his movies at TCM's tribute page.

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Roku + Netflix = Instant Movies on your TV

Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.