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October 2009 Archives
FLICK PICKS: Halloween horrors!
October 29, 2009 8:28 PM
Fright flicks are all over the place Friday and Saturday, in places you'd expect (TCM, AMC) and places you wouldn't (like PBS stations). Choices run the gamut from classic Boris Karloff to blaxploitation's Blacula to Troma's Toxic Avenger.
Karloff kicks things off during the day Friday when Turner Classic Movies runs 11 of the scare star's films. And not the usual Frankenstein titles either. Starting at 6 a.m., TCM progresses chronologically through Karloff's career, from 1932 to 1945, including The Ghoul (Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET), The Man They Could Not Hang (12:30 p.m. ET) and the Val Lewton noir Isle of the Dead (6:45 p.m. ET, all Friday on TCM).
Lewton's dreamlike darkness reappears in Saturday's Halloween marathon -- the creepy producer portrait Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton, The Man in the Shadows (Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET), plus Lewton's original '40s Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People (5 and 6:30 p.m. ET, all on TCM).
AMC climaxes its annual FearFest of more recent chillers with some interesting choices. Monk comedy king Tony Shalhoub gets seriously spooked in 2001's Thir13en Ghosts (Friday at 6 p.m. and 1 a.m. ET, AMC), followed by the quintessential horror homage comedy, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 7:30 a.m. ET, AMC). There's more wit with Kristy Swanson in the pre-TV feature film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Friday night at 3 a.m., Saturday at 10 a.m. ET, AMC).
(Remember, AMC is also streaming horror B-flicks free online.)
Among the other fun tricks and smart treats:
Interview With the Vampire (Friday at 5:30 p.m. ET, Syfy), with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise embodying Anne Rice's bestseller.
Twelve Monkeys (Saturday at 9 a.m. ET, G4), Terry Gilliam's fantastical expansion of Chris Marker's classic short La Jette, starring Bruce Willis as a time traveler thrown into a nightmarish asylum with mental case Brad Pitt (in his Oscar-nominated performance).
Cape Fear (Saturday at 2:45 p.m. ET, Retro), 1962's original Robert Mitchum-Gregory Peck stalkfest.
The Silence of the Lambs (Saturday at 3 p.m. ET, BIO), the serial killer Oscar winner with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster.
Shaun of the Dead (Saturday at 3 p.m. ET, Comedy Central) and Scary Movie (Saturday at 7 p.m. ET, Comedy Central), making 21st century fun of it all.
Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream (Saturday at 4 and 6 p.m. ET, TV One), with William Marshall as a '70s blaxploitation Dracula.
The Toxic Avenger Part II (Saturday at 10 p.m. ET, G4), followed by two more crazy '80s Troma stews, The Toxic Avenger Part III (midnight) and Class of Nuke 'Em High (2 a.m. ET, all on G4).
And be sure to check your local stations, too. In New York, Elvira resurrects "Chiller Theater" to host the Hammer horror The Evil of Frankenstein (Saturday at 8 p.m. ET, WPIX/11). Even NYC public TV contributes George Romero's '60s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (Saturday at 9 p.m. ET, WNET/13), followed overnight by a feast of other vintage treats: '30s creep-outs The Vampire Bat and The Most Dangerous Game, Roger Corman's cheap chills Dementia 13 and The Terror, and more.
(The autumn time change comes at 2 a.m. Saturday night into Sunday morning, so be sure to recheck those overnight airtimes.)
GOOD SPORTS: Behind the mask
October 29, 2009 2:06 PM
The hockey fanatic in me can't let this one pass without promotion.
Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of hall-of-famer Jacques Plante donning the first true goalie mask in an NHL game. His shocking move established a standard that not only protects goaltenders today but delivers plenty of cool on-ice art.
The NHL hour special 50 Years Behind the Mask (Sunday at 7 p.m. ET, NHL Network) traces that history and explores the impact of this now taken-for-granted piece of gear. (The special also streams live at nhl.tv.)
A couple of NHL goalies remained unmasked when I started watching hockey as a '70s kid, but everyone pretty much assumed they were nuts. Hard to believe, but all NHL goalies had stopped pucks barefaced before Plante took a stand for safety. (The great Glenn Hall set the still-standing 502 consecutive games record without one.) Mask-wanters had been derided as cowards, yet no one could question all-star Plante's credentials, and soon other goalies followed his lead. And that changed how they played the game.
"To me, those [mask-less goalies] were the most courageous athletes ever," ex-goalie TV analyst Chico Resch told NHL.com, "more so than race car drivers or bull fighters because every night you had guys with those hooked sticks unleashing shots where they didn't know where it was going and neither did the goalies." Resch noted that in many old photos, non-masked goalies have their eyes closed while making saves. "That's why Glenn Hall threw up every night [before and during the game]. One mistake could cost you your career. The pressure was incredible."
Wearers of the early full-face masks (today supplanted by helmets with face cages) began to decorate them, most famously in Gerry Cheevers' stitch patterns for the '70s Boston Bruins. Now, goalies spend thousands on elaborate helmet paintings of cityscapes, fierce animals, personal heroes and trademarkable logos. Back then, Cheevers' trainer marked his puck stops with a Sharpie.
And then there's hockey-mask wearing Jason of the Friday the 13th movies. Even he makes his mark in the hockey mask package at nhl.com.
WATCH THIS: '24' preview
October 28, 2009 11:09 PM
In case you missed the 24 new season preview during Wednesday's first game of the World Series -- it premiered in the ninth inning of a blowout -- we've got the trailer here. It's our first tease for Fox' new season starting Jan. 17, with Kiefer Sutherland, of course, and returning cast members Cherry Jones (the president), Mary Lynn Rajskub (Chloe), Annie Wersching (Renee) and Elisha Cuthbert (Kim).
Also on board this season: Katee Sackhoff and Callum Keith Rennie (Battlestar Galactica), Benito Martinez (The Shield), Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire), Mykelti Williamson (Boomtown), Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jurgen Prochnow.
This season's setting is New York.
DVD DEAL: Hitchcock movies
October 28, 2009 11:13 AM
It's not a true TV DVD release, but these films are on the tube so often, it might as well be.
"Alfred Hitchcock - The Masterpiece Collection" is a jam-packed maroon velvet box of 14 suspensers with enlightening extras.
And Wednesday only, Amazon has it for less than half the $120 list price -- just $54 as the deal of the day.
Note that it doesn't ship till Nov. 1, so no Halloween chills here.
But Hitchcock flicks are fun anytime, and these are the best. Start with the '40s gems Saboteur, Rope and Hitch's fave, Shadow of a Doubt, where uncle Joseph Cotten puts the fright into a teen Teresa Wright.
Head into the '50s for acclaimed hits Rear Window and Vertigo.
Then it's '60s greats Psycho and The Birds, on to '70s finales Frenzy and Family Plot. And there's more.
While you can delve deeper into classics like Psycho and Vertigo in subsequent single-film Universal Legacy releases (feature-length making-ofs!), Amazon's Wednesday "Masterpiece Collection" price provides amazing bang for the buck.
COMING UP: Gervais hosts the Globes
October 26, 2009 4:13 PM
Are you having a laugh? You certainly should when Ricky Gervais hosts January's freewheeling Golden Globe Awards ceremony on NBC.
Nabbing the clever creator-star of The Office (UK) and Extras (HBO) is quite a coup for these also-ran awards of dubious merit. Their sponsoring Hollywood Foreign Press Association is famously a junket-loving group easily swayed by suckups. (Two words: Pia Zadora.)
On the other hand, they're also willing to step outside the box and honor fun/quirky/obscure movies and shows that the stuffier-than-thou Oscars and Emmys won't. Like Anna Paquin this year for True Blood.
And like Gervais, who copped the best TV comedy actor Globe in 2004 for The Office. Which we'd say gained the attention of Emmy voters, except it took them three more years to surprisingly name Gervais their 2007 best comedy actor for Extras.
OK, maybe not so surprising. Emmy votes love sentiment, and Extras, like The Office, had a strong undercurrent of poignancy in Gervais' schlemiel bit-part player.
Extras also hosted hordes of cameos from names like Patrick Stewart, David Bowie, Ben Stiller, Orlando Bloom and Kate Winslet, which should stand Gervais in good stead hosting the star-party Globes on Jan. 17.
DVD DEAL: All of 'Angel'
October 26, 2009 12:25 PM
Just in time for Halloween, Amazon's deal of the day for Monday is the entirety of Angel, all five seasons of David Boreanaz' vampire drama for just $53.
Pretty good price, considering the cube-boxed set is usually in the $120-$140 range.
It's an especially great buy for those who only discovered Boreanaz' charms in Bones and need to catch up on his earlier, um, activities, as a supernatural private eye. There's lots of action, passion and even fatherhood, plus visits from characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the series that Angel was spun out of.
IN MEMORIAM: Vic Mizzy, Soupy Sales
October 23, 2009 3:25 PM
They're sucking all the fun out of TV.
"They" would be the grim reapers of time and evolution. While the latter agent of change seems intent on making TV as grim and/or convoluted as possible (see Heroes, Lost, Flash Forward, even the quick-cut comedy of Modern Family), the former is taking away TV's fun makers on what seems like a daily basis.
First, we lost Vic Mizzy, the composer of such whimsical TV theme song classics as The Addams Family ("They're creepy and they're kooky") and Green Acres ("The chores! The stores!").
Now, it's Soupy Sales, the absurdist of '60s kids' TV, who gave us hip puppets and crazed characters, while getting plastered by pies, and who once cheekily asked his young fans to send in those "funny green pieces of paper" from their parents' wallets.
Mizzy died last Saturday at the age of 93. Sales left us Thursday at 83.
They leave behind a medium that's more extensive and diverse, yet somehow less joyful.
Today's TV gives us no theme songs to parrot and cherish through the years, first singing along with our parents, later with our own kids or grandkids. And the shows those children watch are now designed to sell either products or the Disney universe (an even more insidious product), staying on the air only so long as they serve their conglomerate charge of making money.
This isn't a bout of nostalgia on my part, either, not some baby boomer looking longingly back and elevating the shows of her childhood memory to the pantheon of TV classics. I'm just as happy to watch a newer creative explosion like '80s delight Pee-wee's Playhouse and current gem SpongeBob SquarePants. I can love a sharp single-camera comedy like the ambitious '90s take on race, class and character study that was the Fox cop lampoon Bakersfield, P.D. Even Heroes its first season was a weekly revel in superpowered delight.
But then Heroes got complicated and dark and incomprehensible if you missed a single moment, which it wasn't worth the trouble of catching up to. There just isn't much TV suffused with joie de vivre anymore. Everybody takes things so seeeeriously. Even comedy. That why even though The Big Bang Theory ain't great, viewers watch, because the characters are good-hearted folks who just wanna have fun.
So the passing of Mizzy and Sales is a signpost in the passing of a TV era, when shows were largely lighthearted and easy to digest, even the dramas; and pretty much the entirety of America tuned in.
You'd think the networks would get this, but they don't seem to. Cable does, however -- submitting tasty treats like Monk, The Closer, Warehouse 13, Army Wives and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Even Mad Men and Breaking Bad, for all their darkness, are invested in creating visceral relationships and conflict that's easy to follow and savor. Ditto something like The Shield, which managed to deliver adult social drama through full-bodied characters and action-packed pace, not morose density.
But enough of my soapbox speechifying. (Type-ifying?) At least we can continue to savor the work of TV's dying masters of fun, thanks to the modern miracle of DVD.
Catch Mizzy's animated music in the complete series of The Addams Family (he talks about his music in the extras!) and the first three seasons of Green Acres.
Sales' kid stuff has come out on DVD, too, though not in the high-quality presentations you'd want. Even the existing DVD sets are out of print and hard to find. (Plus, The Soupy Sales Collection: The Whole Gang Is Here features material from Sales' late '70s output, not nearly as wild, inventive or well-remembered as his earlier lunacy.) But you can always try Netflix and other rental options.
SCARY STUFF: Halloween film festivals
October 16, 2009 4:57 PM
It isn't just Monty Python hitting the air on IFC this Sunday. That's also the night the channel starts its Indie Screams festival as we head toward Halloween.
Tune in before Python's 9 p.m. ET start to catch Rob Zombie's insanely decadent 2005 splatterfest The Devil's Rejects (Sunday at 7:10 p.m. ET, repeating 2:30 a.m., IFC; photo at top). The serial-killing-family saga kicks off a nightly run of fright films starting 7-ish ET through Oct. 31. (Schedule here.)
We're partial to Tuesday's 1980 comedy creepfest Motel Hell (Tuesday at 7:15 p.m. ET, IFC), the answer to "Whatever happened to Rory Calhoun?" and "Where I can see Wolfman Jack?"
Another treat: next Saturday's Shadow of the Vampire (Oct. 24 at 8 p.m. ET, IFC), where it's hard to tell what's weirder: F.W. Murnau's silent spooker Nosferatu or its bizarre production, chronicled here with John Malkovich (as driven director Murnau) and Willem Dafoe (his vampire flick's method-acting star). See the trailers here and here.
AMC catches up to the action next Friday, starting its annual nonstop FearFest with Sigourney Weaver's 1980s hits Alien and Aliens (Oct. 23 at 8 and 10:30 p.m. ET, AMC).
Even better, AMC's web site boasts more than a dozen cheesy creature features you can stream anytime! The B-movie bounty includes Fiend Without a Face, The Horror of Party Beach, Karloff and Lee in Corridors of Blood, and 1971's Werewolves on Wheels, pitched by AMC as "the best movie ever about biker gangs, Satanism and lycanthropy." (Trailer here.)
Turner Classic Movies, meanwhile, is all over the map. Tuesday night's five-film salute to gimmick director William Castle, who once wired theater seats to literally shock audiences, starts with the frozen smile of 1961's Mr. Sardonicus (Oct. 20 at 8 p.m. ET, TCM). Then skip to next Friday's festival of gothic thrillers, led by a genuinely singular film, Charles Laughton's gorgeously expressionistic 1955 chiller The Night of the Hunter (Oct. 23 at 8 p.m. ET, TCM), starring Robert Mitchum as the tattooed hate/love preacher. 
On Oct. 25, it's meteor night with the '50s fright of The Blob. Psychic powers get the spotlight Oct. 27 with 1982's Poltergeist.
TCM gets serious on Oct. 30 with a Boris Karloff marathon of 11 titles, while Oct. 31's all-day scary stuff ranges from the 1932 Fredric March and 1941 Spencer Tracy versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to 1971's literately camp deco-fest The Abominable Dr. Phibes with Vincent Price. Full schedule here.
FLICK PICKS: Arnold vill be back!
October 16, 2009 3:27 PM
Arnold Schwarzenegger flexes. Arnold gets funny. Arnold terminates, runs, destroys and more Saturday in Encore's all day Ah-nuld festival.
Starting at 8:30 a.m. ET, Encore unreels nine different Schwarzenegger titles, ranging from 1984's action epics Conan the Destroyer and The Terminator to 1997's Batman & Robin, with funny business like Twins in between.
Encore even promises the California guv will "talk about his films" Saturday night.
Here's the Oct. 17 lineup:
- Conan the Destroyer (8:30 a.m. ET) - costarring Grace Jones, Wilt Chamberlain
- Red Sonja (10:15 a.m. ET) - Brigitte Nielsen, Sandahl Bergman
- Kindergarten Cop (11:50 a.m. ET) - Penelope Ann Miller, Pamela Reed
- The Last Action Hero (1:45 p.m. ET) - Austin O'Brien, Charles Dance
- Batman & Robin (4 p.m. ET) - George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell
- Twins (6:10 p.m. ET) - Danny De Vito, Kelly Preston
- Eraser (8 p.m. ET) - James Caan, Vanessa Williams
- The Running Man (10 p.m. ET) - Maria Conchita Alonso, Yaphet Kotto
- The Terminator (11:45 p.m. ET) - Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn
Catch Arnold's big movie catchphrases here.
WEIRD & WILD: Are you a 'Simpsons' character?
October 16, 2009 8:17 AM
Here's your chance to crash The Simpsons. But get cracking -- the deadline for The Simpsons Character Contest is this Saturday (Oct. 24).
The series' writers -- who declare they're "tired and, frankly, too rich to care anymore" -- are asking fans to submit character ideas. Dream up a great name, catchphrase and character description. (Fields to be filled out include: age; "sex, if any"; body type; "blood type, just in case.") You don't even have to draw.
Deadline is late Saturday, Oct. 24, at 11:59 p.m. ET.
The winner gets flown to Los Angeles to meet with artists, who'll insert the character into an episode currently planned for Fox airing Jan. 31 as part of the series' 20th anniversary celebration.
Enter here.
THE LATEST: Fox Reality becomes NatGeo Wild
October 14, 2009 9:01 PM
UPDATE Friday, Oct. 16 -- Turns out those crazy folks at Fox already had plans for their Fox Reality channel position before declaring the end of FRC this week. They quickly announced that NatGeo Wild will soon be airing animals in place of . . . well, that one is just too tempting, isn't it?
Fox cable and Washington-based NatGeo have run the original National Geographic Channel as a joint venture for a decade, but anybody watching NGC can tell which part of that partnership is firmly in control.
Thank god.
Full story can be read here.
ORIGINAL POST --
Aw, gee, gosh golly darn, and ----in' shocking! Fox Reality Channel will be no more. It will cease to exist when it expires March 31. It's a stiff.
And pretty much was from its May 2005 debut on cable, recyling shows nobody wants to see a second time. Once you know who backstabbed whom originally, and who best betrayed other competitors while trampling to the title, what's the point in a replay?
Here's the news, fresh from our friend Joe Adalian at newsy Hollywood site TheWrap.com.
Oh, dear! Where will Househusbands of Hollywood go now?
At least the channel taped its annual reality-show Really Awards on Tuesday before dropping the boom. Watch 'em Saturday at 10 p.m. ET on Fox Reality.
While you can.
WEIRD & WILD: Duct tape does it all!
October 13, 2009 8:06 PM
Because you can just never learn enough about duct tape, here's a new hour of Mythbusters (Wednesday at 9 p.m. and midnight ET, Discovery) in which Adam and Jamie somehow manage to keep their giddy tests of this beloved product down to the show's usual hour length.
See them use duct tape to lift a 5,000-pound car, build a black-powder cannon, and repair a boat.
(The Army originally invented duct tape to seal ammo casings watertight. And the sponsor of the Discovery site's video clips is -- wait for it -- Pampers.)
Complete with vintage commercials!
Will this fun never stop?!
(Discovery repeats the MythBusters duct tape hour Oct. 21 at 8 and 11 p.m. ET.)
ON DVD: 'MTM' Season 5 finally makes it, after all
October 13, 2009 6:53 PM
How long have we been waiting for Season 5 of The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Well, the Season 4 DVD set came out in June 2006, so it was more than a three-year wait for Season 5 to hit shelves Oct. 6.
Which seems par for the course, since Fox Home Entertainment let nearly three years elapse between the DVD release of Season 1 in September 2002 and the arrival of Season 2 in July 2005.
(To be fair, we did get Seasons 2-3-4 in fairly short order: July '05, Jan. '06, June '06.)
Many MTM devotees are now elated. Others are angry. Yes, Fox can't win for losing. After agitating online to get more seasons coming, some of those same fans are incensed by Season 5's packaging. Its three discs come in a standard single-disc case with one of those center flipover inserts holding a disc on each side. Previous seasons came in the once-familiar (but now-disappearing) fold-out package. Loathers think the new plastic case seems cheap. Personally, as a multi-season collector, I'm thrilled its thinner profile takes up less shelf space, and it actually feels sturdier to me.
They're right about one thing, though -- the set's documentation leaves a lot to be desired. There isn't even an episode list, much less an episode guide, so good luck finding the show you want. (Try visiting tv.com and printing out the episode guide.)
Plus, the back of the case lists the wrong members of the cast. Valerie Harper is included, though she isn't in this season's episodes. (She was doing Rhoda then.) Newer regulars Betty White and Georgia Engel aren't listed, though they do appear. They're even in the cast photo right above the list!
I'll take it anyway, just happy to move my MTM collection toward completion. (Two more seasons remain unreleased -- Season 6 with "Chuckles Bites the Dust" and Season 7 with that clever series finale.) Sales of early seasons were not what Fox would have liked to see, perhaps because the show was rerun to death for so long that only the most fanatical viewers were willing to shell out for discs. (Early seasons were also priced a bit high, with Season 1 in the $50 list price range, while Season 5 arrives at $30. Amazon's discount brings that down to $25, as of Oct. 13.)
That explains those years-long lags in the release pattern, which seems to resume only when fans have worked themselves up into a lather.
A more efficient way to get the other MTM seasons released on DVD would be for sales to pick up -- and fan anger doesn't help promote that. As our friends at the definitive TV Shows on DVD site often remind, $$$ are the best way to impress studio distributors with your desires. I know that seems counterproductive when release specifics aren't to your liking. But sometimes -- especially with studios' older and lower-selling "library" titles -- it's either a semi-okay set or nothing at all.
Or another three-year wait.
DISC DEAL: 'BBC Earth' on Blu-ray
October 12, 2009 1:56 PM
Monday's Amazon deal of the day is gorgeous. It's the Blu-ray set of The BBC Earth Collection, including both Planet Earth and Earth: A Biography -- with the former production coming from premier natural history presenter David Attenborough (The Blue Planet, The Life of Birds).
List price for the 6-disc Blu-ray set is $130, but Monday only it's $53.
Even on DVD, the two together would cost $64 from Amazon.
This is the original Planet Earth as narrated by Attenborough, not the Discovery Channel version with Sigourney Weaver. And nobody can top Attenborough's delivery.
Info/order here.
FLICK PICKS: Muni-ficent history
October 9, 2009 12:13 PM
While the Warner Bros. studio was making a mint making gritty gangster pix in their 1930s heyday, they were also making "prestige" pictures with one chameleonic actor.
Paul Muni starred as a Mexican rebel leader and a French scientist, among other assignments that Cagney and Bogart would have killed for, if they weren't too busy killing other dirty little rats in Tommy-gun shootouts. Turner Classic Movies turns to Muni this Saturday night, starting with the movie for which he's most famous -- the more everyman crusade film I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Saturday at 8 p.m. ET, TCM).
I Am a Fugitive gets TCM's "Essentials" treatment because it's a riveting social commentary, circa 1932, on the unfortunate fate of too many World War veterans, "forgotten men," whose adjustment to home life in the jazz-age/pre-Depression '20s did not go so swimmingly. Warners would tackle this topic time and again (The Roaring Twenties, for one, with both Cagney and Bogart; Hollywood in this era had a much more clear-eyed view than post-WWII), but rarely assessed it with such brutal force as in Muni's pre-Code delivery into the ranks of the title prison hell. Fugitive has one of the movies' most famously haunting endings, and it's not to be missed.
Muni's historical "performances" feel less visceral, perhaps, because of all those expectations and all that makeup, pomp and circumstance. Juarez (Saturday at 10 p.m. ET, TCM) is a strange take on Mexico's battle against Napoleon that spends far more time with foreign interlopers Brian Aherne, Claude Rains and simpering princess Bette Davis (somebody sock this woman!) than with Muni's nearly mute local hero. The actor won the Oscar for 1935's 
The Story of Louis Pasteur (Saturday late-night at 1:30 a.m. ET, TCM), biopic of the 19th century sterilization scientist. This one showcases Muni-the-emoter, whose intensity studio-era Hollywood adored.
He's also a "crime doctor" in the '30s rackets tale Dr. Socrates (Saturday late-night at 12;15 a.m. ET, TCM), but then we get a later title that lets Muni simply be an actor becoming a character. His final film, 1959's The Last Angry Man (Saturday late-night 3 a.m. ET, TCM), casts him as an elderly Jewish doctor in Brooklyn whose good works get him attention from the kind of cynical media manipulators on whom the late '50s fixated (A Face in the Crowd, What Makes Sammy Run?, et al).
By this time, theater-trained Muni had returned to the New York stage (he'd actually started out in Yiddish theater), and won a Tony for the original staging of Inherit the Wind. But he's still best known as Warner Bros.' go-to "prestige" star. Find out why.
(By the way, Muni wasn't above gangstering. He's got more than one screw loose in Howard Hawks' original 1932 Scarface, another pre-Code demento-fest.)
TALK TALK: Streisand and nothing but
October 9, 2009 11:32 AM
Barbra's back and Jonathan's got her. Streisand does a whole hour on tonight's Friday Night With Jonathan Ross (9 p.m. ET, BBC America), another of the Beeb's fun chatfests with clever hosts.
"Friday Night With Streisand and Ross" has the star discussing everyone from Elvis to De Niro to hubby James Brolin. She also teases an autobio ("You never know the truth until you write it yourself") and trashes the press (quel surprise). She even sings.
If that's not enough Brit-talk for you, there's the season premiere of the reliable Graham Norton Show (Saturday at 10 p.m. ET, BBC America), this week cramming in Ricky Gervais, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, and Olivia Newton-John.
WEIRD & WILD: 'South Park' vs. celebs
October 7, 2009 12:01 PM
[UPDATE BELOW]
The boys are back in town.
South Park returns with new episodes Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.
Tonight's Season 13 entry may be hitting two trendy birds with one stone. Titled "Dead Celebrities," it also involves ghost hunters, another current reality TV obsession.
Seems poltergeists are tormenting Ike, Kyle's (Canadian) younger brother. Who ya gonna call?
(Might be a real thriller. Check out the location in that photo!)
-----
UPDATE:
Wanna be on South Park? Here's your chance.
Here's Comedy Central's press release:
SOUTH PARK ANNOUNCES FIRST-EVER"BECOME A SOUTH PARK CITIZEN" WATCH AND WIN SWEEPSTAKES!
A lucky South Park fan will be animated and included in the full cast shot seen in the open of the 14th season premiere in March 2010.
The "Become A South Park Citizen" watch and win sweepstakes kicks-off tonight, Wednesday, October 7 at 10:00 p.m. in an all-new episode of South Park titled "Dead Celebrities." Throughout this new season, viewers can tune-in each week to the broadcast airing of the new fall season episodes to locate the hidden alien in each show and then enter online at SouthParkStudios.com for a chance to win.
The alien can only be seen in the broadcast version, not the version on SouthParkStudios.com.
Each week viewers can earn one entry toward the Grand Prize by identifying the alien at SouthParkStudios.com.
All online entries must contain the location of the hidden alien and be entered only at SouthParkStudios.com before 9:00 p.m. EST on Thursdays.
Each entry will also make them eligible for great weekly South Park prizes.
The Grand Prize winner will have their likeness animated as a South Park character, by the artists at South Park studios. The winner's character will be unveiled in the premiere episode of season 14 in March 2010. The Grand Prize winner will also receive a framed poster of their character with the South Park cast, signed by the show's co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the entire South Park DVD collection, a free download of South Park's new Xbox game and more.
DVD DEALS: 'Gilmore Girls'
October 7, 2009 11:37 AM
Bring home Lorelai and Rory in a puffy plastic retro-Barbie case, at a bargain price.
Gilmore Girls: The Complete Series Collection is Amazon's deal of the day for Thursday at $110, nearly two-thirds off the list price.
That's for all seven seasons, 153 episodes on 42 discs, including commentaries, featurettes, a booklet of Gilmore-isms from those chatty chicks, and more.
Taking another look at Gilmore Girls only reaffirms the ways in which this tube treat, along with Ally McBeal, redefined TV comedy into the sort of hour-format hybrid now personified by Monk. And it makes us yearn for more of the literate wit delivered not just by star pair Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, but also Kelly Bishop, Edward Herrmann and the other buoyant actors.
WB, where hast thou spirit gone? Gilmore, Buffy, Dawson -- sigh. Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill just don't cut it.
GOOD SPORTS: Filmmakers dive deeper on ESPN
October 6, 2009 12:46 PM
Think "sports documentaries," and you think of elegiac baseball histories or NFL Films mythologizing that game into a patriotic religion.
Certainly ESPN hasn't done much to change this perspective, but maybe that's changing. Tonight's documentary film Kings Ransom (Oct. 6 at 8 p.m. ET, ESPN) kicks off a Tuesday night series called 30 for 30, in which diverse directors examine wider-ranging stories that developed in sports throughout ESPN's 30-year history.
Peter Berg of Friday Night Lights is first up. Devoted to hockey, he chose to delve into the momentous Wayne Gretzky trade, sending the sport's all-time king in 1988 from Canada's four-time Stanley Cup champion Edmonton Oilers to a middling team called the Kings in a hockey afterthought called Los Angeles. The trade broke Canada's heart and broke up what might have been a historic dynasty.
In Kings Ransom, Berg chats up Gretzky on the golf course -- that second home for hockey players who get the summer off -- and talks to the owners involved in the deal and to Gretzky's "Yoko-ized" actress wife Janet Jones. Berg also captures that moment in time when hockey was Hollywood cool. (Talk about elegiac.)
Next week's film, The Band That Wouldn't Die (Oct. 13 at 8 p.m. ET, ESPN), comes from that great Baltimore partisan, Barry Levinson (Homicide, Diner). He charts that city's love affair with its Colts, and their own '80s heartbreak, when the football team packed its gear into moving vans and left town in the middle of the night for Indianapolis.
In Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? (Oct. 20 at 8 p.m. ET, ESPN), producer Mike Tollin (The Bronx Is Burning) revisits how he broke into Hollywood, shooting games for the upstart football league that challenged the NFL in the early '80s. Tollin finds "a sports story, a business story, a human interest story . . . a great piece of Americana." And he handily had lots of footage available to mine.
So did cinema verite legend Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens), who'd spent two months shooting training footage before Muhammad Ali's 1980 fight with Larry Holmes. Muhammad and Larry (Oct. 27 at 8 p.m. ET, ESPN) finally presents that footage nearly 30 years after the simultaneously tragic and triumphant bout.
Subsequent 30 for 30 film subjects (and their directors) include the cocaine death of basketball's Len Bias (Kirk Fraser), NBA superstar Michael Jordan's attempt to switch to baseball (Ron Shelton), NFL legend O.J. Simpson's "slow speed chase" (Brett Morgen), sprinter Marion Jones' downfall (John Singleton), and even the BMX circuit (Jeff Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville, Spike Jonze).
In other words, these aren't the usual glossy sports stories. They broaden beyond the competition to examine fans' ties to teams, the business of leagues, and the players' emotional landscapes. And the sociological impact of all of it. ESPN's 30 for 30 also offers 30 different viewpoints on both sports and filmmaking, and that alone provides reason to celebrate its presentation.
Let's hope it doesn't take ESPN another 30 years to take such a richly idiosyncratic look back.
Or to take a more clear-eyed look at history in the making -- as it happens.
THE BIG DAY: No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
October 5, 2009 11:21 AM
And no one expects Monty Python's Flying Circus to be 40 years old.
But Britain's seminal silly surreality first hit the air that long ago today, with all its dead parrots and fish-slapping dances. Wait two more weeks, and IFC commemmorates the event -- doesn't a grand two-weeks-late celebration seem appropriately Python-esque? -- by showing a new six-part history of the comedy troupe that treads familiar ground yet feels fresh at the same time.
I've been previewing the entirety of Monty Python: Almost the Truth - The Lawyer's Cut (Oct. 18-23 at 9 p.m. ET on IFC; out on DVD Oct. 27), and it's a wealth of fun info, even for those of us who've already memorized The Life of Python, Parrot Sketch Not Included: Twenty Years of Monty Python, and various other bio-profile-reunions.
Creative collaborators Michael Palin, Terry Jones, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam do separate interviews to talk one more time (as does the late Graham Chapman, via archive film), illuminating how all the absurdity came together. And we get a fine sense of whence it sprung, learning about their childhoods and educations.
(People forget how smart these Oxbridge boys are, and how that depth and width of knowledge fueled their comic topics. You gotta love that philosophers drinking song: "Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable...")
We also see the sketches, of course -- at least some of them, in flashes and snippets -- from those 45 golden half-hours of Monty Python's Flying Circus that hit the BBC starting Oct. 5, 1969. But Almost the Truth delves even more deeply into the movies they made next, with nearly an hour each devoted to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, nicely illuminating the movies' ambition. (Religion-aimed Brian, especially.)
IFC will unreel Python movies, too -- both Grail (Oct. 19 at 10 ET) and Brian (Oct. 20 at 10 EY) -- along with episodes of Flying Circus (11:30-ish ET nightly) and other goodies like 1982's Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Oct. 18 at 10 ET).
You'll be laughing uncontrollably.
Preview Almost the Truth here.
Or recall the lunatic original:
FLICK PICKS: Lon Chaney's gonna get you if you don't watch out
October 4, 2009 6:40 PM
He's been dead for 80 years, but he's still a singular star. Lon Chaney again takes the spotlight for Turner Classic Movies this October, being Hollywood's creepiest continuing presence.
Chaney headlines TCM's Silent Sunday Night showcase, Sunday nights at midnight ET, starting with 1926's atypical Tell It to The Marines (late Oct. 4 at midnight ET, TCM), in which he plays a tough drill sergeant (like there's any other kind). But the movies' immortal Man of a Thousand Faces -- title of the '50s biopic starring James Cagney -- gets spooky soon enough.
Next weekend's double feature of The Unknown and The Unholy Three illustrates why Chaney remains famous decades after his demise. In fact, 1927's The Unknown (late Oct. 11 at midnight ET, TCM) gets seriously sick, casting contortion/makeup master Chaney as a circus performer who pretends to be an "armless wonder" who does dextrous things with his feet. [See photo at top.] A very young Joan Crawford likes that, having been abused by men's arms, and the two become close enough that a lovesick Chaney takes drastic measures to assure her affections. You can see where this is going, and since the director is reliably perverse frequent-collaborator Tod Browning (Freaks), The Unknown absolutely arrives there.
It's followed by Browning's 1925 silent original of The Unholy Three (late-night Oct. 11 at 1 a.m. ET, TCM), which Chaney would remake five years later as his only sound film before his tragic 1930 cancer death at the age of 47. Again in the sideshow, he's a ventriloquist who masterminds a crime trio including a strongman (Victor McLaglen) and a midget (Harry Earles, the largely unintelligible motormouth who returns in the sound version and Freaks). The sound remake may be more effective -- you can hear the ventriloquist, and the story's denoument hinges on sound -- but anything pairing Chaney and Browning becomes must-see.
Then TCM turns to The Phantom of the Opera (late Oct. 18 at midnight ET, TCM), which spotlights Chaney's makeup mastery. (It's that chameleon effect to which this column's headline refers: When 
MGM showcased all its silent stars in the early sound feature Hollywood Revue of 1929, Chaney never actually appeared, instead inspiring vaudevillian Gus Edwards' eerie musical number Lon Chaney's Gonna Get You If You Don't Watch Out.) Chaney's visual definition of the character remains archetypal, even if everything else in this Phantom exemplifies the overwrought styles so often associated with silent film.
But silent movie nuts like me know the best soundless films are actually more primal and expressive. And The Unknown certainly illustrates that.
So does the final week's non-Chaney silent spooker -- Nosferatu (late-night Oct. 25 at 12:30 a.m. ET, TCM), the influential 1922 vampire flick from Germany's F.W. Murnau (Sunrise). Its making would be dramatized in 2000's comedy creepfest Shadow of the Vampire, pitting Willem Dafoe as vampire star Max Schreck ("the original method actor," winks TCM's essay) against John Malkovich as his driven director.
TCM's actual Halloween festival at the end of the month devotes itself entirely to sound films. Including some effective ones -- Cat People, Psycho, Mad Love. But I'll always head first for the silents, those dreamlike creations that so effectively pull you deep inside the evocative worlds they conjure.
