TiVoPlex

By John Seal

March 16-22, 2004

Jim Carrey might have forgotten you but I find you hot!

From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times PST.

Tuesday 03/16/04

3:35am More Max
No Down Payment (1957 USA): This edgy soap about life in suburban Southern California features a superb cast and is blessed with an excellent screenplay by blacklisted Ben Maddow, here fronted by his loyal friend Philip Yordan. Starring Joanne Woodward and Cameron Mitchell as a happy couple living in one of the increasingly ubiquitous tract-housing estates then gobbling up orange orchards across the Southland, the film records the travails of their new neighbors (Jeffery Hunter and Patricia Owens) as they try to adapt to life in Paradise. Of course, things aren’t as perfect as they seem, and the bloom soon comes off the utopian suburban rose. Also featuring Tony Randall in one of his finest performances, No Down Payment (the second effort by director Martin Ritt) was one of the first films to explore the hard facts about life behind the Kiss the Chef curtain. More Max is unfortunately airing a pan-and-scan print, but until such time as Fox Movie Channel exhumes a wide-screen print from their vaults, it’s better than nothing. Or even a poke in the eye with a sharp barbecue utensil.

7am IFC
Onibaba (1964 JAP): I recommended this film last week, but having now seen it again for the first time in ages, I’m even more prone to ply it with praise. Set in a Japan infrequently seen on screen - the world inhabited by peasants instead of that inhabited by warlords and their samurai servants - Onibaba is easily one of the most stunning films you’ll ever see, shot by Kiyomi Kuroda in sharply-defined wide-screen black-and-white that puts it on par with such visual delights as Night of the Hunter (1955 USA), Woman in the Dunes (1964 JAP), and Juliet of the Spirits (1965 ITA). Not only does the film look astonishing, it also tells a riveting story of two peasant women who survive by scavenging the corpses of dead or dying warriors who have lost their way in an overgrown forest of reeds. There’s an incredibly daring erotic subplot that - surprisingly for a Japanese film of any period - includes full frontal female nudity, and a terrifying and disturbing denouement that will leave you with plenty of food for thought. Hikaru Hayashi’s remarkable score blends traditional Japanese music with modern jazz and sounds like a cross between Takemitsu and Morricone, who surely must have taken some inspiration from it when preparing his soundtracks for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. This is absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in world cinema or the horror genre, and strongly recommended for everyone else. Don’t miss it.

Wednesday 03/17/04

11:30am IFC
The Last Broadcast (1998 USA): Widely considered to be the film that inspired the production of the following year’s Blair Witch Project, The Last Broadcast holds up as the better of the two films now that the brouhaha surrounding Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s surprise box office blockbuster has long since dissipated (In retrospect, 2000’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is also a better film, but that’s the subject for a different rant). The mystery surrounding the disappearance of two TV producers investigating the mythical Jersey Devil monster is unraveled when their lost footage is recovered by a local filmmaker…is this all starting to sound a bit familiar? Unlike Blair Witch, however, The Last Broadcast has an unambiguous and vaguely realistic ending, albeit one that will not leave all viewers satisfied. For a very low-budget indie production, however, this is a reasonably competent and certainly watchable concoction that offers a few spooky chills and manages to hold your attention. Also airs 3/18 at 9am.

8pm Turner Classic Movies
Pay Day (1922 USA): Appearing amidst this evening’s block of Charlie Chaplin features - all of which have been aired before on TCM - comes another of the First National two-reelers Chaplin completed in 1921-2 in order to fulfill his contractual requirements and move on to independent production. This time, Charlie is a bricklayer whose termagant of a wife (Phyllis Allen) won’t let him go out for a night with the boys after a hard day’s work on the building site. A bit more reliant on sight gags and broad humor than the previous year’s The Idle Class, which TCM aired a week ago, Pay Day was the last of the Little Tramp’s many shorts before he embarked on feature-length filmmaking. Also featuring regulars Mack Swain and Edna Purviance, it’s a fine coda to Chaplin’s two-reeler career.

Thursday 03/18/04

5am IFC
Fighter (2000 USA): As regular readers know, I’ve been burned before by films with similar or identical titles that turned out to be completely different from what I thought was being aired (and in some cases, what certain channels online schedules indicate was being aired). I’m thinking and hoping that this is the excellent and mildly provocative documentary about two Holocaust survivors who return to their homeland in the Czech Republic after years spent in the United States and Britain. One of the men was interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and both lost family and friends there, but the return trip opens new fissures in their relationship, as differing interpretations of wartime events start to divide the reunited comrades. By the end of the film, the two men are no longer on speaking terms, and the far-away war that divided them in the 1940s no longer seems such a distant event. It’s a Holocaust documentary with a bittersweet difference, but if IFC actually ends up showing Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Street Fighter instead, please accept my apologies in advance, and don’t blame me, because I voted for Kodos. Also airs at 11am.

Friday 03/19/04

5:30am Turner Classic Movies
Money and the Woman (1940 USA): This nifty Warner’s B flick is based on the great James Cain’s short story The Embezzler. For those not familiar with Cain, he wrote a handful of the finest intrigue novels of the 20th century, including Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as the incomparable tearjerker Mildred Pierce. Cain’s gift was an ability to harness a fluid and intelligent writing style to the conventions of the series noir, and within the bounds of that (admittedly broad) genre, he’s second to none. Perhaps the only other authors to possess similar skills were Graham Greene and the wildly uneven Cornell Woolrich, whose stories veered from sublime brilliance to cockamamie absurdity from novel to novel. Of course, none of that speaks to the relative merits of this film, which Cain briefly worked on before handing the baton to Robert Presnell, who ended up with the screen credit. Presnell, of course, was no slouch himself, being responsible for some very fine Warner’s scripts of the early ‘30s. The result here is a well above-average bill-filler about a bank teller taken in by a scheming co-worker and his unsuspecting wife in a brilliant but ultimately flawed effort to defraud his employers. Starring Jeffrey Lynn, Brenda Marshall, and John Litel, Money and the Woman is low-budget, assembly-line picture-making at its best.

11:00 Turner Classic Movies
Family Diary (1962 ITA): A few weeks ago, TCM aired Marcello Mastroianni’s Divorce Italian Style. From the same year as that Academy Award-winning film came this starkly different and long-forgotten drama about two brothers (Mastroianni and Jacques Perrin) separated at an early age and reunited years later as very different adults, one now from a privileged background and the other still true to his hardscrabble roots. Divided by the years, by class, and by politics, the two engage in the sort of existential continental navel-gazing guaranteed to turn off most American viewers, but Family Diary is a quintessential ‘60s Euro art film, with themes cheekily echoed in 1991’s Belgian-made Toto the Hero. It’s miles away from the sexy excesses of Divorce, slowly paced, and beautifully shot in color by the great cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (Satyricon, Candy, Rocco and His Brothers). Unseen for years on American TV and only fitfully available on the home video market, this is well worth a look for those who like subtitles with their films.

Saturday 03/20/04

6am Sundance
Enigma (2000 GB): How bad can it be? I missed this World War II spy story during its brief theatrical run, and the film garnered lukewarm reviews at best. Its tale of code breaking and love amidst the ruins of Blitz-period Britain didn’t make much of an impression on American cinemagoers and the story struck many critics as old-fashioned and plodding. But let’s review the ingredients: screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Music by John Barry. Direction by Michael Apted. Acting by the attractive and reasonably-talented Saffron Burrows, Kate Winslet, and the always-wonderful Jeremy Northam. Enigma appeared at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival - hence its appearance tonight on the channel of the same name - but was really a big-budget film in indie clothing, achieving moderate success in British cinemas, where a dollop of World War II nostalgia still stirs the blood and pries open the pocketbooks of OAPs. If you’re going to bother to see it at all, you may as well see it tonight, when Sundance airs it in its correct wide-screen aspect ratio.

5pm Trio
The Iceman Cometh (1973 USA): Trio’s package of American Film Theater productions continues with this excellent, if extremely lengthy, adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s 1946 play about a bar full of alkies whose final hopes and dreams are snuffed out one evening upon the arrival of realist and naysayer Lee Marvin. Amongst the old timers are Fredric March in his last film appearance and Robert Ryan, whose haunting, death-obsessed performance anticipated the actor’s real-life demise shortly after production wrapped. Directed by an uncharacteristically sedate John Frankenheimer, this will try many viewers patience - especially with the inclusion of commercial interruptions - but is worth a look for theater fans and art-house mavens. If for no other reasons, tune in to see Ryan’s last great performance and Marvin’s remarkable final act soliloquy. Caveat: this appears to be the truncated three-hour redaction that played briefly on cable in the late ‘90s, but not having seen it, I’m not sure what’s been excised from the full-length version. The film re-airs at 8:30pm, immediately after this showing, and 3/21 at 5am.

Sunday 03/21/04

5am Encore Mystery
Drive a Crooked Road (1954 USA): This oddly-affecting pseudo-noir stars Mickey Rooney as a mechanic whose love for bad girl Diane Foster gets him in a whole heap of trouble with bank robbers Kevin McCarthy and Jack Kelly. This is one of Rooney’s best efforts - right up there with the similarly-themed The Strip (1951 USA) - and is also a showcase for McCarthy, whose onscreen persona is now defined by his role as the good-guy doctor in 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (look for his character’s reappearance in black-and-white in last year’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action, recently released on DVD). Written by wheelchair enthusiast Blake Edwards and directed by Richard Quine, Drive a Crooked Road is an overlooked Columbia melodrama that deserves a better fate.

9pm Turner Classic Movies
Mare Nostrum (1926 USA): This film’s unwieldy title shouldn’t keep you away from it, especially if silent cinema is your bag. Directed by the great Rex Ingram (Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), Mare Nostrum stars Mrs. Ingram (Alice Terry) as a World War I Austrian spy who snares sea captain Antonio Moreno in her web of Axis deceit. Filmed on location in Italy and the south of France, this is one of the last big-budget silent hits, and while the story now seems predictable and conventional, the film still looks great thanks to John Seitz’s photography and some impressive miniature work. It’s unavailable on video or DVD, so this will probably be your only chance to see this film for the next year or two at least.

Monday 03/22/04

10:45am IFC
Home Movie (2001 USA): A documentary about five unusual houses (and their equally odd occupants), Home Movie seems like a fitting way to end a TiVoPlex week that began with a film about the suffocating sameness of suburbia. Exploring such living quarters as a missile silo, a tree house, and a (literal) cathouse, amongst others, Home Movie is an inspiring tribute to individualism and, well, obsessive-compulsive behavior. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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