tcm alert thread (Jun '23 - tcm alert: dead)

Erk---Brewster McCloud about 15 min in

Just watched the beginning of Pushover (1954), Kim Novak’s screen debut. After a wan, pre-credits bank robbery, the movie kicks into gear with a late-night scene in which Novak is picked up by a stranger (Fred MacMurray) after a movie… they go to a bar, then his apartment. The chemistry in this entire scene (and Novak herself) are—pardon me—hot fuckin stuff!!

Watched the rest of that movie; it was pretty good (though cheap-looking as hell). MacMurray plays a cop who goes crooked and totally screws up his own scheme. (Don’t worry, that’s not much of a spoiler.)

Stone cold Nightmare Allley tonight @11:05 Central, after a parade of Powers as clean-cut action heroes.

TCM to launch onlyfans page. https://t.co/LOALv96Esd

— Bill Chambers (@flmfrkcentral) August 26, 2021

Looks like it was a new logo?: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_identity_and_on_air_look_for_tcm_by_sibling_rivalry.php

https://memegenerator.net/img/images/400x/73118120.jpg

Oh god that T and M are in different universes

2020’s: death to serifs

ugh, it was much better before

when i write my memoirs it will be called FIRST THEY TOOK OUR SERIFS

Lol, yeah. Ugh, yeah.

Old one was kind of Art Deco or something

Watched a little tonite… I think the new on-air graphics actually look pretty good, it’s a nice refresh. But yeah, the logo in isolation is hard to digest.

The Big Sleep started a little earlier than I thought, not too far back, not like the plot matters that way---next: Out of the Past, Mildred Pierce, Stagecoach, North By Northwest, The Heiress, Body and Soul, and The Bride Wore Red, the only one I haven't seen.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021, 10:30pm (EST): The TCM premiere of Three Women (Lubitsch, 1924).

Kino is releasing this on Blu-ray in January 2022--hope "The Ernst Lubitsch Collection" means more titles in this vein. (So This Is Paris? Forbidden Paradise? Even an upgrade of the Lubitsch in Berlin box set would be welcome.)

TCM's NFR 2021 programming on Friday, December 17:

08:00 PM(EST) Sounder (1972)
10:00 PM Chicana (1979)
10:30 PM Strangers on a Train (1951)
12:30 AM The Watermelon Woman (1995)
02:15 AM What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
04:45 AM The Méliès Mystery (2021)

Classic Newport doc Jazz On A Summer's Day about to start, followed by How They Got Over(2017), about the great gospel groups, then The Wiz.

One nice thing about JustWatch is they tell you when something is on TCM.

Anyway, starting to up my game with respect to using the on demand feature. Do other people make extensive use of this? One thing I started as of this month is to go to the monthly calendar on the website and search for actors and directors I am currently extra-interested in.

TCM going viral this weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwYcwB_deG8

Heard about but didn't watch yet.

xps Love the VOD feature of TCM. Their Roku/Fire Stick box app is spartan, but it works. That said i'm always distracted by a million other things and use it maybe once or twice a year, but it's definitely super great.

I tried to watch the Dick Tracy interview from 10 years ago, couldn't make it past like 10 minutes. Can't imagine how bad a newer, Zoom version would be

I have had kind of an unfortunate mini-obssession with that guy's love life, feel that was his real art, his film's were just something to pay the bills.

Films. Damn these eyes!

TCM's app consistently logs me out about once every three days. Other than that, great stuff

Anyway, starting to up my game with respect to using the on demand feature. Do other people make extensive use of this?

― The Windows of the URL (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, February 12, 2023 12:03 PM

Yeah, I use the FireTV app two or three times a week. Everything has its own end date, though, so if you add a couple films to your watchlist one might expire in a month and the other in five days, so when you come back it's a mystery what might still be there waiting.

Sorry for the random q: I’ve been wanting to see Kiss Me Deadly (1955), but the only expeditious way to watch it seems to be purchasing the Criterion BD for ~$27 (…even library doesn’t have it). Is it worth it?

Oh hell yes, most definitely

Thx – ordered

personally, i love it. it's pretty crazy for... so many reasons.

it's a masterpiece.

Psyched to see it! Don't know how it's slipped thru the cracks for me all these years...

Hard to think of a pulp noir with a better opening ... or ending

our hack for TCM is to blindly record things and rewatch at our leisure. a lotta good/weird stuff we wouldn't consider at 9PM is great on a rainy saturday at 2PM

TCM often runs their coolest/grindhouse/genre shit like at 2 am on a Saturday night or something

I tried taping those TCM Underground showings for a little while, but couldn’t really get into watching them later. I’m sure I’ll cycle back around to making time for that kind of thing…

Well, Kiss Me Deadly was pretty crazy indeed. Something about it feels not totally "right," as you watch it... like it has this kind of grim, relentless momentum, without any "comfortable" scene (or "relatable" character) to ground you. The acting isn't terrific, in a conventional sense (Cloris Leachman probably best) – and a lot of what happens doesn't quite make sense or fit together - but all this (slight) artificiality somehow adds to the overall uncanny atmosphere.

I can see how these elements may have seeped into David Lynch's work (it was the Wikipedia page for Lost Highway that put this film back on my radar, although I was aware of it before).

The ending, of course, is totally f'd up and disturbing! The noise made by the open box may be the creepiest sound effect I've ever heard. (Beyond the obvious tributes paid by Repo Man, I wonder if Alex Cox chose a Chevy "Malibu" as a hat-tip to the beach house...)

Did it just play? There is some weird trivia thing about it that the actress was Jerry Leiber's (First) wife, I think.

Gaby Rodgers.

Jerry apparently used her name as a pseudonym for his song-doctoring credit on "Jackson"!

WIkipedia also sez: the great-niece of the philosopher Edmund Husserl

(It didn't just play... I bought it 'cuz I really wanted to see it, and there were no upcoming TCM showings & it's not streaming.)

I did just pick another one up from the library – Pick-Up on South Street (pleased to find that it's also a Criterion BD). Do we have a thread where we discuss old flicks like this generally, without the TCM hook?

Film noir: your favourites

Yes, that is the correct thread. Also, I believe it was you who first alerted me to JustWatch, so I would like to thank you for that.

...and I was hipped to it here by sic!

Thanks, sic! It's great. For instance, I just went to see if Gentleman Jim had expired yet, from TCM, but it seemed to still be there so I clicked on the link and hit play. See you in one hour and forty four minutes!
https://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/titles/617

I might even start posting those links for other stuff.

Bedazzled link is still there but it has expired. So there is a tiny lag but not much.

Oh shit… one of the supplements on this Blu-ray is “Director Alex Cox on Kiss Me Deadly”(!)