I have a confession to make. The channel I write about the least is the one I watch the most: Turner Classic Movies. I’m so into classic film that I have a basement full of 16mm movies. TCM threds my projector these days, providing clean, perfect prints of rarely seem gems. That’s been their shtick
Friday nights have been Screwball Comedies nights all this month of November on Mr. TV Feeds My Family’s favourite channel, TCM.This final Friday night brings three from the great writer/director Preston Sturges: The Lady Eve (1941) with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Christmas in July (1940), again with Stanwyck, always delicious, and The Palm Beach
What kind of entertainment does Dracula like? Something in a jugular vein!Oy! There’s that joke again. Anyway, Dracula premieres Friday night at 10 p.m. on NBC and Global.The drama stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the infamous vampire count. The series is set in London in 1896, with this centuries-old Dracula posing as an American inventor.
School’s out for summer, as Alice Cooper used to say. So what’s on TV?Tons ‘o stuff. The new Showtime original Ray Donovan, starring Liev Schreiber as a slick LA fixer-to-the-stars, begins Sunday, for example. Dexter returns for a final run. In August, so does Breaking Bad. The Listener, True Blood, Saving Hope and Rookie Blue
UPA’s Rooty Toot Toot (1952) There does seem to be a disconnect between what I am writing about lately and what I am actually watching on TV. To that end: Kudos to TCM for showcasing classic animation last Saturday night. Robert Osbourne welcomed animation historian Jerry Beck and the two presented six hours of vintage
TCM salutes the late, great Andy Griffith tonight, starting at 8 p.m. with his breakthrough role in A Face in the Crowd (1957). If you haven’t seen this film,directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, it is startlingly relevant today. Griffith plays a drifter plucked off the streets and thrust into the white-hot
TCM always does such a beautiful job with their end of the year “In Memoriam” videos. As you can see above, this year is no exception. An eye opener, thanks to some clever scene selections, is that three people in “Airplane” passed away in 2010–Peter Graves, Barbara Billingsley and Leslie Nielsen. Don’t fret that Blake Edwards
Turner Classic Movie’s beautiful little year ender brings a tough year to a close with style and grace. If there was a better channel in 2008, I’d like to know about it. The recent salute to Disney’s live action films, The Age of Believing, was such a terrific Christmas present, worth it if just for