Free TV blogging -- ThisTV's Art house/Grind House mix

I always thought it would be fun to run a TV station and yet I've noticed that the people who do seldom seem to enjoy themselves. Most channels reek of that sterile kind of marketing you get when business people try to pitch a product they neither enjoy nor understand.

There are exceptions, of course. Ted Turner had a good time and I get the impression that the people at Weigel Broadcasting are having fun as well as they carve out a mini Turner-style empire in the new world of digital broadcast TV.

Weigel are the people behind ThisTV and the exceptionally good retro station MeTV (more on that later). ThisTV is basically a poor man's TCM. It can't compete with Turner's movie channel in terms of library and budget -- no one can (if my cable company hadn't bumped TCM to a more expensive tier I never would have dropped the service), but it manages to do a lot with limited resources using imagination and personality. As a movie channel, it consistently beats the hell out of AMC.

ThisTV has caught on to the fact that the most interesting films are often on the far ends of the spectrum and has responded with a wonderful mixture of art house and grind house. Among the former, you can see films like Persona, the Music Lovers and Paths of Glory. Among the latter you'll find American International quickies and action pictures with titles like Pray for Death. You can even find films that fit into both categories like Corman's Poe films or Milius' Dillinger.

If I ran a TV station, I would definitely combine Bergman and ninjas. I would not, however, run Mario Bava's faeture length pulp magazine cover, Planet of the Vampires from twelve till two. Some of us have to get up in the morning.

Great moments in marketing -- Charlie Sheen edition

About a week ago, while waiting to check out at a local electronics store, I came across these odd pouches in the snack section.

They looked a bit like IV bags but closer examination revealed they were energy shots accompanied with inexplicably bizarre copy.

It was only after consulting Google did I discover that phrases like "Adonis DNA," "truth torpedos" and "rockstar from Mars" were taken from Charlie Sheen rants.




Further research revealed that the product went out on the shelves more than a month ago. Say what you will about American ingenuity, I'd like to see another country go from embarrassing public spectacle to worthless consumer product this quickly.

The asshole plot

You may be familiar with James Blish's idiot plot, generally defined as a plot that is only possible if the protagonist is an idiot (in some variants, the whole cast has to consist of idiots).

I'd like to add an even more common genre, the asshole plot. In these stories, most or all of the conflict comes from a major character who makes things difficult for the protagonist by being an asshole for no apparent reason other than to make things easy for the writer.

Television, with its constant need for story arcs, is rife with asshole plots. Recent examples include Jayne Atkinson's Erin Strauss on Criminal Minds whose campaign to remove Thomas Gibson's character never made any any sense in the context of the story, or Chi McBride's Edward Vogler on House.

But the best example I've seen in a long time comes from CBS's soon to be late Chaos. In the episode "Song of the North," a congressman, played by Currie Graham holds a press conference revealing a secret mission in North Korea. He knows that this information is top secret. He knows that making it public will endanger American lives. He should know he's risking his political career if something does go wrong. The only reason for him to screw up the mission was that the writer couldn't think of anything else.

When great direction serves a great movie

Something of read while you're waiting for Citizen Kane to come on TCM

How to lie with statistics -- rare cinema history edition

And now a word from our sponsors

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Kael on Welles

I was at a party once where conversation turned to Pauline Kael. A guest commented that he didn't know much about Kael except that she "didn't care much for Orson Welles."

The idea that Kael had it in for Welles has been a useful weapon in certain film history debates but it doesn't hold up that when you read what she actually wrote about the man. Here's a representative quote I came across recently:

I mean men like Griffith and von Stroheim and Abel Gance and Eisenstein and Fritz Lang and Orson Welles who thought big, men whose prodigious failures could make other people's successes look puny.

From the review of the Bible, collected in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.