Once Burnt... - Aug 19 - What's To Watch? - Mike

 

  (Notes for any who are revisiting any of these pieces: First, I apologize for any of the inevitable, broken links. Things get pulled from YouTube all the time. Second, for the most current streaming availability for anything, go to JustWatch and type in the name of the show or movie. Streaming platforms are swapping material all the time these days. That JustWatch link will pop out into its own window. - Mike)

     Late Bonus: Netflix just dropped a surprise double episode addition to their recently-released Sandman series! Two, standalone tales from the source series, an animated version of "A Dream of A

Thousand Cats" (one of my favorite issues from the comics, and reportedly a small treasure trove of voice talent) and a live action one "Calliope." Haven't looked at them yet, but wanted to slip the update in here while we're still in Friday morning.
    A couple, quick items from this past week, which were (then looking forward) things from last Friday's post:
     The Monday series finale for Better Call Saul (AMC/AMC+), continued to set a very high bar for serial entertainment. High marks from beginning to end. Everyone involved with the show was justifiably proud of it. I look forward, in time, to a full series rewatch. All involved in that show can justifiably take pride in being part of it. I'll be very happy to discuss the series with those who are so-inclined, but don't want to spoil details for those who've yet to watch the show.
     Thursday's debut of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney+ was a pleasant turn, achieving an entertaining tone. Tatiana Maslany works out well as main character Jen Walters, much as was expected given her performances in general. They tidily, competently packed a considerable amount of exposition into a 30 minute main episode and a mid-credits scene. I'm looking forward to the remaining eight episodes.

     On the other hand...
     Few entertainment brands have traced the path that Benioff & Weiss' HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones did. For nearly its entire eight season run it had a fierce and devoted fan base, up until the final march of episodes in that oddly truncated final season.
     To say it went off the rails doesn't quite suffice. It wasn't even like the simple disappointment experienced by many of the fans of Lost, back in 2010, when the finale failed to deliver, as a great many of us knew it almost had to.

    No, with Game of Thrones, it wasn't even an implosion of fandom. It was more of a broad nullification. Something that so many had been spending so much time talking about, week to week, season to season, for eight years, suddenly went silent. It wasn't even vitriol, with fans' passions redirecting to ire. The show suddenly became something the majority of people who'd been so animated about for so long... didn't want to talk about anymore. It's as if a huge group of children suddenly all stop believing in Santa at the same time. A disappointment thick with embarrassment at having been so excited about it for so long in the first place. By just past mid-May 2019, it became a non-topic.
     Three years and three months later, a new prequel series finally arrives on HBO, set two centuries before the main events of Game of Thrones, it centers on pivotal events in the history of House Targaryen, the House of the Dragon.

     Certainly, to be fair, this is its own production, with a different showrunner, but I suspect there are many of us who won't be rushing to get attached to this.
     I'm sure that at some point I'll take a look, perhaps much sooner than I currently expect. At the moment, days away from it as I write this, there's no strong draw for me.

     While poking around Amazon Prime recently I came across a bit of holiday horror from out of the U.K. back in 2018. Await Further Instructions, an increasingly paranoiac, claustrophobic tale of a particularly awful set of winter holidays; almost oddly prescient, coming well over a year before COVID and pandemic protocols. I was tempted to wait for a more seasonal posting somewhere in the Thanksgiving to Christmas block, but as it's something on Prime I thought it best to mention it now, while it's not behind an additional paywall.
     Nick (Sam Gittins), against all his better instincts, gives in to the pressure of his girlfriend, Annji (Neerja Naik) to take her with him for a holiday visit to his very white, working class, suburban family home. He knows it won't go well, but she prevails.
     There we have his well-intentioned, but almost manically muffled mum, Beth (Abigail Cruttenden), his deeply emotionally repressed, authoritarian father, Tony (Grant Masters) who is an obvious pressure-cooker, his father, "Grandad" (David Bradley), a real, old school concentration of toxic masculity and cultural xenophobia, who quickly makes us realize why Tony is as damaged as he is. Also, in short order, the group's rounded out with Nick's pregnant, mentally-/culturally-limited sister Kate (Holly Weston), and her overly-muscled husband, Scott (Kris Saddler), who we realize has filled the role of approval-seeking, manly man, surrogate son Tony had wished he had instead of Nick.
     We gradually learn that Nick's avoided a holiday visit for several years, and his returning with a girlfriend who's clearly outside the neighborhood gene pool is a thinly-concealed issue for his dad, granddad, and sister. You can tell it's going to be a wonderful Christmas.
     Tensions soon mount, and both Nick and Annji decide that come the morning, they'll make a quiet exit.
     It turns out that waiting wasn't a great idea.
     The morning finds the household trapped inside the suburban home, a mysterious, striated, metallic material blocking every door and window. Phone, Internet, and even the standard tv feed are all gone, though power remains and the tv screen spelling out in green text:  "STAY INDOORS AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS."

     Things spiral downward from there, soon becoming obvious to the audience that this is some sort of twisted social experiment. The psychological test underpinnings are hinted at by the screenwriter via the choice of family name, Milgram, referring to a series of psych experiments conducted at Yale concerning obedience to authority, even when doing so is to act against one's best interests, while the family home is on Stanford Street, bringing to mind the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison experiment.
     The late-film reveal, as it takes a sudden turn regarding the actual threat, went over less well with the average audience member than I'm guessing the filmmakers hoped.
     It's Await Further Instructions (2018 TV-MA 91m)

      Paramount+ has another streaming & simultaneous theatrical release item arriving today. It's a prequel to the 2009 horror film Orphan - which is appropriately also available on Paramount+. Here Isabel Fuhrman reprises here role as Esther (which was also the title they used during filming), twelve years later in real time, playing an even younger version of the character than she did in '09. It's Orphan: First Kill

     It seems most likely this was driven simply by the success of the first film, and the ownership of a property that might make more money for them if they hit "repeat." That 2009 film did almost four times its $20 million production budget, so the studio must have been reasonably happy. I enjoyed that earlier film well enough, though it wasn't one that I've felt much of an urge to revisit. My presumption is that there are some distinct fetish itches the premise scratches, and that's often the backbone of a franchise.
     My current interest in it is mostly at a practical level, intrigued that an actress now in her mid-twenties is reprising an even younger version of a character she played when she was less than twelve... albeit of a character who (do I really need to post a spoiler alert for a twelve year-old movie?) turns out to be much, much older. Presumably the audience for this one are fans of the earlier film, so what was a twist in 2009 is now only a twist for the various other characters in the film. The audience knows the real score from the start, and is mostly waiting for the other characters to become aware of it one victim at a time.
    (As an aside on fetishes and formulas: An old friend of mine who was decades ago looking for any market interested in buying original fiction, once told me of some small-run specialty magazine that catered to people who had fantasies of giant women. Specifically of women who suddenly became giants. Would-be contributors were given tips such as including sight and sound descriptions of the clothes stretching beyond their limits, tearing and shredding. That was, to them, a vital element. It's a big, strange world out there.)

     Back to streaming, and sticking to Paramount+, next Thursday, the 25th, the third season of the animated Trek sit-com Star Trek: Lower Decks begins.

     That the series turned out to be both ultimately in-continuity and entertaining were pleasant surprises, so I'm casually looking forward to this new season.
     Oh, fans should note that whenever we get the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, there will be a Jonathan Frakes-directed episode which will involve a crossover by two of the Lower Decks characters, Mariner and Boimler, in a mixed live action & animation format. Given the different time periods of the shows (Strange New Worlds is pre-Kirk Enterprise, while Lower Decks is Next Generation era) it'll have to involve time travel.

     Back in the here and now, one last Paramount+ note: They very recently added five of the six seasons of the WB, then VH1 "reality" series The Surreal Life.

     The core premise is having a disparate group of celebrities (the term became very elastic over the show's various seasons) whose heydays were in the past - but understandably saw themselves as simply being between jobs - are brought together to live in an environment where they're forced to interact and compete in various events. At its best, you had celebrities from vastly different cultural regions getting to know each other as people beyond their reputations, and at worst, well, you had "reality stars" such as Omarosa.
     The show was an odd one for me to have gotten drawn into, but around 2004, via circumstances I don't clearly recall, I ended up watching the show. Unfortunately, presumably due to various legal issues, that 2004 season, the show's second, which was the one that drew me in, is the one missing from this block. That was the season where the house included a post-PTL televangelist "Christian" Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Bakker), and legendary (I'm told) porn star Ron Jeremy. despite knowing how heavily manipulated and deceptively edited "reality" tv shows are, I found the interactions and the arc of their relationship once they got to connect as human beings, interesting.

     Still, as each season is its own, separate grouping, it's not as if a missing one busts up a narrative.
     Each of the five seasons here on the streamer have their potential points of faded pop-cultural interest, drawing from diverse pools - tv, music, sports, modeling, and, worst by far: other reality shows - such that I would think it was the rare audience member who didn't have at least a couple of "Who?!" reaction moments as each cast was introduced, the light of recognition flickering or blazing with others. At its best, the show presented opportunities to see something more in people who'd otherwise been long ago dismissively labeled, boxed and shelved, as they tried to be more than cliches and old jokes, and find a new lease on public life.
     I've yet to start revisiting these, but I expect the earliest ones - seasons one, three and four - to overall be the best revisits. Season five I recall being archly staged and deeply toxic, primarily because of Bronson Pinchot, Janice Dickinson and Omarosa Manigault, with the latter two (especially Omarosa) obviously gaming the show, knowing that playing the diva was how one would "win" by scoring the most screen time; for her that was the complete aim, relentlessly playing a character. As best I recall, season six simply lacked chemistry.
    I expect that each of the times I try to revisit these part of my brain is going to be rebelling, warning me much as it might were I to sit down to open and eat full "party size" bags of the most heavily-processed snacks. Letting others know they're there is as much as I wanted to accomplish here. Only you can decide whether or not this holds any appeal.

    Rolling through the back half of the month, TCM's Summer Under the Stars celebration continues. (That link is to an interactive page, listing all of the films.) Here are the actor spotlights from today through next Friday:
     Friday Aug 19:    Toshiro Mifune
     Saturday Aug 20:    Joan Crawford
     Sunday Aug 21:     Clint Eastwood
     Monday Aug 22:    Constance Bennett
     Tuesday Aug 23:    Mickey Rooney
     Wednesday Aug 24:    Jacqueline Bisset
     Thursday Aug 25:    Gilbert Roland
     Friday Aug 26:    Vivien Leigh

     As ever, entirely too many to attempt to curate here, all the more so given how many of them I've never seen. Oh, to have the financial security and time to be able to just give more of them a try. There are, as you'd expect, many of the films one associates with each of these actors, though those are often not the strongest draws for me. Hopping to the end of the list, to one week from now and the Vivien Leigh films, I've virtually no interest in rewatching Gone With the Wind again anytime soon - and that one dominates that Friday night, with a very long 1988 documentary on the making of it, preceding a showing of the film. No, my peak film of interest on that day would be mid-afternoon's Ship of Fools (1965).

     I'll try to remember to update this a little later, if I find that they've added this to either the TCM Watch online assortment (which would just be for a limited time) or if it ends up added as part of the TCM Hub that's a sub-section of HBO Max.

     Ending with a free-to-view item of dubious worth, it's a werewolf movie centering on a multi-millionaire who is also a world-traveling hunter. He's set his sights on an elusive, exotic creature: a werewolf. Having collected evidence of attacks matching key elements, then compiling a list of suspects (including his own wife) who happened to be at or near every one of these killings in various countries, he invites all of the suspects to his secluded estate for a weekend. There he informs them of the facts, his conclusion that one of them is a werewolf, and that with that weekend coinciding with the full moon, he intends to out and kill the creature. The estate is heavily covered by CCTV cameras, microphones and sensors.
     The film opens with a message to the audience that this is a detective story, in which they are to play the detective. Before the final scenes, there will be a 30-second "werewolf break" during which audience members can declare who they believe to be the werewolf. The device was added at the insistence of one of the producers, Milton Subotsky, who I suppose saw it as a marketing flourish akin to something William Castle might have come up with. Director Paul Arnett hated the gimmick, feeling that it was unnecessary and "stopped the film cold dead," though there were some who liked it, including critic Leonard Maltin.
     Based on a 1950 short story by James Blish ("There Shall Be No Darkness") it's The Beast Must Die! (1974  PG  1h 32m) (Not to be confused with a 1952 film with the same title, about a mystery writer who goes in search of the guilty party after his child is hit by a car.)
     Here's the trailer, and the full film is available to all over on Tubi.

      That's as much time as I have for this week, and almost certainly more time than you have to spare. Thanks for reading, I hope something here caught your attention, and that we all make it back here next Friday. - Mike

Struggle and Dream - August 5 - What's To Watch?

 

   First Friday of August, 2022. As a kid, in Eastern PA, I'd be staring down at the last month of summer vacation, with the new school year lurking just after Labor Day.
     Friday's piece now expanded by colored notes, after watching several of the new items.
     This week saw the season-ender for Seth MacFarlane's semi-comedic Star Trek hommage, The  Orville: New Horizons. I've been watching it week to week, but have been avoiding saying much about it as it's an episodic series and I prefer to avoid spoiling details for potential viewers. Also, it seemed that the majority of Orville posts I've read, the comments on them at least, in social media tend to quickly devolve into a race to the bottom sniping match at all or nearly all of the modern Trek series over on Paramount+, perhaps peppered by the occasional mentally-stunted chime-in from someone who uses "woke" as a pejorative much the same way as those same people used to reference something as "PC." Who wants to court any of that?
     Anyway, this long-delayed third season was the first one to be on Hulu -- and one way or another seems certain to be the only new season of it to be on Hulu.
     As had been seen even while it was still on Fox, working to find its footing and tone, the series is ultimately a fan's love letter to Star Trek, and while the comedic elements are still there, this latest season did lean more on the drama and, for lack of a more species-inclusive term, humanity, all while proselytizing enthusiastically for the ideals of Star Fleet The Planetary Union; a message of humane, post-capitalistic existence I can wholly embrace. More than its first two seasons, the 2022 show is an earnest Star Trek variant where the defining difference was mostly a

technical one: No transporters.
     The media landscape has changed considerably over the five years the show's been around. While this season aired first on Hulu, next Wednesday it'll move over to Disney+. At the moment, there are no contracts for a season four, so all of the talent has been lining up other projects. This season resolved some big plot complications by the penultimate episode, and ended on a note of calm and contentment that could serve as a series finale -- we don't know. Word from Seth himself is that its future will now largely depend upon what Disney sees in terms of streaming viewers.
    If they made more, I would watch. If this ends up being a wrap, well, they ended it with an overall upbeat, life goes onward & upward note. That's more than most tv projects have gotten.

     From 1988 until 1996, Neil Gaiman, in collaboration with some two dozen, diverse, graphic artists, produced a comics series called The Sandman for DC Comics' mature readers' imprint Vertigo. A series that ultimately developed spin-off series and specials, the titular focus is Dream - the lord of dreams and nightmares - who has also been known by various other names, including Morpheus. A being whose kingdom touches all of humanity as they enter his realm when they sleep. As it turns out, Dream is part of a family of anthropomorphic beings called The Endless, In descending order by age, they are: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium.
     The series begins with the circumstances that captured and imprisoned Dream nearly a century earlier, when an occultist accidentally did so while trying to capture and nullify his older sister, Death, seeking immortality and the return of cruelly lost loved ones. While the wrong sibling was captured, Dream was not released -- for reasons best left in the story to explain.
     In the decades of Dream's absence from his kingdom, it falls into disrepair, additional elements of it escaping and running riot while others quietly occupied themselves, and others lay fallow. Mankind suffered for it all in various ways, including a plague of sleeping sicknesses. So, an early part of the journey is about Dream escaping, recovering, surveying the damage, rebuilding his power (including reacquiring various totems from unworthy hands), confronting old friends, acquaintances, and rivals, reclaiming his kingdom, reigning in rogue elements, dispensing punishments, and attempting to undo damage.
     Over the course of the series the emphasis sometimes wandered, and it became a gateway to other stories, on the way filling out the history of the world and the Endless, and allowing us to meet the many players.
     Today, a ten-episode first season of this series finally arrives on Netflix. Villains, eccentric characters, and schemers aplenty, I'm hopeful it'll make for a good time.    
     This first season aims to offer an adaptation of the first two collected volumes (the first 18 issues of what would become a 75-issue series) Preludes and Nocturnes, and The Doll's House.

     It's an ambitious undertaking, and I'll be interested in seeing the choices made. A series with so many strong, divergent visual styles and story elements is bound to fail in some respects - to varying

degrees and judgements by readers - a consequence of pinning elements down, casting roles, etc. This is especially the case not only here in 2022, where gender-bending and gender fluidity in general is increasingly common, though in the case of a series like this, populated by characters many of whom are themselves concepts, it really should be no problem at all. Still, I know for some it will be. Even if a Lucifer played by Gwendoline Christie is no issue, the seeming decision to remake supernatural conman John Constantine as Johanna Constantine (played by Jenna Coleman) will doubtless ruffle some feathers, even if just at the simple level of being forcefully at odds with broader notions of the DC Universe of characters, given that John has been part of two television series and was a key character introduced in comics earlier in the '80s as a conniving player in Alan Moore's reinterpretation of Swamp Thing. I can roll with it, but - on the face of it, here, before seeing the show - that does seem to be a gratuitous move. Then again, I'm getting ahead of things, as I haven't watched any of this yet.
     I will be trying to mostly allow it to tell this version as they decided. The source

works are still there, unchanging, safe, waiting to be revisited. A four-volume set of slipcase books collecting the main series, all in an oversize format to better appreciate them - especially with older, feebler eyes - has been part of what I've assembled in the past couple years as I (with no small degree of presumptive hubris) plan elements of a new stage of life for myself in four or five years.
     I'm not the person I was 30-odd years ago, and part of the interest in revisiting this sort of thing is to see what stuck with me from then, how that estimation holds or falls with the revisit, and to ideally catch many elements that I couldn't appreciate back in the day for lack of life experience.
     So far I've been saving my revisit of them, aside from some light browsing. The temptation to dive into them ahead of this series, as a refresher, was there, but I ultimately decided I'll allow the new series to tell the story its own way, and see how that works out.
     As mentioned, all ten episodes of this first season arrive today, so pacing will be a matter of available time, and restraint or lack thereof. Habit and history makes the bet that I'll have seen it all by Sunday where to put the smart money. Looking forward to this.
     Indeed, I had run through the complete season - even with restraint - by Saturday morning. I didn't apply the brakes by going back to reread the roughly corresponding books, preferring at the moment to let this production be its own, self-sufficient thing -- which it was. Removing any and all overt ties to the DC universe of characters was a wise move on more than one front. Most simply, there was nothing to be gained by the larger audience in retaining those ties, and certainly not enough even at points to justify all of the effort and inevitable distractions that would have involved; also, the DC universe as it currently exists is at best a patchwork, with multiple iterations of itself discarded along the way. While the comics started with many of those linkages and groundings, as it moved on they were left farther and farther behind.
     What the series is intent on bringing us is a cohesive narrative that is, again self-sufficient. No previous comics reading is required. There are echoes of some characters in the mix, but almost entirely sticking with the originals would have been of no interest to the mainstream audience. The echoes function as knowing nods to the comics cognoscenti; the most effective of which is when a character from an even earlier era, who was then refitted to be superheroic crusader of the dream realm, is suitably worked in as the fantasy life of a twelve year-old boy, complete with period costume. Also, as is so often the case with comics series that run over the course of years, it was a work in progress, published in serial fashion rather than produced as a single novel which was then subject to editing as a whole, including a rewriting process. What they become is often not what was key to the plans at the start. Here, adapting the first two story arcs of a 75-issue series, the early material's been rewritten to match what the full series came to be.
     What we have, is something that should work well for a broad audience, particularly if they are content with what is more of a concatenation of fables than an exacting story worked out in clockwork detail. If one is intent on finding fault with it, they can fairly easily do so, as the fuzziness of dream logic suffuses the story and the characters. Relationships, foibles, and possibilities for character growth are what are prized here, well over concerns for seamless storytelling. That's Gaiman's way.
     I enjoyed this first block, and am hoping that the bottom-line bloodbath that's been going on over at Warner following a recent regime change won't interfere with this project rolling on into a second season. I find myself just waiting for official word, one way or another, rather than trying to comb through the imdb listings for key people involved, because that can be maddening. Consider that the people behind and in front of the cameras have their own lives, and bills to pay, and that the final filming for what landed on Netflix this week was done a couple weeks shy of one year ago. The lack of financial commitment to a complete project from the start screws around with the paths of so many people.
     Regardless, what's been done stands well on its own. Stories are told, and the first two arcs of the larger tale are told. While it leaves us much more to potentially look forward to, any notion of "waiting for it to be finished" before starting to watch would be distinctly bone-headed.

     Over on Hulu today (here in the U.S., that is, in most other parts of the world it'll be on Disney+), a different, more visceral and sinewy item, part of a franchise also going back to the 1980s, arrives. In this case the franchise is the sci-fi horror action stories involving alien game-hunters known as Predators.
     Set in 1719, in the Comanche Nation (what are the Southern Plains of the present United States), it's the story of an early encounter between humans and one of these powerful, stealthy hunters that came to Earth looking for what it judged to be worthy prey.
     Suitably enough, it's simply titled Prey (2022  R  1h 39m)

     This is technically the sixth film in this franchise (the other five are also there on Hulu), though by far it's the one set earliest in time. I'm optimistic about this one.
     I see they've even offered an option where it's all dubbed into Comanche, so someone gave this project their special attention.
     Nicely conceived and ably done, fans of the 1987 film, in which a band of highly-skilled mercenaries found themselves up against a mysterious and powerful opponent, should enjoy this period piece in which the flip the characters encounter is the more basic one of the roles of hunter and prey. That this fits in with a Comanche coming of age ritual where hunters prove themselves by hunting something that is also hunting them, makes this an even tidier package, in terms of theme. Those who may be inclined to rush to identify "woke" elements, self-tellingly using such as a pejorative, are invited to keep their peace and come back when they mature.

     Also arriving today on Netflix is a movie I'd barely been aware of, which I'm mentioning here simply because I see it's hitting the streamer and many people find themselves looking for a couple hours of random actions to munch popcorn to. I'm assured this is another adaptation of a video game I've never heard of and will almost certainly never play, a treasure-hunting romp starring Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, and Antonio Banderas, the latter looking rough enough in the trailer to remind me that we're only 8 months apart. Yeesh! It's Uncharted (2022 PG-13 1h 56m)

     From the look of it it's going to be a great deal of sudden, random movement (maybe something the cat will want to watch with you?) strung together by cliches. Maybe it'll be better than that.

     Returning August 10th - next Wednesday - to Syfy with the back half of its second season, is the sci-fi comedy crime procedural Resident Alien. It hit its mid-season break back in mid-March, and in all the flurry of life I'd forgotten they still owed us eight more episodes in this expanded season. Out of sight, out of mind. It's almost amazing how this brief teaser trailer from back in March refreshed the plot points for me.

     I'll also note that a couple weeks ago they formally greenlit season three, which will be 12 episodes.

     Speaking of August 10th and returning series that have sneaked up on me - over on Netflix this time - the third (and final) season of yet another comics-derived series, Locke & Key, arrives.

     Adapted from Joe Hill's (pen name of Stephen and Tabitha King's son) comics, the first two seasons were generally fun and conceptually engaging, including the central gimmick of the magical keys. All factors considered, I think they've paced this out just about right in wrapping this up.

     While you're there, kicking around Netflix on the 10th, I'll note for no particularly good reason that arriving that same day will be a sci-fi workplace action comedy from South Africa, which mainly seems to remind us that work is, and people in general are, so bad an alien invasion is going to be more welcome than another day of that shit. Ideally it'll at least offer us the catharsis of seeing lousy co-workers and foul roommates eviscerated and fried by alien visitors. I don't know -- that was my most optimistic take-away from the trailer. It's Office Invasion.

     As mentioned last week, August is TCM's Summer Under the Stars month, wherein each 24 hours, from 6am to 6am, is a spotlight of films and features on a single actor. (That link will pop out with an interactive page for the month.)
     From today through next Friday the stars in the spotlight are:
         Friday, Aug 5:     Orson Welles
         Saturday, Aug 6: Audrey Hepburn
         Sunday Aug 7:    Gene Kelly
         Monday Aug 8:    Maureen O'Sullivan
         Tuesday Aug 9:    William Holden
         Wednesday Aug 10:    Greta Garbo
         Thursday Aug 11:    Laurence Harvey
         Friday Aug 12:     Jane Powell

     As is often the case with these spotlight months, if one looks down the list of offerings for a given star and fails to see what should be an obvious choice, be patient enough to scan through the other offerings for that month. A good example among the above is that Greta Garbo's 24 hours doesn't include Grand Hotel (1932). However, if one looks to the 20th, Joan Crawford's day, they'll find that film in the mix. TCM's curated by movie fans, after all, and they generally try hard to work all the angles they have available.
     So much goodness in the mix for the month, it reminds me how near-certain it is that there's material that's as good or better in there, I just don't know it yet.

Odd bits in the mix, too, such as the last of Orson Welles' 24 hours being given over to a Brian DePalma-directed absurdist comedy starring Tommy Smothers as a corporate man who attempts to escape his highly-paid career straight-jacket by becoming a poor-but-happy tap-dancing magician: Get To Know Your Rabbit (1972  92m). Including supporting players John Astin, Katharine Ross in the role of "Terrific Looking Girl", extremely familiar-faced character actors including Charles Lane, Hope Summers, and Allen Garfield, and the late Bob Einstein as a police officer, there should be plenty to watch for.
     Oh, I know the film by reputation, that it bombed and did so in large part because the tone was too flat and deadpan for U.S.audiences at the time. Tommy Smothers hated the production enough that he skipped out for days at a time and refused to return for retakes. The studio was unhappy with DePalma's cut, so they hired Peter Nelson to recut it and direct a new sequence, still didn't like it, so it sat on the shelf for a couple years before they dumped it into theaters without any fanfare, where it quickly disappeared.
     A seemingly serviceable copy of it is here on Youtube, so I'll add that here if you're casually interested:

     As I have TCM, have the DVR set to record it, and am awash in more that I want to see than I have time for, I'll catch it over there.

     That's all for this week. I have things to do, as I'm sure is the case for you. Time to get to it! Keep cool, and I'll see you all here again on the 12th. - Mike