And now, Movieline's home-viewing guru Michael Atkinson introduces a new feature dedicated to the most recordable films on a movie channel near you during the upcoming week.
Let's forget that trying to make recording movies off of cable illegal is far from logical when every home video player since 1982 has a record button -- it'd be a little like selling us a gun and telling us we can't touch this thing called a trigger. Whatever. Click ahead to see this week on cable.
This week, TCM tosses up an all-day Mary Astor marathon on Monday -- nine features in a row, starting at 6:15 with the star-making Beau Brummel, from 1924 -- if you'd like a taste of her early stardom before her divorce trial (in 1936) and tabloid-printed diary entries sludged up her career and sent her into brilliant supporting roles in the '40s.
At IFC, you shouldn't miss 1976 Oscar winner Harlan County U.S.A. (Tues., 12:30 PM), in case you haven't seen it lately, for a chilling jolt of Howard Zinn-style history about how many bullets you can catch (and children you can see starve) if you dare to confront big business, like workers perhaps could've this year, to Massey Energy in West Virginia, had the beleaguered unions been even as tenacious as they were in the '70s.
You may not know it, but you may get Encore Westerns, in which case the semi-rare appearance of Fritz Lang's 1952 farewell to westerns Rancho Notorious (Mon., 8:00 PM), a garishly, absurdly artificial myth-ballad of revenge and moral sickness the perverse flavor of which can only be suggested by describing it as the key precursor to Wisit Sasanatieng's Thai-camp western Tears of the Black Tiger. You know where that record button is. Likewise, in terms of prizes on Encore's minor-tentacle channels, Encore Drama's programming block is sucked on Monday by the uncut version of Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (12:45 PM), all almost-five-hours of it, remaining one of the great WWII films and a sweaty, claustrophobic tribulation beside which the edited-down version is a trifle.
At Sundance, Michael Roemer's Nothing but a Man (1964) sneaks into the slipstream on Tuesday (12:30 PM), and it's a forgotten marvel of pre-indie acumen, shot on the shoulder with real film (like a news report) and detailing an average black man's struggle for dignity in the early '60s Deep South. Look at the date, and the movie's bristling realism -- in the era of Sidney Poitier -- demands attention, as does the performance, as a preacher's gentle daughter, of jazz diva Abbey Lincoln. I'll assume you're intimate, so to speak, with Darren Aronofsky's 2000 sand-blaster Requiem for a Dream (Showtime, Thurs. at 1:00 AM) -- if not, have Pepto Bismol ready -- but not perhaps with Lodge Kerrigan's debut film Clean, Shaven (1994), showing up on Showtime Showcase Tuesday night at 3:35 AM. Not only is it a pivotal American indie but also one of the least compromised; its portrait, from the outside in and vice-versa, of a conscious slipping into destructive madness and moral crisis is a harrowing sit-through and still one of its decade's best films.