This Weekend On Cable: 8 Films Worth Emptying the TiVo For

Between avoiding the new Shrek and waiting on the balls of you feet for Lost's denouement, the weekend doesn't have to be a wasteland of twiddled thumbs and regretted multiplex expenditures. You pay for cable already -- use it.

Sukiyaki Western Django (Showtime Extreme; Friday, 8:00 PM)

Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike makes movies the way most of us read magazines -- quickly, rashly, even disposably -- and this meta-spaghetti western was only one of four films he made in 2007. This one, though, features Quentin Tarantino has a meta-narrator (in a wheelchair), and the story is a recycling of numerous Italian westerns and samurai epics, shot in subtitled meta-English. Nothing like it anywhere else on your radar.

The President's Last Bang (Sundance; Friday, 12:00 midnight)

In 1979 the dictator of South Korea was assassinated by the country's own secret service men, and it was a big f*cking deal. That didn't stop Im Sang-soo, one of the Korean New Wave's stalwart voices, from making this Road Runner comedy out of the incident, complete with Rube Goldberg plot collapse, accidental casualties and outrageously farcical characterization. Imagine if someone had succeeded in killing Ronald Reagan, and then decades later Oliver Stone made a comedy of errors out of it.

The Fallen Sparrow (TCM; Friday, 12:45 AM)

This rarely-broadcast, un-DVD-ed wartime noir, shot in 1943, is all about bitter vet John Garfield snaking his way through New York in search of who killed his buddy, and of course it turns out to be Nazis, around every corner and under every bedspread. The spectacle here is Garfield, whose HUAC-foreshortened career still lingers like a bruise on Hollywood history and who practically invented the angry, lost modern man prototype. He is where all the embittered brooders, from Eastwood to Willis to Christian Bale came from, and he's almost forgotten.

Sid & Nancy (Indieplex; Saturday, 10:40 PM)

Another firestarter, this Alex Cox classic from 1986 puts every other rock-pop biopic to shame. As punk as its subject, the film chronicles the exuberant beginnings of the movement in the late '70s U.K., as experienced -- more or less only as a festival of narcotics -- by Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman). From there, of course, it was a cascade into doom, homicide and, here, salvation after death. Visionary.

Disengagement (Sundance Channel; Saturday, 1:50 AM)

Erratic Israeli bad boy Amos Gitai has lately gone international (see One Day You'll Understand), and it's done him a world of good -- his late films are expansive, sharp and resonant when before they were often simplistic and crude. This one, in theaters here last year, has Juliettre Binoche as a French woman who decides to return to the West Bank in search of the daughter she gave up years before.

Fuzz (Showtime Extreme; Sunday, 2:00 PM)

Maybe this cop comedy from 1972 deserves to be forgotten, but it's so rarely broadcast (and video-ized; the 2001 DVD is long out of print) that it seems to deserve a day in court. Actually, it's funny as hell in an affectionate kind of way, and Burt Reynolds, Jack Weston and Tom Skerritt make for terrific compadres in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, searching for a mad bomber (Yul Brynner!) and using rookie Raquel Welch as bait.

The Story of Adele H. (TCM; Sunday, 2:15 AM)

Francois Truffaut's rough-and-ready 1975 Oscar-nominee introduced the world to Isabelle Adjani as the daughter of Victor Hugo, whose early life was one long blouse-shredding howl of frustrated passion. One of the great portraits of descending madness in film history, and the 19-year-old Adjani was simply robbed of every award she didn't win, which weren't many.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (HBO Zone; Sunday, 7:00 PM)

Easily the most enjoyable of recent comic book movies -- if only because it dared to mix 90% self-mockery with 10% unpredictable pathos -- Guillermo del Toro's original Hellboy made its mark, and so therefore needed a sequel. True, the scenario is more or less the same (suggesting that it could be a weekly TV show, coming up against Mordred, Ravana, the Gorgons, Sauron and Lucifer himself by season's end). But No. 2 is a breeze to watch, undemanding of empathy, constantly inventive in its monsters, and always ironic. The high point: a beer-drunk idyll shared by Ron Perlman's "Red" and Doug Jones's amphibian, both of them heartsick and crooning along to Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile without You."