This Week On Cable: Raceploitation Cinema That Machete Could Learn From

While Arizona strives mightily to legislate Mexicans out of existence, and we discover all over again that our country is hardly "post-racial," your week's prime choices on cable cover the multicultural gamut. Sure, race cinema can be righteous and dull, but it can also be Brotherhood of Death...

Brotherhood of Death (IFC, Tuesday, 8:35 PM)

An unjustly neglected 1976 blaxploitation classic, with a hand grenade of a premise: a band of Southern black buddies escape from bigotry by joining the Army and going to 'Nam, where they learn about violent oppression from the other end. Then, when they return home, they're haunted by the Ku Klux Klan, and by-any-Malcolm-X-means vigilante kick-ass breaks out in raw '70s style. Crude, defiant and one of a kind.

Liberty Heights (Starz in Black, Thursday, 5:50 PM)

Have you ever heard of a stupider cable station name than "Starz in Black"? Whatever -- Barry Levinson's 1999 film (his fourth to take place in Baltimore) is a rich slice of nostalgia pie. For one thing, Levinson gets the details right, focusing principally on Jewish culture and being a teenager in 1955 B-town, and therefore expending more attention on, say, two kids listen to R&B records than on a kidnapping at gunpoint. Race becomes a pivotal issue, of course: wet-eared high schooler Ben (Ben Foster) contemplates a romance with a sublimely intelligent and relaxed black girl (Rebekah Johnson), which is just one plot thread in a serious knot. And Johnson, who hasn't been seen much since, is mesmerizing.

The Gun Runners (TCM, Monday, 2:15 AM)

All night tonight, TCM indulges in a Hemingway film festival, but this is the one you may not know well: Don Siegel's 1958 remake of To Have and Have Not. Here, it's relocated to the Cuban revolution years, and the tension of refugee immigration gets the rugged, ambivalent Siegel treatment. Audie Murphy is the Hemingwayesque boat captain caught in the middle.

The Silent Enemy (TCM, Thursday, 2:15 AM)

In the tradition of Robert Flaherty and Merian C. Cooper, this one-shot, fictionalized yet historic artifact from 1930 stars real Ojibwe tribesman (plus at least one mixed-blood hoaxster) struggling for survival amid the Ontario caribou herds. Practically unprecedented as a social document, and destined for the National Film Registry eventually.

Far and Away (WMax, Thursday, 10:00 PM)

Director Ron Howard and Scientologist demigod Tom Cruise have left no cliche standing in the story of a starry-eyed Irish peasant boy who hooks up with a spoiled landowner's daughter and travels to America to stake his claim in the Oklahoma territory. In addition to the Oirish stereotypes, the feisty damsels, and the Snidely Whiplash villains, there's a duel at sunrise, a virgin sneaking a peek at a unconscious man's package, a nighttime visit via ladder to a high window, a can't-be-broke horse, a starving-in-the-winter-streets sequence (in which Nicole Kidman's coif remains poo-perfect). Everybody should see this turkey just once; I remember my only time, when I nearly bust a blood vessel in my eye as Cruise dreams at a frontier worksite about f***ing Kidman, a workman bellows "Fire in the hole!" and a mineshaft shoots its wad at the sky.

Strangers in Good Company (IFC, Tuesday, 1:00 PM)

A blast of gorgeous, melancholy fresh air, this modest Canadian movie couldn't be simpler: a busload of old women get stranded in a hunk of pleasant country, and talk. Director Cynthia Scott cast each of the eight women -- a Cockney, a nun, a Mohawk, etc. -- as themselves, essentially, each recounting the crooked paths of their lives, punctuating the flow with the women's individual stream of snapshots, birth to present. Movies that so appreciate the accumulation of life and memories are as rare as ten-ounce pearls.

Frailty (Outermax, Wednesday, 12:00 midnight)

Frailty is a small, unassuming horrorshow directed by Bill Paxton, its feet planted squarely in Texan grave dirt and its head lost in the ether of Christian derangement. With little ado, an aw-shucks car-mechanic Dad (Paxton) wakes his two young sons (Matthew O'Leary and Jeremy Sumpter) to some awful news: he's been visited by an angel, assigned the task of demon-killing, and the family's project will thereafter be a secret mission to rid the earth of evil. Suffice it to say that once Dad returns home with his first harvest -- an uncomprehending nurse, bound and readied for execution -- O'Leary's unbelieving 12-year-old is trapped in the ultimate down-home Hell, made to dig shallow burial pits after macaroni dinners.