This Week on Cable: Reds, Rebel Yells and Required Viewing

This week on cable, rebel politics are in the air -- just as your fight-the-power muscle felt like it was growing slack and the news seems just politics as usual... Find everyone from Warren Beatty to Melvin Van Peebles to Brian De Palma after the jump.

Reds (TCM, Monday @ 10:30 PM)

A film for all seasons, it would appear, but Warren Beatty's gargantuan, passionate, inventive 1981 biopic of journalists/socialist activists John Reed and Louise Bryant (Beatty and Diane Keaton) is poundingly eloquent when it comes to the famed lovers' time in revolutionary Russia (shot for the most part in Finland). But there's more: it's possibly the best historical film ever made in America, it's an exhausting and involving romantic tragedy, and it's a deft primer on socialist thought (in a Hollywood movie?), the embattled legacy of unionism and the inherent, decidedly unsocialist madness of the post-Bolshevik Soviet system. And it's got Beatty, Keaton, and Jack Nicholson (as a booze-hardened Eugene O'Neill) in their prime, and dozens of "witnesses" long past theirs (including Rebecca West, Will Durant, Henry Miller, and Georgie Jessel), eloquently speaking of their post-WWI memories.

Harlan County USA (IFC, Tuesday @ 12:00 noon)

I'll quit stumping for this jagged-edged piece of American history when they stop broadcasting it -- or when corporations begin behaving like the rights-blessed citizens they're supposedly equal to. Released in 1976 and never forgotten.

The Parallax View (TCM, Monday @ 2:00 AM)

In the paranoid post-JFK-RFK-MLK world of 1974, Warren Beatty's rogue reporter sniffs out a conspiracy behind a politician's murder, and ends up inside of an assassin training program. Director Alan J. Pakula was the dark prince of Nixon-era paranoia, and this neglected chiller is crazy with institutional menace.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Retroplex, Wednesday @ 11:35 PM)

Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 blaxploitation pioneer is about as lean and mean a rebel holler as you can want in American cinema. Taking his cues from the violence of the civil rights era, not from other movies, Van Peebles puts himself in the film as a stud who does battle with bigot cops and then goes on the run, hunted. Groovy, new wavey and angry as hell, it was dedicated to the "brothers and sisters who have had enough of the Man."

Blow Out (IFC, Wednesday @ 8:00 PM & 3:00 AM)

Brian De Palma's tribute to Antonioni's Blow Up, Chappaquiddick, Watergate, JFK, sound engineering and Philadelphia, all rolled into a crazy political-assassination plot that the hero (John Travolta, engagingly relaxed) may or may not have accidentally recorded on audio tape. The background of a berserk City of Brotherly Love during the July 4 fete is as central, visually and ironically, as Hitchcock's use of national monuments. All in all, a smashing, thoughtful, stirring piece of pulp. Made in 1981.

Capitalism: A Love Story (Starz, Tuesday @ 2:10 PM)

Michael Moore's irritating but essential comic activism trips up a bit here -- Moore's flip-earnest style cannot hope to engulf the reasons and villains behind the economic downturn. To do it justice you'd need a 12-hour mini-series, and no one could bear to watch. Still, as always Moore has the suffering and injustices dished out to lower-middle-class American workers right in the middle of his plate.

Clean, Shaven (Showtime Showcase, Monday @ 3:30 AM)

Lodge Kerrigan's 1994 elliptical, experimental debut, and as close to experiencing the inside of a collapsing psychopath's skull as modern movies are ever likely to get. Mysterious, upsetting, and required viewing.

Manufactured Landscapes (Sundance, Tuesday @ 1:15 PM)

Jennifer Baichwal's 2007 documentary is a cold-stare portrait of planetary waste that makes An Inconvenient Truth look like, well, an Al Gore lecture. Baichwal simply follows photographer Edward Burtynsky in his work, documenting his process, showing his work and often dollying through the locations he's studying -- which are all unimaginably huge, unfathomably grotesque, and morally nauseating arenas of human industrial destruction, from dumping sites to decommissioned mines to dehumanized manufacturing operations to poisoned landscapes glowing with radioactive colors. Numbers can bounce off of us, but these images don't, resonating with guilt and culpability, and breathtaking in scale.

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (TCM, Thursday @ 8:00 PM)

Amid a day packed from stem to stern with more Norma Shearer movies than any one person can tolerate in a lifetime, there's this unknown "Viennese fairy tale," adapted from an operetta, with Ramon Novarro as a sheltered royal falling for Shearer's tavern maid. Made silent in 1927, and lovely to look at.

The Last Wave (IFC, Thursday @ 1:35 PM)

Peter Weir's 1977 doomsday machine derived from native Aussie myth follows a stuffy corporate lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) through the various stages of Aboriginal world-end. It's a triumph of atmosphere and nightmare imaginings (a schoolkid-assaulting hailstorm, sourceless water running down a carpeted stairwell, a dream of flooded urbanity as seen from inside a submerged car, etc.), and as apocalypses go it's also refreshingly un-Biblical.