Friday morning of last week found me keeping my appointment with the cataract specialist…and yes, I do have some small cataracts but the doc says it’s nothing to set anyone’s hair on fire about just yet. He’s going to monitor both those and my Fuchs’ dystrophy (he concurred with the retina guy…but apparently it’s not full-blown serious yet either), and in the meantime, he has prescribed for me a stronger pair of eyeglasses to deal with my vision problem. (Yes, I know that was my initial diagnosis…but I am not a medical professional…though I did play one on the short-lived sitcom Where’s That Scalpel?)
Despite the arid desert that is the DISH austerity program
(and for what I had to shell out for these eyeglasses, the program will likely
continue in perpetuity) I’ve been fortunate to find the occasional oasis in our
scaled-back programming. One of the
channels we have is something called HDNet Movies, which shows an array of
movies old and new (mostly new) and this month of August they have a number of
Hitchcock movies scheduled, including TDOY
favorites like Saboteur, Rear Window and Vertigo. The problem is that
you also have to wade through drek like The
Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl; yesterday, my father was entranced
by a little offering entitled Space
Chimps. (I swear I’m not making that
up.) What perplexes me is that when we
had our former DISH package…HDNet Movies was MIA among the channel
line-up. It’s like it’s offered up as a
sop to those folks who have to nickel-and-dime the packaging.
To back up this radical theory, DISH has bestowed upon us a
“freeview” of MGM HD and FXM for the month of August. (I’m not kidding—I think
they feel sorry for me.) I got a gander
at MGM HD when we had the U-Verse; the movies are shown unedited (and often
letterboxed, which I heartily endorse) and except for an “intermission” in the
middle (they take time to show you promos and coming attractions) they’re
mostly uncut. They’ve got some good
stuff on the schedule; I recorded ClassicBecky fave Richard III (the 1995 version with Ian
McKellen) and there’ll be some vintage offerings like The Monster That Challenged the World, Chicago Confidential, and Die,
Monster, Die! FXM’s morning schedule (which they call “FXM
Retro”) does show their movies
commercial-free; I availed myself of the opportunity to see Seven Thieves again the other day, and
it was a most enjoyable experience.
(Sure—it’s no TCM…but you don’t turn down a glass of water when you’re
dying of thirst.)
While I’m on the subject of movies, I’d kind of like to take
a brief moment to plug a couple of current crowd-funding projects to restore
some silent classics. My Facebook amigo
Eric “Dr. Film” Grayson is
spearheading a
Kickstarter effort to restore the 1918 feature Little Orphant Annie—an early film starring silent cinema legend
Colleen Moore and based on the famous poem by James Whitcomb Riley. (In fact, Riley himself makes a brief
appearance in the film—at the beginning and end, and it’s believed that this is
the only extant footage of ol’ J.W.) The
Library of Congress is providing their prints for this project, and their
material is far superior to the current ones now in circulation. There are a number of contribution levels on
this one: if you can afford the $25 kick-in, you’ll get a DVD of the finished
restoration…thirty simolians will get you a Blu-ray.
Sadly, the household budget dictated that I could only
contribute to one project (I’ve not had any problems with Kickstarter, so I
went with Annie)—the other is one
that his Filmship is also involved in; a GoFundMe effort to restore the surviving print of the 1927
feature Little Mickey Grogan. In many ways, this is even a more important
project; it’s a rarity from the FBO studios (later absorbed into R-K-O) and the
last silent feature from actress Lassie Lou Ahern—she, along with Diana Serra
Cary (a.k.a. “Baby Peggy”), is one of the few surviving performers from that
era. I really regret being too tapped
out to kick in for this one (fingers crossed that there’ll be some money at the
end of this month and the project will still be taking donations) but maybe a
few of you out in Yesteryearland have some spare change rattling around in that
sofa. I thank you.
1 comment:
Infrequently...perhaps two films over the last five years (that I recall) saw their premieres on HD Movies...indie films of the sort Mark Cuban has engaged for his Ritz Theaters and the like...
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