I like your typical holidays – Christmas is nice and my birthday lasts two pretty terrific weeks usually – but tomorrow marks the beginning of my very favorite time of year. Beginning now in the dead of winter and extending until early April is my season. The high holy days that I look forward to all year and miss as soon as they are gone. They are, in succession, TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar and the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I have no need to lament the weather outside when I can get genuinely excited about being stuck in the house all day staring at my television like a true, red-blooded American.
March Madness is still a ways away; these are the days of studious preparation (or in my case, blind delusion mixed with scorn) but fortunately TCM’s annual cinema celebration is here just in time for the winter storm that will surely kill us all. Every movie the network plays will have been nominated for an Academy Award in some category and they are grouped each day according to themes. If you find yourself snowbound this week, these are my best bets to pass the time:
Citizen Kane – kick off the festival tomorrow with what is widely praised as the best movie of all time. Airing at noon central time (as all listings will be here), it’s an obligatory viewing for everyone at some point in life, so why not watch it when you have absolutely nothing else to do? It’s a perfect snow day movie – there’s a sled. But that’s as much as I’ll say about that.
Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider – Wednesday night is a marathon of Jack Nicholson films, and these are the most exciting. Airing at 7p.m. and 11:30, you’ll have no reason to miss them if you live somewhere where you’re actually expected to go to your job in the middle of Snowmageddon or the Icepocalypse. Back in the early days before the unbearable ego and one-note performances, Nicholson was just a terrific actor, which is why he has more Oscar nominations than anyone else. You don’t want to miss the man at his best, and maybe films about the irrepressible fight for freedom will help those trapped-in-the-Overlook-Hotel feelings you’ll surely be facing before you wind up searching for an axe.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and A Streetcar Named Desire – Thursday brings the goods with classics featuring family tension that might make you pretty pleased to be snowed in by yourself. There are two rules of thumb with classic cinema: Watch anything with Sidney Poitier, and watch anything with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Guess Who at 9:30a.m. meets both rules, so no sleeping in. And the only thing in the world wrong with A Streetcar Named Desire is that Jessica Tandy is not in it, and Vivien Leigh almost always annoys me. But she won an Oscar for it, as did Karl Malden and Kim Hunter. Only Marlon Brando didn’t, and he defined the Stanley Kowalski role for the rest of eternity. So there. Airs at 4:30.
The Lion in Winter and The Bridge on the River Kwai – Friday offers up more Katharine Hepburn at 1:45, bringing it hard as Eleanor of Aquitaine alongside Peter O’Toole and a young and sprightly Anthony Hopkins. This is a favorite for any history nerd, as is The Bridge on the River Kwai at 9p.m.. This one will probably make you cry, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
If you need me this week, I’ll be getting “snow drunk” (where you can drink wine all day long because you can’t have anywhere to go) and burning my retinas with the great American pastime.
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