To keep you busy through the weekend, cable tv has a few movies worth watching.  One is most decidedly not a good movie, but it's a stunning failure.  The second has an interesting story behind it, at least, but I don't know if it's a good movie.  The third is one of the best movies ever made.  Choose wisely!  Heck, choose them all.

First up is Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) on IFC Wednesday, February 18 at 11 pm central/12 am eastern.  This may be Lee's angriest and most shocking movie, but all that fury leads him from one misstep to another.  Lee has a good reason to be pissed.  The history of entertainment in this country (and abroad, yes) is horribly racist and ugly, and quite a bit of that racism still permeates pop culture.  However, Lee intends this movie to be a tribute to A Face In The Crowd and Network, two movies that never stoop to showing their story when they can tell it at the top of their lungs.  First misstep!  Lee centers all of the action on an extremely unlikeable Harvard-educated black TV executive played by Damon Wayans.  Wayans shows his character to be a pretender to his social class with an accent that is, well, to call it effeminate doesn't capture its weirdness, but to call it otherworldly doesn't capture its fundamental prissiness.  Second misstep! Then Lee throws in just about every type of black stereotype there is, plus a bunch of unthinking white people, and the whole story loses its message because it refuses to include any characters worth a damn.  And that's not to mention the godawful climactic speech.  One of the things that made Do The Right Thing so great was that the people in it seemed like real people who acted the way they did for real reasons.  This movie is filled with marionettes.  Definitely worth a viewing, just to see how and why a good idea from a director with talent (and no quality control) can go so very wrong.

Next up is The Human Comedy (1943) on TCM Thursday, February 19 at 5 am central/6 am eastern.  I haven't seen this one, but I did read the novel years ago.  And here's the thing: author William Saroyan was hired by MGM to write and direct this movie.  But MGM was unhappy that it was running long, and Saroyan refused to cut anything.  So he got the axe.  He rushed to turn his screenplay into a novel and managed to get it published right before the movie was released.  So anyway, I remember reading the novel in high school and thinking that it could use more darkness and despair.  From what I understand, the book is much darker than the movie, which stars Mickey Rooney and Donna Reed, among others.  But the movie was a hit, winning an Oscar for the screenplay and being nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.  It seems to have captured a certain mindset of the mid-century American.  And the main reason it's here is that I'm interested to see how it is, and it isn't available, to the best of my knowledge, on DVD.  Oh, on more little piece of trivia: according to the IMDB, it features Robert Mitchum's first confirmed film appearance in the uncredited role of "3rd Soldier."  Go get 'em, Bob!

Finally, on Friday, February 20, TCM is showing The Battle of Algiers (1966) at 9:30 am central/10:30 am eastern.  This movie should be required viewing of all citizens of any nation that occupies another.  It has the exact opposite effect of Bamboozled: your sympathies constantly shift throughout the movie as everyone in it is a real person with real motives for their actions.  And everyone in it is doing horrible things for reasons they think justified.  The French torture captured Algerians for information (side note: as Phil Nugent wrote so eloquently yesterday, Jean Martin, who plays Colonel Mathieu, passed away a couple of weeks ago), while pointing out that they, too, were survivors of Nazi prison camps.  The Algerians bomb innocent civilians.  It's easy to say, but hard to conceptualize: the battle for freedom is never a simple matter.  Recommended for all thinking human beings.