TVSquad

Of course, every week is a great week to watch Turner Classic Movies. If you're not a regular viewer of TCM, you're really missing out.

But looking over their schedule for tomorrow, I noticed several movies are playing that you really must see, especially if you haven't seen them before. In fact, two of the movies are ones I haven't seen before myself, though I've always wanted to. Many of these movies aren't shown on TV that often, and when they are it's only on TCM, another reason to watch the channel regularly.

Besides being the day that the series finale of Seinfeld aired, May 14, 1998 was also the day that legendary singer and actor Frank Sinatra died at the age of 82. I remember spending an entire week listening to nothing but Sinatra songs, watching all the specials that aired that week, reading all of the obituaries and tributes. And now TCM is going to honor the man by airing a month long tribute starting today. In fact, they've launched a special web site for the event, Frank Sinatra: The Man and His Movies.

• It's the 60th anniversary of NBC Nightly News.
• Today's tip: if you're selling bootleg copies of The Carol Burnett Show, don't use a newspaper's address as your address. [via Lee Goldberg]
• Should CBS show Dexter, even if it is cleaned up?
• Tom Shales is not happy with Turner Classic Movies.
• What did William Shatner, Tina Fey, and Naveen Andrews do during the strike?
• This may be a silly question to ask on a TV blog, but are you a movie person or a TV person?
• Aaron Barnhart has a list of strike winners and losers.

We first told you about this back in August, and now the complete list is out: Turner Classic Movies is letting celebrities program the network for the month of November. Each celeb is picking three or four films, and here are a few of the more interesting choices (it started Thursday with Alfred Molina's picks).

Turner Classic Movies has asked several well-known celebrities to pick their favorite movies, which will be shown every night throughout November, and I have to say I'm very impressed with their picks.

Some of the choices fit the celeb. For example, Martha Stewart picked Enchanted April, Madame Bovary, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and Anna Karenina, which you can imagine Martha watching at home, a bowl of popcorn in her lap (and critiquing the job Mr. Blandings did), and James Ellroy's picks (Stakeout On Dope Street, The Lineup, Armored Car Robbery, and Murder By Contract) stay along the lines of his noir/mystery background. But a few picks are interesting. Access Hollywood co-host Maria Menounos picked the 1932 cult classic Freaks, and Food Network icon Alton Brown picked the Lee Marvin classic Point Blank. As for non-human celebs, Kermit The Frog picked Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon.

This week, TCM.com, the site for Turner Classic Movies, launched a cool little video site called the Media Room that features a bunch of movie trailers and clips from its library of classic films.

On occasion however, you will be able to watch select feature-length films. Currently, you can see Living on Love starring James Dunn and Whitney Bourne. Other films will follow, including Rafter Romance, A Man to Remember and Double Harness.

I think this is a really cool idea, especially for folks who might not be familiar with some of these old movies. This new site gives people a chance to watch trailers and clips and get an idea of what the movie is about so they can decide whether or not they'd like to see it. There are always trailers and clips available for current releases, but not as many for older flicks. I myself have already been checking out the clips for Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire, a movie I'm curious about since one of Browning's other films, Freaks, is probably one of my top ten favorite movies of all time.

[via Hollywood Reporter]

I am now one of you. No longer will I be shunned at social events, ignored by family, and laughed at by world leaders. That bleak and dark time of my life is now over. Why, you ask? Well, as of a few short months ago I became one of the 24 million households that owns a flat-screen HDTV. Utopia is now within my reach.

I had no interest in purchasing one at first. It was the re-carpeting of our family room that actually planted the seed.

Remember when AMC used to show movies that actually fit into their name, American Movie Classics? And then for some reason they started to show Predator five times a month. Turner Classic Movies has been the network to watch lately.

But starting in October, the cable network will get back to its roots a little bit more with AMC Gold, which, despite sounding like some CD of 70s songs you might buy from an infomercial, is actually a new regular feature showcasing movies that AMC says are "essential viewing." So far the list includes On The Waterfront, Sergeant York, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Apollo 13.

Apollo 13 is a good movie, but let's hope the network doesn't pull from the list of more recent films too often. There are plenty of older classic gold movies to keep the feature going for a few years.

Last year, Brett mentioned that Turner Classic Movies would be showing a retrospective on the life and career of actor Marlon Brando. Well, it's finally here, and you can check out the first part of Brando on TCM tomorrow night at 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and the conclusion on Wednesday night at the same times.

The documentary features interviews with Al Pacino, John Turturro, John Travolta, Martin Scorsese and Cloris Leachman, among others about what it was like to work with a man many considered both a genius and one of the most difficult men in Hollywood to work with.

If you can find it, I also recommend Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now that also shows a glimpse as to what Brando could be like on set. Of course, by the end of filming on that movie I think everyone had pretty much lost their marbles.

The Hollywood Reporter has a review of the doc here.