Cinemoi

Some months back, DirecTV added the channel Cinémoi to the lineup. From what I can tell, it's the American arm of a British channel, focusing partly on vintage and foreign movies, and partly on style. The last time I watched, the movies were shown commercial free; at least, there were no commercials in the last half hour of the dreadful Girl on a Motorcycle (a film which deserves a full-length post because of its hilarious awfulness, but that's a topic for another day). The only thing is, the channel seems to be permanently letterboxed. That is, latter-day films shot in a 1.85:1 format show up properly if you've got an old CRT TV, but if you're watching something from the days before widescreen, you wind up with both letterboxing and pillarboxing: black bars on all four sides. If you're watching on an old TV, you're out of luck; on HD TVs there should be some format that chops off the top and bottom of the screen and stretches out the remaining image. Or, I suppose, you could finally get an HD satellite dish, but the one I've got now works fine, and having to set up a new dish is a pain in the you-know-what.

As for the vintage films, they've had several with Rita Hayworth. Autumn Leaves is showing up today at noon, while Gilda is showing up at 5:30 PM today and 7:00 PM tomorrow. Check the listings, however.