La Jetée again, and some unrelated comments/rants

TCM is running La Jetée again, toniht at 8:00 PM as part of the Friday Night Spotlight "Future Shock" theme. I blogged about it back in November of 2008, and it's one of those films that it would be tough to do a longer post about without giving away key plot points, what with it only running about a half hour.

I couldn't remember whether I had blogged about it before, and I'm fortunate that Blogger searches correctly on characters outside the ASCII range for the English alphabet. When I did a search on "jetee", it returned no results, but a search on "jetée", with the accent on the middle E, did correctly return the November 2008 post. Blogger, however, drops such characters in the URL for posts if you use them in the title. For the most part, however, that would only be an inconvenience for anybody stupid enough to try to remember the links to posts by the actual title of the thread and enter the URLs by hand. (Blogger also removes "a" and "the", as well as punctuation, including the hyphen.) I do wonder, though, what would happen if I tried doing a post on a Russian film and title the post using the Cyrillic alphabet.

The rant, if you can call it that, involves the TCM schedule. I notice that some sort of glitch in the daily schedule has called tonight's 8:00 PM program, "Jetee, La (to be deleted) (1962)". One wonders what's up with the "(to be deleted)" part. But of more import is that none of today's movies, and none of yesterday's either, when I was looking up Bell, Book, and Candle and Phffft!, are listed as being on DVD, when in fact some of them are on DVD. That is, if you click the individual links to each movie to get the whole synopsis page, it'll still tell you if you can buy the movie from the TCM Shop. But the main schedule page used to have a price tag icon and some text as a link to the TCM Shop page for the DVD. That is what's gone. For me, it's only mildly irritating, as I generally only use that information to determine whether a certain DVD is still in print. But you'd think that TCM would want to monetize their schedule page -- and making users go through more clicks to buy a DVD seems to go against that idea.

(For the record, La Jetée is available on DVD.