TCM Guest Programmer: Bill Paxton

Tonight sees this month's Guest Programmer on TCM: actor Bill Paxton, whose movies include Apollo 13, in which he played Fred Haise, one of the three astronauts who successfully returns to Earth after a technical glitch causes the moon mission to go disastrously wrong. (Oh dear, I've given away the ending.) Paxton has an interesting set of selections, starting at 8:00 PM with Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. I don't think I've actually seen this one all the way through, because the last time it was on TCM, it was part of a night of Fellini's movies and came on second, after 8-1/2 (which I think is a bit overrated in that to me it never really seemed to go anywhere). So it began around 10:30 PM, and after a half hour of nothing much happening, I didn't feel like staying up until 1:00 AM for the ending.

The rest of Paxton's selections are as follows:

Spirit of the Beehinve at 10:30 PM, about to girls who try to find Frankenstein's monster after seeing the classic movie;
California Split at 12:30 AM, Robert Altman's film about a gambling road trip to Tijuana; and
The Last Detail at 2:30 AM, in which two MPs take a sailor on a road trip to show him a good time before the sailor has to go to military prison.