Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Another round of FXM repeats

I've mentioned quite a few times how it seemed the programming strategy of the old Fox Movie Channel, and now that of FXM Retro which replaced it, is to take a small number of movies out of the vault and run them a whole bunch of times for a few months, and then to put those movies back in the vault for a long time to replace them with new movies. Tomorrow's schedule contains a pair of movies that I blogged about in the early part of 2011, for example.

Roxie Hart, in which Ginger Rogers plays a chorus girl who tries to get away with murder, is on at 4:35 AM tomorrow. In fact, it was also on this morning at 6:00 AM. It's not at all uncommon for a movie to show up on consecutive days on FXM Retro; in fact, I think I've seen quite a few cases of some movie finishing the Retro part of the FXM schedule, and then being the first movie on the next morning. Unfortunately, that morning doesn't always begin at 3:00 AM any more. Sometimes, the last movie of the prime time part of the schedule runs past 3:00 AM, and the first part of the Retro schedule might only begin at 4:00 AM.

Ven Heflin leads a group of confederate soldiers leading his men on The Raid of St. Albans, VT, at 10:30 AM. This one I actually mentioned just last September when it was on the schedule then, but I have to admit I didn't pay much attention to whether it was on much between September and now. FXM doesn't replace all of its movies in one fell swoop, but however they replace their films, the result is still that there's always a fairly limited selection on FXM Retro.

At least the programming block is still limping along. As I sais when they introduced FXM on January 1, 2012, I expected the more recent movies with commercial interruptions to take over the entire schedule within six months. Three years on, and there are still some old movies, including some I've never seen before. Hooray for minor miracles.

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