A pair of Guest Programmers

With the Presidential race going on here in the US (will it ever end?), TCM decided to call up a pair of political writers and have them select some movies. Those selections will be airing tonight. The two are Jonah Goldberg from the right (if you believe politics only goes from right to left or left to right) and Leon Wieseltier (whom I'd never heard of before) from the left. I haven't been paying close enough attention to TCM to see the bits between the movies, so I haven't seen any promos to see if the two writers were in the studio together (presumably with Ben Mankiewicz) to discuss their selections. I'd hope so, because the selections are alternated, one from Goldberg followed by one from Wieseltier, and so on.

Tonight's lineup:

8:00 PM A Face in the Crowd (selected by Goldberg), a movie that makes sense in the current political climate of treating politicians as celebrities;
10:15 AM America America (Wieseltier). Elia Kazan's movie about immigration; you can imagine why somebody on the left would select this
1:15 AM Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Goldberg). The little guy standing up to the corrupt government could be a theme for anybody of any political stripe, and somehow I have a feeling Jefferson Smith would be horrified at seeing people use him for their own ideologies.
3:30 AM Fury (Weseltier). Weseltier selected this because of its themes of demagoguery; I'd rather use it to point out the dangers of having prosecutors with political ambitions. Although on that point, They Won't Forget might be an even better choice.

I've watched a couple of movies off my DVR recently, and will get around to doing full-length posts on them sometime.