Thursday, December 31, 2020

Ring in the new year the same way!

There are a lot of traditions around the holidays, such as watching the ball drop in Times Square at 11:59 PM, probably an hour earlier in Central Time Zone who celebrate the new year at an odd time. No zombie Dick Clark, of course. At any rate, TCM is not immune to recycling programming ideas on December 31 in the day and prime time. I think it was on TCM back in 2004/2005 that I first saw them run ABBA: The Movie as part of a night of concert movies on New Year's Eve.

But this year sees to of the more repeated, I think, New Year's Eve programming ideas they trot out. The morning will be starting at 9:15 with the 1934 movie The Thin Man, with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, solving the murder of Edward Ellis in a story that actually does have its climax on New Year's Eve. At any rate, I'm sure you can guess what the other five movies are leading up to prime time.

Then, at 8:00 PM, we get the first of the That's Entertainment! movies, which is always somewhat sad since the wraparounds were all filmed on the old MGM backlot which at the time was already decaying and which I believe was eventually sold off. TCM used to run the trailer for it when the movie was on the schedule, which had an amusing line about how "there may never be another movie like it". Not that the producers knew there was going to be a sequel in two years. And you can probably figure out that the sequel follows at 10:30, with the next two movies following that. Hollywood, My Hometown concludes the night at 5:00 AM.

Now to do one final edition of Thursday Movie Picks before putting a wrap on the blog for 2020. Here's to hoping that the politicians don't fuck up 2021 as much as they did 2020 and it's a better year for all of us.

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