Thursday, May 6, 2021

Ooh, a virtual film festival again

It's hard to believe that governments have been shutting stuff down for 14 months now thanks to the panic over the coronavirus. It wasn't that surprising that last year's TCM Film Festival got shut down in the "two weeks to flatten the curve" hysteria, but to still be shutting stuff down a year later when empirical evidence shows lockdowns haven't worked one bit is madness. At any rate, this year's TCM Film Festival starts tonight, virtually, on TCM and HBO Max.

I suppose one minor advantage is that if you do the streaming thing and subscribe to HBO Max, it's like those old-time movie theaters that would put a movie on loop and people would supposedly come in at whatever point in the movie and leave when they got to that point in the next showing, which frankly doesn't make any sense to me. The only difference is that with streaming you can start the showing whenever you want, and you don't have to line up outside a theater to do it. (At least, that's what I'm guessing; I don't know whether the films become available only at the same time as they air on TCM.)

In any case, the opening movie on TCM tonight at 8:00 PM is a 60th anniversary airing of West Side Story. It's 155 minutes but put into a 3:15 block, so I'm guessing that the extras on HBO Max will show up in the extra time allotted. I don't see any overriding theme for the four days of movies.

The Film Festival being this weekend also means there's not much going on for Mother's Day, with the exception of I Remember Mama at 4:30 PM Sunday.

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