I haven't done a briefs post in a week and a half, mostly because I haven't generally been feeling much urge to go on my desktop computer where it's easiest to type up posts after dinner. On the tablet has generally been much easier for me, but try typing anything long-form with those touch-screen keyboards, never mind Blogger not wanting to play nicely with the table.
Alan Ladd, Jr. died a week ago at the age of 84, and I really should have mentioned him. The son of actor Alan Ladd, he became a producer in the late 1960s, working in Britain and making interesting if messy films like Villain and X, Y, and Zee, and then returned to Hollywood where he worked at Fox and shepherded films as diverse as Silver Streak, Star Wars, and Chariots of Fire, although didn't get the producer credit on any of those. Ladd finally won an Oscar for producing Braveheart, as the Best Picture Oscar nowadays goes to the producer instead of the studio. TCM did a documentary on him several years back.
I didn't know until yesterday that fellow movie blogger Caftan Woman, real name Patricia Nolan-Hall, died a few days back. I've been greatly remiss in updating my blog roll, not paying much attention to who's been blogging regularly and who hasn't, instead generally just seeing the most recent posts in the sidebar and clicking on the ones that looked interesting. I also tend not to pay that much attention to what people post about their personal lives, mostly because I barely know any of you and have certainly never met any of you. And it's not like you'd want to know that much about my personal life. But Caftan Woman's posts were always worth a read, and she'll be greatly missed.
A movie that I've never blogged about, other than to use it in a TMP, is Quintet, the Robert Altman/Paul Newman science-fiction movie where people in a post-apocalyptic world suffering from nuclear winter play a mysterious game called Quintet. I've always had trouble getting all the way through it. I briefly mentioned last month that it's back in the FXM rotation, but it doesn't look like I mentioned a time. So for those of you who want to try to watch it, Quintet will be on today at 1:00 PM, and then again tomorrow at 8:25 AM.
This being a Thursday, 31 Days of Oscar over on TCM is looking at films from the 60s, and this Thursday we get a bunch of epics, including another TCM airing of the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra, at 1:30 AM, a movie I blogged about recently. Tomorrow means films from the 1970s, and that brings the first airing in ages of a movie I've always wanted to see but never actually have, just to see if it's actually any good: You Light Up My Life, at 2:00 PM Friday. Anybody who's old enough will remember the Debby Boone song, although as I understand it she didn't sing it in the movie. If you don't know the song, click the link and suffer the earworm like the rest of us old farts.
One other 1960s movie on the TCM lineup today is A Man for All Seasons, at 11:15 PM. That gives me another opportunity to present a clip which has always been relevant, but has been especially relevant since the 2016 elections:
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