Thursday, January 5, 2023

Thursday Movie Picks and other administrative news

The 2023 schedule for the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon was released the other day, and it's a scaled back affair, with most months having only one movie week and one TV week. Since January's themes are about movies and TV shows from 2022, I'm not going to be taking part in either of those, as I didn't go to the theater at all in 2022 and don't watch much in the way of episodic TV -- and certainly not any shows that premiered last year. February gets back to romance, so I'll probably be rejoining the blogathon next month.

I've said on quite a few occasions that I prefer to blog about stuff that's either on DVD, or is coming up on one or another of the TV channels, mostly because I don't terribly like blogging about some great movie that none of you are going to have the chance to watch because it hasn't really been available since the last time TCM showed it. That policy is probably going to change somewhat over the next couple of months, mostly because of the fact that I'm going to be moving and likely getting rid of the current DVR. There are definitely movies on there that I'd like to see that don't show up often, so I hope I'll be able to get around to at least some of them and do posts on them.

Another of TCM's programming themes for January is The Jewish Experience, running every Thursday in prime time. It's a sign of the times that TCM put up a disclaimer saying that apparently there are people offended by the word "Jew", and it's not the antisemitic people. I'd never heard that complaint, and I listen regularly to the English newscast of Israel's public broadcaster which uses the word to describe Jewish people fairly regularly. The disclaimer really smacks of virtue signalling to me. In any case, I'm assuming most of the movies getting shown are the ones that were shown the last time TCM did such a theme, although the article implies that this time there's no guest to sit down with Ben.

Then, on Fridays, TCM is giving us a programming theme of female detectives, looking at a couple of different series since Hollywood liked to give us movie series in the 1930s and 1940s, at least on the first two nights. The third and final night looks to be a mish-mash of various unrelated movies that all happen to have women solving mysteries.

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