Movies on TV

Over the past few days I’ve had a couple of occasions to experience movies being broadcast on commercial cable channels. With interesting mental results.

I used to watch movies on television all the time. I’ve barely scratched the surface of how my young impressionable mind was irretrievably warped by easy access to HBO, but that’s still only a part of the picture. My family used to literally gather around the television for the yearly broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, big bowl of air-popped popcorn and everything, which sounds so hokey and Norman Rockwell now it defies belief, but I swear that’s not one of my faulty manufactured memories. That ritual stands out strongly in my mind, but I’m sure there were other occasions that all required us to take note of what time the movie would be starting on tv, and on what channel, and clear the schedule for much longer than the actual running time of the movie, so that we could sit through commercials with no way to fast-forward (no remote controls at all come to think of it – oh, the barbarism). None of those things seemed like inconveniences at the time because we couldn’t conceive of receiving entertainment any other way. Now that we have DVD players and on-demand cable services, those factors aren’t so much minor irritants as insurmountable barriers to entry. Who would watch a movie on tv anymore? (A Hollywood movie, that is. Clearly the very existence of cable channels along the Lifetime and Hallmark lines means that made-for-tv movies are with us for the long haul and will always seem correct in a scheduled, commercial-perforated context.)

Still, I was home on Saturday afternoon (baby playing happily, wife still at work) flipping around on cable and saw that the movie Elf was about to start in one minute on USA or TNT or one of those middle-tier networks. I had never seen Elf, but I like Will Ferrell and I’m a sucker for movies about the true meaning of Christmas and it wasn’t like I had already missed the beginning and the next thing I knew I was sucked in. I halfway expected it to be a failed experiment and that I would lose interest or for one reason or another fail to watch it all the way through, but I was pleasantly surprised that I made it to the end. I had to leave the room a couple of times and I’m sure some scenes were cut in the tv-editing and all in all it wasn’t as immersive an experience as popping in a DVD would have been, but it’s a Christmas fable about Will Ferrell as a man-child elf and I think I got the gist. I laughed at the good gags and I got misty at the happy ending (see above, re: being a sucker) and I think I can now honestly answer “yes” if anyone asks me if I’ve ever seen Elf. I don’t think this revelation is going to change my life, because the serendipitous combo of free time and a movie about to start on cable is going to remain rare at best. But still: keen.

Seeing a movie from the beginning is important to me only if I’ve never seen the movie in question before; I can drop in on the middle of a movie I’ve already experienced pretty easily. I was once again flipping around during Monday Night Football, which meant I had something to return to, when I hit Kill Bill Volume 1 on Spike. Specifically the part where The Bride is doing the voiceover intro of O-Ren Ishii, Gogo Yubari and the Crazy 88’s. I last-buttoned back and forth between the Packers-Ravens and Kill Bill for a while, but every time I went to the movie I seemed to stay with it longer and longer.


There’s a crazy ton of stuff happening in the movie at that point as Tarantino is arranging all the pieces on the board for what has got to be one of the greatest swordfight setpieces in the history of cinema. I remember seeing Kill Bill in the theater and just finding the story ridiculously propulsive, which is partly due to the inherent appeal of revenge stories and how they work, and partly due to the specific narrative Tarantino brings to the table. So the movie-going experience was dominated by thoughts of “what’s going to happen NEXT?” and there wasn’t room for much else.

The fascinating thing (to me) about accidentally dropping in on a movie on cable is that you are decidedly not swept up in the plot. You don’t have the immediacy of whatever momentum-building was conveyed earlier in the movie, and if you’re lingering because you’ve seen the movie before, you already know how it’s going to end so the questions of resolution have zero urgency. Flipping to Kill Bill without the intense investment in the story itself let me see everything that I was oblivious to the first time around: the way the shots are framed, the way the intercutting of scenes are structured, the way Tarantino uses different focus depths and foreground/background elements to break up one continuous tracking shot through the House of Blue Leaves into sub-scenes, the music, everything. I would say that all of those elements are really show-off-y but that can’t possibly be right since the first time I saw the movie on a giant freaking screen I didn’t consciously notice them. They are pretty delirious when you focus on them, though. Now I really feel like I need to sit down and watch both volumes of Kill Bill again and appreciate the artistry that my brain didn’t have the parallel processing power for during the initial consumption.

Of course for every “ooh, pretty” technique I noticed and gave Tarantino credit for, there was a stumbling decision made by whoever edited the movie down for basic cable that gave me something to chuckle over. Sometimes it’s actually a little bit impressive in and of itself, how computer editing now allows for a four-letter word to simply be skipped over gracefully, at least when the only sound is a character’s voice and the only visual is a close-up of Lucy Liu’s face. But other times it’s just sad, like the fact that they basically eliminated all the footage of Sofie Fatale’s severed arm hosing down the room with arterial spray. There’s a certain deranged genius to the way that bit plays out in the uncut movie, and when it’s excised there’s a measurable detraction from the impact of the Bride making her bad-ass presence known. But even that kind of negative space can make for interesting food for thought on notions of censorship and acceptable levels of fantasy violence and so on.

So, huzzah for movies on tv! They may not be the ideal combination of mediums for the utmost cinematic experiences, but I for one am glad they co-exist.