What promising movies, you may well ask, does TV have to offer this weekend? Well, I may well answer, there's the second part of a samurai epic, there's Tom Stoppard's deconstruction of Hamlet, and then there's a meditation on alienation in Swinging London! Wowee!, you may exclaim. Keep it down, I might reply, people are trying to blog in here. Perhaps you could tell me more, you may ask. Pushy, I might think, aren't you? But I would tell you anyway. And, as long as we're speaking in hypotheticals, this is what I might say:
First up is Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple on IFC Saturday morning (that's 2/14) at 7 am central/8 am eastern. If you caught Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto last week, you know that this is a must-watch trilogy. If you missed it, go ahead and start here. I think you can pick the story up easily enough. Starring Toshiro Mifune. I should point out that the above clip is far murkier than the cinemascope colors in the actual movie.
On Sunday, IFC is showing Tom Stoppard's comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead twice: first at 7 am central/8 am eastern and then again at 1:05 pm central/2:05 pm eastern. I'm sure you're aware of this movie or the play behind it, but just in case you need a refresher, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Hamlet who are convinced by Claudius (that's Hamlet's uncle, the King) to transport him to England, where Hamlet is to be executed. Hamlet escapes, but not before modifying the letter to the King of England so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be executed in his stead. At the end of the play, a messengers arrives at the Danish court to inform Claudius that R & G are dead, only to find the Hall full of bodies (uh, spoiler?). Anyway, Stoppard's play and movie assume that the viewer has more than a passing familiarity with Hamlet and Beckett's Waiting For Godot. The events in the story are greater than R & G can understand, leading them to muse on life and fate and roles that people must play as they rush headlongs towards their fates.
Finally, on Sunday night (technically Monday morning) at 1 am central/2 am eastern, TCM is showing Blow-Up, Antonioni's strangely meditative film about the nature of reality. As in other Antonioni films, the central mystery of the film is unanswerable, but it causes an existential crisis in the lead character, who in this case is a fashion photographer who believes that he has photographed a murder. Antonioni injects an extra layer of cool by setting the time and place in mid-60s Swinging London, and the cast includes David Hemmings, a shockingly young Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Birkin, and the Yardbirds in full swing with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, who steals Pete Townshend's guitar-smashing schtick for the film. The clip above appears towards the end of the film, but I had to include it because of the lovely symmetry with the fake tennis match in the clip from Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. Tennis matches: with a ball, they're only a game, but with no ball, they are metaphors for life.