TCM: great; Fox Movie Channel: not so much

Robert Osborne: classy, smart, knowledgeable, a true movie lover and the face of Turner Classic Movies. Three years ago I was in line at a Judy Holliday film festival and saw him leaving the theatre as I was walking in. I leaned toward him. "When will you show 'About Mrs. Leslie?' "Ahh. Shirley Booth.," he said. "That's a good one. It's out of print. " A little wave, without breaking his stride. The man knows his movies, and knows exactly what to tell you in his intros and outrows. He picks interesting themes. There's "Thirty One Days of Oscar," with a month's worth of Academy Award winners in all the categories. Ethnic film festivals, including Native Americans, and the African American one doesn't run during Black History Month, by the way, which is unheard of. What else. "Guest Programmers" who choose four (sometimes five) movies they love and get to talk to Robert Osborne about why they love their movies. And the TCM Film Festival next April, and I'm going.

Tom Rothman: God awful. On Fox Movie Channel. Hosts "Fox Legacy With Tom Rothman," starring himself, which is fifteen or so minutes of his dull anecdotes before the movie starts. Why does he do this? Because he can. It's his studio. He talks about the "alchemy" of movie-making (?), or he yaks his way through through the entire plot, or he states the obvious. I don't need him to tell me how brilliant "All About Eve" is, and sorry, but "Die Hard 2" isn't in the same category. His idea of "programming" is putting the same stupid movies back to back, and calling it a Triple Play, and in the TV promos the poor announcer has to sell this idiocy as if six hours of the same shit is something to look forward to! Classics like "Revenge of the Nerds!" "Zardoz!" "Without A Trace!" (TV Land and Nick At Nite do the same, with four hours straight of "Roseanne," or "Everybody Loves Raymond," or "The Nanny," sometimes "The Cosby Show." They don't even bother to pretend it's some kind of "marathon," this is routine. Eight hours each of 3 sitcoms, and that's a day. And someone gets a paycheck to arrange this. I only hope they'll be affected by the Bush tax cuts, but now that the GOP wants to protect the hardscrabble top three percent of the country that make more than $250,000 a year, those inventive programmers should be fine. )