OggOggilby

Hey, everybody...I'm brand-new to these boards (as in, I registered about a half hour ago). I wanted to join the conversation because, yeah, I'm another one of those people who's been sitting in front of his TV irate every time I see TCM schedule a movie from the 80s/90s/00s. Here's my take: It's really less a qualitative issue (i.e, what constitutes a "classic") than it is an temporal issue. I mean, why in the world is TCM showing stuff like A Beautiful Mind (tonight), The Holiday (earlier this week) and AI: Artificial Intelligence (a month or so ago), just to name a few? People can disagree on whether or not any of these are classics (except for The Holiday; that's an object lesson in mediocrity); the issue for me is that there are sooo many other cable channels that can and do show these films, whereas many of the films one sees on TCM can only be seen on TCM (save the occasional--and often shoddy-looking PBS airing). Scheduling space is a zero-sum proposition: There are only so many hours in a month's programming grid. Why should space be taken up there by films that can be and are seen on numerous other channels when it can be used to show films that no one other than TCM will ever show? I realize the Mark Cousins documentary throws a bit of a monkey wrench into this debate, because some people believe that showing a bunch of very recent films to complement The Story of Film is completely defensible. I don't feel too strongly one way or the other about that particular situation. But A Beautiful Mind? Really?