Like a lot of people, I re-subscribed to HBO several months back to catch the final season of The Sopranos. When the show cut to black and left me hanging on Steve Perry's operatic bluster at the climax of "Don't Stop Believin,'" I was too stunned to call the cable operator and cancel my service. And I'm glad I didn't. I'm now sucked into the slowly-simmering second season of Big Love, mightily enjoying the scruffy comic stylings of Flight Of The Conchords, and making a go of figuring out just what the fuck is happening on John From Cincinnati. HBO's current slate of original shows doesn't quite live up to the channel's reputation–if only because the supremely sucky Entourage, like Ebola and Winona Ryder, taints everything it touches–but it forms the core of my summer televised entertainment schedule, along with Brewers games and reality TV shows starring famous hair metal frontmen and small armies of stripper slutbots.
But I'm not here to talk about HBO's TV shows. I want to address the HBO programming nobody talks about and yet makes up the bulk of its schedule: movies. You would think a cable network called Home Box Office would put movies front and center in its promotional materials, and attempt to lure subscribers by promising to present the latest, greatest flicks in pristine form, uncut, in the privacy of your own home. True, in the age of DVDs and On Demand seeing movies on cable isn't quite the humdinger it was when I was a kid, when my dad let me watch Risky Business with him on HBO as long as I left the room during the sex scenes. (Which is why for many years I thought Tom Cruise's love interest in Risky Business was Curtis Armstrong, not Rebecca DeMornay.) But the fun of subscribing to a movie channel is serendipitously discovering those movies you don't know to rent or order until you stumble upon them late at night and get your mind blown. That's certainly the case with Turner Classic Movies, hands down the best movie channel around in terms of selection, presentation, and respect for the form. I'm also becoming a fan of Encore's MoviePlex channel, which balances out a fair amount of dreck with lost gems like Hal Ashby's wonderful 1970 directorial debut The Landlord (currently unavailable on DVD) and the 1973 Sergio Leone production My Name Is Nobody. HBO, though, is far more likely to put James Gandolfini or Larry David in a commercial than clips from its roster of upcoming movies.
The reason why is obvious to any HBO subscriber: The TV shows are typically good to great, while the movies are mediocre to incredibly shitty, and presented accordingly.
I have about a dozen HBO channels as part of my cable package, and I swear three of them play Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter Is Dead every single morning. Admittedly, the pop culture masochist in me doesn't mind this so much. Normally, I try to seek out movies, albums, and books I expect going in to be good, and more often than not I've done enough investigating beforehand to ensure my time won't be wasted. The upside to this approach is that you end up experiencing a lot of worthwhile entertainment. The downside is constant exposure to quality can make it seem average and run of the mill–you need some crappy contrast to make greatness truly stand out. The best thing I can say about HBO's movie programming is that it has given me a shit-ton of crappy contrast for movies I love. In the past few weeks alone I have watched all or part of the following: She's The Man, Date Movie, Rumor Has It, The Break Up, You, Me, And Dupree, The Devil Wears Prada, and Monster-In-Law, as well as "classic" crap like The Secret Of My Success, Great Expectations, Doctor Doolittle, and the aforementioned Christina Applegate vehicle about climbing the corporate ladder as a fashion-minded teenager with a conveniently deceased caregiver. After feeding myself a steady diet of movies I would normally never watch, I feel good about the fact that 99 percent of the movies I assumed were horrible based solely on the commercials were, in fact, horrible.