Life is dotted with moments of clarity. Tiny forks in the long road of existence, if you will. For example: When you find yourself at prom with a real dipshit because the person you really liked was too cool for a dance—emphasizing your shitty taste in both crushes and revenge—that’s a real moment of clarity. Losing your keys at Chicago’s finest dive bar because you let Julie talk you into doing Jaeger shots, so now you’re just sitting up with the KJ trying not to cry because you’re so tired—that’s another. Well, Rick Rojas of the New York Times had such a moment. You make one choice, and then another, and suddenly you’ve tweeted about your refusal to watch movies made before 1975, and then you’re being politely dunked on by America’s pleasantest cable network.
The tweets that drew this response from the kindly film nerds running TCM’s social media accounts have since been deleted, probably because they resulted in getting dunked on by the network that is, as this article is being filed, showing the Olivia de Havilland-starring Princess O’Rourke (Norman Krasna, 1943), in which “a flying ace’s romance with a princess creates diplomatic problems.” Still, someone’s always got a screenshot, and in this case that someone is Scott Weinberg:
But as stated above, such moments give one the opportunity to look at their life and look at their choices, and the two-part happy ending to this story is that a) it turns out Rick Rojas is one of the rare few who responds to the dunking-on of a bad hot take with humor, and b) Weinberg, likewise, responded in kind.
And lo, the bad film hot take became a pretty delightful thread of film recommendations from people who also sometimes apologize for being buttheads about the bad tweets. It’s nice! Click on the tweet above (the one with the Laura poster) to browse the responses, then flip back to TCM for a screening of Her Highness And The Bellboy (Richard Thorpe, 1945), in which Hedy Lamarr’s Princess Veronica gets escorted around by, you guessed it, a bellboy.
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