TV Alert

I'm stealing a page from my lovely, wise and sexy wife and going to alert you all to a film festival starting tonight on Turner Classic Movies, an American-based cable channel. Thursdays this month, TCM is running a Miyazaki film festival. And if you haven't seen a Miyazaki animated film, you are in for a treat. Imagine animation as a serious art form, and not a cookie-cutter toy promotion/theme park pimp that we have here in the states. Imagine joy and sorrow as technicolor beings. Imagine the practical and the wondrous butting together. Imagine a small girl in an elevator with a gigantic radish spirit, no words exchanged, but there's a respectable acceptance of each other. No questions asked. Stuff to make you feel like a kid again, recapturing the sensation when you first saw something like "Fantasia," and you just weren't sure what it was, but you felt this elemental sense of wonder about where the imagination and the heart could go. Miyazaki is that times ten.

Very good stuff. And tonight, a heck of a one-two punch, "Spirited Away" and "Princess Mononoke."

Setting the DVR so I can record and savor them at my leisure. Tonight, I'm meeting a valued source in a fog-heavy alley for the advance screeners of the new season of Battlestar Galactica. Can't wait.

And there's more drama in the now-epic Death of a Shuffle saga. More later.