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Turner Classic Movies, 8:15 p.m., May 18

I don’t think Murder by Death is as good as the similarly themed Clue – both of them are parodies of the 1970s Agatha Christie murder mysteries – but it is still great fun.

Written by Neil Simon, the film’s conceit is that a rich madman (the ur-queen Truman Capote) invites the world’s greatest detectives for dinner and a murder mystery. The detectives are all versions of Miss Marple (Jessica Marbles, played by Elsa Lanchester), Charlie Chan (Lionel Wang, played with racist absurdity by Peter Sellers), Sam Spade (Sam Diamond, played by Columbo’s Peter Falk), and others, and the humor is certainly helped along if you know the quirks these great actors are mocking.

The movie is a romp of slapstick and hamming, and it’s great fun.

Hair

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Turner Classic Movies, Sunday, April 21, 1 a.m.

While the musical Hair is a beloved classic, there is an unspoken problem with the staged version. It doesn’t really have much of a plot. The movie, on the other hand, which was directed by the great Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt), has a screenplay by Michael Weller that turns the tone poem about hippiedom and revolution into a powerfully resonant story about love, death, honor and protest.

In the late 1960s, Claude (John Savage) is a farm boy draftee who arrives in New York for his Army physical and he falls in with a group of hippies that includes the charismatic Berger (Treat Williams), who introduces Claude to a debutante (Beverly D’Angelo).

The songs (like “Age of Aquarius,” “Let the Sunshine In,” and “Easy to be Hard”) are all wonderfully, lovingly staged and the film is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan the Ape Man

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Turner Classic Movies, Saturday, April 13, 12:45 p.m.

Imagine it’s 1932, and you’re gay, or you are sexually attracted to men but don’t use the word “gay” to describe it. But you know. You hear there’s a movie starring an Olympic swimmer, in which he’s wearing only a loin cloth. So, you go see it. It’s Tarzan the Ape Man and it’s about a British lord who was lost in the jungle as a boy and raised by apes. He yodels, has a chimp sidekick and he falls in love with a woman named Jane. You’re there. In the theater. Over and over. Because Johnny Weissmuller is just that hot. Thank God for Hollywood.

Iain Glen and Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones

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HBO, Sunday, April 7, 9 p.m.

It’s back! HBO’s stupendous orgy of sex, violence and beards returned for its third season March 31, and for three months, we’ll have Sunday nights full of swords, sorcery, intrigue and dragons. While the show occasionally feels exploitative (tits, again?), it is also so well acted, so well written, and so gorgeously directed, you can be titillated and still feel smart.

Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur

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Starting at 4:30 a.m., TCM is playing one great, not-so-great and fabulous Easter movie after another. It starts with Ben-Hur, the epic gladiator-meets-Jesus movie that star Charlton Heston didn’t realize was secretly a gay love story.

At 3 p.m., they’re showing Easter Parade, the wonderful Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ann Miller musical; forgive the blackface routine.

Between and after are a host of bible story movies, including both Nicholas Ray’s and Cecil B De Mille’s versions of King of Kings and The Robe, about the Roman tribunal who crucified Jesus and then decided to understand the man.

Even if you think Christianity is just an excuse to bash gays, these are great movies and probably more entertaining than an Easter egg hunt.

La Femme Nikita

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Turner Classic Movies, 10:45 p.m., Saturday, March 23

Luc Besson became world famous with the great thriller La Femme Nikita, in which a teenage junkie (Anne Parillaud) agrees to become an assassin in order to avoid going to jail for murder. She’s not happy at first and it’s not easy.

She is put through the ringer by her handler Bob (Tchéky Karyo) while another trainer (Jeanne Moreau) puts her through charm school. Then she starts killing people. And falling in love.

It’s great fun, and in French. It was poorly remade in the U.S. as Point of No Return, and it is the basis of two mediocre TV series.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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Turner Classic Movies, March 9, 2:30 p.m.

Before Stephen Spielberg started making Oscar bait, he made Oscar-worthy adventure films, and from that early period in the 1970s, I think Close Encounters of the Third Kind is his best film. Based on the classification of UFO encounters in which the third refers to human witnessing of actual alien beings, the film follows a French scientist (the great director Francois Truffaut), an Indiana electrical line man (Richard Dreyfuss) and a mother (Melinda Dillon) and her young son (Cary Guffey) as they are drawn closer and closer to that encounter. The film was initially amazing because of its then-incredible and still-gorgeous special effects, but it remains resonant because Spielberg’s dramatization of the themes of wonder, fear and destiny. It is one of the greatest science fiction films ever made

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment

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Turner Classic Movies, 2:45 p.m., Saturday, March 2

TCM is finishing off their annual 31 Days of Oscar, and March 2, they’re playing one of the great underwatched gems of the ‘60s, The Apartment. It stars Jack Lemmon as a milquetoast corporate drone who is forced to loan out his pad to his co-workers, who use it for their extramarital trysts.

One of the girls is a young Shirley MacLaine. He falls in love. This is a bittersweet comedy, and simply perfect; one of Billy Wilder’s best, which is saying a lot. Lemmon and MacLaine are both brilliant, and without this movie, there would be no Mad Men.

Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis in Tootsie

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Turner Classic Movies, 5 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 24

For some insane reason, Dustin Hoffman didn’t win an Oscar for playing Michael Dorsey, a struggling actor who impersonates a woman in order to get a role on a soap opera.

The woman he impersonates, Dorothy Michaels, is an uptight, middle-aged redhead who becomes a fan favorite and star of the soap.

Michael falls in love with his costar, Julie (Jessica Lange), while stringing along his girlfriend Sandy (Teri Garr), leading to the great line, “Sandy thinks I’m gay, Julie thinks I’m a lesbian!”

The movie is hilarious and it is perfect, going from great slapstick to gender commentary to romance, and Hoffman is brilliant, as are Lange and Garr.

Irene Cara in Fame

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Turner Classic Movies, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2:30 a.m.

Alan Parker’s searing, gritty, and brilliant musical about New York’s School of the Arts is everything Glee is not: believable, moving and full of original songs.

Starring Irene Cara as the ambitious singing and dancing Coco; Debbie Allen as the school’s charismatic dance teacher and Paul McCrane as Montgomery, who is gay in the movie and turned straight for TV show. The musical numbers are stellar, especially “Hot Lunch” and, of course, “Fame.”

Joan Fontaine and Cary Grant in Suspicion

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The only person who Hitchcock directed to an Oscar, Joan Fontaine, is wonderfully terrified as a meek heiress who marries a mysterious playboy played with devilish creepiness by Cary Grant at his best. Suspicion is one of Hitchcock’s great suspense melodramas of the 1940s, and it holds up nearly 70 years later, engrossing and thrilling. Fontaine holds up, too; she’s still alive at 95 and living in Carmel.

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde

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Turner Classic Movies Monday, Feb. 4, 5 p.m.

Arthur Penn’s hyper-violent-for-1967 film about the legendary outlaws was wildly influential and it turned Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into superstars. You can see the film in the work of Quentin Tarentino, Oliver Stone and Andrew Dominik, among others.

Film history aside, it’s also entertaining. Beatty’s charisma has never been more powerful; Dunaway is at her most raw and unhinged and sexy and the action and plot barrel toward the historically and dramatically inevitable conclusion like a runaway train down a cliff.

It’s a gorgeous and thrilling film.

Spartacus: War of the Damned

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Starz, Friday, Jan. 25, 10 p.m.

The Starz show about mostly naked muscle men killing each other and having sex with each other and many of the women they come into contact with is loosely based on the actual Roman slave rebellion during the first century B.C. It’s astonishingly violent and the sex is almost always gratuitous, but, wow, the men are so very hot. If you like that sort of thing.

Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

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Turner Classic Movies 2:15 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 22

One of my favorite movies, Rebecca is romantic, creepy, thrilling and among the most beautifully shot films ever made.

It is based on the Daphne du Maurier novel about a young woman who marries a widower and is haunted by his past, his housekeeper and his massive mansion.

Joan Fontaine is among the greatest damsels in distress ever – she eventually won an Oscar for a similar role in Suspicion – and Laurence Olivier is as sexy as he is enigmatic.

As the original evil maid Mrs. Danvers, Judith Anderson is genius. All of this is helmed by Alfred Hitchcock at the pinnacle of his pre-late 1950s career.

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

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Turner Classic Movies, 5 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 12

As camp masterpieces go, there’s no competition for this insane classic about two sisters, one stuck in a wheelchair (Joan Crawford) and the other suffering from delusions of grandeur (Bette Davis).

Davis, under layers of makeup and in dresses more appropriate for a Victorian child, overacts with hysterical results, while Crawford does among the best work of her career as Baby Jane’s subdued, long-suffering victim.

It’s quite possible to see how the film could be both good and bad, and that’s why it works so well as being camp.

It also features more future drag queen quips per minute than any other film in history except, maybe, The Women.

Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter

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Turner Classic Movies, Friday, Dec. 14, 2:45 p.m.

Katherine Hepburn won her third Oscar (in a tie with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl) playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, the scheming estranged wife of King Henry II (Peter O’Toole).

At Christmas 1183, court wrangling over who is be heir to the throne – Eleanor wants their oldest son Richard the Lionheart and Henry wants their youngest, John (names you may recall from various versions of Robin Hood) – leads to dramatic and occasionally snide speeches, dungeon imprisonments and inappropriate couplings.

Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl

Turner Classic Movies, Sunday, Nov. 25, 1:30 a.m.

On my list of movies that every gay man should see, Funny Girl is what transformed Barbra Streisand from a Broadway star into a movie star. Playing the great Vaudeville comedienne Fanny Brice from her girlhood to international fame, Streisand does everything from comedy to drama, owning every moment, and also, yeah, singing like no one else had or has since.

She won her Oscar, and deservedly so, for Funny Girl, and she’s so charismatic and so endearing that you don’t notice that the movie itself is a little creaky.

Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria

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Turner Classic Movies,

Monday Nov. 19, 2:45 p.m.

Julie Andrews is a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman in Blake Edwards’ hilarious musical comedy. Set in 1930s Paris, Andrews plays an out of work singer who gets a gimmick by pretending to be a male female impersonator. Complications ensue when she falls in love with a Chicago gangster (James Garner), whose moll (a hysterical Lesley Ann Warren) is perplexed and enraged. Meanwhile the gangster’s body guard (Alex Karras) develops a fascinating relationship with her Svengali (Robert Preston). Rather daring for everyone involved in 1982, it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars and was a huge hit.

Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye

Turner Classic Movies

Since it’s one of those weird gay movies from before Stonewall that I haven’t seen, I’m DVRing Reflections in a Golden Eye, a movie about repressed homosexual (and heterosexual) desire starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor and directed by the great John Huston.

Not considered Huston’s best movie by far (that would be The Treasure of Sierra Madre or The African Queen) but doing such a weird, queer movie with the world’s biggest stars – Brando and Taylor – was a huge risk that didn’t quite pay off.

As Vito Russo wrote in The Celluloid Closet, the film is not remotely progressive in its politics: Brando’s character can only see homosexuality as a manifestation of the effeminate. As a historical document, Reflections in a Golden Eye is vital. Just don’t take it seriously as a tutorial on how to be gay.

Glee – season 4

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Fox, Thursday, Sept. 13, 9 p.m.

While it’s become cool to hate Glee, I haven’t become cool. I still find the campy high school musical soap opera absurdly enjoyable, and it’s still the gayest thing on TV. Last season, the show’s biggest stars graduated, and just like every other TV show about high school (from Fame to 90210 to That 70s Show), it will be a struggle to keep the old magic with so many new circumstances. For example, the action will be split between New York City and Lima, Ohio, where the glee club is still part of a high school. Old favorites – including Kurt, Rachel, and Puck – remain and, I assume, so will the great musical numbers.

Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead

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Turner Classic Movies, Sunday, Aug. 26, 11:30 p.m.

King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s ridiculous novel about an ambitious, obnoxiously individualistic architect is high camp absurdity, which is fitting because of how influential Rand’s politics are among the most selfish of the current Republican leaders. Gary Cooper is Howard Roark, in arguably his worst performance, and the gorgeous Patricia Neal is his love interest. At one point, he literally sweeps her off her feet. A good movie to mock, and it will help you mock Paul Ryan, Rand’s biggest fan, with more authority.

Stephen Mangan, Mircea Monroe and Matt LeBlanc in Episodes

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Showtime, repeated constantly starting July 9

Matt LeBlanc plays Matt LeBlanc in this hilarious satire of Hollywood sitcom production. Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play Sean and Beverly Lincoln, two British TV writers whose hit BBC sitcom is being adapted for American audiences. Despite bearing no resemblance to the show’s original star (the aging, portly Richard Griffiths), LeBlanc is cast – to the Lincoln’s chagrin. LeBlanc is better than he has ever been playing a likable Hollywood semi-talent, and Mangan and Greig are wonderful parodies of arrogant, superior Brits trapped in the cultural black hole of Hollywood. HBO’s Veep is the only pay-cable comedy that is funnier.

Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

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Turner Classic Movies Saturday, June 23 10:15 a.m.

Patty McCormack plays the most wicked child imaginable in this classic film that is both campy fun and downright scary. Director Mervyn LeRoy keeps the suspense taught and focused, giving the viewer ample time to identify and sympathize with Christine (Nancy Kelly), whose daughter Rhoda (McCormack) is not possessed or crazy, just evil. Eileen Heckart steals some scenes playing the grieving mother of one of Rhoda’s victims. It’s a great film, and great fun.

Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz

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TCM, from 3 a.m., June 10, to 3 a.m., June 11

Judy Garland would be turning 90 June 10 this year, and TCM is honoring her birthday by showing all of her greatest musicals, from The Wizard of Oz to A Star Is Born to Easter Parade, and many more. While watching these films may not help you understand why she was so important to a generation of gay men – as both a tragic figure and as camp humor – but it would be a start. Also, she was an awesomely vulnerable, yet forceful actress and, wow, can she sing.

Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame

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Turner Classic Films, Monday, June 4, 2:30 p.m.

At the top of the list of movies every gay man must see, Auntie Mame is one of the camp classics that is deliberately funny, garish and, yes, camp. Based on Patrick Dennis’ semi-autobiographical novel, the movie follows young Patrick as he becomes the ward of his eccentric and ribald Auntie Mame. A wealthy New Yorker, she is still a bohemian, hanging with artists and intellectuals who appalled Patrick’s father. Rosalind Russell was nominated for an Oscar for playing Mame, and her performance – delivering lines like “tell him to bring me a light breakfast – black coffee and a side car” – is fast and crisp and wildly funny. Some of the lines go by so fast, you’ll be happy to have your DVR ready for the rewind.

Seann William Scott in Goon

dvd of the week

I loved almost every second of Goon, the broad, dirty comedy about a Massachusetts bar bouncer who becomes the star enforcer in a Canadian hockey league. Playing stupid, loyal and truly good, Seann William Scott has never been better; while he’s usually very funny, he’s never been as deeply sympathetic or as believable as a romantic lead. Jay Baruchel is doing what he normally does, which is loud and geeky and dirty, but working with the lines he wrote himself, he steals most of his scenes. Alison Pill is not just a love interest. Her cynical, self-proclaimed slut is conflicted and surprised to be in love, though after 90 minutes of watching Scott as Doug Glatt, no one else is.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep

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If you haven’t been watching Veep, you should just set the DVR and record all of the episodes that you can. HBO’s comedy Girls is getting much of the press, but Veep, in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays a harried vice president of the United States, is much, much funnier and much, much less annoying. Dreyfus is, as always, a pitch perfect comedian, but not since Seinfeld has the writing matched her skills. And, oh, the writing. While it’s a scathing political satire, the jokes are less about mocking current events than they are about figuring out ingeniously filthy ways to get from point A to point B. You gotta love a show that features a United States senator referring to someone as a “gold-plated fucking shit gibbon.”

West Side Story

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Turner Classic Films, Monday, May 7, 7 p.m.

Easily one of the two or three greatest movie musicals of all time, West Side Story is also my favorite. Stunningly shot, directed and choreographed, it is not just so beautiful to look at, but as affecting as any production of Romeo & Juliet, which it is, of course, based on. The rival Italian families of Shakespeare’s play are replaced by rival ethnic gangs in modern New York City, with Maria (Natalie Wood) falling in love with Tony (Richard Beymer) before tragedy strikes. The songs and the score are among the most indelible of 20th century music. Not to be missed.

Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams in The Vow

dvds of the week

Channing Tatum has suddenly become a very bankable star. The thriller Haywire landed with a soft thud that no one heard, but a couple weeks later the saccharine love story The Vow was a surprising hit. Both are out right now, and they’d be a good double feature. Because he’s so damn good-looking. And it turns out he’s not that bad of an actor either. (The Vow also has Rachel McAdams, who can make any movie ten times better. And Haywire was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who can’t make a bad movie.)

Fran Drescher and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic in UHF

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While ‘Weird Al’ has recorded parody songs that make an 8-year-old squeal with laughter, the idea that he could write and star in a movie that keep an adult laughing for an hour and a half is somewhat preposterous. But UHF is so balls-out absurd, so relentless in its physical comedy and so broad in its parody of low-budget local TV, the movie succeeds where it shouldn’t. It helps that ‘Weird Al’ is supported by a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards, pre-Nanny Fran Drescher and pre-wingnut Victoria Jackson. Yes, it’s a stupid movie. But it’s also hilarious.

Lena Dunham and Allison Williams in Girls

HBO’s latest dramedy is about three twentysomething women navigating love, sex and adulthood in New York City. If it was only about clothes and hair and putting men into categories like “rugged” or “wears a suit,” then it would be Sex and the City for a new generation, as some clueless TV critic wrote this week. But it’s not: Girls is about sex, but it is naturalistic and not always cheerful and not always about how sex is a weapon used for conquest. The rapturous reviews may lead to a backlash, but before that happens, DVR and enjoy.

Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot

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Arguably the funniest movie ever made, Billy Wilder’s movie about cross-dressing musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) and the most amazing ditz to ever grace the screen (Marilyn Monroe) was shot at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado and has as many quotable lines as Casablanca, Wizard of Oz and Star Wars combined. On NBC’s Smash, about the making of a fictional Marilyn Monroe musical, half of the clips that the Monroe wannabe’s watch to get into character are from Some Like It Hot. And rightfully so; it is her iconic role. And Lemmon and Curtis were at top form. A must see.

Jon Hamm in Mad Men

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Season premiere, AMC, 9 p.m., Sunday, March 25

The best show on television, and one of the best ever, Mad Men returns after almost a year and a half. In case you’ve been living under a rock: It is the story of the private and professional lives of New York advertising executives in the early 1960s, and it plays with sexism, consumerism, politics and alcoholism. While the impeccable cast is led by John Hamm and Elizabeth Moss and the insanely perfect art direction is a marvel, the stars of the show are the writers, who craft episodes like John Cheever short stories or Broadway one-act plays.

Rita Tushingham and Paul Danquah in A Taste of HoneyRita Tushingham and Paul Danquah in A Taste of Honey

A movie way, way, way before its time, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey tells the story of a young white English woman (Rita Tushingham) who has an out-of-wedlock baby with a black sailor, and her gay roommate (Murray Melvin) is determined to be the stand-in father. In 1962. A classic of British “kitchen sink realism,” it dealt with homosexuality and interracial relationships with a sensitivity no American film would approach for decades. It won a host of British Academy Awards.

Jason Isaacs and Wilmer Valderrama in Awake

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I hope that NBC’s third attempt in six months to find a drama on Thursday nights works out with Awake, a high-concept brain twister about a detective who seems to be living in two realities, one where his wife died in a car crash and another where his son died. It comes from the creator of the quickly and sadly departed Lonestar, and it stars, among others, the great Jason Isaacs and gay icons Cherry Jones and BD Wong as his parallel therapists.

Michael Cudlitz and Ben McKenzie in Southland

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One of the best cop shows on TV, Southland is the only one that features a gay beat cop, Officer John Cooper, played with awesome anger and arrogance by Michael Cudlitz. In the season premiere, Cooper has just returned sober from medical leave (thankfully, since his painkiller addiction was not the greatest pilot), and his new partner is played by Lucy Liu. Hotty McHotteron Ben McKenzie (from The OC) is still trying to be a hero and not taking his shirt off often enough. And one of the great characters on TV, Detective Lydia Adams (Regina King), is still wise, funny and smooth, and her love life is still a mess.

James Stewart, Donna Reed and Thomas Mitchell in It’s A Wonderful Life

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NBC is showing the holiday classic on Christmas Eve. I’m one of the few people who loathe this movie and its terribly conservative love-your-boring-life message, but I know that this may just be my cold, Grinchy heart speaking. So, curl up with some hot cocoa or some mulled wine, snuggle up with whoever you met under the mistletoe and brace yourself for the crying jags. James Stewart, Donna Reed, and Frank Capra will be there for you.

Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria

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This absurdly funny Blake Edwards musical comedy about a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman is one of Julie Andrews’ greatest roles. In order to get a job singing at a nightclub in Paris, she passes herself off as a gay female impersonator. Wackiness ensues. James Garner is a mafia-ish Chicagoan who figures that Andrews is really a woman and falls in love with her, while Lesley Anne Warren gives the performance of her life as Garner’s ditsy moll. She’s so funny it hurts.

Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in Pat and Mike

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George Cukor directed Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in one of their better romantic comedies, and one of the gayest, in hindsight. Hepburn and Tracy perfected the I-hate-you, I-love-you, We’re-Really-Smart-and-Funny genre, and their chemistry was not just great acting, since they were also in love and having an illicit affair. In Pat and Mike, the always-a-little-dykey Hepburn plays a star golfer (a golfer!), Tracy is her manager, and with Cukor’s slyly gay sensibility, the film has a queer feel to it. Also, it’s really funny.

MTV’s Made

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I have no idea how this will turn out, but in the season premiere of Made, MTV’s long-running show about wish fulfillment, a gay teenager is turned into a rapper. Knowing that MTV has long been the most progressive voice for gay rights on TV for 25 years, this episode could be amazing. But also knowing that MTV has turned things like MTV News and The Real World into cloying, creepy shells of their former brilliance, I’m worried. Either way, the show will be fascinating.

Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success

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Inarguably one of the great American films of the 1950s, Sweet Smell of Success is also one of the meanest, with zingers as pointed as anything in the other great 1950s films about the desire for fame, All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Burt Lancaster plays the malevolent newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker and Tony Curtis as the press agent desperate for his favor. It is classically noir, with striking black and white cinematography and a plot revolving around corruption and a wronged ingénue. Not to be missed.

Robin Wright and Colin Farrell in A Home at the End of the World

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The film version of Michael Cunningham’s lyrical, moving 1990 novel about a bisexual love triangle set among AIDS and 1980s New York is not nearly as good as the book, but it’s still a damn fine movie. Dallas Roberts, who is now playing the gay brother on The Good Wife, is in love with Colin Farrell, who can’t seem to decide if he loves Roberts or Robin Wright Penn. Farrell is as good as he’s ever been, and director Michael Mayer (best known for his very good Broadway work) handles the sad, beautiful story with great sensitivity.

Johnny Depp and Martin Landau in Ed Wood

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Flix, 8 p.m., Oct. 31

In arguably Tim Burton’s best movie, Johnny Depp plays the worst director of all time, Ed Wood, whose insanely bad, low-budget schlock often starred Bela Lugosi and various other has-beens. Martin Landau won an Oscar playing Lugosi, who can’t seem to believe he’s still playing Dracula after all these years. Depp is at his most arch and loopy. It’s a crazy, and most excellent, film.

James Stewart in Bell, Book and Candle

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I’d rather prep for Halloween with a witchy comedy than silly horror film. So, thanks to TCM, we can see the 1959 movie, Bell, Book and Candle, that was the inspiration for Bewitched. The film is a delightful romantic comedy featuring Jimmy Stewart (in the role that would be Darren in the TV show) and Kim Novak (as the blonde witch). Spells are cast that push the two together, and Stewart’s patented fluster is perfect for the oh-my-God-I’m-dating-a-witch wackiness that ensues. Kim Novak is, of course, gorgeous and seductive, though it’s hard not to prefer Elizabeth Montgomery. In key supporting roles Jack Lemmon and Elsa Lanchester stand out as wacky practitioners of witchcraft.

Kevin Bacon in Footloose

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There are three gay things about The Playboy Club that have flown under the radar: 1) The lead bunny, blonde bombshell Amber Heard, is an out lesbian. 2) A major subplot involves funneling tips to the Mattachine Society, the 1960s gay rights group. 3) Eddie Cibrian seems to be contractually obliged to take off his shirt. Sure, the show is silly, but it’s also fun. Support it! Footloose

The remake of the 1984 dance-and-rebellion movie comes out on Oct. 14, so it’s a good time to re-watch the original. Kevin Bacon moves to a small town from the big city and he wants to dance and date Lori Singer, the daughter of a stern preacher who thinks dancing leads to Satan. The plotting is silly, but the soundtrack and dancing is 1980s awesome. The movie rightfully made Bacon a star.

Leah Renee Cudmore, Naturi Naughton and Amber Heard in The Playboy Club

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There are three gay things about The Playboy Club that have flown under the radar: 1) The lead bunny, blonde bombshell Amber Heard, is an out lesbian. 2) A major subplot involves funneling tips to the Mattachine Society, the 1960s gay rights group. 3) Eddie Cibrian seems to be contractually obliged to take off his shirt. Sure, the show is silly, but it’s also fun. Support it!

Barney Frank in Outrage

HBO Signature
Wednesday, Sept. 75 a.m.

Kirby Dick’s scathing documentary about closeted gay politicians who work against gay rights will outrage anyone who doesn’t already know that, say, Charlie Crist and David Dreier are hypocritical scumbags. But the dirt digging goes beyond outing and exposes the ways in which politics and homophobia are deeply and terrifyingly intertwined.

Marilyn Monroe and Donald O’Connor in There’s No Business Like Show Business

This classic film about show people stars Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor and Marilyn Monroe and features some amazingly bombastic Merman numbers, including her signature tune “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Campy, earnest, fun and a must-see for lovers of the old school musical.