To begin with, there’s no Snark Attack or OCD Jukebox tonight. There are two reasons for this…
The first reason is long, but basically, Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (WMP) for Windows 10 and 11 is borked, big time. Apparently it’s an issue that’s been known since 2019, but they haven’t fixed it. What it does is eat the album cover art of your files, leaving you with this:
If you try to fix this by right-clicking on an album and doing a “find album information” search, you’ll see that there’s no album cover in their database. Because they didn’t bother to update all the information.
So then you’re faced with the tedious task of finding covers online and then pasting them into WMP yourself. See that image above? Yeah, imagine page after page that looks like that, and you understand my plight. I’ve been working for hours and have only made a small dent in the situation.
So, yeah. I’ve learned this lesson: save each album cover as I go to a “covers” folder, so that the next time WMP eats them (which it inevitably will, as this has happened before to me. This time is just the worst case of it I’ve seen…) it won’t take quite as long to copy-paste them back in place.
So… silver linings, right?
The other reason for the interruption in our regularly scheduled program is that August is “Summer Under the Stars” on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). So every day, they feature a different classic film star, like Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, or Katherine Hepburn. Okay, you’re thinking, but what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
We won’t be getting any Noir Alley for August. So I’m going to do my own programming for us, following these guidelines:
- Every film selected will be available FOR FREE on YouTube, so you’ll be able to watch it at your leisure before I cover it. The schedule will be posted at the end of this month, so you’ll have at least a full week to watch the first film.
- Avoiding films that are in Turner’s library, and instead opting to promote films that are rarely seen. There are a lot of movies to choose from, so I’m picking the best of them here to share with you. This should also help us avoid duplication once Noir Alley returns in September and beyond.
- Few, if any, commercial breaks.
- Each link to a film will be the cleanest copy I can find, with best image and sound, along with nothing irritating added (like a ghost watermark that’s visible on the entire film).
- Will try to get a good representative selection covering the various sub-genres of noir films, like criminal/gangster, police procedural/detective, gothic noir, and social problem.
- Films that are unquestionably noir, with the visual and thematic hallmarks of the genre.
- If there’s source material available online on which the film is based, like a short story or novel, that will be linked along with the movie. That way, if you want, you can compare and contrast the source material to the film.
I may not be able to meet all those guidelines, but will come as close as I can to them.
Be sure to watch each film so we can discuss them in comments! Oh, BTW, I have one film lined up that blew me away when I saw it! Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it, too! (That one’s last on the schedule). 🙂
Okay, my Blender peeps, I’m outta here! Gotta find more covers to copy-paste into my WMP. As always, this is an open thread, so feel free to discuss whatever you like in the comments below.