I have been enjoying a free preview of the Sundance Channel via my cable provider. It has lasted a good long while, and will end in a few days, but I have discovered some obscure movies that I would not have otherwise seen.

One of them is L'amour fou - A documentary on the relationship between fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent and his lover, Pierre Berge.

It starts with the death of Saint-Laurant and then we see his life through flashbacks, and then back to the present as their lavish Paris apartment is dismantled, all the fabulous artworks going to auction. That place was a feast for the eyes. They had a second home in Morocco, and it was fun to see that, as well as the fashions over the decades portrayed through film clips. The language is French with subtitles. I recommend it for anyone who likes to see inside other peoples' homes.

Another favorite is Of Time and The City. - The film has Terence Davies (an English screenwriter, film director, sometime novelist and actor) recalling his life growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, using newsreel and documentary footage supplemented by his own commentary voiceover and contemporaneous and classical music soundtracks.

It's the anglophile's dream combined with that fond nostalgia for the mid-century years when I was growing up. A lot of it is just the daily gritty life set to great music.

He refers to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth as "Betty and Phil with a thousand flunkies. The trouble with being poor is it takes up all your time. The trouble with being rich is it takes up everyone else's."

Sometimes a movie will take us somewhere unexpected. I was watching Control, set in England in the 1970s, about a guy named Ian Curtis. He was an odd guy who was noted for his participation in a post-punk band called Joy Division. I'd never heard of him, and would probably never listen to their music. He suffered from epilepsy and depression, and killed himself in 1980 at age 24. Since I didn't start out knowing anything about him, watching his life, I was amazed that he had amounted to enough to warrant a biographical movie. I was watching it because I like black and white movies set in middle-class England. Then, I saw another movie about that general time period, and it touched on his story, so I felt like I was In the Know, and maybe there was more to him than I thought.

One reason I was excited about free access to that channel was they were going to feature the mini-series Restless adapted from William Boyd's novel.

Restless is about English people who worked for an information agency in the late 1930s-early 1940s that planted half-true and totally un-true news stories in the media for political purposes. One of their biggest efforts was to get the United States to enter World War Two, and the premise of the story was that a fake map from Nazi Germany showing airline flights from South America to the United States would tip the balance of American sentiment when we realized we were the spoils of war already being divided up. Pearl Harbor negated the need for that campaign, though, and they all went home.

I'd liked the novel, but was disappointed by the movie because they peppered it with advertisements. Yes, we have TIVO, but it's still distracting to have to stop the story to fast-forward. And they did that stupid announcement at the end of each break: "You are watching Restless on the Sundance Channel" in addition to having crap splashed all over the bottom of the screen: "Premiere: Restless - the Sundance Channel. Next week: blah blah blah" (It's getting to where there is barely any real estate left on the screen for the show we are currently trying to watch.) I hadn't expected all the ads because most of the movies on Sundance Channel have only one break in the middle.

Well, after feasting on movies, I'm ready for a break. I'll be glad when the free preview ends. Maybe sometime I'll subscribe to their package that includes this channel, but not very soon. I still have Netflix, but have to say their Instant View never seems to offer any movies I want to see. If I want to catch up on the first-rate movies, I'll have to subscribe to their DVD offerings.

Soon, I'll be back in Colorado where there are two public TV stations, and one of them shows a classic old movie on Saturday nights. That's where my charity donation goes every year.