TV Recommendations

I don't usually make TV recommendations, but today I do have a couple of suggestions to pass along. Please indulge me.

* Is a single year significant in the history of a country? Most of the time, a single year probably isn't significant by itself, only when seen as part of the overall picture.

Tonight, however, The History Channel will be showing a two-hour documentary on such a year -- 1968, which was an extremely significant year from start to finish.

More than most years, it seemed, 1968 had more than its share of triumph and tragedy. And there was no all-news, all-the-time channel to cover it, the way there is today.

It was a year that started with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which led many people (including Walter Cronkite) to conclude that the United States could never win in Southeast Asia. It was a year that ended with an Apollo space mission at Christmas time that took man closer to the lunar surface than he had ever been (and set the stage for the moon landing the following year).

And, in between, America witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June, as well as the unexpected withdrawal of President Lyndon Johnson from the presidential campaign in March and the riots in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey for president that summer.

Later that year, Richard Nixon was elected president, setting in motion the events that would lead to the Watergate scandal.

It was a year that affected -- and continues to affect -- politics, culture and race relations in America. From what I've read, the program will present the perspectives of many people, the famous and the unknown.

Hosted by TV journalist Tom Brokaw (who has written books on "the greatest generation" that came of age during the Depression and won the war against the Nazis and the Japanese), the program airs at 9 p.m. Eastern time, 8 p.m. Central time.

It will be repeated at 1 a.m. Eastern time, midnight Central time.

* The other night, I watched a movie on the Independent Film Channel that I've seen on cable before in recent months. Somehow, it slipped under my radar when it was released at theaters in 1996, but I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it.

The film is called "Sling Blade," and it stars Billy Bob Thornton, who won an Oscar for his writing. He was nominated for an Oscar for best actor, too, which he did not win, but he won comparable awards from the Screen Actors Guild and the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Thornton plays a simple man named Karl who has been incarcerated in the state hospital for many years for killing his mother and her lover when he was 12. Karl committed the act with a knife called a "sling blade" (Karl calls it a "kaiser blade"), a curved cutting tool that is often used for clearing brush.

Karl has been deemed "rehabilitated" and is being released from the hospital. He returns to the small town where he lived before the killings and befriends a young boy and his mother.

The cast isn't exactly an all-star cast, but it does have some familiar faces, including the late John Ritter and Robert Duvall. Ritter, who played a straight man pretending to be gay in the TV series "Three's Company," plays a real homosexual in this film and does so with a quiet dignity. Duvall has a cameo role as Thornton's long-lost father that is a masterful performance.

Other cast members you might recognize are Dwight Yoakam and Lucas Black.

It's the only film I can recall in which the last word said by all the main characters (except Thornton's character) is the same: "Karl?" It isn't spoken in unison but in four separate scenes and in four separate contexts.

The film is set in the South. Maybe that's part of the reason the characters seem so familiar to me. Much of it apparently was filmed in a town where I used to live -- Benton, Arkansas. I've also read that Thornton wrote the script in longhand at his family's home in Hot Springs, Arkansas -- a city I've visited on many occasions.

So, while I'll admit that there is a personal connection for me to this film, that doesn't mean it isn't outstanding!

The Independent Film Channel will be showing this film again at 9 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, Dec. 23, and at 3 a.m. Eastern on Monday, Dec. 24.