by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Sometimes Lifetime weakens one of their better productions
by showing a not quite as good film on a similar theme right after it, and last
night they did that with a film misleadingly called Escaping My Stalker, a title which doesn’t really do it justice. It’s
actually about a 16-year-old girl who was living on the streets of Los Angeles
(though our only clue to that is a 213 area code on one of the local phone
numbers she asks to be connected to) named Taylor (Ezmie Garcia, who’s actually
quite good and authoritative in the role). Taylor was homeless and forced to
live by her wits on the street (though she’s somehow managed to maintain her
virginity, something homeless teenage girls almost never can do because too
often they’re either raped or turn to prostitution to survive) until she was
picked up (licitly speaking) by a middle-aged couple named Larry (Linden Ashby,
who also directed the film from Stephen Romano’s script) and Sandy (Alexandra
Paul) Stuart. The Stuarts run a homeless shelter downtown but have been so
impressed by Taylor’s survival skills and overall goodness — including her
outreaches to other homeless kids in the neighborhood — they have adopted her and
she’s been living with them for a year. She also has a job working at an indoor
skater park when she meets Clu Dunsten (Pedro Correa), a highly talented
skateboarder whose brother almost turned pro in the sport until he died (the
implication is he went into the military and was killed in combat), a cute,
tousled-haired young man with a disarming manner. They start to date, but
unbeknownst to either Taylor or anyone else she’s been targeted by a mad
killer.
The mad killer is Miles Dyson (Andrew James Allen), and writer Romano
decides to tell us what’s going
on well before the on-screen characters know it. It seems that on the street
Taylor befriended Miles’ brother Randy, only when the Stuarts adopted her she
stopped going to the streets and stopped seeing him, so he killed himself. Both
Dyson brothers were under the total brainwashing and control of their
grandmother Marnie (Mariette Hartley, giving one of those
move-out-of-the-way-and-let-the-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances
like Ellen Burstyn’s in the Lifetime version of Flowers in the Attic. Marnie Dyson used all the classic brainwashing and
“seasoning” techniques to enslave both her grandsons and make them powerless to
resist her (“seasoning” is what U.S. slave-traders called the process of breaking
the newly captured and transported slaves’ will and getting them to accept
their lot, including their utter powerlessness). In the final confrontation
scene, Marnie boasts of how she brainwashed her late grandson Randy by locking
him in a room without food or light for two months until when she finally
released him, he accepted her without question as his benefactor (though he had
the presence of mind to escape later on and to latch on to Taylor, only to kill
himself when Taylor left the streets to become the Stuarts’ adopted daughter,
for which Marnie blames Taylor) — and she says she’s going to do the same thing
to Taylor: lock her in a dark room without food for two months, then release
her and have her accept Marnie as her lord and mistress — “and then I’m going
to slit her pretty little throat.” I made the Flowers in the Attic parallel and certainly both Romano’s writing of
Marnie and Mariette Hartley’s chilling playing seem to belong much more to the
world of V. C. Andrews than the usual Lifetime formula — even though Pierre
David and Tom Berry are the credited producers of Escaping My Stalker and they have previously supplied a lot of Lifetime’s most blatantly formulaic product.
Escaping
My Stalker is full of plot holes — notably
the whole idea of even the most loving couple, hugely concerned about the fate
of the homeless teens attracted to their shelter program, actually taking the
huge risks of adopting one (two, since a young, cute Black kid, whom we’re told
is 14 even though he has a visible moustache, who helped Larry Stuart after
Miles tied him up and gagged him in his home and Taylor gave him her family’s
address so he could rescue Larry and call 911, also gets adopted by the Stuarts at the end); also how
easily Miles infiltrates the staff at the shelter and he’s even able to plant a
bug in the Stuarts’ office without anybody catching on to him even though his
whole smoldering James Dean act almost seems to scream out, “Watch out! This
one’s dangerous!” I also wished
the character of Clu Dunsten had lasted longer instead of being murdered by
Miles just before the halfway point, not only because he was cute and a nice
counterpoint to Miles’ smoldering evil but offing him seemed the equivalent of
offing the white heroine’s African-American female friend who stumbles onto the
villain’s plot but gets killed for her pains — and frankly I was hoping that he
would make it to the end and become Taylor’s lover. But though I don’t think Escaping
My Stalker lived up to the promise of its
title, and it wasn’t quite as well directed as Black Widow Killer, it was still a quite good, compelling feature
several cuts above the Lifetime norm, and quite haunting in its depiction of
the support structures street people build to help each other survive; the idea
that there is nobility as well as desperation and greed among homeless people,
and they sometimes stab each other in the back but also help each other out at
times, is one we need more of in depictions of them. About the only really
false note I found in this movie is the rather seedy appearance of Alexandra
Paul in one of the parts that’s supposed to represent stability and “normal”
life and sanity — but maybe that had at least something to do with how much she
reminded me, both physically and in her mannerisms, particularly her weird mix
of love and almost suffocating, neurotic protectiveness, of my own mother.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Monday, March 9, 2020
Kidnap (Di Bonaventura Pictures, Gold Star Films, 606 Films, Relativity Media, Universal, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime presentation was of a film called Kidnap, and they ballyhooed the presence of Halle Berry as star so relentlessly I had got the idea that Kidnap Starring Halle Berry was actually the film’s title. I had also assumed the movie was made for Lifetime, but it was a wanna-be theatrical release from a company called Relativity Media which raised money from investors by claiming they had a mathematical formula that would ensure long-term success and a steady stream of profits from an industry as inherently chancy as filmmaking. Alas, after a series of commercial bombs they were forced to declare bankruptcy in 2017 and the remaining films in their pipeline were sold to other studios. Kidnap is prefaced by the usual plethora of production company credits — Di Bonaventura Pictures, Gold Star Films, 606 Films — and casts Halle Berry as Louisiana resident Karla Dyson, who’s just gone through a divorce and is fighting her ex-husband for custody of their young son (he’s supposed to be 6 but looks more like 8 or 9) Frankie (Sage Correa) even though Frankie’s dad and dad’s new girlfriend both have professional jobs while Karla is barely scraping by as a waitress. In the opening scene she’s shown on the job getting into an argument with a couple of parents and their heavily spoiled young son about just what they will order, and Karla can’t help but mutter an insult to them even though that sort of thing could get her fired. Then she takes Frankie to a playground, only in the middle of their outing she has to take a phone call, she turns away from him, and when she turns back he’s gone.
Karla gets a glimpse of him being grabbed by a shadowy figure and pulled into a 1980’s Ford Mustang GT of indeterminate color — it’s described in the script as green but it looked teal blue to me — and she doesn’t get its license-plate number because it doesn’t appear to have one. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling the police on her cell phone, Karla decides to chase the Mustang on foot and actually grabs on to it, though of course nothing she does can stop the car (hey, Halle, when you made a DC Comics Universe movie you were Catwoman, not Wonder Woman!), so she gets into her own car, a red Chrysler Town Car SUV that has a hard time keeping up with the Mustang even though, as some imdb.com posters pointed out, the two are about equal performance-wise and her car is newer and therefore presumably faster. (Charles also questioned whether a woman working as a waitress could afford such a high-end car, but maybe she bought it during her marriage and got title to it after the divorce.) From then on the film becomes a long series of car chases that reminded Charles of The French Connection and The Blues Brothers, as the antagonists end up causing accidents that include the flipping-over of another SUV, the near-death of a woman pedestrian who happens to get in their way, and the crushing to (apparent) death of a motorcycle cop who tries to get Karla to pull over and ends up being squeezed between her car and the Mustang. Karla finally reports the kidnapping of her son at a sheriff’s office and the bored Black deputy working the reception desk puts out an Amber Alert for the green, blue, teal or whatever-color-it-is Mustang — only in the meantime it’s been put out of commission after Karla ran it off the road and the kidnappers have stolen a black Volvo SUV to continue the chase.
Also Karla has actually met the kidnappers, a scrawny white guy named Terrence Tichy (Lew Temple) and his wife, a huge woman named Margo (Chris McGinn, who was in The Silence of the Lambs and has a surprisingly long credits list on imdb.com — one would think she’d be difficult to cast because of her enormous size, but she’s managed to keep working for almost three decades). Margo tells Karla that Terrence just wanted to kill her son Frankie, but Margo can persuade him to let Frankie go alive if Karla can come up with a $10,000 ransom. At one point Margo insists on getting into Karla’s car, where she sits in the back seat but then in the middle of the ride — which they’re presumably taking so Karla can drain her bank accounts and max out her credit cards to pay the ransom — Margo insists on grabbing the controls, giving new meaning to the phrase “back-seat driver,” until Karla manages to throw her out of the car and strand her. Then, after Karla has pushed the Mustang off the road but has run out of gas herself, she gets shot at by Terrence with a shotgun and a truck driver she was asking to help her gets blown away. At the police station where she reports a crime she sees a whole wall full of wanted posters for missing children — in one of the few genuinely poignant moments of the movie — and her heart sinks. One thing she has been able to do from the wreckage of the kidnappers’ Mustang is retrieve their I.D.’s, which tell her not only their names but also their address — and Karla ends up going there to find her son, only to play a cat-and-mouse game with the woman kidnapper (Karla had managed to kill Terrence with his own shotgun, but his wife doesn’t yet know he’s dead), calling on the Tichys’ cordless phone to the police. She finds her son but also two other kidnapped children, both girls, only she has to flee in a hurry when Margo retrieves her husband’s shotgun and sets a tracking dog on her to find where she and Frankie are hiding — only Margo accidentally kills the dog with the shotgun and Karla is able to kill Margo.
Then Karla attempts to free the other captives — only she’s set upon by another guy with a shotgun, the Tichys’ neighbor, who at first insists he’s known them for years and they would never do anything like that, then seems to switch sides and help rescue the kids still being held captive in the Tichy’s attic, only Karla realizes that he knows something she’s never told him — that there are two captives and they’re both girls — so she realizes he’s part of the human-trafficking ring that’s behind all this and was offering $100,000 for Frankie. Karla kills Frankie by walloping him with a shovel, the police finally arrive and rescue everybody, and we see a newscaster announcing that Karla’s brave actions have led to arrests of members of a widespread human-trafficking ring over several states. Kidnap is a genuinely exciting thriller — writer Knate Lee and director Luis Prieto knew exactly what they wanted to do to their audience, and did it — though there are an awful lot of plot holes and we’re all too aware of them even as we’re being swung like one of those tethered amusement-park balls from one thrill to the next. Halle Berry is effective in what’s basically a one-woman show, but the role doesn’t require her to do much but show an adrenaline-fueled panic and a single-minded determination to find and rescue her son no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts in the pursuit. One can see why this wasn’t a big theatrical hit, and if this is the sort of movie Relativity Media thought was sure-fire box-office gold it’s not surprising they went bankrupt, but Kidnap is at least a movie that accomplishes what it set out to do even though one could imagine a far richer, greater film being made of the same basic situation.
Last night’s Lifetime presentation was of a film called Kidnap, and they ballyhooed the presence of Halle Berry as star so relentlessly I had got the idea that Kidnap Starring Halle Berry was actually the film’s title. I had also assumed the movie was made for Lifetime, but it was a wanna-be theatrical release from a company called Relativity Media which raised money from investors by claiming they had a mathematical formula that would ensure long-term success and a steady stream of profits from an industry as inherently chancy as filmmaking. Alas, after a series of commercial bombs they were forced to declare bankruptcy in 2017 and the remaining films in their pipeline were sold to other studios. Kidnap is prefaced by the usual plethora of production company credits — Di Bonaventura Pictures, Gold Star Films, 606 Films — and casts Halle Berry as Louisiana resident Karla Dyson, who’s just gone through a divorce and is fighting her ex-husband for custody of their young son (he’s supposed to be 6 but looks more like 8 or 9) Frankie (Sage Correa) even though Frankie’s dad and dad’s new girlfriend both have professional jobs while Karla is barely scraping by as a waitress. In the opening scene she’s shown on the job getting into an argument with a couple of parents and their heavily spoiled young son about just what they will order, and Karla can’t help but mutter an insult to them even though that sort of thing could get her fired. Then she takes Frankie to a playground, only in the middle of their outing she has to take a phone call, she turns away from him, and when she turns back he’s gone.
Karla gets a glimpse of him being grabbed by a shadowy figure and pulled into a 1980’s Ford Mustang GT of indeterminate color — it’s described in the script as green but it looked teal blue to me — and she doesn’t get its license-plate number because it doesn’t appear to have one. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling the police on her cell phone, Karla decides to chase the Mustang on foot and actually grabs on to it, though of course nothing she does can stop the car (hey, Halle, when you made a DC Comics Universe movie you were Catwoman, not Wonder Woman!), so she gets into her own car, a red Chrysler Town Car SUV that has a hard time keeping up with the Mustang even though, as some imdb.com posters pointed out, the two are about equal performance-wise and her car is newer and therefore presumably faster. (Charles also questioned whether a woman working as a waitress could afford such a high-end car, but maybe she bought it during her marriage and got title to it after the divorce.) From then on the film becomes a long series of car chases that reminded Charles of The French Connection and The Blues Brothers, as the antagonists end up causing accidents that include the flipping-over of another SUV, the near-death of a woman pedestrian who happens to get in their way, and the crushing to (apparent) death of a motorcycle cop who tries to get Karla to pull over and ends up being squeezed between her car and the Mustang. Karla finally reports the kidnapping of her son at a sheriff’s office and the bored Black deputy working the reception desk puts out an Amber Alert for the green, blue, teal or whatever-color-it-is Mustang — only in the meantime it’s been put out of commission after Karla ran it off the road and the kidnappers have stolen a black Volvo SUV to continue the chase.
Also Karla has actually met the kidnappers, a scrawny white guy named Terrence Tichy (Lew Temple) and his wife, a huge woman named Margo (Chris McGinn, who was in The Silence of the Lambs and has a surprisingly long credits list on imdb.com — one would think she’d be difficult to cast because of her enormous size, but she’s managed to keep working for almost three decades). Margo tells Karla that Terrence just wanted to kill her son Frankie, but Margo can persuade him to let Frankie go alive if Karla can come up with a $10,000 ransom. At one point Margo insists on getting into Karla’s car, where she sits in the back seat but then in the middle of the ride — which they’re presumably taking so Karla can drain her bank accounts and max out her credit cards to pay the ransom — Margo insists on grabbing the controls, giving new meaning to the phrase “back-seat driver,” until Karla manages to throw her out of the car and strand her. Then, after Karla has pushed the Mustang off the road but has run out of gas herself, she gets shot at by Terrence with a shotgun and a truck driver she was asking to help her gets blown away. At the police station where she reports a crime she sees a whole wall full of wanted posters for missing children — in one of the few genuinely poignant moments of the movie — and her heart sinks. One thing she has been able to do from the wreckage of the kidnappers’ Mustang is retrieve their I.D.’s, which tell her not only their names but also their address — and Karla ends up going there to find her son, only to play a cat-and-mouse game with the woman kidnapper (Karla had managed to kill Terrence with his own shotgun, but his wife doesn’t yet know he’s dead), calling on the Tichys’ cordless phone to the police. She finds her son but also two other kidnapped children, both girls, only she has to flee in a hurry when Margo retrieves her husband’s shotgun and sets a tracking dog on her to find where she and Frankie are hiding — only Margo accidentally kills the dog with the shotgun and Karla is able to kill Margo.
Then Karla attempts to free the other captives — only she’s set upon by another guy with a shotgun, the Tichys’ neighbor, who at first insists he’s known them for years and they would never do anything like that, then seems to switch sides and help rescue the kids still being held captive in the Tichy’s attic, only Karla realizes that he knows something she’s never told him — that there are two captives and they’re both girls — so she realizes he’s part of the human-trafficking ring that’s behind all this and was offering $100,000 for Frankie. Karla kills Frankie by walloping him with a shovel, the police finally arrive and rescue everybody, and we see a newscaster announcing that Karla’s brave actions have led to arrests of members of a widespread human-trafficking ring over several states. Kidnap is a genuinely exciting thriller — writer Knate Lee and director Luis Prieto knew exactly what they wanted to do to their audience, and did it — though there are an awful lot of plot holes and we’re all too aware of them even as we’re being swung like one of those tethered amusement-park balls from one thrill to the next. Halle Berry is effective in what’s basically a one-woman show, but the role doesn’t require her to do much but show an adrenaline-fueled panic and a single-minded determination to find and rescue her son no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts in the pursuit. One can see why this wasn’t a big theatrical hit, and if this is the sort of movie Relativity Media thought was sure-fire box-office gold it’s not surprising they went bankrupt, but Kidnap is at least a movie that accomplishes what it set out to do even though one could imagine a far richer, greater film being made of the same basic situation.
Sunday, March 8, 2020
My Nightmare Landlord (The Asylum, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s two Lifetime movies were My Nightmare Landlord and Baby Monitor Murders, and though both were very much to the Lifetime “pussies in peril” (the phrase is New York Times critic Maureen Dowd’s) formula, My Nightmare Landlord was actually quite good. It was a product of The Asylum — a company that usually does ripoff movies of major-budget productions based either on public-domain stories (they rushed their own versions of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars ahead of the major versions of those stories by Spielberg and Disney, respectively) or concepts so obvious they couldn’t be copyrighted (they did a movie about people chasing ghosts called Ghosthunters and one about street racers called The Fast and the Fierce). This time writer Naomi L. Selfman and director Dylan Vox, both names new to me, came up with an “original” story in which Lydia Shaw (Caroline Harris) is a college student who has a work-study job at the school library (though it has a children’s section and services the general public as well; Charles questioned this but I figured the town it was in was so small the city government had decided not to maintain their own library but to contract with the university so non-affiliated people could use the library as well). She’s barely hanging on both to her academic career — her faculty advisor, Professor Moodley (Harwood Gordon) keeps rejecting her suggestions for papers on the ground that her topic is too broad and she needs to narrow her focus — and her job, at least in part because she’s also screwed up her personal life. She was living with a white boyfriend named Tim (Spencer Belko) who spent his spare time drinking, hanging out in bars and cruising other women, and he’s become so abusive she’s determined to leave him even though it will make her homeless and her only recourse is to sleep on the couch of her best friend Kaylee (Sinéad D’arcy) until she finds a place. She almost gets one in an apartment building run by a middle-aged Black woman when Tim, who’s followed her there, shows up, makes a scene and leads the Black manager to say, “This is a quiet building, we don’t need that kind of trouble here,” and tear up the draft lease.
She finally seems to luck out at another building run by a young, hunky white guy, Drew (Ignacyo Matynia), whom we first see topless as he’s in the middle of doing his own renovations on the building. The fact that Ignacyo Marynia is drop-dead gorgeous and superficially charming ought to be the dead giveaway that he’s not to be trusted — and the fact that the apartment Drew is showing Lydia is fully furnished and decorated because the woman who was living there before her just moved out and abandoned everything (Drew said it was to marry a rich guy and move in with him, but we think, “Yeah, right; he’s probably got her buried in his crawl space, or maybe his basement”) also ought to be a warning sign. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that she needs the apartment at all because she’s just left an abusive boyfriend who’s still stalking her (which I would think would make her more aware of the dangers of falling for a new guy), she naïvely takes Drew at face value. At face value he’s a charming man who’s literary (on finding out Lydia is an English major he starts spouting Hemingway trivia and expressing his desire to take a vacation to Italy and take her to Harry’s Bar from The Sun Also Rises) and a fun companion. But he also has her apartment bugged so he can snoop on her with video cameras connected to his laptop (including watching her in her bathtub, though both she and he take bubble baths so director Vox can avoid showing “naughty bits” — this movie has more bubble-bath scenes than anything made since the heyday of Jayne Mansfield), and when she innocently gives him her student paper and her renewal application for her financial aid, he doesn’t mail the aid application and somehow opens the envelope with a paper and keeps her cover sheet but substitutes an already published paper he downloaded online — which leads her to be accused of plagiarism and get threatened with being thrown out of the university.
He also goes into a hissy-fit when he sees Lydia with her teacher’s assistant Brad (André Beyer), a reasonably attractive Black man we find ourselves thinking she should be dating if only because she’s had rotten luck with white guys and it would seem to make sense for her to pick one of her own. Drew steals Lydia’s cell phone, uses it to send a text to Brad accusing him of sexual harassment and breaking off further contact, and then drops the phone into the water dish of Lydia’s cat Pumpkin so she’ll have to replace it and won’t be able to read the texts Drew sent impersonating her. The missing phone also gets Lydia fired from her library job when she shows up late because she didn’t get the text her boss, Lucia (Lucy Bowyer), sent rescheduling her an hour early. Also in the building is a middle-aged woman named Helen (Willow Hale) who’s suffering from some sort of age-related dementia —when we first meet her she’s trying to get into Lydia’s apartment, thinking it’s her own, and I joked, “Ah! It’s Joe Biden in drag!” — and whom Drew murders when she rats him out to Lydia, saying that he’s used his pass key to let himself in her apartment any time he feels like it. It ends with Drew binding Lydia and threatening to drown her in a bathtub (not another bathtub scene!) when the police respond to an incomplete 911 call and her friend Kaylee (ya remember Kaylee?) clues them to what’s going on and rescues her in time. The movie ends happily — Lydia gets her financial aid, her professor gets her real (and genuinely original) paper and gives her the paid internship she was hoping for so she won’t have to work at the library anymore, and Lydia and Kaylee lay plans to find their own apartment together. “Ah!” I joked. “Boy meets girl, boy turns out to be psycho, girl gets girl.”
Though My Nightmare Landlord isn’t that much of a departure from the usual Lifetime clichés, it’s actually quite well done: more than I do in most of these productions, I really identified with Lydia. It helps that both the leads are quite good actors: Caroline Harris is warm and human enough that we really identify with her and care about her plight, and Ignacyo Matynia manages to capture the complexity of his character, genuinely attractive, appealing and fun to be with when that bit of glare-ice in his head isn’t sending him skidding off the road into the possessive mania of the crazed stalker. He even manages to sound genuinely sorry in the final scene that he’s going to “have” to kill the woman he thought he was in love with, the woman he thought would make him complete. There’ve been a handful of performances over the years in which great actors played characters who did horrible things to women but managed even at the height of their murderous manias to remain charming — Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932); Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); John Carradine in Bluebeard (1944); Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960) — and though Matynia may not be in that exalted company it’s clear he’s managed the rare double balance of being charming and evil at the same time. Certainly it’s a lot easier in this film than in some of Lifetime’s other, similarly plotted productions to understand why the woman is genuinely attracted to him — even though, in one scene Naomi Selfman seems to have carefully constructed to keep Lydia from opening herself in the last and most irrevocable way to Drew (at least short of him killing her!), he has them make out and get horny but she draws back from the actual sex act … so at least she won’t have that psychological burden to worry about later. (Still, I can’t help but think how this movie might have worked if Lydia and Drew not only had had sex, but she’d got pregnant from it; it’s tempting to imagine the sequel that could have generated and the moral dilemma it would have put her in: have an abortion or raise her psycho ex’s child?)
Charles thought there was a theatrical movie from the late 1980’s or early 1990’s that had used the situation of a monster landlord or property manager putting the moves on a tenant and freaking out and making her life miserable when she turned him down — I had thought he was thinking of Pacific Heights (a film from 1991 Charles and I had seen together, though in that one it was the tenant from hell, Michael Keaton, driving crazy the people he rents a room from, Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) but the film he ultimately ran down was called Sliver, it was made in 1993 and starred Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenger in a story of (as imdb.com synopsized it) “a woman moves into an exclusive New York City apartment building, which she soon discovers houses tenants with all manner of shocking secrets.” It was based on a book by Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, and doesn’t really sound that much like My Nightmare Landlord (the title of Sliver comes from the film’s setting, one of those tall but ultra-narrow buildings in New York City that were designed to fit a weirdly shaped lot that had somehow become available), but it’s indicative of how obvious ideas get recycled throughout cinema history. Still, My Nightmare Landlord (despite its title, which seems to be working too hard to be frightening) has a rare level of humanity and emotional complexity that sets it more than a bit above the Lifetime norm.
Last night’s two Lifetime movies were My Nightmare Landlord and Baby Monitor Murders, and though both were very much to the Lifetime “pussies in peril” (the phrase is New York Times critic Maureen Dowd’s) formula, My Nightmare Landlord was actually quite good. It was a product of The Asylum — a company that usually does ripoff movies of major-budget productions based either on public-domain stories (they rushed their own versions of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars ahead of the major versions of those stories by Spielberg and Disney, respectively) or concepts so obvious they couldn’t be copyrighted (they did a movie about people chasing ghosts called Ghosthunters and one about street racers called The Fast and the Fierce). This time writer Naomi L. Selfman and director Dylan Vox, both names new to me, came up with an “original” story in which Lydia Shaw (Caroline Harris) is a college student who has a work-study job at the school library (though it has a children’s section and services the general public as well; Charles questioned this but I figured the town it was in was so small the city government had decided not to maintain their own library but to contract with the university so non-affiliated people could use the library as well). She’s barely hanging on both to her academic career — her faculty advisor, Professor Moodley (Harwood Gordon) keeps rejecting her suggestions for papers on the ground that her topic is too broad and she needs to narrow her focus — and her job, at least in part because she’s also screwed up her personal life. She was living with a white boyfriend named Tim (Spencer Belko) who spent his spare time drinking, hanging out in bars and cruising other women, and he’s become so abusive she’s determined to leave him even though it will make her homeless and her only recourse is to sleep on the couch of her best friend Kaylee (Sinéad D’arcy) until she finds a place. She almost gets one in an apartment building run by a middle-aged Black woman when Tim, who’s followed her there, shows up, makes a scene and leads the Black manager to say, “This is a quiet building, we don’t need that kind of trouble here,” and tear up the draft lease.
She finally seems to luck out at another building run by a young, hunky white guy, Drew (Ignacyo Matynia), whom we first see topless as he’s in the middle of doing his own renovations on the building. The fact that Ignacyo Marynia is drop-dead gorgeous and superficially charming ought to be the dead giveaway that he’s not to be trusted — and the fact that the apartment Drew is showing Lydia is fully furnished and decorated because the woman who was living there before her just moved out and abandoned everything (Drew said it was to marry a rich guy and move in with him, but we think, “Yeah, right; he’s probably got her buried in his crawl space, or maybe his basement”) also ought to be a warning sign. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that she needs the apartment at all because she’s just left an abusive boyfriend who’s still stalking her (which I would think would make her more aware of the dangers of falling for a new guy), she naïvely takes Drew at face value. At face value he’s a charming man who’s literary (on finding out Lydia is an English major he starts spouting Hemingway trivia and expressing his desire to take a vacation to Italy and take her to Harry’s Bar from The Sun Also Rises) and a fun companion. But he also has her apartment bugged so he can snoop on her with video cameras connected to his laptop (including watching her in her bathtub, though both she and he take bubble baths so director Vox can avoid showing “naughty bits” — this movie has more bubble-bath scenes than anything made since the heyday of Jayne Mansfield), and when she innocently gives him her student paper and her renewal application for her financial aid, he doesn’t mail the aid application and somehow opens the envelope with a paper and keeps her cover sheet but substitutes an already published paper he downloaded online — which leads her to be accused of plagiarism and get threatened with being thrown out of the university.
He also goes into a hissy-fit when he sees Lydia with her teacher’s assistant Brad (André Beyer), a reasonably attractive Black man we find ourselves thinking she should be dating if only because she’s had rotten luck with white guys and it would seem to make sense for her to pick one of her own. Drew steals Lydia’s cell phone, uses it to send a text to Brad accusing him of sexual harassment and breaking off further contact, and then drops the phone into the water dish of Lydia’s cat Pumpkin so she’ll have to replace it and won’t be able to read the texts Drew sent impersonating her. The missing phone also gets Lydia fired from her library job when she shows up late because she didn’t get the text her boss, Lucia (Lucy Bowyer), sent rescheduling her an hour early. Also in the building is a middle-aged woman named Helen (Willow Hale) who’s suffering from some sort of age-related dementia —when we first meet her she’s trying to get into Lydia’s apartment, thinking it’s her own, and I joked, “Ah! It’s Joe Biden in drag!” — and whom Drew murders when she rats him out to Lydia, saying that he’s used his pass key to let himself in her apartment any time he feels like it. It ends with Drew binding Lydia and threatening to drown her in a bathtub (not another bathtub scene!) when the police respond to an incomplete 911 call and her friend Kaylee (ya remember Kaylee?) clues them to what’s going on and rescues her in time. The movie ends happily — Lydia gets her financial aid, her professor gets her real (and genuinely original) paper and gives her the paid internship she was hoping for so she won’t have to work at the library anymore, and Lydia and Kaylee lay plans to find their own apartment together. “Ah!” I joked. “Boy meets girl, boy turns out to be psycho, girl gets girl.”
Though My Nightmare Landlord isn’t that much of a departure from the usual Lifetime clichés, it’s actually quite well done: more than I do in most of these productions, I really identified with Lydia. It helps that both the leads are quite good actors: Caroline Harris is warm and human enough that we really identify with her and care about her plight, and Ignacyo Matynia manages to capture the complexity of his character, genuinely attractive, appealing and fun to be with when that bit of glare-ice in his head isn’t sending him skidding off the road into the possessive mania of the crazed stalker. He even manages to sound genuinely sorry in the final scene that he’s going to “have” to kill the woman he thought he was in love with, the woman he thought would make him complete. There’ve been a handful of performances over the years in which great actors played characters who did horrible things to women but managed even at the height of their murderous manias to remain charming — Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932); Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); John Carradine in Bluebeard (1944); Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960) — and though Matynia may not be in that exalted company it’s clear he’s managed the rare double balance of being charming and evil at the same time. Certainly it’s a lot easier in this film than in some of Lifetime’s other, similarly plotted productions to understand why the woman is genuinely attracted to him — even though, in one scene Naomi Selfman seems to have carefully constructed to keep Lydia from opening herself in the last and most irrevocable way to Drew (at least short of him killing her!), he has them make out and get horny but she draws back from the actual sex act … so at least she won’t have that psychological burden to worry about later. (Still, I can’t help but think how this movie might have worked if Lydia and Drew not only had had sex, but she’d got pregnant from it; it’s tempting to imagine the sequel that could have generated and the moral dilemma it would have put her in: have an abortion or raise her psycho ex’s child?)
Charles thought there was a theatrical movie from the late 1980’s or early 1990’s that had used the situation of a monster landlord or property manager putting the moves on a tenant and freaking out and making her life miserable when she turned him down — I had thought he was thinking of Pacific Heights (a film from 1991 Charles and I had seen together, though in that one it was the tenant from hell, Michael Keaton, driving crazy the people he rents a room from, Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) but the film he ultimately ran down was called Sliver, it was made in 1993 and starred Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenger in a story of (as imdb.com synopsized it) “a woman moves into an exclusive New York City apartment building, which she soon discovers houses tenants with all manner of shocking secrets.” It was based on a book by Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, and doesn’t really sound that much like My Nightmare Landlord (the title of Sliver comes from the film’s setting, one of those tall but ultra-narrow buildings in New York City that were designed to fit a weirdly shaped lot that had somehow become available), but it’s indicative of how obvious ideas get recycled throughout cinema history. Still, My Nightmare Landlord (despite its title, which seems to be working too hard to be frightening) has a rare level of humanity and emotional complexity that sets it more than a bit above the Lifetime norm.
Baby Monitor Murders (My Life Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after the warmth and humanity of My Nightmare Landlord, Lifetime’s next feature, Baby Monitor Murders, was a return to the dullness and slovenliness of the network’s usual fare. First off, the title is risible; it was originally shot under the title The Babysitter, which in one way would have been better but would probably misled audience members to expect a story about a psycho babysitter coming into the home of a normal family, ingratiating herself with their child and plotting to kidnap the kid and/or kill the mother out of the delusion that she and the father were “made for each other” and anyone who got in the way deserved to die. Instead of that set of Lifetime clichés, though, it was the set of Lifetime clichés in which the innocent babysitter stumbles into a murder plot and starts to become convinced that the father of the child she’s babysitting may have killed the mother. The babysitter is Cassie Temple (Natalie Sharp), an aspiring rock musician — apparently Natalie Sharp has some real-life reputation as a singer-songwriter in her native Canada, though what we hear of her music (a few desultory picked-out songs on a guitar and some off-key singing of them) leads the audience (this member of it, anyway) to think she should give up any thoughts of rock stardom and settle into a normal job. The fact that Natalie Sharp doesn’t look like a woman rock star —she’s heavy-set and if she dyed her long brown hair black and put all that smoky eye shadow around her eyes she’d be a good choice for a biopic of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — doesn’t help her credibility either. Anyway, she was hoping to spend her summer vacation from college in Los Angeles working in an internship for a big-time music producer, but at the last minute the funding for it fell through (of course I joked, “He really got sued by a woman for sexual harassment, got exposed by #MeToo, and had to pay a huge settlement, so you’re luckier that you didn’t end up working for him!”), so she’s stuck in the little town in which she grew up and her parents still live.
Only the quiet little town isn’t so quiet anymore; we’ve seen a prologue set in twilight in which a woman is being chased through the woods. We don’t see who’s chasing her but it’s clear she’s in mortal danger, and when the main part of the movie turns up we find that her name is — or was — Mallory Raymond (Cassandra Ebner), and her husband Glenn Raymond (Dustin Lloyd), a tall, fierce redhead with a full beard (unusually for a Lifetime movie, all three of the male leads have beards), is angry at the police for having done so little to find her. Then Cassie, Our Heroine, gets hired by Tom Paine (Jon Cor) — they gave the character the same name as the famous pamphleteer and propagandist for the American Revolution — and his wife Chloe (Nicole LaPlaca) to baby-sit their daughter Becca (Emma Oliver). Cassie settles into her new job and Becca takes to her. So does her dad; though at least this time around writer Emily Golden and director Danny J. Boyle (an old Lifetime hand) don’t suggest that Tom Paine has the hots for his new, young, nubile (if a bit on the Zaftig side, especially by today’s standards) babysitter and is willing to murder his wife for her, they do have Chloe disappear under circumstances similar to Mallory Raymond’s. The usual dumb cop, Sheriff Hayes (Blake Stadel), leaps to the conclusion that Chloe is dead, killed similarly to Mallory, and her husband Tom committed both murders. Then a seeming deus ex machina comes into the action in the form of Dr. Jim Gideon (Brendan Taylor), Chloe’s therapist and the sort of tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime usually casts as the innocent husband — only when he summons Chloe for a meeting and tells her that he can’t say what Chloe told him because that would violate doctor-patient confidentiality, he drops an awful lot of hints against Tom Paine. The moment Dr. Gideon showed up, all dripping with phony solicitousness and concern that barely masked his twitchiness, it almost immediately became apparent (though my husband Charles caught it before I did) that he’s the real killer, though his motive doesn’t become apparent until he traps Cassie in his home and locks her in his basement.
While there she discovers the dead and badly decomposed body of Mallory Raymond, the still-living (but barely) Chloe Paine, and the secret, which was that Dr. Gideon (like a number of other therapists in previous Lifetime movies) got tired of hearing all his married clients talk about their relationship problems when at least they had relationships, while he was single and came home at the end of the day to an empty house. What fueled his psychotic rage was Chloe Paine’s revelation in her therapy sessions that her husband Tom was having an affair with Mallory Raymond. Dr. Gideon decided that Tom didn’t deserve Chloe and that he was going to woo her himself, first by offing her husband’s paramour, then kidnapping her but keeping her alive, and setting Tom up to take the fall so he’d be either imprisoned, executed or shot to death in one of the final shoot-outs beloved by Lifetime writers, so he could become Chloe’s husband and Becca’s father. In the end Dr. Gideon becomes that rare Lifetime villain that’s taken alive rather than killed, Tom, Chloe and Becca are reconciled, Glenn Raymond (who in some respects is the most interesting character in the movie and is played by its sexiest actor!) is absolved of the lingering suspicions that he killed his wife, and the final sequence shows Cassie driving into Los Angeles to pursue her music career (though, as I said before, given what we’ve seen and heard of her “music” before this we really don’t hold out much hope that she’ll make it to stardom). A product of old Lifetime pros (including two of the four “executive producers,” Tom Berry and Breanne Hartley) and nowhere near as interesting as My Nightmare Landlord (which was made by people new to the Lifetime orbit, even though a familiar distribution company, Reel One Entertainment, sold it to Lifetime), Baby Monitor Murders (named for a brief scene in which the “baby monitor,” an Alexa-like speaker that’s supposed to alert Cassie if anything is wrong in Becca’s room, gets its wires crossed and we hear an unidentified male voice plotting something sinister — shades of Lucile Fletcher’s legendary radio play, later a movie, Sorry, Wrong Number!) is O.K. entertainment and not as embarrassingly bad or silly as some Lifetime movies have been, but it doesn’t have the relative emotional richness and compassion of My Nightmare Landlord either.
Alas, after the warmth and humanity of My Nightmare Landlord, Lifetime’s next feature, Baby Monitor Murders, was a return to the dullness and slovenliness of the network’s usual fare. First off, the title is risible; it was originally shot under the title The Babysitter, which in one way would have been better but would probably misled audience members to expect a story about a psycho babysitter coming into the home of a normal family, ingratiating herself with their child and plotting to kidnap the kid and/or kill the mother out of the delusion that she and the father were “made for each other” and anyone who got in the way deserved to die. Instead of that set of Lifetime clichés, though, it was the set of Lifetime clichés in which the innocent babysitter stumbles into a murder plot and starts to become convinced that the father of the child she’s babysitting may have killed the mother. The babysitter is Cassie Temple (Natalie Sharp), an aspiring rock musician — apparently Natalie Sharp has some real-life reputation as a singer-songwriter in her native Canada, though what we hear of her music (a few desultory picked-out songs on a guitar and some off-key singing of them) leads the audience (this member of it, anyway) to think she should give up any thoughts of rock stardom and settle into a normal job. The fact that Natalie Sharp doesn’t look like a woman rock star —she’s heavy-set and if she dyed her long brown hair black and put all that smoky eye shadow around her eyes she’d be a good choice for a biopic of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — doesn’t help her credibility either. Anyway, she was hoping to spend her summer vacation from college in Los Angeles working in an internship for a big-time music producer, but at the last minute the funding for it fell through (of course I joked, “He really got sued by a woman for sexual harassment, got exposed by #MeToo, and had to pay a huge settlement, so you’re luckier that you didn’t end up working for him!”), so she’s stuck in the little town in which she grew up and her parents still live.
Only the quiet little town isn’t so quiet anymore; we’ve seen a prologue set in twilight in which a woman is being chased through the woods. We don’t see who’s chasing her but it’s clear she’s in mortal danger, and when the main part of the movie turns up we find that her name is — or was — Mallory Raymond (Cassandra Ebner), and her husband Glenn Raymond (Dustin Lloyd), a tall, fierce redhead with a full beard (unusually for a Lifetime movie, all three of the male leads have beards), is angry at the police for having done so little to find her. Then Cassie, Our Heroine, gets hired by Tom Paine (Jon Cor) — they gave the character the same name as the famous pamphleteer and propagandist for the American Revolution — and his wife Chloe (Nicole LaPlaca) to baby-sit their daughter Becca (Emma Oliver). Cassie settles into her new job and Becca takes to her. So does her dad; though at least this time around writer Emily Golden and director Danny J. Boyle (an old Lifetime hand) don’t suggest that Tom Paine has the hots for his new, young, nubile (if a bit on the Zaftig side, especially by today’s standards) babysitter and is willing to murder his wife for her, they do have Chloe disappear under circumstances similar to Mallory Raymond’s. The usual dumb cop, Sheriff Hayes (Blake Stadel), leaps to the conclusion that Chloe is dead, killed similarly to Mallory, and her husband Tom committed both murders. Then a seeming deus ex machina comes into the action in the form of Dr. Jim Gideon (Brendan Taylor), Chloe’s therapist and the sort of tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime usually casts as the innocent husband — only when he summons Chloe for a meeting and tells her that he can’t say what Chloe told him because that would violate doctor-patient confidentiality, he drops an awful lot of hints against Tom Paine. The moment Dr. Gideon showed up, all dripping with phony solicitousness and concern that barely masked his twitchiness, it almost immediately became apparent (though my husband Charles caught it before I did) that he’s the real killer, though his motive doesn’t become apparent until he traps Cassie in his home and locks her in his basement.
While there she discovers the dead and badly decomposed body of Mallory Raymond, the still-living (but barely) Chloe Paine, and the secret, which was that Dr. Gideon (like a number of other therapists in previous Lifetime movies) got tired of hearing all his married clients talk about their relationship problems when at least they had relationships, while he was single and came home at the end of the day to an empty house. What fueled his psychotic rage was Chloe Paine’s revelation in her therapy sessions that her husband Tom was having an affair with Mallory Raymond. Dr. Gideon decided that Tom didn’t deserve Chloe and that he was going to woo her himself, first by offing her husband’s paramour, then kidnapping her but keeping her alive, and setting Tom up to take the fall so he’d be either imprisoned, executed or shot to death in one of the final shoot-outs beloved by Lifetime writers, so he could become Chloe’s husband and Becca’s father. In the end Dr. Gideon becomes that rare Lifetime villain that’s taken alive rather than killed, Tom, Chloe and Becca are reconciled, Glenn Raymond (who in some respects is the most interesting character in the movie and is played by its sexiest actor!) is absolved of the lingering suspicions that he killed his wife, and the final sequence shows Cassie driving into Los Angeles to pursue her music career (though, as I said before, given what we’ve seen and heard of her “music” before this we really don’t hold out much hope that she’ll make it to stardom). A product of old Lifetime pros (including two of the four “executive producers,” Tom Berry and Breanne Hartley) and nowhere near as interesting as My Nightmare Landlord (which was made by people new to the Lifetime orbit, even though a familiar distribution company, Reel One Entertainment, sold it to Lifetime), Baby Monitor Murders (named for a brief scene in which the “baby monitor,” an Alexa-like speaker that’s supposed to alert Cassie if anything is wrong in Becca’s room, gets its wires crossed and we hear an unidentified male voice plotting something sinister — shades of Lucile Fletcher’s legendary radio play, later a movie, Sorry, Wrong Number!) is O.K. entertainment and not as embarrassingly bad or silly as some Lifetime movies have been, but it doesn’t have the relative emotional richness and compassion of My Nightmare Landlord either.
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Game of Thrones, season 3, episodes 9 and 10: “The Rains of Castamere,” "Mhysa” (Television 360, Startling, Bighead Littlehead, Home Box Office, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the last two episodes of season three of Game of Thrones — and once again I can see why a lot of people “binge-watched” this show, either on DVD’s or streaming, because it takes a while to remember where the locations are, who these people are (since this is a medievalist fantasy just about everyone except the people in the very top brackets of society wears crude clothes, mostly furs, and are dirty all the time), which sides of the various conflicts they’re on and what they’re actually doing, let alone why. The episodes were called “The Rains of Castamere” and “Mhysa,” and are summarized on imdb.com as follows: “Robb and Catelyn arrive at the Twins for the wedding. Jon is put to the test to see where his loyalties truly lie. Bran's group decides to split up. Daenerys plans an invasion of Yunkai. … Bran and company travel beyond the Wall. Sam returns to Castle Black. Jon says goodbye to Ygritte. Jaime returns to King's Landing. The Night’s Watch asks for help from Stannis.” In case you were wondering, Robb Stark (Richard Madden) is the legitimate heir on the Stark side of the battle between Lannisters (read: Lancasters) and Starks (read: Yorks) at the heart of much of Game of Thrones; Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) is his wife (I think)/
Bran is the boy prince who caught his elder brother and his elder sister screwing each other, was pitched out of the tower where he caught them, took a header of about 50 feet or so and ended up disabled (though in these episodes he’s developed a superpower: he’s able to “freeze” attackers, human or animal, by mental will power alone, though he doesn’t have full control over this and sometimes it doesn’t work); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) is the rebel queen from across the “Narrow Sea” (which I supposed meant the Irish Sea but Charles thinks it’s the English channel, and the land across from it where Daenerys is stranded for lack of ships to get across and fight for power in “Westeros,” i.e. England, is a George R. R. Martin conflation of continental Europe and the Middle East, since we’ve got people who look like Scythians and Saracens as well as a smattering of Blacks); Sam (John Bradley) — full name: Samwell Tarly — is the heavy-set character who in the early going seemed just like your typical comic-relief character (when he trained for the Night’s Watch, the group of volunteer soldiers who guard the wall of ice separating Westeros from the North and the “White Walkers,” homicidal ghosts not that different from the zombies in the George Romero films) — but develops some heroic characteristics when he accidentally discovers the “dragon blades,” which look like ordinary obsidian cave-people’s tools to us but are made of a magical material that can literally shatter a White Walker’s body when it’s thrust into one — and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is Robb Stark’s illegitimate half-brother, who was exiled to the Night’s Watch but broke his vow of celibacy by falling in love with his prisoner Ygritte — whose “farewell” to him at the end of “Mhysa” consists of shooting three arrows into him and leaving him for dead, though he manages to ride back to Castle Black, the last redoubt of the Night’s Watch.
The “Stannis” they’re asking for help from is Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), uncle (I think) of the current King Joffrey Baratheon (though he’s really not a Baratheon — the murdered King married a Lannister and she was the sister who had a Walküre-like affair with her brother, only instead of producing Siegfried they created Joffrey, a psychopathic nerd reminiscent of ancient Rome’s “bad Emperors” like Caligula or Nero — either of which would be good roles for Jack Gleeson, who plays Joffrey as a great and fun-to-watch super-villain) who considers himself the rightful heir and wants to deliver Westeros from Joffrey’s homicidal madness. At the end of “Mhysa” we also get to see another scene with Daenerys and her dragons, three beasts she created when she got 300-year-old dragons’ eggs to hatch and who — though they’re hardly big enough for humans to ride the way Anne McCaffrey’s dragons of Pern are — are still mightily impressive and dangerous fighters whose very presence and obvious bloodthirst have enabled Daenerys and the armies she’s been able to recruit by capturing slave populations and offering them their freedom. At least the two sexiest guys on this show, Jon and the new knight Daenerys signed up at the end of episode eight when he was assigned by the leaders of the city of Yunkai to kill her but decided he wanted to fuck her instead, end up these episodes still relatively good-looking and with all their parts intact — hot guys on this show tend to end up losing their hands or their dicks. I’m not exactly enjoying Game of Thrones, but it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon and has some good and witty lines and sequences even though the relentless successions of bloodbaths, loveless sexual couplings, and dingy scenes in forests tend to get a bit wearing at times!
Last night Charles and I watched the last two episodes of season three of Game of Thrones — and once again I can see why a lot of people “binge-watched” this show, either on DVD’s or streaming, because it takes a while to remember where the locations are, who these people are (since this is a medievalist fantasy just about everyone except the people in the very top brackets of society wears crude clothes, mostly furs, and are dirty all the time), which sides of the various conflicts they’re on and what they’re actually doing, let alone why. The episodes were called “The Rains of Castamere” and “Mhysa,” and are summarized on imdb.com as follows: “Robb and Catelyn arrive at the Twins for the wedding. Jon is put to the test to see where his loyalties truly lie. Bran's group decides to split up. Daenerys plans an invasion of Yunkai. … Bran and company travel beyond the Wall. Sam returns to Castle Black. Jon says goodbye to Ygritte. Jaime returns to King's Landing. The Night’s Watch asks for help from Stannis.” In case you were wondering, Robb Stark (Richard Madden) is the legitimate heir on the Stark side of the battle between Lannisters (read: Lancasters) and Starks (read: Yorks) at the heart of much of Game of Thrones; Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) is his wife (I think)/
Bran is the boy prince who caught his elder brother and his elder sister screwing each other, was pitched out of the tower where he caught them, took a header of about 50 feet or so and ended up disabled (though in these episodes he’s developed a superpower: he’s able to “freeze” attackers, human or animal, by mental will power alone, though he doesn’t have full control over this and sometimes it doesn’t work); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) is the rebel queen from across the “Narrow Sea” (which I supposed meant the Irish Sea but Charles thinks it’s the English channel, and the land across from it where Daenerys is stranded for lack of ships to get across and fight for power in “Westeros,” i.e. England, is a George R. R. Martin conflation of continental Europe and the Middle East, since we’ve got people who look like Scythians and Saracens as well as a smattering of Blacks); Sam (John Bradley) — full name: Samwell Tarly — is the heavy-set character who in the early going seemed just like your typical comic-relief character (when he trained for the Night’s Watch, the group of volunteer soldiers who guard the wall of ice separating Westeros from the North and the “White Walkers,” homicidal ghosts not that different from the zombies in the George Romero films) — but develops some heroic characteristics when he accidentally discovers the “dragon blades,” which look like ordinary obsidian cave-people’s tools to us but are made of a magical material that can literally shatter a White Walker’s body when it’s thrust into one — and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is Robb Stark’s illegitimate half-brother, who was exiled to the Night’s Watch but broke his vow of celibacy by falling in love with his prisoner Ygritte — whose “farewell” to him at the end of “Mhysa” consists of shooting three arrows into him and leaving him for dead, though he manages to ride back to Castle Black, the last redoubt of the Night’s Watch.
The “Stannis” they’re asking for help from is Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), uncle (I think) of the current King Joffrey Baratheon (though he’s really not a Baratheon — the murdered King married a Lannister and she was the sister who had a Walküre-like affair with her brother, only instead of producing Siegfried they created Joffrey, a psychopathic nerd reminiscent of ancient Rome’s “bad Emperors” like Caligula or Nero — either of which would be good roles for Jack Gleeson, who plays Joffrey as a great and fun-to-watch super-villain) who considers himself the rightful heir and wants to deliver Westeros from Joffrey’s homicidal madness. At the end of “Mhysa” we also get to see another scene with Daenerys and her dragons, three beasts she created when she got 300-year-old dragons’ eggs to hatch and who — though they’re hardly big enough for humans to ride the way Anne McCaffrey’s dragons of Pern are — are still mightily impressive and dangerous fighters whose very presence and obvious bloodthirst have enabled Daenerys and the armies she’s been able to recruit by capturing slave populations and offering them their freedom. At least the two sexiest guys on this show, Jon and the new knight Daenerys signed up at the end of episode eight when he was assigned by the leaders of the city of Yunkai to kill her but decided he wanted to fuck her instead, end up these episodes still relatively good-looking and with all their parts intact — hot guys on this show tend to end up losing their hands or their dicks. I’m not exactly enjoying Game of Thrones, but it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon and has some good and witty lines and sequences even though the relentless successions of bloodbaths, loveless sexual couplings, and dingy scenes in forests tend to get a bit wearing at times!
Checkmate: “The Human Factor” (Jamco Productions, Revue Productions, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Game of Thrones Charles and I watched another download of a TV show featuring Peter Lorre: “The Human Factor,” a quite engaging episode of a quirky TV series called Checkmate, filmed by Revue Productions (the subsidiary of the giant Music Corporation of America, or MCA, agency founded in the 1950’s to produce specifically for television) and aired for two seasons, from fall 1960 to spring 1962. Basically Checkmate is Nero Wolfe meets Route 66: two young men from San Francisco, Don Corey (Anthony George) and Jed Sills (Doug McClure), run a high-end private detective agency, but the real work seems to be done by their Nero Wolfe-esque criminological consultant, Dr. Carl Hyatt (Sebastian Cabot). Lorre appears in this one as master criminal Alonzo Pace Graham — we’re never told just what crimes he committed but they were serious enough to earn him a 15-year stretch in prison from which he’s just got out and hatched a revenge plot against Hyatt that involves hiring a similarly built confederate to impersonate Hyatt (I wasn’t sure whether the impostor was also played by Sebastian Cabot, though it seems likely) and also engaging a much-married widow named Helena Quattrell to seduce Hyatt (the real one). The plot consists of having Helena Quattrell disappear and her blood turn up on Hyatt’s clothes (courtesy of a syringe Alonzo stuck in her to draw out the blood so he could plant it), while she’s reported missing by her friend Fay Razon (Rebecca Welles — when I saw that name on the credits I wondered if she was the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, but that Rebecca Welles would have only been a teenager when this was made and this was a different Rebecca Welles, born February 5, 1928, and at the time this show was made she was the wife of Don Weis, who directed it), who’s also in on Alonzo’s plot, though ultimately the two young boys running the detective agency and looking like they couldn’t find their way out of a hole even if they’d been the one to dig it, along with the real Hyatt, figure it all out and Alonzo is arrested again. This was an engaging show even though it could have used stronger actors in the two young leads, and it’s a pity Sebastian Cabot didn’t get engaged to play the real Nero Wolfe. Alas, after selling two Nero Wolfe stories to Columbia in the late-1930’s — Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936 and The League of Frightened Men in 1937 — Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, was so upset at the miscasting of Walter Connolly as Wolfe in the second film that he decided to pull the rights and never again allow the Wolfe stories to be filmed (though a short-lived TV series with William Conrad, also not a good choice, was made later after Stout died), so Sydney Greenstreet, who would have been absolutely perfect for the role, got to play Nero Wolfe on radio but never in a movie; and Sebastian Cabot, who wouldn’t have fit the part as perfectly as Greenstreet but would still have been an inspired choice, didn’t either even though his role here shows how right for it he would have been! It’s also worth noting that the composer for this show was “Johnny Williams” — a young man who has since shortened his first name to John Williams and become one of the most popular and most honored film-score composers of all time!
After Game of Thrones Charles and I watched another download of a TV show featuring Peter Lorre: “The Human Factor,” a quite engaging episode of a quirky TV series called Checkmate, filmed by Revue Productions (the subsidiary of the giant Music Corporation of America, or MCA, agency founded in the 1950’s to produce specifically for television) and aired for two seasons, from fall 1960 to spring 1962. Basically Checkmate is Nero Wolfe meets Route 66: two young men from San Francisco, Don Corey (Anthony George) and Jed Sills (Doug McClure), run a high-end private detective agency, but the real work seems to be done by their Nero Wolfe-esque criminological consultant, Dr. Carl Hyatt (Sebastian Cabot). Lorre appears in this one as master criminal Alonzo Pace Graham — we’re never told just what crimes he committed but they were serious enough to earn him a 15-year stretch in prison from which he’s just got out and hatched a revenge plot against Hyatt that involves hiring a similarly built confederate to impersonate Hyatt (I wasn’t sure whether the impostor was also played by Sebastian Cabot, though it seems likely) and also engaging a much-married widow named Helena Quattrell to seduce Hyatt (the real one). The plot consists of having Helena Quattrell disappear and her blood turn up on Hyatt’s clothes (courtesy of a syringe Alonzo stuck in her to draw out the blood so he could plant it), while she’s reported missing by her friend Fay Razon (Rebecca Welles — when I saw that name on the credits I wondered if she was the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, but that Rebecca Welles would have only been a teenager when this was made and this was a different Rebecca Welles, born February 5, 1928, and at the time this show was made she was the wife of Don Weis, who directed it), who’s also in on Alonzo’s plot, though ultimately the two young boys running the detective agency and looking like they couldn’t find their way out of a hole even if they’d been the one to dig it, along with the real Hyatt, figure it all out and Alonzo is arrested again. This was an engaging show even though it could have used stronger actors in the two young leads, and it’s a pity Sebastian Cabot didn’t get engaged to play the real Nero Wolfe. Alas, after selling two Nero Wolfe stories to Columbia in the late-1930’s — Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936 and The League of Frightened Men in 1937 — Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, was so upset at the miscasting of Walter Connolly as Wolfe in the second film that he decided to pull the rights and never again allow the Wolfe stories to be filmed (though a short-lived TV series with William Conrad, also not a good choice, was made later after Stout died), so Sydney Greenstreet, who would have been absolutely perfect for the role, got to play Nero Wolfe on radio but never in a movie; and Sebastian Cabot, who wouldn’t have fit the part as perfectly as Greenstreet but would still have been an inspired choice, didn’t either even though his role here shows how right for it he would have been! It’s also worth noting that the composer for this show was “Johnny Williams” — a young man who has since shortened his first name to John Williams and become one of the most popular and most honored film-score composers of all time!
Friday, March 6, 2020
Game of Thrones, season 3, episodes 7 and 8: “The Bear and the Maiden Fair," "Second Sons" (Television 360, Startling, Bighead Littlehead, Home Box Office, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the next two episodes in sequence of series three of Game of Thrones, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” and “Second Sons.” These were considerably better and a lot more interesting than the two immediately preceding episodes, “Kissed by Fire” and “The Climb,” partly because they focused a lot more extensively on the three most interesting characters — Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who in the third season is top-billed and, as I’ve commented before, obviously relished and rose to the challenge of a multi-dimensional character instead of the usual villains or smarmy sidekicks little-person actors usually get cast as); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), who armed with three dragons she’s managed to hatch from old eggs and thereby revive a species thought to have been extinct for hundreds of years; and King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), a blond-haired psychopath who’s the current occupant of the Iron Throne and a sort of successor to such “bad Emperors” in ancient Rome as Caligula, Nero and Commodus. (If anyone makes yet another film about Caligula or Nero, Gleeson would be perfect casting for the role.) These also got considerably more screen time in the open air instead of the dank interiors that dominated the last two episodes, and the plots seem generally more coherent: Daenerys uses her looks, her wiles, her money (a fortune she’s extorted from each city she’s occupied) and her dragons (even though we only see one of them, and that barely at all — I admire the Lewtonian reticence of the Game of Thrones filmmakers to “tease” us with the dragons instead of bringing them on in large numbers and full force, but I was really hoping that with all the publicity about dragons that Game of Thrones would start looking more like my imagination’s idea of the films that could be made of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books) to free the slave armies that abound on her side of … well, they have different names but clearly “Westeros” is England, “The North” is Scotland and the island she’s currently stranded on for lack of ships to take her across the sea is Ireland.
She’s recruiting them to her cause and at the end of “Second Sons” she’s able to get a group of knights called the “Second Sons” (after the old English laws of primogeniture, which provided that the first male heir got everything and subsequent boys born to a noble family got nothing and had to fend for themselves — many of the people who ran Britain’s Third World colonies in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were second and third sons who took those jobs because there was nothing for them to do at home) on her side after three of them decide to kill her — only one (a long-haired cutie who’s just about the sexiest guy we’ve seen in Game of Thrones so far) decides he’d rather fuck her than kill her and kills his two comrades instead (revealed by a shocking scene in which he opens his cloak and there are their two severed heads). The other big piece of news in these episodes is the forced marriage of Tyrion Lannister to one of the Stark girls, intended to create a dynastic link between Lannisters and Starks (names Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin obviously drew from the Lancasters and Yorks, two real-life feuding families in 15th century England whose battles for the throne became known as the “Wars of the Roses” because the Lancasters’ emblem was a red rose and the Yorks’ a white one) — only the 14-year-old Starklet Tyrion is paired with seems to be the one reasonably attractive female in the entire dramatis personae Tyrion doesn’t want to fuck. There’s also a plot line in which a reasonably attractive young man is seduced by the red-haired priestess of the “Lord of Light” (this seems to be the Game of Thrones equivalent to Christianity, whereupon most of the people worship the “Old Gods,” here represented by a tree with a face in it à la The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings, in what George R. R. Martin seems to have paralleled to the old Norse religion of the Vikings that’s been drawn on by artists as varied as Richard Wagner and Mighty Thor comic-book creator Jack Kirby) into a bondage session in which — not having offered him a safe word — she applies leeches to him because she and her relatives need “royal blood” for some potion or other they’re producing.
And there’s a final cliffhanger in which comic-relief character Samwell Tarly (John Bradley, playing the role Alan Hale would have if this has been a 1930’s sword-and-sorcery script from Warner Bros) and his sort-of girlfriend Gilly (Hannah Murray) encounter a White Walker (ya remember the White Walkers?) from episode one and nearly get killed, only for some reason, after touching Sam’s sword and turning it into metal dust, self-destructs but may have some comrades out there in an episode that has all the earmarks of a quite good serial cliff-hanger. I can see why people got addicted to Game of Thrones and why so many people “binge-watched” whole seasons of it at a time — it takes a while just to remember who is who, how they’re related and what side they’re on (or who’s double-crossing whom) — looking back on it via DVD or Blu-Ray sets of the first six seasons after the series run has finished (though the idea that any of these parties could lay claim to the Iron Throne on a permanent basis when, like so much else about this story, the way the title of King changes hands either through bribery or assassination is redolent of the later, more decadent stages of the Roman Empire is absurd and therefore the supposed “resolution” of the story at the end of season eight cannot really be assumed to be final). I’ve had other observations about Game of Thrones over the time (since June 2019!) Charles and I have been watching it, including how strongly it reflects the Zeitgeist of the Trump administration and the neo-fascist rulers and parties that are taking over country after country after country even though most of the series was filmed while Barack Obama was still U.S. President and Great Britain also had relatively enlightened leadership instead of the Trump-like boor, Boris Johnson, who won the last British election in a landslide; certainly its portrait of a world in which the contending parties fight each other for power for its own sake and the interests of common people are simply ignored is looking more and more like the one we live in now!
Charles and I watched the next two episodes in sequence of series three of Game of Thrones, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” and “Second Sons.” These were considerably better and a lot more interesting than the two immediately preceding episodes, “Kissed by Fire” and “The Climb,” partly because they focused a lot more extensively on the three most interesting characters — Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who in the third season is top-billed and, as I’ve commented before, obviously relished and rose to the challenge of a multi-dimensional character instead of the usual villains or smarmy sidekicks little-person actors usually get cast as); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), who armed with three dragons she’s managed to hatch from old eggs and thereby revive a species thought to have been extinct for hundreds of years; and King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), a blond-haired psychopath who’s the current occupant of the Iron Throne and a sort of successor to such “bad Emperors” in ancient Rome as Caligula, Nero and Commodus. (If anyone makes yet another film about Caligula or Nero, Gleeson would be perfect casting for the role.) These also got considerably more screen time in the open air instead of the dank interiors that dominated the last two episodes, and the plots seem generally more coherent: Daenerys uses her looks, her wiles, her money (a fortune she’s extorted from each city she’s occupied) and her dragons (even though we only see one of them, and that barely at all — I admire the Lewtonian reticence of the Game of Thrones filmmakers to “tease” us with the dragons instead of bringing them on in large numbers and full force, but I was really hoping that with all the publicity about dragons that Game of Thrones would start looking more like my imagination’s idea of the films that could be made of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books) to free the slave armies that abound on her side of … well, they have different names but clearly “Westeros” is England, “The North” is Scotland and the island she’s currently stranded on for lack of ships to take her across the sea is Ireland.
She’s recruiting them to her cause and at the end of “Second Sons” she’s able to get a group of knights called the “Second Sons” (after the old English laws of primogeniture, which provided that the first male heir got everything and subsequent boys born to a noble family got nothing and had to fend for themselves — many of the people who ran Britain’s Third World colonies in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were second and third sons who took those jobs because there was nothing for them to do at home) on her side after three of them decide to kill her — only one (a long-haired cutie who’s just about the sexiest guy we’ve seen in Game of Thrones so far) decides he’d rather fuck her than kill her and kills his two comrades instead (revealed by a shocking scene in which he opens his cloak and there are their two severed heads). The other big piece of news in these episodes is the forced marriage of Tyrion Lannister to one of the Stark girls, intended to create a dynastic link between Lannisters and Starks (names Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin obviously drew from the Lancasters and Yorks, two real-life feuding families in 15th century England whose battles for the throne became known as the “Wars of the Roses” because the Lancasters’ emblem was a red rose and the Yorks’ a white one) — only the 14-year-old Starklet Tyrion is paired with seems to be the one reasonably attractive female in the entire dramatis personae Tyrion doesn’t want to fuck. There’s also a plot line in which a reasonably attractive young man is seduced by the red-haired priestess of the “Lord of Light” (this seems to be the Game of Thrones equivalent to Christianity, whereupon most of the people worship the “Old Gods,” here represented by a tree with a face in it à la The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings, in what George R. R. Martin seems to have paralleled to the old Norse religion of the Vikings that’s been drawn on by artists as varied as Richard Wagner and Mighty Thor comic-book creator Jack Kirby) into a bondage session in which — not having offered him a safe word — she applies leeches to him because she and her relatives need “royal blood” for some potion or other they’re producing.
And there’s a final cliffhanger in which comic-relief character Samwell Tarly (John Bradley, playing the role Alan Hale would have if this has been a 1930’s sword-and-sorcery script from Warner Bros) and his sort-of girlfriend Gilly (Hannah Murray) encounter a White Walker (ya remember the White Walkers?) from episode one and nearly get killed, only for some reason, after touching Sam’s sword and turning it into metal dust, self-destructs but may have some comrades out there in an episode that has all the earmarks of a quite good serial cliff-hanger. I can see why people got addicted to Game of Thrones and why so many people “binge-watched” whole seasons of it at a time — it takes a while just to remember who is who, how they’re related and what side they’re on (or who’s double-crossing whom) — looking back on it via DVD or Blu-Ray sets of the first six seasons after the series run has finished (though the idea that any of these parties could lay claim to the Iron Throne on a permanent basis when, like so much else about this story, the way the title of King changes hands either through bribery or assassination is redolent of the later, more decadent stages of the Roman Empire is absurd and therefore the supposed “resolution” of the story at the end of season eight cannot really be assumed to be final). I’ve had other observations about Game of Thrones over the time (since June 2019!) Charles and I have been watching it, including how strongly it reflects the Zeitgeist of the Trump administration and the neo-fascist rulers and parties that are taking over country after country after country even though most of the series was filmed while Barack Obama was still U.S. President and Great Britain also had relatively enlightened leadership instead of the Trump-like boor, Boris Johnson, who won the last British election in a landslide; certainly its portrait of a world in which the contending parties fight each other for power for its own sake and the interests of common people are simply ignored is looking more and more like the one we live in now!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)