"Game of Thrones," season six, episodes seven and eight: "The Broken Man," "No One" (Television 360, Startling TV, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the next two episodes in sequence of season six of Game of Thrones -- it’s become kind of a default choice for us when we can’t think of anything else in the video backlog to run, and as I’ve occasionally joked after watching all the dire news stories on MS-NBC and elsewhere, “Now let’s watch something that will restore our faith in the essential goodness, kindness and decency of humanity … like Game of Thrones.” The episodes we watched last night were “The Broken Man” and “No One,” episodes seven and eight of season six, and once again I’m going to quote the official synopses and then comment on them:

The Broken Man: The Hound was saved by Brother Ray, the leader of a community, and has a peaceful life working as a woodsman. When three men from the Brotherhood threaten the villagers, The Hound is worried about it but Brother Ray does not believe in violence anymore. Margaery seems to be converted by the High-Sparrow, but when she learns that her grandmother Oleanna Tyrrell is in danger, she contacts her to convince Oleanna to leave King's Landing. Jon. Sansa and Davos are searching for allies to vanquish Ramsay and retake Winterfell. Jaime and Bronn arrive at the Blackfish Castle and Jaime tries to convince him to surrender to the siege he to his castle. Theon and Yara are resting in a brothel and waiting for uncle Euron's attack. Arya makes arrangements to return to Westeros but she is stabbed by the Waif.

No One: Arya recovers after being helped by the actress whose life she saved, Lady Crane, whom she finds murdered when she wakes up as Waif catches up with her. The Hound goes on a revenge trip and finally reunites himself with Beric. Cersei uses the Mountain to get back at the High Sparrow and his people. Then she receives the cruel news that her son, king Tommen, is manipulated by the high Sparrow to ban the trial by combat in the seven kingdoms. Brienne and Podrick reach Jaime and Bronn. Brienne makes an offer to Jaime to get him, Sansa and the Blackfish satisfied. She tries to convince the Blackfish to take his army North and help Sansa get Winterfell back. As Jaime threatens to kill Lord Edmure's son, Edmure decides to help Jaime take Riverrun. Daenerys comes back to the pyramid in Meereen.

The main impression I got from these two episodes is that they seemed to be transitional, setting us up for the action to come -- there was a lot of talk about future battles and preparation for them but precious little action. The synopses are also a bit confusing in that they frequently refer to characters by nicknames; just as “Littlefeather” in season six, episode five was really Peter Baylish (Aiden Gillen), who in his combination of sang-froid, skill at political manipulation and outright amorality reminded me a great deal of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, so “The Hound” mentioned in “The Broken Man” is really Sandor Clegane (Rory McCann), brother of “The Mountain” a.k.a. Gregor Clegane (who apparently got killed in season four but reappears here) and a super-killer with an ax who dispatches three of the four people the leader of the so-called “Brotherhood” wanted to hang. Like an even more demented version of Donald Trump, Sandor doesn’t like hanging because it’s too quick and doesn’t give him a chance to torture his victims and make them suffer before they die. (Remember George Orwell’s catechism in 1984: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”) He comes on, knocks off a few people and then pretty much disappears until the end of the episode, when the man who’s about his only friend is himself brutally killed.

There are a lot of plotlines floating around in these two episodes, including the one about Anya Stark (Maisie Williams), who for several episodes trained to join the cult of the “Faceless Ones,” who keep a necropolis full of the faces of the people they’ve killed and assume them when they go on their latest murder mission (which couldn’t help but remind me of Jim Morrison’s line from the Doors’ song “The End”: “He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall … ”), only Anya muffs her first killing assignment when she spares the life of the leading actress in a theatre company that tours with a play based on the death of the late king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) with such wretched, banal dialogue it’s obvious that in this world Shakespeare hasn’t existed yet. She’s marked for death and stabbed repeatedly by “The Waif” (played by Faye Marsey when she appears as a woman and Adam Turns when disguised as a man), once at the end of episode seven (where she’s nursed back to health by the actress she was supposed to kill, and whom “The Waif” finally does in) and once at the end of episode eight -- though we’ve seen enough miraculous resurrections of characters who looked like they couldn’t possibly have survived their injuries -- including Jon Snow, played by Kit Harington, who was revived through magic after an assassination that looked like a combination of Julius Caesar’s and Jesus Christ’s! -- that just because we’ve seen her apparently mortally wounded twice does not mean we won’t see her again. (I remember coming in on my late roommate John while he was watching a scene in The Lord of the Rings in which Gandalf was pitched off a ledge into a crevasse. I explained, “This is a fantasy, so just because you’ve seen someone killed doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t see them again,” He said, “I hate stories like that!”)

Once again the writers seem to be ignoring some of their most interesting characters -- the woman knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) does little more than standing around and talking about whom she’s honor-bound to side with this time (she’s about the only character in Game of Thrones who seems to be aware of, and attempts to practice, any of the codes of chivalry from the real Middle Ages!). Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) once again abandons the kingdom she’s supposedly ruling to recruit allies for her struggle against everyone else for the throne of fictitious “Westeros” (obviously the main British island, though as its name suggests Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin moved it west, not east, of the rival island that’s obviously supposed to be Ireland), and her much-hyped dragons this time appeared only in one shot: a single dragon flying way in the background. Given that every time she leaves the people she leaves behind prove wretchedly unable to keep order without her, one would think she’d get the message and stay where she is. Even Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), who in previous episodes has been both the story’s most interesting character and its best actor (as I’ve said before this must have been a dream assignment for Dinklage, playing a character of real depth and complexity instead of the dreck roles little-person actors usually get cast in!), appears here only in one scene in which he tries to get two of his allies in Daenerys’ court, her handmaiden and the soldier who leads her “Unsullied” troops, to break their straight-edge commitments and drink wine. (She likes it; he, to his credit, does not.)

The most important plot line in these episodes is the continuing dictatorship of virtue being run in King’s Landing by the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), and while we’ve gotten conflicting signals about just what his creepy theology is it’s obviously strongly patterned on the evangelical Right-wing Christianity of today, with its obsession with micromanaging people’s sex lives and how they deal with the consequences therefrom, which the current Republican Party is essentially seeking to impose as an unofficial state religion in the United States. It’s probably because I so loathe their real-life modern-day counterparts in this country (and elsewhere in the world) that I find the High Sparrow the creepiest and most thoroughly evil character in this story -- far more than the many tribal leaders who glory in wreaking havoc and shedding the blood of their rivals, who are living a brutal code but at least living it more or less honestly! The High Sparrow has raised such a large following he’s convinced just about everybody in the court at King’s Landing, including the king himself, Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman) and his wife Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), who in their earlier appearances were screwing like bunny rabbits but now Margarey has so totally bought in to the High Sparrow’s anti-sex preachings he now has to reverse course and persuade her to have sex with her husband, not for enjoyment but to fulfill her womanly and queenly function to produce an heir. There are also plot lines featuring Margaery’s grandmother Oleanna Tyrell (played by the great veteran actress Diana Rigg, who recently died of cancer but with this part got a far better send-off than a lot of legendary players, especially women, end up with -- can you say Trog?) and Margaery’s attempts to engineer her escape from King’s Landing before the High Sparrow and his moralist minions come after her. At one point King Tommen, under the High Sparrow’s influence, bans trial by combat in Westeros … and for some reason the writer of the above synopsis seems to think that’s a bad thing.

There are also the efforts of rivals Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) -- the real father of King Tommen and his late brother Joffrey (he was having an incestuous affair with his sister, Cersei Lannister, payed by Lena Headey, who first encouraged the High Sparrow’s cult and then became one of its victims) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) with his half-sister Sansa Stark (Sophia Turner) to recruit rival armies, and the effort of Jaime to take the so-called Blackfish castle by threatening to execute the lord’s rather twerpy son Edmurd Tully (Josiah Menzies), only dad seemingly couldn’t care less what happens to his kid. Even Charles, whom I suspect has been liking Game of Thrones better than I did -- he’s had a better memory than I for who is who and what side they’re on (he successfully made it through all three -- or four, depending on how you reckon The Hobbit -- books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, whereas I got about a third of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring and then gave up in disinterested disgust) -- is getting a bit tired of the speed of the switchbacks between storylines and how many of the most interesting characters seem to disappear for long stretches.

55th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards (dick clark productions, mrc, CBS-TV, aired September 16, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night CBS-TV aired the 55th annual American Country Music Awards, which were originally supposed to be in April in Las Vegas (yeah, that well-known center of country music … ) since this was the “rump” country-music awards compared to the Country Music Association awards in the mother ship of the genre, Nashville, Tennessee. Alas, the SARS-CoV-2 dictatorship struck again: Nevada went under lockdown and so the ceremony got put off for five months and ultimately ended up in Nashville after all. The ceremony, such as it was, took place in three venues, all of them without audience members: the main stage at the Grand Ole Opry; Ryman Auditorium (the converted barn that was the original home of the Opry until it outgrew it in the early 1970’s) and the Bluebird Cafe. (It was occasionally jarring to hear an incandescent performance on one of these stages -- and have it greeted with silence at the end when one would expect to hear wild applause.) As usual in music “awards” shows these days, the awards themselves were secondary and came off as almost an afterthought; the real “meat” was the performances, which began with a medley of the five nominees for Entertainer of the Year -- Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Luke Combs, Thomas Rhett and Carrie Underwood -- each doing a snippet of their biggest hit this year -- which set the stage for a quite good show that was as high-energy as you could expect given that it had to do without the extra power of an appreciative live audience.

The first full performance of an entire song was by an African-American country singer named Jimmy Allen -- it’s nice to know that Black country singers aren’t the bizarre novelty item they were when Charley Pride emerged half a century ago (and got booed when announcers called him on stage and audience members who’d just heard him on radio were shocked when the man who emerged was Black), and the song was an intriguing one about a man who picks up a woman for a one-night stand and suddenly finds himself feeling emotional: “It Might Be Too Soon to Say I Love You (But I Want To).” Then there was a medley of three songs from the group Old Dominion, who are pleasant but little more (even though they won the Best Group prize) and a quite good song called “One Margarita” by Luke Bryan. Though I most give the current crop of country songwriters credit for writing about other alcoholic beverages than the traditional ones in country music, beer and whiskey -- later in the evening we got Kelsea Ballerini singing a song called “Hole in the Bottle” whose main novelty was that the titular bottle contained, of all things, Cabernet wine (and among other things the singer was worried that her tears would dilute the red color of the wine) -- of course there wasn’t really a hole in the bottle: she was just drinking all of it -- one old country cliche this show definitively lived up to was the sheer number of songs about people drowning their sorrows over lost jobs or relationships with alcohol. (Given that I once had a partner who drank himself to death on cheap beer -- and I watched him do it but was helpless to stop him -- this sort of song hits home for me and I could have used a few less tales of people assaulting their livers just because they had a disappointment in life.)

Other than that, this show was really not your grandfather’s (or even your father’s) country awards show: the songs that addressed political or social issues were so relentlessly liberal that if Donald Trump was watching this he was probably thinking, “Et tu, Nashville?” For those of you who think a political country song is going to sound like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” or Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” (both great songs, no matter what you think about their politics), you were in for some shocks last night, About two-thirds of the way through the program Taylor Swift, who hadn’t played the American Country Music Awards in seven years, sang a song called “Betty” about a woman she’d had a romantic crush on when they were teenagers and got at least to the point of making out (if not necessarily any farther) when she angrily broke off with Betty when she saw Betty at a school dance with a man. Then Eric Church did a stunning song that was introduced by Johnny Cash’s masterpiece “Ragged Old Flag” (one of the great songs Cash came up with in the 1970’s when he was being proclaimed as the Left’s country singer as opposed to Merle Haggard, the Right’s country singer, and wrote songs that hailed America and its ideals while acknowledging how far we had fallen short of them) and used Cash’s record as an introduction to a song of his own called “Stick That In Your Country Song.” Among the issues Church was asking his colleagues to stick into their country songs were police violence against people of color and the evil of mass shootings (one of which hit home with the country audience when an assassin targeted an outdoor country festival in Las Vegas and killed 22 people -- indeed, some of the artists on last night’s program, including Outstanding Female Singer winner Maren Morris, had been on that bill).

The next performer after Luke Bryan’s and Kelsea Baklerini’s odes to unusual (at least for country songs) alcoholic beverages (though as good as Bryan’s song was, Jimmy Bufffett’s “Margaritaville” was and remains the best song ever written about that cocktail), was an extraordinary performance by Miranda Lambert, doing an unadorned acoustic version of her song “Bluebird” with her songwriting partners, Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby, which she said was “just like we did it on the demo.” I haven’t heard the final record of “Bluebird” but I suspect I’d like the simple, beautiful version she did last night better. Then there was yet another ode to booze, “Whiskey Glasses,’ by Morgan Wallen, and while for me a lot of the thrill of watching a country-music show is being able to ogle the hot young guys in tight-fitting blue jeans, Wallen easily had the most impressive basket on last night’s show and he was brushing his hand awfully close to his crotch. (Wallen’s relationship status is actually one of country music’s mysteries; he has a child and is “co-parenting” with the kid’s mother but there’s no indication that they’re in an ongoing relationship -- and while the song specifies that the lover he’s drinking whiskey out of all those glasses to try to forget was a woman, the gender of the person he’s with now is carefully unspecified … ) -- and then Thomas Rhett and Jon Hardie (whom I thought was sexier!) did yet another drinking song, “Ain’t Nothing Wrong that a Beer Can’t Fix.”

Then Blake Shelton and his current squeeze, Gwen Stefani (when he took up with her following his breakup from Miranda Lambert, I asked rhetorically, “How did Blake Shelton get two far more charismatic, more talented and more sexy performers to fall in love with him?” -- and my husband Charles said, “Maybe he has a big dick”), did an O.K. song called “I Could Be Happy Anywhere (With You).” After that Carrie Underwood was called upon to celebrate the 95th year of the Grand Ole Opry program with a tribute medley to the female greats of country music .. some of them, anyway. I can understand why she didn’t include Rose Maddox, the tragically little-known cult artist whom you could (I could, anyway) make a case for as the greatest woman country singer of all time -- I’d never heard of her before seeing the brief segment on her and her brothers on Ken Burns’ Country Music documentary last October and now I own 10 of her CD’s -- everything Kity Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton did, Rose Maddox did, and she did it first! But why her medley didn’t include Tammy Wynette, who (unlike Maddox) does have a place in the country music pantheon, is a mystery -- certainly a chorus of “Stand By Your Man” would have fit in with the songs she did include, starting with the masterpiece Willie Nelson wrote for Patsy Cline, “Crazy.”: Underwood did “Crazy” in a sort of cocktail-lounge style that wasn’t like either Cline’s understated but searing emotion or the laid-back way Nelson does the song himself, but it worked. Then Underwood followed with Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man,” Barbar Mandrell’s “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” Dolly Parton’s “Why’d You Come Here Looking Like That?,” and Reba McIntire’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” All of those were perfectly nice, respectable “tribute” performances that didn’t at all prepare me for the last song in Underwood’s medley, Martina McBride’s “A Broken Wing,” for which Carrie finally dropped her reserve and laid down a vocal of such searing soul and emotion I was too amazed at what I was hearing to wonder why she’d been holding back her power until the very end.

The next song was “Better Together” by Luke Combs, who’s not as aggressively ugly as Chris Stapleton (he’s really a not-bad-looking bear type) but gives hope for guys who don’t look like GQ models or anatomically correct mannequins that they too can have a career in country music. He’s been married (to a woman, named Nicole) for a little over a year and honored her with a song he wrote about her before they were married, “Better Together” (I couldn’t help but chuckle at the similarity to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Stronger Together” -- I can only hope Luke Combs’ marriage does better than Hillary’s campaign … or her marriage, come to think of it). Following that came what I thought was the best performance of the night, by Female New Artist winner Tenille Townes. She did a wrenching song called “Somebody’s Daughter” about driving by a homeless panhandler on the street and wondering, “Why do I have a comfortable life and she doesn’t?” Not only was it a great (and socially conscious) song, but Townes gave it a scorching performance. She reminded me of the late-1960’s/early 1970’s singer-songwriter Melanie -- whom I think is criminally underrated, dismissed as a stoned-out hippie chick (even though she avoided the excesses of the era, stayed healthy and stable, and is still alive) and written off as an influence even though a lot of modern-day women singers (Cyndi Lauper, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Lorde) sound an awful lot like her: high-lying voices with fast vibratos.

Tenille Townes is definitely a talent to watch, and the show did the runner-up for Best Female New Artist, Gabby Bennett, no favors by having her perform her own song, “I’ll Be Your Song,” right after Townes’ scorching performance, Bennett did a nice rendition of a nice song and I probably would have liked her a lot better if she hadn’t had to follow Townes. Then the prize-winning vocal duo Dan & Shea did an O.K. song called “I Should Probably Go to Bed,” after which one of the contestants for Best Male New Artist, Lionel Green, did a song called “I Wish” (a perfectly nice song that bears unfair comparison to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece of that title). Then Kane Brown came out with a song called “Worldwide Beautiful” that was one of the most astonishing moments of the program: not only is Kane Brown Black, but he stationed backup singers of various colors throughout the otherwise empty auditorium and had them join in a lyric celebrating “One Love, One God, One Family” in what I thought was the best anti-prejudice song since the one John Legend and Common wrote for the final credits of the film Selma. After that Maren Morris, who won my heart on a previous country-music awards show with her great song “My Church,” did a lovely ballad off her newest CD, Girl, called “To Hell and Back.” It was a lovely song, but would someone please sign Maren Morris to star in a biopic of Janis Joplin while she’s still young enough to play the role? She’s got the look, she’s got the voice and she’s even from the right state (Texas). After that came the political and social fireworks from Taylor Swift and Eric Church, and then Tim McGraw did a good song called “I Called Mama.”

Then came another number that highlighted how this is not your parents’ world of country music: Black woman Mickey Guyten, with Keith Urban on plano and backing vocal, on a great song called “What Are You Going to Tell Me?” Then Urban paired up with the singer Pink for yet another booze song, “One Too Many” -- which was O.K. though given Pink’s penchant for Cirque du Soleil-style antics as she performs I had thought the gravamen of the lyric would be, “I knew I’d had one too many when the girl I went home with got on her wires and started flying above me over the bed.” Then came the In Memoriam segment, featuring not only deaths I’d heard of (like Charlie Daniels and Kenny Rogers) but ones I hadn’t (like Sonny Curtis, Buddy Holly’s original lead guitarist and composer of “I Fought the Law” and “Love Is All Around,” the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song). The song played to memorialize these people (and quite a few others) was “I’ll Carry You Home” in a surprisingly intense performance by Trisha Yearwood that savored the song’s obvious borrowings from the Black church, down to Yearwood’s vocal keenings on it. Anything would have been a letdown after that, and the letdown was an emptily patriotic song called “I Love My Country” by the group Florida Georgia Line -- though even that wasn’t the mindless ode to American exceptionalism you’d have expected from a song of that title on a country awards show 20, 30 or 50 years ago) and a film clip of Willie Nelson joined by the other stars of the evening doing “On the Road Again” and savoring how much more that song (“Can’t wait to get back on the road and see my friends”) means in the SARS-CoV-2 era when the only person who gets to do any sort of stadium tour to big audiences is Donald Trump!

"Game of Thrones," season six, episodes five and six: "The Oath," "Blood of My Blood" (Television 360, Startling TV, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I watched episodes five and six of season six of Game of Thrones, “The Oath” and “Blood of My Blood.” Once again I’ll copy the synopses from imdb.com and then riff on them:

The Oath: Littlefinger faces the consequences of his actions. Sansa and Jon make plans. Daenerys decides Jorah's fate. An uneasy truce in Slaver's Bay doesn't withhold Tyrion from trying to improve the situation. The Ironborn choose their new ruler. No -one (Arya Stark) is given a new mission and witnesses a play. Bran learns about how the Long Night came to be but brings chaos upon his group. Wyllis holds the door.

Blood of My Blood: The White Walkers reach Meera and Bran but they are saved in the last minute by a mysterious black rider who turns out to be Benjen Stark. Sam and Gilly arrive at Horn Hill, where Sam introduces Gilly and Crastor's son to his family. Defending Sam, Gilly confesses that she is a wildling, which is appalling to Randyll. Nevertheless, Randyll accepts the baby into his home. However, Sam changes his mind in the last moment and decides to take Gilly, the baby as well as the Valyrian sword of his father with him and leave his home for good. King Tommen is allowed to see Queen Margery. Instead of killing the actress playing Cersei by poisoning her, Arya recovers her Needle and makes different plans. Jaime and the Tyrell army march into King's Landing, trying to stop Margery's planned walk of shame but the High Sparrow already thought this event through, making sure he will succeed in the end by manipulating King Tommen to take his side. As a result, Tommen fires his father from his job as ...

One of my sources for confusion as to who’s who in Game of Thrones is the sheer multiplicity of plot lines and the way the writers wrench us back and forth between them -- and I must confess my husband Charles has a better ability than I do to keep track of who is who and what side they’re on. Also, as Game of Thrones has progressed it’s become more supernatural and also more gory -- though these two episodes were at least a bit of an exception to the gore, at least. The White Walkers still remind me an awful lot of the brain-eating zombies in George Romero’s films -- they’re supposed to be an implacable menace but at least the dead warriors in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung were revivified so they could be heroes guarding Wotan’s Valhalla for all time, while the ones here look like someone gave Romero the budget to make a film set in the Middle Ages.

The most powerful scenes in these episodes barely got mentioned in the above synopses -- we’re supposed to believe that the White Walkers were able to breach the defenses of the cave where Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright), the kid who in the early episodes climbed up the side of the Lannister castle wall (what, if the Lannisters and the Starks are supposed to be sworn enemies, was he doing there?) and witnessed Jaime and Cersei Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Walden and Lena Headey) in the throes of incestuous passion and they responded by pitching him out of the window of the castle tower, permanently disabling him) and his minder because Bran dreamed that the king of the White Walkers touched him (and he also had a dream where his beautiful twink chest was pierced by a stone knife with which he was stabbed), and now the two of them have to flee for their lives while being chased by a horde of hundreds of implacable, instinctive enemies who can’t be reasoned with, stopped or successfully fought without the exotic weapon “dragon glass,” which is in woefully short supply.

The most emotionally wrenching story here is the one about Samwell Tardy (Jon Bradley), who brings his girlfriend and their baby (though actualy, as noted in the synopsis, she's someone else's baby) back to the ancestral home from which he was exiled years before -- and suddenly a character that’s been basically a comic-relief foil for Jon Snow (Kit Harington) (I’ve joked that if Warner Bros. had made this story in the 1930’s Alan Hale would have played him) suddenly becomes a figure of weight and pathos as he gets himself thrown out of his family again when the woman accidentally “outs” herself as a “wilding,” the tribe of Northerners that though (unlike the White Walkers) are still human, nonetheless are hated by just about everyone else in the story because they’ve survived for centuries by raiding the other tribes.

The other most interesting story in these episodes concerns the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), a religious leader who’s built up a huge cult following so large and powerful they can literally tell the King of Westeros, Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman) -- a guy who’s way too nice for the cutthroat world of power in Game of Thrones (it would be like replacing nice Barack Obama with nasty Donald Trump -- oh, wait, that actually happened!) -- who’s ultimately recruited into the cult of the High Sparrow, an offensive moralist who’s somehow able to get away with anything (even though, unlike most of these people either in fiction or in real life, there’s no hint that he’s personally participating in the behaviors he condemns so vociferously in others), who’s trying to save his wife Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) from the High Sparrow’s wrath by adopting the High Sparrow’s sick religion himself and ordering Jaime Lannister (Tommen’s ostensible uncle and actually his father as well, since he and his brother, former King Joffrey, were products of the long-term incest between him and Cersei) to stand down just when he had assembled an army to slaughter that disgusting religious pedant and all his followers. (Once again a figure in Game of Thrones is able to escape accountability for his evil -- also like Donald Trump.)

Though most of Game of Thrones was filmed before Trump became President the show definitely reflects the Zeitgeist of the Trump years -- the various characters pursuing power for its own sake and the lip service paid to codes of “honor” that the characters actually break left and right. There’s also a metafictional conceit in these episodes in that “No-one” -- actually Anya Stark (Maisie Williams) -- is ordered to assassinate an actress in a theatrical troupe that performs a play about Tyrion Lannister’s (Peter Dinklage) successful assassination of his nephew Joffrey, and while it might have been trippier for the actor playing Tyrion to be a normal-sized person simulating little-persondom by going about on his knees and tying the rest of his legs behind hlm like Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec in the 1952 Moulin Rouge, the casting director for Game of Thrones was able to come up with another little-person actor. There’s also the contest for the leadership of the “Ironborn,” a contest between Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), who’s somehow recovered from being hypniotized into slavery and rechristened “Reek” in previous episodes (if they explained how that happened, I forgot), his sister -- who’s clearly more qualified but this is one of those realms, like the United States, that won’t allow its head of state to be a woman) -- and their uncle, who pulls rank on both of them.

Also part of the problem with Game of Thrones is that some of the most interesting characters -- like the woman knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie, who’s complained off-screen that she doesn’t get considered for many roles because she’s six feet tall -- the opposite of Peter Dinklage’s problem and an indictment of what we as a society still consider “appropriate” for women and their roles!) -- are some of the least effectively used, and even Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), who’s in the thick of the dynastic battles because her father was king until he went insane and was murdered by Jaime Lannister -- is supposed to be the “Mother of Dragons” but we see very little of her, and none of her dragons, until the very end of episode six, when we finally get to see her ride one. I suspect we haven’t seen more of the dragons simply because the producers of Game of Thrones couldn’t afford enough time on CGI computers to give us more of them -- so perhaps my dream that one day Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books can one day be filmed will remain elusive.

Sinfidelity (Curmudgeon Films, Storyworks Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was of a movie called Sinfidelity, produced by “Curmudgeon Films” and “Storyworks Entertainment,” directed by Tamer Halpern and co-written by him and Daniel Bruckner. I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that this film was created by men had something to do with its being far less sensitive and complex than the previous night’s “premiere,” Deranged Granny, which was written and directed by women and was far more creative in its deployment of Lifetime’s cliches. Sinfidelity’s title and promos promised a much better movie than the one Messrs. Halpern and Bruckner delivered. The film opens with its best and most chilling scene: a young man follows the woman who’s just dumped him into a roller rink where they’re playing loud techno, stalks her with his camera, corners her and stabs her to death, photographing her all the while and (we learn later) carefully saving the prints and putting them in an album so he can relive the experience. Then we get a “Ten Years Later” chyron and we meet the lead couple, Greg (Mark Jude Sullivan) and Angela (Jade Tailor), and their prepubescent daughter Vivian (Piper Blair). Greg is the president of an Internet start-up that’s about to be acquired by a major company and make him a lot of money. Angela doesn’t really need to work but she runs a boutique wine business out of her home.

To facilitate the deal Greg has hired two people, an accountant named Franco (Aidan Bristow) to ensure his books are in order and can withstand a major company’s due diligence, and a personal assistant named Lisa (Caroline Cole) with whom Greg is working a lot of late nights. Earlier Greg had had an affair while Angela was pregnant with Vivian, and from those long nights as well as the goo-goo eyes Greg and Lisa are making at each other during the party to celebrate the upcoming acquisition, she becomes convinced that Greg and Lisa are having an affair. With Franco cruising her big-time at the same party, and later offering to help with the books of her wine business (she knows more about vintages than she does about accounting and her customers and suppliers are getting restless about her business sloppiness), she decides to yield to Franco’s advances for a revenge fuck of her own. She regards it as a one-night stand and feels guilty about it almost as soon as it happens -- and she feels even guiltier when she learns those late nights her husband was spending with Lisa were planning sessions for the super-trip to Italy he was going to surprise Angela with as soon as the money from the acquisition came through.

Franco not only has become romantically obsessed with Angela, but though none of the other characters know it yet we realize from his hobby of photography and the old film camera he uses (he has a darkroom in his home and develops his own pictures) that he’s the stalker and killer we saw in the prologue. Like most Lifetime villains he escalates as the film progresses, planting spyware on Angela’s smartphone (allegedly it’s accounting software but it gives him the ability to track her everywhere he goes and even to watch her bedroom as she and Greg have make-up sex) and threatening to sabotage Greg’s acquisition deal by rewriting the books to make Greg seem either incompetent or crooked. Franco also forces Angela to record what amounts to a hostage tape, saying that she cheated on Greg (which she did) and she’s in love with Franco (which she isn’t). Needless to say, Angela also has a Black best friend, Claire (Blythe Howard), who advised her to have the revenge affair in the first place and whose ex-husband (whom we never see), whom she dumped because he was having an affair, is a private detective. Angela asks Claire to get in touch with her ex to see if Angela can hire him to get the goods on Franco -- only Franco eavesdrops on the conversation and keeps that from happening by picking up Claire and having sex with her.

Only Claire stumbles into Franco’s darkroom, sees his collection of snuff photos and realizes Angela’s in mortal danger -- but she meets the fate of all too many of the heroines’ African-American best friends and gets killed by Franco, who puts her in a bondage pose in his bed and then stabs her for his latest series of snuff pics. Eventually, to no one’s particular surprise, Franco tries to get Angela to leave her husband for him by kidnapping Vivian (ya remember Vivian?) and tying him up; Angela retrieves a gun from a safe but Franco easily takes it away from her, only while his back is turned Angela realizes where her husband is, frees him and in a Free Soul-style ending Greg “grows a pair” by shooting down his wife’s paramour. If Deranged Granny was an artful and creative redeployment of LIfetime cliches, Sinfidelity (despite a genuinely creative title) is an all too obvious by-the-numbers exploitation of them, almost as if Halpern and Bruckner had a checklist by their computer and ticked off every familiar plot element as they included it.

They deserve points for the different styles of music used in the various scenes -- the icy EDM of the prologue, the cool jazz played at the party where Franco first cruises Angela and the tear-in-my-beer laments heard at the country bar where he takes her as the final stop before he brings her to his place to have sex with her. But it doesn’t help that Sinfidelity is surprisingly weakly cast, especially in the man-meat department; in most Lifetime movies about dastardly male seducers one’s used to being able to ogle a nice hunk even while knowing he’s going to be playing the black-hearted villain, but not this time: Aidan Bristow as the bad guy looks way too much like Mark Jude Sullivan as the man he’s cuckolding, and though there’s a soft-core porn scene between him and Jade Tailor director Halpern shoots it too ineptly to get the sexual frisson we want. If some Lifetime movies have triumphed over stupid titles, Sinfidelity is the opposite: a great title yoked to a dull and mediocre film.

Pool Boy Nightmare (The Asylum, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had high hopes for the next movie on LIfetime’s schedule last night, Pool Boy Nightmare (incidentally the title is spelled as two words on imdb.com but three words on the actual credits), mainly because the words “pool boy” in the title promised us a nice, hunky piece of man-meat as the titular pool boy, and I was not disappointed in that department. Though I would have liked more body hair and a more butch face instead of a baby one, Tanner Zagarino was all I could have hoped for: tall, well muscled and with a quite promising basket writer-director Rolfe Kanefsky lets us see a lot of in mid-shots of him wearing beach shorts and nothing else. Like Sinfidelity, Pool Boy Nightmare opens with a prologue establishing at the start that Adam Lance (Tanner Zagarino) is a murderer: he corners the woman who owns the house whose pool he’s supposedly cleaning, drowns her in the pool (after a bizarre and quite imaginative scene in which he literally “nets” her with his pool sweeper) but then puts her in the bathtub and fakes the scene to look like an accident.

Then the main action begins: Gale Foley (Jessica Morris, top-billed), a high-powered accountant who’s been raising her 18-year-old daughter Becca (Ellie Darcey-Alden) as a single parent since her husband Tony (Clark Moore, whom I found almost as sexy as Tanner Zagarino, albeit in a more mature and more butch way) left her to have a flaming mid-life crisis, buy a sports-model BMW and disport with a series of bimbos little older than Becca. Gale has bought the house where the previous owner died and has inherited the pool boy (“pool man,” he insists, since he’s 25), obviously worried far less than she should be about the jinx one might expect from the mysterious death that occurred there. Gale, who if anything has a sexier figure than her daughter, attracts the attentions of the amorous pool boy -- though, like Angela in Sinfidelity, she only has sex with him once and regards it as a big mistake. To get back at Gale for dumping him so peremptorily, Adam decides to get his revenge by dating Becca -- who’s attracted to the idea of sex with an older man. Mom goes into full overprotective mode, grounding Becca and trying to throw as many roadblocks in the way as possible.

Unknowingly, she’s got an ally in Becca’s best friend Jackie (Cynthia Aileen Strahan), who works at “Creamology,” the local ice cream parlor, where both Foley women are such regular customers one wonders how they maintain their girlish figures. Jackie is first happy for her friend that she’s got such a hunk in her life, but when she searches “Adam Lance” on her computer she finds that he has no presence on social media at all. That’s enough to make her suspicious of him -- after all, even if he didn’t want to do the Facebook or Twitter thing one would presume he’d at least want an on-line presence to attract more customers for his pool-cleaning services -- and as for Gale, she’s so upset that Becca is dating her sloppy seconds she ramps up her overprotectiveness. As for Adam, his obsession goes into typical Lifetime-movie overdrive, especially when he orders so many flowers and gifts sent to Gale’s workplace (how did he know where that was?) that Gale’s boss Victoria (Angela Nicholas), who seems not to want her employees to have any private lives at all, threatens to fire her. Gale tries to enlist her husband Tony to intimidate Adam into leaving her family alone, and Tony duly shows up at Adam’s place (surprisingly fancy for a 25-year-old who makes a living as a pool cleaner), gives him a good hard punch in the stomach and warns that there’s more to come. Then we hear sounds of crashing as Adam goes back inside and closes the door behind him, and it turns out that Adam has beaten himself up to make it look like Tony worked him over big-time. What’s more, he’s sent the photos of himself in this condition to all three Foleys and to the police.

Fortunately Adam’s antics have attracted the attention of a relative rarity in Lifetime movies -- an intelligent cop, a woman named Detective Davidson (Gina Hiraizumi) who manages to get Adam’s juvenile criminal record unsealed and figures out What Makes Adam Run. Though writer-director Kanefsky had to pull some punches to appease the TV ratings board, it seems that when he was 14 years old Adam was sexually seduced by his mother Rhonda (seen in a flashback and played by Sarah French) and enlisted Adam’s aid in killing his dad -- sort of Oedipus Rex meets Psycho. It’s not clear what happened to Rhonda (presumably she went to prison and later died) but Adam was tried as a juvenile and then let go. But this made it impossible for him to perform sexually with women his own age and led him to search out older women with pools he could clean, seduce them and form the typical romantic obsessions of a Lifetime villain on them until they definitively rejected him, whereupon he killed them.

Adam also attempts to kill Gale’s ex Tony by spiking the water of his Jacuzzi with a toxic chemical, and he tries to kill Becca’s friend Jackie by pushing her off the ledge of Gale’s pool, which has since been drained by the nerdier and heavily accented pool person Gale’s hired to replace Adam. Both of them fortunately end up hospitalized but still alive -- and I give Kanefsky credit for having all the murders in this film, completed or attempted, involve water or pools -- and in the end there’s the typical final confrontation in which Gale corners Adam while he’s in the bathtub of her house and dangles a plugged-in hair dryer over him, threatening to drop it in and electrocute him, though in the end Detective Davidson comes in as a deus ex machina and arrests Adam for the murder of the house’s previous owner, saying ominously, “You won’t get off so easily this time.” (Actually Adam doesn’t seem to have had any problem getting off!)

Though beset by bizarre continuity issues my husband Charles had fun pointing out -- in the scene in which Adam makes love to Gale he has a two-day growth of beard when he approaches her outside on the pool patio, is clean-shaven when they’re in bed together and has the beard again outside after they finish; and after Adam supposedly bruises himself to frame Tony for assault, the next scenes showing him stripped down for action (aquatic, sexual or whatever) show no trace of the bruises -- Pool Boy Nightmare was mostly the sort of good clean dirty Lifetime fun I was expecting from the title, and the acting and casting were quite a bit more impressive than those in Sinfidelity: Jessica Morris has a great figure and one wonders why her husband jilted her for bimbo Cindi Sullivan (Valeria Gomez) except that Cindi has much bigger tits. Morris and Ellie Darcey-Alden powerfully present the clash between the protective mother and the daughter who’s ready to leave the nest (it’s established that Becca is 18 and about to graduate from high school and go off to college in the fall), complicated by her own guilt feelings over having had sex with the man she’s trying to warn her daughter away from. And aside from being drop-dead gorgeous, Tanner Zagarino does the character’s superficial charm so well I’m not sure Pool Boy Nightmare wouldn’t have worked better if Kanefsky had omitted the prologue and allowed Zagarino to play the character as a bit oafish and immature but outwardly sympathetic until the characters started noticing things a little “off” about him and ultimately realized how crazy and dangerous he really was.

Deranged Granny (Imoto Productions, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a Lifetime “premiere” movie that was pretty typical plot-wise but quite a bit better than their norm in terms of the execution: Deranged Granny (well, they’d already done Killer Granny and Psycho Granny, so they were running out of titles for this particular concept), produced for Imoto Productions and with women as both director (Jennifer Liao) and writer (Vicky L. Neal), which helped a great deal. The film opens with couple Ethan (Josh Ventura) and Lucy (Jane Nawartschi) Anders expecting their first baby. Ethan has long been estranged from his mother Barbara (Wendie Malick, top-billed), but she’s come back into his life with a vengeance even though, as Lucy complains, Barbara never took any interest in her until she got pregnant with a son who could continue the Anders (the word means “different” in German, by the way) family line. Only Lucy goes into hemorrhaging in the final stages of her pregnancy and her obstetrician, an Asian-American male named Dr. Howard (Jim Lau), has to make a Solomon-style decision: save the mother’s life or try to keep the baby alive even at the risk of mom’s death? He chooses to save the mother and lose the baby, whereupon Barbara goes into a hissy-fit, insisting on being presented with the baby’s corpse and wrapping it in the knit blanket she had made for her prospective grandson. She also writes “Murderer” in red letters on the windshield of doc’s car -- though earlier director Liao had given us an ambiguous close-up of the doctor appearing to laugh, which for one brief moment made me wonder if Ethan’s and Lucy’s baby had been born alive after all and the doctor was going to human-traffic him, possibly by selling him to a wealthy couple for an underground adoption. Fortunately, Neal chose not to go with that set of Lifetime cliches.)

Then we get a typical Lifetime chyron reading “Three Years Later,” and three years later Ethan and Lucy have broken up over the strains of having lost their baby -- and we never see Lucy again -- while one of Ethan’s friends sets him up with a co-worker of theirs, Kendall Thompson (Amanda Righetti). Kendall not only looks about a decade older than Ethan but already has two kids of her own, 11-year-old Amy (Isabel Gameros) and six-year-old son Bobby (Finnegan Garny). The kids’ father, Calvin Thompson (Dave Baez), is still very much in the picture since he and Kendall have joint custody, and one of the best aspects of Neal’s script is how well it depicts the sheer complexity of so-called “blended families” and the traumas people, especially children, get put through trying to negotiate these living arrangements. But of course the most sinister intrigue is with the character of Barbara (and kudos to the filmmakers, including casting director Lindsay Chag, for using an actress to play Barbara who’s middle-aged and still surprisingly attractive instead of one of the old bags who usually get cast in “grandmother” roles -- though Chag gets docked a few points for casting both men in Kendall’s life with actors who look a decade younger than she; indeed, though Dave Baez is a bit shorter than Josh Ventura and has a full beard, the two men otherwise look strikingly alike and make us wonder if this is Kendall’s one and only “type”) and the well-balanced performance Liao gets out of Wendie Malick in the part.

She gets a few of the eye-rolling, arm-waving, screaming scenes Lifetime writers and directors tend to give their psycho characters (especially the female ones), but for the most part she’s beautifully controlled in her interactions with others, and Neal helps Malick out with a script that remains grounded in reality and doesn’t throw the kinds of unbelievable coincidences a lot of lesser Lifetime scribes use (though one hole she leaves unexplained is where Barbara’s money comes from -- she’s obviously well-to-do even though she also has a history of mental illness, which at least in this country tends to impoverish people). Malick’s best scene occurs in Barbara’s kitchen, when she's decided to poison Kendall’s ex-husband Calvin for having accepted a job promotion that will require him to move to Boston, and his resulting request to have custody of Amy and Bobby for the three summer months they’re not in school. She makes an apple pie and spikes it with rat poison, and does so with the cheery indifference of a particularly demented contestant in the Pillsbury Bake-Off in a scene that reminded me of Lily Tomlin’s crazy fantasy of doing in her abusive boss in Nine to Five.

Barbara also mounts a major charm offensive to win the allegiance of Kendall’s children even though she’s no biological relation to them at all, and it works -- they end up liking her a lot better than either their mom or their stepdad-to-be -- and it’s not until the very end of the movie that she ends up losing her sang-froid and going after Kendall with a gun just as Kendall is about to call 911 and report her to the police. Barbara orders Kendall to drop her phone, which she does, but fortunately the phone remains on and the police dispatcher hears enough to learn of the emergency and trace the call to Kendall’s address, whereupon they get Barbara to drop her gun and take her into custody. The final tag scene shows Ethan and Kendall married and with a newborn daughter of their own -- she found out she was pregnant before the final confrontation with Barbara -- and Barbara in a mental hospital knitting a blanket for her first biological grandchild while a tough-looking butch African-American nurse says, “She’s really going to like that.”

Though Neal’s plot trods along a pretty well-established Lifetime pathway, at least it makes more sense than most of their movies -- and Liao’s direction not only gets good and multi-faceted performances from his actors, it features creative camera angles that propel us into the action and achieve some at least quasi-noir effects appropriate to the story. Deranged Granny isn’t great (and that typically dorky Lifetime title doesn’t help), but it’s done with real distinction and flair and stands several cuts above the Lifetime norm.

Columbo: "Murder Under Glass" (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal Television, 1978)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a Sundance Channel Columbo rerun from 1978 called “Murder Under Glass” which, though it dealt quite extensively with the world of fine dining, did not feature any dish actually being served under glass. The central character is Paul Gerard, played by former The Paradine Case and Gigi star Louis Jourdan at a time when Columbo had become so fashionable that quite a few stars with heavy-duty movie cred campaigned to get roles on Columbo as the principal villain whom Columbo would force to confess to some dastardly murder plot. In this one Paul Gerard has artfully combined an old-style protection racket (“Nice little restaurant you’ve got here; it would be a shame if anything happened to it”) with a far-reaching power as a restaurant critic and foodie TV personality with the reach and absolute power of Burt Lancaster’s character, J. J. Hunsaker, in Sweet Smell of Success.

He’s organized a front group called the “Restaurant Development Association” and charges aspiring restaurateurs 25 percent of their proceeds in exchange for super-favorable coverage -- with the promise of utter destruction of their reputation and their business if they stop paying up. In the opening scene Gerard is being comped to a fabulous private dinner at the Italian restaurant owned by Vittorlo Rossi (Michael V. Gazzo) when Vittorio serves notice on Gerard that he’s no longer going to pay him. But Gerard has already planned ahead: he’s extracted the toxin from fugu, a rare Japanese fish (also known as a puffer fish or a blowfish) which for some reason has become a gourmet delicacy for fine diners who are literally putting their lives in their sushi chef’s hands. The trick in preparing fugu is to cut away all the toxic parts and serve only the bits that are safe to eat -- and according to Robert Van Scoyk’s script, fugu chefs are actually licensed by the Japanese Department of Health and most fugu-related deaths are caused by people who think they can fix it themselves and don’t really know what they’re doing.

Gerard has extracted fugu toxin and put it in a medical ampule, from which he extracts it with a hypodermic syringe and contaminates the business end of one of those high-tech corkscrews that inject gas into the wine bottle and thus extract the cork by pressure without having to shred it in the process. He seems to have picked this unusually baroque murder method (the Columbo creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, seem to have worshiped at the shrine of St. Agatha Christie in coming up with insanely complicated murder schemes) not only because it ties in with his self-image as the world’s arbiter of fine dining but because fugu poison is not the sort of toxin that turns up on police toxicology tests.

The script overall is a pretty typical Columbo episode in which Peter Falk’s detective character not only displays some unexpected and previously ignored talents -- when Mario DeLuca (Antony Alda), Vittorlo’s nephew and a key witness, turns out to know almost no English, Columbo is able to question him in Italian, and later in the show he’s depicted cooking his old family’s recipe for veal scallopini and doing so well enough he attracts the admiration of Paul Gerard himself -- but also his basic one of solving his cases by annoying the principal suspect into confessing. The show was directed by Jonathan Demme and has some of the demented quirkiness of his feature films, and there’s a plot gimmick straight out of one of the controversies surrounding Howard Hughes. Demme directed a film called Melvin and Howard in which an old Nevada drifter ostensibly discovers Howard Hughes in the desert and gets him out to safety -- and for this was rewarded with a one-sixteenth share of the entire Hughes estate, though the will was later established to be a forgery.

“Murder Under Glass” directly references another famous Hughes forgery, in which author Clifford Irving had his girlfriend Nina von Pallandt (Irving had a wife and a girlfriend, and I can hear my husband Charles’ clucks of disapproval now!) deposit the checks McGraw-Hill and Time-Life were paying him for his fake “autobiography” of Howard Hughes and do so under the name “Helga R. Hughes.” In “Murder Under Glass” Gerard has his typical blonde-bimbo girlfriend Eve Plummer (Shera Danese) do the banking for his scheme in Europe under an assumed name -- only Columbo finds out her disguise by calling her by the pseudonym, and of course she answers to it. The final scene is a cat-and-mouse game between Columbo -- wearing a chef’s hat that gives him a stronger-than-usual resemblance to Chico Marx (another Jew who became internationally famous for playing an Italian!) -- and Gerard at Vittorio’s restaurant (the key scenes take place there on Monday since that’s the night the restaurant is closed to the public) in which Columbo ticks off detail after detail that convinced him Gerard was Vittorio’s murderer.

Like most of the Columbo shows, this one was nice light entertainment, and the elaborateness of the murder plot (which Gerard tries to duplicate on Columbo, of course unsuccessfully, in the final scene) was key to the formula even though as I’ve grown older and more familiar both with mystery fiction and real crime I’ve gained more respect for Raymond Chandler’s statement that real homicide detectives had told him the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killers got fancy with these elaborate preparations both for committing the crime and covering it up, while the hardest murders to solve were the ones in which killer and victim were buddy-buddy until just seconds before one killed the other.