A Widow Seduced (Vortex Productions, Super Channel, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 17) I watched two of the weakest Lifetime movies I’ve seen in quite a while, A Widow Seduced and The Beach House Murders. A Widow Seduced was pretty much what you’d guess from the title and it being a Lifetime movie (produced by a Canadian company called “Vortex Entertainment” and what I presume was a premium Canadian streaming service called “Super Channel”). The titular widow who gets seduced is Kellie Gibson (Natalie Brown), who lost her husband to cancer a year before and has since been running their company, Gibson Marketing, but has tired of the grind of being a businesswoman and wants to sell the company and get out. Her seducer is Dan Smith (Gray Powell, who’s easy enough on the eyes and ruggedly handsome but not the GQ model type Lifetime usually casts as its male villains), whom she meets via a dating app she gets on at the urging of her best friend Sasha (Erin Agostino) from a “Bereavement Support Group.” Before the action proper begins, we get another one of those mysterious Lifetime prologues in which we see Dan – or whatever he was calling himself then – torturing a woman to death and then disposing of her body in a woodchipper, which immediately led me to think that the writer, Jessica Landry, had seen Fargo. Needless to say, it’s not until way later in the plot that we learn who this woman was, Lucy Wilson (Jeannette Roxborough) and why Dan (or whoever he is) wanted to kill her. Sasha encourages Kellie to answer Dan’s app post and the two go out for dinner that night. Eventually they end up at Dan’s place and they have sex (and Natalie Brown is just right for the role physically, still attractive but looking like someone who’d been off the dating market for the 20 years of her marriage and hadn’t had sex between her husband’s death – or probably well before that given what cancer does to you in the later stages – and her meet-up with Dan), following which Dan tries to talk Kellie into letting him move in with her.

Dan tells Kellie his own home was destroyed in a fire and he needs a place to stay while it’s being rebuilt. The moment Dan lets Kellie move in, he becomes quite demanding and starts ordering her around, canceling her cell-phone service and opening a joint cell-phone account so he can literally track her movements 24/7. Dan also takes out papers for a joint bank account and demands that Kellie sign them so he’ll have access to her income. Complicating the story is Kellie’s scapegrace brother Jack (Jamie Spilchuck), whom for some reason writer Landry gave the last name “Gibson” even though it’s hard to believe Kellie wouldn’t have used her late husband’s name instead of her original one in managing a business that until his death they co-owned and was really more his baby than hers. Jack previously wrote a software program that became the basis of a huge company, which he sold for a gazillion dollars – which he blew on alcohol and gambling. Now he’s been clean and sober for a year, but he’s still tempted to fall off the wagon and he occasionally takes sips of wine when he thinks nobody (particularly Kellie) is looking. Jack is immediately suspicious of Dan’s intentions towards his sister, and of course his suspicions are right on the money: Dan is really a scam artist out to grab the fortune Kellie is about to make by selling Gibson Marketing. Landry throws us another couple of curveballs in the form of Mona (Sima Sepehri), a woman who keeps getting Kellie’s attention to warn her against Dan – only Dan is able to convince Kellie that she’s just a vengeful ex who doesn’t want him to be happy with a new woman – and a sinister meeting between Mona and two other women who tell each other about Kellie, “We’re just going to have to step up the pressure.”

I wondered whether they were going to turn out to be part of Dan’s plot against Kellie, but in the end they turn out to be the Seventh Cavalry. In addition to everything else, Dan has slowly been poisoning Kellie with toxins in her soup, and she’s about to die when Mona and the two other mystery women kidnap her from her home and force her to drink a jug of noxious liquid. It turns out the liquid is “activated charcoal” (well, that’s what Jessica Landry wrote for them to tell her!) and its purpose is to flush out the poison from her system. It also turns out that Mona is the sister of Lucy Wilson, the woman we saw Dan murder in the prologue, and the two other women are relatives of other rich widows Dan targeted and killed after extracting their fortunes. There’s a typical Lifetime climax in which Kellie confronts Dan, only Dan has captured Kellie’s friend Sasha (ya remember Sasha?) and threatens to kill her unless Kellie makes over the $2 million check for the sale of her business to him. Kellie yields, only [spoiler alert!], in a twist ending that was a lot less surprising than Landry clearly thought it was, Sasha turns out to be Dan’s real-life husband (only they call each other “Chris” and “Emily” instead) and part of his plot. Ultimately the police respond to Kellie’s distress call and arrest Sasha, but Dan gets away – are they setting us up for a potential sequel or did they just want to give us the added frisson of having the principal villain get away and presumably pull this off on another victim somewhere else? The person connected with A Widow Seduced I felt sorriest for was the director, Bill Corcoran, who did the best he could with the nonsense Landry and the five producers (Christopher Giroux, Jesse D. Ikeman, Bill Marks, Evan Ottoni and Justin Rebelo) handed him and actually got in a few genuinely suspenseful sequences, as well as some nice soft-core porn sex between Gray Powell and Natalie Brown, but a silly script and O.K. but hardly great actors did him in.

The Beach House Murders (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards it was time for Lifetime’s “premiere” for the week, The Beach House Murders, which turned out to be just the usual Lifetime garbage with Black people to commemorate Black History Month. This time the central “pussy in peril” is best-selling mystery writer Sarah Brewer (Brittany Dorey), who’s been blocked on her latest novel for over a year. Her agent, Alice (Ashli Auguillard), suggests that Sarah stay at her beach house for as long as it takes her to finish the book. Only Sarah has a “past”: one year earlier she passed out at the same beach house (at least I think it was supposed to be the same beach house), and when she came to both she and her then-husband Miles (Devante Winfrey) were badly wounded. Miles was arrested and served a one-year sentence for assaulting her, but he’s been released and now he’s hanging around the beach community trying to attract Sarah’s attentions so they can get back together. On her first night at the beach house Sarah wakes up in the middle of the night to find a strange white man in her bed; he’s Jack (Kyle Williams), a not-bad looking youngish fellow who says he’s there to re-enact a sex-and-murder scene from one of Sarah’s novels. Sarah throws Jack out, but later Jack breaks into the beach house and steals the laptop computer that contains Sarah’s latest novel as well as the hard drive to which she’s been backing it up. Jack calls her and demands $100,000 for the return of her book – when Sarah calls Alice to ask what she should do, Alice asks, “Why didn’t you back it up to the cloud?” Sarah reminds Alice, “You told me not to do that because it might get stolen!” If Jack doesn’t get paid, he’ll throw her computer and hard drive into the sea and render the novel unrecoverable.

Kellie starts dating a young ex-Marine who served in Afghanistan, Tony (Cj Hammond) – for some reason Sarah is the only character in the movie writers Josh Ridgway and Doug Campbell (Ridgway got credit for the original story, both got a “screenplay by” credit and Campbell also directed, in the traffic-cop sense) gave a last name – only Tony gets knifed to death three-fourths of the way through while he and Sarah are in bed together. (Maybe Messrs. Ridgway and Campbell read the original Nibelungenlied, in which Siegfried is similarly stabbed while he and his wife Kriemhild are in bed together and she wakes up to find a pile of meat where her husband had been the night before – though like that story, this had me wondering, “How come she didn’t wake up?”) After a lot of wanna-be “sinister” back-and-forth during which Sarah loses her new man, her book contract and her agent – Alice tells Sarah her partners in the agency have instructed her to fire Sarah, and she’s reluctantly complied – ultimately her ex-husband Miles turns out to be the villain behind her ordeals. He was determined to wreck her life completely, and Jack was an out-of-work actor whom Miles hired (how did Miles get the money?) to steal Sarah’s laptop and pose as a blackmailer in exchange for all the cocaine he could snort. Miles drugs Sarah, throws her into the swimming pool on the beachfront property and leaves her to drown – only this time the Seventh Cavalry arrives in the person of Alice, who’s talked her partners into rehiring Sarah.

By this time the plot had got so preposterous that I thought Ridgway and Campbell were going to pull the old Seven Keys to Baldpate gimmick and have the story turn out to be the plot of Sarah’s latest novel – and they came close to doing that when Sarah and Alice are sitting at the beach in portable chairs after Alice has knocked off Miles, Sarah laments that Tony had got killed, and Alice has Tony magically materialize out of the water, alive. Then, however, that turns out merely to be a dream sequence; Sarah had nodded off in her beach chair and dreamed Tony’s resurrection, though the dream leaves her determined to abandon mystery writing and make her next novel a love story instead. Sarah explains to Alice that even though Tony actually died, she’ll have to keep him alive and have her female lead get together with him at the end because “a romance novel needs a happy ending” (a piece of advice I’ve heard from real-life romance novelists, too). The Beach House Murders has all too many of the same flaws as A Widow Seduced: an overly complicated plot and dull, one-dimensional characters we really don’t care that much about even on the rare occasions when we can actually keep track of who’s doing what to whom.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Hunting the Stag" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 15) I watched a quite good episode of the New Zealand-based TV series The Brokenwood Mysteries, aired in 2014 (when the series started production; this was the fourth episode of season 1) called “Hunting the Stag.” It’s about a young couple named Hayden (Francis Mountjoy) and Kelly (Jessica Joy Wood) who are about to get married, only the day before Hayden goes out on a hunting trip with his two (male) best friends and co-workers, Stent Baker (Ben Wright) and Frankie Oades (Karl Willetts), for some reason nicknamed “Frodo” after Frodo Baggins, the lead Hobbit in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Frodo is not the best-looking man in the cast but he is the most striking, with his oddly craggy face that signifies “avuncular” (i.e., “uncle-like”) even though he’s the same age as Stent and Hayden. The three men have an agreement whereby they’ll each load their hunting rifles with one bullet each from the same box of ammunition and they’ll all fire at the same time. Only when they do that, Hayden gets shot with a bullet from his own gun. The police – lead detective Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), his assistant Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland) and a third plainclothes cop, Sam Breen (Nic Sampson) – immediately suspect suicide until both male detectives try to manhandle the gun and realize they can’t possibly hold it in such a position that they could fire it themselves and kill themselves with it. They then briefly suspect Kelly of murdering her husband-to-be when they learn she used to be a crack shot with just that sort of gun – the gun Hayden used on his ill-fated trip was a present from her, and she’d intended to buy another for herself as a sort of his-and-hers hunting-rifle pair, but she didn’t because the owner of the local gun store, Rory Parkes (Jared Turner), reported it stolen from his gun safe.

Though the cops suspect the other two guys as well as Kelly, the crime’s roots turn out to stretch back to an auto accident from five years earlier in which Hayden, Kelly and a young woman named Marcie (Rachel King) were involved. At the time Hayden and Marcie were dating and Kelly was along for the ride, only when the car caught fire and exploded, Marcie was trapped inside while Hayden and Kelly escaped relatively unharmed – though Kelly got concussions that led her to periodic losses of memory and muscle control. (Marcie is dead when our story begins, but she’s shown in enough flashbacks to the scene of the accident that they needed an actress to play her.) The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Marcie’s brother, Rory Parkes (Jared Turner), owner of the gun store and tire shop (or “tyre,” this being New Zealand, a British Commonwealth country that spells the word in the British fashion) where Hayden, Stent and Frodo all worked. Rory’s motive is that in the accident he lost both his sister and his girlfriend, since Kelly re-met Hayden in a grief counseling group and the two started dating, with Kelly dumping Rory to be with Hayden and ultimately deciding to get engaged. Rory loses it totally about 20 minutes before the episode ends and he kidnaps both Kristin Sims and his own office assistant, Tanya Stokes (Mirama McDowell). He holds them both at gunpoint with two separate rifles and demands that Mike Shepherd pick one to set free, whereupon he will keep the other under his control until the cops let him escape.

After some effective suspense direction by Mike Smith (working from a script by Timothy Balme, with Philip Dalkin supplying “additional material”) Mike picks Tanya to be set free and Kristin remains in captivity. Rory strings her up by a chain and keeps her dangling, but Kristin kicks him in the balls and gets him to drop his gun. Rory retrieves it but Mike comes up from behind and wrestles him to the ground, ultimately getting him to let go of the gun again and arresting him. Mike then sets Kristin free and she, understandably miffed that he chose to let Tanya go free while Kristin remained in the madman’s power, asks Mike why he chose the way he did. “Because she has kids,” he says – and the final shot of Tanya shows her on the couch watching TV with the two children she’s been raising as a single mother. “Hunting the Stag” is an above-average episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, with an exciting action climax far more intense than the rather wry ending of most British Commonwealth mystery shows, a truly interesting psychopathic villain, and a plot that gives us multidimensional characters and a resolution that actually makes sense. This one made less of the odd character of Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor), a hunky Maori who deals in rare wines and whom Shepherd and the other cops use as an informant because he apparently has some ill-defined association with Brokenwood’s underworld, than usual, and there was also less of Mike Shepherd’s obsession with country music (or at least the Down Under version thereof). But it was well written and, more than most shows in this series, made use of the odd characteristic that in a town as small as Brokenwood, everybody seems to know everybody else’s business.

Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace (COPA Films; TV documentary, dated 2022, copyright 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 14) I watched a quite intriguing program on PBS from French television called Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace, produced by Sally Black and directed by Stéphane Jacques. It was actually about two lost palaces on the Île de Cité (“island of the city”), an oblong island in the middle of the Seine River between the Right and Left Banks. It’s best known today as the site of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, and until recently it was also the home of the French national police in a building called the Palais de la Justice. Then the French police moved out and into a new building just north of the Paris city limits, which turned archaeologists and architects loose on whatever had been under the structures. The first Palais de la Cité was actually built during the Roman occupation of France in 52 B.C. and began as a military fortification, but it soon acquired a fancy residential wing to allow for the Roman emperor to be housed there. It lay pretty much in ruins for the 400 or so years between the final fall of the (Western) Roman Empire in 476 A.D. and the emergence of the unified Kingdom of France in the ninth century. The grounds of the Palais were the center of a French Resistance movement against the attempt of the Vikings to conquer France in 885 A.D., which led to the gradual accumulation of buildings on the site, including a new palace for the royal residence. (The Viking invasion of France was apparently the factual basis for the video game Assassin’s Creed, which got name-checked in this program, though the Wikipedia page on Assassin’s Creed lists its real-life origins as the cult of the Hashashins in medieval India, whose name produced the words “assassin” and “hashish.”)

The palace on the Île de la Cité became known as the Palais de la Cité, and at least one building from it still survives: the spectacular Church of Saint-Chapelle. This is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture that in at least one aspect goes beyond the usual notion of a Gothic cathedral. Ordinary Gothic buildings are supported by what are called “flying buttresses,” great arms that essentially cling to the sides of the building and are there to hold up the walls. The main chapel of Saint-Chapelle is a wide-open giant room without flying buttresses or any other visible means of support, which led the team of experts investigating the building as it stands to wonder just how it had held up over the years. The team included architect Uves Ubelmann (from a company called Iconon), Marjorie Coulon, Pierre-Yves Le Pogem, Maxim Loutierierre, Dadie Couturier, Didier Busson, Evelyne Demeaux (curator of medieval collections at the Chateau de Chantilly library), archaeologist Gregory Chaumier, Hervelyne Damieux and two chemists expert at reproducing medieval paints, Maggie Choubert and Evelyne Poulier. They based their attempted reconstruction (through digital modeling) of the Palais de la Cité largely on the work of pioneering 19th century French archaeologists Eugène-Violette Le Pac and especially Théodor Vaquier, whose specimen collections are still housed in a Paris museum and have largely been preserved over time. They theorized that the walls of Saint-Chapelle were held up by the flying buttresses in a basement room below the main chapel, and also by iron rings centered around the structure. As this show argued, the builders of Saint-Chapelle basically invented reinforced concrete centuries before it was rediscovered and became a standard building material.

The show chronicled various monarchs who reigned from the Palais de la Cité, including Philippe Auguste (the longest-reigning medieval monarch of France; he was king from 1180, when he assumed the throne at just 15, to his death in 1223); his grandson Philippe Le Bel (the name means “The Beautiful,” and judging from his portrait on French coins of the period, that he was; he took the throne at 17 and reigned from 1285 until his death in 1314); and Charles V, who was King of France during the attempt by British King Edward III and his oldest son, Edward the Black Prince, to conquer France in the 1300’s. Charles V had to deal not only with a foreign threat but a domestic one as well. The internal threat was led by a man named Étienne Marcel who had the title “Provost of Merchants,” which the Wikipedia page on Charles V describes as being the medieval equivalent of the Mayor of Paris today. Marcel’s fighters managed to kidnap Charles V from the Palais de la Cité and hold him, and while Charles eventually regained power he decreed that the palace was not sufficiently secure and ordered that neither he nor any future royals would live there. So after 300 years of serving as both the royal residence and the administrative center of the growing French state (and the growing French bureaucracy that ruled it), the palace lost its status as such but various agencies of the French government still ran their affairs from it. The show didn’t say where the French kings lived in between the closure of the Palais de la Cité in the 1350’s and the construction of Versailles by Louis XIII in 1624 – it was originally a hunting lodge but Louis XIV ordered it expanded to a full-scale palace in the early 1660’s – but according to Wikipedia, it was mainly in the Louvre, which was a palace before it was repurposed as the most famous art museum in the world.

The ultimate objective of the team behind the excavation of the Palais de la Cité was to create a digital model of it, including reproducing the giant hall that contained life-sized statues of the first 43 kings of a unified France, for which they needed exact reproductions of the colors with which the statues – especially the bright blue or red outfits they had worn – had been painted. That’s how Maggie Chambert and Evelyne Poulier got involved; they knew how to make blue paint from lapis lazuli (a super-rare stone that came mostly from what is now Afghanistan) and they could reproduce the original color of the royal robes the French kings depicted in the statues would have been wearing. They had the immeasurable help of a Treatise on Painting written by Cennino Cennini in 1844, which according to the description on amazon.com “covers a wide range of topics related to painting, including materials, techniques, and the principles of composition.” Chambert and Poulier used Cennini’s recipes to mix their own paint colors, with the result that even though the sculptures in the great hall are only digital models, they still glow with fire-bright colors that, according to the show’s narration, give the lie to the common stereotype (reinforced by Terry Gilliam’s films) that the Middle Ages looked dark and dingy.

Shrek 2 (DreamWorks Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 12), my husband Charles and I watched the second film in the Shrek cycle, rather unimaginatively titled Shrek 2. The titles got more creative later on in the cycle; the third film was called Shrek the Third and the fourth was called Shrek Forever After. I’m looking forward to ordering the third and fourth Shrek movies (the third was made in 2007, the fourth in 2010, and though a fifth was planned from the get-go it still hasn’t been made). Part of the delay in making Shrek 5 was due to the sale of DreamWorks Animation to NBC Universal, and part of it (according to the Wikipedia page on the Shrek franchise) was due to the increased computing power needed to make these computer-animated films. As the Wikipedia page explains, “Despite the advances in computing power over the 2000’s decade, the increasing usage of novel techniques like global illumination, physics simulation, and 3-D demanded ever more CPU [central processing unit] hours to render the films. DreamWorks Animation noticed that every Shrek film took roughly twice the CPU hours than the previous film and thus labeled this trend as ‘Shrek's law.’ Similar to ‘Moore's law,’ Shrek's law says, ‘The CPU render hours needed to complete production on a theatrical sequel will double compared to the amount of time needed on the previous film.’” I was surprised at how literate both the first two Shrek films were and how many charming cultural-reference gags they contained, not only to other fairy tales (I mentioned in my comments on the first Shrek that it seemed to have a kinship to Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods for its creative mash-ups of classic fairy stories) but to bits and pieces of the mass culture that had little or nothing to do with the Grimms or their equivalents outside Germany.

I was also surprised at how many illustrious stars the producers of Shrek 2 got to join the franchise; the plot premise of Shrek 2 is that the newly married couple Shrek (Mike Myers) and Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) are invited to the land of “Far, Far Away” to attend a grand ball being given in their honor by her parents, King Harold and his Queen – and damned if they aren’t voiced by two legendary performers, John Cleese from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and Julie Andrews from … you know. What’s more, in addition to the donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy in the first film (and who, of course, returns here!), there’s a new annoying talking-animal sidekick, Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), and when the big ball finally occurs it’s covered in a TV show announced by Joan Rivers … playing herself. Shrek 2 was both written and directed by larger committees than made the first one; Conrad Vernon gets a co-director credit along with Andrew Adamson and Kelly Asbury, who co-directed Shrek. The writing credits similarly grew, with Andrew Adamson getting acknowledged for both the original story and a share of the screenplay, the latter with Joe Stillman, J. David Stern and David N. Weiss, with Cody Cameron, Walt Dohrn, Chris Miller and David P. Smith getting “additional dialogue” credit and Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio and Roger S. H. Schulman winning nods for creating characters recycled from the first film that weren’t in the original 1990 children’s book Shrek! by William Steig. Steig was born in 1907 and joined the staff of The New Yorker as a cartoonist in 1930. He contributed original art to an auction organized by Langston Hughes to benefit the Scottsboro Boys’ legal defense fund in 1934. Steig didn’t start writing children’s books until 1968, at age 61; he achieved success with his third one, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, and published Shrek! in 1990, when he was 86. He went through four marriages, one of which produced the jazz-rock flutist Jeremy Steig (whom I remember from the 1960’s, when he led a band called Jeremy and the Satyrs), who played a voice role as the Pied Piper in the last Shrek film (so far), Shrek Forever After.

William Steig died October 3, 2003, just as Shrek 2 was about to be released, and the film’s closing credit includes a dedication to him. Asked what he thought about the first Shrek movie, which he lived long enough to see, Steig said, “It’s vulgar, it’s disgusting – and I loved it,” which isn’t the usual reaction writers have to movies based on their works. The setting of Shrek 2 in a country called “Far, Far Away” is an obvious nod to Star Wars and its nominal setting in “a galaxy far, far away,” and its biggest surprise is the appearance of a Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders) not as a beneficent force in the heroine’s life but quite the opposite: as a cold-blooded villainess eager to marry off Princess Fiona to her own son, Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), who’s designed to look as much like the comic-strip character Prince Valiant as the folks at DreamWorks Animation could get away with. The Fairy Godmother also runs a sweatshop factory where hundreds of exploited elves make spells for her – Shrek, the donkey and Puss in Boots crash her palace by claiming to be union organizers – and the smokestacks emit rainbow-colored smoke. The reason Shrek and Fiona want the Fairy Godmother’s help in the first place is because, not surprisingly, King Harold and his Queen aren’t exactly thrilled by having an ogre as a son-in-law. There are the predictable double-takes from the courtiers as Shrek and Fiona arrive looking like the ogres they are (though Harold and his missus don’t seem all that surprise that Fiona is now looking pretty ogre-esque herself, which may be due to something we learn about Harold much later). Shrek figures that if he can get hold of one of the Fairy Godmother’s spells and turn himself into a relatively normal human, he can win his in-laws’ affections and live happily ever after, despite the Fairy Godmother’s insistence that ogres never live happily ever after. At one point Shrek and company get put into a dungeon, only various other fairy-tale characters break them out in a quite amusing spoof of Mission: Impossible, complete with Lalo Schifrin’s famous theme song from both the TV series and the films.

Ultimately Shrek and the donkey grab the potion from the Fairy Godmother’s armamentarium and they both drink it; Shrek becomes a quite appealing if rather hefty bear-type human male (who frankly did far more for me than the overly twinky Prince Charming!) and the donkey becomes a noble white horse. They repair to the big ball, and there’s an effective suspense ending in which Prince Charming tries to kiss Fiona (who’s also reverted to human form after seeing Shrek as a homo sapiens), while Shrek attempts to escape the Fairy Godmother’s clutches and get to her to kiss her before Prince Charming does. The gimmick is that if the two kiss before midnight, they will remain in human form for the rest of their lives, while if they miss the deadline they will revert to ogre-dom and stay there. Ultimately Shrek and Fiona decide not to kiss until after midnight, so they presumably live happily ever after as ogres, Eddie Murphy’s white horse becomes a donkey again, King Harold reverts to his original status as a frog (the big secret I mentioned above), and the Fairy Godmother literally disintegrates into teardrops. Then a post-credits sequence follows, a quite amusing and entertaining spoof of American Idol that, like the karaoke scene at the end of the first Shrek, only appears on the home-video versions. It features various cast members performing songs like Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” The Trampps’ “Disco Inferno” (one of the few disco songs I actually liked at the height of the craze in the late 1970’s), Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy,” Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” (which I can remember was popular at the same time as Ringo Starr’s “Oh My My,” so I kept getting them mixed up), Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” her dad’s hit “My Way” and The Romantics’ “What I Like About You.”

These bizarre medleys of classic songs from the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s are among the most fun parts of these movies, and the American Idol spoof (which featured Simon Cowell as himself, though Rick Riso sang for him on “My Way” – they would give that bizarre hymn to egomania to Simon Cowell, or at least his voice double!) was so elaborate there was a whole separate credit roll for it. Charles said after it was all over that Shrek 2 was more of a musical than Shrek – though there were plenty of intriguing musical interludes in the first film, too – and the first two Shreks hold up as quality family entertainment and make me look forward to catching up to the other two films in the cycle.

Shrek (DreamWorks Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images, 2001)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 11) my husband Charles and I screened a DVD copy of the 2001 movie Shrek, which somehow had eluded us before now even though it became a major cultural icon. It was so old a disc that the image was in the old 4:3 “full-screen” aspect ratio, though since Shrek was a computer-animated film that wasn’t as much an issue as it would be for a live-action movie. In fact, I suspect the filmmakers, directors Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jenson, deliberately framed the movie so it would work in both 1.33:1 and 1.55:1 ratios. Like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Shrek (which we obtained, along with the sequel Shrek 2, in a batch of old DVD’s one of Charles’s co-workers was giving away because she’s given up on playback software and now “streams” everything – yuck!) isn’t a great movie but it is an extremely entertaining one. Basically, Shrek is a mash-up of fairy tales somewhat along the lines of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods, though without the overlay of seriousness Sondheim and his book writer, James Lapine, brought to their version. The title character, Shrek (Mike Myers), is a hideous green ogre whose very appearance is supposed to scare the hell out of ordinary humans, but he predictably turns out to be a gentle giant. He lives in the kingdom of Dulac (as in “Sir Lancelot du Lac” – the parking lot in front of the big castle where the ruler lives is even inevitably called “Lancelot”), whose ruler, Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), is upset because he’s still called a “Lord” instead of a full-fledged king. The only way he can get to be a king is if he marries a princess, and there’s a nice sequence satirizing the “Bachelorette” dating shows in which he’s offered three possibilities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz).

Alas, Princess Fiona is being held hostage in a castle guarded by a fire-breathing dragon (Gary A. Hecker), and only a knight pure and brave of heart can rescue her and give her the first kiss that will remove the spell from her and bring her life and love. Lord Farquaad hires Shrek to go on the quest and bring Princess Fiona back to him so he can marry her, and in return Farquaad will give back Shrek his swamp, where he’s dumped all the fairy-tale characters he’s exiled from his domain – including Pinocchio (Cody Cameron), his creator Geppetto (Chris Miller), Peter Pan (Michael Gelasso), two of the Three Blind Mice (Christopher Knights, who’s also listed as voicing a character called “Thelonious,” and Simon J. Smith) and various other classic personae. Along the way Shrek also acquires a companion, a wise-cracking donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy (in one of his more tolerable performances, largely because we don’t have to look at him; he was great as the old soul singer in Dreamgirls but ordinarily he’s one of the most repulsive screen presences in movie history), and the two of them rescue the princess from the dragon quite easily. Part of that is explained by the writing committee (written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman and Roger H. Schulman from a kids’ book by William Steig, with additional dialogue by Cody Cameron, Chris Miller and Conrad Vernon), who make the dragon female and have her get a crush on the donkey. The princess is rescued from the dragon at the film’s midway point, and the rest of the movie is taken up by Shrek’s and the donkey’s efforts to get her back to Dulac and into the arms of Lord Farquaar. There are a lot of jokes about Lord Farquaar’s short stature, and at first I thought they were rather dubious off-color lines suggesting that Farquaar wasn’t especially well hung, but when Our Heroes finally get back to the castle it turns out that Lord Farquaar is really short (though I couldn’t help but think of another fantasy, Game of Thrones, in which Peter Dinklage’s character did pretty well for himself despite his little-person status).

In the meantime, Shrek has fallen for Princess Fiona himself, and the writers have a trick up their sleeves [spoiler alert!]: at sundown Fiona goes through a werewolf-style physical transformation from a nice-looking human woman into an ogre like Shrek, thanks to a spell a witch put on her in her girlhood. During their trek back to Dulac, the good guys also encounter Robin Hood (Vincent Cassel) and his band of Merry Men, and the meeting is staged almost exactly like the “Welcome to Sherwood, my lady!” scene from the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood movie with Errol Flynn. The Merry Men do a song-and-dance routine that came a bit too close to Mel Brooks’s spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights for me, then they disappear. By the time the wedding of Farquaar and Fiona is supposed to occur, Shrek decides to do a Graduate-style crash of the big ceremony while Fiona is rushing through it hoping it can be completed before she changes back into an ogre – only, thanks to the amorous dragon who conveniently eats Lord Farquaar just as the ceremony is completed (making Fiona an instant widow), Shrek is able to marry her himself and it turns out that an ogre is Fiona’s normal form; it’s the beautiful princess that was the result of the witch’s spell. Shrek is also full of clips from famous popular songs, some of them used quite effectively (notably the appearance of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation”), others not so well (and it doesn’t help that the version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a surprisingly limp one by John Cale, an artist I ordinarily like; my reference versions are Cohen’s own, Jeff Buckley’s star-making hit cover and the stunning one k. d. lang sang at the end of the opening ceremony at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver). But in addition to the songs in the film itself there’s a quite charming post-credits karaoke sequence featuring songs like Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Anthony Ray’s “Baby Get Back,” Morris Albert’s and Louis Gaste’s awful “Feelings,” the Village People’s “Y-M-C-A,” Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?,” the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” Anselm Douglas’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music” and The Turtles’ “Happy Together.” All told, Shrek is a quite charming movie (that word keeps coming to mind about it) and an easy hour-and-a-half on the minds and ears of its viewers.

Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story (Cineflex Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, February 10) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, both about young women in hostage situations but at opposite ends of the quality scale. The first was the good one, Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story. Written by Amani Walker, directed by Katie Boland, and featuring a mostly African-American cast (Lifetime’s way of observing Black History Month by pressing Black cast and crew members into the network’s standard “pussies in peril” formula), Abducted Off the Street begins with a disclaimer that though the movie was “inspired” by a true story, some characters have been fictionalized or turned into composites. What follows is a genuinely chilling tale of Carlesha Gaither (Riele Downs), a student nurse just finishing her training – we know she’s supposed to be good because she takes over at the last minute from an ill colleague and relates quite well to the patient she has to take on. She goes to a party with her extended family, including dad Carl Gaither (Danny Waugh), mom Keisha Gaither (Kenya Moore) – they’re separated at the start of the story but join forces to prod the local police (this is in Philadelphia) into taking Carlesha’s case seriously – and grandmother Ana (Diane Johnstone). Alas, while she’s walking home she’s accosted by a strange (in both senses) young man, Delvin Barnes (Sam Asante), who overpowers her, kidnaps her and throws her into the back of his car. For the next three days Delvin holds her against her will, taking her on a journey through various states (they go through Maryland and end up in Virginia) and periodically changing the license plates on his car to make it harder for the police to catch them.

The police investigation is led by Detective Darby (Aidan Devine), who’s bound and determined that this is not another young Black woman who’ll disappear on his watch and never be heard from again. He gets upset with his subordinate, Officer Montgomery (Dylan Taylor), after he hears Montgomery mutter “white savior syndrome” under his breath about Darby’s dedication to solving the case. The reason Darby is so committed to solving the case and doing what he can to bring Carlesha home alive is that there’s a whole wall in the police station full of photos of young Black women who disappeared under similar circumstances. We get the idea that Delvin is a serial killer, and we’ve even seen him before at work on another victim he previously kidnapped, then tortured and raped before he killed her. (Charles and I both were a bit confused by this prologue because it wasn’t immediately clear whether the woman was Carlesha and we were getting a flashback, or it was another victim of Delvin in what the law calls a “prior bad act.”) The film cuts back and forth expertly between the pressure campaign the Gaither family in general and Keisha in particular mount on the authorities to solve the crime, bring Carlesha home and prove that in at least one city Black lives do matter, and the edgy relationship between Carlesha and Delvin. Writer Walker even takes a welcome page from Christine Conradt’s playbook and makes Delvin a believable character, pathetic in the good sense of the word. I felt sorry enough for him that at the end of the movie I was hoping that at least the police would take him alive instead of shooting him at the end, and in the end he is captured alive and Carlesha is rescued.

Walker’s writing and Sam Asante’s playing make Delvin a fully rounded character, scary in his very indecisiveness, torn between playing for Carlesha’s (and our) sympathies and acting like a complete psychopathic monster with a glare-ice nature. The only thing that made me dubious about Walker’s largely successful attempt to give the character of Delvin depth instead of making him just a cardboard villain was her choice for his “Rosebud” moment: as a high-school senior, he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke in which he was encouraged to run for prom king, only to learn at the day of the prom that no one had any intention of voting for him. It was all just a prank that went hideously wrong and convinced him that women were evil and not to be trusted. At several points in the action he seems to be apologizing to Carlesha for planning to kill her, saying that it’s nothing personal but he just has to do it to relieve the pressure on his psyche. They even have at least one sexual encounter, which director Boland stages elliptically (a long-shot of Delvin’s car parked in the middle of nowhere as he demands sex from her and she reluctantly yields out of fear for her life) but which adds to the power of the story and the sense we get of Carlesha’s violation. The police finally get the clue they need from a surveillance photo of Delvin’s car, from which they are able to trace it to the dealer who sold it. The woman at the dealership tells them that because Delvin’s credit history was shaky, they put a GPS detector on the bottom before they let him drive it away.

The cops are ultimately able to trace the car and manage to apprehend Delvin and rescue Carlesha just as he’s on the point of stealing another car and thereby shaking their electronic tail completely. The credits let us know that the real Delvin Barnes was sentenced to 35 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 2051. Abducted Off the Street is an example of Lifetime at its best: a powerful, tightly-knit story (even though they don’t always tell their true stories the way they happened, the existence of a real-life tale as the basis seems to put Lifetime’s writers on their best behavior), effective suspense-filled direction and a cast that rises to the occasions and embraces their roles: determined Carlesha, indomitable Keisha and pathos-filled Delvin.