by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie I
picked out of the DVD backlog because it’s one of the two feature films (so far)
directed by Callie Khouri, who “made her bones” writing the screenplay for the
film Thelma and Louise and got
picked to do this movie, Mad Money (dated 2008 on imdb.com even though the copyright date on the closing
credits is 2007), because it’s also about unlikely and ordinary-seeming women
becoming crooks. I was interested in Khouri’s credits because she had directed
last Saturday’s Lifetime “premiere” Patsy & Loretta, about the mentoring relationship between
country-music superstars Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn between 1961, when they
met, and 1963, when Cline died in a private-plane crash. Mad Money turned out to be the sort of movie that’s
entertaining but all too obviously recycled from innumerable past models,
starting at least as far back as 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob: a “caper” film about ordinary and previously
law-abiding people who are tempted by the wealth that surrounds them into
staging a big crime to steal some of it. Mad Money also recycles at least two films starring Jane
Fonda, the underrated 1977 farce comedy Fun with Dick and Jane (in which Fonda and George Segal play a couple who
plunge downwards from their upper-middle-class lifestyle when Segal is suddenly
laid off from his high-paying corporate job and turn to street crime to make
ends meet; and 1980’s Nine to Five, in which Fonda is one of three secretaries dealing with a yucky boss
(played by Dabney Coleman — and there’s a creepy boss in this movie, too, named
Glover and played by Stephen Root, who proves they didn’t break the mold after
they made Dabney Coleman) and finally turning the tables on him. Mad Money began as a script by Neil McKay and Terry Winsor
called Hot Money which actually got made in
2001 (that one was set in Britain and the target for the thieves was the Bank of
England, though the original McKay-Winsor script was rewritten by John Mister),
and Glenn Gers got the assignment to rewrite Hot Money with a U.S. setting: Kansas City, Missouri, home of
one of the branch offices of the Federal Reserve. Bridget Cardigan (Diane
Keaton) suddenly loses her opulent suburban lifestyle when her husband Don (Ted
Danson) is laid off from his high-paying corporate job. Their bills pile so
high that they’re four months behind on everything, they have to list their home for sale, and in one
of the film’s most grimly amusing scenes Bridget has to pay off her cleaning
lady with a silver trophy since she has no cash. Desperate to earn the family some kind of income, and handicapped by being in her
50’s with a college degree (comparative literature) that’s useless in the job
market and not having worked in over two decades, Bridget finally gets a job as
a cleaning woman at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. The money she’s tempted to
steal is money that doesn’t officially exist: it’s worn bills that are taken
out of circulation and returned to the Federal Reserve to be destroyed.
Bridget
hooks up with two other low-level employees, Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah) —
who wants to be able to send her kids (she’s raising two boys as a single mom) to
private school so they don’t meet the usual fate of African-American children
in 21st century America (especially 21st century movie America) — and Jackie Truman (Katie Holmes, better
known as Mrs. Tom Cruise #3 — she was a last-minute replacement for Lindsay
Lohan after the film company couldn’t get a completion bond with Lohan involved
because of her much-publicized drug problem, though since her character is
supposed to be a druggie as well Lohan wouldn’t have been inappropriate; Holmes
will never have a reputation as an actress equal to that of Mrs. Tom Cruise #2,
Nicole Kidman, but she’s quite good here and her on-screen husband, Adam
Rothenberg, has the kind of half-homely, half-sexy Scooby-Doo guy look I actually like) — and notices that the
three padlocks that safeguard the Federal Reserve’s stashes of
about-to-be-shredded cash are identical to a $25 brass padlock sold at Home
Depot. So she works out a scheme that involves substituting their own padlocks
for the official ones and helping themselves to the cash, which they stuff into
trash bags and smuggle some of it out on their bodies. They get away with this
long enough that they have the problem of how to spend the money, given not
only that they are stealing far above their salaries but also the Internal
Revenue Service has a requirement that any time you spend $10,000 or more in
cash on something, you have to file a report stating how you got that money.
(The film doesn’t mention that this law has
a significant loophole — you don’t have to file if you spend the money on real
estate — which is how Donald Trump got in bed with the Russian Mafia in the
first place: in the 1980’s he was having trouble moving the condo units in New
York’s Trump Tower until he was bailed out by Russian mobsters looking for a
convenient way to launder their money and get it into the U.S.) In order to
explain how they suddenly have so much more money than they’re supposed to
have, Don Cardigan works out a scheme by which he’ll pretend to be a “corporate
consultant” and Jackie’s husband Bob will pose as a day trader.
They’re finally
caught by a Black security guard at the bank, Barry (Roger Cross), who in one
of the film’s most wickedly funny lines starts feeling up Nina (it’s been
established earlier that he has the hots for her and has been cruising her all
movie) and then tells her the jig is up — “Unless you have a half-dozen very
hard rectangular breasts, we need to talk.” Fortunately Nina is able to seduce
Barry, literally and
figuratively, into going along with their scheme in exchange for an equal share
of the money, and the crime ring only gets broken by the arrival of a bank
examiner (played by an appealingly dorky actor who’s hotter-looking than
Franklin Pangborn in a similar role in W. C. Fields’ 1940 classic The Bank
Dick but is still doing the
same sort of monomaniacal characterization) who figures it all out and gets
Glover to bust the thieves despite his protestations that nothing like this
could ever happen at a Federal
Reserve facility. (According to some imdb.com “Goofs” posters, it couldn’t: “When
currency is destroyed at a Federal Reserve, it is carefully accounted for:
serial number, denomination, and destroy date. In addition, the carts carrying
money are weighed full & empty — as well as the shredded output — with very
sensitive scales at several stages for comparative analysis. Allegedly, the
scales can detect the absence of a single bill. At the Federal Reserve, no
employee is left alone with the money during cash processing. In Federal
Reserve cash processing facilities, multiple denominations of money are never
allowed to mingle.” So don’t try this yourselves.) The thieves are arrested and
Nina the Black single mother is especially upset because a criminal conviction
— even one with no prison time — will mean her sons will end up in the
foster-care system (at this time Charles joked, referencing I Am Somebody’s
Child: The Regina Louise Story, “It’s not like Diane Keaton did anything really horrible, like try to adopt Queen Latifah’s kids”)
and she’ll lose custody of them forever.
The cops hold all the defendants
separately to see which will rat out the others first — the rat turns out to be
Jackie, whose condition for cooperating is full immunity not for herself but
for Nina so she can keep her kids — and ultimately the charges against them are
dropped by the Kansas City police but their ill-gotten gains are confiscated by
the Internal Revenue Service. Earlier in the film Bridget had used the name
“Capone” while taking a weekend vacation at a fancy hotel, an obvious in-joke
reference to Al Capone’s ultimate fate: he escaped prosecution for bootlegging,
murder and all his other more obvious crimes but was ultimately convicted of
income-tax evasion and served a decade in Alcatraz. However, in the final scene
they’re shown as having held on to some of the proceeds, which they declare is
their “mad money” (hence the film’s title) and they gleefully throw around the
screen just before the final fade-out and the end credits. Mad Money is a likable film but it could have been quite a
bit more — with my habit of mentally recasting movies with some of the other
people who would have been available at the time I fantasized a version with
Jane Fonda as Bridget and Whoopi Goldberg as Nina (however awkward it might have
been for her and Danson to work together again!); Fonda might have brought more
authority and spark to the role (Keaton plays her with a kind of glum
seriousness that went against her strengths as a comic actor) and Queen
Latifah, as much as I loved her in Chicago (and ache for the chance to see the Bessie Smith biopic HBO made with
her — for once a real-life filmmaker cast a biographical film with the very
person I would have used!), has too much on-screen integrity to be believable
as a crook, even a lovable one. But the real problem with Mad Money is the sense that we’ve seen it all before; it’s
an enjoyable movie (and at 1 hour 45 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome
like so many films do these days) but little more than that, and as a vehicle
for Callie Khouri’s directorial talents it doesn’t work as well as Patsy
& Loretta — if only because we’d
rather see a female-solidarity movie about women who make it above-board as
singing stars than make it on the down-low as crooks!
Monday, October 21, 2019
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Patsy & Loretta (Sony Pictures Television, Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I settled in for the night to watch the Lifetime “premiere” TV movie Patsy & Loretta. As you could probably guess from the title and the faux-“country” lettering of the title in the credits, this was a film about the friendship and mentorship between country star Patsy Cline and up-and-comer Loretta Lynn between 1961, when they met, and 1963, when Cline died in the crash of a private plane one of her band members had bought in hopes of making it to and back from gigs without costing her too much time away from her home, husband and kids. The film is competing with two big-budget theatrical movies from the 1980’s, the well-received Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (with Sissy Spacek not only starring as Lynn but doing her own singing — and quite effectively, too — while Tommy Lee Jones got his star-making career as Lynn’s all-too-often straying husband, Doolittle Lynn, variously called “Mooney” or “Doo,” the subject of some of her greatest songs, including “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” and “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ with Lovin’ on Your Mind”) and the less well-received Cline biopic Sweet Dreams (with Jessica Lange as Cline and Patsy Cline’s old records used for the soundtrack, but with the original accompaniments digitally erased and new ones added à la Clint Eastwood’s Bird), and though I never saw Sweet Dreams the memories I have of Coal Miner’s Daughter (with Beverly D’Angelo indelible as Cline even though she got only about 10 minutes of screen time) are of a better movie than this.
What’s strongest about Patsy & Loretta is its depiction of the relationship between the two women and how much it bonds over two key commonalities: their mutual dedication to their music and the problems each has with their husbands. Megan Hilty grips the screen as Cline, not only acting the role but doing her own singing — and doing it with complete authority even though Cline’s surprisingly jazz-like phrasing (I’ve written elsewhere that it was Patsy Cline who was “the white Billie Holiday,” not any of the white women jazz singers who deliberately tried for that title: much of Cline’s actual singing reminds me of Billie, particularly the way she hung behind the beat and the “dying falls,” the downward glissandi with which both Billie and Patsy liked to end a line so the lyric became a kind of sigh) pretty much eluded her. She projected more vocal authority than Jessie Mueller as Lynn — but then Lynn herself didn’t have the gripping, almost tragic dramatic sense of Cline. What made Loretta Lynn great was less the voice per se and more the sheer audacity of her material — at a time when the conventional wisdom in the country world was that a man could sustain a career on songs he wrote himself (like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash), a woman didn’t have the chops to do that and would have to rely on professional songwriters, Loretta Lynn not only wrote her own songs but gave the Nashville establishment an in-your-face defiance by calling one of her albums Loretta Lynn Writes ’Em and Sings ’Em. As I’m writing this I’m listening to the Lynn CD All-Time Greatest Hits (including her cover of Cline’s hit “She’s Got You”) and it seems like an almost day-to-day diary of her and Mooney’s marriage (the only song missing that would have completed the story would have been “I Can’t Hear the Music,” the absolutely heart-rending song she wrote after his death based on his literal last words; I remember a TV special on Lynn through which an annoying announcer, Joan Lunden, babbled her way through the show and kept undermining the effect of just about everything Lynn sang … until Lynn tore up the stage with “I Can’t Hear the Music” and the effect was so emotionally intense that for once in her life Joan Lunden just shut up). The soft-rock singer-songwriters that dominated the L.A. music scene in the 1970’s thought they were inventing the art of basing your songs directly on your personal life — only Lynn and other country singers had been doing it way before that.
Indeed, much of country music’s appeal lies directly in the emotional bond between singer and audience; Ken Burns’ recent Country Music documentary recounted that when Patsy Cline released her song “I Fall to Pieces” she got a fan letter from a woman who had just been through a bitter breakup and had finally overcome enough of her traumas to go out and accept a friend’s invitation to a party — only who should turn up there but her ex. So the woman wrote to Cline and basically said, “How did you know? How did you know what I was going to feel?” The film Patsy & Loretta was, among other things, yet another triumph for the women filmmakers Lifetime has given opportunities to even while feature-film assignments remain one of the thickest glass ceilings (almost as bad as the Presidency) — the director was Callie Khouri, who’s made two theatrical features (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Mad Money) and shown her chops as a director of films about country music with episodes of the TV series Nashville, and the writer was Angelina Burnett — and judging from her whole list of credits Khouri’s specialty seems to be stories about women bonding and supporting each other in the face of abuse by men. In Patsy & Loretta both Cline and Lynn are physically assaulted by their husbands (though Cline’s abuse is shown only elliptically, when Lynn points to the bruise on her face and calmly says she needs more makeup to cover it before she goes on stage) and the only two real quarrels shown between them come when Lynn makes a remark about how much time Cline is staying on the road away from her kids. Cline reacts to this like Dracula to the crucifix and eventually she tearily confesses that the reason she’s so concerned about being accused of not caring enough about her children was that she was herself sexually abused by her father. Casting director Susan Edelman deserves credit for getting first-rate actors to play the male leads — maybe Joe Tippett isn’t quite as demented-looking as Tommy Lee Jones as Mooney, but he’s got just the right mix of machismo and vulnerability he’s believable even though when he goes out honky-tonkin’ he might as well wear a warning sign saying, “Go to bed with me and Loretta Lynn’s next record will be about you.”
Kyle Schmid is a bit too unassuming for Cline’s husband Charlie Dick (her second husband, actually; it was a short-lived first marriage that gave her the last name “Cline,” but naturally Dick feels insulted and ashamed when someone addresses him as “Mr. Cline”[1]) but he’s believable, though I wish screenwriter had shown the incident in which Dick woke Cline up at 4 a.m. to tell her he’d found the perfect song for her next record: “Crazy,” from a demo recorded by a then little-known songwriter named Willie Nelson. In the movie Cline finally listens to the song and is taken by it — and we hear Willie Nelson’s voice on the soundtrack in what’s supposedly his demo but is probably a re-recording he made years later, after Cline’s death and in the full flush of his own fame. (I first knew Willie Nelson wrote “Crazy” when he sang it on the premiere episode of Austin City Limits in 1975 and thanked Cline for launching his career by recording it.) Cline sings along with Nelson’s demo and learns the song that way, though in the Burns Country Music documentary Harold Bradley, director of the session band that his brother, ace producer Owen Bradley, used on his records, recalled that Cline wanted to record “Crazy” at the tempo Nelson had used on his demo. Owen Bradley wanted it slower, and he ended up recording just the backing track so he could get the tempo he wanted and had Cline add the vocal a day later. (This would become the common way of recording rock in the late 1960’s but it was still unusual in 1961.)[2] Indeed, one of the best things about both Cline and Lynn was they managed to make great, soulful records even with Owen Bradley — the architect of the string-laden, usually syrupy “Nashville Sound” of country-pop — producing them; Cline resisted a string orchestra until her very last session, on which she made “Sweet Dreams” and her awesome cover of Bob Wills’ “Faded Love” which turns a simple honky-tonk lament into a deathless romantic tragedy; much the way Billie Holiday did when she recorded with strings, Cline buzzes with unquenchable integrity and raw emotion and triumphs over the rather cloying arrangements.
The only thing I could have done without about Patsy & Loretta was the three appearances of Patsy Cline’s ghost — or at least Loretta Lynn’s imagination conjuring her up — after her fatal plane crash (and it doesn’t help that Khouri and Burnett anticipated it by having Cline’s last scene shot in slow motion and accompanied by dire instrumental strains: one wants to yell at her, “Patsy! Don’t do it! Don’t get into that little teeny plane in the rain! Does the name ‘Buddy Holly’ mean anything to you?”), including singing a duet with her on Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at a tempo midway between the two most famous versions of the song, Monroe’s original and Elvis Presley’s uptempo cover on the B-side of his first Sun Records single. If she had to do a duet after Cline’s death, the person she should have been shown doing it with is Connie Smith, an aspiring country singer Lynn picked up in a pay-it-forward way and tried to mentor the way Cline had mentored her. Otherwise, though, Patsy & Loretta is a beautiful, moving tribute to women’s solidarity as well as two of the most formidable talents ever to perform in as unfairly maligned and slighted a genre as country music — and Cline and Lynn are two of the people I cite when I point out that despite country’s reputation as a music of melodramatic excess, its greatest performers have wrenched and moved their audiences’ emotions precisely by being understated, delivering their laments in a matter-of-fact tone quite the opposite of the 1920’s and 1930’s “torch singers” who introduced a lot of the songs in the Great American Songbook … until great jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald took out the phony cries and sobs and showed just how good, and how emotionally timeless, those songs actually were. So are the songs of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, and the powerful understatement with which they sang them.
Last night Charles and I settled in for the night to watch the Lifetime “premiere” TV movie Patsy & Loretta. As you could probably guess from the title and the faux-“country” lettering of the title in the credits, this was a film about the friendship and mentorship between country star Patsy Cline and up-and-comer Loretta Lynn between 1961, when they met, and 1963, when Cline died in the crash of a private plane one of her band members had bought in hopes of making it to and back from gigs without costing her too much time away from her home, husband and kids. The film is competing with two big-budget theatrical movies from the 1980’s, the well-received Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (with Sissy Spacek not only starring as Lynn but doing her own singing — and quite effectively, too — while Tommy Lee Jones got his star-making career as Lynn’s all-too-often straying husband, Doolittle Lynn, variously called “Mooney” or “Doo,” the subject of some of her greatest songs, including “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” and “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ with Lovin’ on Your Mind”) and the less well-received Cline biopic Sweet Dreams (with Jessica Lange as Cline and Patsy Cline’s old records used for the soundtrack, but with the original accompaniments digitally erased and new ones added à la Clint Eastwood’s Bird), and though I never saw Sweet Dreams the memories I have of Coal Miner’s Daughter (with Beverly D’Angelo indelible as Cline even though she got only about 10 minutes of screen time) are of a better movie than this.
What’s strongest about Patsy & Loretta is its depiction of the relationship between the two women and how much it bonds over two key commonalities: their mutual dedication to their music and the problems each has with their husbands. Megan Hilty grips the screen as Cline, not only acting the role but doing her own singing — and doing it with complete authority even though Cline’s surprisingly jazz-like phrasing (I’ve written elsewhere that it was Patsy Cline who was “the white Billie Holiday,” not any of the white women jazz singers who deliberately tried for that title: much of Cline’s actual singing reminds me of Billie, particularly the way she hung behind the beat and the “dying falls,” the downward glissandi with which both Billie and Patsy liked to end a line so the lyric became a kind of sigh) pretty much eluded her. She projected more vocal authority than Jessie Mueller as Lynn — but then Lynn herself didn’t have the gripping, almost tragic dramatic sense of Cline. What made Loretta Lynn great was less the voice per se and more the sheer audacity of her material — at a time when the conventional wisdom in the country world was that a man could sustain a career on songs he wrote himself (like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash), a woman didn’t have the chops to do that and would have to rely on professional songwriters, Loretta Lynn not only wrote her own songs but gave the Nashville establishment an in-your-face defiance by calling one of her albums Loretta Lynn Writes ’Em and Sings ’Em. As I’m writing this I’m listening to the Lynn CD All-Time Greatest Hits (including her cover of Cline’s hit “She’s Got You”) and it seems like an almost day-to-day diary of her and Mooney’s marriage (the only song missing that would have completed the story would have been “I Can’t Hear the Music,” the absolutely heart-rending song she wrote after his death based on his literal last words; I remember a TV special on Lynn through which an annoying announcer, Joan Lunden, babbled her way through the show and kept undermining the effect of just about everything Lynn sang … until Lynn tore up the stage with “I Can’t Hear the Music” and the effect was so emotionally intense that for once in her life Joan Lunden just shut up). The soft-rock singer-songwriters that dominated the L.A. music scene in the 1970’s thought they were inventing the art of basing your songs directly on your personal life — only Lynn and other country singers had been doing it way before that.
Indeed, much of country music’s appeal lies directly in the emotional bond between singer and audience; Ken Burns’ recent Country Music documentary recounted that when Patsy Cline released her song “I Fall to Pieces” she got a fan letter from a woman who had just been through a bitter breakup and had finally overcome enough of her traumas to go out and accept a friend’s invitation to a party — only who should turn up there but her ex. So the woman wrote to Cline and basically said, “How did you know? How did you know what I was going to feel?” The film Patsy & Loretta was, among other things, yet another triumph for the women filmmakers Lifetime has given opportunities to even while feature-film assignments remain one of the thickest glass ceilings (almost as bad as the Presidency) — the director was Callie Khouri, who’s made two theatrical features (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Mad Money) and shown her chops as a director of films about country music with episodes of the TV series Nashville, and the writer was Angelina Burnett — and judging from her whole list of credits Khouri’s specialty seems to be stories about women bonding and supporting each other in the face of abuse by men. In Patsy & Loretta both Cline and Lynn are physically assaulted by their husbands (though Cline’s abuse is shown only elliptically, when Lynn points to the bruise on her face and calmly says she needs more makeup to cover it before she goes on stage) and the only two real quarrels shown between them come when Lynn makes a remark about how much time Cline is staying on the road away from her kids. Cline reacts to this like Dracula to the crucifix and eventually she tearily confesses that the reason she’s so concerned about being accused of not caring enough about her children was that she was herself sexually abused by her father. Casting director Susan Edelman deserves credit for getting first-rate actors to play the male leads — maybe Joe Tippett isn’t quite as demented-looking as Tommy Lee Jones as Mooney, but he’s got just the right mix of machismo and vulnerability he’s believable even though when he goes out honky-tonkin’ he might as well wear a warning sign saying, “Go to bed with me and Loretta Lynn’s next record will be about you.”
Kyle Schmid is a bit too unassuming for Cline’s husband Charlie Dick (her second husband, actually; it was a short-lived first marriage that gave her the last name “Cline,” but naturally Dick feels insulted and ashamed when someone addresses him as “Mr. Cline”[1]) but he’s believable, though I wish screenwriter had shown the incident in which Dick woke Cline up at 4 a.m. to tell her he’d found the perfect song for her next record: “Crazy,” from a demo recorded by a then little-known songwriter named Willie Nelson. In the movie Cline finally listens to the song and is taken by it — and we hear Willie Nelson’s voice on the soundtrack in what’s supposedly his demo but is probably a re-recording he made years later, after Cline’s death and in the full flush of his own fame. (I first knew Willie Nelson wrote “Crazy” when he sang it on the premiere episode of Austin City Limits in 1975 and thanked Cline for launching his career by recording it.) Cline sings along with Nelson’s demo and learns the song that way, though in the Burns Country Music documentary Harold Bradley, director of the session band that his brother, ace producer Owen Bradley, used on his records, recalled that Cline wanted to record “Crazy” at the tempo Nelson had used on his demo. Owen Bradley wanted it slower, and he ended up recording just the backing track so he could get the tempo he wanted and had Cline add the vocal a day later. (This would become the common way of recording rock in the late 1960’s but it was still unusual in 1961.)[2] Indeed, one of the best things about both Cline and Lynn was they managed to make great, soulful records even with Owen Bradley — the architect of the string-laden, usually syrupy “Nashville Sound” of country-pop — producing them; Cline resisted a string orchestra until her very last session, on which she made “Sweet Dreams” and her awesome cover of Bob Wills’ “Faded Love” which turns a simple honky-tonk lament into a deathless romantic tragedy; much the way Billie Holiday did when she recorded with strings, Cline buzzes with unquenchable integrity and raw emotion and triumphs over the rather cloying arrangements.
The only thing I could have done without about Patsy & Loretta was the three appearances of Patsy Cline’s ghost — or at least Loretta Lynn’s imagination conjuring her up — after her fatal plane crash (and it doesn’t help that Khouri and Burnett anticipated it by having Cline’s last scene shot in slow motion and accompanied by dire instrumental strains: one wants to yell at her, “Patsy! Don’t do it! Don’t get into that little teeny plane in the rain! Does the name ‘Buddy Holly’ mean anything to you?”), including singing a duet with her on Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at a tempo midway between the two most famous versions of the song, Monroe’s original and Elvis Presley’s uptempo cover on the B-side of his first Sun Records single. If she had to do a duet after Cline’s death, the person she should have been shown doing it with is Connie Smith, an aspiring country singer Lynn picked up in a pay-it-forward way and tried to mentor the way Cline had mentored her. Otherwise, though, Patsy & Loretta is a beautiful, moving tribute to women’s solidarity as well as two of the most formidable talents ever to perform in as unfairly maligned and slighted a genre as country music — and Cline and Lynn are two of the people I cite when I point out that despite country’s reputation as a music of melodramatic excess, its greatest performers have wrenched and moved their audiences’ emotions precisely by being understated, delivering their laments in a matter-of-fact tone quite the opposite of the 1920’s and 1930’s “torch singers” who introduced a lot of the songs in the Great American Songbook … until great jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald took out the phony cries and sobs and showed just how good, and how emotionally timeless, those songs actually were. So are the songs of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, and the powerful understatement with which they sang them.
[1] — Indeed, one of the big issues filmmakers Khouri and
Burnett hint at — though, praise be, they don’t get preachy about it — is how
intensely macho men like Charlie
Dick and Doolittle Lynn must have felt when their wives became superstars and
made far more money than their families had ever dreamed of having — but at the
cost of being away from home most of the time, which forced these men into the
“womanly” role of taking care of their kids.
[2] — One irony is that the Ken Burns Country Music documentary told another story about a singer being
awakened to hear a song at 4 a.m., and also involving Willie Nelson. It seems
Nelson was in the middle of recording a duet album with Merle Haggard and in
the wee hours of the morning he happened to be listening to an Emmylou Harris
album and was struck by her cover of Townes Van Zandt’s song “Pancho and
Lefty.” Nelson decided that would make a great song for the album and woke Haggard
up at 4 a.m. to play him the song and record it then and there. Haggard
protested that he didn’t want to sing his vocal until he’d had a full night’s
sleep, but he went ahead and he and Nelson recorded the song. Then he went back
to sleep, and when he got up he wanted to redo his vocal. Nelson said no, and
the record went out with their 4 a.m. vocals on what turned out to be its title
song.
I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story (Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night, after the surprisingly quiet and dignified drama of Patsy & Loretta, Lifetime ran a rerun of an older film that was if anything even more emotionally wrenching and powerful, I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story, also based on a true story and also the work of a woman director (Janice Cooke) and a woman screenwriter (Camille Thomasson[1]). Most of it takes place in Oakland, California in the 1970’s and involves Regina Louise (Angela Fairley), who at the start of the film is 13 years old when she’s incarcerated in the Locke home for delinquent children after both her birth parents rejected her. She was busted as a runaway after her father, who conceived her as a result of a one-night stand when her mom was just 13 herself, threw her out of his house after she butted heads with her half-brother and half-sister from dad’s new wife. Dad said he’d turned his back on his former lifestyle, become a born-again Christian and turned her out when she threatened his younger, legally “legitimate” kids. Mom — whom we don’t meet until well into the movie — has also put her formerly dissolute lifestyle behind her and is shacking up with a guy she hopes to marry, and doesn’t want him to know she’s got a teenage daughter already lest that be a deal-breaker for him. Locke is run by a fiendishly buttoned-down Black administrator named Gwen Ford (Kim Hawthorne) who runs the place according to strict discipline, though under her are two white women who are considerably more compassionate and caring, Jeanne Kerr (Gennifer Goodwin) and her more heavy-set co-worker Annie (Lauren Cochrane). Jeanne reaches out to Regina with love and affection, crossing the boundaries big-time but also forming a bond with this troubled kid and being the only person at the facility who can actually get Regina to behave. Jeanne invites Regina to her own home for Christmas, they exchange presents — Regina gives Jeanne a rope holder for a plant pot she made in the Locke arts and crafts department, and Jeanne gives Regina a collegiate dictionary to make it clear that she thinks Regina, despite being three grades behind her age in formal education, has the smarts to make it to college and succeed there. Later on Jeanne also gives Regina a mini-cassette tape recorder and the two make a tape together that becomes significant later on.
Indeed, Jeanne is so taken with Regina that after Regina fails in two foster-home placements — in one because she’s placed with a couple of Black senior citizens and most of the wife’s affections are going to her husband because he’s on oxygen; and in another with a school coach and his family, which seems like it’ll work out O.K. except the coach’s oldest son tries to rape her and she successfully fights back and gets the hell out of there — Jeanne applies to adopt her. Alas, that sends Gwen into a hissy-fit that at least to me sounds like reverse racism, saying that Jeanne is not a fit adoptive parent for Regina for no other reason than that Regina is Black and Jeanne is white. The adoption hearing where Jeanne’s request is heard turns into a grim farce that sounds as if it were co-scripted by Franz Kafka and Louis Farrakhan; Gwen goes into the courtroom and announces that the National Association of Black Social Workers has decreed that Black children should only be adopted by Black parents (at this point I was thinking, “I’ve never even heard of the National Association of Black Social Workers, and if I were the judge in this case I’d be wondering what on earth the National Association of Black Social Workers has to do with this case, especially since they haven’t formally intervened as an organization”). Her arguments against Jeanne’s adoption of Regina go so far that in one particularly bizarre courtroom outburst Gwen accuses Jeanne of “genocide” against Black children — and you want to (or wish the judge would) tell her that this is preposterous: Jeanne doesn’t want to kill Black children en masse, simply to adopt one. The ironies deepen when we realize that every Black person Regina has been involved with has treated her horribly: her birth parents have abandoned her, the other Black kids at Locke have bullied her unmercifully (most of the disciplinary “red stars” she’s racked up have been because she fought back against kids who were bullying her), and Gwen has treated her as a statistic and totally ignored her needs as a person.
Amazingly, the judge (a grey-haired old white guy) buys all this racialist crap and sentences Regina to a psychiatric hospital, where — in yet another irony, given that the whole reason Gwen opposed Jeanne’s adopting Regina was that she deserved to be raised among other Black people — there are no other Black people, either among the inmates or the staff, except for one Black orderly. The rules at this facility are so strict and so relentless it seems like the entire staff trained at the Nurse Ratched School of Psychiatric Care. The kids are supposed to take medications in front of a nurse, who makes them stick their tongues out to prove they’ve swallowed them (though Regina, after the meds make her sick, figures out a way to stick them in the back of her throat and then, when she’s alone, get them out again and stockpile them to take all at once in case she wants to kill herself). When Regina actually does attempt suicide with her stockpile of meds — she chooses to take them at the swimming pool, use the pool water to get them down, then drown herself in the pool because one of the few positive memories in her life is of Jeanne teaching her to swim, only the Black orderly rescues her in what’s the first decent thing any other Black person has done for her — the hospital changes the policy so the kids have to take the meds in liquid form. The blonde woman nurse in charge of administering them tells Regina, “Do you know I almost lost my job because of what you did?” Regina responds by spitting the liquid medication in her face. Jeanne attempts to visit Regina at the hospital, but her letters are intercepted (sort of like Lucia di Lammermoor, in which Lucia’s malevolent family intercepts all her lover Edgardo’s letters to her so she’ll think he’s abandoned her and will be willing to marry the upper-class twit they think will rejuvenate the Lammermoor family fortunes — and, not surprisingly, she ultimately goes homicidally crazy), she’s escorted off the premises when she tries to visit, the hospital actually takes out a restraining order against her and Gwen eventually tells Regina that Jeanne has married a foreigner and moved out of the country. (Oddly, we never find out whether or not this is true, though we see at least two men dating Jeanne.)
The only two slip-ups in the hospital’s relentless regime to get Regina to forget Jeanne by convincing her Jeanne has abandoned her are they let her keep the dictionary and the tape recorder Jeanne gave her way back when — and Regina studies the dictionary relentlessly every chance she gets and plays the tape of her and Jeanne until the batteries wear down and ultimately die. (One decent thing the Black orderly does, besides save her from her suicide attempt, is give her fresh batteries for her machine so she can hear Jeanne’s voice again.) Regina’s rebellious attitude only eases up when she asks for permission to leave the grounds every day to attend high school and is told she has too many demerits to have “away privileges,” so she decides to play by the rules as long as she can, goes to high school, excels, gets a scholarship to attend San Francisco State University (my own alma mater, by the way), goes to work for a hairdresser (the second Black persom in the entire movie who’s treated her with any human decency) and ultimately opens a hair salon of her own. When she was released from the psychiatric hospital — not because they thought she was cured but because she’d turned 18 and “aged out” — she demands to see her psychiatric records. The staff says those are “confidential” (from whom? They’re her records and she’s legally an adult now! Obviously they’re worried that if they supply her documentation on what they did to her, she’ll find a lawyer and sue them) but they give her all the letters Jeanne sent her, many of which included mini-cassettes on which Jeanne recorded messages.
The film ends with Regina writing a book about her experiences called Somebody’s Someone — after the hope she’d expressed throughout her ordeal that someday she could be “somebody’s someone” — and a much older Jeanne running into an adult Regina (played by Sherri Saum, who’s actually a good physical match for Angela Fairley) at a book-signing. The two recognize each other and a title tells us that in 2003, in the same courtroom where Jeanne’s petition to adopt Regina had previously been denied, Jeanne is granted a petition to do an adult adoption of Regina and the ceremony, which weirdly looks and sounds like a wedding, duly takes place. I Am Somebody’s Child moved me to tears (indeed, I’m tearing up all over again just writing about it!), an inherently gripping and emotionally intense story which the filmmakers, Janice Cooke and Camille Thomasson (among other things, last night Lifetime gave us a great case for women directors and displayed that there are quite a few women out there with the chops to direct feature films), trusted to tell itself without either sentimentalizing it or making it nastier and more brutal than it has to be. Regina Louise’s real tragedy was not only that they grew up unwanted and unloved but that the system that was supposed to backstop her and protect her instead treated her in ways that just compounded her problems — yet they did so in the apparently sincere belief that they were helping her. (In one chilling scene Gwen ridicules Regina’s dream of attending college and says it’s her job to make Regina accept what she can do and not try to do things she can’t.) Throughout the film I was reminded of what mystery writer and former Child Protective Services case worker Abigail Padgett told me when I interviewed her for the June 2001 issue of Zenger’s Newsmagazine:
Last night, after the surprisingly quiet and dignified drama of Patsy & Loretta, Lifetime ran a rerun of an older film that was if anything even more emotionally wrenching and powerful, I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story, also based on a true story and also the work of a woman director (Janice Cooke) and a woman screenwriter (Camille Thomasson[1]). Most of it takes place in Oakland, California in the 1970’s and involves Regina Louise (Angela Fairley), who at the start of the film is 13 years old when she’s incarcerated in the Locke home for delinquent children after both her birth parents rejected her. She was busted as a runaway after her father, who conceived her as a result of a one-night stand when her mom was just 13 herself, threw her out of his house after she butted heads with her half-brother and half-sister from dad’s new wife. Dad said he’d turned his back on his former lifestyle, become a born-again Christian and turned her out when she threatened his younger, legally “legitimate” kids. Mom — whom we don’t meet until well into the movie — has also put her formerly dissolute lifestyle behind her and is shacking up with a guy she hopes to marry, and doesn’t want him to know she’s got a teenage daughter already lest that be a deal-breaker for him. Locke is run by a fiendishly buttoned-down Black administrator named Gwen Ford (Kim Hawthorne) who runs the place according to strict discipline, though under her are two white women who are considerably more compassionate and caring, Jeanne Kerr (Gennifer Goodwin) and her more heavy-set co-worker Annie (Lauren Cochrane). Jeanne reaches out to Regina with love and affection, crossing the boundaries big-time but also forming a bond with this troubled kid and being the only person at the facility who can actually get Regina to behave. Jeanne invites Regina to her own home for Christmas, they exchange presents — Regina gives Jeanne a rope holder for a plant pot she made in the Locke arts and crafts department, and Jeanne gives Regina a collegiate dictionary to make it clear that she thinks Regina, despite being three grades behind her age in formal education, has the smarts to make it to college and succeed there. Later on Jeanne also gives Regina a mini-cassette tape recorder and the two make a tape together that becomes significant later on.
Indeed, Jeanne is so taken with Regina that after Regina fails in two foster-home placements — in one because she’s placed with a couple of Black senior citizens and most of the wife’s affections are going to her husband because he’s on oxygen; and in another with a school coach and his family, which seems like it’ll work out O.K. except the coach’s oldest son tries to rape her and she successfully fights back and gets the hell out of there — Jeanne applies to adopt her. Alas, that sends Gwen into a hissy-fit that at least to me sounds like reverse racism, saying that Jeanne is not a fit adoptive parent for Regina for no other reason than that Regina is Black and Jeanne is white. The adoption hearing where Jeanne’s request is heard turns into a grim farce that sounds as if it were co-scripted by Franz Kafka and Louis Farrakhan; Gwen goes into the courtroom and announces that the National Association of Black Social Workers has decreed that Black children should only be adopted by Black parents (at this point I was thinking, “I’ve never even heard of the National Association of Black Social Workers, and if I were the judge in this case I’d be wondering what on earth the National Association of Black Social Workers has to do with this case, especially since they haven’t formally intervened as an organization”). Her arguments against Jeanne’s adoption of Regina go so far that in one particularly bizarre courtroom outburst Gwen accuses Jeanne of “genocide” against Black children — and you want to (or wish the judge would) tell her that this is preposterous: Jeanne doesn’t want to kill Black children en masse, simply to adopt one. The ironies deepen when we realize that every Black person Regina has been involved with has treated her horribly: her birth parents have abandoned her, the other Black kids at Locke have bullied her unmercifully (most of the disciplinary “red stars” she’s racked up have been because she fought back against kids who were bullying her), and Gwen has treated her as a statistic and totally ignored her needs as a person.
Amazingly, the judge (a grey-haired old white guy) buys all this racialist crap and sentences Regina to a psychiatric hospital, where — in yet another irony, given that the whole reason Gwen opposed Jeanne’s adopting Regina was that she deserved to be raised among other Black people — there are no other Black people, either among the inmates or the staff, except for one Black orderly. The rules at this facility are so strict and so relentless it seems like the entire staff trained at the Nurse Ratched School of Psychiatric Care. The kids are supposed to take medications in front of a nurse, who makes them stick their tongues out to prove they’ve swallowed them (though Regina, after the meds make her sick, figures out a way to stick them in the back of her throat and then, when she’s alone, get them out again and stockpile them to take all at once in case she wants to kill herself). When Regina actually does attempt suicide with her stockpile of meds — she chooses to take them at the swimming pool, use the pool water to get them down, then drown herself in the pool because one of the few positive memories in her life is of Jeanne teaching her to swim, only the Black orderly rescues her in what’s the first decent thing any other Black person has done for her — the hospital changes the policy so the kids have to take the meds in liquid form. The blonde woman nurse in charge of administering them tells Regina, “Do you know I almost lost my job because of what you did?” Regina responds by spitting the liquid medication in her face. Jeanne attempts to visit Regina at the hospital, but her letters are intercepted (sort of like Lucia di Lammermoor, in which Lucia’s malevolent family intercepts all her lover Edgardo’s letters to her so she’ll think he’s abandoned her and will be willing to marry the upper-class twit they think will rejuvenate the Lammermoor family fortunes — and, not surprisingly, she ultimately goes homicidally crazy), she’s escorted off the premises when she tries to visit, the hospital actually takes out a restraining order against her and Gwen eventually tells Regina that Jeanne has married a foreigner and moved out of the country. (Oddly, we never find out whether or not this is true, though we see at least two men dating Jeanne.)
The only two slip-ups in the hospital’s relentless regime to get Regina to forget Jeanne by convincing her Jeanne has abandoned her are they let her keep the dictionary and the tape recorder Jeanne gave her way back when — and Regina studies the dictionary relentlessly every chance she gets and plays the tape of her and Jeanne until the batteries wear down and ultimately die. (One decent thing the Black orderly does, besides save her from her suicide attempt, is give her fresh batteries for her machine so she can hear Jeanne’s voice again.) Regina’s rebellious attitude only eases up when she asks for permission to leave the grounds every day to attend high school and is told she has too many demerits to have “away privileges,” so she decides to play by the rules as long as she can, goes to high school, excels, gets a scholarship to attend San Francisco State University (my own alma mater, by the way), goes to work for a hairdresser (the second Black persom in the entire movie who’s treated her with any human decency) and ultimately opens a hair salon of her own. When she was released from the psychiatric hospital — not because they thought she was cured but because she’d turned 18 and “aged out” — she demands to see her psychiatric records. The staff says those are “confidential” (from whom? They’re her records and she’s legally an adult now! Obviously they’re worried that if they supply her documentation on what they did to her, she’ll find a lawyer and sue them) but they give her all the letters Jeanne sent her, many of which included mini-cassettes on which Jeanne recorded messages.
The film ends with Regina writing a book about her experiences called Somebody’s Someone — after the hope she’d expressed throughout her ordeal that someday she could be “somebody’s someone” — and a much older Jeanne running into an adult Regina (played by Sherri Saum, who’s actually a good physical match for Angela Fairley) at a book-signing. The two recognize each other and a title tells us that in 2003, in the same courtroom where Jeanne’s petition to adopt Regina had previously been denied, Jeanne is granted a petition to do an adult adoption of Regina and the ceremony, which weirdly looks and sounds like a wedding, duly takes place. I Am Somebody’s Child moved me to tears (indeed, I’m tearing up all over again just writing about it!), an inherently gripping and emotionally intense story which the filmmakers, Janice Cooke and Camille Thomasson (among other things, last night Lifetime gave us a great case for women directors and displayed that there are quite a few women out there with the chops to direct feature films), trusted to tell itself without either sentimentalizing it or making it nastier and more brutal than it has to be. Regina Louise’s real tragedy was not only that they grew up unwanted and unloved but that the system that was supposed to backstop her and protect her instead treated her in ways that just compounded her problems — yet they did so in the apparently sincere belief that they were helping her. (In one chilling scene Gwen ridicules Regina’s dream of attending college and says it’s her job to make Regina accept what she can do and not try to do things she can’t.) Throughout the film I was reminded of what mystery writer and former Child Protective Services case worker Abigail Padgett told me when I interviewed her for the June 2001 issue of Zenger’s Newsmagazine:
I have a lot of trouble with
systems. I really like the idea of looking at individuals and meeting their needs, which will never be the same needs that have
been outlined for everyone by a system. Of course, you can’t always do that.
You can’t educate each child individually. You have to have school. But when
you’re dealing with something as sensitive as child abuse, I would have been
more comfortable working there [at Child Protective Services] if more attention
had been given to individual situations, rather than, “O.K., this is what we
do, routinely, with everybody.”
That, if anything, is
the moral of I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story. It’s clear from what Abigail Padgett told me in our
interview (and what she wrote in her novels featuring Bo Bradley, a Child
Protective Services worker who’s continually getting in trouble with her bosses
precisely because she wants to work out what’s best for each individual in her
caseload instead of following the standard protocols) that she and Jeanne Kerr
were sisters under the skin. It’s a story I found incredibly moving, at least
partly because while my father was never anywhere nearly as dismissive or
hostile as Regina Louise’s, it was always clear that he thought of me as a
mistake, something he had been stuck with from his brief and ill-advised
marriage to my mother (they divorced when I was 1 ½ and I never had any direct
experience or memories of them as a couple) before he remarried the Stepford
Wife he always wanted, they had the Stepford Daughter they wanted, and she in
turn married the Stepford Boy and gave them the Stepford Grandchildren. Though
I generally avoid Lifetime movies that aren’t sleazy crime stories, last night’s
films — as well as some previous efforts of theirs like For the Love
of a Child, another true-life tragedy about
the founding of the Childhelp Foundation (a film which, as I wrote about it when
it aired in 2009, makes you love humanity for bringing forth the two women who
started Childhelp and also makes you hate humanity for having enough depraved people they needed to start Childhelp) — are among the most powerful
and dramatically moving productions I’ve seen anywhere and need none of the usual apologetic dismissals
like, “Good — for something directed by a woman,” or, “Good — for a Lifetime
movie.”
Monday, October 14, 2019
Killer Contractor (Maple Island Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched yet another “premiere” on Lifetime, which after the excellence of The College Admissions Scandal (a great story to begin with, told powerfully, movingly and with a degree of understatement rare on this network) was a return to their usual schlock and, if anything, was below their average. It was called Killer Contractor — a title risible enough in itself — and starts out with a mysterious figure in a black hoodie (not another mysterious figure in a black hoodie!) loosening two screws on a banister rail in and old house so its elderly male occupant falls down the stairwell and dies. The scene then shifts to San Francisco (we get that from a stock shot of the San Francisco skyline which includes Coit Tower and the Transamerica pyramid) where we meet the old man’s daughter and granddaughter. The daughter is Kerry McLeod (Alyshia Ochse) — the last name is pronounced “Mc-LEE-odd,” not the more usual “Mc-CLOUD,” by the way — and she makes her living as a writer and illustrator of a highly successful series of children’s books called the “Ella” series, after her own daughter. (Oddly, the imdb.com page on this movie doesn’t list the child actress who plays Ella, though some adult cast members in shorter and less significant roles are listed.)
Kerry and Ella go to the small town where Old Man McLeod lived with the plan of hiring a contractor to fix up the house and then sell it. They’re greeted by an annoyingly chipper realtor (or is that “Realtor™”) named Claire, who gets to wiggle her ass at the camera a lot (director John Murlowski is really into ass shots, of both men and women) and at first agrees to list the house for sale but then decides she wants to buy it herself. Of course, the Killer Contractor hears this and breaks into Claire’s own home, rewiring her electric circuitry so she gets electrocuted when she tries to turn on a light switch. We meet the Killer Contractor, Mike Dean (Zac Titus), when he turns up on the property and asks for the job — and like a typically stupid Lifetime heroine, instead of going to Home Advisor or Angie’s List or anywhere else that would be sensible, she hires him on the spot because they were friends back in high school. Indeed, Kerry’s friend Meghan (Kendra Andrews) warns her against Mike because she was also in high school with them and noticed him hanging around her a lot in what she assumed was an unrequited crush Mike had on Kerry. The next person we meet is the Good Contractor, Jason Carr (Mark Lawson), who’s shorter and stockier than Mike but also a good deal better-looking (and director Murlowski gives us some nice shots of his basket — yum!), who also bids for the job of fixing Kerry’s house but is just a few minutes too late. He offers to look around the place and goes into the attic, pronouncing it just fine, while Mike insists it needs work. This becomes significant when Kerry goes into the attic, we see some removed screws on the floor, and sure enough she tumbles through the floor and onto her couch, where she lands surprisingly little-scathed.
Just as I was praising this movie for defying Lifetime’s usual iconography in which the cute guy is almost always the villain, Charles warned me that the writer, Meridith Stack (the imdb.com page spells her first name the more normal way, “Meredith,” but “Meridith” is what appears on her credit), might be setting us up for a reversal in which Jason would turn out to be the Killer Contractor and Mike the Good — or at least Morally Ambiguous — Contractor. We also get a number of twitchy scenes between Mike and his mother Eleanor (a marvelously acid performance by Rebecca Tinley) in which Mike lovingly fingers photos of himself and Kerry when they were kids and Eleanor tells him he shouldn’t think of her and threatens to burn the photos. It turns out from an insurance investigator that the MacGuffin is a large life-insurance policy that Kerry’s dad took out on himself with Kerry and Mike as co-beneficiaries — and in the first of Stack’s spectacular reversals, it turns out that Mike is actually Kerry’s half-brother, since her dad had an affair with Eleanor before he married Kerry’s mom. Dad was planning to rewrite the insurance policy so Kerry would be sole beneficiary, but he didn’t sign the form to do that before he died — and sure enough, with just 15 minutes of running time to go, Stack pulls her second big reversal and has Jason turn out to be the Killer Contractor after all (something we should have been expecting not only because Mark Lawson was so much hotter than Zac Titus but also because Jason drove a black truck while Mike drove a white truck — a throwback to all those “B” Westerns in which the good guy wore a white hat and rode a white horse, while the bad guy wore a black hat and rode a black horse) — indeed he’s a literal “contractor,” meaning a hit man, and he’s desperately in need of money because his previous employers are going to have him “hit” if he doesn’t come up with some scratch, pronto.
The person who’s hired him for this job is Eleanor Dean, Mike’s mother, who’s after the insurance money for herself and doesn’t care how many people she has to kill — including all the McLeods (it was Jason who loosened the banister rail in granddad’s home and thereby started all this) as well as her own son and Meghan, who stumbles on the truth, gets clubbed by Eleanor, survives but is tied up, manages to escape her bonds but is run over by a van, taken to the hospital and revived, only Eleanor, who happens to work at the hospital as a nurse, shows up for her shift and takes an unauthorized detour into Meghan’s room, where she intends to smother her with a pillow (how is she going to make that look like an accident? In most Lifetime movies in which a nurse tries to murder a patient, it’s by introducing a toxic substance into her IV), only the police show up and arrest her in time, while both Mike and Kerry herself take their swings at the real Killer Contractor and finally subdue him long enough for the cops to arrest him, too. Killer Contractor is a good example of everything that’s wrong with Lifetime movies, from the risible title to the melodramatic situations to the ill-justified reversals (though Mark Lawson deserves credit as an actor for playing both the good and evil incarnations of his character superbly, and I’d like to see more of him) and the over-the-top ending (about the one Lifetime cliché Murlowski and Stack avoided was having the villain kidnap daughter Ella at the end), and yet it’s also a thrill ride of pure camp and therefore manages to be entertaining.
Last night Charles and I watched yet another “premiere” on Lifetime, which after the excellence of The College Admissions Scandal (a great story to begin with, told powerfully, movingly and with a degree of understatement rare on this network) was a return to their usual schlock and, if anything, was below their average. It was called Killer Contractor — a title risible enough in itself — and starts out with a mysterious figure in a black hoodie (not another mysterious figure in a black hoodie!) loosening two screws on a banister rail in and old house so its elderly male occupant falls down the stairwell and dies. The scene then shifts to San Francisco (we get that from a stock shot of the San Francisco skyline which includes Coit Tower and the Transamerica pyramid) where we meet the old man’s daughter and granddaughter. The daughter is Kerry McLeod (Alyshia Ochse) — the last name is pronounced “Mc-LEE-odd,” not the more usual “Mc-CLOUD,” by the way — and she makes her living as a writer and illustrator of a highly successful series of children’s books called the “Ella” series, after her own daughter. (Oddly, the imdb.com page on this movie doesn’t list the child actress who plays Ella, though some adult cast members in shorter and less significant roles are listed.)
Kerry and Ella go to the small town where Old Man McLeod lived with the plan of hiring a contractor to fix up the house and then sell it. They’re greeted by an annoyingly chipper realtor (or is that “Realtor™”) named Claire, who gets to wiggle her ass at the camera a lot (director John Murlowski is really into ass shots, of both men and women) and at first agrees to list the house for sale but then decides she wants to buy it herself. Of course, the Killer Contractor hears this and breaks into Claire’s own home, rewiring her electric circuitry so she gets electrocuted when she tries to turn on a light switch. We meet the Killer Contractor, Mike Dean (Zac Titus), when he turns up on the property and asks for the job — and like a typically stupid Lifetime heroine, instead of going to Home Advisor or Angie’s List or anywhere else that would be sensible, she hires him on the spot because they were friends back in high school. Indeed, Kerry’s friend Meghan (Kendra Andrews) warns her against Mike because she was also in high school with them and noticed him hanging around her a lot in what she assumed was an unrequited crush Mike had on Kerry. The next person we meet is the Good Contractor, Jason Carr (Mark Lawson), who’s shorter and stockier than Mike but also a good deal better-looking (and director Murlowski gives us some nice shots of his basket — yum!), who also bids for the job of fixing Kerry’s house but is just a few minutes too late. He offers to look around the place and goes into the attic, pronouncing it just fine, while Mike insists it needs work. This becomes significant when Kerry goes into the attic, we see some removed screws on the floor, and sure enough she tumbles through the floor and onto her couch, where she lands surprisingly little-scathed.
Just as I was praising this movie for defying Lifetime’s usual iconography in which the cute guy is almost always the villain, Charles warned me that the writer, Meridith Stack (the imdb.com page spells her first name the more normal way, “Meredith,” but “Meridith” is what appears on her credit), might be setting us up for a reversal in which Jason would turn out to be the Killer Contractor and Mike the Good — or at least Morally Ambiguous — Contractor. We also get a number of twitchy scenes between Mike and his mother Eleanor (a marvelously acid performance by Rebecca Tinley) in which Mike lovingly fingers photos of himself and Kerry when they were kids and Eleanor tells him he shouldn’t think of her and threatens to burn the photos. It turns out from an insurance investigator that the MacGuffin is a large life-insurance policy that Kerry’s dad took out on himself with Kerry and Mike as co-beneficiaries — and in the first of Stack’s spectacular reversals, it turns out that Mike is actually Kerry’s half-brother, since her dad had an affair with Eleanor before he married Kerry’s mom. Dad was planning to rewrite the insurance policy so Kerry would be sole beneficiary, but he didn’t sign the form to do that before he died — and sure enough, with just 15 minutes of running time to go, Stack pulls her second big reversal and has Jason turn out to be the Killer Contractor after all (something we should have been expecting not only because Mark Lawson was so much hotter than Zac Titus but also because Jason drove a black truck while Mike drove a white truck — a throwback to all those “B” Westerns in which the good guy wore a white hat and rode a white horse, while the bad guy wore a black hat and rode a black horse) — indeed he’s a literal “contractor,” meaning a hit man, and he’s desperately in need of money because his previous employers are going to have him “hit” if he doesn’t come up with some scratch, pronto.
The person who’s hired him for this job is Eleanor Dean, Mike’s mother, who’s after the insurance money for herself and doesn’t care how many people she has to kill — including all the McLeods (it was Jason who loosened the banister rail in granddad’s home and thereby started all this) as well as her own son and Meghan, who stumbles on the truth, gets clubbed by Eleanor, survives but is tied up, manages to escape her bonds but is run over by a van, taken to the hospital and revived, only Eleanor, who happens to work at the hospital as a nurse, shows up for her shift and takes an unauthorized detour into Meghan’s room, where she intends to smother her with a pillow (how is she going to make that look like an accident? In most Lifetime movies in which a nurse tries to murder a patient, it’s by introducing a toxic substance into her IV), only the police show up and arrest her in time, while both Mike and Kerry herself take their swings at the real Killer Contractor and finally subdue him long enough for the cops to arrest him, too. Killer Contractor is a good example of everything that’s wrong with Lifetime movies, from the risible title to the melodramatic situations to the ill-justified reversals (though Mark Lawson deserves credit as an actor for playing both the good and evil incarnations of his character superbly, and I’d like to see more of him) and the over-the-top ending (about the one Lifetime cliché Murlowski and Stack avoided was having the villain kidnap daughter Ella at the end), and yet it’s also a thrill ride of pure camp and therefore manages to be entertaining.
Sunday, October 13, 2019
The College Admissions Scandal (Varsity Films, Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I wanted to watch the fourth and last in the Lifetime “Ripped from the Headlines!” movie series, and while the previous week’s entry had been something ripped off from yellowing headlines since it was based on a case from 1980, this time it was from fresh newsprint: The College Admissions Scandal, a film directed by Adam Salky from a script by Stephen Tolkin (I’d never heard of Salky before but Tolkin is an old Lifetime hand, responsible for New York Prison Break and many other Lifetime movies, including quite a few previous ones based on true stories), which despite its rather clinical title (the FBI sting operation against the parents of the kids involved in the real college admissions scandal was called “Operation Varsity Blues,” and that might have been a better title for the film) managed to be genuinely insightful and moving drama. The film has one deep flaw, which I’ll get into later because it was also implicit in a lot of the news coverage of the real case. The central characters are three parents, financial services manager Bethany Slade (Mia Kershner) — who’s been raising her daughter Emma (Sarah Dugdale) as a single parent since dumping Emma’s dad years earlier because instead of seeking a corporate job he was trying to be a writer and was doing drugs and drinking — and a still-intact couple, corporate attorney Jackson Deviers (Robert Moloney) and his wife, interior designer Caroline Deviers (Penelope Ann Miller), who are concerned because, though he has a high I.Q., their son Danny (Sam Duke) — incidentally on the cast list for this film on imdb.com his last name is spelled “Devere,” which suggests that the character finds his parents’ spelling of the name pretentious and has simplified it — is more interested in playing in a band and pursuing a musical career than in attending a prestigious college the way his parents want him to.
Last night I wanted to watch the fourth and last in the Lifetime “Ripped from the Headlines!” movie series, and while the previous week’s entry had been something ripped off from yellowing headlines since it was based on a case from 1980, this time it was from fresh newsprint: The College Admissions Scandal, a film directed by Adam Salky from a script by Stephen Tolkin (I’d never heard of Salky before but Tolkin is an old Lifetime hand, responsible for New York Prison Break and many other Lifetime movies, including quite a few previous ones based on true stories), which despite its rather clinical title (the FBI sting operation against the parents of the kids involved in the real college admissions scandal was called “Operation Varsity Blues,” and that might have been a better title for the film) managed to be genuinely insightful and moving drama. The film has one deep flaw, which I’ll get into later because it was also implicit in a lot of the news coverage of the real case. The central characters are three parents, financial services manager Bethany Slade (Mia Kershner) — who’s been raising her daughter Emma (Sarah Dugdale) as a single parent since dumping Emma’s dad years earlier because instead of seeking a corporate job he was trying to be a writer and was doing drugs and drinking — and a still-intact couple, corporate attorney Jackson Deviers (Robert Moloney) and his wife, interior designer Caroline Deviers (Penelope Ann Miller), who are concerned because, though he has a high I.Q., their son Danny (Sam Duke) — incidentally on the cast list for this film on imdb.com his last name is spelled “Devere,” which suggests that the character finds his parents’ spelling of the name pretentious and has simplified it — is more interested in playing in a band and pursuing a musical career than in attending a prestigious college the way his parents want him to.
So they hook up with college consultant William “Rick” Singer (oddly the actor
playing this part is not credited on imdb.com, though the script uses the
character’s real name and casts him as a heavy-set wrestler type — the real
Singer, helpfully shown in a Behind the Headlines documentary that followed the film, was a former
swimming coach and still was surprisingly lean for his age), who according to
the documentary began as a legitimate “college coach,” obtaining SAT and other
“prep tests” that aren’t identical to the real ones but are close enough they
can be used to practice, and arranging for special tutoring for the children of
the rich and/or famous. Then his operation shaded off into pursuing what he
called the “side door” to college admissions; as the documentary explained,
Singer explained to his clients that there’s a “front door” for a kid to get
into college (good grades, hard work and high admission test scores), a “back
door” for especially well-heeled people (paying for new buildings on a campus
or making major donations to the endowment) and a “side door” for the folks whom
he was targeting as his market, who seem to have been what might be called the
2 to 10 percent — not outright members of the 1 percent but folks with enough
money (and enough of the sense of entitlement that comes with it) to afford
him.
Among his tricks were putting the kids of his clients through psychiatric
exams with his own hired-gun “therapists” to claim they needed more time to
take the tests, giving the tests at his own proctoring centers (and either
correcting errors the students made or actually having “ringers” take the tests
for them), and faking athletic backgrounds for the would-be admittees — usually
in recherché sports like squash
and crew, though Emma gets to fake being a soccer player (let’s face it, it’s
easy enough to photograph someone kicking a ball around a field) while Danny is
passed off as a crew coxswain (though the fake photograph we see of him shows
him leaning off the deck of a sailing yacht adjusting a sail). The FBI stumbles
across the scheme when their agents interrogate a man they’ve nailed on an
unrelated case of financial fraud, and when he makes them an offer to turn in
Singer’s scheme in exchange for leniency on his own case, they bite. The FBI
arrests Singer, who almost immediately turns state’s evidence and rats out his
own clients (as well as the high-school and college athletic coaches who took
bribes from him to say they played sports they really didn’t), agreeing to call
them and get them on tape admitting to their involvement in his criminal
schemes by telling them his non-profit “charitable” foundation, The Key
International (ostensibly set up to help Cambodians and other low-income
students attend college, actually a device for Singer to launder his ill-gotten
gains and give his clients the side benefit of being able to write off their
payments to him from their own taxes), is being audited by the Internal Revenue
Service and they need to get their stories straight as to what they will tell
the IRS investigators. (One line on one of the actual tapes from a real Singer
client played on the documentary was even more chilling than anything in
Tolkin’s script: “After all, it’s only the IRS. It’s not USC!”)
There are
certain people in the movie — including a Black counselor at Emma’s school who
notices the abrupt jump in her SAT scores when she retests and gets suspicious
— but the scheme rolls on until Singer rats on all his clients (though the
documentary claims he helped up to 800 families and only 35 have been busted so
far) and ultimately everyone comes to grief. Bethany is fired from her firm —
they invoke the morals clause in her contract to seize her 10 percent equity
share in her company — and when her attorney says she still owns her property,
including at least two houses (one in the L.A. area and one in Aspen), she
tells him she mortgaged them all to fund Singer’s campaign to get Emma into
Yale. Emma loses her coveted admission slot to Yale and also gets dumped by her
boyfriend Bryan (Sebastian Greaves), whom she wanted to go to Yale in the first
place because he was already a freshman there, while her younger sister’s
future also gets screwed because she’s part of the same family even though her
own grades were so good mom didn’t buy her Singer’s services because she
figured she didn’t need them. Jackson Deviers finds himself faced not only with
a prison sentence but near-certain disbarment, his wife loses all her interior
design clients (including the ones that were in foreign countries, which she
can no longer visit because as a condition of bail she had to surrender her
passport) and Danny, who in a way is the most tragic character, loses the
legitimate opportunity his musical talents had earned him when the major
manager who was interested in representing him suddenly decides he’s a hot
potato and drops him. (We’re told in the script he’s the next Bob Dylan, David
Bowie or Bruce Springsteen — all of whom Danny cites as examples of music
superstars who never went to college[1]
— but when we finally hear a song ostensibly by him at the end of the show it’s
a pretentiously sappy acoustic ballad that led me to joke, “He could always get
a job writing songs for Lifetime movies.”)
Just what Danny or Emma were
supposed to be studying once they won their credentials to prestigious
universities (Yale in her case and Stanford in his) is never made clear —
though Emma makes some noises about wanting to do something to help the
homeless — but what is made clear
is how incredibly stratified America has become, and for members of the 10
percent who want their kids to make it into the 1 percent a degree from a
high-prestige school has become all-important. The one aspect I didn’t like
about this movie is that it assumes that college admissions are part of a
genuine “meritocracy” and Singer and his clients were screwing that up for
everyone else by gaming the system. The insanity of well-heeled parents using
their money to get their children legs-up in America’s relentlessly competitive
career market and economy reaches far lower than college: we’ve heard stories
of parents bribing their kids’ ways into prep schools, private grade schools
and even private pre-schools on
the assumption that even when you’re all of three years old your whole future
can be determined by whether you get into the “right” schools and thereby win
the all-important bragging points (“I went to … !”) that will ensure your
ability to advance. The whole idea that grades and test scores measure
something called “aptitude” for success in college is a monstrous myth (all
test scores measure is your ability to take tests, and as standardized testing
has filtered lower and lower in the education system and is now hailed as the
ultimate test of how well the schools are teaching our kids, the built-in
prejudices of those tests — which were designed in the first place in the late
19th and early 20th centuries by racists seeking “proof”
that whites were smarter, and hence more fitted to rule, than anyone else —
have once again become institutionalized in our education system).
Grades
measure what you’ve already learned, and that’s dependent not only on how well
the schools have taught you (and how much money they have for books, small
classes, equipment and other factors that give kids from affluent neighborhoods
a built-in advantage) but what your home life is like and how much your parents know and encourage you to learn instead of just
making it through school as a chore. As America has basically wiped out its
middle class and become far more class-stratified than it was through most of
the 20th century (where you could still hold down a job if you
hadn’t gone to college, and you could make a fair amount of money — enough for
a middle-class lifestyle — once workers organized into unions and won better
wages, benefits and on-the-job safety protections), a college education has
changed from something helpful to something virtually necessary if you don’t want to be stuck in ultra-low-wage jobs
all your life. At the same time the number of seats open in colleges has been
deliberately kept low, partly because America has never put the kind of public money into education most
other advanced countries have (in most of Europe college is available free of
charge to just about anyone who can benefit from it; in the U.S. that’s
considered a dangerously radical and unaffordable idea) and partly because
historically college in the U.S. was one of the ways the rich and privileged
retained their money and privileges across the generations. Through much of the
19th and 20th century it was just accepted that colleges were something rich kids went to in
order to prepare to keep their families in the ruling class since America had
never had an hereditary aristocracy, or at least one that called itself that),
and though college became democratized somewhat in the mid-20th
century (as a lot of those working-class families who had good union jobs and
used some of that money to send their kids there), the current American ruling
class regards that as a threat and has used various tactics to once again
restrict college to the rich and powerful.
Among those techniques are insanely
restrictive admissions criteria (the parts of the system Rick Singer and his
clients were trying to game), increases in the actual costs of going to college
that have risen faster than overall inflation, a system of student loans (i.e.,
forcing would-be students from less affluent backgrounds to borrow huge amounts
of money that leave them essentially as debt peons for life, especially since
student loans are one of only two categories of debt, the other being taxes,
that cannot be discharged in
bankruptcy) and other techniques to keep the number of college graduates low
(and the number of graduates from the high-prestige institutions Singer was
aiming his clients’ kids to especially low) in order to increase their value in the job market, since as
anyone who took Economics 101 will remember, reducing the supply of something
automatically increases its price. The idea that certain people have (including
an Asian-American mother named Toy who’s profiled on the documentary, who filed
a $500 billion lawsuit against Singer and his clients, claiming that because of
their actions her son was denied the place at a prestige university to which
his grades, test scores and hard work should have entitled him) that America’s
college system, and the admissions policies that are its gateway, is a genuine
meritocracy is nonsense. America’s college system was set up by the rich and
privileged to maintain their wealth and privileges across the generations, and
by and large it’s done an excellent job of doing that. Rick Singer’s clients
were rich people who wanted to get their kids into the elite precincts of the
super-rich (as I put it above, 10-percenters who wanted their kids to be
1-percenters). As University of Oklahoma history professor Wilfred McClay wrote
in a Newsweek article quoted on
the Wikipedia page about the scandal, “The thing driving the current scandal
seems to be that ultimately parents were willing to do anything to game the
system to get their kids these advantages, not because the education was better
but because the legitimation of social position would be better.”
[1] — Actually, I think Dylan briefly attended the
University of Minnesota — the earliest extant recordings of him are from that
campus — though he didn’t graduate.
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Alice Through the Looking Glass (Walt Disney Pictures, Roth Films, Team Todd, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ran Charles a movie, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the 2016 sequel to Tim Burton’s marvelous 2010 (sort-of) adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and a sufficiently dull and disappointing movie both Charles and I found ourselves nodding off through bits of it. The 2010 Alice in Wonderland departed considerably from the Urtext of Lewis Carroll’s (t/n Samuel Dodgson) original books — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which may have motivated Burton and his writer, Linda Woolverton, to insist that the name of the magical place Alice visits is really “Underland” and she got it wrong in the first place) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There — and like most Alice in Wonderland movies it freely mixed and matched between the two books instead of just doing one or the other. Woolverton did a few things in the first Alice movie that really annoyed me, notably giving Alice and her parents the last name “Kingsleigh” (an homage to another British fantasy writer, Charles Kingsley, whose 1867 book The Water-Babies might itself be worth filming even though the Wikipedia page on it says it fell from popularity because of its anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Black aspects) when it’s well known the real-life Alice who inspired the books was named Alice Liddell. (Someone traced her in England in 1924 and did an interview with her, though by then she’d been married and went by the name Alice Liddell Hart.) Apparently Carroll saw the real Alice laying under a tree, having fallen asleep while reading, and that inspired him — though there are some reports that Carroll was really a pedophile who had a crush on the 11-year-old Alice Liddell. Alice Through the Looking Glass begins with what turns out to be its best scenes: it opens in the Straits of Malacca in 1864, where the Kingsleigh family ship, the Wonder, is being chased by pirates and is also about to tip over and sink in a storm. The anxious officers and crew members want to turn back, but Alice, the ship’s captain, insists on pressing on and adding more sail until the ship passes safely through the storm while the three pirate ships that were chasing her run aground on reefs. The scene then cuts to London, one year later, and Alice crashes a party being given by her former fiancé Hamish (Leo Bill) to commemorate his assumption of the title of Lord Ascot following the death of her father, who was also the business partner of Alice’s late father.
In Alice in Wonderland Hamish was merely an insufferable upper-class twit, but in Alice Through the Looking Glass he’s an out-and-out villain who’s bought out the Kingsleighs’ 10 percent interest in the company his father and Alice’s co-ran and is threatening to evict Alice’s mother from her home unless she signs over the papers for the Wonder. That means Alice will no longer have a ship at her disposal for her explorations, but Hamish offers her a job as a clerk and says she’ll be able gradually to work her way up through his organization. He stresses this will be a rare opportunity for her because almost no other company in Britain hires women as clerks. Needless to say, Alice finds this a fate almost as bad as death, and she hides in a study of Hamish’s home during his party and comes across a looking-glass through which she enters and crosses back into Wonderland, or Underland, or whatever it’s called. Linda Woolverton misses Alice’s discovery of the backwards looking-glass world in the marvelous opening chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, including the bit that she can’t read the books on the other side of the looking-glass because they’re all printed backwards, but that’s not the biggest problem with Woolverton’s script. Once she actually gets Alice back to Wonderland (or Underland, or whatever it’s called) her writing turns flat, ordinary and just plain dull as, instead of working out clever variations on Lewis Carroll’s themes, Woolverton comes up with an annoying and ponderous tale of her own based on some of the Carroll characters as well as some new ones she invented. The schtick this time around is, instead of the manic character he was in Alice in Wonderland (both book and the previous film), the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) has gone into a heavy-duty depressed phase because he’s found the first hat he ever made — a tiny blue toy hat made of paper which he made for his parents before they were killed by the Jabberwock in the first film’s backstory. This indicates that his parents may have survived the attack after all, and for some reason instead of lifting his spirits and giving him a sense of hope, it plunges him deeply into depression.
He summons Alice in the hope that she can work out a solution to his problem; he also briefs her that Time is actually an animate being (played by Sacha Baron Cohen with his usual insufferability — I briefly thought Depp might be doubling the roles of the Mad Hatter and Time, but he wasn’t and this film might have been better if he had been) and he’s in possession of something called the “chronosphere,” which controls the flow of time. If Alice can steal the chronosphere and use it to reverse time so the Mad Hatter’s family aren’t killed after all, his depression will be lifted and he’ll be happy again. Alice crashes Time’s castle and steals the chronosphere — despite the efforts of Time’s minions, a bunch of clockwork gadgets reminiscent of the animated sidekicks in previous Disney productions like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, to stop her — and once she has it it instantly expands from a round crystal atop the center of a giant clock to a round vehicle, sort of like the ones used in the Jurassic World movies, in which Alice can go through both space and time. The vehicle’s controls seem an awful lot like the ones that ran the TARDIS on the Doctor Who TV show — a reference score composer Danny Elfman caught and exploited by quoting the Doctor Who theme in his music — only the chronosphere is stolen by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who wants to use it to start a genocidal war against the other denizens of Wonderland because she’s still pissed off at her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), for some transgression from their joint childhoods. This part of the plot seems like Woolverton was ripping off Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, in which the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch were estranged sisters and had tongue-twisting names — in Alice Through the Looking Glass the White Queen is called “Mirana” and the Red Queen “Iracebeth” (or is it the other way around?).
Anyway, the Red Queen steals the chronosphere and uses it to screw up time, only since time can’t really change everything ultimately reverts to what it was before. The Red Queen grows a heart (like the Grinch) and the Mad Hatter finds his family, alive but in suspended animation and miniaturized, in the molding of a picture frame. He’s able to bring them back not only to life but to normal size via a cake with a label, “Eat Me” (ya remember the cake? The drink labeled “Drink Me” which shrunk Alice, and the cake labeled “Eat Me” that expanded her again, were both in Lewis Carroll’s first book and Tim Burton’s first Alice movie, but bringing the cake back this way did have a certain degree of charm), though they seem so dull and oppressive one wonders why the Mad Hatter wanted them back. (Then again, traumatic relationships with their parents are a specialty of Tim Burton’s leading characters; remember the odd backstory he gave Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, filling out the character from what Roald Dahl had written and making Wonka’s father a crazy dentist who not only forbade his son any chocolate but encased him in a helmet-like tooth brace which Tim Burton said was something like the one his real-life father had made him where when he was a kid.) In the end Alice says a sad farewell to the Mad Hatter and returns to Britain (a scene very reminiscent of the ending of the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz — the Burton-Woolverton conception of Alice in Wonderland is very much influenced by Wizard, not only in giving her these tearful farewells but also in making Alice a far more assertive and self-actualizing character than Lewis Carroll did), where her mom reneges on the deal she made with Hamish and risks eviction to keep the Wonder in the family so Alice can captain her in another voyage.
Alice Through the Looking Glass has enough charming moments it can’t be dismissed completely, but it’s a weird fantasy indeed in which the opening and closing framing scenes set in the normal world seem far more moving and dramatically coherent than the fantastic bulk of the film. Besides, Woolverton makes one of the basic mistakes of fantasy writers: because she’s dealing with a genre in which anything can happen, she makes anything she can think of happen whether or not it makes any sense or follows the internal logic of her story. Tim Burton didn’t personally direct Alice Through the Looking Glass — someone named James Bobin did, though Burton is listed as one of the producers and he’s clearly the auteur (and Bobin’s chief qualification for the job of directing this movie seems to have been that he’d worked with Sasha Baron Cohen before on his TV series Da Ali G Show) — but the problem with this movie isn’t that Tim Burton didn’t direct it, it’s that Linda Woolverton did but brought far less imagination to creating her original story than she had in adapting Lewis Carroll for the first film. There are a lot of scenes here that achieve some of the charm of the earlier movie — notably the one in which Humpty Dumpty (Wally Wingert) gets knocked off his perch and realizes as he’s in free fall, “Oh no, not again” (though even here Wingert is up against the competition of W. C. Fields’ marvelous and incomparable voicing of Humpty Dumpty in Paramount’s 1933 Alice in Wonderland film) — but on the whole this is a disappointment, especially since the first Tim Burton Alice was so good. It was a disappointment at the box office, too, though according to imdb.com the poor returns were attributed to Johnny Depp going through an unpleasant and well-covered divorce from Amber Heard — though I suspect word got around that it simply wasn’t that good a movie and was a far cry from its predecessor. I should mention that Alice Through the Looking Glass is a “doubles” movie since it features two actors who’ve played Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft, Rhys Ifans (Zanik Hightopp) in the TV series Elementary and Stephen Fry (who voiced the Cheshire Cat) in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (the 2012 sequel to the first Holmes film starring Robert Downey, Jr.).
Last night I ran Charles a movie, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the 2016 sequel to Tim Burton’s marvelous 2010 (sort-of) adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and a sufficiently dull and disappointing movie both Charles and I found ourselves nodding off through bits of it. The 2010 Alice in Wonderland departed considerably from the Urtext of Lewis Carroll’s (t/n Samuel Dodgson) original books — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which may have motivated Burton and his writer, Linda Woolverton, to insist that the name of the magical place Alice visits is really “Underland” and she got it wrong in the first place) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There — and like most Alice in Wonderland movies it freely mixed and matched between the two books instead of just doing one or the other. Woolverton did a few things in the first Alice movie that really annoyed me, notably giving Alice and her parents the last name “Kingsleigh” (an homage to another British fantasy writer, Charles Kingsley, whose 1867 book The Water-Babies might itself be worth filming even though the Wikipedia page on it says it fell from popularity because of its anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Black aspects) when it’s well known the real-life Alice who inspired the books was named Alice Liddell. (Someone traced her in England in 1924 and did an interview with her, though by then she’d been married and went by the name Alice Liddell Hart.) Apparently Carroll saw the real Alice laying under a tree, having fallen asleep while reading, and that inspired him — though there are some reports that Carroll was really a pedophile who had a crush on the 11-year-old Alice Liddell. Alice Through the Looking Glass begins with what turns out to be its best scenes: it opens in the Straits of Malacca in 1864, where the Kingsleigh family ship, the Wonder, is being chased by pirates and is also about to tip over and sink in a storm. The anxious officers and crew members want to turn back, but Alice, the ship’s captain, insists on pressing on and adding more sail until the ship passes safely through the storm while the three pirate ships that were chasing her run aground on reefs. The scene then cuts to London, one year later, and Alice crashes a party being given by her former fiancé Hamish (Leo Bill) to commemorate his assumption of the title of Lord Ascot following the death of her father, who was also the business partner of Alice’s late father.
In Alice in Wonderland Hamish was merely an insufferable upper-class twit, but in Alice Through the Looking Glass he’s an out-and-out villain who’s bought out the Kingsleighs’ 10 percent interest in the company his father and Alice’s co-ran and is threatening to evict Alice’s mother from her home unless she signs over the papers for the Wonder. That means Alice will no longer have a ship at her disposal for her explorations, but Hamish offers her a job as a clerk and says she’ll be able gradually to work her way up through his organization. He stresses this will be a rare opportunity for her because almost no other company in Britain hires women as clerks. Needless to say, Alice finds this a fate almost as bad as death, and she hides in a study of Hamish’s home during his party and comes across a looking-glass through which she enters and crosses back into Wonderland, or Underland, or whatever it’s called. Linda Woolverton misses Alice’s discovery of the backwards looking-glass world in the marvelous opening chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, including the bit that she can’t read the books on the other side of the looking-glass because they’re all printed backwards, but that’s not the biggest problem with Woolverton’s script. Once she actually gets Alice back to Wonderland (or Underland, or whatever it’s called) her writing turns flat, ordinary and just plain dull as, instead of working out clever variations on Lewis Carroll’s themes, Woolverton comes up with an annoying and ponderous tale of her own based on some of the Carroll characters as well as some new ones she invented. The schtick this time around is, instead of the manic character he was in Alice in Wonderland (both book and the previous film), the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) has gone into a heavy-duty depressed phase because he’s found the first hat he ever made — a tiny blue toy hat made of paper which he made for his parents before they were killed by the Jabberwock in the first film’s backstory. This indicates that his parents may have survived the attack after all, and for some reason instead of lifting his spirits and giving him a sense of hope, it plunges him deeply into depression.
He summons Alice in the hope that she can work out a solution to his problem; he also briefs her that Time is actually an animate being (played by Sacha Baron Cohen with his usual insufferability — I briefly thought Depp might be doubling the roles of the Mad Hatter and Time, but he wasn’t and this film might have been better if he had been) and he’s in possession of something called the “chronosphere,” which controls the flow of time. If Alice can steal the chronosphere and use it to reverse time so the Mad Hatter’s family aren’t killed after all, his depression will be lifted and he’ll be happy again. Alice crashes Time’s castle and steals the chronosphere — despite the efforts of Time’s minions, a bunch of clockwork gadgets reminiscent of the animated sidekicks in previous Disney productions like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, to stop her — and once she has it it instantly expands from a round crystal atop the center of a giant clock to a round vehicle, sort of like the ones used in the Jurassic World movies, in which Alice can go through both space and time. The vehicle’s controls seem an awful lot like the ones that ran the TARDIS on the Doctor Who TV show — a reference score composer Danny Elfman caught and exploited by quoting the Doctor Who theme in his music — only the chronosphere is stolen by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who wants to use it to start a genocidal war against the other denizens of Wonderland because she’s still pissed off at her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), for some transgression from their joint childhoods. This part of the plot seems like Woolverton was ripping off Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, in which the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch were estranged sisters and had tongue-twisting names — in Alice Through the Looking Glass the White Queen is called “Mirana” and the Red Queen “Iracebeth” (or is it the other way around?).
Anyway, the Red Queen steals the chronosphere and uses it to screw up time, only since time can’t really change everything ultimately reverts to what it was before. The Red Queen grows a heart (like the Grinch) and the Mad Hatter finds his family, alive but in suspended animation and miniaturized, in the molding of a picture frame. He’s able to bring them back not only to life but to normal size via a cake with a label, “Eat Me” (ya remember the cake? The drink labeled “Drink Me” which shrunk Alice, and the cake labeled “Eat Me” that expanded her again, were both in Lewis Carroll’s first book and Tim Burton’s first Alice movie, but bringing the cake back this way did have a certain degree of charm), though they seem so dull and oppressive one wonders why the Mad Hatter wanted them back. (Then again, traumatic relationships with their parents are a specialty of Tim Burton’s leading characters; remember the odd backstory he gave Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, filling out the character from what Roald Dahl had written and making Wonka’s father a crazy dentist who not only forbade his son any chocolate but encased him in a helmet-like tooth brace which Tim Burton said was something like the one his real-life father had made him where when he was a kid.) In the end Alice says a sad farewell to the Mad Hatter and returns to Britain (a scene very reminiscent of the ending of the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz — the Burton-Woolverton conception of Alice in Wonderland is very much influenced by Wizard, not only in giving her these tearful farewells but also in making Alice a far more assertive and self-actualizing character than Lewis Carroll did), where her mom reneges on the deal she made with Hamish and risks eviction to keep the Wonder in the family so Alice can captain her in another voyage.
Alice Through the Looking Glass has enough charming moments it can’t be dismissed completely, but it’s a weird fantasy indeed in which the opening and closing framing scenes set in the normal world seem far more moving and dramatically coherent than the fantastic bulk of the film. Besides, Woolverton makes one of the basic mistakes of fantasy writers: because she’s dealing with a genre in which anything can happen, she makes anything she can think of happen whether or not it makes any sense or follows the internal logic of her story. Tim Burton didn’t personally direct Alice Through the Looking Glass — someone named James Bobin did, though Burton is listed as one of the producers and he’s clearly the auteur (and Bobin’s chief qualification for the job of directing this movie seems to have been that he’d worked with Sasha Baron Cohen before on his TV series Da Ali G Show) — but the problem with this movie isn’t that Tim Burton didn’t direct it, it’s that Linda Woolverton did but brought far less imagination to creating her original story than she had in adapting Lewis Carroll for the first film. There are a lot of scenes here that achieve some of the charm of the earlier movie — notably the one in which Humpty Dumpty (Wally Wingert) gets knocked off his perch and realizes as he’s in free fall, “Oh no, not again” (though even here Wingert is up against the competition of W. C. Fields’ marvelous and incomparable voicing of Humpty Dumpty in Paramount’s 1933 Alice in Wonderland film) — but on the whole this is a disappointment, especially since the first Tim Burton Alice was so good. It was a disappointment at the box office, too, though according to imdb.com the poor returns were attributed to Johnny Depp going through an unpleasant and well-covered divorce from Amber Heard — though I suspect word got around that it simply wasn’t that good a movie and was a far cry from its predecessor. I should mention that Alice Through the Looking Glass is a “doubles” movie since it features two actors who’ve played Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft, Rhys Ifans (Zanik Hightopp) in the TV series Elementary and Stephen Fry (who voiced the Cheshire Cat) in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (the 2012 sequel to the first Holmes film starring Robert Downey, Jr.).
Friday, October 11, 2019
Sensations of 1945 (Andrew Stone Productions, United Artists, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Sensations of 1945, a semi-major musical produced and directed by Andrew Stone for United Artists release and the last starring role for super-dancer Eleanor Powell (and her only film for a studio other than MGM). Powell was getting tired and was also in a troubled marriage with Glenn Ford, who didn’t want her to work, and after this she confined herself to guest appearances. Sensations of 1945 is also the last film W. C. Fields made before his death on Christmas Day, 1946, though he appears only in one brief scene as himself and in another in which he performs a stage skit in which he plays a U.S. traveler in England crashing a train compartment reserved for “Lord Robert R. Roberts.” We were watching a DVD from the same grey-label source as our DVD of the 1941 Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin’ — though the print wasn’t in as good shape: this was the Astor Pictures TV reissue that shortened the title merely to Sensations, and there was a bad scratch through the first few minutes and occasional other scarring during the film. The opening scene reminded me of the scandal a couple of years back involving the Gay Black actor Jussie Smollett, who hired a couple of friends to beat him up and then claimed he’d been Gay-bashed by two homophobic Nigerian immigrants, all to win more money and a more prominent role on the TV show he was then appearing on. Instead he got fired and the Chicago police and prosecutors went ballistic, at one point indicting him on 16 charges before a Chicago judge threw the case out — whereupon the police and prosecutors denounced her as corrupt. It was ironic that when we watched the newest episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit after the movie, it also did a riff on the Smollett case: a Black rapper who’s about to be “outed” as Gay on the TMZ Web site has his brother assault him on the street and sodomize him with a beer bottle, copying a real-life Gay-basher who’s been doing the same thing to Black Bisexuals on the “down low,” confident that his victims won’t report the crimes to police because they don’t want their wives and kids to know they go to Gay bars and pick up men for sex.
The Smollett parallel in Sensations occurs during the opening scene, representing a performance of the current Broadway show featuring ace dancer Virginia “Ginny” Walker (Eleanor Powell), which is interrupted by a black-clad woman who rises up from a theatre box with a gun, points it at the stage, yells out at Walker, “You’ll never steal another man from his wife again!” and fires at her. Later it turns out that Walker set up the whole thing: the supposedly wronged wife is a friend of hers, a circus markswoman whom Ginny could hire to shoot at her, confident that she would (deliberately) miss. Ginny’s publicity stunt shames her P.R. people, an agency run by the father-and-son team of Gus Crane (Eugene Pallette) and his son, identified only as “Junior” (Dennis O’Keefe). The Cranes have been arguing since “Junior” got out of the army after World War II and took a job co-running the agency with his dad. Dad loves flamboyant publicity stunts while “Junior” thinks they’re embarrassing and counterproductive — so dad demotes his son and gets Ginny to run the agency in his place. Not surprisingly, the movie’s plot is merely a pretext to showcase various acts, including the big bands of Woody Herman (they’re supposedly the pit band for Ginny’s show, which she continues to perform in for eight shows a week while co-running the P.R. firm as well) and Cab Calloway. Herman’s band was on the cusp of becoming the famous “First Herd” and I spent some time and mental energy trying to figure out who his drummer was: he was too stocky and heavy-set to be Dave Tough (who drove the First Herd during its early years and was a superb Dixieland and swing drummer who adapted surprisingly well to Herman’s bebop-influenced style; like a lot of the musicians of his generation, he was also an alcoholic and would drink himself out of the Herman band in 1946 and die two years later), I didn’t think it was Frankie Carlson (who’d been Herman’s drummer through the band’s origins in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s) and it didn’t look like Buddy Rich (who took over for Tough on a few gigs and one recording session before the bop drummer Don Lamond got the job on an ongoing basis).
Calloway is featured in one number, but it’s a doozy: Ginny has arranged to promote the Plantation Club where Calloway is appearing by projecting his show on the side of the New York Times building in Times Square, and a huge crowd gathers in Times Square and has a great jitterbug party as Calloway does a song called “The Hepster’s Dictionary” (Calloway actually wrote and published a book called The Hepster’s Dictionary, a dictionary of Harlem slang) and classically-trained Black jazz pianist Dorothy Donegan does a spectacular rendition of one of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, first come scritto and then as a boogie-woogie, after which it turns into a piano duel between Donegan and the band’s regular pianist, Bennie Payne, who’d previously done this sort of thing with his former employer, Fats Waller. (Their joint feature was George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which Waller recorded with his full band instead of the cut-down “Fats Waller and His Rhythm” he usually recorded with, but the record was only issued in Switzerland, apparently because Waller didn’t think he’d outplayed Payne enough to want his American fans to hear it.) The high point of the film comes towards the end, in which the stage of Ginny’s show turns into a giant pinball machine, with the Herman band as the back display and Powell as a pinball dancing between the various cushions and scoring points appropriately. (I had remembered that she did this dance to the Mexican song “Las Chiapanecas,” but she didn’t — though Herman had recorded that song and he does play it in the film.)
The show ends with Ginny and “Junior” pairing up even though he’s got so discouraged by the complications in their relationship that he’s re-enlisted (their final clinch features him in Army uniform) and him sneaking behind her back and giving a 10 percent interest in a new 1890’s-themed nightclub to Dan Lindsay (C. Aubrey Smith) because his contacts have recruited such genuine stars of the period as W. C. Fields and Sophie Tucker (doing a weird song called “You Can’t Sew a Button on a Heart”) to perform on the club’s opening night, only Ginny was prepared to welch on the deal and cut him out once the club had its big opening and its success was assured. (A New Yorker who welches on deals and exploits people to make herself richer — gee, with a background like that she could run for President!) Sensations is a fun movie, though as Charles pointed out afterwards there were plenty of similar —but much better — movies like it being made in the early 1930’s (when W. C. Fields’ routines were screamingly funny, whereas here his sketch is entertaining but only moderately amusing). Andrew Stone’s most famous movie was probably The Last Voyage (1960), a story about a shipwreck at sea for which, instead of building sets, he actually bought an ocean liner that was about to be scrapped, brought his cast, crew and equipment onto the liner and sank it for real for his final scene. That’s an example of his heavy-handedness as a director, which is somewhat in evidence here, but a film featuring Eleanor Powell, Cab Calloway and Woody Herman can’t help but be entertaining!
Last night’s “feature” was Sensations of 1945, a semi-major musical produced and directed by Andrew Stone for United Artists release and the last starring role for super-dancer Eleanor Powell (and her only film for a studio other than MGM). Powell was getting tired and was also in a troubled marriage with Glenn Ford, who didn’t want her to work, and after this she confined herself to guest appearances. Sensations of 1945 is also the last film W. C. Fields made before his death on Christmas Day, 1946, though he appears only in one brief scene as himself and in another in which he performs a stage skit in which he plays a U.S. traveler in England crashing a train compartment reserved for “Lord Robert R. Roberts.” We were watching a DVD from the same grey-label source as our DVD of the 1941 Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin’ — though the print wasn’t in as good shape: this was the Astor Pictures TV reissue that shortened the title merely to Sensations, and there was a bad scratch through the first few minutes and occasional other scarring during the film. The opening scene reminded me of the scandal a couple of years back involving the Gay Black actor Jussie Smollett, who hired a couple of friends to beat him up and then claimed he’d been Gay-bashed by two homophobic Nigerian immigrants, all to win more money and a more prominent role on the TV show he was then appearing on. Instead he got fired and the Chicago police and prosecutors went ballistic, at one point indicting him on 16 charges before a Chicago judge threw the case out — whereupon the police and prosecutors denounced her as corrupt. It was ironic that when we watched the newest episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit after the movie, it also did a riff on the Smollett case: a Black rapper who’s about to be “outed” as Gay on the TMZ Web site has his brother assault him on the street and sodomize him with a beer bottle, copying a real-life Gay-basher who’s been doing the same thing to Black Bisexuals on the “down low,” confident that his victims won’t report the crimes to police because they don’t want their wives and kids to know they go to Gay bars and pick up men for sex.
The Smollett parallel in Sensations occurs during the opening scene, representing a performance of the current Broadway show featuring ace dancer Virginia “Ginny” Walker (Eleanor Powell), which is interrupted by a black-clad woman who rises up from a theatre box with a gun, points it at the stage, yells out at Walker, “You’ll never steal another man from his wife again!” and fires at her. Later it turns out that Walker set up the whole thing: the supposedly wronged wife is a friend of hers, a circus markswoman whom Ginny could hire to shoot at her, confident that she would (deliberately) miss. Ginny’s publicity stunt shames her P.R. people, an agency run by the father-and-son team of Gus Crane (Eugene Pallette) and his son, identified only as “Junior” (Dennis O’Keefe). The Cranes have been arguing since “Junior” got out of the army after World War II and took a job co-running the agency with his dad. Dad loves flamboyant publicity stunts while “Junior” thinks they’re embarrassing and counterproductive — so dad demotes his son and gets Ginny to run the agency in his place. Not surprisingly, the movie’s plot is merely a pretext to showcase various acts, including the big bands of Woody Herman (they’re supposedly the pit band for Ginny’s show, which she continues to perform in for eight shows a week while co-running the P.R. firm as well) and Cab Calloway. Herman’s band was on the cusp of becoming the famous “First Herd” and I spent some time and mental energy trying to figure out who his drummer was: he was too stocky and heavy-set to be Dave Tough (who drove the First Herd during its early years and was a superb Dixieland and swing drummer who adapted surprisingly well to Herman’s bebop-influenced style; like a lot of the musicians of his generation, he was also an alcoholic and would drink himself out of the Herman band in 1946 and die two years later), I didn’t think it was Frankie Carlson (who’d been Herman’s drummer through the band’s origins in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s) and it didn’t look like Buddy Rich (who took over for Tough on a few gigs and one recording session before the bop drummer Don Lamond got the job on an ongoing basis).
Calloway is featured in one number, but it’s a doozy: Ginny has arranged to promote the Plantation Club where Calloway is appearing by projecting his show on the side of the New York Times building in Times Square, and a huge crowd gathers in Times Square and has a great jitterbug party as Calloway does a song called “The Hepster’s Dictionary” (Calloway actually wrote and published a book called The Hepster’s Dictionary, a dictionary of Harlem slang) and classically-trained Black jazz pianist Dorothy Donegan does a spectacular rendition of one of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, first come scritto and then as a boogie-woogie, after which it turns into a piano duel between Donegan and the band’s regular pianist, Bennie Payne, who’d previously done this sort of thing with his former employer, Fats Waller. (Their joint feature was George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which Waller recorded with his full band instead of the cut-down “Fats Waller and His Rhythm” he usually recorded with, but the record was only issued in Switzerland, apparently because Waller didn’t think he’d outplayed Payne enough to want his American fans to hear it.) The high point of the film comes towards the end, in which the stage of Ginny’s show turns into a giant pinball machine, with the Herman band as the back display and Powell as a pinball dancing between the various cushions and scoring points appropriately. (I had remembered that she did this dance to the Mexican song “Las Chiapanecas,” but she didn’t — though Herman had recorded that song and he does play it in the film.)
The show ends with Ginny and “Junior” pairing up even though he’s got so discouraged by the complications in their relationship that he’s re-enlisted (their final clinch features him in Army uniform) and him sneaking behind her back and giving a 10 percent interest in a new 1890’s-themed nightclub to Dan Lindsay (C. Aubrey Smith) because his contacts have recruited such genuine stars of the period as W. C. Fields and Sophie Tucker (doing a weird song called “You Can’t Sew a Button on a Heart”) to perform on the club’s opening night, only Ginny was prepared to welch on the deal and cut him out once the club had its big opening and its success was assured. (A New Yorker who welches on deals and exploits people to make herself richer — gee, with a background like that she could run for President!) Sensations is a fun movie, though as Charles pointed out afterwards there were plenty of similar —but much better — movies like it being made in the early 1930’s (when W. C. Fields’ routines were screamingly funny, whereas here his sketch is entertaining but only moderately amusing). Andrew Stone’s most famous movie was probably The Last Voyage (1960), a story about a shipwreck at sea for which, instead of building sets, he actually bought an ocean liner that was about to be scrapped, brought his cast, crew and equipment onto the liner and sank it for real for his final scene. That’s an example of his heavy-handedness as a director, which is somewhat in evidence here, but a film featuring Eleanor Powell, Cab Calloway and Woody Herman can’t help but be entertaining!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)