by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie was Psycho Nurse, a Michael Feifer production from Feifer Worldwide
and MarVista Entertainment (I’ve joked before that Michael Feifer slaps his
name on so many places in his credits that some day I expect to see a movie
credit reading, “Associate Producer: Michael Feifer, Jr., A Michael Feifer Production”),
though this time he merely directed and let another person, Hannah C. Langley,
write the script. What Langley came up with was a pretty typical Lifetime
script with one of the most frightening scenes I’ve ever seen: nursing-home
patient Ida Leonard (Nancy Petersen) is talking to her nurse Gwen (Lyndon Smith
— a woman named Lyndon?) about how, like the singer in “Ol’ Man River,” she’s
“tired of livin’ but a-feared of dyin’.” Gwen — superbly acted by Smith, whose
angelic face gradually hardens into something you could strike matches on as
both Ida and we realize that she has every intention of resolving Ida’s dilemma
by dispatching her ahead of schedule — turns off the oxygen pump that’s
enabling Ida to breathe, then cinches the hose so whatever oxygen still in the
hose won’t go through either and she’ll suffocate. Then, just as Ida has lost
consciousness, Gwen goes into the hallway screaming for help reviving her — not
only are we thinking “Münchhausen Syndrome by Proxy” (the rather awkward name —
derived from the legendary teller of tall tales — for a mental illness in which
a person causes a disaster and then expects recognition as a hero for “solving”
the crisis they’ve caused … sort of like Donald Trump) but it turned out on the
imdb.com page for this film that it was originally shot under the title Münchhausen
by Internet — and though Ida apparently
survives that time she croaks later and Gwen loses her job at the nursing home.
She offers herself as a live-in in-home caregiver (watching this movie was a
busman’s holiday for me, especially since I’d had to put one of my clients into
an emergency room that very day!) and gets hired by Mira (Abbie Cobb) and her
husband Todd (Sean Faris) to take care of their son Max (Griffin Morgan) —
Langley’s script tells us he’s seven but he looked more like 10 to me — who has
muscular dystrophy and first started manifesting symptoms a year before our
story begins.
Naturally, this being a Lifetime movie, Todd and Mira both think
Gwen is absolutely wonderful and that they’ve lucked out by having her — only
Mira has not only one, but two,
African-American friends who are going to catch onto Gwen’s real nature but die
for their pains before they can warn her. One is Max’s doctor, Dr. Keller
(Rolonda Watts), who doesn’t even make it out of the first act alive; she comes
over bringing a new pair of crutches for Max which will be easier because
they’re aluminum instead of wood, only she remembers Gwen from a previous job
in which Gwen threatened the lives of patients and threatens to expose her.
Gwen, knowing that Dr. Keller had a history of drug addiction and was only
recently successfully rehabbed and let back into practice, knocks her
unconscious with a thick glass vase (it doesn’t even break, and the
too-cool-to-move Gwen casually dusts it and puts it on the shelf from whence it
came) and then takes Dr. Keller to her home down the street and shoots her full
of heroin (or something) that will make it look like she relapsed and O.D.’d.
The other Black best friend who bites the big one before she can warn Mira of
what Gwen really is is her business partner Karen (Mieko Hillman), who’s
involved with her in some sort of job (either architecture or interior design,
we suspect) that requires them to walk around with large carry bags filled with
huge pieces of paper representing plans, only she researches Gwen’s background
on the Internet and also catches her in one of her scams to keep Mira under her
thumb: after suggesting Mira attend a support group for other parents of kids with
muscular dystrophy, she calls her frequently, posing as a man Mira met in the
group — she calls herself “David” and uses a voice filter on her computer to
sound male, and posts a low-resolution photo of “David” to give Mira an idea of
what (s)he looks like without offering anything too recognizable. Only Mira has
also been getting e-mails from the real David — it seems Gwen stole the identity from the husband of a former
patient of hers — saying that the “David” who’s communicating with Mira is a
fake and offering to meet with her.
Anyway, Gwen kills Karen after Karen
catches her in the middle of one of her “David” calls to Mira, and she also
kills the real David — who turns out to be former investment banker David
Webber (Jay Wilkins), though if he was an investment banker one wonders why
he’s now living in a cheap motel room. David tells Mira that Gwen was the
live-in nurse of his late wife Louise, who died of cancer — for which David
blames Gwen because Gwen talked Louise out of doing chemo and into pursuing
“alternative” remedies instead. One wonders how writer Langley and
producer-director Feifer are going to bring this one to an end, which they do
by having Mira at last catch on to Gwen when she hears “David” refer to her son
Max as “little guy” — Gwen’s favorite nickname for him. Alas, Gwen catches on
that she’s caught on and lures her into Gwen’s car by claiming (falsely, though
the business of kidnapping the kid in the last act of a Lifetime movie is so common a device of theirs no wonder Mira believes
it) that she’s kidnapped Max but will take Mira to where she’s holding him.
Gwen tells Mira flat-out that she’s been neglecting both Max and her husband
Todd — who somehow got persuaded (by Gwen, or just on his own?) that Mira was
having an affair and the mysterious “David” was the guy she was having it with
— and so she’s going to kill Mira and set it up to look like it was suicide
motivated by her guilt over having killed Todd, since Gwen has told Mira she
got Mira’s blood and plastered it all over the knife with which Gwen killed the
real David, along with putting Mira’s prints on it (how? Actually we’re
obviously supposed to think Gwen is lying precisely because of the sheer unlikeliness of what she’s telling
Mira.) The two women struggle for the knife (Maurine Watkins wants to know from
her plagiarism attorney if she can sue for “they both reached for the knife”
because it’s so similar to “they both reached for the gun”) and Mira ultimately
takes out Gwen and, it’s hinted in the final scene, quits her job so she can take care of Max full-time.
Psycho
Nurse is a pretty typical Lifetime movie
that has an unusually good performance by Lyndon Smith in the title role — it’s
a virtuoso job of acting that enables us to see both the kind, caring veneer she puts on and the hard
heart underneath — but the film really needed a stronger actress as her rival
than the dull, kewpie-doll-like Abbie Cobb as Mira. Her husband Todd is played
by Sean Faris, who’s a nice, tall, dark-haired hunk of man-meat — we get to see
him topless at least twice, and he’s got great pecs, though I’d have found him
sexier if his chest weren’t so totally smooth (a little hair — or a lot — on
the body is a turn-on for me). Psycho Nurse was an O.K. Lifetime movie, cut to their formula but
with a few infinitesimal variations, and its main interest is Lyndon Smith’s
powerful acting that cuts through the all-too-conventional plotting, including
“holes” typical of Feifer’s work — like the way neither Mira nor anyone else
seems to miss her victims even though she’s supposedly close to them!
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
The Devil’s Advocate (Warner Bros., Regency Enterprises, Kopelson Entertainment, 1997)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 p.m. I put on the Sundance channel hoping to find Law and Order reruns. Instead I stumbled on a movie that was just starting, The Devil’s Advocate, which turned out to be a 1997 production from Warner Bros., Regency Enterprises and Kopelson Entertainment. It begins with Keanu Reeves playing Kevin Lomax, an attorney in Gainesville, Florida who’s won 64 consecutive cases. Right now he’s in the middle of the trial of Lloyd Gettys (Christopher Bauer), a male high-school teacher and coach who’s accused of molesting female students, and when the principal victim testifies Kevin is so shocked by what she’s saying about his client he asks for a 15-minute recess — only Johwhen he comes back he conducts a masterly cross-examination that reveals she’s hung out and played sex games with boys, and she and the coach’s other accusers compared notes in a sort of can-you-top-this game about who could come up with the most outrageous story about him. The jury acquits Gettys and Kevin receives an offer from a New York law firm to take a job with them as a consultant on how to pick juries. Just when I was thinking that after all the science-fiction films and period epics Keanu Reeves has done over the years I was finally getting the chance to see him play a normal human being in a contemporary story, he takes the job with the New York law firm and brings his wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) with him.
He soon gets hired on as a full-fledged lawyer and for his first case he draws the defense of Phillipe Moyez (Delroy Lindo), who lives in an underground lair and is so disheveled he looks homeless. He’s been put on trial by the New York Health Department for killing a goat in his basement home, but Kevin wins his acquittal on the ground that he’s a voodoo practitioner and he was just exercising his First Amendment-guaranteed right to freely exercise his religion when he killed that goat. He moves up through the firm and arouses the jealousy of other associates, including the middle-aged Eddie Barzoon (Jeffrey Jones), with his rapid rise through the ranks, largely due to the sponsorship of the firm’s managing partner, John Milton (an oddly Anglo name for a character played by Al Pacino, who’s quite good in the role but I found his playing a bit too aggressive). The naming of this character after the author of Paradise Lost — a poetic retelling of the Book of Genesis from the point of view of Satan, who at the end of the book, after being exiled from God’s presence, utters the famous line, “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven” — is our first clue as to what’s really going on at that law firm. The firm turns out to have business interests in various countries around the world, largely helping support dictators who not only rule brutally but are ripping off their countries blind and storing the proceeds in international havens — indeed, one of the key partners is Christabella Andreotti (Connie Nielsen in her first U.S. role), who babbles for long stretches in non-English languages that are not subtitled because the filmmakers, writers Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy (adapting a novel by Andrew Neiderman, whom I’d previously heard of only as the posthumous amanuensis of the late V. C. Andrews; he’s churned out a whole series of “Andrews” books since her death in 1997, and if The Devil’s Advocate is any indication, he was an appropriate choice by Andrews’ publishers to keep her name and style going even after her death) and director Taylor Hackford, deliberately wanted to keep us in the dark about who she is and what she’s doing.
The Lomaxes move into an expensive apartment (though the bathroom fixtures are still pretty tacky) and are mentored on how to paint and decorate it by their next-door neighbors, Leamon and Jackie Heath (Ruben Santiago-Hudson and future Law and Order: Special Victims Unit regular Tamara Tunie) — only a passing close-up of Jackie’s mouth reveals rotted teeth under her normal-looking ones. Kevin starts neglecting his wife in favor of his work, and she tries to fight back by redoing her hair (back in Florida she was a tousled-haired blonde; in New York, on the advice of the Heaths, she dyes her hair black and has it cut in the Louise Brooks bob) and getting new, more fashionable clothes. Midway through the story Kevin’s mom Alice (a nice turn by Judith Ivey) shows up in New York; a religious fanatic back home in Florida, she naturally denounces the Big Apple as a cesspool of sin and damnation and tries to get Kevin to leave it and go back home. She also raised Kevin as a single parent after his dad died before he was born — or at least she thinks that’s what happened. Kevin gets a huge case involving filthy-rich, thrice-married and totally unscrupulous New York real estate developer Alexander Cullen (Craig T. Nelson), who allegedly murdered his latest wife and two other members of his family one night (it seems like the writers were fusing O. J. Simpson and Donald Trump), and even though he knows she’s lying and therefore he’s suborning perjury, Kevin puts Cullen’s mistress Melissa Black (Laura Harrington) on the stand and she testifies that she and Cullen were having a long drawn-out sexual encounter during the murder. Cullen is acquitted, but the stresses of the case drive the final nails into Kevin’s relationship with his wife as well as her very sanity — in a series of scenes that might have been inspired by Vera Miles’ descent into madness in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Wrong Man, she ends up in a mental institution and ultimately commits suicide there.
Eventually the story becomes a sort of supernatural reworking of John Grisham’s The Firm — and its film version, in which Tom Cruise plays a young lawyer who joins a big firm and gradually realizes its principal business is representing the Mafia — in which John Milton turns out to be Satan himself and Kevin turns out to be his son (though the idea that Keanu Reeves could have resulted from the pairing of Al Pacino and Judith Ivey is pretty weird itself). The business of the two leads being father and son — like the title character in Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable, the lead of The Devil’s Advocate is the product of a union between the Devil and an ordinary mortal woman (a twist that, according to an imbd.com “Trivia” poster, wasn’t in Neiderman’s novel but was added by Lemkin and Gilroy), though she knew him only as a waiter in a New York hotel she stayed in during a week — and Milton wants the newly widowed Kevin to couple with Christabella, who’s also the devil’s child by a (different) mortal woman, and conceive the Antichrist. Instead Kevin shoots himself, which sets up a cataclysmic explosion that blows up the whole building where Milton had his home and his law firm. The Devil’s Advocate is an interesting movie, better when it’s just a fish-out-of-water story about a small-town Florida attorney trying to adjust to life and career in New York than when it’s throwing the devil stuff at us in the later reels and giving John Milton a soapbox from which to preach about the evils of the world (including saying that “Who in their right mind, Kevin, could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine?” Politically and economically, he has a point, but the 20th century also produced a lot of really cool culture!) as if Robert A. Heinlein had suddenly developed an interest in the conflict of God and Satan.
It’s decently acted — though there’s a sort of harshness and angularity about Keanu Reeves’ appearance, especially his face, that makes it hard to believe in him as the (un)holy innocent the script tells us he is, while Theron gives us a lot more intensity than her rather underwritten character really needs. Indeed, the most moving performances come from some of the down-cast actors, particularly Jeffrey Jones and Craig T. Nelson, and the film also benefits from real locations and cameo appearances by then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato and boxing proprietor Don King. Donald Trump is mentioned — there’s a big party scene which featured D’Amato and it’s explained that Trump would be there if business hadn’t called him out of town — and the room in which Kevin meets Cullen to plan his defense is actually Trump’s personal suite at Trump Tower (and yes, it’s as garish and ugly as its reputation). It’s possible Trump did film a cameo for this movie — reportedly he frequently insists that filmmakers wanting to shoot scenes at one of his property include him in the movie as part of the deal — and often his scenes hit the cutting-room floor. One time it didn’t was in the film Home Alone 2, in which Macaulay Culkin encounters Trump in the lobby of Trump Tower and asks him where the restroom is (and Trump tells him) — only the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) cut Trump’s scene in 2012 to shorten the film to fit a TV time slot, and Trump recently learned about this and tweeted that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had ordered the deletion because he doesn’t like Trump politically and has had harsh words for him at recent international conferences of world leaders.
Last night at 9 p.m. I put on the Sundance channel hoping to find Law and Order reruns. Instead I stumbled on a movie that was just starting, The Devil’s Advocate, which turned out to be a 1997 production from Warner Bros., Regency Enterprises and Kopelson Entertainment. It begins with Keanu Reeves playing Kevin Lomax, an attorney in Gainesville, Florida who’s won 64 consecutive cases. Right now he’s in the middle of the trial of Lloyd Gettys (Christopher Bauer), a male high-school teacher and coach who’s accused of molesting female students, and when the principal victim testifies Kevin is so shocked by what she’s saying about his client he asks for a 15-minute recess — only Johwhen he comes back he conducts a masterly cross-examination that reveals she’s hung out and played sex games with boys, and she and the coach’s other accusers compared notes in a sort of can-you-top-this game about who could come up with the most outrageous story about him. The jury acquits Gettys and Kevin receives an offer from a New York law firm to take a job with them as a consultant on how to pick juries. Just when I was thinking that after all the science-fiction films and period epics Keanu Reeves has done over the years I was finally getting the chance to see him play a normal human being in a contemporary story, he takes the job with the New York law firm and brings his wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) with him.
He soon gets hired on as a full-fledged lawyer and for his first case he draws the defense of Phillipe Moyez (Delroy Lindo), who lives in an underground lair and is so disheveled he looks homeless. He’s been put on trial by the New York Health Department for killing a goat in his basement home, but Kevin wins his acquittal on the ground that he’s a voodoo practitioner and he was just exercising his First Amendment-guaranteed right to freely exercise his religion when he killed that goat. He moves up through the firm and arouses the jealousy of other associates, including the middle-aged Eddie Barzoon (Jeffrey Jones), with his rapid rise through the ranks, largely due to the sponsorship of the firm’s managing partner, John Milton (an oddly Anglo name for a character played by Al Pacino, who’s quite good in the role but I found his playing a bit too aggressive). The naming of this character after the author of Paradise Lost — a poetic retelling of the Book of Genesis from the point of view of Satan, who at the end of the book, after being exiled from God’s presence, utters the famous line, “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven” — is our first clue as to what’s really going on at that law firm. The firm turns out to have business interests in various countries around the world, largely helping support dictators who not only rule brutally but are ripping off their countries blind and storing the proceeds in international havens — indeed, one of the key partners is Christabella Andreotti (Connie Nielsen in her first U.S. role), who babbles for long stretches in non-English languages that are not subtitled because the filmmakers, writers Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy (adapting a novel by Andrew Neiderman, whom I’d previously heard of only as the posthumous amanuensis of the late V. C. Andrews; he’s churned out a whole series of “Andrews” books since her death in 1997, and if The Devil’s Advocate is any indication, he was an appropriate choice by Andrews’ publishers to keep her name and style going even after her death) and director Taylor Hackford, deliberately wanted to keep us in the dark about who she is and what she’s doing.
The Lomaxes move into an expensive apartment (though the bathroom fixtures are still pretty tacky) and are mentored on how to paint and decorate it by their next-door neighbors, Leamon and Jackie Heath (Ruben Santiago-Hudson and future Law and Order: Special Victims Unit regular Tamara Tunie) — only a passing close-up of Jackie’s mouth reveals rotted teeth under her normal-looking ones. Kevin starts neglecting his wife in favor of his work, and she tries to fight back by redoing her hair (back in Florida she was a tousled-haired blonde; in New York, on the advice of the Heaths, she dyes her hair black and has it cut in the Louise Brooks bob) and getting new, more fashionable clothes. Midway through the story Kevin’s mom Alice (a nice turn by Judith Ivey) shows up in New York; a religious fanatic back home in Florida, she naturally denounces the Big Apple as a cesspool of sin and damnation and tries to get Kevin to leave it and go back home. She also raised Kevin as a single parent after his dad died before he was born — or at least she thinks that’s what happened. Kevin gets a huge case involving filthy-rich, thrice-married and totally unscrupulous New York real estate developer Alexander Cullen (Craig T. Nelson), who allegedly murdered his latest wife and two other members of his family one night (it seems like the writers were fusing O. J. Simpson and Donald Trump), and even though he knows she’s lying and therefore he’s suborning perjury, Kevin puts Cullen’s mistress Melissa Black (Laura Harrington) on the stand and she testifies that she and Cullen were having a long drawn-out sexual encounter during the murder. Cullen is acquitted, but the stresses of the case drive the final nails into Kevin’s relationship with his wife as well as her very sanity — in a series of scenes that might have been inspired by Vera Miles’ descent into madness in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Wrong Man, she ends up in a mental institution and ultimately commits suicide there.
Eventually the story becomes a sort of supernatural reworking of John Grisham’s The Firm — and its film version, in which Tom Cruise plays a young lawyer who joins a big firm and gradually realizes its principal business is representing the Mafia — in which John Milton turns out to be Satan himself and Kevin turns out to be his son (though the idea that Keanu Reeves could have resulted from the pairing of Al Pacino and Judith Ivey is pretty weird itself). The business of the two leads being father and son — like the title character in Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable, the lead of The Devil’s Advocate is the product of a union between the Devil and an ordinary mortal woman (a twist that, according to an imbd.com “Trivia” poster, wasn’t in Neiderman’s novel but was added by Lemkin and Gilroy), though she knew him only as a waiter in a New York hotel she stayed in during a week — and Milton wants the newly widowed Kevin to couple with Christabella, who’s also the devil’s child by a (different) mortal woman, and conceive the Antichrist. Instead Kevin shoots himself, which sets up a cataclysmic explosion that blows up the whole building where Milton had his home and his law firm. The Devil’s Advocate is an interesting movie, better when it’s just a fish-out-of-water story about a small-town Florida attorney trying to adjust to life and career in New York than when it’s throwing the devil stuff at us in the later reels and giving John Milton a soapbox from which to preach about the evils of the world (including saying that “Who in their right mind, Kevin, could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine?” Politically and economically, he has a point, but the 20th century also produced a lot of really cool culture!) as if Robert A. Heinlein had suddenly developed an interest in the conflict of God and Satan.
It’s decently acted — though there’s a sort of harshness and angularity about Keanu Reeves’ appearance, especially his face, that makes it hard to believe in him as the (un)holy innocent the script tells us he is, while Theron gives us a lot more intensity than her rather underwritten character really needs. Indeed, the most moving performances come from some of the down-cast actors, particularly Jeffrey Jones and Craig T. Nelson, and the film also benefits from real locations and cameo appearances by then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato and boxing proprietor Don King. Donald Trump is mentioned — there’s a big party scene which featured D’Amato and it’s explained that Trump would be there if business hadn’t called him out of town — and the room in which Kevin meets Cullen to plan his defense is actually Trump’s personal suite at Trump Tower (and yes, it’s as garish and ugly as its reputation). It’s possible Trump did film a cameo for this movie — reportedly he frequently insists that filmmakers wanting to shoot scenes at one of his property include him in the movie as part of the deal — and often his scenes hit the cutting-room floor. One time it didn’t was in the film Home Alone 2, in which Macaulay Culkin encounters Trump in the lobby of Trump Tower and asks him where the restroom is (and Trump tells him) — only the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) cut Trump’s scene in 2012 to shorten the film to fit a TV time slot, and Trump recently learned about this and tweeted that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had ordered the deletion because he doesn’t like Trump politically and has had harsh words for him at recent international conferences of world leaders.
Monday, January 6, 2020
Abducted on Air (Incendo Media/Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” feature was called Abducted on Air, though the working title was The Lead, and it was written by Barbara Kymlicka (whom I’ve jokingly called “Barbara Cum-Licker” because virtually all her screenplays, including this one, deal with nubile young women having sex with older men for money, power or status) and directed by Philippe Gagnon. The central character is Sasha Bruder (Kim Shaw), a reporter for Cable 4 TV News — just where this story takes place is a bit of a mystery, since a line of dialogue early on identifies it as Cleveland but a later sign outside a law-enforcement building says “State of Okla.” Bruder is young, super-ambitious and jealous of the station’s lead investigative reporter, Dianne Baldwin (Perrey Reeves, top-billed), who gets the big nasty crime stories (including one on a series of home-invasion robberies) that lead the newscasts and Sasha’s stories, if they air at all, are relegated to the tail end of Cable 4’s schedule. The title is a misnomer since Sasha isn’t actually abducted, on air or otherwise; instead she and her former journalism teacher, Aidan Ferguson (Gord Rand), plotted to fake her kidnapping as she was alone in the Cable 4 studios after hours recording the intro to her latest story about community activists trying to save an old building from demolition. The gimmick was that she would usher her assistant Alex Peterson (Marc Bendavid), who has a big-time crush on her (he actually got the chance to have sex with her, but after one time she decided she didn’t want to go there again), out of the building and then Aidan would disguise himself in the obligatory Lifetime crook’s uniform — a black hoodie and black ski mask — “kidnap” her and then hide her out for a few days before she would reappear, having supposedly “escaped” from her (alleged) captors.
For the first hour or so it seemed like Kymlicka and Gagnon were going the route of Alfred Hitchcock — who after his early 1930 British film Murder! carefully avoided whodunits and plots which turned on surprise; instead Hitchcock let the audience in early on who the heroes were, who the villains were and what the dastardly plot was, and made the suspense out of when the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. That could have been the basis for an interesting film, especially since Kymlicka and Gagnon evoked not only Hitchcock comparisons but Billy Wilder ones as well: the whole concept of a journalist stuck in a small-time job and willing to do anything, no matter how unscrupulous, to break into the big-time is the plot of Wilder’s greatest film, Ace in the Hole, and the growing antagonism between Sasha and Aidan as their plot unravels and gets in the way of their physical relationship made me think, “Ah, it’s Double Indemnity, only with journalism instead of insurance.” Kymlicka also gives us some formidable suspects as the scheme starts going south, including Aidan’s icy-cold wife Jocelyn (Kristin Booth) — who’s also the daughter of the president of the college where Aidan teaches (apparently at some point Kymlicka had read or seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) — and Sasha’s crush object Alex, whom at one point she tries to frame for the crime by leaving the handkerchief with which she was gagged during the “kidnapping” in his home and dripping blood (which she extracts by cutting open the palm of her hand — ouch!) on his clothes, leading to his arrest for the crime.
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” feature was called Abducted on Air, though the working title was The Lead, and it was written by Barbara Kymlicka (whom I’ve jokingly called “Barbara Cum-Licker” because virtually all her screenplays, including this one, deal with nubile young women having sex with older men for money, power or status) and directed by Philippe Gagnon. The central character is Sasha Bruder (Kim Shaw), a reporter for Cable 4 TV News — just where this story takes place is a bit of a mystery, since a line of dialogue early on identifies it as Cleveland but a later sign outside a law-enforcement building says “State of Okla.” Bruder is young, super-ambitious and jealous of the station’s lead investigative reporter, Dianne Baldwin (Perrey Reeves, top-billed), who gets the big nasty crime stories (including one on a series of home-invasion robberies) that lead the newscasts and Sasha’s stories, if they air at all, are relegated to the tail end of Cable 4’s schedule. The title is a misnomer since Sasha isn’t actually abducted, on air or otherwise; instead she and her former journalism teacher, Aidan Ferguson (Gord Rand), plotted to fake her kidnapping as she was alone in the Cable 4 studios after hours recording the intro to her latest story about community activists trying to save an old building from demolition. The gimmick was that she would usher her assistant Alex Peterson (Marc Bendavid), who has a big-time crush on her (he actually got the chance to have sex with her, but after one time she decided she didn’t want to go there again), out of the building and then Aidan would disguise himself in the obligatory Lifetime crook’s uniform — a black hoodie and black ski mask — “kidnap” her and then hide her out for a few days before she would reappear, having supposedly “escaped” from her (alleged) captors.
For the first hour or so it seemed like Kymlicka and Gagnon were going the route of Alfred Hitchcock — who after his early 1930 British film Murder! carefully avoided whodunits and plots which turned on surprise; instead Hitchcock let the audience in early on who the heroes were, who the villains were and what the dastardly plot was, and made the suspense out of when the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. That could have been the basis for an interesting film, especially since Kymlicka and Gagnon evoked not only Hitchcock comparisons but Billy Wilder ones as well: the whole concept of a journalist stuck in a small-time job and willing to do anything, no matter how unscrupulous, to break into the big-time is the plot of Wilder’s greatest film, Ace in the Hole, and the growing antagonism between Sasha and Aidan as their plot unravels and gets in the way of their physical relationship made me think, “Ah, it’s Double Indemnity, only with journalism instead of insurance.” Kymlicka also gives us some formidable suspects as the scheme starts going south, including Aidan’s icy-cold wife Jocelyn (Kristin Booth) — who’s also the daughter of the president of the college where Aidan teaches (apparently at some point Kymlicka had read or seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) — and Sasha’s crush object Alex, whom at one point she tries to frame for the crime by leaving the handkerchief with which she was gagged during the “kidnapping” in his home and dripping blood (which she extracts by cutting open the palm of her hand — ouch!) on his clothes, leading to his arrest for the crime.
She even drops a
hint that the reason Diane Baldwin is doing Sasha out of all the big stories is
that she’s having an affair with
the station’s news director, Gavin (Bruce Dinsmore), which suggests that in the
age of #MeToo Sasha would have done better simply to report Gavin as a sexual predator
to his higher-ups and get him denounced by the modern-day Sex Police and driven
out of his job, with Diane as collateral damage, instead of going through all
the trouble of faking her own kidnapping. Another big issue is that Aidan is
motivated not only by his dick but his literary career; he’s already published
one book (we’re not told whether it was nonfiction or fiction) but it flopped,
and he sees Sasha’s “abduction” story as having best-seller written all over it
— though Sasha is double-crossing him by negotiating for the rights with
another author. Sasha also has a father who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s or
some other sort of age-related dementia, and one of the few things that reminds
him he has a daughter is an old
home-movie videotape, which Sasha had transferred to DVD, of Sasha as a child
(played by Maya Fellen) holding a rubber toy replica of an ice-cream cone to
her mouth and pretending it’s a TV microphone and she’s recording an intro to a
TV news story — indicating that a successful TV reporter is the only thing Sasha has ever wanted to be in her life.
Sasha
starts receiving threatening notes and then gets left some of the accoutrements of the “crime” she and Aidan faked, including the
rope she was tied with covered in still-damp blood, and for a long time
Kymlicka leads us up the garden path and makes us think Aidan’s wife Jocelyn,
who’s previously cleaned up the messes he’s got himself into with other affairs
with current or former students, is behind the harassment as part of her campaign
to force Sasha to confess and win back her errant husband’s affections. Instead
the payoff is that the real
stalker is [spoiler alert!] Diane
Baldwin, who faked being victimized by a home-invasion — she left blood around
her house and left her furniture in disarray to make it look like she’d been
killed by one of the co-conspirators and then her body had been taken away, but
really she’d caught on to inconsistencies in the recorded video of the
“kidnapping,” had somehow deduced the truth and in a final scene evocative of
Edward Bryant’s science-fiction story “The 10:00 Report Is Brought to You By …
” (a dark tale about rival TV news shows arranging for real crimes to be
committed so they can report “exclusive” stories on them, published in Harlan
Ellison’s 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions) and the 1976 movie Network (which I’ve long suspected was itself influenced by
Bryant’s story), Sasha is sent to the local police station to cover the arrest
of her kidnapper — only to find that Diane is also there and the story she’s
been sent to “cover” is her own arrest.
Abducted on Air is a good movie that had the potential to be even
better; if Barbara Kymlicka had stuck to the Hitchcockian plot construction she
began with and not started dragging traditional Lifetime formula elements into
it, and also if casting associate Kalene Osborne (whose post-script affiliation
is not “C.S.A.” but “C.D.C.,” which of course led me to joke, “So instead of
being cast by the Confederate States of America, this film was cast by the
Centers for Disease Control!”) had come up with the hot, hunky actor we usually
expect to play a Lifetime villain. Instead both the men in Sasha’s life are played by boring-looking
milquetoasts, and Gord Rand and Marc Bendavid look enough alike one can imagine
Rand as Bendavid’s older (and clean-shaven) brother. Also we could have used
some Christine Conradtian backstory on What Made Sasha Run — perhaps a
flashback to her childhood that showed the young Sasha obsessively watching TV
news and wanting to be one of Those People. But even as it stands Abducted
on Air is a better-than-average Lifetime
film, easily the best Barbara Kymlicka-written film I’ve seen, since here she’s
been able to harness her penchant for stories about sexually manipulative young
women getting in over their heads and take it to more sinister and dramatically
more complex territory than usual for her — and Gagnon and a solidly
professional cast do justice to Kymlicka’s script even though I’ve seen better
performances by other actresses as Lifetime’s nubile young girl psychos than
the one Kim Shaw gives here.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Sleeping with My Student (Deception, Robbins Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Sunday Lifetime offered a movie they billed as a “premiere” even though imdb.com gave its release date as October 18, 2019 and there’s even a review on their site. It was called Sleeping with My Student and was actually a pretty close remake of a 2018 Lifetime movie called The Wrong Teacher, which despite different directors and writers (Sleeping with My Student was directed by Tom Shell and written by Michael Perronne, while The Wrong Teacher was directed by old Lifetime hand Dennis DeCoteau and written by Robert Dean Klein) was awfully close to this one. Sleeping with My Student opens with a prologue set in 2002, in which a man, a woman and a child are riding in a car. The man is driving and he’s in an argument with the woman, though we don’t hear enough of the dialogue to figure out what they’re arguing about. The woman reaches for the wheel and predictably it causes the car to crash, and we think the two adults died and the kid lived. Flash-forward 17 years later, and the kid has grown up to be Ian Johnson (Mitchell Hoog), who looks something like a blond version of the young Leonardo di Caprio.
Meanwhile, a high-school teacher named Kathy Sullivan (Gina Holden, top-billed and a frequent star in Lifetime movies) has risen and just been offered a job as school principal. But her home life is not so happy: she’s just separated from her husband Ben (David Lipper, who looks even homelier than the guys Lifetime usually cast as innocent husbands; he reminded me of Dick Van Patten in Eight Is Enough and all the jokes I made in the late 1970’s about how he looked like he’d been baked out of Wonder Bread dough) and this is having the predictable effects on their daughter Bree (Jessica Belkin), a boyishly slim teenager with long, straight blond hair. Just before the school year starts and Kathy is about to take her new position as principal, her girlfriends Megan (Novi Brown) and Gina (Olivia Bak) persuade her to join them on an all-woman vacation to Miami Beach, Florida, where the air conditioning conks out in their room and a young maintenance man — yep, our villain-to-be Ian Johnson — comes to their room, fixes it and then turns up in the hotel pool where Kathy is swimming. He advances on her and flashes a quite beautiful twink body at her until she succumbs. Then she does a big double-take on the first day of school when he turns up as a member of the student body. She checks her records and finds out he was 18 when they tricked — so at least she isn’t guilty of statutory rape, but she’s well aware that if anyone finds out she slept (and more) with one of her students she risks disgrace, being fired and driven out from the education profession, and possibly losing custody of Bree because her separated husband could sue to have her taken away. We also learn that Ian filmed himself and Kathy having sex — he propped his smartphone on top of a dresser and turned on its video recorder — one of the few aspects in which Sleeping with My Student was better than The Wrong Teacher, in which the seductive student turned up with a video record of him and his teacher having sex but with no clue about how he made it.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, once he’s safely enconsed in his new high school (where he’s repeating his senior year because in his previous one he cut up so badly he flunked out) he starts cruising Kathy’s daughter Bree — who of course starts hating her mom for over-reacting and trying to break up the budding romance between her and the one boy in school who actually seems to give a damn about her. Anyone who’s watched more than three Lifetime movies in their life has probably guessed that Ian deliberately targeted Kathy to seduce her and then try to seduce her daughter out of some twisted revenge plot, and it turns out that Ian’s mother did not die in the opening car crash (though his dad did) but survived, only she married someone even creepier than Ian’s father: Boom Lee (Steve Humphreys), a fat slob who lives with her in a tumble-down shack on the outskirts of town, makes his living by dealing illegally obtained prescription drugs (the fact that he’s dealing prescription drugs and not selling heroin or cooking meth or crack marks this as a 2019 drug story) and keeping Ian’s mom hooked on the stuff so she won’t leave him. The big twist [spoiler alert!] is that Ian and Kathy’s daughter Bree are actually half-siblings: almost two decades earlier Kathy was working as a teacher in a school and seduced the custodian, Ian’s dad, into having an affair with her. She got pregnant from this and then started dating Ben, who agreed to raise Bree as if she were his biological child and never to tell her the truth about her parentage — only Ian naturally blames Kathy for the ruination of his mom (he tells Kathy — and us — during the big confrontation scene at the end that what his parents were arguing about when they crashed their car was his dad’s affair with Kathy) and hatched this whole plot to seduce and destroy her to get his revenge. The film ends with Ian getting his and Kathy and her husband Ben reconciling, while she’s able to continue as school principal and live down her scandalous behavior not only with Ian but with Ian’s dad nearly two decades earlier.
Sleeping with My Student (originally titled Deadly Vengeance, which would have been too generic and not have the sleazy “oomph” of the title they ultimately went with) is an O.K. Lifetime movie, but The Wrong Teacher did the basic plot — a teacher goes out of town for a summer vacation, has a one-night stand with a much younger man, then does a double-take when he turns up as a student of hers and has to worry both about the ramifications of her conduct and his obsession with her — quite a bit better. It helped that the wrong student (sorry, but I couldn’t resist the pun) in The Wrong Teacher is played by Philip McElroy, a much better actor than Mitchell Hoog and also, to my mind at least, considerably sexier. (When I reviewed The Wrong Teacher for this blog I described him as “a darkly handsome young man whose great looks and skillful acting should make him a future star.”) The Wrong Teacher also had a better, if psychologically kinkier, explanation for what made the villain “run.” I might have liked Sleeping with My Student better if The Wrong Teacher hadn’t existed (or I hadn’t seen it), but after a while the similarities just started to wear me down and I began to wonder — always the problem with remakes or quasi-remakes — why they didn’t just re-show the first film instead of doing it all over again, and doing a lamer version?
Last Sunday Lifetime offered a movie they billed as a “premiere” even though imdb.com gave its release date as October 18, 2019 and there’s even a review on their site. It was called Sleeping with My Student and was actually a pretty close remake of a 2018 Lifetime movie called The Wrong Teacher, which despite different directors and writers (Sleeping with My Student was directed by Tom Shell and written by Michael Perronne, while The Wrong Teacher was directed by old Lifetime hand Dennis DeCoteau and written by Robert Dean Klein) was awfully close to this one. Sleeping with My Student opens with a prologue set in 2002, in which a man, a woman and a child are riding in a car. The man is driving and he’s in an argument with the woman, though we don’t hear enough of the dialogue to figure out what they’re arguing about. The woman reaches for the wheel and predictably it causes the car to crash, and we think the two adults died and the kid lived. Flash-forward 17 years later, and the kid has grown up to be Ian Johnson (Mitchell Hoog), who looks something like a blond version of the young Leonardo di Caprio.
Meanwhile, a high-school teacher named Kathy Sullivan (Gina Holden, top-billed and a frequent star in Lifetime movies) has risen and just been offered a job as school principal. But her home life is not so happy: she’s just separated from her husband Ben (David Lipper, who looks even homelier than the guys Lifetime usually cast as innocent husbands; he reminded me of Dick Van Patten in Eight Is Enough and all the jokes I made in the late 1970’s about how he looked like he’d been baked out of Wonder Bread dough) and this is having the predictable effects on their daughter Bree (Jessica Belkin), a boyishly slim teenager with long, straight blond hair. Just before the school year starts and Kathy is about to take her new position as principal, her girlfriends Megan (Novi Brown) and Gina (Olivia Bak) persuade her to join them on an all-woman vacation to Miami Beach, Florida, where the air conditioning conks out in their room and a young maintenance man — yep, our villain-to-be Ian Johnson — comes to their room, fixes it and then turns up in the hotel pool where Kathy is swimming. He advances on her and flashes a quite beautiful twink body at her until she succumbs. Then she does a big double-take on the first day of school when he turns up as a member of the student body. She checks her records and finds out he was 18 when they tricked — so at least she isn’t guilty of statutory rape, but she’s well aware that if anyone finds out she slept (and more) with one of her students she risks disgrace, being fired and driven out from the education profession, and possibly losing custody of Bree because her separated husband could sue to have her taken away. We also learn that Ian filmed himself and Kathy having sex — he propped his smartphone on top of a dresser and turned on its video recorder — one of the few aspects in which Sleeping with My Student was better than The Wrong Teacher, in which the seductive student turned up with a video record of him and his teacher having sex but with no clue about how he made it.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, once he’s safely enconsed in his new high school (where he’s repeating his senior year because in his previous one he cut up so badly he flunked out) he starts cruising Kathy’s daughter Bree — who of course starts hating her mom for over-reacting and trying to break up the budding romance between her and the one boy in school who actually seems to give a damn about her. Anyone who’s watched more than three Lifetime movies in their life has probably guessed that Ian deliberately targeted Kathy to seduce her and then try to seduce her daughter out of some twisted revenge plot, and it turns out that Ian’s mother did not die in the opening car crash (though his dad did) but survived, only she married someone even creepier than Ian’s father: Boom Lee (Steve Humphreys), a fat slob who lives with her in a tumble-down shack on the outskirts of town, makes his living by dealing illegally obtained prescription drugs (the fact that he’s dealing prescription drugs and not selling heroin or cooking meth or crack marks this as a 2019 drug story) and keeping Ian’s mom hooked on the stuff so she won’t leave him. The big twist [spoiler alert!] is that Ian and Kathy’s daughter Bree are actually half-siblings: almost two decades earlier Kathy was working as a teacher in a school and seduced the custodian, Ian’s dad, into having an affair with her. She got pregnant from this and then started dating Ben, who agreed to raise Bree as if she were his biological child and never to tell her the truth about her parentage — only Ian naturally blames Kathy for the ruination of his mom (he tells Kathy — and us — during the big confrontation scene at the end that what his parents were arguing about when they crashed their car was his dad’s affair with Kathy) and hatched this whole plot to seduce and destroy her to get his revenge. The film ends with Ian getting his and Kathy and her husband Ben reconciling, while she’s able to continue as school principal and live down her scandalous behavior not only with Ian but with Ian’s dad nearly two decades earlier.
Sleeping with My Student (originally titled Deadly Vengeance, which would have been too generic and not have the sleazy “oomph” of the title they ultimately went with) is an O.K. Lifetime movie, but The Wrong Teacher did the basic plot — a teacher goes out of town for a summer vacation, has a one-night stand with a much younger man, then does a double-take when he turns up as a student of hers and has to worry both about the ramifications of her conduct and his obsession with her — quite a bit better. It helped that the wrong student (sorry, but I couldn’t resist the pun) in The Wrong Teacher is played by Philip McElroy, a much better actor than Mitchell Hoog and also, to my mind at least, considerably sexier. (When I reviewed The Wrong Teacher for this blog I described him as “a darkly handsome young man whose great looks and skillful acting should make him a future star.”) The Wrong Teacher also had a better, if psychologically kinkier, explanation for what made the villain “run.” I might have liked Sleeping with My Student better if The Wrong Teacher hadn’t existed (or I hadn’t seen it), but after a while the similarities just started to wear me down and I began to wonder — always the problem with remakes or quasi-remakes — why they didn’t just re-show the first film instead of doing it all over again, and doing a lamer version?
Saturday, January 4, 2020
2020 Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert (ORF, Vienna Philharmonic, Sony, 1-1-2020)
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights
reserved
Right
now I’m listening to a download of the complete Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s
concert, of which Charles and I watched a cut-down digest version on KPBS on
New Year’s night. The Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concerts were performed
sporadically since the orchestra was founded in the 1830’s but the tradition we
know today was actually launched by conductor Clemens Krauss and Nazi Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, who had been put in charge of
Austria following the Nazi takeover in 1938, at the end of 1939.
The
first concert was a war-relief benefit and also a pleasant diversion from the
war news for the Viennese audience. Krauss decided to focus the concert on the
music of the Strauss family: founder Johann Strauss, Sr. (whose “Radetzky
March,” written as a parade-ground piece for the army of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, always closes the concert); his three composing children, Johann, Jr.
(by far the most famous of them, with hits like the “Blue Danube,” “Tales from
the Vienna Woods,” “Artist’s Life,” et al.),
Josef (whom some critics have considered the most talented of the Strausses,
but who died young) and Eduard. To confuse things, there was a Johann Strauss
III, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s son; he was Eduard’s — and to make things even
more confusing, Richard Strauss,
who was no relation to the Viennese Strausses (and was German, not Austrian),
ripped off one of Josef Strauss’s pieces, the “Dynamism: Mysterious Powers of
Magnetism” waltz (performed in the 2020 concert), for the waltz theme in Act II
of his opera Der Rosenkavalier.
What
we got in the U.S. was only the second half of the concert, beginning with the
first post-intermission selection, Franz von Suppé’s Light Cavalry overture — and in addition to leaving out the six
selections performed in the first half, PBS left out one piece from the second
half, Josef
Hellmesberger, Jr.’s “Gavotte.” From previous years’ downloads (including
one in which we got the entire feed from Austria’s TV network, ORF, including
all their B-roll) we knew that ORF, which officially co-produces the show with
the Vienna Philharmonic and Sony (whose record label has the Vienna
Philharmonic’s current recording contract), sends out a whole mass of footage
which, in the day or so between the concert and the airing on New Year’s night,
can edit it pretty much the way they choose.
In
the U.S. the New Year’s concert is kept to a 90-minute time slot (even though
episodes of the Great Performances
series, the rubric under which the PBS showing occurs, usually runs two hours
and sometimes even longer) and the musical selections are sandwiched in between
long segments showing the sights (not so much the sounds) of Vienna, drawn from
all that B-roll ORF supplies. This year the big features were the Sacher Hotel,
where the famous Viennese Sacher Torte dessert originated, and the castle of Heiligenstadt, where Ludwig van
Beethoven was staying in 1802 when he realized he was growing deaf and wrote a
famously self-pitying letter to his cousin that became known as the
“Heiligenstadt Testament” — he didn’t send it but it was preserved among his
papers and just about everyone who’s written a biography of Beethoven has quoted
it.
The
reference to Beethoven was occasioned by the appearance of a Beethoven work in
the concert program; usually the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert doesn’t
go near anyone as “heavy” as Beethoven,
but at one point in his career he wrote a cycle of light pieces called “12
Contretänze” and the orchestra pressed them (or at least four of them) into
service for one of the concert segments done with the Vienna State Ballet
dancing somewhere off-site while the orchestra plays in the Musikvereinsaal (which
simply means “Music Union Hall”) where the concert takes place. (I don’t know
if these segments are pre-recorded and pre-filmed or the dancers dance live to
the music piped in remotely from the live concert, though the former seems more
likely.)
The
inclusion of a work by Beethoven was apparently “keyed” to this year being the
250th anniversary of his birth, which has already brought attention
from the record companies: Naxos has issued a boxed set purporting to be all
Beethoven’s surviving music and Pristine is planning a reissue of the
substantially complete cycle of his string quartets (12 out of the 16) recorded
by the Lener Quartet in 1926-27 as part of the cycle of recordings British
Columbia issued as a commemoration of the centennial of Beethoven’s death in
1827.
Overall,
this was one of the better Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concerts I’ve heard
—despite the typically annoying PBS presentation, including an on-air host.
When PBS started broadcasting these things in the 1980’s (or at least that’s
when they first crossed my path) Walter Cronkite was the host, and as he went
on and on and on about how this or that
aspect of the concert was “traditional” I wondered how anyone — the conductor,
musicians or audience — could have any fun or experience any spontaneity in an
event so hide-bound by inviolate “tradition.” When Cronkite retired his place
was taken by Julie Andrews, a wonderful woman and a fine actress but someone
whose only connection to Austria was having starred in the film The
Sound of Music, which took place there (but
in Salzburg, not Vienna).
Since
Andrews stepped down the host has been British actor Hugh Bonneville, who in
this country is best known for having starred as Robert Crawley, Earl of
Grantham, in the BBC-TV series Downton Abbey — a show I’ll have to admit I’ve never watched — and he’s an O.K. host
for this, imposing but still with a hint of an ability to have fun, but though
I applaud him for pronouncing the “t” sound in the word “often,” he’s really
not that scintillating a personality and I would be fine with no host at all —
just chyrons to tell us what the orchestra is playing, who wrote it and when it
was written.
Still,
I loved the music-making in Vienna this year better than I have in a lot of
previous years, and I think the main reason is the formidable conducting of
Andriss Nelsons. I must admit that when I saw his name as the conductor of this
year’s concert I did a bit of a double-take — “Isn’t he dead?” I thought — but
I had mistaken his name for the similar one of Mariss Jansons, a major
conductor who did die last year. Nelsons
played the music by the Strauss boys and the other light composers represented
— Carl Michael Ziehrer, Franz von Suppé, Joseph Hellmesberger (who in his
“serious” works sounds so much like Brahms that a Fanfare reviewer once wrote that if you love Brahms’
symphonies but regret that there are only four of them, Hellmesberger is your
man), and Hans Christian Lumbye (often referred to as “the Johann Strauss of
Denmark”) — with appropriate verve and a sense of fun but also with an underlying seriousness, essentially saying
to both orchestra and audience, “I love this music so much I’m not going to
patronize or ‘play down’ to it.”
Nelsons’
performances were absolutely wonderful, turning the extended waltzes of Johann
II and Josef Strauss (not only the familiar “Blue Danube,” which gains so much from hearing the extended slow introduction
instead of just the Big Tune, but lesser known works like Johann’s “Be
Embraced, You Millions” and “Enjoy Life” — written for the opening of the
Musikvereinsaal, where the concert takes place — and Josef’s “Dynamism:
Mysterious Powers of Magnetism,” actually written as a sort of ode to
hypnotism) into great, broad, moving pieces of music that are — as my husband
Charles once said about a compilation I played him years ago of various artists
playing the bossa nova songs of
Antonio Carlos Jobim — “light but not trivial.”
Though there were a few mistakes (including
one quite obvious “clam” from one of the trumpeters on the “Blue Danube” —
well, give the folks in the orchestra a break: it’s a long night), for the most
part Nelsons got great playing from this sometimes tricky and prima donna-ish orchestra that made this concert a joy to sit
through. I only wish the camerawork had focused more on the orchestras, its
players and the audience (and to my surprise there were a lot of empty seats on
the Musikvereinsaal floor; I had expected this would be one of Vienna’s hottest
tickets!) and less on the chandeliers, the wall paintings and the furniture and
bric-a-brac in the various rooms of the building. Andriss Nelsons certainly
knows his way around this music and I look forward to hearing more from him,
especially since among his other international gigs he’s also the principal conductor
of one of America’s great orchestras, the Boston Symphony.
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (CNN Films, PCH Films, Telling Pictures, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 6 p.m. I watched a fascinating CNN documentary on the singer Linda Ronstadt: Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. Ronstadt was one of those singers I respected more than I really loved: I admired her versatility and her fearlessness (particulary the multiple genres she performed and recorded in: she started out as a folk singer but soon branched into rock and then did albums of 1930’s and 1940’s standards, the Mexican songs she’d learned from her family, and a Joseph Papp production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance that required her to learn to sing coloratura — which she did surprisingly capably — and, though not represented here, a short-running performance of a full-fledged opera, Puccini’s La Bohème) but I never really cared for the laid-back 1970’s Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter style in which Ronstadt made her original commercial mark. One thing I hadn’t known about Ronstadt is how she got her German-sounding name when her background was Mexican: I’d always assumed she was the product of a mixed marriage between a Mexican mother and a German-American father, but she was actually the descendant of a line of Ronstadts founded by a man who emigrated from Germany to Mexico in the 1840’s. She learned to sing at home — her father was an accomplished singer (there’s a snippet of a home recording of his voice, and he’s quite good) and her siblings all sang before brother Peter went into law enforcement and ultimately became police chief of Tucson, Arizona, where Linda grew up.
In the 1970’s she hooked up with two family members, founded a band that played small gigs in what there was of a folk scene in Tucson, then decided to try her luck in L.A. She, Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards formed a folk group called the Stone Poneys that got signed to Capitol Records on the strength of a song called “Different Drum” that was actually written by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. But when Ronstadt came to the Capitol studio to record “Different Drum,” she found a large orchestra, including a string section, there to back her. She initially wanted to walk out of the session but finally decided to stay — and the version of “Different Drum” she recorded then became her first hit. (This film, directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, plays excerpts from the Stone Poneys’ original demo of “Different Drum” and intercuts them with the final record — and for once the “suits” at a label were right: the final version, which moved the song from folk to pop and gave it an appealing bounce in tune with the tastes of the time, is much better.)
Ronstadt was originally managed by Frank Zappa’s business partner, Herb Cohen, until she and her producer John Boylan got arrested at the airport on a flight to Honolulu and charged with receiving stolen property; it turned out Cohen had bought their plane tickets from a thief because they were cheap. Boylan took over as her manager and, according to Geoffrey Stokes’ book Star-Making Machinery, her lover — though according to this film her real romantic interest at this time was singer John David Souther. Boylan also produced her solo records for Capitol and got her a gig doing a tour opening for Neil Young — and at least as presented here she rivaled him in terms of audience appeal. But Ronstadt’s career really took off in 1974, when Peter Asher — one-half of Peter and Gordon, brother of Paul McCartney’s 1960’s girlfriend Jane Asher and former head of the Beatles’ Apple Records label — stepped in to help Ronstadt and Boylan finish her album Don’t Cry Now and then took over as producer for her next record, Heart Like a Wheel. This, her final album for Capitol, broke wide open, sold millions and jumped Ronstadt from minor star to superstar. Though the title track was a folk song by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the album also included Ronstadt’s cover of Betty Everett’s late-1950’s soul record “You’re No Good” — and that became Ronstadt’s biggest hit to that time. (I remember hearing the Everett record and being absolutely flabbergasted at how much better it was — not only because Everett was a full-voiced soul singer but she’d had Ike Turner’s band backing her — with a young Tina Turner as one of her backup singers.)
After completing her Capitol contract with Heart Like a Wheel (which must have pissed off a lot of Capitol executives big-time — here was a singer they had nurtured and kept recording through a series of artistically and commercially disappointing releases, and then right after she makes the record that makes her a superstar, she leaves!) Ronstadt signed with David Geffen’s Asylum Records, also the home of a lot of talents she had nurtured by recoding their songs and giving them career boosts: The Eagles (who had begun as Ronstadt’s backup band — though they only played one gig together, in Disneyland of all places, Don Henley and Glenn Frey had both worked with her and indeed had met on one of Ronstadt’s projects), John David Souther, Jackson Browne and (unmentioned here) Warren Zevon (who was always my favorite Asylum artist because he wrote songs like “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” that skewered the pretensions of his Asylum label-mates). Through the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, Ronstadt continued to make pop-rock albums with Asher as her producer, cleverly adjusting her style to stay on top of whatever sound was trending then — including the punk-new wave style of the late 1970’s — and she also stayed in the news for non-musical reasons, including her affair with California Governor Jerry Brown in the mid-1970’s which landed the two of them on the cover of Newsweek. There have been a lot of rumors about this alleged affair over the years, including one that Brown was really Gay and was using Ronstadt as a “beard” and also a way to appeal to younger voters as he sought the Democratic Presidential nomination three times, but this film presents it as a bona fide relationship which ended on friendly terms due to the clash between their careers: Brown wanted to do politics and governance full-time and needed a partner who was part of that world. (When Brown finally married late in life it was to a member of his political staff, Anne Gust.)
Ronstadt — who was extensively interviewed for this film even though it’s only at the end, singing with a few members of her family, that she’s actually shown in her present state — said that the reason she largely dropped out of the rock world in the 1980’s was she saw how sick and tired other stars were of having to do the same star-making hits night after night after night, so she decided to broaden her musical horizons. She made What’s New?, an album of 1930’s and 1940’s standards arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle (who had largely masterminded Frank Sinatra’s comeback in the 1950’s) — there’s an amusing bit in this film in which Peter Asher recalls Ronstadt telling him she wanted to do an album of standards and wanted “someone like Nelson Riddle” to arrange it, and Asher said, “Why don’t we just get Nelson Riddle?” Ronstadt was amazed that Riddle was still alive, but she agreed, and the result was a succession of three albums that not only revitalized both Ronstadt’s and Riddle’s careers but (along with Willie Nelson’s contemporaneous forays into the standards repertoire) revived interest in the great Broadway and Hollywood musical songs of the 1930’s and 1940’s that had been considered hopelessly retro when Ronstadt was starting out in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Ronstadt also branched out into playing the female lead in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance for Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theatre — a production that was later filmed — and she made an album of Mexican songs called Canciones de Mi Padre (“Songs for My Father”) that turned out to be the best-selling Spanish-language record of all time. The Ronstadt documentary then leaps ahead to the early 2000’s and her discovery that she was losing her voice over time — which ultimately was due to Parkinson’s disease, from which her grandmother had already suffered and died. Between Ronstadt’s decision to retire just as the effects of the disease were starting to ravage her voice — she gave her last concert in 2009 — and Julie Andrews’ loss of her voice due to a botched throat operation, one faces the bizarre irony that two of the greatest voices of the 20th century have been silenced forever even though their owners are still alive. The final scenes of Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice show her and several family members doing a sing-along on some traditional Mexican songs — and from the bits of her we hear it’s clear she still has something of a voice.
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice has some of the usual flaws of music documentaries — including bits of what I call “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers in all media to assume that the person they’re biographing was the first person ever to do something even though other, earlier examples exist. I was particularly ticked at the assertion that Ronstadt was “the first female rock star” — even by the narrowest definition of what constitutes a “rock star” I would say Janis Joplin qualified, and if she hadn’t died so young and had been able to keep her voice intact (even while Janis was still alive I worried about how long she’d be able to sustain her career given what she was doing to her voice) Janis might have had the kind of career Ronstadt did.[1] (I would say the “first female rock star” title goes back even further, to Wanda Jackson in the mid- to late-1950’s: I remember the time Charles and I met her at one of the Adams Avenue music festivals and someone in her autograph line asked her, “Did you really open for Elvis?” “No,” she said; “he opened for me!”) It also suffered from another typical flaw of music documentaries — not presenting a full song start-to-finish — though at least Epstein and Friedman let their excerpts run long enough that you could tell just what made Linda Ronstadt special.
Personally, I’ve always liked her best as a country singer (Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, with whom she recorded at least two albums, are both interviewed here); Ronstadt could sing uptempo rock and soul songs credibly but she couldn’t sing a Black song (or a Black-influenced white song like the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice”) with the intensity of the original artists, and while her standards recordings are quite beautiful they’re hardly in the same league as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald. There are also a few Ronstadt experiments unmentioned here, including not only her performances of La Bohème but her guest appearance on the avant-garde jazz album Escalator Over the Hill, recorded and released independently by Carla Bley and her then-partner Michael Mantler between 1968 and 1971. Still, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a quite engaging musical documentary on a performer who managed to stay ahead of the curve and, through a combination of native talent and acute intelligence, have a long, prosperous and healthy (at least until the genetic time bomb of Parkinson’s went off inside her and ended it) career.
Last night at 6 p.m. I watched a fascinating CNN documentary on the singer Linda Ronstadt: Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. Ronstadt was one of those singers I respected more than I really loved: I admired her versatility and her fearlessness (particulary the multiple genres she performed and recorded in: she started out as a folk singer but soon branched into rock and then did albums of 1930’s and 1940’s standards, the Mexican songs she’d learned from her family, and a Joseph Papp production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance that required her to learn to sing coloratura — which she did surprisingly capably — and, though not represented here, a short-running performance of a full-fledged opera, Puccini’s La Bohème) but I never really cared for the laid-back 1970’s Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter style in which Ronstadt made her original commercial mark. One thing I hadn’t known about Ronstadt is how she got her German-sounding name when her background was Mexican: I’d always assumed she was the product of a mixed marriage between a Mexican mother and a German-American father, but she was actually the descendant of a line of Ronstadts founded by a man who emigrated from Germany to Mexico in the 1840’s. She learned to sing at home — her father was an accomplished singer (there’s a snippet of a home recording of his voice, and he’s quite good) and her siblings all sang before brother Peter went into law enforcement and ultimately became police chief of Tucson, Arizona, where Linda grew up.
In the 1970’s she hooked up with two family members, founded a band that played small gigs in what there was of a folk scene in Tucson, then decided to try her luck in L.A. She, Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards formed a folk group called the Stone Poneys that got signed to Capitol Records on the strength of a song called “Different Drum” that was actually written by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. But when Ronstadt came to the Capitol studio to record “Different Drum,” she found a large orchestra, including a string section, there to back her. She initially wanted to walk out of the session but finally decided to stay — and the version of “Different Drum” she recorded then became her first hit. (This film, directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, plays excerpts from the Stone Poneys’ original demo of “Different Drum” and intercuts them with the final record — and for once the “suits” at a label were right: the final version, which moved the song from folk to pop and gave it an appealing bounce in tune with the tastes of the time, is much better.)
Ronstadt was originally managed by Frank Zappa’s business partner, Herb Cohen, until she and her producer John Boylan got arrested at the airport on a flight to Honolulu and charged with receiving stolen property; it turned out Cohen had bought their plane tickets from a thief because they were cheap. Boylan took over as her manager and, according to Geoffrey Stokes’ book Star-Making Machinery, her lover — though according to this film her real romantic interest at this time was singer John David Souther. Boylan also produced her solo records for Capitol and got her a gig doing a tour opening for Neil Young — and at least as presented here she rivaled him in terms of audience appeal. But Ronstadt’s career really took off in 1974, when Peter Asher — one-half of Peter and Gordon, brother of Paul McCartney’s 1960’s girlfriend Jane Asher and former head of the Beatles’ Apple Records label — stepped in to help Ronstadt and Boylan finish her album Don’t Cry Now and then took over as producer for her next record, Heart Like a Wheel. This, her final album for Capitol, broke wide open, sold millions and jumped Ronstadt from minor star to superstar. Though the title track was a folk song by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the album also included Ronstadt’s cover of Betty Everett’s late-1950’s soul record “You’re No Good” — and that became Ronstadt’s biggest hit to that time. (I remember hearing the Everett record and being absolutely flabbergasted at how much better it was — not only because Everett was a full-voiced soul singer but she’d had Ike Turner’s band backing her — with a young Tina Turner as one of her backup singers.)
After completing her Capitol contract with Heart Like a Wheel (which must have pissed off a lot of Capitol executives big-time — here was a singer they had nurtured and kept recording through a series of artistically and commercially disappointing releases, and then right after she makes the record that makes her a superstar, she leaves!) Ronstadt signed with David Geffen’s Asylum Records, also the home of a lot of talents she had nurtured by recoding their songs and giving them career boosts: The Eagles (who had begun as Ronstadt’s backup band — though they only played one gig together, in Disneyland of all places, Don Henley and Glenn Frey had both worked with her and indeed had met on one of Ronstadt’s projects), John David Souther, Jackson Browne and (unmentioned here) Warren Zevon (who was always my favorite Asylum artist because he wrote songs like “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” that skewered the pretensions of his Asylum label-mates). Through the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, Ronstadt continued to make pop-rock albums with Asher as her producer, cleverly adjusting her style to stay on top of whatever sound was trending then — including the punk-new wave style of the late 1970’s — and she also stayed in the news for non-musical reasons, including her affair with California Governor Jerry Brown in the mid-1970’s which landed the two of them on the cover of Newsweek. There have been a lot of rumors about this alleged affair over the years, including one that Brown was really Gay and was using Ronstadt as a “beard” and also a way to appeal to younger voters as he sought the Democratic Presidential nomination three times, but this film presents it as a bona fide relationship which ended on friendly terms due to the clash between their careers: Brown wanted to do politics and governance full-time and needed a partner who was part of that world. (When Brown finally married late in life it was to a member of his political staff, Anne Gust.)
Ronstadt — who was extensively interviewed for this film even though it’s only at the end, singing with a few members of her family, that she’s actually shown in her present state — said that the reason she largely dropped out of the rock world in the 1980’s was she saw how sick and tired other stars were of having to do the same star-making hits night after night after night, so she decided to broaden her musical horizons. She made What’s New?, an album of 1930’s and 1940’s standards arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle (who had largely masterminded Frank Sinatra’s comeback in the 1950’s) — there’s an amusing bit in this film in which Peter Asher recalls Ronstadt telling him she wanted to do an album of standards and wanted “someone like Nelson Riddle” to arrange it, and Asher said, “Why don’t we just get Nelson Riddle?” Ronstadt was amazed that Riddle was still alive, but she agreed, and the result was a succession of three albums that not only revitalized both Ronstadt’s and Riddle’s careers but (along with Willie Nelson’s contemporaneous forays into the standards repertoire) revived interest in the great Broadway and Hollywood musical songs of the 1930’s and 1940’s that had been considered hopelessly retro when Ronstadt was starting out in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Ronstadt also branched out into playing the female lead in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance for Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theatre — a production that was later filmed — and she made an album of Mexican songs called Canciones de Mi Padre (“Songs for My Father”) that turned out to be the best-selling Spanish-language record of all time. The Ronstadt documentary then leaps ahead to the early 2000’s and her discovery that she was losing her voice over time — which ultimately was due to Parkinson’s disease, from which her grandmother had already suffered and died. Between Ronstadt’s decision to retire just as the effects of the disease were starting to ravage her voice — she gave her last concert in 2009 — and Julie Andrews’ loss of her voice due to a botched throat operation, one faces the bizarre irony that two of the greatest voices of the 20th century have been silenced forever even though their owners are still alive. The final scenes of Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice show her and several family members doing a sing-along on some traditional Mexican songs — and from the bits of her we hear it’s clear she still has something of a voice.
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice has some of the usual flaws of music documentaries — including bits of what I call “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers in all media to assume that the person they’re biographing was the first person ever to do something even though other, earlier examples exist. I was particularly ticked at the assertion that Ronstadt was “the first female rock star” — even by the narrowest definition of what constitutes a “rock star” I would say Janis Joplin qualified, and if she hadn’t died so young and had been able to keep her voice intact (even while Janis was still alive I worried about how long she’d be able to sustain her career given what she was doing to her voice) Janis might have had the kind of career Ronstadt did.[1] (I would say the “first female rock star” title goes back even further, to Wanda Jackson in the mid- to late-1950’s: I remember the time Charles and I met her at one of the Adams Avenue music festivals and someone in her autograph line asked her, “Did you really open for Elvis?” “No,” she said; “he opened for me!”) It also suffered from another typical flaw of music documentaries — not presenting a full song start-to-finish — though at least Epstein and Friedman let their excerpts run long enough that you could tell just what made Linda Ronstadt special.
Personally, I’ve always liked her best as a country singer (Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, with whom she recorded at least two albums, are both interviewed here); Ronstadt could sing uptempo rock and soul songs credibly but she couldn’t sing a Black song (or a Black-influenced white song like the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice”) with the intensity of the original artists, and while her standards recordings are quite beautiful they’re hardly in the same league as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald. There are also a few Ronstadt experiments unmentioned here, including not only her performances of La Bohème but her guest appearance on the avant-garde jazz album Escalator Over the Hill, recorded and released independently by Carla Bley and her then-partner Michael Mantler between 1968 and 1971. Still, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a quite engaging musical documentary on a performer who managed to stay ahead of the curve and, through a combination of native talent and acute intelligence, have a long, prosperous and healthy (at least until the genetic time bomb of Parkinson’s went off inside her and ended it) career.
[1] — Ronstadt briefly discusses the rampant drug use in
the rock scene of the 1960’s and 1970’s and acknowledges that she got hooked on
diet pills — until she and her lead guitarist, Waddy Wachtel, both decided on
their own to quit before it became a problem. Another interesting subtext to
the film is her discussion of what it was like being a woman bandleader in a
very male-centric musical form and the machismo antics of some of her band members, which were their
reaction to the shame they felt of having to take orders from a woman.
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
Mistress Hunter (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I’ve been waiting for the chance to comment on a couple of movies that aired on Lifetime last Sunday, one billed as a “premiere” even though it was already shown in Canada (there’s an imdb.com review dated September 2019) and one definitely dated 2018. The 2018 film was called Mistress Hunter and is about your typically clueless Lifetime heroine, Jackie Blanchard (Lauralee Bell), who as the film begins notices that her husband Karl (Martin Copping) seems to be growing more distant from her and their daughter Mikayla (Caitlin Reagan). He’s also “working late” a lot of nights, and anyone who’s seen more than two Lifetime movies in their own lifetime knows what that means. Jackie talks about this one night with her girlfriends Valerie (Lauren Plaxco) and Melanie (Christy Meyers). They tell her about a quasi-legendary figure in the neighborhood, a woman who calls herself a “mistress hunter” and goes by the name Hannah (Lidya Look). It seems that during her previous marriage she caught her husband cheating on her with another woman and determined to make his life as miserable as possible before divorcing him and getting as big a settlement as she could. When Jackie follows her husband during his lunch break her suspicions are confirmed: Karl is meeting another woman for afternoon quickies in what at first I thought was supposed to be a motel but turns out to be the seedy apartment building in which she lives. Her name is Beth Robinson (Chloe Brooks), and apparently she and Karl have been an “item” for several months. Hannah the “mistress hunter,” who in the scene in which she and Jackie meet leads her through an abandoned warehouse and puts her through a series of security precautions that seems like she was reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels on LSD, says that she can follow “Plan A” or “Plan B” — “Plan A” means driving the adulterous husband crazy until he wants to bail on the relationship and will pay whatever he has to in order to divorce his wife, while “Plan B” is aimed at building the grounds for a reconciliation — only Hannah admits that none of her clients have ever asked for “Plan B.” In order to lay the groundwork for “Plan A” and give Hannah the evidence with which she needs to work, Hannah tells Jackie to sneak into her husband’s office after hours and take pictures of all his credit cards and any other financial information she an find. Jackie briefly complains that Hannah is making her do all the work, but Hannah insists that as Karl’s wife her presence in his office after hours would at least be explicable, where a total stranger’s wouldn’t.
The scare campaign begins to work — in fact it begins to work too well, as we see a scene in which Beth returns to her apartment expecting Karl to be there meeting her — only Karl is all bloody and very dead in her bed. When the police come Beth is dead, too, leading the typically clueless Lifetime cops to jump to the conclusion that it was a murder-suicide — only we know better because we saw Beth enter her apartment after Karl was already dead. Later another woman in Jackie’s circle is also found murdered, and this time the cops are convinced Jackie is the culprit, killing her husband and his mistress out of jealousy and revenge and later killing the other woman because she “knew too much.” When Jackie tells them about the “mistress hunter” the cops assume that she’s a figment of Jackie’s imagination, a non-existent scapegoat on whom she can blame her own crimes. We see the usual Lifetime mystery figure dressed in a hoodie, who at one point pitches a bloody knife into Jackie’s recyclables trash can (I really doubt if a bloody knife is recyclable), obviously to frame her. The conclusion comes when Hannah hacks the personal photo file on Karl’s computer and reveals a whole raft of pictures of Karl with his various affair partners — it seems Beth was far from the first woman he cheated with — and one of them is [spoiler alert!] Jackie’s friend Valerie, who turns out to have killed all these people in an apparent attempt at jealousy-fueled revenge because Karl had stayed with Jackie and started dating other women instead of leaving his wife for Valerie. (This reminds me of Joy Fielding’s comment in her novel The Other Woman to the effect that the woman who’s the male lead’s second wife and started her affair with him while he was still married to wife number one shouldn’t be at all surprised if he starts seeing another woman while still married to her.)
Valerie committed all three murders and planted the bloody knife in Jackie’s trash can so Jackie would go to prison for the murders, and when the cops finally arrest Valerie (it’s nice writer J. Bryan Dick — co-creator of the Whittendale University universe with Barbara Kymlicka, which has always amused me if only becamse it’s so appropriate that Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker would collaborate on these heavy-breathing tales of sex gone wrong: the Whittendale films are all about young nubile female college students prostituting or mistressing themselves to older men to get the money to pay Whittendale’s tuition — actually lets Valerie be taken alive by the cops instead of killed) and Jackie asks how could her best friend betray him by letting her husband screw her, she comes up with a rather lame but still sad line to the effect that you never know what love can make you do. In the end Jackie ends up as a single mom to her daughter Mikayla (ya remember her daughter Mikayla?) and a new career as the business partner of the Mistress Hunter — who tells her, not to any particular surprise, that “Hannah” is not her real name — and from now on she only wants to pursue “Plan B,” reconciliation, because after dumping her cheating first husband she married a guy who’s faithful and really nice, and that’s the outcome she wants to spread to her future clients. Mistress Hunter strikes me as a better-than-average Lifetime movie, mostly credibly written by Dick and directed by Penelope Bultenhuis — she may not be quite at the level of Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise but she’s still an indication of the depth of the talent pool of women directors and the ongoing shame of the movie industry that they aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve!
I’ve been waiting for the chance to comment on a couple of movies that aired on Lifetime last Sunday, one billed as a “premiere” even though it was already shown in Canada (there’s an imdb.com review dated September 2019) and one definitely dated 2018. The 2018 film was called Mistress Hunter and is about your typically clueless Lifetime heroine, Jackie Blanchard (Lauralee Bell), who as the film begins notices that her husband Karl (Martin Copping) seems to be growing more distant from her and their daughter Mikayla (Caitlin Reagan). He’s also “working late” a lot of nights, and anyone who’s seen more than two Lifetime movies in their own lifetime knows what that means. Jackie talks about this one night with her girlfriends Valerie (Lauren Plaxco) and Melanie (Christy Meyers). They tell her about a quasi-legendary figure in the neighborhood, a woman who calls herself a “mistress hunter” and goes by the name Hannah (Lidya Look). It seems that during her previous marriage she caught her husband cheating on her with another woman and determined to make his life as miserable as possible before divorcing him and getting as big a settlement as she could. When Jackie follows her husband during his lunch break her suspicions are confirmed: Karl is meeting another woman for afternoon quickies in what at first I thought was supposed to be a motel but turns out to be the seedy apartment building in which she lives. Her name is Beth Robinson (Chloe Brooks), and apparently she and Karl have been an “item” for several months. Hannah the “mistress hunter,” who in the scene in which she and Jackie meet leads her through an abandoned warehouse and puts her through a series of security precautions that seems like she was reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels on LSD, says that she can follow “Plan A” or “Plan B” — “Plan A” means driving the adulterous husband crazy until he wants to bail on the relationship and will pay whatever he has to in order to divorce his wife, while “Plan B” is aimed at building the grounds for a reconciliation — only Hannah admits that none of her clients have ever asked for “Plan B.” In order to lay the groundwork for “Plan A” and give Hannah the evidence with which she needs to work, Hannah tells Jackie to sneak into her husband’s office after hours and take pictures of all his credit cards and any other financial information she an find. Jackie briefly complains that Hannah is making her do all the work, but Hannah insists that as Karl’s wife her presence in his office after hours would at least be explicable, where a total stranger’s wouldn’t.
The scare campaign begins to work — in fact it begins to work too well, as we see a scene in which Beth returns to her apartment expecting Karl to be there meeting her — only Karl is all bloody and very dead in her bed. When the police come Beth is dead, too, leading the typically clueless Lifetime cops to jump to the conclusion that it was a murder-suicide — only we know better because we saw Beth enter her apartment after Karl was already dead. Later another woman in Jackie’s circle is also found murdered, and this time the cops are convinced Jackie is the culprit, killing her husband and his mistress out of jealousy and revenge and later killing the other woman because she “knew too much.” When Jackie tells them about the “mistress hunter” the cops assume that she’s a figment of Jackie’s imagination, a non-existent scapegoat on whom she can blame her own crimes. We see the usual Lifetime mystery figure dressed in a hoodie, who at one point pitches a bloody knife into Jackie’s recyclables trash can (I really doubt if a bloody knife is recyclable), obviously to frame her. The conclusion comes when Hannah hacks the personal photo file on Karl’s computer and reveals a whole raft of pictures of Karl with his various affair partners — it seems Beth was far from the first woman he cheated with — and one of them is [spoiler alert!] Jackie’s friend Valerie, who turns out to have killed all these people in an apparent attempt at jealousy-fueled revenge because Karl had stayed with Jackie and started dating other women instead of leaving his wife for Valerie. (This reminds me of Joy Fielding’s comment in her novel The Other Woman to the effect that the woman who’s the male lead’s second wife and started her affair with him while he was still married to wife number one shouldn’t be at all surprised if he starts seeing another woman while still married to her.)
Valerie committed all three murders and planted the bloody knife in Jackie’s trash can so Jackie would go to prison for the murders, and when the cops finally arrest Valerie (it’s nice writer J. Bryan Dick — co-creator of the Whittendale University universe with Barbara Kymlicka, which has always amused me if only becamse it’s so appropriate that Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker would collaborate on these heavy-breathing tales of sex gone wrong: the Whittendale films are all about young nubile female college students prostituting or mistressing themselves to older men to get the money to pay Whittendale’s tuition — actually lets Valerie be taken alive by the cops instead of killed) and Jackie asks how could her best friend betray him by letting her husband screw her, she comes up with a rather lame but still sad line to the effect that you never know what love can make you do. In the end Jackie ends up as a single mom to her daughter Mikayla (ya remember her daughter Mikayla?) and a new career as the business partner of the Mistress Hunter — who tells her, not to any particular surprise, that “Hannah” is not her real name — and from now on she only wants to pursue “Plan B,” reconciliation, because after dumping her cheating first husband she married a guy who’s faithful and really nice, and that’s the outcome she wants to spread to her future clients. Mistress Hunter strikes me as a better-than-average Lifetime movie, mostly credibly written by Dick and directed by Penelope Bultenhuis — she may not be quite at the level of Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise but she’s still an indication of the depth of the talent pool of women directors and the ongoing shame of the movie industry that they aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)