The Au Pair Nightmare (Indy Entertainment, Quint Pictures, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Charles and I eventually watched a Lifetime “premiere” movie called The Au Pair Nightmare — originally shot under the title The Au Pair until someone at Lifetime realized few American audiences would know what an “au pair” is. According to Wikipedia, it’s actually someone who comes from another country to take a live-in position as a nanny and general housekeeper — which makes the title a misnomer because the central character, Taylor (Brytnee Rutledge — and I thought “Brittany” was an overly pretentious spelling of that first name! I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet!), merely travels from one part of the United States to another, a small town out in the middle of nowhere called “Mill Valley.” The place name threw me because I grew up near the real Mill Valley in Marin County, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco, and while it’s a small town it’s not as small — or as isolated — as the one depicted in the film. Taylor was attending college to become a teacher and was one year away from graduation when her fiancé Brad (Micah McNeil), who in the opening scene had taken her for a night walk and rigged the window lights of a local business to read “WILL YOU” and “MARRY ME?”, got killed in an auto accident when a drunk driver rammed into his car. Since we see this only in a dream in which Taylor relives it, it’s not clear whether she was in the car and survived or she just registered in her subconscious what she was told about how her boyfriend had died, but it traumatized her enough that she quit college and her older sister Kara (Elizabeth Saytah) and Kara’s husband Mark (Kurt Kubicek), with whom she’s been staying, tried to get her to stop grieving and get interested in life again. Taylor finally decides to sign up with an agency that places au pairs and ends up in the remote Mill Valley home of Dr. John Caleb (Tristan Thomas) and his forbidding wife Allesandra (Annie Heiss, top-billed). The Calebs have an argument over her — Allesandra, adopting a forbidding tone that’s about equal parts Mrs. Danvers and Lady Macbeth, says she specifically asked for someone with previous au pair experience but John, who’s cute and charming enough I was expecting this film to go the Jane Eyre route and pair up John and Taylor after Allesandra burned the house down and killed herself, insists on hiring her — especially once the couple’s daughter Emily (Gianna Gallegos) bounds down the stairs and she and Taylor bond immediately. 

Allesandra is supposedly writing a novel and in order to keep its contents private has an office door she keeps permanently locked, and they get their groceries delivered from the local market by Luke (Luke Valen), who though considerably younger-looking than Taylor (we’re told Taylor is 22, which is believable, but Luke looked about 17 to me), makes googly-eyes at her and she seems interested in reciprocating. Taylor notes some strange things about the way John and Allesandra are raising Emily; not only do they home-school her (of course in the SARS-CoV-2 era lots of parents are finding themselves forced to home-school their children!) but they literally lock her bedroom door from the outside when she goes to bed at night. (Around this time I joked, “Whom did Allesandra learn parenting skills from — Joan Crawford?”) John explains this is because Emily is a sleepwalker, but Emily denies this. Allesandra also has an obsessive hatred with the movie star “Brad Hardwick” (Trevor Donovan), star of Overnight Sensation and its three sequelae. (Imdb.com lists at least four real-life movies with “Overnight Sensation” in their titles, but the one most likely to have inspired Au Pair Nightmare writers Joe Russo, who also directed, and Chris LaMont was one from 2000 about amateur filmmakers trying to crash a big-name film festival with their low-budget production.) When Taylor brings a gossip magazine with Brad Hardwick on the cover to the Calebs’ home, someone tears off the cover; when she shows Emily a DVD of a Brad Hardwick movie Allesandra walks into the room and demands that Taylor not only stop playing the disc but destroy it. Taylor also notices that there are no photos of the family on the Calebs’ wall that include Emily, and from all those things — including Allesandra’s paranoid insistence that someone is trying to kidnap Emily and that’s the real reason they have to lock her in at night (though, like Joan Crawford’s kids working themselves loose from her torture devices, Emily has managed to figure out how to open the lock and sneak out), both we and Taylor come to the conclusion that movie superstar Brad Hardwick is Emily’s real father. 

Allesandra says that eventually — she says that she started an affair with him while he was in Mill Valley on a film shoot — and she’s not only convinced herself that Brad Hardwick is Emily’s father but that Brad has hired kidnappers to take Emily from her. She decides Taylor is one such merely because she’s seen the name “Brad” on her lists of phone contacts (of course the “Brad” listed on Taylor’s phone is simply her late fiancé, whose contact information she’s never bothered to delete) and she convinces John that Luke the cute delivery boy is really an agent of Brad Hardwick’s goon squad, so at Allesandra’s direction John kills him. The finale takes place at the Calebs’ home, after Taylor has secretly collected DNA material on all three Calebs and sent it to her sister Kara (ya remember Kara?) and her brother-in-law Mark (ya remember her brother-in-law Mark?), who have some job in the medical field and thereby can get a DNA test run. The tests prove [surprise!] that John Caleb, not some movie star Allesandra has probably never even met, is Emily’s biological father, and Allesandra originally made up the story about having had an affair with Brad Hardwick just to make John jealous (before that she’s told Taylor that she and John have an open relationship and Allesandra won’t mind if Taylor accepts John if and when he comes on to her — he does, but she doesn’t — but, as with a lot of real-life couples who attempt “open relationships,” there are limits on just how open she wants it to be, and I noted the irony that not long after she tells Taylor she won’t mind if Taylor has sex with her husband, she has a hissy-fit when she catches Taylor and the delivery boy flirting). But over time Allesandra not only kept up the story that she and Hardwick had had an affair but he was Emily’s real father, she began to believe it herself and assumed the existence of a conspiracy of people hired by Hardwick whom she and her husband had to kill so they wouldn’t lose their child. (Once again Lifetime’s writers are copying the Macbeth formula: a basically decent but weak man who’s driven to murder and other crimes by his strong-willed psycho wife.) 

It ends with Allesandra stabbing John to death, Taylor killing Allesandra in self-defense, and Kara and Mark picking up Taylor and for good measure taking custody of Emily, who’ll grow up alongside Mark’s and Kara’s own son Billy (Brady Bauer). (A sequel taking place 20 years later, with Emily and Billy having drifted into a psychologically if not biologically incestuous relationship, might be interesting!) Though the ending was a bit disappointing, The Au Pair Nightmare is actually a quite good Lifetime movie: director Joe Russo proves a master at both atmosphere and suspense, keeping the film exciting and moving it fast enough we don’t notice many of the plot improbabilities Russo and Chris LaMont put into their script. The three leads are especially well acted; Brytnee Rutledge gives Taylor enough toughness and initiative to make her more than yet another Lifetime “pussy in peril,” Annie Heise is formidable in the best Judith Anderson/Gale Sondergaard manner (it’s nice to know there’s someone alive today who can keep that tradition going!), and Tristan Thomas captures both John’s superficial charm and basic decency and the underlying weakness that makes him a patsy for his wife’s schemes. (He does a far better job creating a morally ambiguous character than Rory Gibson did in the similar, but less complex, role in Twisted Twin.) Despite the silly title (which might have led me to believe the film was about a nice couple who let a nasty au pair into their home to wreak havoc, not the other way around), The Au Pair Nightmare was quite gripping filmmaking and, if not a truly great thriller, at least one you don’t feel embarrassed to tell your friends you watched!

Twisted Twin (K2 Entertainment, Greentree Media, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night Charles and I watched the latest Lifetime “premiere” movie together: Twisted Twin, which as its title suggests was about two identical twin sisters who were both put up for adoption by separate families, with the result that one of them, Tess Houston, grows up with a sympathetic mom who raises her as a single parent after Mr. Houston is killed in one of America’s innumerable wars (we know that because in their basement there’s a sort of mini-shrine to him, including a footlocker and one of those triangularly folded U.S. flags, encased in a triangular glass case, presented to the survivors of U.S. servicemembers killed in combat). The other, Samantha “Sammy” Crain, was adopted by a rich couple who live in the beach community near fictional “Coastal University” (oddly this film was made by the “Whittendale Universe” creators, producer Ken Sanders and writer J. Bryan Dick, but this time they call their fictional university something else) but, at least according to a bit of would-be pathetic exposition writer Dick throws us at the end of the movie, she was regularly beaten by her adoptive parents, Mitch (Jack Armstrong — what a horrible thing for the All-American boy to do!) and Kim (Julie Lancaster) Crain. As a result, she grew up to be a “bad girl,” constantly getting into various scrapes and getting into trouble from which her parents had to bail her out, and in the opening scene we see Mitch and Kim both getting stabbed to death in their bed, though we’re not yet aware of by whom. The elder Crains are seen in enough flashbacks that the filmmakers, Sanders, Dick and director Jeff Hare, needed actors to play them — though Hare can’t manage to make the cut-backs between present and past smooth and each such gesture jars — and what apparently triggers their murder was their decision to disown Sammy and write her out of the will. Mitch tells her they’ve already signed the document to do that, so Sammy figures she needs them dead immediately so she can at least grab the thousands of dollars’ worth of cash and uncut diamonds (the latter suggests that the Crains have made their money in some less-than-legitimate ways) and flee to Mexico with her boyfriend Damon (Rory Gibson, not surprisingly by far the sexiest man in the film), who’s actually killed her parents — one neat irony in Dick’s script is that, though she’s bloodthirsty and psychopathic enough to want everybody in her way to be killed, she’s too squeamish about murder actually to do it herself.

After the opening scene showing the murder, we’re flashed back to “Two Days Earlier” and Patricia Houston (Jennifer Taylor — the good news about her casting is that she looks enough like her on-screen daughter that they’re credible as a family even though they’re not actually blood relations; the bad news is Taylor’s so young she looks more like her on-screen daughter’s older sister) is packing her daughter Tess off to an “orientation weekend” at Coastal University. (Remember universities? Places where a whole bunch of young people traveled, often across the entire country, and sat in the same room together while an instructor actually lectured them live instead of by computer via a Zoom hookup?) Costume designer John C. Houston IV obviously knew the right iconography to portray the twin sisters: though her jacket is light blue, under it Tess is wearing a white shirt and a short white skirt when she shows up at Coastal for her orientation, while Sammy is wearing an all-black skin-tight pantsuit, one of those ensembles that’s designed to look like it’s all-in-one even if it isn’t, and matching black boots. It’s the modern-day equivalent to all those classic Westerns in which the good cowboy wore a white hat and road a white horse, while the bad cowboy wore a black hat and rode a black horse. Speaking of horses, though the Houstons are supposed to be less affluent than the Crains (when we got our first look at the Crain mansion Charles cried out “Xanadu!” and I said, “Wrong Welles reference — it looks more like the Amberson mansion to me”), they own a fairly extensive horse stable even though there appears to be only one horse in it (obviously the budget of K2 Entertainment and Greentree Media couldn’t stretch to rent more horses than that!) who’s called “Pepper” and is a particular favorite of Tess. In fact, the reason Tess is traveling across the country to attend “Coastal University” is she wants to be a horse veterinarian and they have a particularly good and nationally renowned program in veterinary medicine.

Tess also had a boyfriend named Lucas (Bryson Powers) — of course the good girl’s boyfriend, though nondescriptly pretty, is hardly in the same league for hunkiness as the bad girl’s boyfriend! — only on the eve of her orientation weekend Lucas told Tess he was breaking up with her because he didn’t want the strain of a long-distance relationship. While Tess is in town near Coastal University for their orientation Sammy and Damon are plotting out and, in his case, carrying out Sammy’s parents’ murder, and the inevitable happens in a twins story: Sammy goes back to Tess’s home town and impersonates her, while Tess gets arrested for the murders and can’t get the cops to believe that she even has a twin sister, much less that her twin is the one the cops should really suspect. Tess realizes that the whole reunion with Sammy — who traced her online through social media and thus realized for the first time in her life that she had a twin — was a setup so Sammy could kill her adoptive parents and set Tess up as the fall girl. Peculiarly, the imdb.com page on Twisted Twin (Lifetime’s schedule page lists the film as The Twisted Twin, but neither the actual credits nor imdb.com list the article) doesn’t list the actress(es) who played Sammy and Tess — though it credits a woman with the improbable name “Destiny Gin” (who thought that one up? Her parents? Her agents? Herself?) as playing both the small part of Nurse Jordan and as doubling for both Tess and Sammy in the scenes showing them together. By process of elimination I’ve guessed that the actress in both roles (and it’s clearly the same person even though, as Charles pointed out after the movie was over, even identical twins don’t look absolutely the same; they develop subtle but unmistakable differences in height, weight and mannerisms) was Lorynn York. She’s quite good at creating two different characters for Sammy and Tess but without making them so similar we’d lose the point of the story that they’re supposed to have absolutely opposite senses of morality. She’s not as good as the classic-era actresses like Bette Davis in A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer or Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror, but she’s competent enough she’ll do.

Like all good impersonation stories, much of the fun of Twisted Twin comes from watching Sammy go to Roberta’s home and try to pass herself off as Tess — and Dick is an inventive enough writer he’s able to set her a number of traps and then create resourceful ways for her to escape them (like when she offers her “mom” a cup of coffee, says she’ll have hers black and asks mom how she wants hers, and mom says, “The usual” — Sammy responds by bringing her a tray with the coffee, cream and sugar on it and saying she’ll let mom do it herself), including the cold, rude way she tells off Lucas after he comes around all sweetness and light and offers to resume their relationship. Sammy does prove herself capable of murder on her own when she decides her boyfriend Damon has become inconvenient and eliminates him by giving him a shot of ketamine — an animal tranquilizer that’s also the highly abused party-scene and date-rape drug “Special K” — which she gets from an unlocked metal cabinet in Tess’s horse’s stable (Charles questioned whether anyone would keep such a widely abused drug in an unlocked cabinet) — and waiting in the woods with him until it overpowers him (there’s a nice shot in which he’s grabbing at her ankle, trying to pull her down so he can overpower her, before the drug kicks in and renders him first unconscious and then dead — after which Sammy steals his cell phone and on it writes what’s ostensibly his suicide note in which he confesses that he killed Sammy’s parents but says he did it on his own). The climax occurs at an old mountain cabin formerly owned by Roberta’s mom — once again, a Lifetime writer is setting a climax at a mountain cabin so it will take place outside cell-phone range — where Sammy has taken Roberta, who still thinks she’s Tess, in order to do her in while the real Tess has faked illness so she could be sent to a hospital instead of jail, then escaped from the hospital — there’s a nice scene in which she grabs a set of keys at random, punches the security button, watches which car’s lights in the parking lot light up, then steals that car.

She and Lucas, with whom she’s reconnected, drive out to that old cabin (Tess went there often as a child so she knows where it is), and when they realize there’s no cell phone reception Tess sends Lucas out to the nearest town to call the police while she confronts Sammy, who’s holding Tess’s dad’s old service gun on her mom. Mom reacts to the situation with almost preternatural calm, essentially daring Sammy to shoot her, and when Sammy does the gun doesn’t go off — mom then calmly explains that the firing pin for the gun wore out years before. Sammy uses the gun to club mom and render her unconscious — but Tess sneaks up behind Sammy, grabs a fireplace poker and knocks her out, then (unlike a lot of heroines in Lifetime movies who’ve just knocked out the villain) has the good sense to tie her up so they can keep her from escaping until the police arrive. Later there’s a tag scene “Ten Months Later” showing Tess visiting Sammy in prison. Twisted Twin is actually a bit better than the common run of Lifetime movies — especially Bryan Dick’s previous scripts, which were usually about nubile young college girls selling their bodies to rich men to get the money to afford Whittendale University’s tuition. (These were the ones he wrote with his former writing partner Barbara Kymlicka, of whom I joked that given the heavy-duty sexual content of their scripts it seemed odd that they were willing to have them credited to Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker.) It’s a neatly done movie and it’s well acted by the principals, but it’s also one tied way too closely to the usual Lifetime formulae and Dick doesn’t turn Sammy into the sort of genuinely conflicted character Christine Conradt might have made her if she had worked on this script.

Green Book (Universal, Participant Media, Innisfree Pictures, DreamWorks, 2018)

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

On Friday, May 15 I ran Charles a movie I’d been curious about for some time: Green Book, the 2018 Academy Award Best Picture winner and quite a good film, though it winning Best Picture over the electrifying masterpiece Black Panther is a similar miscarriage in Academy Award history to giving John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley Best Picture over Citizen Kane. I was especially upset with Green Book having beaten out Black Panther because Green Book was yet another example of a film that used the African-American civil rights struggle mainly as a vehicle to redeem a bunch of white people and get them to confront their inner racism and overcome it. That’s a story that needs to be told, but can’t we have more films that recognize Black people as the primary movers in this struggle — as did Ava DuVernay’s Selma (another film that deserved the Academy recognition it didn’t get: its only Oscar was for John Legend and Common for the great theme song) and, albeit in a metaphoric way, did Black Panther. Green Book was directed by Peter Farrelly, who until now has been known almost exclusively for gross-out comedies co-directed with his brother Bobby (his first credit on imdb.com is Dumb and Dumber), and though Farrelly and Brian Hayes Currie get co-writing credits the real inspiration for the film was the third writer, Nick Vallelonga, who based it on a two-month tour his father Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortenson, who had to put on weight for the film to look like an Italian-American living on the fringes of organized crime without actually joining it) took as driver and overall factotum for the great African-American pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali — I was ready to write one of my usual denunciations about casting directors who reach to Africa or Britain to find actors to play African-Americans, but then I checked Ali’s listing on imdb.com and found he was actually born in Oakland, California, U.S.A. in 1974!) on a two-month tour through the Midwest and the South. 

Needless to say, when the film begins Tony is a racist — not an active one but one who’s absorbed and never questioned the prejudices of his community and his time — so much so that when two Black workmen come to his family’s apartment he takes the glasses they’ve drunk from and throws them away, but his more sensible (and economical) wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) pulls them from the trash and washes them for reuse. At the same time virtually all the popular music the Vallelongas listen to is Black R&B — the gag that these bigoted people who throw the N-word around like confetti like Black entertainers is run almost to death in this film, though between the R&B records and music director Kris Bowers’ expert re-creation of Shirley’s piano style this movie would have generated an excellent soundtrack CD. (As far as I could tell, only one of the pop records heard on the soundtrack as source music is by a white act: the Four Seasons’ cover of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”) But the film’s principal gag is the irony that the Black protagonist is cultured, intelligent, accomplished and multi-lingual (he’s referred to as “Dr. Don Shirley” because he has three Ph.D.’s, in music, psychology and liturgical studies) while the white guy is an unlettered proletarian who can barely put a sentence together either in English or Italian (the language of his forebears — and there’s one marvelous “face” moment when Tony and his friends are conversing in Italian and Shirley starts speaking it, essentially saying to Tony, “I know a lot more about your culture than you know about mine”). At one point Shirley notices Tony writing a letter home to his wife, grabs the manuscripts, critiques its grammar and spelling and starts writing his own letter in Tony’s persona — and I joked, “Now it’s Cyrano de Bergerac.” 

The fish-out-of-water gags begin when, after an opening sequence at the Copacabana night club in which there’s an altercation involving a particularly persnickety Mafioso whose prized hat (it was a gift from his now-deceased mom) is hijacked from the hat-check girl and this leads to a fight in which Tony the bouncer gets involved and leads to the Mafioso punishing the Copacabana’s ostensible owner by ordering the club closed (which it is, for two months, ostensibly for “renovations” — many, if not all, of New York’s fabled nightclubs in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s were Mafia-owned and their ostensible “owners” were simply fronts for the Mob). This in turn leads to a scary couple of months in which the Vallelongas are so desperate for money Tony is willing to enter a hot-dog eating contest to win a $50 bet (which he wins — in an imdb.com “Trivia” item Viggo Mortenson was quoted about the high-fat, high-carb diet he had to go on to assume the real Tony’s jumbo size and said that he had to maintain it seven days a week since if he went back on the weekends to eating as he normally did, he’d lose so much weight the costumes would be too large for him) before he gets a lead on a job driving “Dr. Don Shirley” for two months. He shows up at the address he’s given for his interview and finds out that it’s Carnegie Hall — Dr. Shirley lives on an apartment in the Carnegie Hall building above the famous concert space — and he’s ushered into Shirley’s living room, ornately decorated with real elephant tusks and other bizarre items he’s been presented as gifts from his 1-percenter friends over the years. He receives Tony sitting on a huge chair that looks like a throne — and he’s wearing a white gown that makes him look more like an African potentate than a working musician. As the tour progresses and descends from the Midwest to the South and then the Deep South (the film’s title comes from a guidebook written for Black tourists to let them know which hotels, restaurants and other establishments were safe for them to use when driving across the country, especially the South), the racism becomes more pronounced and so does the gulf between the cultured, literate, intelligent Shirley and the other Black people we see in the movie, who drink, dance to R&B, shoot craps, eat fried chicken and do all the other stereotyped things Tony thought all Black people did. 

One scene that particularly surprised me was the one in which Tony has to bail Shirley out of a YMCA where he’s been caught in flagrante delicto with a white guy — was Don Shirley Gay or Bi? That was news to me; earlier he’d mentioned having been married but said he and his wife broke up because as a working musician he was constantly on the road (a story a lot of musicians have told — the PBS American Masters show on B. B. King featured an interview in which he mentioned that he’d gone through three marital breakups with women he loved but who didn’t realize his career — and the constant touring he needed to do to sustain it — came first), but this sequence throws us a curveball and suggests another reason why Don Shirley’s marriage might have broken up. (It also raises a question that’s fascinated a lot of jazz fans, including me: why have there been so few Gay jazz musicians? A lot of the Black blues queens of the 1920’s were Bisexual, including Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, but of all the world-class instrumentalists in jazz history I can think of only three, Bix Beiderbecke, Billy Strayhorn and Gary Burton, who were even remotely plausibly described as Gay or Bi — and though Strayhorn’s sexuality was well known in the jazz world and Burton “came out” late in life, Bix’s Gay side is described only by Ralph Berton, who claims Bix had an affair with Berton’s Gay brother — though I believe it, if only because a lot of Gay men I have known have been guilt-ridden about their sexuality and responded by becoming introverted and drinking heavily.) One peculiarity about the script is it describes Don Shirley as fully aware of the level of prejudice he’s going to encounter on this tour but also almost suicidally reckless in his behavior — like the time he slips out of the Black-only hotel he’s had to stay in and walks down the street to a white bar just because he feels like having a drink and Tony has to get him out of a situation in which three rednecks, one wielding a knife, are about to beat him up at least and cut him up at worst. These bizarre quirks in Shirley’s nature that turned him from the self-controlled man we see through most of the film to the risk-running of these scenes, at best naïve and at worst idiotic, go unexplained — as does his heavy drinking: in addition to insisting that he will only play on Steinway pianos (apparently, according to his Wikipedia page, because he simply liked their construction and action better than other brands, though I wondered if he had an endorsement contract with Steinway the way Liberace did with Baldwin), he insists that he have a bottle of Cutty Sark in his hotel room every night, and when Tony asks him if he needs any “help” drinking it, Shirley responds that he can do that perfectly well on his own. 

One thing the film does make an issue of is Shirley’s frustration that he really wanted a career as a solo classical pianist but was forced to play jazz because there was too much institutionalized racism both among the businesspeople and promoters running the classical music world and among the music’s audiences for a career path in classical music to be credible for an African-American. That caused me to start looking online to see how many major musicians who are classical soloists are African-American — and surprisingly there still aren’t many. There have been a fair number of African-American classical singers, a smattering of conductors, and some highly significant Black composers, but according to a 2013 post by Brian Wise of radio station WQXR (https://www.wqxr.org/story/266404-timeline-history-black-classical-musicians/), “While Blacks continue to play crucial roles in jazz, gospel, R&B, hip-hop and other popular styles, hurdles remain in classical music. Fewer than three percent of U.S. orchestral musicians are Black. Opera has a greater concentration of Black performers, though singers face their own set of challenges in terms of casting. And when a concert series highlights music by Black composers, it's often as part of Black History Month or another special event.” There are at least two powerful moments in the film that address this; in one, Tony tries to support Shirley as he laments that he couldn’t have had a career in classical music: “Personally I think if you stuck to the classic stuff it would’ve been a big mistake.” “A mistake?” says Shirley. “Performing the music I trained my entire life to play?” “Trained?” Tony throws back. “What are you, a seal? People love what you do! Anyone can sound like Beethoven or Joe-Pan or them other guys you said. But your music, what you do? Only you can do that!” To which Shirley replies, “Thank you, Tony. But not everyone can play Chopin. Not like I can.” The other is a speech by Shirley late in the film in which he laments that he’s not at home in either the white or the Black communities: “Yes, I live in a castle, Tony! Alone. And rich white people pay me to play piano for them because it makes them feel cultured. But as soon as I step off that stage, I go right back to being just another nigger to them. Because that is their true culture. And I suffer that slight alone, because I’m not accepted by my own people ’cause I’m not like them, either. So, if I’m not Black enough and if I’m not white enough and if I’m not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?” 

Don Shirley’s Wikipedia page describes the world of classical music as not as totally closed to him as the film depicts: in 1945, at age 18, he played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony; a year later he played one of his own pieces with the London Philharmonic; and in 1954 he was invited by Arthur Fiedler to play with the Boston “Pops” Orchestra. The Wikipedia page claims that in 1955 Shirley played with the NBC Symphony Orchestra as the soloist in a piano concerto by Duke Ellington — only Ellington never wrote a piano concerto; what I suspect they meant was Ellington’s 1943 jazz tone poem “New World A-Comin’,” a 12-minute work Ellington premiered at Carnegie Hall with his regular band and Duke himself as the soloist — and according to a 1969 High Fidelity article by Duke’s friend Stanley Dance, even a virtuoso like Shirley was thrown by some of Ellington’s idiosyncratic piano writing. It’s interesting that Shirley’s trio, as depicted in the film (and in real life), was not the usual lineup for a pianist-led jazz trio (either piano-guitar-bass or piano-bass-drums) but piano, bass and cello, lending the music a semi-classical air that was actually fairly popular in the late 1950’s, when classical composer Gunther Schuller coined the term “Third Stream Music” for his experiments in fusing classical and jazz. (Others had tried that earlier: Paul Whiteman in the 1920’s, Artie Shaw in the 1930’s, Stan Kenton in the 1940’s.) Shirley made most of his records for Archie Bleyer’s Cadence label, whose most famous artists were AndyWilliams and the Everly Brothers, and it’s significant that Bleyer thought Shirley had a potentially broad enough audience that he put his records out on Cadence rather than his usual jazz label, Candid. The film ends with Shirley and Tony getting arrested on their way to a concert in Birmingham, Alabama — the writers actually used an incident from a later tour on which Tony drove for Shirley in which they got arrested and Shirley literally called then-attorney general Robert Kennedy to pressure the governor of Alabama to release him — followed by an incident in which Shirley walks out on his Birmingham concert when the venue owners won’t let him eat at the building’s restaurant, and he ends up at a Black juke joint playing the Chopin “Winter Wind” etude on the bar’s house piano and then sitting in with the R&B house band — thus establishing both his classical and Black “cred.” 

It’s not surprising that Green Book has been criticized for the usual dramatic inaccuracies — Mahershala Ali apologized to Shirley’s surviving relatives for not having sought them out for input before the film was made, since he’d bought into the script’s conceit that Shirley had been out of touch with his family when the film’s events took place, while jazz musicians like Quincy Jones who knew Shirley defended the accuracy of the film’s portrayal and a tape of an old interview with Shirley himself (he and Tony both died within two months of each other in 2013) in which he described his relationship with Tony as more than the usual employer-employee one: “I trusted him implicitly... You see... not only was [Tony] my driver, we never had an employer/employee relationship. You don’t have time for that bullshit. My life is in this man’s hands!... So you’ve got to be friendly with one another.” Green Book is quite a good movie, probably better in its parts than as a whole (I especially liked the part in one of Tony’s letters home — before Shirley started writing them for him — in which he writes of Shirley, “He don’t play like a colored piano player. He plays like Liberace, only better”) but certainly an estimable piece of work. But seeing it also heightened my resentment that the Academy gave the Best Picture Oscar to yet another movie in which it’s the function of the noble Black supporting character (Ali actually won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) to ennoble the whites and get them off their racism instead of a film like Black Panther, written and directed by Black people and starring the Black characters as powerful agents of their own liberation.

Maternal Secrets (MarVista Entertainment, Triventure Films, Burnt House Entertainment, Lifetime, 2018)

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

This week the Lifetime channel is “celebrating” Mother’s Day — “celebrating” definitely in quotes! — by showing a whole bunch of movies about psychopathic mothers and the men (and sometimes women) who get ensnared by them. Last night they showed a couple of movies, including one in their 8 p.m. “Premiere” slot even though, according to imdb.com, it was two years old: Maternal Secrets, directed by Lucinda Spurling from a script she co-wrote with Louise Ascot Byres, also known as Louise Burfitt-Dons. What Lucinda and Louise (I’m going to avoid having to deal with Louise’s plethora of last names) came up with is a script so excruciatingly complex and so defiant of one’s suspension of disbelief it’s hard to watch past it and realize that Spurling is actually a quite good director, one who can create exciting suspense and action scenes and also get between them without letting up the tension or indulging in those ponderous bits of exposition that mar so many action films — even big-budget ones with “A”-list directors, writers and stars! The film opens with a chyron title, “Two Years Before,” and two years before the main action Jackson Lewis (the surprisingly hunky Sean Stolzen) has just won an election for state senate, with the implication being that the U.S. Senate is next on his to-do list. 

He chats up the woman who ran his campaign and offers her a job on his state senate staff. He also invites her to dinner and drinks — the obvious implication is that he’s hoping the evening will end up with her in his bed — only when she uses the rest room in the hotel just before they’re supposed to leave the party together, she suddenly has an attack, gets really sick and ultimately dies. Jackson is convinced he murdered her because the autopsy found both alcohol and the prescription medications Jackson takes for his epilepsy. The attorney and principal backer of his campaign, Richard Outerbridge (LeVar Hollis), quietly arranges for the incident to be hushed up with the assistance of attorney Samantha Mason (Brooke Burfitt). Then we flash-forward two years to the present (though it can’t be that recent a present since a vacation resort is still functioning!) and Jackson Lewis is on his way to a vacation in the Bahamas with his new girlfriend, art photographer Aubrey Ross (Kate Mansi, top-billed). Aubrey is six months’ pregnant with Jackson’s child, but he’s refused to marry her for reasons which remain powerfully ambiguous until the end. He’s also declined to let Aubrey see any of his family members, for similarly mysterious reasons. There’s a nicely amusing scene when they get off the plane (Jackson flew down in a casual shirt and a nice pair of salmon-colored shorts) and Aubrey is visibly pregnant while Jackson is carrying a giant white and vaguely human-shaped balloon that briefly makes him look pregnant — and which turns out to be an inflatable relaxation device which Aubrey needs to sleep on to get any rest while she’s pregnant. 

Then Aubrey watches by the side of one of the Bahamian resort’s many swimming pools (the movie was actually filmed there and sponsored by the Bahamian government, though why they should want to given the skullduggery it depicts as going on inside a Bahamian resort is something of a mystery) and drink suitably non-alcoholic fare (she because she’s pregnant and he because he’s on epilepsy meds that will cross-react with alcohol and become toxic) as Jackson receives a mysterious letter, tells her he has to go see someone but he’ll be back soon, and leaves. Needless to say, he never comes back: instead a white-haired, heavy-set woman shows up and introduces herself to Aubrey as Jackson’s mother Rose (Kelly McGillis, 37 years after Top Gun — and, not surprisingly, the years have not been kind). Rose seems to be in league with Jackson’s ex-girlfriend Samantha Mason, who shows up in the Bahamas and turns up in the room the kidnapped Jackson is being held in, with zip-ties holding him onto the bed, and virtually rapes him, insisting that she’s not going to tolerate him being with another woman and the two belong together forever. Much of the movie consists of Aubrey, sometimes with Rose’s apparent help and sometimes on her own, getting into more and more trouble with the Bahamian authorities as she tries to trace Jackson within the hotel (lying to a number of hotel staff and security people on the way) and attracting the attention of Bahamian law enforcement. Since the population of the Bahamas is mostly Black, Maternal Secrets ramps up the frequent Lifetime trope of having sensible Black people getting the stupid white people out of the scrapes they get themselves into; in the Bahamas it’s not just one sensible Black person fulfilling that role but virtually the entire island government. 

Rose finally takes Aubrey onto the water in a motorboat and we don’t know whether Rose intends to save Aubrey or to drown her and abandon her at sea, and eventually the Bahamian authorities stop the boat, seize it and arrest both women. For much of the movie’s running time we’re led to believe that Jackson is a psycho who knocks off any woman who gets too close to him and starts bringing up words like “relationship,” “commitment” and “marriage,” but eventually we learn [spoiler alert!] that the real villainess is Samantha, who murdered the staff aide Jackson wanted to date two years before that and did it by spiking her cocktail with Jackson’s anti-epilepsy meds so it would look like he’d killed her. Then she pretended to “protect” him from her family’s efforts to bring him to justice — there’s a flashback scene in which she arranges a payoff, funded by Jackson’s political backer Outerbridge after Jackson himself protests he doesn’t have the kind of money to pay what the family is demanding — and now she’s after Aubrey because not only has this other woman come between her and Jackson, she’s about to bear Jackson’s child. Aubrey ultimately gets bailed out of jail by Jackson and [another surprise!] Jackson’s real mother (LuAnn d’Agostino, also known as Luana de Lesseps — any relation to the builder of the Suez Canal?) shows up and she’s dark-haired, relatively slender and still quite attractive — appears and gives her blessing to Aubrey’s relationship and impending marriage to her son. (The black velvet-covered box containing the engagement ring Jackson bought for Aubrey itself becomes a major plot point in the film, almost a MacGuffin, especially in the earlier scene in which Samantha discovers it while she’s having her wicked way with Jackson while he’s bound and Jackson insists it’s a symbol of his relationship with the woman he really loves.) 

As far-fetched as Maternal Secrets is — and as deceptive as its title turns out to be (and we never find out who the grey-haired stocky woman who was impersonating Rose is or what relation, if any, she is to Samantha) — it’s got a lot going for it, including a tough-minded and unsentimental performance by Kate Mansi as Aubrey (and whether she was really pregnant or it was faked in some way, she certainly looks, moves and acts pregnant) and brilliant work by Brooke Burfitt as Samantha, the principal villainess. Through much of the movie I was reminded of one of the quirkier 1940’s noirs, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which featured Barbara Stanwyck in the sort of role Brooke Burfitt is portraying here — the fiercely ambitious partner of a handsome but weak-willed politician (Kirk Douglas, in his first film — and as I’ve written in these pages before one of the frustrations of Kirk Douglas’ career is how quickly he became a star and therefore got typecast in heroic roles when some of his most interesting early films, including Out of the Past, I Walk Alone, Ace in the Hole and Detective Story, had cast him as villains) who will literally stop at nothing, including murder, to protect and advance his career. While Brooke Burfitt and Sean Stolzen are hardly in the class of Stanwyck and Douglas as actors (though both have real potential for stardom if they can crack the Lifetime ghetto), they deliver the goods and the scenes between them, charged with relentless ambition and sexual aggression on her part and desultory attempts at resistance on his, are the best in the film and indicate real potential not only for the actors but for Lucinda Spurling as well — if next time she can only co-write and direct a script that makes at least a little more sense!

The Wrong Stepmother (Hybrid/Lifetime, 2019)

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

Alas, after the surprising quality of Maternal Secrets Lifetime reverted to its formula at its most slovenly in The Wrong Stepmother, made in 2019 and apparently followed up with a 2020 film called The Wrong Stepfather. This time the production company (Hybrid LLC) and team (director David DeCoteau, story writers Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan — though the person who turned their story into an actual script, Michael Varrati, is a new one on me — and a list of eight “producers” including DeCoteau, Schenck, Sullivan and Vivica A. Fox, who’s also in the movie in the minor role of, you guessed it, a school principal) are familiar Lifetime hands, and so is the story. Michael S. (Corin Nemec, who was born in 1971, had a teen-idol career as Corky Nemec in the late 1980’s and according to his imdb.com page has worked steadily ever since — he’s still a very hot-looking man and I spent most of this movie in a fog of lust over him that helped me through a lot of its silliness) — we don’t get any more of his last name than that — has been a widower for five years and is raising two daughters, high-school senior Lily (Calli Taylor) and her younger sister Nicole (McKinley Blehm), as a single dad when he goes onto a dating app and finds Maddie Sawyer (Cindy Busby). Like most of the leads in Lifetime’s “Perfect … ” and “Wrong … ” series, she seems wonderful at first and one rejoices that Michael’s sexiness has an appropriate outlet at last even though there’s another woman in his life, his work partner Cynthia (Gina Hiraizumi), and we can’t help but think she would be a more appropriate partner for him and stepmom for Lily and Nicole, especially since she was a good friend of Michael’s late wife.

Then Maddie starts getting possessive and throwing her weight around, acting like she’s already Michael’s new wife and in one chilling scene confiscates Nicole’s phone because she dared using it during what Maddie had declared “family hour.” Until then, as in quite a few other Lifetime movies, the younger sibling had actually liked the interloper and it had been the older sister who had taken a dislike to her. Lily teams up with her sort-of boyfriend Patrick (Mitchell Hoog, who’s a hot little twink even though I found the older, more butch Nemec sexier — and my twisted imagination thought it would be fun to see Nemec and Hoog co-star in one of those “Daddy/boy” Gay porn films), who like a lot of teenage boys in Lifetime movies is an ace computer hacker, and they try to get the goods on Maddie so Lily can expose her before she and her dad get too close to each other, like getting married. Michael’s work-wife Cynthia also investigates Maddie’s past and finds that she’s already pulled this scam before under the name “Claire Sullivan,” as whom she romanced a well-to-do older man and ruined him financially before the police caught on to her and she fled. Cynthia traces the previous victim’s nephew Tyler (Leonardo Cecchi) and gets the story from him — only Maddie follows her out to Tyler’s place, somehow breaks into Cynthia’s car and strangles her, then for good measure knocks on Tyler’s door and, when he answers, stabs him with a knife and thus eliminates anyone who can reveal the secrets of her past. (Though she’s Asian instead of Black, Cynthia’s demise fulfills a commonplace of the Lifetime formula: the person of color who finds out the villainess’s true agenda but gets killed before she can tell anybody.)

Only there’s one loose end Maddie has to take care of later: Lily breaks into Maddie’s place in search of information and finds the business card for Maddie’s former therapist, Dr. Cassandra Joy Harris (Tracy Nelson). Lily goes to Dr. Harris, who says (predictably) that her obligation to maintain doctor-patient confidentiality (what I call “medical omertà,” after the code of silence that governs the Mafia) prevents her from talking about a former patient. Dr. Harris is convinced that Lily is just suffering anxiety issues over the loss of her mother and her dad’s interest in another woman until Lily lets slip the identity of the woman her dad is dating, and Dr. Harris warns her in vague but unmistakable terms that that woman is trouble. Alas, that’s about the last thing Dr. Harris gets to do, since Maddie shows up with her trusty knife and kills her. (One wonders why no one seems to notice any of these people missing, especially Cynthia since she and Michael were co-workers and one would have assumed he would be anxious about her. One also wonders why the police remain oblivious to these murders; one would think they’d get reported and some detective might even make the connection between the corpses and the one person all three of the victims knew.) There’s also a bizarre plot twist in which Maddie hacks into Lily’s computer and rewrites her college admission essay from a memorial to her late mom into a hagiographic depiction of Maddie herself — whom, you’ll remember, Lily never could stand even before she started racking up her body count — and the school principal (Vivica A. Fox) gets suspicious and reports it to Michael not only because the essay wasn’t about what Lily had said it would be about but “it lacks her usual organization.” The finale occurs at Michael’s home, with Maddie having picked up Nicole at school even though Michael had left instructions that no one but he would do that; and when Michael comes home Maddie is holding a knife to Nicole and demanding that if they want to survive they’ll have to accept her as Michael’s wife, Lily’s and Nicole’s new mother and the real power in the household.

There’s a bit of an attempt to explain What Makes Maddie Run — when she was a girl her mom committed suicide after her dad left her mom for another woman, and later dad died too (the script doesn’t say that Maddie murdered dad but it’s certainly implied that she could have) and Maddie was bounced around various foster homes until an aunt took her in. Christine Conradt might have been able to take this tantalizing bit of backstory and make Maddie a figure of real pathos, but Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Varrati couldn’t have cared less about humanizing their villainess and they left Cindy Busby at sea trying to bring life to this clichéd character. They also didn’t give us any soft-core porn scenes between her and Corin Nemec, which I would have liked not only for aesthetic reasons but also to dramatize just what sort of hold she had over him (the idea that this man could have been taken for an erotic joy ride by a femme fatale after a lifetime of staid marital sex and five years of celibacy would have given a richer and kinkier thrill to this plot and brought it more in line with the classic-period noirs Lucinda Spurling did such a good job of evoking in Maternal Secrets). Also, I suspect that Cindy Busby just isn’t as good an actress as Brooke Burfitt; she plays the psycho acceptably but doesn’t bring her to life as powerfully as Burkitt (acting a much richer, if equally unbelievable, script) did in Maternal Secrets. The Wrong Stepmother is one of those O.K. Lifetime movies that delivers the goods but you know all too readily in advance where it’s going, whereas Maternal Secrets — as far-fetched as a lot of it was — at least offers not only surprises but also real pathos and a sense of identification with the innocent victim’s ordeal far stronger than the hints we get in The Wrong Stepmother. But it will be interesting to see how the filmmakers reverse the formula with The Wrong Stepfather, and how Vivica A. Fox (subject of a blast from one imdb.com reviewer who wondered how she keeps getting cast in these things when she’s a one-dimensional actress who plays everything on just one note … because she happens to be one of the producers!) will fit herself into it this time!

Game of Thrones, series 4, episodes 3 and 4: “Breaker of Chains,” “Oathkeeper” (Television 360, Startling, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2014)

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

Charles and I watched the next two episodes in sequence of Game of Thrones, season four: “Breaker of Chains” and “Oathkeeper” (the latter a quite ironic title given that the story line of this program features people breaking oaths to each other, right and left!). Actually we’d seen the opening of “Breaker of Chains” two nights ago when I mistakenly loaded disc two of season four into our Blu-Ray player instead of disc one (disc one was hidden behind a placard announcing what you have to do to download a digital copy of the movie, something I have no use for and don’t ever see myself doing unless they so totally abolish physical copies of any entertainment media I have to learn to!) and so we knew that King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson, who got his name on the credits of “Breaker of Chains” even though he’s only seen as a close-up with a bloody head at the very start of the show) was assassinated by being fed poison in his wine. Much of this episode turns into Game of Thrones: The Whodunit, as Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), the most multidimensional and fully human character in the story (and, as I’ve noted before, a truly extraordinary opportunity for a little-person actor, especially by comparison to how ill-used he was in the film Elf!), who spends most of his time in these episodes in prison awaiting trial for the murder — which given that he’s going to be tried before a three-judge panel including his father (who, he assures us, is definitely not biased in his behalf! “He’s wanted me dead since I was a child,” he explains) and another one of his long-term enemies is probably going to be as fair as a Bill Barr prosecution. 

The story also deals with the aftermath of Joffrey’s assassination in other ways, as Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) is smuggled out of the King’s Landing castle where the titular throne (a hard iron seat with a back made up of swords stuck into the base) resides by a professional who’s been promised ten thousand (we’re not told ten thousand what because it’s supposed to be ambiguous what the currency of the fictional “Westeros” — really the British Isles — is, though I presumed it was 10,000 pieces of either silver or gold) and instead gets shot and killed for his pains. (That’s the pattern of Game of Thrones: just when you think something noble is actually happening, writers George R. R. Martin, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have a double-cross occur and the incident becomes as sleazy and relentlessly self-serving as the rest of the plot.) The new king is Joffrey’s younger brother, though the regent is his mom and she and her brother/lover, in a scene even kinkier than the weird one in the recently shown Lifetime movie Deadly Mile High Club (in which the psycho female flight instructor who’s seduced the hot but rather dim young man has him fuck her on top of a large wooden box that, unbeknownst to him but beknownst to us, contains the body of his still-living but unconscious wife who comes to while they’re literally doing it on top of her), he fucks her on top of the body of their dead son Joffrey. Meanwhile, the men of the Knights’ Watch are supposed to be standing guard over the Wall (ya remember the Wall? Nobody else does, except Donald Trump), have let their guard slip and the “Wildings,” who have pasty and badly scarred faces and are cannibals (one particularly nasty one invades a town and tells one of the boys, “First I’m gonna eat your mom, and then I’m gonna eat your dad”) and who look like the ancestors of George Romero’s zombies, have got through the wall and are menacing the people of northern “Westeros.” 

The good guys (to the extent that anybody is “good” in this relentlessly cynical story) are trying to figure out how to stop the “Wildings” while at the same time getting kvetchy about who’s having sex with whom — the men of the Knights’ Watch are sworn to celibacy but that doesn’t stop them from venturing outside the Order and picking up women. There’s also a polymorphously perverse prince in the dramatis personae whose five-way with three women and a man is rather rudely interrupted by one of the white-haired father-figures in which this story abounds, and the finale features Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) on her way over from — I think it’s Ireland but Charles noted the Mediterranean accoutrements of the cities she’s conquering (much like the Universal serial The Adventures of Smiling Jack from the early 1940’s, which was supposed to be taking place on the border between India and Tibet but the locales looked Egyptian because they were recycling the sets from the Mummy movies) and suggested that “Westeros” is actually a mish-mash of various parts of Europe in which, among other things, Sicily is located just across the sea from England). We briefly got to see her with her three dragons at the start of episode one but when she reappears the dragons are nowhere to be found (I like the Lewtonian reticence of Messrs. Benioff and Weiss to show too much of the dragons, but I still wish we were seeing more of them, especially since they’re supposed to be the medieval Westerosian equivalent of the H-bomb, the ultimate superweapon against which there is no viable defense; she comes to another city, incites a slave rebellion and gets the newly liberated slaves to join the other newly liberated slaves in her army. (There’s a sort of object lesson here about how if you liberate yourselves with outside help, the outside help will just enlist you for their vainglorious cause — “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” — but there’s little real social commentary in Game of Thrones besides the overall impression that all human beings are greedy, unscrupulous, bloodthirsty S.O.B.’s.) 

Once again, though, the overall message of Game of Thrones — that the ruling class is a bunch of amoral savages and everyone else just exists to feed them enough surplus value to keep them going and buy them the luxuries (including paid-for sex partners) they live for when they’re not industriously killing each other —is weirdly and uncannily appropriate for the Trump era even though most of the series was shot while Obama was still president. Country after country throughout the world — including the three that were most instrumental in fighting the original fascists, the U.S., Britain and Russia — has been taken over by neo-fascists determined to turn their countries into personal autocracies, and between their sheer unscrupulousness and unconcern for the lives and welfare of their citizens (as witness Trump’s recent detached musings on how many people he’s willing to let die of COVID-19 in order to “restart the economy”) modern-day leaders like Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jiaoping of China, Viktór Orban of Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Receo Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines all look very much like Game of Thrones characters!

Game of Thrones, season 4, episodes 1 and 2: “Two Swords,” “The Lion and the Rose” (Television 360, Startling, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2014)

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

Charles and I also resumed our amble through the Game of Thrones series, cracking open the fourth-season Blu-Ray package and mistakenly putting on disc two because disc one was hidden behind the cardboard leaflet with instructions for accessing a digital copy (something I will never use!). That rather gave away the ending of the first two episodes of season four, “Two Swords” and “The Lion and the Rose,” which lead up to the assassination of King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson, who as I’ve commented before would make an excellent Caligula or Nero if anyone decides to make yet another movie about either of them) — not that this was that big a surprise, given that all through the show so far Joffrey has been giving just about everyone else in the dramatis personae ample reasons to want to see him dead. The other main development in these two episodes is the return of Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Walden), who insists on resuming his position in the King’s Guard even though he was held captive for a long time and his sadistic captors cut off his right hand, so he has to re-learn how to use a sword with his left hand.

These ambitions are relentlessly ridiculed by his brother Tyrion (Peter Dinklage, who here as throughout the series is playing the role probably every little-person actor has dreamed of, a character with real weight, depth and multidimensionality instead of either a cute sidekick or a nasty but not particularly scary villain like his dorky role in Elf) on the eve of the marriage of Joffrey to Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), which takes place at the end of “The Lion and the Rose” but is almost immediately followed by Joffrey’s murder. It’s not made quite clear how Joffrey dies but the implication is he drank a glass of poisoned wine (after doing one of his petty cruelties by pouring his glass of non-poisoned wine on Tyrion Lannister’s head), and in the final shot of episode two Tyrion is shown holding the glass from which Joffrey drank, with the obvious implication that he’s going to be framed for the murder. This being Game of Thrones there are other plot lines galore, including a scene in which the kid who got crippled after he climbed a tower and saw a brother and sister in bed together having at each other incestuously, only the brother saw him and pushed him out the window to the ground, dreams himself into the body of a wolf and thus has the sensation of movement he can’t do in real life (and there’s even a point-of-view shot from the boy-as-wolf’s perspective!) and the confrontation between the guardians of the Wall and the invaders from the South, and the uncertain relationship between Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and the Stark family, which he’s technically a part of — his dad was a Stark but his mom was his dad’s mistress — though about all that gets him in this story is he’s threatened with death by the Starks’ enemies.

I’ve enjoyed Game of Thrones but been put off and confused by its sheer multiplicity of plotlines and the abruptness with which the writers and directors (and “The Lion and the Rose” was scripted by Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin himself!) cut back and forth between them. I’m also rather put off by the fact that in this tale of medieval life there are no good guys — Martin and the series creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, seem to delight in getting us to like a particular character and then having him or her do something totally despicable — though as I’ve said before about previous Game of Thrones episodes, that makes this show perfectly appropriate for the Donald Trump era. Its portrayal of a world in which all the people aspiring to “leadership” are wantonly cruel and totally unscrupulous (and so is everybody else: one of these episodes begins with a group of people seemingly unrelated to the main intrigues running through the woods, chasing a woman and ultimately causing her death by shooting her in the leg with an arrow so she collapses and is eaten by wild dogs; this is carefully shot so the sequence looks like it’s just going to be innocent fun until we realize what’s really going on) really fits in with an historical era in which country after country, including the U.S., Britain, Russia, China, Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Israel and Turkey, has been taken over by Trump-like egomaniacs who divide their countries and win fanatical political bases by promising to “Make _______ Great Again,” while not only ignoring but actively boosting the destruction of the environment humans need to be able to survive.