Game of Thrones, season five, episodes nine and ten: “The Dance of Dragons,” “Mother's Mercy” (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead,HBO, 2015)

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

Last night Charles and I watched the last two episodes of season five of Game of Thrones, “The Dance of Dragons” and “Mother’s Mercy.” As usual of late I’ll quote the imdb.com synopses of these episodes to remind me of what happened in them, and then comment:

The Dance of Dragons: Things are not going well for Stannis and his army. Winter is upon them and they are attacked in the night losing most of their stores. Unable to move forward or back, he dispatches Ser Davos Seaworth to seek help from Castle Black. Jon Snow and the survivors of the attack at Hardhome make it safely back to the wall but the reception they get is anything but warm. In Dorne, Doran Martell takes the diplomatic route telling Jaime that Myrcella can return to King’s Landing with him provided certain conditions were met. In Braavos, Arya sees Lord Tyrell who arrives to speak to representatives of the Iron Bank. He’s accompanied by Meryn Trant, one of the men on her list. In Meereen, the Great Games begin but the needless killing is not to Daenarys’ or Tyrion’s liking. Ser Jorah defeats his opponents in the arena but a trap is sprung and the Sons of the Harpy attack. Rescue is at hand however.

Mother’s Mercy: Stannis attacks Winterfell. Sansa and Theon find themselves on a difficult situation. Arya challenges the many-faced god. Daenerys is surrounded by acquaintances. Jaime and Myrcella leave Dorne. Cersei confesses. Sam goes to oldtown to become the new maester [meaning the librarian]. Jon receives news about his uncle Benjen.

I’ll comment rather briefly on these episodes: they suffer from the usual problem with Game of Thrones generally — there are too many plot lines, and the editing between them makes the episodes choppy (just when we’ve absorbed the relationships between the currently on-screen characters and started to identify with them — to the extent to which anyone less psychopathic than Donald Trump could identify with anybody in Game of Thrones — we’re rudely and crudely wrenched to another set of characters) — and also series creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss seem to have made the series more openly gory as it rolled on (I worried about Charles’ gore quotient because much of what was going on last night was pushing my gore tolerance threshold, and his is even lower than mine!), to the point where during one of the gladiatorial contests Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) has reluctantly reauthorized in the land of Meereen, one fighter cleanly sliced another’s head off and I couldn’t resist quoting the line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “It’s only a flesh wound.” Aside from the gore, Game of Thrones is so full of human cruelty that, as I’ve commented ad nauseam before, it’s the perfect story for the Trump era (even though most of it was filmed while Barack Obama was still President). A group of people with no morals, no scruples and a casual indifference to the sheer numbers of people who are going to get killed in pursuit of their goals. Among the big things that happen in these episodes are the gladiatorial games and their invasion by the “Sons of the Harpy” (oh, so that’s who those people in metal masks who invaded Meereen’s Colosseum were! I joked that they were the Game of Thrones equivalent of Anonymous!), who start killing contestants and spectators alike until Daenerys flies away on one of her three pet dragons (ya remember her dragons?). The attempt of Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) and his army to attack and conquer the North gets defeated by an even bigger force from heaven knows where; and previous to that the insistence of the fire-god priestess that Stannis’s “hand” (essentially his prime minister) literally have his daughter burned at the stake as a sacrifice to ensure the success of the mission. 

Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) is forced to endure a “Walk of Shame” by the culto the so-called “High Sparrow” (though the at least three religions we’ve seen practiced in Game of Thrones are derived from the Abrahamic tradition of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, they share not only the viciousness and intolerance of all real-world religions, the Abrahamic ones in particular, but their obsessive micromanagement of people’s private lives, especially their sex lives: there’s still a part of me that wonders how on earth someone can be both Gay and a Christian given what organized Christianity has to say about us, and this despite the fact that I’ve had three serious partners, including my current husband and partner of 25 years, who consider or considered themselves Christians!) in which she’s forced to walk the streets naked and get pelted with garbage (she’s supposedly being punished for committing incest with her brother, but compared to her Siegmund and Sieglinde got off easy, he dying in battle and she in childbirth!) and a cross is burned onto her neck. The final scene is one in which Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is lured to his death by a false tale about a dead friend of his supposedly having survived and killed by the other [K]night’s Watch members, who stab him one after the other in a scene obviously copied from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Charles warned me that Jon Snow’s character may actually survive this, since Kit Harington did the talk-show circuit to be interviewed about Game of Thrones even after this episode pretty definitively eliminated him. The final shot of “Mother’s Mercy” is of his blood flowing picturesquely out of his body and into the snow, and it’s hard to imagine even a fantasy character surviving that without direct supernatural intervention of a kind Game of Thrones has mostly avoided — though its “teases” of dragons and other impossible beings and event are annoying and I found myself wishing Messrs. Benioff, Weiss and George R. R. Martin (who wrote the five-novel cycle, A Song of Ice and Fire, on which Game of Thrones is based) had decided one way or another: either make theirs a frankly and openly supernatural universe or kept it within established physical reality!

Her Deadly Groom (Mutiny Films, Traplight Pictures, Lifetime, 2020)

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

There was another Lifetime “Premiere” on at 8 p.m., and it was Her Deadly Groom, a by-the-numbers production from the teams at Mutiny Films and Traplight Pictures. Whereas the previous night’s Lifetime “Premiere,” Stalked by My Husband’s Ex, had got genuinely creative with the formula and improved as its running time continued, in this one there was no character ambiguity. We know from the get-go that Vincent Black (Michael DeVorzon, a reasonably hunky but not drop-dead gorgeous guy) is the villain because writers Jared Cohn (who also directed) and Naomi L. Selfman give us a prologue in which he’s supposedly honeymooning with his latest spouse when he takes her to a favorite cliff and suddenly and for no apparent reason pushes her off it. Next we meet the heroine he’s going to target, Alison May (Kate Watson), who’s partners in a business making designer peanut butter (I’m not making this up, you know!) with her friend Brenna (Kelly Erin Decker). The two are having trouble getting the business off the ground because wholesalers are refusing to order it on the not-unreasonable ground that there’s nothing distinguishing it from all the other peanut butters out there, including the ones from major brands like Jiffy and Skippy. 

Alison has also gone through a bitter divorce with George May (Eric Roberts, who despite his current cragginess and seediness is still a quite handsome and charismatic man whom Lifetime persists in casting as creepy villains), who owns the home Alison and her daughter Nicky (Elyse Cantor) are staying in but has agreed to let them live there until Nicky goes off to college that fall. Alison encounters Vincent when her friend and business partner Brenna talks her into going on a dating Web site and Vincent answers. The two hit it off immediately and drift into a passionate relationship (though we only get one soft-core porn scene between them, alas) that within six months seems headed for the altar. Only in the meantime Vincent has taken out a $2 million insurance policy on Alison’s life — he did this because he put $50,000 into the business and told her it was merely partnership insurance — and at the wedding reception Breana stumbles onto Vincent’s phone and writes down the policy number so she can tell Alison about it — only Vincent catches her and pushes her down a flight of stairs. His hope is that she was drunk enough, and unsteady enough on her high heels, that it will be written off as an unfortunate accident. Earlier we’ve seen Vincent kill Alison’s scapegrace ex George in similar fashion; it seems George had hired Vincent to woo Alison so she’d marry him and therefore George would no longer have to pay her alimony. Only Vincent had decided that instead of a quickie annulment and a fee from George, he’d be much better off financially keeping the marriage going, taking out the $2 million and then killing her for the insurance money. Even before that we’d seen a creepy scene in which Vincent is in his hovel of a home, talking to an unseen person whose name sounded like “Waylon” and who turned out to be someone he’d asphyxiated with a plastic bag over their head. “That’s the perfect roommate: someone who stays quiet,” he says in the one genuinely witty line in the Cohn-Selfman script. 

When George, before meeting his demise at Vincent’s hands, throws Alison and Nicky out of “his” home, Vincent invites them to move in with him in a palatial mansion he’s effectively stolen from the vacationing couple who rightfully own it by seducing their realtor, Taylor (a nice performance by Andrea Fletcher) — they’re shown wrapping up a “quickie” in the house’s kitchen just after Vincent has sworn to Alison that he’s so in love with her he hasn’t even looked at another woman since they met — and grabbing a phone copy of the key and noting down the code on the security lock so he can just move in and squat. When Taylor catches him, he kills her and stuffs her body into her car, presumably to crash it and make it look like either an accident or a suicide. With Brenna alive but comatose in a hospital after her fall, the only person in the dramatis personae is Nicky’s boyfriend Josh (Jacob Michael, a nice-looking twink who looks enough like a younger version of Michael DeVorzon one could imagine them playing father and son), whose father is an ex-con who actually did time with Vincent and was released at the same time, so he knows Vincent’s real name: Jordan Wilde. The climax occurs at what’s supposed to be a four-way dinner party at the mansion with Vincent, Alison, Nicky and Josh — only Vincent spikes Josh’s medication with a more powerful drug and Josh, who’s had a history of drug abuse, acts erratically. Vincent corners Josh at his home and force-feeds him pills to make it look like he used them to kill himself after Alison, figuring he’d relapsed, forbade Nicky from seeing him. 

Only Josh somehow manages to maintain consciousness and make his way back to the mansion, where Vincent has invited Alison to take a shower with him, only to bail when he learns Josh is onto him and needs to be eliminated pronto. Alison decides to take a bath instead but Vincent returns from his dirty errand with Josh, intent on knocking Alison off once and for all and collecting his big insurance payday — referencing Hitchcock’s Psycho, I joked, “Alison, never get into a shower with a psycho who talks to dead people” — only when he returns he ends up in the bathtub while she’s out of it, then throws her hair dryer in the tub, electrocuting and presumably killing him. (George Baxt’s pioneering 1960’s Gay-themed mystery A Queer Kind of Death used a similar gimmick: the victim had a radio in his bathroom and the killer, who turned out to be a partner who wanted to get rid of him, knocked him off by pushing the radio into the bathtub when it was connected.) The tag features both Jake and Brenna (ya remember Brenna?) making full recoveries — and Brenna, true to her man-hungry form, has fallen for Dr. Lin (Carl Chao), who took care of her during her coma — and Alison profusely apologizing to Jake for doubting him when he was right about Vincent (t/n Jordan) all along. Then we get one of Lifetime’s increasingly common — and annoying — endings in which Vincent isn’t dead at all: he’s in prison but he’s got a female guard staring hungrily and lasciviously at him and it looks like it’s only a matter of time before he seduces her into helping him escape. Acceptably directed but indifferently acted and not especially well cast (except for Andrea Fletcher’s indelible bit and a walk-on by a cop who shows up to tell Alison that George is dead — though he’s not listed on the film’s imdb.com page, he’s easily the sexiest guy in it!), Her Deadly Groom is O.K. for Lifetime but not especially interesting either dramatically or aesthetically.

Stalked by My Husband’s Ex (The Asylum, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

I watched last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie at 8 p.m., Stalked by My Husband’s Ex — a title that’s doubly inaccurate because not only are the leads, Kristen Carter (Alex McKenna) and Ryan Munson (Adam Huss), not married until the very end of the film — though they’re living together and co-parenting Ryan’s 10-year-old daughter Lisa (Joey Rae Blair — a girl named Joey?), and Ryan is shown proposing to Kristen during the film (with an expensive ring daughter Lisa picked out for him) — but through a “surprise” twist writers Scott Collette and Dave Hickey (the two collaborated on the “original” story but Collette wrote the actual script solo) throw in about three-quarters of the way through the movie (more on that later), Ryan’s “ex,” Nora Monson (a nice hang-dog performance by Juliana Dever) actually isn’t the titular stalker. Stalked by My Husband’s Ex (an annoyingly clinical title, though imdb.com doesn’t list a more creative working title Lifetime ordered changed) begins with a prologue in which Ryan and Nora are in the final stages of a bitterly contested divorce and Nora, a heavy-duty alcoholic, gets mega-upset when Ryan wins a court order giving him sole custody of Lisa. In fact, she resents it so much that she goes to Ryan’s home, kidnaps baby Lisa, takes her in her car — and promptly crashes it. The police rescue baby Lisa and arrest Nora. She serves a four-year prison sentence and, when next we see her, it’s 10 years later and she’s having her final discharge interview with her probation officer.

Only, being a Lifetime villainess, she can’t resist expressing her bitterness over losing her daughter by being snippy with the probation officer — so much so that we briefly wonder if he’s going to extend her probation or, even worse, send her back to prison. Ultimately, he does neither, relying on Nora’s glowing report on her success at work (even though she’s only had the job three months) and her continued commitment to sobriety (she’s seen fingering one of the chips AA gives you for not drinking for a particular length of time). Nora immediately blows all of that once she sees Lisa’s social-media posts celebrating the upcoming wedding of her dad and his long-time girlfriend. At first she has enough willpower to walk past a store called “Santa Barbara Liquor” (the whole film takes place in that affluent community), but eventually she succumbs and within a couple of commercial breaks she’s blown off her job and is sitting in a grungy room doing nothing but drinking and plotting to get her daughter back. Meanwhile, Ryan and Kristen are sipping wine from tall glasses — they’re probably doing as much drinking as Nora is, but they’re doing it in classy circumstances in a house so lavish it practically becomes a character in itself. We’re never told what Ryan does for a living, but Kristen runs a resort called “Almost Paradise” she rents out for retreats and the like, and needless to say she’s also planning to marry Ryan there with her best friend Sierra Phillips (Melissa Ordway) as her maid of honor. Sierra good-naturedly kids Kristen about her formerly poor taste in men, ridiculing her ex-boyfriend Matt (Mike Erwin, who looks enough like Adam Huss we get the impression Kristen has one and only one physical “type” of man she’s attracted to), who like all Kristen’s other boyfriends until Ryan wanted her to give up her career and stay at home as a housewife and baby-making machine.

Then the stalking begins in earnest: Nora starts hanging out at Lisa’s school and waiting for Lisa in her car — behaving for all the world like a legitimate custodial parent — and when she’s alone she’s looking at Lisa’s social-media posts expressing her joy at soon having another mother and swearing under her breath, “She doesn’t need another mother. She needs me!” Then Nora ruins the engagement party her friend Sierra threw her at Kirsten’s own resort by crashing it (in tacky-looking pants that establish the class contrast with the designer outfits Kristen, Sierra and their friends are wearing) and grabbing a drink to throw in Kristen’s face. Nora then starts sending Lisa texts, impersonating an age-peer from another school, and asking Lisa, “Do you want to meet your real mom?” Lisa unhesitatingly answers, “Yes!” While all this has been going on Kristen’s best friend Sierra borrows Kristen’s car and drives it home at night, and a mysterious driver we presume is Nora chases the car and runs it off the road, causing it to crash into a tree. Sierra is killed (though Sierra is white she fulfills the character function usually reserved in Lifetime movies for the heroine’s Black best friend: she stumbles onto the villain’s plot but gets killed before she can reveal it) and Kristen is broken up about it for various reasons, not the least of which is that after all the kidding she’d endured from Sierra about all the Mr. Wrongs in her life she really, really, really wanted Sierra to be the maid of honor when she finally married Mr. Right. We also get at least a hint of What Makes Nora Run when Ryan tells Kirsten that Nora’s father also served time in prison, and when Nora was 14 he was released and sued for and won joint custody. The stress of being whipsawed between two homes with two decidedly different parents and being unable to make friends in either location started Nora’s drinking, Ryan tells Kristen (and us) — a bit of backstory a writer like Christine Conradt could have used to make Nora a figure of genuine pathos but which Collette and Hickey drop almost as soon as they’ve introduced it.

The climax occurs at a grungy café to which Nora has lured Lisa with the prospect of finally meeting her birth mother — we know it’s grungy not only because it’s dark and the customers are dressed in proletarian clothes but the music they’re playing on the sound system is bad, lame country rather than bad, lame soft-rock. At first Lisa is happy to meet her biological mom at long last after having heard almost nothing about her from her dad all her life, but she starts getting spooked by Nora’s overall weirdness (she’d ordered them both hot chocolates, but Lisa protests hers is too hot to drink while, when Lisa wasn’t looking, Nora spiked her own with a flask — a flask? How 1920’s!) and she ducks into the café’s restroom, from which she hopes to escape. Ryan has traced Lisa to the café — Nora told Lisa to turn off her cell phone but her dad remembered that Lisa’s tablet is keyed to mirror the phone and can therefore give him its (and Lisa’s) location — but Lisa couldn’t leave through the bathroom window because it was barred. So she looked for a location in one of the restaurant’s back rooms where she could hide. Nora goes looking for her and can’t find her; then she hears Ryan and finds her own hiding place. Only when Ryan hunts her down he finds [spoiler alert!] that Nora has just died, and when the cops arrive they assume that Ryan strangled her and arrest him for murder. With Ryan held in jail overnight because the courts won’t process him until the next day, Kristen receives a box of items taken from her car when Sierra was run off the road and killed in it. Then a mysterious figure appears in the back of her house, which had me momentarily thinking that Collette and Hickey were going to have Ryan turn out to be a psycho who murdered his ex-wife after all, the real stalker turns out to be [surprise!] Matt, Kristen’s ex. (So instead of calling the movie Stalked by Her Husband’s Ex they should have called it Stalked by Her Ex — which would have been more accurate but would also have given the game away.)

Surprisingly, the last half-hour of Stalked by Her Husband’s Ex proves considerably better than the hour-and-a-half which preceded it; director Anthony C. Ferrante, who in the previous portions of the movie looked like he was trying to sneak in bits of genuine excitement and suspense into a script whose writers wouldn’t let him, finally comes alive, grabs hold of what he has to work with and gives us a climax both viscerally exciting and genuinely moving. And the writing, direction and acting of Matt bring this character fully to life and make him a truly imposing Lifetime villain. He kidnaps Lisa and leads Kristen on a wild-goose chase — instead of telling her the final destination so she could summon the cops, he directs her via her cell phone from one point to the next — that comes to an end in a large beachfront home overlooking a cliff, where Matt is hiding Lisa out in the attic and threatening to kill her unless Kristen goes along with his plan. His plan is to let Ryan take the fall for Nora’s murder so Kristen will be rid of him, the two of them can get back together and they can raise Lisa as their own. (Hey, I didn’t say it was a good plan.) The writers and director Ferrante actually do a good job of putting Kristen in dire and seemingly inescapable peril, though they also do something silly: they have Matt’s and Kristen’s final confrontation take place on a stretch of yard directly next to the cliff, so we just know that they’re going to deliver Kristen from Matt’s evil by having him slip and fall off the cliff to his death … and that indeed happens. The tag scene shows Ryan and Kristen finally getting married at the Almost Paradise resort — with daughter Lisa as their maid of honor as well as their ring-bearer. Stalked by My Husband’s Ex could have been an even better movie than it is if the writers and director hadn’t been working so hard to set up that Big Surprise Twist at the end and if they, like their colleagues on previous Lifetime movies, had made Nora a more complex, conflicted character. As it stands, it’s an O.K. by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller until it takes that unexpected detour of killing (who we think is) the principal villain three-fourths of the way through and then suddenly becomes a work of rare strength and power, especially by Lifetime standards!

Game of Thrones, season five, episodes 7 and 8: “The Gift,” “Hardhome” (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead LIttlehead, HBO, 2015)

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

Two nights ago Charles and I watched the next two episodes in sequence of our amble through the eight-season series Game of Thrones, whose episodes are actually combining with the novel I’m currently reading — Jon Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, a near-future novel about the disastrous consequences of both air and water pollution (the Mediterranean has literally died — it’s covered by a permanent layer of oil and everything in it has perished), seafood has become a rare luxury because it has to be harvested from lower and lower depths where the pollution hasn’t sunk to yet, and in two twists that are happening now, people can’t go out without wearing face masks and no one dares go to the beach (also there’s a grey layer of smog over the atmosphere so almost never can one actually see the sun in the sky) — and the actual news reports of today, particularly the U.S. government’s utter inability to deal with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the very real possibility that there may be nothing modern medical science can do to stop this virus (the successive pieces of news that even if you’ve already had COVID-19, the disease SARS-CoV-2 causes, you can get it again three months later — which raises questions as to whether a vaccine against it is even possible; the vaccine candidates have shown “promise” in stimulating an “immune response,” but how long will that immune response last? — and the virus can transmit as free-floating viral particles in air, which means it can pass right through a mask) and it may be as far beyond our current state of medical knowledge to solve as smallpox and plague were in the Middle Ages) into a sort of dystopian miasma in which the horrible insights into the basically greedy, avaricious, amoral and unscrupulous aspects of human nature come together and produce a state of utter hopelessness and despair. 

As I’ve noted before in these pages, Game of Thrones is a perfect story for the Trump era because it posits that human beings are basically evil, that they have no motivations beyond their own self-interest — the rich and powerful machinate against each other and don’t care how many of the not-so-rich and not-so-powerful they kill in the process, and the not-so-rich and not-so-powerful merely scramble as best they can to survive it all. As I’ve started doing recently, I’m reproducing the imdb.com online synopses of the two most recent episodes Charles and I screened last night, as much as an aid to keeping track of the myriad plot lines as for any other reason:

The Gift: At Castle Black, Jon Snow, Tormund Giantsbane and a few Rangers head north of the Wall. Master Aemon has reached the end of his days and Sam gets a warning. Stannis and his army face the ravages of winter and Ser Davos recommends they return to Castle Black. At Winterfell, Sansa begs a terrified Theon to help her escape but he proves an inadequate ally. Tyrion and Ser Jorah are sold at a slave market. In Meereen, Daenerys gets unexpected advice from Daario. In King's Landing, Lady Olenna calls on the High Sparrow to seek her grandchildren's release but gets no satisfaction. She may have found an ally. A gloating Cersei visits Margaery in the cells below the Red Keep but the High Septon has a surprise for her. In Dorne, Jaime sees Myrcella who makes it clear that she considers Dorne her home and that she has no intention of leaving.

Hardhome: In Braavos, Arya is learning slowly and is regularly tested. She poses as an oyster seller and is assigned a specific task. In Meereen, Daenerys sits in judgment on Ser Jorah and Tyrion. While Jorah is again banished, Tyrion soon becomes her advisor. In Winterfell, Sansa learns something important from Theon. Roose Bolton meanwhile awaits Stannis' arrival but Ramsay disagrees with his approach. In King's Landing, Cersei learns from Qyburn that the High Sparrow has a strong case against her and recommends a way out for her. At Castle Black, Sam recovers from his wounds. Jon Snow and Tormund Giantsbane arrive at their destination north of the Wall. While some of them accept the offer of land in the south, many do not. Before they can leave, however, the army of walkers arrive.

One of the things that makes Game of Thrones so confusing is not only that there are so many plot lines, but the series’ creators, George R. R. Martin (who wrote the original cycle of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, of which A Game of Thrones — note the article — was merely the first of five he’s already published plus two he’s outlined and promised but has got stuck on), David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, so relentlessly intercut between them that you feel you’ve been whipsawed from one to another just as you’re getting into one of them. These shows are full of “Meanwhile … ” moments and the sorts of things that Anna Russell made fun of in her parody of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (which is actually a model of clarity compared to Game of Thrones): “Ya remember __________ ?” 

The cutbacks keep taking us away from the interesting characters (Daenerys Targeryan, Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister) and inflicting the boring ones (Stannis Baratheon, Peter Baelish) on us. The most interesting things that happen in “The Gift” are that Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), who’s been reduced from being “The Hand” of the King to shipwreck victim who’s about to be sold as a slave in Meereen. 

There Daenerys technically freed the slaves and then found that an awful lot of them didn’t want to be free, so she restored the gladiatorial “Fighting Pits” by popular demand even though running these pits, in which 12 or so warriors go in and, as in the Hunger Games, the object is for only one to survive — which, aside from the morals of it, seems an appalling waste of manpower for a woman who’s hoping to use Meereen as a base of support for an amphibian invasion of “Westeros” — i.e., Britain — from across the Irish Sea and would seem to need all the fighters she could muster. Anyway, with the gift of gab we’ve seen him show in previous episodes, Tyrion talks Daenerys into taking him on as her advisor even though she’s understandably miffed at the whole Lannister clan because Tyrion’s much taller and hunkier (though hobbled because his right hand was cut off by a captor to torture him) brother Jaime (pronounced “Jamie”) (Nikolaj Coster-Walden) killed Daenerys’ father, the former King of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros (sometimes the Seven Kingdoms seem like a federal association and sometimes they don’t) — and Tyrion points out that he’s killed more Lannisters than anybody, including his mother (she died giving birth to him) and his father (the crime that forced him to flee Westeros in the first place), and therefore he’s been more of an instrument of revenge against his own family than either she or anyone fighting for her ever could be. 

The other big thing that happens in “The Gift” is the witchhunt led by the cult of the “High Sparrow,” who seems to be trying to reshape the religion of Westeros from a pantheon of seven gods (hence the seven-pointed star that’s emblazoned on a stained-glass window above the Iron Throne and also on the floor of the throne room) to a single god with seven incarnations and a particular hatred for anyone who has sex outside a normal heterosexual marriage and only for purposes of reproduction (in other words, that same monstrous denial of human sexuality the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have wreaked upon the world!!!!!), and like most of their real-world equivalents they’re particularly hard on Queers. They’ve targeted the brother of Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), the current wife of king Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman) and therefore at least nominally queen of the Iron Throne, for being Gay. Then they arrested Margaery for having lied in their rump “court” to try to protect her brother. Then they double-crossed Tommen’s mother, Cersei Lannister Baratheon (Lena Headey), who supported them in the first place as a counterweight against her enemies, and had her arrested, held in a cell and periodically visited by an aging woman acolyte who offers her water (the ladle from which she offers it is shot by director Miguel Sapochnik — a marvelously multicultural name! — to look like a cobra’s head) but only if she agrees to “confess.” 

We’re not sure what she’s supposed to “confess” to, but we think it’s because of the rumor that’s been spread through the entire show that Tommen and the previous king, Joffrey are the products of an incestuous relationship between Cersei and her brother Jaime (ya remember Jaime?). We know they were having an affair because a kid who was climbing the outside of the castle tower caught them, and Jaime gave him a back-handed slap when he appeared at their window and he fell, surviving but becoming permanently disabled — though this character, who became rather interesting especially when he turned out to have the power to control wolves and other animals telepathically, seems just to have disappeared. (Charles said a lot of interesting characters have just disappeared from Game of Thrones, including most of the strong women in the dramatis personae — though there are a few left, including Olenna Tyrell, played by the great Diana Rigg, who in the 1970’s became a feminist sensation for her superb performance as a female James Bond in the British TV series The Avengers and in 1994 was acting in a Broadway revival of Euripides’ Medea just when Newt Gingrich was blaming Susan Smith’s murder of her two kids on Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society and the “permissive culture” it had supposedly engendered, and I was amused that just then a 2,500-year-old play was running on Broadway with a similar situation. (It’s true that Susan Smith killed her kids because she was dating her boss and he didn’t want the kids around, while Medea killed hers to get back at their dad for leaving her, but the principle was not that different — and I also found it ironic that when Susan Smith invented a fictitious criminal to blame for the deaths of her kids, she made him Black: the original Karen!) 

A few of these plot threads get continued in the next episode, “Hardhome,” but that one eventually resolves into a quite good and surprisingly (especially for Game of Thrones!) unified story about Jon Snow (Kit Harington), bastard son of the Stark family, who’s reaching out to the Wildings, a human tribe living north of the Wall which the order Snow is now leading, which I’m not sure whether it’s called the “Night’s Watch” or the “Knight’s Watch,” is reaching out to in order to come south to the other side of the Wall and accept his offer of farmlands where they can settle and be safe from the “White Walkers,” a race of ghosts who, like Bram Stoker’s vampires, keep expanding their numbers by turning anyone they kill into one of them. They can only be destroyed by a substance called “dragonglass,” which if they’re stabbed with it causes them to shatter instantly. Jon and his principal ally among the Wildings, Tormund Giantsbane (Kristofer Hivju), try to get the rest of the Wildings to accept their offer but, in a negotiation that couldn’t help but remind me of Israel and Palestine, the Wildings go on and on and on about how many of their number have been killed by members of the [K]night’s Watch, going back over centuries — and just as Jon and Tormund are evacuating the Wildings who’ve agreed to go and leaving the rest in their keep, the White Walkers stage a mass attack to put an end to the Wildings once and for all and either destroy them or enlist them into their undead ranks. 

The sequence is one of the best sustained action scenes in the entire Game of Thrones cycle, not only because it’s allowed to unfold continuously but because the director (Miguel Sapochnik again) and writers (Benioff, Weiss and Dave Hill) have created plenty of opportunities for suspense, including Jon losing the all-important bag full of dragonglass blades and some spectacular shots of slain Wildings transforming into White Walkers as they leave earthly existence and join the nearly invincible army of the supernatural. (One odd thing about Game of Thrones is their rather grudging feints towards the supernatural in what’s an otherwise at least physically possible storyline: Daenerys’s dragons, whom we’ve seen far too little of, are the cycle’s other main supernatural element.) As the White Walkers break down the gates of the Wildings’ castle, and Jon’s carefully planned evacuation turns (like all too many real ones) into a panicked flight as the people who had originally planned to stay rush the boats that were taking the evacuees to Jon’s ships and threaten to sink them and kill all their occupants. For once a Game of Thrones episode not only hung around one plot line long enough to keep us caring about it, it delivered spectacular action, thrills and genuine pathos as Jon Snow is injured in the fight against the White Walkers and his fate remains in doubt as the episode ends.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Bert Stern Productions, Galaxy Productions, Raven Films, 1958)

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

I went home and had a leisurely dinner, returning to Charles at 8 p.m. or so with an old videotape: the movies Jazz on a Summer’s Day and Captain Carey, U.S.A. I mentioned that Jazz on a Summer’s Day was a highly influential concert film in its day and that a lot of the people who filmed rock concerts in the 1960’s and since copied from it (particularly, it turned out, in its multiple — and sometimes oblique — camera angles and its absorption with the audience watching the performers as much as with the performers themselves), and Charles said, “Now I know who to blame.” Actually, he enjoyed the movie — not only the music itself but at least some of the filmic tricks (working at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, director Bert Stern also availed himself of the fact that an America’s Cup defense was occurring at the same time, and like most other people who have filmed it managed to make sail racing look considerably more exciting than it really is!), and the rather odd spectacle of performers from the rhythm-and-blues world like Dinah Washington (doing a legitimate jazz version of “All of Me” with vibist Terry Gibbs), Big Maybelle (doing a rehash of the old Count Basie/Jimmy Rushing “Boogie Woogie Blues”) and Chuck Berry (doing “Sweet Little 16” with a clarinet solo by Buster Bailey in the middle of the proceedings — in addition to all his other contributions, Chuck Berry also invented jazz-rock fusion!) cheek-by-jowl with the genuine jazz musicians.

These included Louis Armstrong, George Shearing, Jimmy Giuffre, Chico Hamilton (whose piece Charles actually liked better than I did — I thought it on the dull side and could only marvel at how sedate Eric Dolphy’s flute playing sounded here in comparison to the wild work on his own albums!), Thelonious Monk (whose number was burdened with a voice-over from the America’s Cup race, a poor camera angle that deprived us of any view of Monk’s fingers on the piano keys, and low-quality sound recording that lopped off the top frequencies of Roy Haynes’ cymbal work, but any film of Monk is welcome since he did so little — just this, his appearance on the CBS-TV show The Sound of Jazz the previous year and the German footage from 1968 that became the basis of the posthumous documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser) and a surprisingly exciting (and Coltrane-ish) Sonny Stitt. But Stern was a good enough show person to save the best performer for last. I’ve been listening to quite a lot of Mahalia Jackson lately, and her closing set in Jazz on a Summer’s Day is by far the best thing in the movie. She’s in absolutely fantastic voice (was she ever not in absolutely fantastic voice? Sometimes Mahalia’s vocal cords sound like forces of Nature — or God, if you believe as she did), and for once Stern’s camerawork stays out of the way and allows the performer to project her own appeal. (Mahalia is also helped by the plain cotton dress she wore — she dressed like she was going to church, in formal but still simple clothes, whereas most of the other women in this movie wore dresses only drag queens would dare put on today; Anita O’Day sings divinely but sports one of the silliest outfits of all time, a black cinch dress with white feather-boa trimmings and a matching floppy sun hat that makes it a bit difficult to see her face under the damned thing!)

Mahalia comes out singing “Heav’n, Heav’n” — a gospel version of the old spiritual that actually has little in common with the original except the lyric line, “Everybody’s talking about Heaven, ain’t going to Heaven” (as I said to Charles later, playing this right after Marian Anderson’s record would illustrate the difference between spiritual and gospel) — and then goes into “Didn’t It Rain?,” a performance that manages to rock far harder than anything Big Maybelle or Chuck Berry could manage (thanks to Mahalia’s sense of rhythm and the magnificent piano accompaniment of Mildred Falls); it builds to a false ending, then to a reprise that gets the crowd (previously shown as almost abysmally uninterested in the great music being served to them — the tensions at the Newport Festival and the underage drinking that would erupt in rioting two years later are already clearly visible in this film) up on its feet, excited and stamping away — and then Mahalia finally finishes “Didn’t It Rain” (during which, incidentally, she pronounces the name “Noah” as “Nora” throughout, undoubtedly for euphony, not that it really matters) to a tense, expectant crowd. Does she rock them harder with another stomping, infectious gospel number? NO! She gives them “The Lord’s Prayer”! Mahalia sings the familiar setting of the King James version of the prayer — generally one of the most unspeakably dull pieces of music ever conceived by the half-mind of man — and manages for once, with her “worrying” ornamentation of the notes (she once defined gospel music as adding rhythmic intensity to the faster songs and ornamentation to the slower ones), to make the piece sound like a worthy companion to the eloquent language of the Prayer itself — and that incredibly ill-mannered audience quiets down and listens raptly, hanging on every word and every note. In his rather silly song about Henry “Red” Allen, David Amram sang, “He turned the place into a church” — an impression I never got from his music, but which is an absolutely accurate impression of what Mahalia Jackson managed to do in this film, from her great heart, her impeccable musicianship and the sheer power and weight of her personal belief and conviction in God as expressed through her music. It’s one of the most marvelous spectacles ever captured on film — and I noticed Charles had the same reaction the Newport crowd did (and I did, for that matter): reverence. — 3/16/97

•••••

Last night I screened Charles and I a DVD of the pioneering 1958 documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day, directed by photographer Bert Stern and shot in Newport, Rhode Island during the Fourth of July weekend because that was the weekend of the Newport Jazz Festival and also the America’s Cup yacht races. I’d earlier made a VHS tape of this movie from the Bravo channel and shown it to Charles back in 1997, and it remains a fascinating film both for its historical importance (among other things, I believe it was the only time Eric Dolphy was ever filmed and the only time Thelonious Monk was filmed in color) documenting the art of under-filmed jazz musicians and the template it set for future music documentaries. Just as the Newport Jazz Festival itself set the template for future pop-music festivals — it begat a similar but competing event on the West Coast in Monterey, the Monterey Jazz Festival, which in turn begat the Monterey Pop festival in 1967 (which marked the explosive U.S. debuts of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Who and itself was the subject of a hit movie, Monterey Pop), which begat Woodstock (both the event and the mega-hit film) — so Stern’s direction of this movie set the style for future films of such events. The film opens with a series of abstract patterns formed by the sun shining down on the waters of Newport harbor, following which the film cuts to the performance we first heard underscoring the abstract shots: “The Train and the River” by the Jimmy Giuffre 3. This was a highly unusual group that featured Giuffre on clarinet and tenor sax, Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone and Jim Hall on electric guitar — no piano, bass or drums! The package we were watching contained a CD of most of the film’s soundtrack (for some reason one song, a piece by George Shearing listed on imdb.com as Carlos Federico’s “Rondo” but really the 1947 Dizzy Gillespie-Chano Pozo piece “Manteca,” is in the film but not included on the CD), and one of the most interesting aspects of the movie is the sheer eclecticism of the talent roster.

The performers ranged from Louis Armstrong to Thelonious Monk (whose piece “Blue Monk” was saddled with a radio broadcast of the America’s Cup over Monk’s playing in the movie but is blessedly “clean” on the CD —and also pitch-corrected, eliminating the noticeable wow and flutter in the movie) and included avant-garde groups like Chico Hamilton’s quintet (whose front-line instruments were Fred Katz on cello and Eric Dolphy on alto sax and flute —Stern filmed this ensemble rehearsing “Blue Sands” in a room and then showed the final performance on stage) and Giuffre’s trio; straight-ahead bop by tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt and guitarist Sal Salvador; Anita O’Day’s marvelous treatments of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two” (she wears one of the silliest dresses of all time and it wasn’t until I saw a later documentary about her that she explained why she wore this odd black outfit with white trim and a big black-and-white floppy hat: she came to Newport expecting to perform at night, the festival organizers put her on during daytime instead, and when she heard that she went to a local dress shop and bought an outfit similar to those the society women who lived in Newport would wear if they had to go out in daytime under a hot sun), the latter of which she does in a double-time patter style that sounds like she’s trying to swing a Gilbert and Sullivan song; and three talents who strictly speaking were not jazz at all. One was the R&B singer Big Maybelle, who did a rather raucous blues called “I Ain’t Mad at You” that was a variation of the Count Basie-Jimmy Rushing “Boogie Woogie” from 1936 and 1937; interestingly, she had to follow an even bigger R&B talent, Dinah Washington, who sang a version of the standard “All of Me” that showed off her jazz as well as R&B chops. (Dinah’s performance here is yet more evidence that, as great as Aretha Franklin was, she was only the second “Queen of Soul”: Dinah was the first, and most of what Aretha did in the 1960’s Dinah had done as well or better in the 1950’s.) 

One of the odder “ringers” was Chuck Berry, who was brought out to play “Sweet Little Sixteen” in what proved to be one of the movie’s least satisfying clips (despite the triumphalism of one imdb.com reviewer of this film, who wrote, “this particular slice of time has special significance, because jazz would soon be replaced in popularity by Rock & Roll. We watch it happen before our eyes as a young Chuck Berry takes the stage. Backed by some excellent jazz musicians, all looking ‘amused’ but not taking very seriously the music that would knock them off the charts for good within a couple of years.” Actually, Berry looks bored in this clip — almost totally lacking the galvanic energy he brought to his performances in the Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll “quickie” films (even though in those he was merely miming to his records instead of performing live in real time) — and though veteran jazz drummer Jo Jones gets into the rock spirit and plays well, trumpeter Buck Clayton and trombonist Jack Teagarden just stand at the back of the stage holding their instruments but not playing them. The one soloist we hear besides Berry is clarinetist Rudy Rutherford (not Buster Bailey, as I’d previously thought), and he’s totally clueless as to how to play a solo on a song like this. Stern and editor Aram Avakian (whose brother George Avakian produced the music recordings and, because he was dealing with performances that had been filmed in real time, he couldn’t indulge in the technical prissiness that led him to have the artists re-record in the studio songs they had performed at Newport and splice those into allegedly “live” albums from the Newport Festival and other large, outdoor and acoustically chancy venues) wisely saved the two most galvanic performers for last. 

Louis Armstrong gets three songs in the movie (most of the artists just got one, maybe two if they were lucky) and a long stage rap before he starts — which, as Charles pointed out, indicates that he was already being thought of as an entertainer as much or more than as a musical artist), including a duet with Jack Teagarden on Hoagy Carmichael’s song “Rockin’ Chair.” The two had already recorded a legendary duet on this song at New York’s Town Hall in 1947, and 11 years later they re-created it with nice variations, including one joke about the racial difference between the Black Armstrong and the white (though part-Native American) Teagarden: when Teagarden sings the original lyric, “I’m gonna tan your hide,” Armstrong replies, “I’m already tan.” The very last performer in the film is the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who starts with a slow-rocking version of the spiritual “Heav’n, Heav’n” and then turns on her righteous soul power on the song “Didn’t It Rain?” The song, as you might have guessed, is about Noah (or, as she pronounces it, “Nora”) and the Flood, and she gets so totally “in the spirit” she out-rocks Chuck Berry and provokes the crowd to ecstatic dancing and the kind of “spirit-filled” jumping up and down in their seats you see at one of the more charismatic Black churches. If you needed any more proof that all blues, jazz, rock and soul music is firmly rooted in the songs of the African-American church, it’s right here. She soars to a climax, does a false ending, comes back to raise the crowd to even greater heights of spiritual ecstasy and then seems almost embarrassed by the wild applause. “You make me feel like I’m a star!” she says, rather shame-facedly, as if she’s saying, “No, don’t treat me like a star. I’m not the star. God is the star.” 

Then instead of trying to top “Didn’t It Rain?” with another rockin’ gospel number, she quiets the mood and sings Albert Hay Mallotte’s setting of the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer. Just about every other performance of this song makes it sound like one of the most putrid, treacly, and downright dull pieces of music ever written — but the sheer force and power of Mahalia’s voice, her tasteful use of ornaments and “worrying” (stretching one syllable over several notes), the rapt attention of the audience and the superb accompaniment of her longtime collaborator, pianist Mildred Falls (who, alas, is unseen in the film) make this one performance of Mallotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer” that raises the music to the sheer beauty and sincerity of the words. There are some lapses in the photographic presentation — like cropping Mildred Falls out of Mahalia Jackson’s performance (theirs was one of those collaborations between singer and accompanist where they are so “tight” together they sound as one) and not showing any shots of Thelonious Monk’s fingers on the piano keys (as with the surviving films of Jimi Hendrix, what we most want to see in a movie of Monk is what he did with his fingers to get those incredible sounds!) — but overall Jazz on a Summer’s Day is a remarkable movie that holds up excellently and is very much worth seeing. — 7/22/20

Mile High Escorts (Stargazer Films, Beta Film, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Mile High Escorts, a bit of titillation from Stargazer Films and Beta Film dealing with a super-private airline run by a rich old guy named Franklin (Steve Coulter) who built up a fortune doing heaven knows what after his dad worked 40 years as an aeronautics engineer for an aircraft company that laid him off and sent him on his way with a trophy-like statue of a plane in flight which Frederick keeps on his desk as a reminder of “the rewards of a lack of ambition.” With the money he made doing whatever his business was (writers Anthony Del Negro, Shane and Zach O’Brien, and Jeremy Hentschel couldn’t have been less interested in telling us) Frederick started a private airline to fly the ultra-rich to and around Europe with flight attendants who were also “concierges” and — though he didn’t necessarily require them to have sex with the clients — he made it clear that this would be the most desirable outcome in terms of keeping the customers satisfied. When the film opens Frederick is dying of lung cancer and his son Erik (Griffin Freeman) is anxious to inherit the business and turn it into an open whorehouse with wings, ending daddy’s policy of not forcing the flight attendants to do things they wouldn’t want to do.

The film’s central character is Lauren (Saxon Sharbino), who at the start is a flight attendant for a normal airline until she hits a triple whammy: her employers cut her hours in half, she catches her boyfriend screwing another woman and (since his parents co-signed the lease to their apartment) he throws her out, and when she moves back in with her dad and her younger sister Shannon (Ella Frazee) she finds they’re behind on all their bills and are about to lose the house she grew up in. So she and her friend and colleague Ashley (Kara Royster) accept the recruitment by Hannah (Christina Moore) to fly on Franklin’s airline and minister to the high-end customers’ needs for more than coffee, tea or milk. Hannah is in some ways the most interesting character in this committee-written story, directed by Sam Irvin; she’s pretty obviously Franklin’s mistress but she’s also a basically decent person and it’s clear Franklin wants to disinherit Erik and leave his fortune and his unusual airline to her. Alas, before that can happen Erik kills his father by withholding the oxygen mask he needs to breathe (I joked that someone on the writing committee must have seen The Little Foxes) and, when that doesn’t dispatch him fast enough, covering his nose and “burking” him. Meanwhile, Lauren and Ashley have started flying on the private plane and their first clients are traveling business partners Harold (Matt Mercurio) and Thomas (Esteban Benito). Once again, a Lifetime casting director (in this case Anthony Del Negro, who cast this film as well as co-writing it) has made a basic mistake in a prostitution story: he’s cast the johns with genuinely attractive, sexy actors whom the women would probably want to have sex with even if they weren’t getting paid to do so. Ashley takes to Harold — and to the sexual services that are an unspoken but clearly understood part of her employment deal — like the proverbial duck to water, but the more virtuous Lauren gets to the point of an underwear-clad romp with Thomas in his hotel room but draws back from the actual down ’n’ dirty.

Thomas doesn’t seem to mind all that much and eventually he even proposes marriage to Lauren — obviously the writers were thinking Pretty Woman here — but Mile High Escorts quickly turns into one of those Lifetime movies in which the writers simply don’t know when to stop. Erik, it turns out, is not only a hard-nosed capitalist but an out-and-out psycho; in the opening scene he killed a woman named Jenny (Chloe Carabasi) because she’d threatened to leave the airline and report it to the police (which police? Its operations are so far-flung, from Louisville and Frederick’s home “somewhere in Maine” to Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, it’s not clear which country would have jurisdiction). Later he whacks Hannah over the head with that little plane statue his dad kept on his desk (following the sacred Chekhovian principle that if you introduce an object in act one you have to do something significant with it later on) — apparently he has a well-oiled operation for getting rid of all the corpses he creates — and at the end he moves against Lauren and Ashley when he learns they’re recording their interactions with his clients on their smartphones and sending the recordings to Lauren’s sister Shannon (ya remember Lauren’s sister Shannon?) to store on her laptop as a backup. One of the creepier clients Lauren records is Paul (Adam Huss), who’s already tried to rape her — in a scene that naturally was a key part of the promos for this film he says, “I paid hundreds of dollars for you, and you won’t even give me a kiss?” — and who turns out to be an old boarding-school buddy of Erik’s. This time there’s an altercation in which Ashley kills Paul — again with a blunt instrument — and Lauren calls her fiancé Thomas to help them get rid of the body and evade the gendarmerie (we’re in Paris again).

Only — surprise! (well, not really) — Thomas turns out to be in on it with Erik, who tells Our Heroines that he’s sent a hit man to kill Lauren’s dad and sister and destroy the backup copies of the recordings, while he and Erik (Thomas identifies himself as another one of Erik’s boarding-school buddies, which makes us wonder if people Erik went to school with as kids are the whole customer base of his airline). There’s a fight to the finish just before the plane is supposed to take off in which both Erik and Thomas are mortally wounded — Thomas gets a sad farewell to Lauren in which he tries to convince her he loved her all along (this guy goes through more changes of loyalty than Gollum!) but she’s not convinced, and neither are we. Then there’s a typical tag scene set six months later in Marseille, France (like the makers of the 1944 film Passage to Marseille, the makers of this one leave off the final “s” from the city’s name), in which Ashley and Lauren receive a video call from Lauren’s sister Shannon, who’s attending college in the U.S. while Ashley and Lauren have decided to stay in France and study there, Lauren studying European cultural history and Ashley studying fashion design. Lauren, it’s previously been established, already knows how to speak French, and Ashley is rather anxious about her need to learn it before her classes start. Mile High Escorts is an O.K. Lifetime thriller, a bit too skimpy on the soft-core porn for my taste (though I loved the scene in which we got to see Esteban Benito topless in bed; he has pecs to die for and if I were in bed with him, I couldn’t keep my hands off him!) and trailing off into hysterical over-the-top melodrama (I found it especially unbelievable that Lauren’s dad manages to overpower a hired killer half his age and shoot the man with the killer’s own gun) and not the film it could have been if the writers had ditched the psycho stuff and made the conflicts more internal as the women wrestle with the moral implications of their “services.”

Murder in the Vineyard (Cartel Pictures, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

The Lifetime movie I did watch last night was their much-ballyhooed “premiere,” Murder in the Vineyard, which despite some of the usual Lifetime sillinesses turned out to be pretty good. A product of Cartel Pictures (which for some reason imdb.com’s site-masters seem to think is two companies, “Cartel Pictures” and “The Cartel,” even though that’s only one enterprise) and Reel One Entertainment, Murder in the Vineyard begins with a virtually incomprehensible chase scene in which someone is chasing someone else through, you guessed it, a vineyard. We get the impression that the chasee is a woman and the chaser is a man, but other than that we really have no idea what’s going on when suddenly director Craig Goldstein, working from a script by Anne Richardson, jump-cuts to a scene of two women in a car driving up to the wine country and we get one of Lifetime’s typical chyron title, “Three Weeks Earlier.” Three weeks earlier Emma Kirk (Helena Mattsson — shouldn’t her name have been “Helena Mattsdöttir”? Just asking) and her daughter Beatrice, colloquially known as “Bee” (Emma Fuhrmann), are driving up to the wine country of Topanga in southern California (though the name of its police station has the opening “T” erased so it reads “Opanga” — Charles would be pleased!). Emma grew up there and had a brief affair with Luke (Daniel Hall), who back then was the soccer star of Paso Robles High School and looked headed for a professional career in the sport until he tore his foot open on one bad play and was reduced to coaching instead of playing. Then she left town and made her way to Los Angeles, where she launched a startup that became a major success (though we’re never told just what her company did — Arthur Miller, you have a lot to answer for from your decision never to specify in Death of a Salesman just what product Willy Loman sold!) and whose recent IPO has made her rich.

She’s decided to use the money to buy a winery in her old home town and apply her business expertise to grow and sell a new line of premium wines, though this has the longer-established vintners (whom we never see) upset because they’re worried that with her capital she can put them all out of business. But that’s not the main intrigue: that turns out to be Bee’s travails as a high-school junior who’s suddenly had to transfer to a new school where she doesn’t know anybody and she immediately antagonizes the Big Girl on Campus, head cheerleader April Ferguson (Sarah Pierce, rather oddly cast in this role since she’s tall and stocky and hardly the sylph-like creature one usually gets playing a head cheerleader in a high-school drama), when Bee innocently walks past a soccer practice and is immediately accosted by team captain Bryan Hayes (Matthew Erick White, who’s easy enough on the eyes but not drop-dead gorgeous and nowhere near the actor they needed for what becomes a quite significant role as the plot progresses), who wants to dump his former girlfriend April and date Bee instead. Bryan is also being followed by the soccer team’s next most important player, Mac Wilson (Daniel Coyle, who to my mind is a lot sexier than Matthew Erick White), whose relationship with Bryan gives off a heavy-duty homoerotic vibe it’s likely neither director Goldstein nor screenwriter Richardson intended. (Frankly, it’s not hard to imagine them as a Gay couple, with hunky, butch Mac as the top and nerdy Bryan as the bottom.) April puts up a “slam site” on Bee with the aid of a couple of the other cheerleaders, falsely calling her a slut and claiming she has a “venereal disease.” This is just one of the oddball anachronisms in Richardson’s script — no one, especially of high-school age, has referred to sexually transmitted infections as “venereal disease” for decades, and the musical tastes of the characters are about a generation behind: Emma and Luke rekindle their former relationship to 1950’s modern jazz, the “good” high schoolers listen to the sort of “sensitive” singer-songwriter stuff that was popular in the 1970’s and only the “bad” high schoolers listen to rap.

Bryan wins Emma’s permission to take Bee on a date following the year’s first big soccer game, only he first says he has to put an appearance at a party for the team — which turns into your typical Lifetime bad-teen party, with alcohol being served from the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups. Mac pulls Bryan into the house’s basement for what’s supposed to be a “team-only” bonding ritual, and with Bryan out of the way and unable to protect her Bee gets fed a drugged drink — she thinks it’s just cranberry juice but it’s spiked with ketamine and just three sips of the dastardly stuff and she’s under. When she comes to she’s at home in bed, having been brought home by Bryan, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “I Need Sleep” (she does, too!) and with no memory of what happened to her at the party after she blacked out. Like all too many Lifetime parents, especially Lifetime single moms, instead of believing Bee Emma concludes that she drank alcohol and got hammered at the party. Emma grounds Bee and won’t let anyone, not even nice-guy Bryan, see her off campus. The hits just keep on coming as Bee’s locker gets spray-painted with slogans denouncing her low morals and April’s “slam site” features photos of Bee at the party in bed with various members of the soccer team. Coach Luke (ya remember Luke?) gets upset with the immature behavior of his squad members and threatens to bench anyone who does any more further tricks. Bee loses the few friends she’s made at school, including Chloe (Katie Kelly) — who I had thought on the basis of her sexy costuming (skin-tight blue jeans and metallic silver shirts over a very tight-fitting bra that shows off her presumably natural chest assets) would turn out to be Bee’s principal high-school tormentor — and both she and her mom go to the police to report the bullying against Bee. Unfortunately, the police officer, Detective Roberts (Jon Root), couldn’t care less — he warns both Emma and Bee that the high-school soccer players are very popular in town and Emma is only going to make herself even more hated if she goes after them for bullying her daughter.

But Emma and Bee do learn from the police — and from the Black high-school principal (Joanne Baron in what’s very much a Vivica A. Fox-type role) — that two years earlier another girl at the school, Rachel, was the target of similar bullying and ended up committing suicide. Rachel was also a girlfriend of Bryan Hayes and, especially since Bryan’s father is already in prison (we’re told that it was for a non-violent white-collar crime but Richardson is no more interested in specifying what his offense was than she was in telling us what business Emma made her fortune in), the cops start suspecting him of drugging Bee at the party and letting other guys have their wicked ways with her while she was too drugged to fight back. (One of the reasons real-life date rapists like ketamine, also known as “Special-K,” is that the victim stays aware of her surroundings and was is being done to her — or him — but at the same time the drug immobilizes them and renders them powerless to resist.) Bee starts piecing back her memories of the party, including what happened to her and how she got the bruises on her sides from trying to fight off one of the guys, but later she disappears — lured away by a text from someone who stole Bryan’s phone and said he wanted to meet her — and of course Emma doesn’t trust the police and thinks she has to find Bee herself. By this time I had guessed there was a conspiracy afoot that had murdered Rachel and was after Bee as well, and either of two people were at the head of it — either the rather creepy guy who was Emma’s assistant at the winery (ya remember the winery?), whom I thought would turn out to be in unrequited love with her and fiercely jealous of Luke; or it would be Mac Wilson, whose unrequited Gay crush on Bryan was leading him to knock off all Bryan’s girlfriends and make it look like they killed themselves.

In the end [spoiler alert!] Mac indeed turns out to be the killer; he not only knocked off Rachel way back when but more recently killed April Ferguson (ya remember April Ferguson?) when she threatened to go to Emma and Bee with information (once again Richardson doesn’t specify what information, though April did discover her “slam site” against Bee was hacked and someone else posted the compromising pictures of Bee and the soccer players from the party), and now he’s after both Emma and Bee. He’s living in a farm house on the outskirts of town and he’s tied up Bee and locked her in an outdoor shed; Emma frees her by knocking the shed’s padlock open with a pickaxe, but (in the opening scene we’ve already seen before the extended flashback that has constituted the bulk of the movie) Mac recaptures both of them, locking Bee in his basement and tying up Emma and strangling her preparatory to raping her and then killing her. Mac speaks lubriciously about how for him the real thrill is when his victim starts to lose air and is about to transition from life to death. Only Mac has left a box-cutter knife in reach of Bee’s bound hands, and she grabs it, cuts herself free (it helped that, while he tied her legs together with rope, he used only duct tape for her hands), then uses the box cutter to stab Mac and, though she doesn’t kill him, she wounds him enough that he collapses in the vineyard where he’s been chasing them and the police eventually arrest him. The police caught on when they realized Bee had been drugged with ketamine and Mac’s estranged father, Dr. Doug Wilson (Blake Boyd) — who’s listed on imdb.com as “credit only,” which usually means a TV series regular who’s listed on screen but doesn’t appear in that episode, though not only is this a stand-alone movie rather than a TV episode but he actually appears in one scene in the film — is a veterinarian and therefore has ketamine (whose legitimate medical use is as an animal tranquilizer) on hand which his son, on one of his rare visits home, was able to steal.

Emma was able to search Mac’s room before he caught on to her and copied three photos of women Mac had killed other than Rachel, indicating his true motive is he’s a psycho serial killer of women (so I was right about Mac being the killer but way wrong about his motive!). Murder in the Vineyard is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie — the plot more or less makes sense and Richardson and director Goldstein at least partially follow Hitchcock’s Law in constructing a thriller — tell the audience up front what’s going on and build suspense out of when the characters will find out and what’s going to happen to them when they do. There are also some quite felicitous ironies in Richardson’s script, including the bizarre intercuts between Bryan courting Bee and his coach Luke courting Emma — Bryan’s coach (and father figure, given that his real dad is in prison) is making love to Bryan’s girlfriend’s mom, which seems almost incestuous — and the way Luke and Emma always seem to have three wine bottles on the table in front of them whenever Luke comes to Emma’s place (she is in the wine business, after all!), even as she’s lecturing Bee for going to a drunken party. Murder in the Vineyard isn’t one of the very best Lifetime movies — it’s not Restless Virgins or The Bride He Bought Online — but it’s a quite good one, and well acted by all the principals except Matthew Erick White, who simply doesn’t have either the good looks to make us believe Bee would fall in love (or at least in lust) with him at first sight or the authority as an actor to make us believe he would defy all the “cool kids” in school and maintain his friendship and interest in Bee even after the rest of the school declared her a pariah.

Game of Thrones, season five, episodes five and six: “Kill the Boy,” “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” (Startling TV, TV 360°, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2015)

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

I put on the next two episodes of season five of Game of Thrones, “Kill the Boy” (episode five) and “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” (episode six). Once again switching from MS-NBC to Game of Thrones only underscored what a perfect story this is for the Trump era: a saga with no heroes, just a bunch of opportunists all out for themselves, seeking power not for any idealistic reasons (the one character who actually shows any idealism, nominal King Tommen Baratheon, is played by Dean-Charles Chapman and is depicted as a pathetic wimp who’s only being kept alive by his powerful and unscrupulous mother, Cersei Lannister, played by Lena Headey) but just to have it. Though it’s nominally set in the distant past rather than the near-future, Game of Thrones is a good illustration of George Orwell’s maxim that humanity’s future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” There’s no one in the dramatis personae we really like — though there are a few people in Game of Thrones, like Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage in the role every little-person actor who’s ever lived probably dreamed of: a complex, multidimensional character who can do the most outrageously evil things and retain his roguish bad-boy charm) and the female knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie, whose six-foot height no doubt makes her difficult to cast but she’s ideal here), for whom we have a grudging admiration for their survival skills. As before I’m reproducing the imdb.com synopses of these episodes, this time with bracketed, italicized notes I wrote immediately after seeing them to keep important details in my memory, because the biggest single problem with Game of Thrones is how many different plot threads original author George R. R. Martin and his adapters, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (who got Martin to sell the rights to his books, a cycle collectively known as A Song of Ice and Fire of which the first book in the series is called A Game of Thrones — oddly Martin still hasn’t finished the last two books in the cycle so Benioff and Weiss had to come up with their own ending to the saga, which got roundly criticized when it was originally shown, though given how impermanent anyone’s hold on power is in this story it’s impossible to imagine a truly permanent ending), try to keep going at once. Charles is also upset at how many plot threads have simply got dropped and apparently forgotten about by the writers —though that doesn’t mean they won’t suddenly reappear: Game of Thrones is full of the sorts of moments Anna Russell made fun of in her legendary parody of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: “Ya remember ___________ ?” Anyway, here are the bare facts of what happened in episodes five and six:

Kill the Boy: In Meereen, Daenerys has to decide how to deal with the former masters after the death of Ser Barristan Selmy and the injuries inflicted on Grey Worm. She decides to round up the heads of the 13 richest families in the city and introduce them to her dragons [who burn and eat two of them]. Jorah Mormont and Tyrion Lannister approach the ancient city of Valyria and, after witnessing something quite incredible [a flying adult dragon], they are set upon by the Stone Men, and Mormont does not escape unscathed. Sansa finally sees what has become of Theon, courtesy of Ramsay Bolton's jealous mistress Melisandre. [Theon has been brainwashed to forget who he is and goes by the name “Reek.”] Ramsay is particularly cruel to Theon at a dinner, much to Roose Bolton's displeasure. At Castle Black, Jon Snow tries to convince Tormund Giantsbane to move his people south of the Wall and settle in lands that will be made available to them. Most of the men of the Watch object to the plan.

Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken: Arya is tested by Jaqen H'ghar in the House of Black and White and he tells that she is ready to become someone else. Tyrion and Jorah have a conversation about Daenerys and Jorah's father and how he was murdered by his own men; out of the blue, they are captured by pirates and turned into slaves. Little Finger stumbles with Lancel in King's Landing and has a meeting with Cersei and he plots against Stannis Baratheon and the Bolton. Jamie and Bronn are riding in Dornes and they meet Myrcella; however they need to fight against the Sand Snakes. Lady Olenna meets with Cersei to discuss the future of Loras Tyrell. He is judged by the High Sparrow and Margaery Tyrell is involved and arrested with her brother to a formal trial [because Loras is Gay and Margaery lied when she said she had no idea of this]. Sansa marries Ramsay Bolton and he humiliates her [by making Reek watch them on their wedding night and apparently raping her in the ass].

In case you were wondering, the title of the “Kill the Boy” episode doesn’t actually refer to killing a boy — though there’s been enough bloodshed in these shows one could readily imagine it would — but to the advice Jon Snow (Kit Harington) gets from one of the old sages that abound in this story (even though he’s put another one to death at the end of one of the previous episodes: he killed the leader of the Wildings, a human tribe on the other side of the Wall separating the seven kingdoms of “Westeros” from the White Walkers, a tribe of ghosts who live north of the Wall and survive, like George Romero’s zombies, on eating people; though Jon had him burned at the stake he alao fired an arrow into him, which I thought was a coup de grace and a quasi-merciful attempt to spare him from being burned alive … though as I pointed out in my comments on the last two episodes, being burned at the stake was actually a relatively humane way of execution since you’d die from smoke inhalation before the flames burned your body; however, homosexuals were considered so especially evil that instead of being burned at the stake they were bound and tied up, then thrown directly on the flames with the fire logs, which is how the term “faggots,” which originally meant fire logs, got to be a derisive slang term for Gay men. This time Jon and the new/old advisor decide to offer the Wildings safe passage, asylum and settlements inside the south on the other side of the wall, even though the Night’s Watch tribe Jon is supposed to be leading and the Wildings have been attacking and killing each other for centuries. (The script frames it as an interesting parallel to the long-standing religious conflicts in Northern Ireland and how difficult it was to frame a peace agreement there and get it to stick despite all the long-standing enmity and bloodshed between the sides.) 

The advisor says that Jon should proclaim this policy and deal with the hostile reactions to “kill the boy” inside him and let the man come forth. As in the previous two episodes, though, the most interesting plot line of this one is the “High Sparrow” cult Cersei Lannister encouraged and then quickly spiraled out of her control (sort of like the Dowager Empress of China at the turn of the last century, who originally sponsored the Boxer Rebellion as a way of controlling the claims the Western powers who had claimed more and more authority over nominally independent China, then had to turn towards the West to save herself and her imperial regime from the Boxers) and the McCarthy-ite way the High Sparrow’s agents ramp up the witchhunt until it ensnares the woman who’s at least nominally the Queen of Westeros (but of whom Cersei is fiercely jealous because she threatens Cersei’s control over her son, nominal king Tommen). There’s also an interesting plot line involving Tyrion Lannister, who isn’t as interesting a character when he’s on the outs fighting just to survive than he was on the “ins” manipulating the others at the royal court and indulging himself with wine and women. In the previous episodes he was captured by Jorah Mormont, who is (or at least is representing himself to be) an agent of Daenerys Trageryan (Emilia Clarke) and is taking Tyrion to Daenerys in a two-person boat when they’re menaced first by the Stone Men and then by slavers. Jonah warns Tyrion not to let the Stone Men touch him as they fend off the Stone Men’s attacks — we get the impression that they will actually turn to stone if a Stone Man touches them (a rare bit of the supernatural in a story that for all its brutality and typical fantasy-like unbelievability has mostly at least stayed within the normal laws of biology and physics, except for those damned White Walker characters), though that actually happens to Tyrion he seems to survive with no lasting ill effects. 

Then when their boat is shipwrecked because of the Stone Men’s attack they end up on a shore where they’re set upon by a slaving party — and I loved the irony that in this story the slavers were Black and the people they’re trying to enslave were white! Tyrion, with the gift of gab and the utter unscrupulous that’s made his lovable-rogue character work through the entire series (as opposed to the hatable rogues that make up most of Game of Thrones’ dramatis personae), talks the Black captain out of killing him and slicing off his cock for sale (apparently a little-person’s dick was the Game of Thrones era’s equivalent of Viagra) by saying the only way anyone can be sure it’s a little-person’s member is if it’s sliced off in their presence. When the leader of the slaving party says that they can tell it’s a little-person’s dick because it’s correspondingly little, Tyrion smiles and winks with Peter Dinklage’s most charmingly hypocritical smile and wink and says something on the order of, “You couldn’t be more wrong.” Game of Thrones is alternately entertaining and maddening, and as I keep saying it’s a perfect story for the Trump-era Zeitgeist because the characters (with only a few rare exceptions) are so utterly amoral and driven by a lust for power for its own sake (as well as “lust” in the non-metaphorical meaning of the term) they fully live up to the denunciation of both Donald Trump his father Fred as “sociopaths” in the new book Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump, Donald’s niece. Game of Thrones mirrors the Trump family’s creed and its valuation of strength and power as the manly virtues, while compassion and empathy are the qualities of suckers and creeps. If Donald Trump belongs anywhere, it’s on the Iron Throne, not in the White House as the powerful but constitutionally constrained ruler of a republic; one wishes we could consign Trump to the fictional world of Martin, Benioff and Weiss and restore a measure of sanity to the real one!

Game of Thrones, season five, episodes three and four: “High Sparrow,” “Sons of the Harpy” (TV 360°, Startling TV, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2015)

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

Last night Charles and I watched the next two episodes of Game of Thrones, season five: “High Sparrow” and “Sons of the Harpy.” I’ll reproduce the imdb.com synopses for these two episodes:

High Sparrow: Sansa and Littlefinger finally approach their destination where she learns she is to marry Ramsay Bolton. She initially refuses but Littlefinger convinces her that it’s all part of a much greater plan. In Braavos, Arya has now entered the House of Black and White, a dark and somewhat unpleasant place. She learns from Jaqen H’ghar that as a first step, she must rid herself of all personal possessions. Tyrion and Varys arrive in Volantis where Tyrion, already fed up with traveling, heads straight to a brothel where he is recognized. In King’s Landing, Tommen and Margaery are married and the young king is enjoying the pleasures of married life. Also, the High Septon is ridiculed when the Sparrows find him in Littlefinger’s brothel and march him down the street stark naked. The Septon demands that Cersei does something about these outrageous acts and she decides to visit the man commonly referred to as the High Sparrow. At the Wall, the new commander hands out the assignments but one of ...

Sons of the Harpy: Jorah Mormont steals a boat to navigate with his captive, Tyrion. Aboard a merchant ship, Jaime and Bronn sail to Dorne to rescue Myrcella. The Iron Bank is charging their loan and Cersei sends a representative of the Small Council to negotiate with the bankers. She then has a meeting with the High Sparrow and gives an army and power to his followers to neutralize the capital’s sinners, including the patrons of Littlefinger’s brothel, and Ser Loras Tyrell, the brother of Margaery. Tommen and his Kingsguard are stared down by the Faith Militant, and the king refuses to fight his way to the Tyrell knight. The disappointed Margaery leaves his side to stay with her family. Stannis Baratheon plans to head to Winterfell before the snow. Jon Snow is summoning nobles to help the Night’s Watch with men and supplies and he has a dilemma with the name of the Bolton family. Melisandre tries to seduce Jon Snow, but he resists the temptation and does not break his vows. Shireen, restless at Castle ...

The most interesting thing that happens in these episodes is the rising of a new religious cult, the cult of the “High Sparrow,” who at first I thought was preaching the Judeo-Christian-Islamic notion of the big all-in-one, one-in-all “Sky God” (to use the late Gore Vidal’s phrase) that directly intervenes in human affairs and enlists the help of the righteous to smash human immorality in general and sexual immorality in particular. It turns out that the overall religion of George R. R. Martin’s universe remains a system of seven gods (represented by the seven-pointed star that is seen as an emblem on quite a few places, including both above the Iron Throne and as a design on the floor of the throne room. It turns out the “High Sparrow” is merely a Fundamentalist leader within the Church of the Seven Gods, and he’s encouraged by Cersei Lannister, mother of the current King Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman), who has just got married to Margery (Natalie Dormer) and is having so much fun having sex with her (he really was a virgin on her wedding night, a rare accomplishment in the Game of Thrones world: when one character complained that the people in another tribe do nothing but “fighting and fucking,” I said, “That’s all anybody does in Game of Thrones: fight and fuck!”) he literally doesn’t want to do anything else. 

Only Margery’s brother is one of the alleged “sinners” kidnapped by the High Sparrow’s acolytes, and when she complains to Tommen and demands that he do something to get her brother released, he confronts the High Sparrow’s minions but refuses to disturb the High Sparrow personally because he’s told, “He’s praying,” and even though he has an army at his back Tommen recoils from ordering the sort of violence and slaughter it would take to rescue his brother-in-law and instead withdraws and pouts, “I’ll find another way.” Of course this, in the Trumpian world of Game of Thrones, means he’s not long for this world because he’s too weak to survive at all, let alone be king. What’s more, though Queen Mother Cersei encouraged the High Sparrow cult to re-form the “Church Militant” and go on their rampage in the first place, at the end of the surprisingly short (only 51 minutes), she’s going to get a what-goes-around-comes-around comeuppance at the end because the High Sparrow’s minions start the old rumor (which I think we’re supposed to accept as fact) that Cersei’s sons Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), the Nero-like psychopath who got assassinated several episodes before but who was such a fascinating character he’s sorely missed in the dramatis personae) and Tommen were really the product of an incestuous affair she had with her brother Jaime Lannister (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau) and are therefore “bastards” who didn’t and don’t deserve to sit on the Iron Throne. 

The two episodes deliberately contrast Tommen’s wimp-out to Jon Snow’s (Kit Harington) actions as commander of the Knight’s Watch, the army corps who protect the north wall and are supposed to keep the Wildings and the White Walkers (the former are human, the latter are ghosts or something) from invading “Westeros” (i.e., they’re maintaining Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland), who summarily has his old friend and advisor executed — and even beheads the poor guy himself — when the old man turns town Snow’s order that he take over a ruined castle even farther out in the middle of nowhere than the rest of the Knight’s Watch’s infrastructure and rebuild it. In the very Trumpian value system of Game of Thrones (and though most of was filmed while Barack Obama was President it very much reflects the Trump-era Zeitgeist and in particular its total rejection of compassion and empathy as values, and its focus on strength and sheer force as not only necessary but positive and desirable) this indicates that Jon Snow is a real leader and Tommen Lannister Baratheon a wimp who deserves the assassination that is no doubt his inevitable fate. There’s also some interesting backstory concerning the female night Bronwyn, or whatever her name was, and her squire Bronn; she tells him she married one of the Baratheons even though she knew he was Gay simply because everyone else laughed at her, and when he was killed she had a major trauma over her inability to protect him — a rare instance of tenderness and vulnerability in a story that otherwise takes so low an opinion of love and the gentler human virtues in general that the end of the cast list for “Sons of the Harpy” (a reference to the Daenerys Targeryan plot line, which barely got mentioned in these two episodes) includes listings for “Whore #1,” “Whore #2,” and on up through “Whore #6”!