The Wrong Cheer Captain (Hybrid LLC, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I subjected my husband Charles to yet another Lifetime movie in their “Fear the Cheer” series, The Wrong Cheer Captain, which was about midway in quality between the two they’d shown the night before, Killer Cheer Mom (good despite a typically dorky Lifetime title) and Pom Poms and Payback (so terminally silly it almost seemed like writers Doug Campbell and Richard Clark intended it as a parody of Lifetime films). If the title of The Wrong Cheer Captain didn’t give the whole plot away, the promos Lifetime showed for it did: the title character is an enigmatic young woman named Anna Barton (Sofia Masson) who has just shown up for her senior year at {ine Hills High School and got on the cheerleader squad. She’s obsessed with becoming captain of the squad and is willing literally to murder anyone who’s in her way. Her first pigeon is Emma Rogers (Claire Tablizo), who even though she isn’t as agile in her cheerleading moves as Anna has been part of the community all her life and is known and trusted by the other girls on the squad as well as Coach Johnson (Chelsea Gilson). The girls get to vote on captain, though Coach Johnson makes the final decision – apparently Emma got all the votes except Anna’s and the girls threatened a revolt if she wasn’t chosen. Anna meets Coach Johnson and complains, and the coach tells her, “If it weren’t for Emma, I would have picked you as captain” – thereby unwittingly signing Emma’s death warrant.

Anna duly executes Emma at a party in which the kids are drinking alcohol from beer bottles and the ubiquitous red plastic Dixie cups that have become de rigueur for underage drinking in Lifetime movies (and, according to Charles, drinking in real life as well; though Dixie makes these cups in various colors, and there are other companies like Solo that make them clear, red is by far the best seller). Anna spikes Emma’s cup with an overdose of a steroid, nicknamed “honey,” and she passes out and is dead before anyone even notices her, let alone has a chance to call 911. The coach duly names Anna as replacement captain, much to the disgust of the other squad members in general and our protagonist, Kate Taylor (Alexis Samone), in particular. Director David DeCoteau and writer Adam Rockoff are old Lifetime hands, and the top-billed actor in the movie is Vivica A. Fox – but instead of making her the principal or other authority figure at the school, they make her Kate’s mother, Carol Taylor – and the fact that Carol and Kate are Black itself is a departure from the typical Lifetime formula (a white female lead and a Black actress as her best friend who finds out the villain’s plot but gets killed before she can warn the heroine).

Alas for Kate, Carol is as dominant and controlling as her mother as she’s been in previous movies in which she’s run an entire school, angrily reacting when Kate decides to see Shane (Noah Fearnley), the late Emma’s boyfriend and a guy who perked up Charles’ Lust-O-Meter considerably. The luscious medium shots DeCoteau and his cinematographer give us of Shane topless help (though I found him a bit too twinkie-ish for my taste and thought the other main male in the cast quite a bit hotter – more on him later), though Charles looked up Noah Fearnley’s imdb.com page and noted he has a big tattoo on his left side that reads “Family” in cursive script, which DeCoteau carefully framed his shots of the topless Shane working out to avoid showing. The guy in the movie I thought was hotter was Marc Hermann as Eric Olson, Anna’s calculus teacher, who got on Anna’s bad side when he threatens to fail her in his class and also catches her with a vape pen (Pine Hills High has a “zero tolerance” against any products containing nicotine). So after she’s killed Emma, Anna frames Olson by uploading sexy photos of cheerleaders onto his computer (she does this while he’s undressed and is in his shower, which gives us the chance to see Marc Hermann topless as well – he’s drop-dead gorgeous with an especially nice set of pecs, and as Charles noted, for all Lifetime’s promotion of “cheerleader” in their movies as a way to attract straight guys to watch, there’s considerably more beefcake than cheesecake in this one!) so he’ll be accused of being sexually interested in the kids and get himself busted.

Despite her mom’s implacable opposition, Kate and Shane sneak off together and find Anna’s past: she once attended a school called Lombard High and was a cheerleader there, too, until her principal rival on the cheer squad mysteriously died of an overdose of the same drug that killed Emma. They interview the other dead girl’s mother and find that Anna had a nervous breakdown after the body was discovered and was in a mental institution for a year and a half until she was released, whereupon she enrolled at Pine Hills and decided to take up her cheerleading career where she’d left it off. Ultimately it ends with Anna confronting Kate in the offices of the school’s principal, Simpson (Jackee Harry – yet another heavy-set and formidable Black female authority figure, whom they obviously cast because Vivica A. Fox was playing the heroine’s mother and they wanted another woman of a similar physical “type” to play the principal), with Anna yielding a hypodermic whose contents will apparently be lethal, since she’s threatening to inject Kate with it and thereby kill her. Only They Both Reach for the Syringe (Charles chuckled at this variation on the familiar Chicago gimmick of “they both reached for the gun”!) and ultimately Kate sticks it in Anna’s side, though perhaps since it’s only a skin shot Anna survives and, in the final scene, is once again in a cell in a mental hospital, still plotting how to get out, go back to high school and embrace her destiny to be a cheer captain. (What she was planning to do with the rest of her life after she graduated remains a mystery. So do the whereabouts of her parents: we’re told she has a rich dad who jet-sets around the world as part of his job, but we’re never aware of what happened to Anna’s mom. If Adam Rockoff had had her be a mental patient, both her absence and Anna’s madness would have been better explained.)

The Wrong Cheer Captain was an O.K. Lifetime movie, delivering the goods (and offering a lot more glimpses of scantily clad male flesh than I was expecting) that suffers from one flaw in the casting: both Chelsea Gilson and Marc Hermann look so much younger than you’d expect from school authority figures that when they first appeared I thought they were playing students. (Of course, when I saw Marc Hermann undress for his shower I didn’t mind that at all!) If Killer Cheer Mom was at the high end of quality for a Lifetime movie and Pom Poms and Payback towards the low end, The Wrong Cheer Captain was about in the middle, and though I’ve previously defended Vivica A. Fox against imdb.com viewers who wonder how she gets all these parts (simple: she’s part of the films’ production team!), not only did she have relatively little screen time here, she’s so oppressive and pushy one wonders how Kate grew up relatively sane despite having a concentration-camp commandant for a single mother!

The Falcon in Mexico (RKO, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I ran Charles the next in sequence from the boxed set of the Falcon movies, produced by RKO’s “B” unit from 1941 to 1946: The Falcon in Mexico, made in 1944 and one of the better entries of the second leg of the series, where Tom Conway replaced his brother George Sanders as the Falcon, a.k.a. Tom Lawrence. (The gimmick was that the original Falcon was Gay Lawrence, Tom’s brother, who was killed off when Sanders wanted to leave the series and was replaced by his actual brother playing the brother of his now-deceased character.) The Falcon in Mexico was noteworthy not only for using two film clips from Orson Welles’ unfinished 1943 South American documentary It’s All True (though the scenes used here were shot not in Mexico, but in Brazil) but because of the intriguing plot line and a much better director, William Berke, whom for years I’d written off as a studio hack but actually turned out to have an interesting background. He’d started in the world of independent filmmaking (such as it was in the early 1930’s) and returned to it towards the end of his career; just before his death in 1958 he shot films based on the first two Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels which were quite good (and one of them featured the very young Jerry Orbach as a teenage thug decades before his famous trademark role as a New York cop himself in the TV series Law and Order) and showed he had a real command of the noir style.

He shows that in The Falcon in Mexico, too, at least in the opening reels taking place in New York City. Tom Lawrence stumbles on a young Mexican woman, Raquel (Mona Maris), trying to break into an art gallery and steal a painting she says is hers. When the Falcon sees the painting he immediately realizes that Ybarra isn’t its owner, but its model, and the painter is Humphrey Wade (Bryant Washburn), an American expatriate who fled to Mexico and died there in 1929. Only the painting is clearly of a living woman who would have been only a child in 1929. The painting had been consigned by the gallery owner, whom Lawrence finds dead on the gallery floor, to collector Winthrop “Lucky Diamond” Hughes (Emory Parnell), who claims to own every extant Humphrey Wade canvas that isn’t held by a museum. The Falcon flies to Mexico to trace down Dolores after she flees and ultimately ends up in a small town, taken there by cabdriver and guide Manuel Romero (Nestor Paiva, later the boat captain in the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies), who travels around with his son and seems to be a typically annoying comic-relief character – until the end, when he’s revealed to be an undercover agent of the Federales (a legitimate surprise from writers George Worthing Yates and Gerald Geraghty, whose brother Maurice Geraghty was the series’ producer).

The Falcon is on the trail of Humphrey Wade’s daughter Barbara (Martha Vickers, still being billed as “Martha MacVicar”), and he also runs into a Mexican dance duo, Dolores Ybarra (Cecelia Callejo) and her husband Anton (Joseph Vitale). In a rather grim irony that could have been made more of if the filmmakers hadn’t been limited to a 70-minute running time, Barbara reunites with her father, who it turns out wasn’t dead at all and had continued to paint during his 15-year incognito sojourn in the Mexican countryside, only just as the two reunite he’s shot by a sniper and killed for real. The killer turns out to be “Lucky Diamond” Hughes, who’s suffered financial reverses that caused him to sell the famous lucky diamond ring that was his trademark and gave him his nickname, who wanted Wade dead for fear a series of new Wade paintings would dramatically reduce the value of the pre-1929 Wades he already owned. A variation of this plot was used in the 1986 film Legal Eagles (a quite underrated attempt to revive the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s with a starry cast – Robert Redford, Debra Winger, Daryl Hannah – and directed quite stylishly by Ivan Reitman coming off the success of the first Ghostbusters), which was also loosely based on the legal battle waged by the heirs of abstract painter Mark Rothko against his gallery owner.

In Legal Eagles (a dumb title that probably hurt the film commercially), the artist died accidentally in a fire and the gallery owner killed to protect his secret – that he had a large stash of paintings by the dead artist and he was doling them out slowly enough to maintain the premium that attaches to artworks once the artist dies and therefore there aren’t going to be any more of them. He had told the artist’s daughter (the Daryl Hannah character) that all his remaining paintings had been destroyed in the fire that killed him, but they hadn’t been, and that way he could sell them without having to share the proceeds with her. Charles immediately noticed which scenes were directed by Orson Welles – one of fishing boats set out with their big butterfly-shaped nets and another in which Welles’ footage was used as the background in a three-way process shot, a surprisingly intricate special effect for a “B” – and he liked the movie overall, though I think he was a bit less taken with it than I and he spotted a goof: Bryant Washburn looks the same age in his live footage as he did in the photo of him his daughter had from before his supposed “death” 15 years earlier. (Today they’d use an old head shot of the same actor so it would be the same person, but in fact younger.) The film is also an interesting bit of movie trivia in that it features two actresses who worked with Humphrey Bogart: Martha Vickers, most famously, as Lauren Bacall’s nymphomaniac sister in The Big Sleep; and Mona Maris (who was active in films until she died in 1991; she made her last movie, Camila, in her native Argentina in 1984 after a 31-year hiatus), the star of Bogart’s first feature-length movie, A Devil with Women (1930).

Killer Cheer Mom (Hybrid LLC, Mayor Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime offered two “premieres” in their latest series of movies about cheerleaders, “Fear the Cheer.” They do a series of these every year around the opening of school, and I’ve long believed part of their motivation is that the word “cheerleader,” with its promise of nubile, scantily clad young women strutting their stuff on camera and exposing everything the rules of basic cable will allow, is one of the three buzz words why this network, which once proclaimed itself as ‘television for women,” can attract straight men to their audience. (The other two buzz words for the straight male audience are “sorority” and “escort.”) I hadn’t expected the two movies to differ so dramatically in quality, but they did: the first one, Killer Cheer Mom – despite a title that’s not only dorky in itself but serves as a “spoiler” – actually turned out to be a taut, exciting, attention-gripping thriller within the Lifetime genre, while the second, Pom Poms and Payback, was just silly. The dramatis personae of Killer Cheer Mom are Riley Dillon (Courtney Fulk, a name that seems destined to inspire bad jokes even though she’s quite good in the role), who has been raised by her dad James (Thomas Calabro) as a single parent since the death of her mom years before. Only suddenly, as she was approaching her junior year in high school, her dad has married a new wife, Amanda Blakely (Denise Richards, top-billed), and at her insistence has changed jobs and moved to suburbia, uprooting Riley from her familiar surroundings and friend circle in the middle of high school.

She makes one friend on her first day at school, Blaine (Jasmine Putmon), though since Blaine is Black and hardened Lifetime movie watchers like me know the all too common fate of The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine, we start mentally measuring her for her coffin almost as soon as she appears. She also meets a hot-looking young man named Cooper Morris (a young actor billed as Jay Jay Warren – his birth name is James Wray Warren II and he is hot, far sexier than the usual twerpy actors who play the age-peer boyfriends of put-upon high school girls in Lifetime movies, and he’s a phenomenal actor as well), who turns out to be the brother of Chloe Morris (Holly J. Barrett), captain of the school’s cheerleading team. As you might guess from the title, stepmom Amanda becomes obsessed with getting Riley onto the cheerleading squad, even though there are five other girls trying out for just two open spots. Amanda volunteers for the PTA (are Parent-Teacher Associations really a going “thing” in 2021? I remember them from my own grade-school years!) so she can have an excuse to be on the campus of Hamilton High School a lot and keep a watchful eye on the cheer squad and the other girls who are either on it already or trying out. She “accidentally” bumps into Ariel (Tristina Lee, the squad’s Black member, who previously played a similar role in another “Fear the Cheer” Lifetime movie, Dying to Be a Cheerleader) and plants a bottle of prescription steroids (with no name in the slot that usually indicates who it was prescribed to) in Ariel’s backpack.

That gets Ariel suspended from the cheer squad, only that’s not good enough for ambitious Amanda: she also downloads a video online from an anonymous source of a Black and a white teenage girl drinking beer while declaiming about the joys of weekend partying and underage drinking. She uses Photoshop-style video editing software (we already learned from writer Anna White that she was a video editor in her previous career) to take this video and splice on the faces of Ariel and another white cheerleader, Tiana (Mia Rose Frampton, Peter Frampton’s daughter), then posts it online. Of course it goes viral around the school and both Ariel and Tiana are permanently expelled from the cheer squad by the officious but sympathetic coach, Toni (Dominique Toney, yet another African-American authority figure in a Lifetime movie). Then, after Chloe gives Riley a ride home and they step inside so Amanda can make them smoothies, Amanda makes an excuse and cuts the brake line of Chloe’s car so she’ll have an “accident” on one of the steep, winding roads that abound in the area and take herself off the cheerleading squad – and the planet – permanently. Only Chloe is injured but not killed in the accident, but the cop assigned to investigate it, Detective Sanchez (Tia Texada), immediately leaps to the conclusion that Riley sabotaged Chloe’s car to eliminate one more young woman standing between her and a slot on the cheer squad. Riley goes to the hospital to see Chloe and her brother Connor, who got assigned to be her partner in biology lab and whom she’s been dating – and the scene between the two of them in the hospital is the most powerful moment in Jay Jay Warren’s performance, as without saying a word he goes from overall sadness at his sister’s life-threatening accident to desperate emotion as he hugs Riley for comfort to revulsion as he comes to believe (unfairly but understandably) that she caused his sister’s accident. (I told you the man is more than just a pretty face and a hot bod!)

What’s more, everybody in the school gives Riley the cold shoulder after Chloe’s accident – except for Blaine, who stays her friend and helps her research Amanda’s background. Riley discovers a clue – a puddle of brake fluid in her dad’s driveway where the stuff leaked out after Amanda cut the hose – that convinces her Amanda is the culprit (though why she didn’t figure it out earlier since Amanda is the only other person who could possibly have sabotaged Chloe’s car is a mystery to me – it’s the same plot hole as in the otherwise great 1947 thriller Lured, directed by Douglas Sirk and featuring great dramatic performances by George Sanders and Lucille Ball, and a movie I like writing about if only because people aren’t expecting to see “great dramatic performance” and “Lucille Ball” in the same sentence; Sanders’ character is suspected of being a serial killer because the killer wrote notes on Sanders’ typewriter, and Sanders never suspects his roommate even though he’s the only other person with access to the typewriter). One thing she has to go on in searching for Amanda’s real past is the story Amanda once told her that before she met Riley’s father she was involved with a man named Tim, whom she was deeply in love with and was making plans for a long-term future, only just as they were about to get married Tim committed suicide. In a quite creative (if somewhat obvious) use of irony in Anna White’s script, Amanda tells Riley, “You never know what’s really going on in someone else’s head.”

Riley realizes that she’ll have to go to Chicago to trace the mystery but she doesn’t have a car, so she needs to find someone who does and is willing to take her there. She first asks Blaine, but Blaine isn’t willing to cut school for the afternoon. So she asks Cooper, whom she has managed to convince that she didn’t cause the accident that disabled Chloe – Amanda did – and the two first steal Amanda’s cell phone and copy the list of addresses stored on it. Then they drive to Chicago to check out the addresses, and the first is the office of Amanda’s former therapist, Dr. Shaeffer (Jon Bridell), who tells them that due to doctor-patient confidentiality he can’t share any information about “Amanda” – or, as Riley and Cooper have found her real name is, Mallory Rivers. Apparently Anna Brown hasn’t heard of the exception to doctor-patient confidentiality (or, as I like to call it, “medical omertá,” after the code of silence of the Mafia) that not only allows but requires a therapist to warn the authorities if a patient poses an immediate danger to him/herself or others – either that or she’s drawing Riley and Connor as unaware of that law. Nonetheless, they’re able to trace a woman named Sarah Anders (Sonia Rockwell), whose ex-husband Timothy Anders was Mallory’s/Amanda’s former boyfriend until he refused to leave his wife for her. So Mallory/Amanda decided to eliminate the competition by cutting the brake cables on Sarah’s car, only that morning Tim and Sarah decided to switch cars and so Tim was the one who lost control of his car at 120 miles per hour on a mountain road and was killed in the crash – though the car was so badly damaged they couldn’t do a forensic examination of the wreck, they thus never found that the brakes had been sabotaged, and the cops officially ruled Tim’s death a suicide.

Once they realize who Amanda really is and what’s going on, Connor and Riley plan to go to the authorities – only Amanda sneaks up behind Riley and knocks her out, and when she comes to she’s in a garage, tied up, and Amanda has poured gasoline all over the floor and plans to light it and incinerate her. Just then Riley’s dad James, worried because Riley hasn’t been returning his cell phone calls, uses a tracker app to find the location of her phone and rescues his daughter just before the police – who’ve been called by Riley’s friend Blaine, the one person in the cast who’s realized what the numbers “911” mean – arrive and take Amanda/Mallory/whatever her name is into custody. Though Brown’s script follows a lot of the usual Lifetime tropes, at least she keeps the story within range of believability and she’s aided by the high-tension suspense direction of Randy Carter, who’s directed for Lifetime before (including one of last year’s “Fear the Cheer” movies, Cheer Camp Killer), and a highly potent cast. Denise Richards navigates the minefield of traps for actors (of either gender) playing movie psychos and makes Amanda neither too obviously evil nor too unbelievably good-on-the-surface (the revolution Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins wrought in the film Psycho but which has had diminishing returns for most of the people who’ve tried it since). She’s utterly believable as a woman who’s been knocked around by life and whose traumas have either knocked her personality askew or triggered mental illnesses she already had.

And her performance is matched by the people playing sympathetic characters, including Courtney Fulk as a more believable protagonist than usual; though I still think it took her longer than it should have to figure out that Amanda sabotaged Chloe’s car, otherwise she shows a good deal more independence and agency than your usual Lifetime “pussy in peril.” Indeed, the cast in general is quite well assembled – Holly J. Barrett makes Chloe a sympathetic character rather than the snobbish elitist cheer captains usually are in these movies, and as for Jay Jay Warren I’ve already praised him as not only drop-dead gorgeous but unusually talented: I want to see a lot more of him! About the only glitch in the casting is the reverse of one of my frequent pet peeves about movies; I’ve suffered through a lot of films (and not just on Lifetime, either!) in which I’m expected to believe that two people who hardly look at all similar are supposed to be biological relatives. Here, casting directors Dean E. Fronk and Donald Paul Pemnick created the opposite problem: Denise Richards and Courtney Fulk look so much alike, both women of medium height with similar facial structures and matching long blonde hair hanging down straight from their scalps, they’d be more believable as blood relatives than they are as stepmother and stepdaughter. Still, that’s at most a minor flaw in one of Lifetime’s better productions overall.

Pom Poms and Payback (Johnson Entertainment Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, Lifetime followed up one of their better “Fear the Cheer” movies, Killer Cheer Mom, with one of their worst, Pom Poms and Payback. This film starts with a flashback prologue in which a group of young girls in cheer uniforms taunt a homely girl, Sally Crumb (Taylor Scorse), singing a wretched song about her and ignoring her when she pleads with them to stop. Her younger sister Lila (Eden Harker) looks on with horror as the merciless cheerleader bullies taunt Sally. Then we get a chyron reading “25 Years Later” – we’re used to elaborate and abrupt jumps in chronology, either backwards or forwards (the prologue to Killer Cheer Mom was followed by a chyron reading, “Two Weeks Earlier”), but 25 years is a bit much even for them. Twenty-five years later the cheer squad at Palm Vista High School in the Los Angeles area is being run by an officious coach named Denise Evergreen (Emily Killian) who’s dating the school’s information technology guy, Howard (Clark Moore) – who, like the only other person in the cast who knows anything about computers, is drawn as a nerdy guy with big, thick glasses. (His imdb.com head shot reveals a reasonably attractive man before the makeup and hair people on Pom Poms and Payback “nerdified” him.) This time we’re not kept in much suspense as to who the culprit is, though writers Doug Campbell (who also directed) and Richard Clark take their time in establishing why, or what the connection is between the prologue a quarter-century earlier and the main body of the film.

She singles out the stars of the Palm Vista High cheerleading team, Sharlene (Shaylaren Hilton), Jessie (Le’Priesh Roman), and Annabelle (Jazlyn Nicolette Sward), and pulls pranks on them that cause them to break up with their boyfriends right on the eve of the senior prom. In the case of Jessie – the token Black on the squad (there had to be one) – the prank is that someone hacks into the school computer and alters her grades downward so she doesn’t get into Stanford University, and she immediately suspects her white computer-geek boyfriend (the other guy I was mentioning about who knows about computers and shows off as such by wearing big, thick black-rimmed glasses). Howard was savvy enough that when he altered Jessie’s grades at Coach Evergreen’s behest (she is shown almost literally leading him around by his dick, and indeed the scenes between them come as close as we’re going to get to the soft-core porn that used to be a lot more prevalent on Lifetime movies than it is now) he managed to fake it so it looked like it was coming from the IP address of Jessie’s boyfriend’s computer. Dastardly Denise Evergreen is also able to make it look like Sharlene’s boyfriend was having sex in a restroom with the school’s “fast” girl, Theresa Desmond (Shannon Styles, a talented actress who deserved a better character and more screen time than she got), only Denise had spiked his Gatorade with rohypnol and paid Theresa $300 to date-rape him. (If you think that’s a silly plot twist, there’s worse to come.) The third cheerleader has a 21-year-old out-of-town boyfriend and Denise is able to break them up by making it look like his plane has been delayed so he can’t come out to take her to the prom. At the next cheer practice Denise issues contradictory advice to the girls, first telling them they should accept being hurt and move on, then suggesting in classic nudge-nudge wink-wink fashion that they should pull pranks on their ex-boyfriends to get revenge. They do the latter – and Denise tells them off about it.

It’s not difficult for anyone who’s seen more than about three Lifetime movies to figure out where this is going, but just in case you haven’t already “Denise Evergreen” is really Lila Crumb, whose sister Sarah went to Conestoga High School in Mesa, Arizona, where she was unmercifully teased by the school’s three leading cheerleaders – and the person who teased and bullied her the most was Marcia (Carrie Schroeder), Sharlene’s mother. She swore revenge on Marcia and her entire family, and during the course of the movie she’s able to impersonate Marcia and take out a second mortgage on Marcia’s and Sharlene’s home, then deliberately defaulting on it and leaving them homeless. This movie goes totally over the edge when Sharlene and Jessie decide to break into Howard’s car to steal a flash drive on which, out of sheer force of habit, he’s backed up all the incriminating data exposing just what Denise has lured him to do for her through her sexual wiles, and they get the flash drive but just then Howard returns to his car (a white SUV) and drives off with Sharlene still inside, so she has to remain in the back of Howard’s car and avoid detection while Jessie follows them and the two girls make the discovery that Howard and Denise are lovers. Then Howard has an attack of conscience and, like all those similarly conscience-ridden criminals in 1930’s movies, makes the mistake of telling Denise he’s going to report her instead of just quietly doing so – and Denise grinds up some pills and spikes his ginger ale with them, causing him to pass out in his car. Denise drives the car with him in it to a railroad track, then parks it across the tracks so a train will crash into it, and she also manages to set the car on fire so his body will be burned up and there’ll be no evidence connecting her to any of this. Only Our Heroines have managed to trace Denise’s real identity as Lila Crumb by Jessie stealing her purse during a cheer practice and claiming she had to go to the bathroom. For some strange reason only Doug Campbell and Richard Clark could explain, instead of actually going to the restroom (one would think Jessie would hide out there to look for the incriminating documents they were expecting to find in Denise’s purse even if she didn’t really need to go) she goes through the purse and finds identity cards with “Denise Evergreen” but a knife with the initials “SC” out in the open so Doug Campbell can stage a phony and unbelievable “suspense” scene when Denise is on her way and Jessie just barely misses being caught.

The final scene is just as silly as the rest of it: Sharlene has discovered “Denise”’s true identity and has warned her mom, and mom tries to record a confession by buddying up to Denise and getting her to tell all while her cell-phone recorder is on – only Denise catches her and there are Doug Campbell’s attempts at parallel suspense editing between Denise chasing Marcia across the Palm Vista High campus carrying a baseball bat with which she intends to beat Marcia to death, and Sharlene in a stolen car (from a Black motorist who stopped to help her and Jessie after Jessie crashed their own car because Denise had, you guessed it, cut their brake line and they were driving on a mountain road – shot by cinematographer Thomas L. Callaway with so relentless a camera tilt the mountain roads look like the Indianapolis or Daytona speedways – and he had stopped to help, only Sharlene got in his car and drove off in it because she knew her mom was in mortal danger) is racing back to campus to rescue mom. In a final touch of total absurdity that puts the capstone on a relentlessly silly movie, Sharlene does a series of spectacular cartwheels across the school’s football field and saves her mom’s life by kicking Denise in the head and knocking her out – though Campbell and Callaway don’t let the camera linger long enough to tell whether Denise is merely unconscious or dead. Then there’s a tag scene in which we’re supposed to get all het up over the suspense of who’s going to replace Denise as the cheerleader coach – and [surprise! Not really] it’s Sharlene’s mom Marcia. (Well, she did have relevant experience lo those 25 years ago … ) If Killer Cheer Mom was a workmanlike and genuinely exciting thriller despite the dorky title, Pom Poms and Payback was a dementedly stupid movie that lived down to its, and one gets the impression Campbell and Clark could have done more with the character of a grown woman still traumatized by the suicide of her bullied older sister than they did.

Columbo: “Dead Weight” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Sundance Channel’s ongoing series of reruns of the 1970’s TV detective series Columbo has run its course and started over – instead of the extended two-hour episodes made towards the end of the show’s run that featured stories by noir writer Ed McBain that attempted to break (or at least bend) the Columbo formula, last night’s rerun (actually they did two but I only stayed up for one – there are limits even for obsessive people like me) was only the fourth show in the series, when they were still working out the formula and getting rid of the bumps in it. The episode was called “Dead Weight” and featured Eddie Albert, Sr. as Major General Martin J. Hollister, whose personal heroism and fearlessness in the Korean War (which was only about 20 years before this episode was made) had made him a living legend until a land mine ended his active service. He retired from the military and formed a company to make equipment for the Defense Department, only as he grew older and more affluent he also got crooked, forming a mutually profitable relationship with Col. Roger Dutton (John Kerr) in which Hollister’s company submits low bids for military contracts, Dutton signs off on them and then approves the large overpayments Hollister needs to make the contracts profitable and fund his lavish house on a West Coast beach community (though, oddly, his boat’s stern lists “Newport” as its home port, which is in Rhode Island).

Alas, their gravy train is about to be derailed by the Defense Department’s inspector general, who’s investigating the relationship between the military and Hollister’s company and has subpoenaed Dutton to testify against Hollister. Dutton drives to Hollister’s home in a brown Ford LTD (part of the thrill of watching a TV episode of this vintage is seeing the cars that were on the road back then) and announces his intention to cooperate with the investigation, and Hollister shoots him dead with the pearl-handled pistol he carried into combat all those years ago in Korea. Alas, the shooting is witnessed by Helen Stewart (Suzanne Pleshette) and her mother, Mrs. Walters (Kate Reid), who see it through the big picture window in Hollister’s home, though they are too far away to notice what the shooter or the victim look like except the shooter was wearing a bathrobe and the victim was in full military uniform. Mom insists that Helen not call the police, which she takes as a dare to do just that – and it looks like Helen is flirting with the hot young uniformed cop who takes the call. The young, hunky cop decides that actually investigating a murder is above his pay grade, so he calls in Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) – and the moment Columbo comes in and parks his trademark ratty Peugeot convertible (which wasn’t that popular a car even in France – as I noted when Charles and I watched the 1958 French film Paris Belongs to Us, the cars on the Paris streets in that film were mostly Renaults or Citroëns), wearing his trademark raincoat and looking, as one of the characters says later, like an unmade bed.

“Dead Weight” was directed by Jack Smight (who had some important feature-film credits, notably the 1966 neo-noir Harper with Paul Newman and Lauren Bacall) from a script by John T. Dugan, who threw in at least one inventive plot twist: he has Hollister find out who the witness is against him and tries to neutralize her as a threat by romancing her. Since she’s a 30-something divorcée and he’s never been married (his excuse is the usual one – he was too busy first being a general and then starting a defense company – and he’s also way richer than she, she’s impressed and starts genuinely falling for him, Remember that when he killed Dutton she didn’t get a good look at either of them and remembered only what each of them was wearing. The show also did an early version of a gag they rather wore into the ground later on, in which Columbo parks his car in front of the Hollister home to start his investigation, and is told, “You can’t park here. It’s being reserved for the police department.” And they borrowed the old gimmick from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1844) of having Hollister hide the murder weapon in plain sight; early on in the action he attends a testimonial dinner for an upcoming exhibit of his memorabilia. He tells Columbo the pearl-handed pistol that’s part of the exhibit is a replica since he lost the original, but Columbo deduces it is the original because Hollister is such a pack rat he’s kept everything. So he sneaks it out of the exhibit without Hollister’s knowledge and has it tested for ballistics, it’s a match for the gun that killed Hutton, and he arrests Hollister while he’s receiving people at the exhibit honoring him. (This show anticipated the Law and Order franchise by having the culprit arrested at the most publicly embarrassing moment the writers could think of – though that had been done as early as 1929 in the Al Jolson film Say It with Songs, in which Jolson is arrested for killing his manager, who was trying to get Jolson’s wife to have sex with him, and he’s taken into custody at the radio station where he broadcasts right as he’s finishing a song, “I’m in Seventh Heaven,” about how wonderful his life is and everything is going well for him.)

All in all, this Columbo episode is quite a lot of fun, intriguing not only as entertainment in its own right but also nice in that we get to see a lot of the later Columbo formulae before they hardened into clichés – and instead of the killer so elaborately premeditating the murder that his plans include a complicated means of disposing of the body, just when we’re wondering, “What the hell did he do with the body?,” he presses a button and a secret doorway opens in his wall revealing Dutton’s body wrapped in plastic, in a shot that recalls some of Universal’s classic 1930’s horror films. (Eventually he takes the body out of his stash and takes it on board his boat to dump it at sea – hence the “Dead Weight” episode title – only it turns up a few days later and the investigation gets more serious now that the cops have proof that Dutton is dead.) I also like the business of the villain romancing the principal witness against him even though a writer from the classic film noir era of the 1940’s and early 1950’s could have done a lot more with it than John T. Dugan did – like having the bad guy try to rush her into marriage on the ground that a wife can’t testify against her husband, and/or having her come to a shocked realization of who he really is and why he’s courting her, leading to him deciding he needs to eliminate her, and the cops coming in and either arresting or killing him just as he’s about to kill her. But Dugan and the show’s creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, already knew their character wasn’t going to be an action figure (even though Peter Falk had previously played gangster roles and had shown quite a lot of action capability in them), and even this early, though Columbo figures out who the killer is, he has to bring in two younger, more buff plainclothes cops to make the actual arrest!

The Hot Flashes (Vertical Entertainment, 4K Productions, The Hot Flashes LLO, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night we watched a quite entertaining and fairly recent (2013) movie called The Hot Flashes, which I had run into on Amazon.com looking for anything that might have featured the 1980’s San Diego-based four-women comedy group I remember from Pride festivals and other community appearances. No such luck, though this cast featured a lot of actresses of “a certain age” proving, both in the film’s plot and in its actual existence, that they can still cut it. Directed by Susan Seidelman from a script by Brad Hennig, The Hot Flashes takes place in the decidedly fictional town of Burning Bush, Texas, whose high-school women’s basketball team, the Armadillos, has just won the state championship. Beth Humphrey (Brooke Shields, who seems to have disappeared from the national radar screen in the 1980’s but turns out in middle age to be an actress of quiet dignity and power – who’d-a thunk it after all those roles in which she was little more than an animate sex doll?) is a local attorney (though she doesn’t seem to work much at it) married to the local postmaster, Lawrence (Eric Roberts), and her daughter Jocelyn (Charlotte Graham) is one of the Armadillos’ key players. Beth used an inheritance from her late friend Tess to underwrite a mobile van to travel around the Texas back country offering free mammograms (Tess died of breast cancer and was convinced she could have lived longer if she’d had the chance to be screened), only the inheritance has run out and Beth screwed up by not realizing she had to re-apply for matching funds from the state government every year.

Desperate to raise the $25,000 the state official she talks to says she’ll need to keep the van service going (and despite the nasty male-chauvinist comments of her husband and most of the other guys in town who derisively call it the “Tittie Truck”), she decides to reassemble the star Burning Bush high-school women’s basketball team she played on and challenge the current Armadillos to a three-game match. The other members are Ginger Peabody (Daryl Hannah), who runs the local auto dealership and has lived for 16 years with a woman she euphemistically calls her “roommate”; Florine Clarkston (Wanda Sykes, considerably easier to take while playing a character than I’ve seen her as guest host of late-night talk shows, where she’s just a bit too edgy for comfort), who has somehow inherited the mayoralty of Burning Bush from a white guy and is running for election in her own right (her inevitable campaign slogan is “Go with the Flo”); Clementine Winks (Virginia Madsen), the town’s “fast” girl who’s burned through four husbands and been reduced to working as a grocery clerk because her last ex, Coach Slaughter (Carl Palmer), totally took her to the cleaners in their divorce; and my favorite of the five, heavy-set Roxie Rosales (Carolyn Manheim), who bakes cakes and pies laced with cannabis and has a rather unassuming husband, Tito (Kenny Alfonso), who looks about half her size. The Hot Flashes suffers from a certain degree of predictability and a preposterous plot premise – one gets the impression that screenwriter Hennig had his old notes from Script Writing 101 out when he wrote this and checked off every plot point (three-act structure? Check. Exciting come-from-behind victories on the court? Check. A villain who tries to stop the big game from happening and whom the heroines have to foil? Check. A personal crisis for Beth that she has to overcome to triumph in the big game? Check) as he included it.

But The Hot Flashes is still a pretty good and quite funny movie – we may know where we’re going but we’re going to have a lot of fun getting there – and Seidelman directs with real energy and verve even though, like Kathryn Bigelow in Zero Dark Thirty and Patty Jenkins in Wonder Woman, she’s in the odd position of being a woman directing a film about female empowerment written by a man. Among the cleverer bits of the movie are making the team’s principal antagonist be the local church lady, Kayla Rash (Andrea Frankie), who gets the school board to cancel the final game and lock the school gym on the grounds that the Hot Flashes swear during games and one of them is a “homosexual” (which gives Ginger the impetus she needs to come out at last); Paul (Mark Povinelli), the little-person character (a disgraced veterinarian who served time – though it’s not clear what for) who en=ds up as the Hot Flashes’ coach (it’s nice to know that there are high-quality little-person actors out there besides Peter Dinklage; indeed I wish the makers of Game of Thrones had been able to write in another little-person character, if only because it would have been fun to see Dinklage and Povinelli confront each other!); and a genuinely moving finale in which Beth catches her husband late at night at the post office screwing another woman (who, in one of Hennig’s nicer touches as a screenwriter, eroticizes post-office jargon as he’s fucking her) and the experience shatters her morale. She tells Lawrence, “If you’re still seeing her, don’t come to the game tonight,” and just when we think we know where this is going – she’ll blow easy shots throughout the first half, he’ll show up at the halftime break (which features a dance performance by the 1980 Burning Bush cheerleaders, who by authorial fiat all happen to be the wives of the school board members who voted at Kayla’s behest to ban the final game, and whom Beth got to reverse their decision by offering their wives a chance to perform at halftime) and she’ll immediately get her game back, literally and figuratively.

Only he doesn’t show until the last three minutes, and after the game is over and the Hot Flashes have (predictably) won – thanks at least in part to Beth’s daughter Jocelyn telling off Kayla’s daughter Millie (Jessica Rothenberg) over her homophobic comments about Ginger and thereby throwing her off her game – and Beth correctly guesses that it’s Lawrence’s paramour who dumped him, not the other way around. That causes her to exit the marriage, though a tag scene shows that six months later she’s making money doing a blog at the Web address “bethwontshutup.com.” (Well, if you can believe a movie in which a bunch of middle-aged women take on a high-school girls’ basketball team and win, you can believe that a middle-aged, recently divorced woman from Nowhere, Texas could be making money hand over fist from a blog.) Though set in Texas, The Hot Flashes was filmed entirely in Louisiana, in and around New Orleans, and I wish Hennig had tweaked his script to have the story take place in Louisiana as well – there are lots of bits of local Louisiana culture he could have incorporated to make his film even more interesting – but as it stands The Hot Flashes is a real charmer that proves its whole point that middle-aged women still have a lot of life in them and shouldn’t be just thrown on the scrap heap by our youth-obsessed culture.

The Falcon Out West (RKO, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I decided to run a short movie for Charles and I while we waited for the last episode of Icon: Music Through the Lens on KPBS at 10 p.m. The film I picked was The Falcon Out West, the first in the second of the two boxed sets comprising all 13 movies RKO made from 1941 to 1946 about Michael Arlen’s character Gay Lawrence, a.k.a. “The Falcon,” whose day job was in New York’s financial sector but whose real avocation was solving crimes and getting in the way of the police as they attempted – with less success – to do the same. RKO bought the rights to Michael Arlen’s novel The Gay Falcon mainly as a replacement for Leslie Charteris’s character “The Saint” after Charteris pulled the rights, and though they used Arlen’s plot for the first Falcon film they did little more than change the character’s name from Simon Templar, The Saint, to Gay Lawrence, The Falcon. They even used the same actor who’d been making the Saint films for them, George Sanders, though after three Falcon films Sanders was getting bored with the role and wanted out. So someone at RKO hit on the idea of casting Sanders’ real-life brother, Tom Conway (who had changed his last name so he wouldn’t be accused of capitalizing on George Sanders’ success), as Tom Lawrence, Gay Lawrence’s brother, and making a film with both of them called The Falcon’s Brother, in which Gay Lawrence nobly gives his life to foil an Axis plot to assassinate a Latin American diplomat whose country is crucial to the Allied war effort (one of the few times these films, mostly made during World War II, actually drew on the war for its plot). Tom Conway, as “Tom Lawrence.” continued on as The Falcon for nine more series films, of which The Falcon Out West was the fourth. It was written by Billy Jones and Morton Grant, and directed by William Clemens, a hack who’d churned out much of Warner Bros.’ “B” output in the 1930’s before he switched studios. The Falcon Out West is an O.K. series entry which actually began, not out West, but in a New York nightclub (just about all of the Falcon movies start in nightclubs or have significant scenes in them) in which we see the hand of an unseen percussionist beating on a Native American drum. Then the camera pulls back and we see he’s just part of a swing band entertaining at the club. We get some quick exposition that lets us know that Tex Evans (Lyle Talbot, billed way down in the cast on his downward career trajectory from co-starring with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s to working for Ed Wood in the 1950’s), a Texas rancher, makes a typically swaggering entrance to the club several sheets to the wind. We’re also introduced to his fiancée, Vanessa Drake (Carole Gallagher), and also his ex-wife (Joan Barclay, for once released from the Monogram salt mines and getting to do a movie – even a “B” – at a major studio), who doesn’t want to be with him anymore but still has enough concern for him that she doesn’t want him hooked up with a gold-digger like Vanessa. The Evans table also includes his attorney, Steven Hayden (Don Douglas), whom I thought would turn out to be the killer – a lot of 1930’s and 1940’s thrillers, including The Thin Man, had the victim’s attorney be the one who did him in (usually because the attorney had been embezzling from him and the victim was about to catch him) – until he got knocked off himself about two-thirds of the way through.

The plot kicks off when Tex Evans does – he falls on the club’s dance floor and loses consciousness, and it turns out he’s been injected with rattlesnake venom through a device that makes it look as if a rattler actually bit him. By the time anyone thinks to call a doctor he’s already dead, and the Falcon deduces that though the crime occurred in New York, in order to solve it he and the other principals will have to relocate to that Western ranch. The place turns out to be a dude ranch but with enough of an “authentic” Western atmosphere that the taxi taking the people from the train station to the ranch is a stagecoach – no doubt requisitioned from RKO’s Western department (whose staff may have wondered why they needed it for a film set in the present), and of course the stagecoach runs away as its driver falls off and New York police detective Timothy Donovan (Cliff Clark) is stuck on the driver’s ledge with no idea how to control the thing. They’re saved by the appearance of butch cowgirl Marion Colby (a surprising role for the young Barbara Hale), who turns out to be the daughter of Dave Colby (Minor Watson), the late Tex Evans’ business partner. The relationship between them was actually a contentious one, which adds the elder Colby to the suspect pool, but after a lot of back-and-forth among the characters – including a cowboy named Dusty (Lee Trent), who may or may not be Marion Colby’s boyfriend and her partner in some nefarious activity or another – the writers pull an occasionally used trick and have Vanessa, the most obvious suspect (especially once we learn that Evans deeded his half-interest in the ranch to her, and then the Falcon finds the missing deed to that effect, giving her a big bow-tied beauty of a motive), and she did it with a ring that contained rattlesnake venom and injected it through two needles that made it look like the bite of a real snake. Supposedly this object was originally designed by a silversmith working for Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in the early 1600’s and then duplicated from the original in Tex Evans’ collection. The Falcon Out West is a reasonably good series entry, though some of the Tom Conway Falcons (including The Falcon in Mexico – with its intriguing plot about a supposedly dead artist who turns out to be alive, only he’s murdered shortly afterwards and the killer and his motive anticipate the 1980’s thriller Legal Eagles – and The Falcon in Hollywood, which is basically the same plot as The Producers but done absolutely seriously) are considerably more interesting. I felt sorry for Carole Gallagher, who from what we see of her could have turned out a really spectacular femme fatale performance in a script that gave her more depth.

Icon: Music Through the Lens, episode 6: “On the Net” (Cheese Film and Video, Eagle Rock Productions, PBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Falcon Out West I put on the sixth and last episode in the series Icon: Music Through the Lens, “On the Net,” which showed the rise of digital photography in general and smartphones in particular and included the predictable laments from veteran professional photographers that the new technologies have made things entirely too easy. It seems like everyone – or at least a large chunk of the audience – brings their smartphones to concerts (there’s no way to ban people from bringing cameras into concerts the way promoters could do in the old days) and often film the entire show, or as much of it as they can. Nick Mason, the drummer for Pink Floyd, said he wondered whether all the people so industriously filming their concerts with smartphones actually upload their videos to their computers and watch them again. (Enough do, though, that literally within days of Paul McCartney’s last San Diego appearance at Petco Park in September 2019 so many clips of individual songs from the concert had been posted by smartphone users to YouTube you could see almost the whole concert if you took the trouble to log on to it, song by song.)

For me, this final episode emphasized one of the things I like least about the digital age: its ephemerality. As I wrote eight years ago in my blog post “The Interblob,” in which I complained that the Internet was taking over virtually every other form of social interactions, Ken Burns was able to make the films he did about the Civil War and World War II because the soldiers who fought in them wrote their letters home on paper. Certainly a lot of them were lost over the years, but enough of them survived to give him material to work with and bring the past alive through the words of the people who lived it. With paper letters having been replaced by e-mails, texts, direct messages and other computer-based forms of communication, how will a future Ken Burns​ tell the story of our own time? Computerized communications are so ephemeral that there are files from only a decade or so ago that, though they exist in electronic form, can no longer be read because the software to decode them no longer exists. What’s more – as I’ve long believed and worried about – I think the rise of computerization is essentially killing off the whole idea of a “classic,” a work of art in any medium that’s good enough to stand the test of time. The whole ethos of the computer world is that newer is always better: that you constantly need to throw away everything you’ve accumulated and start over. This started out in computer hardware and software largely as a form of planned obsolescence to get you constantly to buy new equipment and thereby make the tech industry money – but I think it’s become an aesthetic of its own, a belief that the past has nothing to teach us and only the newest music, the newest photographs, the newest artworks, the newest films have any legitimacy.

Today the whole idea of “collecting” is becoming obsolete – at least partly, I suspect, to the increasing inequality of income that is making it difficult for young people to afford homes with enough physical space to store collections. Instead they’re being conditioned by the tech industry and by capitalism in general to regard that as a virtue. You no longer need to own a record collection; you can just “stream” everything and get the music you want to hear at a moment’s notice, then dispose of it electronically once you’re tired of it. At the same time as a lot of veteran photographers interviewed for this show (including Baron Wolman, who got bylines in Rolling Stone and probably had more to do than anyone else with creating the idea of “rock photography” as a career) lamented the rise of digital and the way they’re forced to work with digital equipment (largely because clients want the near-instant turnaround of digital and don’t want to have to wait for photographers to develop their film), there’s been a backlash and a renewed interest in film technology, with photographers accepting the technological limitations of film and using them for artistic inspiration. Though Dick Carruthers, who directed these programs, and whatever writers he used didn’t make the point themselves, it’s an attitude oddly parallel to the way musicians are eschewing digital recording and playback, going back to recording on analog equipment and releasing their albums on vinyl. (In 2019 vinyl records outsold CD’s for the first time in 30 years, though both physical formats are now niche markets and streaming accounts for over 80 percent of all music sales today – even though artists, including established ones like Mariah Carey, complain that whoever is getting paid for music streams, the artists themselves are making pittances off them.) Also, photographers like the return of vinyl if only because a vinyl record is three times as large and therefore the cover art looks that much better than it does on a CD.

This show was somewhat at odds with the immediately previous one, “On the Wall,” which was about the museum-ization of music photography and the fact that photos of 1960’s and 1970’s rock stars, both portraits and concert shots, have become a fine-art commodity, commanding three-figure prices for original prints and sometimes quite a bit more in the collectors’ market later on. In some ways the era of the 1960’s and 1970’s, both in the emergence of musicians as cultural icons and avatars and the recording and photographing of their performances, seems to have passed – one wonders whether even the most devoted fans of, say, Ariana Grande will be hankering for wall-ready prints of photos of her 50 years from now. In some ways the computer revolution has expanded the art world (today, as a number of the veteran photographers complained in this episode, digital cameras in general and smartphones in particular have made everyone a photographer, and you no longer have to worry about technical concerns like exposure, lighting and focus because the computer already does all that for you); but it’s also enabled a lot of people to put out a lot of junk out there and call themselves “artists.” It’s part of the same phenomenon that medical researchers are complaining about with respect to phony arguments against things like COVID-19 vaccination: just about anyone can post something that looks like a scientific paper, whether or not there are any real data behind it (and, ironically, it may have a considerably larger audience than real scientific papers on the same subject because the real papers are often hidden behind ultra-thick paywalls because the business model of journal publishers is to charge scads of money for their content).

The advent of computers, the Internet and the digitization of most culture is going to change the history of art (and indeed the act of writing history in general) in ways we still haven’t fully seen – and one down side is that it’s highly less likely that future generations will see enduring value in works that in their time was considered ephemeral. I’m thinking of the great 1920’s jazz records that were regarded as disposable commodities in their day but are now considered artistic masterpieces – and the way the criteria for evaluating them have changed. The Internet has been a good thing for preserving culture in that it’s made the music, literature and visual arts of the past almost instantly obtainable (I quite often listen to a favorite record of mine on YouTube these days rather than go to the trouble of hunting down my physical CD copy), but it’s also put in serious question just how long the culture of the present will survive and whether future generations will be able to hear the music of today at all, let alone with fresh ears that discern things in it we missed when it was new.

“The Sound of Music” Live (ITV British Television, 2015; U.S. release by PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was a TV version of The Sound of Music, the last musical ever by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (he died on August 23, 1960, nine months after The Sound of Music opened on Broadway, and on September 1 all the lights on Times Square were turned off for one minute and the lights on London’s East End were dimmed as a memorial). It was the last of the great collaborations between Hammerstein and composer Richard Rodgers, and the last work of this important figure whose 1927 production Show Boat had revolutionized the Broadway musical. Though Hammerstein had been writing for the theatre since 1920, Show Boat marks the real start of his important career, and since Charles and I had watched the 1936 film of Show Boat a few months ago I had a sense of comparing them as the beginning and the end of Hammerstein’s career. The production of The Sound of Music we were watching was originally a live telecast from London by Britain’s Indepdendent Television service (ITV) on December 20, 2015 and featured Kara Tointon as Maria von Trapp (nèe Reimer) and Julian Ovendon as Captain Georg von Trapp, who hires her from the Naumberg Abbey convent to be governess to his seven children. Just about everyone over a certain age knows the story: Maria shows up and notices the severe discipline von Trapp has imposed on his kids ever since their mother died, calling them by signaling them with a whistle and forcing them to line up in formation and do marches through the Austrian wilderness as their only form of recreation.

Maria, who’d already got herself in trouble big-time with the Mother Superior of her convent (Maria Friedman) and the committee of three nuns who, in the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,” debate whether she should be admitted to the next order of nun-hood since, though she’s suitably devout, she’s constantly running off the reservation and into the Austrian hills to do things like sing the show’s famous title song. The show was done in Britain (there’d been an earlier live telecast from the U.S. in 2013 with Carrie Underwood, an intriguing choice, as Maria) and there were some interesting backstage glimpses after the musical itself, including the fact that they needed 14 child actors to play the von Trapp kids in case one of them got sick, had an accident or for some other reason couldn’t continue and another could immediately be pressed into service as a replacement. The Sound of Music actually premiered on Broadway in 1959 with an American cast – Mary Martin as Maria and Theodore Bikel as von Trapp (an irony since Bikel was Jewish and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been so viciously anti-Semitic a Jew would never have been allowed to become an officer in their military) – but it’s the 1965 film version with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in the leads that “froze” this story in the minds of modern-day audiences. Through much of the production I felt truly sorry for Kara Tointon, if only because the long shadow of Julie Andrews hung so heavily over her performance. Tointon tried her hardest to copy Andrews’ performance, especially her ultra-crisp intonation and diction while singing, trying to live up to her audience’s inevitable association with Andrews’ reading as the way this role should go. (It actually makes me curious to hear the original Broadway cast album on Columbia to hear how this role was performed by a leading actress with her own illustrious history before Julie Andrews grabbed it and set down her interpretation as the standard.)

Before the show there was an announcement to the effect that the writers (none of whom were credited; the only writing credits were to Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, who wrote the book for the stage musical) had attempted to blend the original script with the one Ernest Lehman wrote for the film, but in general they followed the play rather than the movie and used only one of the two new songs Richard Rodgers wrote for the film, “Something Good.” (With Hammerstein dead, for this and the other song added to the movie, “Confidence in Me,” Rodgers wrote his own lyrics, with help from screenwriter Lehman and music director Saul Chaplin.) The telecast also followed the original stage order of the songs, which put “My Favorite Things” early in the show as a duet between Maria and the Mother Superior as the M.S. recalls her own pre-vows life before she sends Maria to the von Trapp home, and I think this lighthearted piece works better where Lehman’s script for the film put it: as the song Maria sings to the von Trapp kids to calm them during a lightning storm. (Later the song is reprised instrumentally at the big party scene that ends Act I, and of course I couldn’t help but joke, “Who’s that Black guy walking through here playing soprano saxophone?”)

This version of The Sound of Music was quite accomplished and entertaining, and in at least one respect it was better than the movie: it was considerably more serious about the story’s political context. The story takes place on the eve of the Anschluss, Adolf Hitler’s non-violent takeover of Austria in 1938 and his incorporation of Austria into his Greater Germany, and though this version was only two hours long (the film ran nearly three hours), the script drops a lot more hints of the burgeoning political situation. There’s an early argument between von Trapp’s eldest daughter, Liesl (Evelyn Hoskins), and her boyfriend Franz (Paul Copley), just before they sing the “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” duet, in which she insists that they’re Austrian and he says, “Some people think we’d be better off being German.” The telecast also restored a song cut from the movie, “No Way to Stop It,” in which von Trapp’s fiancée Elsa Schräder (Katherine Kelly) and the family’s friend Max Detweiler (Alexander Armstrong) declare their intention to compromise and live with the Nazi takeover of Austria rather than try to resist. (There’s another song that was added back to this version after being deleted from the movie, “How Can Love Survive?,” one of those ironic Hammerstein lyrics in which the characters lament that von Trapp and Frau Schräder won’t be able to make their relationship work because they’re both rich and therefore they won’t have the experience of starving in a garret together.)

Overall, this version of The Sound of Music was effective – since it was almost a full hour shorter than the movie it seemed to zip through the story at warp speed, but it hit all the high points and the actors were personable and basically suited to their roles. Charles and I both had one big problem with the telecast: though he was handsome and sang well, Julian Oventon was just too young to play Captain von Trapp. He and Maria are supposed to come from different generations – if not a May-December romance theirs is certainly a May-September one – and Rodgers and Hammerstein had already done the situation of two people from different generations coming together in South Pacific (which also starred Mary Martin in the original Broadway production). Oventon had a better baritone voice than Christopher Plummer’s but he also looked too young to have had a 16-going-on-17-year-old daughter, and that hurt the verisimilitude of the project even though he and Tointon otherwise related well to each other on stage. Still, it’s hard not to like The Sound of Music – it’s what James Agee would have called “an efficient sentimental piece” and I was tearing up through much of it.

Wanna Buy a Record? (Capitol Records, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Charles and I watched a couple of YouTube videos on the history of Capitol Records, one an audio post of a celebratory album the company put out on its 10th anniversary in 1952 and one a film called Wanna Buy a Record?, a promotional film made in 1951 and framed by Mel Blanc – showing his face and body for once in a film instead of just using his voice – attempting to sell a record to a large man who looks like character actor Edgar Kennedy but isn’t (he had died in 1948, three years before this film was made). The only other performer listed in the opening credits is Billy May, the bandleader who was one of Capitol’s biggest sellers in the early 1950’s, and I had known he was a large man but I hadn’t thought he was this large. There’s some weird by-play between the two as Blanc finds out his would-be customer isn’t married and calls him a “gay blade,” and later the two dance together – obviously gags that “read” far differently now than they did in 1951! There are also intriguing glimpses of important Capitol artists, including Dean Martin (he isn’t identified but he’s clearly recognizable) and a country singer I’m pretty sure was Merle Travis.

The film shows off the Capitol offices and studios as they existed in 1951, before the construction of the famous Capitol tower, and the record store Blanc supposedly runs is the real-life Wallichs’ Music City, whose owner, Glenn Wallichs, co-founded Capitol with singer and songwriter Johnny Mercer and former songwriter turned Hollywood producer Buddy de Sylva in 1942. At the time the record industry was beset both by World War II (which, among other things, made it difficult for record companies to secure shellac, a key ingredient in the material from which 78 rpm records were made; for a while during the war you could purchase a new record only if you brought in an old one in trade) and an American Federation of Musicians strike against the record companies which lasted from 1942 to 1944. (The strike was called to try to stop the use of recordings in restaurants, bars and other venues that had previously employed live musicians; the resolution involved setting up something called the Music Performance Trust Fund, which collected royalties on record sales and used them to pay musicians to give live performances. There were actually two strikes, the big one from 1942 to 1944 – though Capitol and Decca settled by the end of 1943 while RCA Victor and Columbia held out for another year – and a shorter one in 1948 over who would administer the trust fund.)

The U.S. government imposed a ration on shellac and gave the scarce supplies to companies that had already been in business before the war, and Capitol had got in under the wire by making its first hit, “Cow Cow Boogie” sung by Ella Mae Morse with Freddie Slack and His Orchestra, in early 1942. (Some companies tried to evade the strike by recording abroad. Columbia had started a recording of the third act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in New York with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf; when the strike started they took the star singers, Lauritz Melchior and Herbert Janssen, to Argentina and finished the record with conductor Roberto Kinsky and the orchestra of the Teatro Colón, the opera house in Buenos Aires.) Charles and I have been watching enough of these vest-pocket documentaries on record-making lately that the processes involved – particularly the elaborate metallurgy needed to take a master lacquer and turn it into a metal master (a negative image of the record), then into a mold or “mother” (a positive) and into the negative “stampers” that are used to press the finished records – have become quite familiar to us.

Do You Trust Your Boyfriend?, a.k.a. Killer Profile (MarVista Entertainment, Shadowboxer LLC, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a movie called Do You Trust Your Boyfriend?, originally shot under the title Killer Profile and directed by Ted Campbell from a script by Richard Pierce. It takes place in the (presumably) fictitious “Griffith Peak” high school in Los Angeles and concerns Nicole Ramos (Lawson Greyson), a high-school senior who’s surrounded by way more authority figures than she deserves: she’s taking a journalism class taught by her mom Madelyn (Gina Simms), who’s also dating the school principal, Lockhart (Michael Scovotti). It’s not clear what happened to Micole’s dad, though the hints we get are that he started running around with a younger woman (or maybe more than one) and that broke up his marriage to Madelyn. Nicole comes equipped with the obligatory best friends, a Black girl named Angie (Alexis Samone) whom she’s known since seventh grade and a nerdy-looking girl named Cass (Luka Oida). We know she’s a nerd because she wears glasses and is good with computers. Nicole is dating the school’s basketball star, Liam (Derek Rivera, a nice-looking but rather nondescript fellow who did little aesthetically for either Charles or I), but to test his fidelity she decides to create a fictitious profile for a girl named “Heather Harris” and direct-message Liam with a series of inducements, including a nude photo (which Nicole actually picked up at random on the Internet), to see if he’ll take the bait and try to meet “Heather.” Only a real student named Heather Harris (Kendall Kato) shows up at Griffith Peak wearing a T-shirt from another high school, Gibson, and having all the same interests as the fictional “Heather” Nicole created for her profile.

When Liam responds to “Heather” with the magic words, “I have a girlfriend,” Nicole decides she’s made her point and deletes the account (which is on a fictional social-media site called “FlashBack,” obviously because the producers didn’t want to face a royalty demand from Mark Zuckerberg for calling it “Facebook”), but her Black best friend Angie decides to restore it and keep it going to see if she can catch other cheaters (sort of like the real-life site Ashley Madison, which was supposedly for men interested in meeting women other than their wives to have affairs, but ended up being mostly women out to catch their husbands looking for other partners). She catches Cass’s boyfriend Isaac (Kemp Connelly, who for my money was a lot hotter than Derek Rivera!) responding to the “Heather” posts and tells Cass, who’s left furious with her former friends for the ruse. At first I thought the appearance of a real-life “Heather Harris” at Griffith Peak High was a big piece of coincidence-mongering on the part of writer Pierce, but as the show wound on we learned that the real Heather was actually a woman named Jenny with a basket-case mother named Ruth (Meredith Thomas, whose imdb.com biography lists her as having been born on August 28 but doesn’t tell us what year, though she made her movie debut in an uncredited role in the 1996 film Pleasantville and you can do the math). Ruth doesn’t seem to be drinking or doing drugs (the usual indicia of bad motherhood in Lifetime films) but she’s had a heart attack, she’s never forgiven Jenny for abandoning her childhood dreams of becoming a great dancer (she still keeps a scrapbook with a photo of her as a kid in a tutu), and she’s totally unaware that Jenny is not only attending a new school but is doing so under the name “Heather.”

Jenny had to transfer from Gibson High after she pushed down a flight of stairs and killed the boy she was dating, Troy (Anthony Caro – we saw her burying him, still wearing her gold lamé prom dress and high heels, since she killed him on the night of the prom, but we see him in a flashback showing how he died). Most of the film consists of Heather’s guerrilla campaign against Nicole, whom she accuses of destroying her life and ensuring that she wouldn’t be received well at Griffith Peak because Nicole’s fake “Heather” posts had made her seem like a “fast” girl and she was getting all sorts of skuzzy proposals from horny male students. Not only does Heather try to seduce Liam away from Nicole by claiming to be “interviewing” him for the school paper (which seems to be a Web site instead of a physical print publication), she erases Nicole’s article and substitutes one of her own about the affair between the principal and Nicole’s mom, publishing it under Nicole’s name and leading Nicole’s mom Madelyn to ground her and treat her with all the sensitivity of a commandant at Auschwitz. Heather also spikes Angie’s drinking water at a cheerleading practice (though this wasn’t being shown under Lifetime’s annual “Fear the Cheer” festival, it has enough of a cheerleading subplot to qualify – and I was amused at the unintended eroticism of the cheer at the basketball games, “Dribble, dribble, dribble! Shoot, shoot, shoot!”) with prescription drugs she stole from her mom, and she collapses in the middle of a practice and injures herself badly enough to end up in the hospital. In fact quite a few of the dramatis personae end up in the hospital thanks to Heather’s ministrations, including Isaac (she strikes him with a blunt object about 45 minutes into the movie, and though the character survives we don’t get to see hot young Kemp Connelly again, darnit) and Liam, whom she strikes with a baseball bat when he won’t yield to her charms. (One wonders what a baseball bat is doing on the basketball court.)

It all ends with Heather taking Nicole and her friend Cass (ya remember Cass?), whom Heather somehow finagled into using her computer skills to give her a phony transcript that admitted her into Griffith Peak High) to her so-called “favorite spot” where she buried Tyler, and about to kill both Nicole and Cass when Nicole’s mother Madelyn (ya remember Madelyn?) comes along, wallops Heather and saves the day. The final scene is Heather in a cell – we’re not sure whether it’s a prison or a mental hospital – still scheming about how to use other people to achieve her mom’s ideals of “perfection.” Do You Trust Your Boyfriend? is a not-bad Lifetime thriller, and Kendall Cato does the bad girl to perfection – she comes off like an adolescent version of Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (especially as played by Patty McCormick in the original film) and one guesses this is how Rhoda would have turned out if she’d remained alive (as she does at the end of Maxwell Anderson’s original play before it was bowdlerized for film at the behest of the Production Code Administration, which insisted she had to be punished for her killings) and the Kafka-esque plight it puts Nicole through. But for the most part it’s pretty ordinary and it suffers from the absence of men (aside from Liam, Isaac, the principal and Troy in his brief flashback we hardly see any males in this supposedly co-ed high school, and as I mentioned earlier Isaac exits way too soon) and a relatively homely set of women (straight men won’t get much more of a charge from this film than Charles and I did!). It also suffers from some pretty formulaic writing and a lot of loose ends in the plot, most notably that we have no idea how the fake “Heather” got Cass to hack into the school’s computer and post her phony student record.

Honor Student (24 Frames Digital Films, Criminal Pictures, Movie Central, Lifetime, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I might have liked Do You Trust Your Boyfriend? better if I hadn’t watched a much better Lifetime movie earlier in the afternoon, a 2014 film called Honor Student directed by Penelope Bultenhuis who won plaudits for her first feature, A Wake, but seems mostly to have been ghettoized in the galleys of TV-movie directors ever since – a pity, since she has a real talent for stories of romantic obsession and makes this one, written by Linda J. Cowgill and old Lifetime hand David DeCrane, come alive. The film opens in a writing class being taught in a women’s prison by a male author, Nicholas Howarth (Niall Matter), who so far has published just one novel, an intellectually serious book that hardly sold. The session we see is the last of the 12-week class, and Nicholas is impressed by a Black woman who has written a story that includes the line, “The night hung over her like a dead man.” But the writer who gets impressed – and then obsessed – with Nicholas is Teresa Smith (Josie Loren), who hasn’t written a word during all 12 weeks of the class but as she’s leaving the last session tells Nicholas of an idea she’s had about a teenage woman college student who had an affair with her much-older literature professor and killed him when he rejected her. Of course we immediately “get” that this is Teresa’s own story and the crime that put her in prison in the flrst place – though we later learn she was only convicted of manslaughter and is serving a relatively short sentence – and then we get a chyron reading “Two years later.”

Two years later Nicholas has turned Teresa’s idea into a best-selling novel called Killer Student and has used the royalty money to buy himself and his wife Lana (Shauna Johannessen) a chicken farm in the rural town of Langley, Washington. Lana is expecting the Howarths’ first child – though like so many Lifetime mothers-to-be she’s already had one pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage and her doctors are worried she’ll lose this baby, too, if she’s subjected to stress. She is also a diabetic with a history of heart disease (apparently no one associated with this project thought to ask writers Cowgill and DeCoteau, “Aren’t you larding it on just a bit?”) and a protective sister named Shannon (Lisa Durant) who becomes a deus ex machina at the end. Aside from the stress of his wife’s pregnancy and various medical conditions, Nicholas is also ‘blocked” on the new novel his editor Erica (Sarah Strange) is expecting from him to capitalize on the success of Killer Student (which he’s still promoting at local book-signings in Seattle). Then suddenly Teresa turns up in his life; she’s been paroled and is working at a local restaurant/diner/coffeehouse/something or other. She comes to Nicholas’s home – and it’s a mystery how she got in, though she is an ex-con after all and probably learned a thing or two about lock-picking along the way – and confronts him. Teresa tells Nicholas, “You stole my life” – meaning, it seems, that now that he’s written and published Killer Student there’ll be no market for her own novel about her life and the professor she knocked off for real – and she demands that he pay her half the royalties from Killer Student as well as doing a joint press conference explaining that the book was her idea, adding her name to future editions as co-author and giving her an equal share of the movie rights. (It’s been well known for some time that the real money in writing pop fiction is selling the movie rights.)

Nicholas is scared about what Teresa’s revelations will do to his reputation as a writer and in particular whether anyone will ever publish anything by him if he gives the press conference she’s demanding. But the shock of the whole incident gets him over his writer’s block and he starts work on a new novel called The First Wife, about two characters who have an illicit relationship but part amicably at the end. Only Teresa isn’t willing to settle for half of Nicholas’s first book, and she sees through his attempts to entrap her into accepting blackmail money and get herself arrested by the local sheriff, Stanton (Michael Hogan), who’s played as the usual stupid doofus small-town sheriff (though Hogan is good enough in the role that if anyone does a remake of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and restores the character of the honest county sheriff Chandler meant as a counterpoint to the story’s corrupt city cop, he’d be right for it). Now she’s after his new book, which at first she demands include her name as co-author (with her billed first) and then says she’ll only accept sole billing. She’s made this possible by literally stealing it, erasing the manuscript from his computer and also taking the two flash drives on which he’d backed it up, one at his place and one in the coffeehouse owned by Nicholas’s friend Marcia (Enid-Raye Adams). The debt writers Cowgill and DeCoteau owe to Stephen King’s Misery – also about a best-selling writer held hostage by a crazy woman and forced to write the way she tells him to – is obvious (though of course Josie Lauren is a good deal hotter than Kathy Bates, who played the crazy in the film version of Misery), but Honor Student is actually a quite good thriller, unusually complex (at least for a Lifetime movie) in the cat-and-mouse game Teresa is playing with Nicholas, coming on to him at several points and trying to derail his marriage by making it look to his wife that they’re having an affair.

It comes to an ending unusually preposterous even by Lifetime standards, with Teresa holding Lana, Erica and Marcia hostage and demanding that Nicholas not only put her name on The First Wife as its sole author but change the ending from a bittersweet one to a brutal bloodbath. Teresa confiscates all the cell phones in the house so no one will be able to call out for help, but Lana’s sister Shannon tries to call, gets no answer, and when that happens she calls the sheriff and tells him to go do a welfare check at Nicholas’s home. Teresa hears the sheriff stalking the place and, when he comes in, she shoots and wounds him, but in the meantime Nicholas decides to play writing teacher and, after he finishes the new ending to The First Wife, sits her down at the computer and she starts to write her own novel. It turns out to be good enough that Erica decides to publish it and launches it and Nicholas’s book simultaneously – and at the end Nicholas is doing another book signing promoting both novels while Teresa is back in the prison where she started out the story (actually given her mental state I had imagined she’d be in a psychiatric hospital instead, and be in at least a somewhat more comfortable room than a prison cell and one in which she could continue to write, since she’d earlier said she couldn’t write in the prison environment). I had actually hoped for a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style ending in which the entire story would turn out to be the plot of Nicholas’s latest novel – but there have been a number of Lifetime movies about writers that could have used that twist even more than this one, and their writers (their real ones) haven’t gone there. Still, despite that silly ending, Honor Student is one of the better Lifetime thrillers, with the cat-and-mouse between protagonist and villainess done better than in a lot of other ones we’ve seen, and with Nicholas and Teresa cast with actors alive to the complexities of the story and their characters instead of just giving stick-figure performances in stick-figure roles.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Summit Entertainment, Millennium Films, Cristal Pictures, East Light Media, TIK Films, Lionsgate, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the third Blu-Ray disc in the package I got from Amazon.com that also contained The Boy Next Door and the surprisingly good The Spy Who Dumped Me (both it and the title of the second Austin Powers movie, The Spy Who Shagged Me, were puns on the real-life Ian Fleming title for a James Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me). The third in the package was called The Hitman’s Bodyguard and was essentially an espionage movie that also used the Black-and-white buddy-buddy formula of the Lethal Weapon movies (and the 48 Hours movies that preceded it). The film, directed by Patrick Hughes from a script by Tom O’Connor, had a prestigious cast: Ryan Reynolds as the bodyguard, Michael Bryce; Samuel L. Jackson as the hitman, Darius Kincaid; Salma Hayek as Darius’s wife Sonia (who apparently was involved with Reynolds’ character until she thought he was dead, or something), and a small but showy part for Gary Oldman as Vladislav Dukhovich, former dictator of Belarus, who as the film begins is on trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands (you know, the International Criminal Court – the one the U.S. refuses to join because we don’t want ever to have any of our war criminals held accountable for anything) and Kincaid is the only person who has the crucial evidence the prosecution needs to convict him. There’s also a woman who works for Interpol – which is described in O’Connor’s script as honeycombed with agents for the bad guys and generally not to be trusted (which made it more ironic than usual that the don’t-pirate-this-movie logos at the end invoked Interpol – the real one – as the agency that would come and get us if we try) – who seems to be there to be Reynolds’ big squeeze even though she’s working for an agency he doesn’t trust. The actress playing this part looked enough like Salma Hayek I thought they were supposed to be the same person – which would have made the film even kinkier.

I nodded off a lot during this one mainly because it contained a lot of repetitive action sequences that got boring as they went on, set in the usual plethora of locations modern movies use because they think the more they travel around the world the more exciting they’ll be (note that the 1941 The Maltese Falcon, which would be my choice for the greatest crime film of all time, never leaves San Francisco except for one wild-goose side trip to a vacant lot in Burlingame, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo takes place just in San Francisco and Santa Cruz), and also I suspect because the more countries you film in, the more credits you can get to claim that a film was made there and therefore they should give you a tax break when you release it there. What I liked least about The Hitman’s Bodyguard is my old bugbear, uncertainty of tone; while the delight of The Spy Who Dumped Me was at least in part from the way director and co-writer Susanna Fogel and her writing partner David Isenson never left us in doubt that they intended the movie to be a spoof (which ironically made the big gravity-defying action scenes easier to take), Hughes and O’Connor seemed to be trying to have it both ways, having the characters exchange witticisms (though they weren’t anywhere near as witty as O’Connor clearly thought they were) and include some light-hearted moments, they expected us to take this all too seriously and staged the action scenes with a total lack of camp – at least of intentional camp. It’s the sort of film that just drones on and on and on – the kind you can sleep through much of without the sense that you’re missing much – you can nod off with Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson being chased for their lives through one European city and when you wake up they’re still being chased for their lives, only in a different European city. And one thing I found amusing about this movie is that there were so many action scenes in so many urban locations, the final credits listed no fewer than 43 people whose role was to direct traffic away from where they were shooting.

In the end Our Heroes (or should that be Our Anti-Heroes?) finally end up in The Hague (ya remember The Hague?) where they’re racing against time to get Darius Kincaid to the International Criminal Court (ya remember the International Criminal Court?) in time to testify against the Belarussian dictator Vladislav Dukhiovich (ya remember Vladislav Dukhovich?) and Hughes gives us a genuinely exciting suspense sequence in which they make it to the Court with literally seconds to spare before the case is dismissed. Only Dukhovich had another trick up his sleeve: he had his cadre drive a truck bomb just outside the Court building to blow it up after making a speech in which he declares that as a sovereign head of state, the International Criminal Court had no jurisdiction over him (I suspect writer O’Connor had in mind the Court’s trial of former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, only in that case he escaped justice because the trial droned on so long he died of natural causes in the middle of it), and in the chaos after the explosion Dukhovich makes it to the roof of the building, where a helicopter is supposed to pick him up and fly him to safety, only Kincaid shoots down the copter and then pushes Dukhovich to his death off the roof of the building. One nice thing about O’Connor’s script is that I suspect a lot of the character’s names are in-jokes: in the film’s opening set-up scene our hapless bodyguard Michael Bryce thinks he’s successfully protected a Japanese businessman named Kurosawa (after legendary Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa?), only just as Bryce is getting him onto his private plane Kincaid picks him off with a sniper rifle, which gets Bryce demoted. Later in the movie there’s a professor named Asimov (Rod Hallett) along with his wife (Nadia Konakchieva) and their son Petr (Valentin Stojanov).

There’s also some good use of music, including Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” used as background for an action sequence (though in that case the soundtrack was if anything too distracting) and songs by Lionel Richie (whom I ordinarily can’t stand but whose music fit the context), Bobby “Blue” Bland, Memphis Slim with Willie Dixon and a couple of blues numbers by Samuel L. Jackson himself – including one that sounds like an old blues record except for the repeated uses of “fuck” and “shit” in the lyrics, which gets even funnier when Jackson’s backup singers echo them. Jackson has a good enough singing voice it might actually be entertaining to hear him do an album – or to see him make a musical. But overall The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a virtual compendium of what’s wrong with contemporary action movies, with preposterous sequences that shatter the laws of physics and all too little explanation of who these people are and why they want to kill each other. Amazingly, this movie did well enough at the box office to generate a sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, which quite frankly I am highly unlikely to see.

The Spy Who Dumped Me (Imagine Entertainment, BRON Studio, Lionsgate, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a movie that turned out to be an unexpected delight: The Spy Who Dumped Me, a spoof of both James Bond movies and Valley Girl stories I got as a package on amazon.com along with The Boy Next Door (the sort of theatrical feature that so closely follows the Lifetime formula that Lifetime has actually shown it; it’s pretty standard Lifetime fare distinguished only by having a star even non-LIfetime watchers have heard of: Jennifer Lopez) and The Hitman’s Bodyguard (which did well enough to generate a sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard). I was hoping that screening something this light would be an antidote not only for the depressing news shows but also the heavy-duty 1950’s French art films we’d been watching lately, Lola Montès and Paris Belongs to Us. I got that but also quite a bit more than I bargained for: a comedy-thriller whose director and co-writer (with David Iserson), Susanna Fogel, managed to balance the comedy and the thrills superbly. It starts with Our Heroine, dark-haired Audrey (Mila Kunis) and her blonde-ditz best friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon) – who later confesses that her last name is “Freeman,” which helps her get restaurant reservations (though what the reservation clerks think when a young white woman shows up instead of the older Black man they were expecting is something to ponder) at a bar for Audrey’s birthday. She has just received a text message from her boyfriend, Drew (Justin Theroux), breaking up with her.

The film flashes back to Audrey’s and Drew’s original meeting exactly one year before, at the same bar, when she and Morgan were also out celebrating her birthday and they met over a bad joke about her wearing a “Happy Birthday” headdress even though it isn’t her birthday (though since the two scenes take place exactly a year apart it’s obvious we’re supposed to think it is her birthday). They had a typical modern relationship that included a dinner date with his parents at the Incredible Cheesecake Factory before he disappeared on her and sent her the breakup text. The film cuts away to what Drew is really doing at the moment Audrey is frantically trying to text him back to plead with him to stay: he’s in the middle of a frantic James Bond-style action sequence involving goon squads out to kill him, hair’s-breadth escapes and, in one scene, Drew surviving the collapse of an apartment-building balcony as the entire building it was attached to blows up. The cover identity Drew had given Audrey is that he was employed by National Public Radio doing a podcast on economics and jazz (which sounds like something I’d probably want to listen to!), but she soon learns that he was really a spy when two espionage agents, Sebastian (Sam Haughan, whom quite frankly I found a lot hotter than Justin Theroux) and Duffer (Hasan Minhaj), kidnap her and hold her hostage in a van.

The MacGuffin they’re after is a flash drive concealed in a plastic trophy Drew won for finishing second in a fantasy football league; a pissed-off Audrey had burned all Drew’s other belongings but hasn’t yet got around to that one. Sebastian and Duffer instruct her to go to Vienna – the one in Austria – and go to the Café Sheila to deliver the trophy to someone named Verne. Of course when I heard they were going to do the drop in a Vienna café I joked, “Will there be a zither player there?” There wasn’t, though there was a nice joke when Morgan reads the tourist guide book and says, “They make a lot about Mozart being from here, but they don’t mention Hitler.” (Actually both Mozart and Hitler were native Austrians, but neither was from Vienna: Mozart was from Salzburg and Hitler from Linz.) Throughout the movie Our Heroines end up surrounded by assassins, either from the CIA, the British equivalent MI-6 (people often get confused between MI-5 and MI-6; MI-6 is the British intelligence agency, their equivalent of the CIA, while MI-5 is their counter-intelligence agency, fulfilling the function of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division in the U.S.) or an international terrorist organization whose whole agenda of future attacks is supposedly contained on that flash drive.

The bartender at the bar where Audrey and Morgan had their birthday celebration, who introduced himself as Ukrainian (which led Morgan to ask him if the correct name of the country is “Ukraine” or “The Ukraine”) and whom Morgan brought home because he had a huge cock, turns out to be a hit man aimed at killing her and Audrey (as well as Drew if he’d been there) to recover the football trophy containing the flash drive. “Verne” at the Café Sheila in Vienna turns out to be a woman – an attendant at the women’s restroom – and this revelation kicks off the film’s strongest action sequence, as Our Heroines attempt to car-jack an elderly couple (then find they can’t drive their car because it has a stick shift) and then steal a taxi while one of the hit people after them clings to its roof and Audrey and Morgan have to remember how to get the car to swerve and knock him off again. The film gets a bit slower as it moves around Europe to places like Paris, France and Berlin, Germany (Charles and I have often joked about how modern audiences are so geographically challenged they have to have explained to them just what countries those cities are in – though we’ve also joked about U.S. towns like Peru, Indiana and Cairo, Illinois that have appropriated foreign place names but pronounce them differently: “PEE-roo” and “KAY-row,” respectively).

Doing for comedy what all too many thriller-movie writers (notably Tony Gilroy) do seriously, Fogel and Iserson (who in addition to co-writing this movie also appears in it, briefly, as a bar patron in the opening scene) fill the second half of this movie with reversals on top of reversals, leaving both Our Heroines and us somewhat at sea as to who is on whose side and what the significance of that mysterious flash drive really is. They also create some truly inspired characters, including Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno), a former Eastern Bloc gymnast who after only winning silver at the Olympics was drafted into being a hit person – and one of the dorkier but also most entertaining scenes is one in which she and Morgan end up on trapezes in the middle of a Cirque du Soleil-style act at the Berlin Museum of Technology’s big reception and, in what might have been intended as a parody of the fight scene in Robert Taylor’s medieval period piece Quentin Durward (1955), in which the hero and the villain had to fight to the death with one hand each because they were both suspended on ropes and needed their other hands to hang on, Morgan and the gymnast-hit woman have to fight on trapezes while desperately gripping them to keep from falling. Of course, the audience in the hall thinks this is all part of the act, and loves it (a gimmick Charlie Chaplin pulled in his 1928 film The Circus, in which he gets a job as a clown but the joke is he can only make audiences laugh when he’s not trying to).

The film ends in a bizarre Mexican standoff in which Drew – who was supposedly killed early on in the action but turns up alive at the end (another all-too-common thriller cliché Fogel and Iserson both exploit and make fun of) – and Sebastian each try to convince Audrey that they’re the good guy and the other is the terrorist, and the ending is a nice capstone to an unexpectedly entertaining and genuinely funny film. The Spy Who Dumped Me has a few of the body-function gags that have rendered so many modern “comedies” not only unfunny but unwatchable – like the sequence in which Audrey tells Sebastian she’s hidden the flash drive in her vagina and, while she’s riding in his car, she has to reach down between her legs to retrieve it; and the later scene in which Morgan says she’s swallowed it (and that means they’ll have to wait until she excretes to recover it), but for the most part The Spy Who Dumped Me is a very funny film; as the late William Youngren once said about Zubin Mehta’s recording of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Act I, The Spy Who Dumped Me is, “if not a great [film] to treasure, at least an extremely fine one for simple enjoyment.”