Road Trip Hostage (Goodflix, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 29) Lifetime showed an unusually good “premiere” movie, Road Trip Hostage, quite convincingly directed by Kaila York and written by John F. Hayes with considerably more dimensional characters than the Lifetime norm. The promos had made it look like a young woman was taken hostage by a no-account psycho, but the film was considerably more psychologically and morally complex than that. The young woman is Emma Moreno (Veronica Ramirez), who’s living at home with her mother Hillary (Chala Savino), only they’re arguing because Emma’s only career ambition is to be a professional dancer, while Hillary insists that if Emma is going to live under her roof, she’s going to have to stay in college and study geology. Emma can dance in her off-hours but college must remain paramount. Emma has already blown several auditions because the time demands of her school work left her with no time or energy to rehearse, though at the start of this story she finally lands a dance gig. (It would have helped if the casting director had located an actress to play Emma who could dance spectacularly; as it is, she looks good but not that good, and our friend Garry Hobbs, who was watching the movie with us, told the old joke that one of the worst things that can happen is if you have some talent.) Then the film cuts to a swanky straight pick-up bar and we meet the other half of our unlikely couple, Rick Frye (Luke Charles Stafford), a super-spoiled rich kid whose dad, attorney Charles Frye (billed on imdb.com as “Circus-Szalewski”), has finally had enough of his lack of ambition and his free-loading on the family fortune.

Unbeknownst to Rick, dad has canceled his credit cards, leading to an embarrassing situation when he’s ready to leave the bar and all his cards are declined. The hot blonde bimbo he was going to take home with him dumps him and Rick slinks home in a fancy red sports car that, like the T-Bird in the Beach Boys’ hit “Fun, Fun, Fun,” daddy is about to take away from him. As Charles awaits his prodigal son’s return, he gets more and more drunk on a liquid from a crystal decanter, and when Rick finally comes home the two men have a confrontation that ends with Rick grabbing the decanter and fatally clubbing his dad with it. Charles’s trophy wife Linda (Nicole Andrews), who’s obviously Rick’s stepmother since she looks about his age (Rick’s real mom died some years before, as did Emma’s dad), freaks out and calls the police despite Rick’s attempt to grab the phone away from her, and it momentarily looks like Rick is going to kill her as well (though he doesn’t). The meet-ugly between Emma and Rick occurs at the home of Emma’s friend Katy (Rachel Turner), where she’s going to stay until she can find a place of her own because she’s finally decided to leave her mom’s place so she can dump college and dance full-time. Katy points out Rick as a neighbor of hers and Emma instantly decides he’s hot, so she eagerly accepts when he asks her to drive him to the airport. Only just before they arrive Rick hears on Emma’s car radio that the police have discovered his dad’s body and are after him. Rick immediately orders Emma to drive him heaven knows where, he hasn’t decided yet.

One of the things that makes Road Trip Hostage better than most Lifetime movies is that Rick is a conflicted character, not a hardened criminal but a basically good kid who was spoiled rotten and who struck back after his dad ordered him off the gravy train. The police search for him is led by a Latina detective named Lisa Ramirez (Gabriella Biziou), and she notices the bad job he’s doing as a fugitive, going north when he’s trying to reach the Mexican border (the film is set in the L.A. area; we know that from the California license plates on the cars and the “San Fernando Valley” sign we see in one scene) and doubling back on his own trail. Needless to say, mom wants to be in on the chase because it’s her daughter Rick is holding hostage, and Detective Ramirez doesn’t want her around because she’ll only gum up the works. Rick and Emma stop at a convenience store, where Rick buys some energy drinks and caffeine pills to keep himself awake on the long drive, while Emma shoplifts a package of sleeping pills with the intent of drugging Rick’s drink and either getting away or turning him in. As I just noted on the “Goofs” section of the film’s imdb.com page, she's able to reach into the bottle and grab them immediately, which could not happen. Modern-day medications are packaged so tightly and have so many safety seals before you can access the pills, there is no way Emma could have just opened the pill bottle once and extracted them. Emma’s plan is foiled when Rick notices the taste of the sleeping pills in his energy drink, and for most of the rest of the trip he insists on keeping Emma bound and gagged. The two stop at a motel, and the clerk (a marvelous I’ve-seen-it-all performance by Lisa Long) catches on to their real situation.

Though Rick offers to pay for the room in cash, the clerk insists on a credit card “for incidentals,”and Emma uses her card – which triggers an alert on her mom's phone so both momand the police have a clue as to her whereabouts, though mom sleeps through the alert because it comes in at 2:15 a.m. The clerk also asks them whether they want the room by the hour or for all night (it’s that kind of a motel). The clerk asks Emma silently, “Are you all right?,” and Emma’s mouth forms the word, “No.” The clerk tries to call 911 and stall Rick long enough until the police can get there, but Rick catches on and speeds off, running down the clerk just as she’s stepped outside her office to call the cops. Rick realizes the police now have the car’s license number, and he insists on stealing another car – only he has no idea of how to break into a modern car and the only thing he can do is carjack a vehicle (a BMW, though this is probably not the sort of product placement BMW would have wanted) from a middle-aged woman, which creates yet another witness who can report him to the police. Ultimately the cops and mom track down the fugitives to a wooded area, where Rick tries to get away from a police roadblock by turning the car off-road, only he drives over a scrap of wood that takes out its radiator. Emma tries to run away but Rick catches her, though she sneaks up behind him and clobbers him on the head with a rock – a nice bit of parallelism given that that’s the way Rick took out his dad. Eventually Rick tries to kill Emma with the knife he’s been holding on her all movie, but Emma pleads with him to spare her and ultimately he does so, and somewhat surprisingly he’s taken alive and into custody at the end instead of dying in a police shoot-out.

Road Trip Hostage is unusually sensitively written, and one of the things I liked about Hayes’ script is that both his central characters are alienated teens who’ve been raised by domineering single parents who haven’t bothered to listen to what they really wanted. It occurred to me that if the film had been made in the mid-1950’s Rick would have been a perfect part for James Dean. Luke Charles Stafford has something of Dean’s knack for switching back and forth between tough guy and vulnerable boy-man in they same scene, and it helps that we get to see him topless in two scenes and he has pecs to die for even though Stafford’s casting follows the all too familiar pattern in Lifetime movies of having the hottest guy in the cast be the villain. With a more morally complicated and conflicted script than the Lifetime norm, and expert suspense direction by Kaila York (three of her four previous directorial credits – Home Is Where the Killer is, Most Likely to Murder and My Nightmare Office Affair – are thrillers), Road Trip Hostage is an unusually good Lifetime movie, the sort of diamond-in-the-rough we longtime Lifetime watchers hope for and for which we’re willing to sit through a lot of God-awful sludge.

Live at the Belly Up: B-Side Players, Maren Parusel (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 28) my husband Charles and I watched a KPBS Live at the Belly Up rerun from ten years ago (2013) featuring the B-Side Players and Maren Parusel. The B-Side Players were founded in 1994 and are still together after nearly 30 years – their Web site says they’ve been making “Music for the People Since 1994” – and the description of their music on the site (https://thebsideplayers.com/about/) says it’s a fusion of many different rhythms, mostly Latin American. I have a personal connection to the B-Side Players – or at least the edition seen and heard here – because the keyboard player was Fabio A. Rojas, whom I featured as a cover boy on one of the last issues of Zenger’s Newsmagazine (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2012/01/fabio-rojas.html) mainly because I’d run into him as a volunteer for Activist San Diego and he was exactly what I was always looking for in a cover story: a quite attractive young person who was also intellectually interesting enough to supply material for a compelling interview.

On this Live at the Belly Up appearance from 2013, the B-Side Players performed five songs in the first half-hour of the show, two in English and three in Spanish. The English ones were “Rocksteady Boogaloo” (which seemed to draw largely on Jamaican music, particularly the intermediate style, actually called “rock steady,” which came between ska and reggae) and “Sweet Good Miss ‘U Lovin’,” which featured a particularly nice tenor sax solo by Regan Branch, which sounded like what John Coltrane would have if he’d remained a rhythm-and-blues musician instead of going after a career in jazz. Frontman Karlos Paez (who did all the lead vocals and also occasionally doubled on trumpet) introduced “Sweet Good Miss ‘U Lovin’” as the group’s country song, and while it doesn’t sound much like country music it does indicate that the B-Side Players can do slow romantic ballads as well as hard-driving danceable rhythm songs. The three songs in Spanish were “El Mar y la Esperanza” (the KPBS chyron got the last word wrong as “Esteranza,” but Paez was clearly singing “Esperanza” – “hope”), “Calavera Negra” (which Charles, who knows conversational Spanish which I don’t, told me means “Black Skull,” Paez’s way of saying that so many different people of color have been part of his ancestry that his skull is basically black) and “Todo Tiene Su Final.”

Maren Parusel was actually more fascinating, at least to me: she was born in Tübingen, Germany and came to the U.S. in the late 2000’s, pursuing a career in indie rock. Alas, I can’t find a Google search entry on her later than November 2015 so it’s a bit of a mystery exactly what she’s doing now, but I’d like to find out because her music is quite good and a convincing evocation of 1980’s pop-rock. Basically Parusel struck me as Siouxsie meets Nena (the fellow German who had an international hit in 1983 with the great anti-nuclear war song “99 Red Balloons”), and she’s also a multi-instrumentalist. For her opening song, “Ordinary Day,” she played a red electronic keyboard instrument that sounded like an electric organ, though she carried her white electric guitar and wore it behind her back. For her second song, “Castle in the Sky,” she began on a Korg synthesizer but then set it to repeat her part on an endless loop while she got out her guitar and played that. For the rest of the evening she mostly played guitar on “You Better Run,” “Kiss You,” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now,” and “Artificial,” though she reverted to the synthesizer on “Tight Rope Walker,” the title song of her second full-length album. Just before she recorded Tight Rope Walker Parusel lost all her equipment to thieves, and she used the crisis to revamp her sound and make it more synth-driven. Alas, she doesn’t seem to have recorded anything since 2012 and, as I noted above, there are no Google search entries for her since 2015 (when she put up a tweet that she was recording in the home studio of former Door Robbie Krieger – not the first member of rock royalty who’d helped her; her debut EP was inspired by a summer she spent at the home of T. Rex founder Marc Bolan’s son Rolan), so I have no idea what she’s doing now, but if talent will out (and if she’s still alive) she’ll undoubtedly be heard from some more.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Bend the Law" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 27, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s (Thursday, April 27) episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, “Bend the Law,” was directed by Martha Mitchell from a pretty wild script by David Graziano, Julie Martin, Brendan Feeney and Gabriel Vallejo. It’s two interlocking stories, one of which deals with the continuing dilemma of Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano) over what to do about his old friend from his gang-banging days in New Mexico, Anthony “Chilly” Suarez (Joseph Castillo-Midyett), who literally saved his life and carried out two killings for a drug cartel that Velasco was supposed to do. Velasco and his strait-laced partner Tonie Churlish (Jasmine Batchelor), go to Maine to track him down and find out he’s become a schoolteacher at a school run by a relative. He’s also got married, and his wife pulls a gun on Velasco after she learns he’s secretly recorded Suarez – who now goes by the name of his principal/relative – confessing to at least two murders out of state in states where it’s legal to record conversations surreptitiously. Velasco saves his own job by arresting his old friend who saved his life way back when, The other, and by far more interesting, story line begins in a men’s club in which a woman forces her way into the club with a gun and demands her husband Harold. She suspects he’s up to extra-relational activities based on her finding condoms in his possession, and she shoots him in the crotch as her revenge. The Special Victims Unit responds to the call and finds at least three 15-year-old women on the premises, all engaging in hot necking sessions with the elderly and middle-aged male club members.

SVU detectives interrogate the men and one of them rats out club member Robert Briggs (Tom Irwin) as the man who put together the men and the women and recruited the girls to work at the club, at first as “hostesses,” then as “entertainers,” and finally as out-and-out hookers. This sets up a huge conflict of interest because Briggs is also the “kept” husband of Lorraine Maxwell (Betty Buckley), head of the trial division of the district attorney’s office and, of course, a specialist in cases of child sexual abuse. Naturally the fact that her husband – her second husband, whom she married seven years earlier after a bitter breakup from her first one, a domestic abuser – was running an underage prostitution ring from his club is a huge political embarrassment for her. In an understandably tense confrontation between them he explains that he got tired of living on a monthly allowance doled out by her from the huge settlement she got in her first divorce and he wanted to do something that would be a successful business venture. At first he tried real estate, but the development he invested in with a partner went belly up after the partner bailed. So he got into the sex-for-sale business and, though he was careful not to indulge in the forbidden joys himself, he pimped out the girls to his fellow club members under the cover of reproducing scenes from Greek mythology in which the girls were cast as “nymphettes.” (By coincidence – or maybe not – “nymphet” was the term used by Humbert Humbert, the central character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, to describe the underage girlfriends for whom he had a penchant.)

An embittered Briggs threatens to take the case to trial, spurning the plea bargain his lawyer has negotiated for him, on the ground that if he’s going to go down he’s going to take his wife down with him. He even calls her a “castrating bitch” and says he can now understand why her first marriage broke up. Then he demands she share a steak dinner with him to commemorate their anniversary – only they’re at home, since he’s ordered the dinner delivered, and while she refuses to eat he has some of the steak and immediately chokes on it. I had been wondering whether he’d arranged the meal as a murder-suicide in which he was literally going to feed them both poisoned meat, but it appears it was just an accident – only Lorraine, instead of doing anything to help him survive, lets him choke to death on their living-room floor with the famous intensity of Bette Davis getting rid of her inconvenient husband (Herbert Marshall) in The Little Foxes by withholding the heart medication he needs to short-circuit a heart attack. She gets away with it and we’re left with the quandary this show often leaves us with: whether we condemn her actions or approve of them, since she was letting her husband die not only to save her own career but everything she’s worked for to bring sexual criminals to justice. Besides, even if we have our doubts about whether she should have let her faithless husband die, we’ve got to wonder about her rotten taste in men – and not only on this show, either: Buckley achieved stardom as the mother on the late-1970’s TV series Eight Is Enough, in which she was married to Dick Van Patten, a relentlessly homely middle-aged man who looked like he’d been baked out of Wonder Bread dough.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "A Diplomatic Solution"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The following episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime also turned out to be pretty good. Ironically, my husband Charles likes this show the best of the three – he hung out at the computer during SVU but joined me for this one – and I’m liking it better now that Dick Wolf and his show runners and writers have abandoned their former worship of the Great God SERIAL and are making each episode complete in itself. This episode was called “A Diplomatic Solution” and it was about Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) taking charge of the personal security of Diya Laghari (Karen David), foreign minister of India, who’s in New York to speak at the United Nations in place of her country’s prime minister, who is supposedly indisposed. At the last minute, Stabler orders Laghari into the second car of her motorcade rather than the first, suspecting that some untoward thing is going to happen to the lead car – and indeed it does: the car is blown up by a C-4 explosive detonated by a cell phone. The members of the Organized Crime Control Bureau track down the would-be assassin and identify him as Ivan Ostrovsky (Bond Mgebrishvili, a name which identifies the actor as Georgian rather than Russian or Ukrainian) after Stabler’s crazy mother (Ellen Burstyn) sees the surveillance photo of him and recognizes the pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket as Pravdas, a Russian brand her earlier boyfriend used to smoke from his service in the Korean War until he was killed in that “police action.” (So Vladimir Putin’s reference to his attack on Ukraine as a “special military operation” is nothing new in the language of war.)

The police are working under the handicap of direct supervision from officials of both the U.S. State Department and the Indian Consulate in particular, especially an officious bastard named Veer (Kamran Shaikh) who works at the consulate and throughout the story takes an instant and relentless dislike for Stabler. Veer continually reminds Stabler that the consulate is considered Indian sovereign territory under diplomatic law and therefore Stabler can’t even be there without Veer’s permission. He’s such an asshole about it that almost immediately we suspect that Veer is actually part of the plot to kill Laghari. The story’s first McGuffin is the metal box Laghari invariably carries around that supposedly contains the text of the prime minister’s speech which she is going to deliver to the U.N. General Assembly; the second McGuffin is a series of semiconductors stolen from a U.S. defense contractor that have such extensive capabilities they can be used to control planes, tanks, drones and driverless war vehicles. Stabler and the rest of the Organized Crime detectives trace the theft of these items to Leland Johnson (Ira Carmichael), an African-American staff member at the defense firm that made them. In a surprise twist, the cops learn not only that Veer commissioned the theft and hired Johnson to commit it, but Diya Laghari herself was behind it all. Apparently she was working on assignment from the Indian Prime Minister to obtain the chips because until now India has been relying on Russia for high-tech weaponry, but with these chips and the thousands they can learn to make themselves once they grab the originals from the U.S., they can build their own weapons and won’t have to stay geopolitically aligned with Russia anymore.

The two McGuffins are linked because Laghari’s hiding place for the semiconductor chips is the little aluminum case we all thought just contained her speech. In the end the U.S. government recovers the semiconductors and Veer is expelled from the U.S. – presumably he’s declared persona non grata, which is the legal recourse a government has if a diplomatic representative of another government commits crimes here on behalf of his country: he can’t be arrested or tried, but he can legally be expelled from this country and ordered never to return – while Laghari goes home with her little aluminum box empty, and likely facing major (though unknown) personal consequences for her failure to get the semiconductors out of our country and into hers. This was a neat episode of Organized Crime and had some nice twists, including the cops’ discovery of a whole community of homeless people literally living in the New York sewer tunnels and getting their electrical power by illegally hooking up to Consolidated Edison, New York’s private utility company and predictably one of the most hated institutions in the city; and the way Stabler’s boss, Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), has to take off work in the middle of the case because she’s locked in a custody dispute with her former wife over their son. It just goes to show that Lesbian couples can have major custody disputes, too.

Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter and Love (Silent House, NBC-TV, aired April 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I got to see a TV special called Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter and Love, which aired last night because April 26, 2023 was in fact Carol Burnett’s 90th birthday. (As I found out later on one of the late-night TV comedy shows, April 26 is also the birthday of Melania Trump. Both are pretty funny ladies, but Burnett, unlike Mrs. Trump, actually was trying to be.) Though virtually all Burnett’s TV career was on CBS – both her early stint on Garry Moore’s variety show and the 11 years she hosted her own – for some reason the special aired on NBC. Our long-time friend Garry Hobbs came over about midway through the special and recalled actually meeting Carol Burnett; his dad was in the Marine Corps and Burnett, Nancy Sinatra and Jim Nabors came to Camp Pendleton in San Diego’s North County to entertain the troops. Garry sneaked backstage during the performance and got royally chewed out by Jim Nabors, who emerged from his dressing trailer and rudely told him to go back to the audience where he belonged. Then Burnett chewed Nabors out, telling him that the fans were the ones who had put them there in the first place and he should be nice to them. Garry said he approached Burnett and addressed her, “Ms. Burnett” – and she said, as she was wont to do whenever anyone approached her, “Call me Carol.” Garry’s anecdote tied in to the things the participants in the special were telling about her – that she was unfailingly polite to fans and also she worked hard to give new talents a break.

Vicki Lawrence, who seems to be the only regular cast member of Burnett’s show besides Carol herself to have survived (Tim Conway died in 2019, Harvey Korman in 2008, and Lyle Waggoner in 2020), recalled that she wrote Carol a fan letter expressing her wish to follow in her footsteps – and Carol not only wrote her back personally, she invited her to a meeting and six years later hired Lawrence for her show. Not surprisingly, by far the best parts of the show were the clips from Burnett’s actual episodes, including the screamingly funny parody of Gone With the Wind. In the movie, Scarlett O’Hara makes herself a new ball gown from the curtains of her home, Tara; in her spoof, Burnett left the curtain rod in. According to Bob Mackie, who designed it (and all the rest of the costumes for Burnett’s show, as well as being Cher’s famous designer – Cher appeared on this show and joked about her and Carol being the same size, which they clearly aren’t), the original costume is in the Smithsonian Institution. Needless to say, the show included a whirlwind biography of Burnett, from her start on Broadway in the musical Once Upon a Mattress (a part-adaptation, part-spoof of the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea”) and on TV when first Jack Paar and then Ed Sullivan put her on their show to sing a comic love song to, of all people, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (One joke about the Dulles brothers – John Foster and Allan, who headed the CIA – from their time was they were so aptly named they were “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”) That got her on Garry Moore’s show (where she consistently outshone him) and then onto a show of her own that ran for 11 seasons.

The show featured tributes from modern-day entertainers as well as veterans like Vicki Lawrence, Julie Andrews and Lily Tomlin. Burnett and Andrews did three specials together and Lawrence introduced a clip of her and Carol doing Brahms’ Lullaby together at a time when Lawrence was visibly pregnant. Broadway veterans Kristin Chenoweth and Bernadette Peters introduced a clip of Burnett and the late opera star Beverly Sills doing a duet called “An Octave Apart” as a spoof of the difference between their voices. Then Chenoweth and Peters did their own “take” on the song, with Peters taking Carol’s original part and Chenoweth doing Sills’s – to much less effect; though Chenoweth has a good “legit” extension on her voice, she’s not a trained opera singer and frankly a true modern diva like Renée Fleming or Natalie Dessay would have been a better choice. There was also a segment featuring Burnett’s career as an actress on both film and TV – including what I think is her all-time best dramatic performance in the 1979 TV-movie Friendly Fire as Peg Mullen, the mother of a U.S. servicemember killed in Viet Nam who’s determined to find out why her son was killed by “friendly fire” – i.e., by his own side. I remember reading an interview Burnett gave to TV Guide to promote that film in which she was asked how someone best known as a comedienne could deliver a dramatic performance, and she said, “Actually, comedy is harder.” (One person who agreed with her was classic-era actor and director Erich von Stroheim, who frequently cast comedians in serious roles on the ground that if you could play comedy, you could play anything.) Alas, the movie they mostly featured was the 1992 film of the hit Broadway musical Annie, which aside from Burnett’s own performance as orphanage manager Mrs. Hannigan – the true villainess of the story, a role she tore into with all the venom it required and then some – was frankly terrible.

The show also paid tribute to the musical guests on Carol’s show, including Steve Lawrence and his wife, Eydie Gormé, The Carpenters, The Jackson 5, Helen Reddy, Ray Charles (the show included a clip of their great duet in the song “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry”), Bing Crosby, “Mama” Cass Elliott, Ella Fitzgerald, Liza Minnelli, Jim Nabors, Mel Tormé, Ethel Merman and two huge talents that weren’t primarily known as singers but acquitted themselves beautifully as such on Carol’s show, Steve Martin and Lucille Ball. The show ended with acknowledgments of Burnett’s current projects, including a recurring slot on the last six episodes of the TV black-comedy Better Call Saul (whose star, Bob Odenkirk, revealed that in the final episode his character was supposed to kill Carol’s, only at the last minute he demanded a rewrite because “I don’t want to go down in history as the man who killed Carol Burnett”) and her newest mini-series, Palm Royale, which according to imdb.com “chronicles a woman reconstructing her identity in the 1960’s after being dismissed by her husband and her entire social circle.” Carol’s co-stars in this series, Alison Janney, Laura Dern and Kristen Wiig, all paid tribute to her on the show and spoke predictably about what it was like to be working with a living legend.

The show concluded with Carol Burnett’s closing theme for all 11 seasons of her show, “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” sung by Katy Perry (surprisingly soulfully; she’s made news recently as one of two entertainers, along with Lionel Richie, who’ve agreed to perform at King Charles III’s coronation after other, bigger names, including Charles’s countrymen Elton John and Ed Sheeran, turned him down) with Carol herself taking over on the last line. Carol Burnett has been one of those people who’s been in the public eye for literally my entire life, or as close to it as makes no difference, and though this show had its clunky moments, it was mostly a heartfelt, moving tribute to an entertainer who has also been a genuinely good, decent human being. When Charles and I watched the biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers I wondered whether being a great talent also inevitably means being a great asshole; Carol Burnett’s life and career have been living proofs that the answer to that question is, “No.”

Breaking Girl Code (MarVista Entertainment, Dawn’s Light, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 23) at 8 I barely got home from St. P)aul’s church in time to watch the latest Lifetime “premiere” movie, Breaking Girl Code, which though it had its problems was a much better movie than the one from the night before, Her Fiancé’s Secret Life a.k.a. Falling for a Killer. Breaking Girl Code centers around Andi Quinn (Katelynn Bennett), a young African-American woman who has just moved to Boston after stints as an intern at two publishing houses in New York. Andi has just moved to Boston, where she’s never lived before and knows no one, because her boyfriend Sean (Johnny Ramey) is a rookie cop there. Alas, Sean’s schedule forces him to work mostly nights,so he and Andi have precious little time together. What’s more, when Andi finally gets a job interview with a publisher in Boston and the interviewer (Celeste Oliva) asks her why she left New York when she seemed to be doing well there, Andi tells her it was to be with a boyfriend. Wrong answer: the interviewer pints to a poster on the wall with a quote attributed to Gloria Steinem abut how every successful woman has done it on her own, and Andi gets the message that she’sn ot going to get the job. She also points out that Gloria Steinem never said the quote attributed to her. To make things even worse for her, just after she loses the job Seean tells her he wants them to stop seeing each other – it’s not rea;ly a break-up but Andi takes it as one,

She looks for companionship online and finds it in BeFriends, an app for single (or at least unmarried) women to meet for friendship and companionship. Her contact with the site is Farrah Priestly (Revell Carpenter), who gets her into an ultra-exclusive bar with her boyfriend Ethan St. Ignace (Ignacyo Matynia), a well-connected 1-percenter who tells Andi that he has a private networking group but it’s for men only. While at the exclusive bar Andi is hit on by one of Ethan’s friends, Jason (Luke Hamilton), and is so repulsed by the experience of being treated like a piece of meat that she bolts from the bar and goes home. Farrah somehow persuades Andi to give her group another chance, and Andi accepts – only to notice two of the other women in the group, Miranda (Ashlei Hazell) and Holly (Priyanka Arya Krishnan) get slipped a date-rape drug in their cocktails. Andi realizes that Farrah’;s group is jost pimping for Ethan’s: Ethan attracts young, attractive single women to go out with them, then his members slip them date-rape drugs and they wind up the next morning in strange rooms with visible evidence of having been gang-raped but no memory of what happened to them. Andi tries to get Miranda and Holly to report to the police while there’s still time to get them tested for drugs in their systems, but they decline. Just then Andi finally lands a job at a publishing company headquartered in the same building as Ethan’s, and while there she runs into Shannon (Danielle Baez), who says Ethan’s group is legendary among the staff in his office. She agrees to help Andi bust Ethan with the help of Andi’s ex-boyfriend Sean, but no sooner have they met in a presujmnably deserted stairwell in the building that a security camera Shannon thought was non-operational turns o tu to be working after all. Either Ethan himself or someone in his office overheard Andi talking to Shannon, cornered Shannon in the stairwell after Andi left,and pushed her down the stairs.

A similarly unknown assailant has also fatally run down Kayla Grayson (Aja Goes) after she showed up at the club to the disgust of one of the men in Ethan’s circle, who’d grown tired of her. Andi eventually tries to get Farrah, who’s in the Ghislaine Maxwell position – she’s a victim but also a predator and a pimp – only Ethan shows up and catches aAndi recording the meeting on her phone. Only he’s caught her too late: Sean has wired his phone to listen to Andi’s recording and is easily able to trace her ot the secret bar where Ethan and his friends are about to gang-rape her. Sean arrests Ethan and takes him away, and in an O.K. epilogue Andi leads a new meeting of the BeFriends women and invites Farrah despite the misiivings of the other members. Andi persuades them that Farrah was a victim herself and the other woman should forgive her and let her back into the sisterhood. Breaking Girl Code was directed by Kristin Fairweather, whose imdb.com biography describes her as “an award-winning independent filmmaker whose experience in politics, advocacy, and women's empowerment creates a unique lens for her critically-acclaimed work,” from a script by Suzanne Egan, whose writing reflects a similar sensibility. Though the characters are pretty stock and some of the coincidences verge n the risible – Andi just happens to get a job in Ethan’s building (I expected Ethan to turn out to be responsible for her employment and guilt-trip her into feeling she needed to protect him out of loyalty and gratitude) – Breaking Girl Code is aq quite good Lifetime movie and its sense of feminist empowerment and girl power is a welcome change from the “pussies in peril” sexism of so much of the Lifetime output!

Her Fiancé's Double Life, a.k.a. Falling for a Killer (13th Floor Productions, Liquid Arts Media, Venafro Capital, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Lifetime movie my husband Charles and I watched last night (Saturday, april 22) at 8 was originally filmed as Falling for a Killer, but was eventually shown under the title My Fiancé’s Secret Life to fit it in with the cycle of movies they’ve made over the years about marital partners whose spouses are harboring some deep, dark secret. In this case the couple aren’t married yet – thank goodness – but are still having sex all over the place. She is Brea Young (Aubrey Reynolds, whom Charles recognized from a previous Lifetime movie, Vacation Home Rental), younger sister of assistant district attorney Darcy Young (Olivia Buckle, top-billed) – a first name that threw me for a while because the only other fictional character I know of named “Darcy” is one of the leads in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and he’s a man. The killer she’s fallen for is Thomas Schure (Jonathan Stoddard, whose very hunkiness, well showcased by director Lindsay Hartley and cinematographer Josh Maas, marks him as a villain in the Lifetime world), though he’s used several different names in the past: Thomas Baugh (the name he was using in a brutal prologue in which he shoves his new bride down an open elevator shaft to collect on the life insurance he’s just taken out on her) and Thomas Snow (the name he used when he murdered a previoius wife, also to collect life insurance on her). Darcy is actually the main character; she’s immediately suspicious of the new man in her sister’s life, especially since he claims to have no social media presence and her Google search of “Thomas Schure” reveals nothing.

Most of the fim takes place at the home of Darcy’s and Brea’s parents, criminal defense attorney Douglass Young (Mike Gassaway) and his wife Loretta (Langley Cornwell). One wonders what writer Jay Black (who’s also listed as an executive producer was thinking when he named his matriarch “Loretta Young,” the name of a quite famous actress from Hollywood’s classic era and the early days of TV (where she had her own show in which she made a grand entrance bursting through a door, and actually threatened to sue any other woman who began a TV show bursting through a door), but that’s not the least of his miscalculations. Black’s biggest mistake was to make Thomas’s villainy so obvious he might as well be a classic Western villain wearing black clothes and a black hat, and riding a black horse. Throughout the film Thomas periodically talks to himself, often in raging tones,and he understandably gets worried that the Youngs’ deaf-mute maid Kristina (Hadassah Patterson, who according to her imdb.com bio is part-Black and part-Native, though she looked just Black to me and I assumed she was going to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her), a skilled lip-reader, will be able to find him out by reading his lips during one of his soliloquies. Thomas does indeed try to kill her by injecting her with a poison drug, but she ends up in a hospital in a coma but survives. Thomas pretended to be helping save her, but he pinned down her arms so she couldn’t sign – a warning to Darcy (the only one of the Youngs who’s learned American sign language).

There’s an ongoing tension within the Young family because dad was grooming Darcy to join him in his defense firm, but she decided to join the D.A. 's office and become a prosecutor instead. There's also a duck-hunting trip on which dad and Thomas go out. There’s a third person on the trip, Earl (Jim O’Brien), who recognizes Thomas from an old case he worked on as a defense attorney, and from the moment I heard that I assumed Thomas would kill Earl and make it look like a hunting accident, but no-o-o–o-o, Black didn’t go there. Instead he had Thomas murder a cater waiter for calling him “dude” instead of “sir,” and spilling sauce over Thomas’s suit, then driving off in the man’s van and presumably crashing it somewhere to make it look like an accident. Eventually it turns out that [spoiler alert!] Thomas’s real last name is Halston and he’s the son of a particularly heinous criminal whom Darcy successfully prosecuted. Then Halston père was murdered in prison by a fellow inmate, and Halston fils decided to get his revenge by romancing female relatives of the judge in the case, the district attorney and Darcy herself, then killing them so the people who put his dad away would know first-hand the anguish of losing a beloved relative.

In the big confrontation scene at the end Thonas announces his intention to murder both Darcy and Brea – whom Darcy had futilely tried to warn about Thomas, and who finally realized that Darcy was right when a delivery man from an insurance company with the preposterous name “Heidelberg” arrived with a rush order on a policy Thomas had taken out on her and needed her to sign before he killed her – only the two women are saved by Douglass and Loretta, who show up as parents ex machina and blast away at Thomas with a shotgun. Thomas apparently survives, since the last we see of him is the police leading him away, but Black isn’t through with us yet. In an epilogie prefaced by a typical Lifetime chyron, “One Year Later," Darcy is in her office when a young man named Justin (Ali Zahin) shows up, claiming to be a new lawyer in her dad’s firm, and she immediately falls for him. Then Black tells us that Justin is really Thomas’s younger brother, out to continue Thomas’s revenge plot.

I’ve seen some pretty bad Lifetime movies over the years, but Her Fiancé’s Secret Life a.k.a. Falling for a Killer is easily one of the worst. The big problem is the villain: he’s too obviously a maniac and I can’t for the life of me understand how a family as intelligent as the Youngs are supposed to be are – with the exception of Darcy – so totally taken in by him. Jonathan Stoddard’s performance reminded me of Lawrence Tierney, a Hollywood actor from the late 1940’s and early 1950’s who shot to brief stardom as John Dillinger in 1945, once the Production Code Administration finally left their ban on portraying him on screen in 1945. (The ban kept us from seeing the actor who was born to play Dillinger, Humphrey Bogart – the two even looked astonishingly alike – in the role, though his star-making role was as the outlaw Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, a character obviously based on Dillinger.) Unfortunately, Tierney was almost as much of a thug off-screen as he was on, so he didn’t have a long career, but Stoddard reminded me so much of him that if anyone wants to do a Lawrence Tierney biopic, Stoddard would be perfect casting for it. I also felt sorry for Lindsay Hartley, a woman who has worked her way up from beauty-contest winner at 14 to actress and now director. In addition to directing this film, she also appears in it in the brief role of Darcy’s immediate superior at the D.A.’s office, who runs a check on Thomas and finds out who he really is. She seems like a potentially capable director but she’s hamstrung here by the idiotic melodramatics of Jay Black’s script, and I can only hope she gets better writers in the future.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (HBO Films, BBC Films, De Mann Entertainment, Company Pictures Productions, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April; 21) shortly after 9 my husband Charles and I watched a movie that premiered on HBO Films in 2004,which probably explains why I’d never heard of it and most likely he hadn’t either: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a 2004 biopic of the great British comedian and actor – played, in a bit of casting that at first seemed strange but ultimately worked brilliantly, by Geoffrey Rush. Before watching this movie I’;d never thought of Rush as a comedian, having known himmostly for his breakthrough role in the 1996 film Shine, in which he plaed real-life Australian classical pianist David Helfgott, who had a demanding father who pushed him to a concert career and had to battle his way back from mental illness to be able to play again. Oddly, though Peter Sellers was a superstar while Devid Hellfgott was never more than a footnote in classical music history, the two characters have strong similarities. Peter Sellers was pushed into acting by a domineering parent – his mother former music-hall performer Peg (Miriam Margolyes), not hs more easygoing father Bill (William Vaughan). When the film, imaginatively directed by Stephen Hopkins from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (based on a book by Righte Lewis that I presume was just a “straight’ biography), opens Sellers is a major star on BBC Radio with The Goon Show, starring him in a comedy trio with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe that were basically Monty Python before Monty Python.

But his mom is pushing him to go after roles in feature films because that’s where the long-term stardom and money are. He reads for a part as an aging World War I veteran and is rudely told by the casting director that, no matter how good his voice is, film is a visual medium and he’s just too young for the part. So Sellers shows up again in age makeup and fakes a trick knee, because the character is supposed to have been permanently wounded in combat. The next thing we see, Sellers is already a movie star in Britain, winner of the British Film Academy award for Best Actor (for which he beats out Laurence Olivier and Daid Niven), only he’s also a holy terror to live with. We see him in a frightening scene in which, when his son mistakenly messes up the expensive sports car Sellers has just bought, he retaliates by destroying his son’s prized slot race cars and track. The boy’s mother, Sellers’ first wife Anne (Emily Watson), uts up with him until he announces that he wants to have an affair with his co-star, Sophia Loren. Just about every male who co-starred with Loren hit on her, and Sellers was no exception. She dealt with them the same way – by playing along with it as long as she dared and then flaunting her husband, Italian film producer Carlo Ponti, in their faces.(My mom always admired Loren for staying with this sport, fat, dumpy-looking guy when she could have had her pick of the world’s straight men.)

Sellers gets his big break when he is offered supporting role as French police inspector Jcques Cloueau by director Blake Edwards in the 1964 film The Pink Panther, and despite both his misgivings about playing in support and accepting a role originally intended for Peter Ustinov (who got sick and had to drop out at the last minute), and his instant dislike for Blake Edwards, he takes the part and the rest, as they say, is history. (Actually Sellers’ British films had already made him known to American audiences, and though it was shot in Britain he’d already appeared in a U.S.-financed film, Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick and with Vladimir Nabokov adapting his own controversial novel for the screen.) Sellers’ next big film is Dr. Strangelove, also directed by Stanley Kubrick (though the script for this film ignores Lolita and depicts Kubrick and Sellers as never having worked together before),and Kubrick (Stanley Tucci, who appears to have got the part largely from having the same first name as his character). Kubrick leads with Sellers to take four roles in the film because his distributor, Columbia,won’t finance the film without him. (In the end he only took three roles in Dr. Strangelove and, at least according to this film's script, faked illness to get out of playing the fourth, the bomber pilot memorably portrayed by Sl;im Pickens.)

Ironically, Sellers had made a previous film, The Mouse That Roared, also a black comedy about the threat of nuclear war and also a film in which Sellers played multiple roles, and also financed by Columbia, but the only references to it here are a brief shot of the poster and an appearance of Sellers in drag as the aging Duchess of Grand Fenwick in a hallucinatory sequence in which various characters he’s played flash befa few months later, while Sellers was making the film Kiss Me, Stupid for director Billy Wilder, in which he was cast as a desperate songwriter eager to place a song with Dean Martin (essentially playing himself) and willing to accept to Martin’s demand for a night with his wife in exchange for plugging his song. Only the songwriter, Orville, hires a prostitute (Kim Novak) to pose as the wife (played by Felicia Farr, real-life wife of frequent Wilder collaborator Jack Lemmon) – but through a mixup the real wife ends up in bed with the singer. Sellers lasted a few weeks on the production and then had a severe heart attack which nearly killed him and wh ich he blamed in the intense sex he’d been having with his new girlfriend, Swedish actress Britt Eklund (Charlize Theron), who soon becomes his second wife. Alas, she quickly becomes pregnant from all that intense sex and Sellers, who already has two kids from his first marriage, doesn’t wnat another. He not-s-ogently hints that she should have an abortion, and she refuses – which heads to a grimly funny scene of them together on the film After the Fox (a pretty stupid mid-1960’s comic caper film directed by Italian neo-realist master Vittorio De Sica,wh ose presence there practically defined “overqualified”) in which the sound of their baby crying keeps wrecking take after take. Eventually Eklund breaks up with Sellers after a scene in which he knocks her down and she retaliates by breaking a framed photo of his late mother over his head.

The rest of the movie is the familiar rags-to-riches-to-not-quite-rags-again tale as Sellers ends up broke from his indulgences with women and drugs (ther’es a scene in a limo of him snorting cocaine with two babes in the back seat with him, and a rather strange deleted scene which appears to be director Jp[lins debating with himself whether he should leave that scene in or take it out, or leave it in but digitally erase the women and the drugs) and his battle with his agents over whether he should do another Pink Panther movie or a pet project of his own, a film of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There. Sellers was attracted to Being There because he saw himself as a blank slate on which people wrote whatever they wanted, and the whole conceit of this movie – that there was no ineradicable “me” to Peter Sellers, no definable persona aside from the roles he played –led him to want to play Kosinski’s unbelievably naïve gardener who has grown to adulthood and only then is confronted by the normal world,

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is a really well-done film in its way, but it’s yet another celebrity biopic that leaves you to wonder whether all talented people are also total assholes. It’s mostly told chronologically, though there are a few scenes in which characters in Peter Sellers' life (his dad early on, his mom on her deathbed – in which she says she perfectly understands why he can’t see her one last time because he’s in themiddle of shooting a film – and Stanley Kubrick) talk to us, the audience, on their experiences of living, raising and/or working with him. Ironically, one of the films on my list of potentially great movies that weren’t made but should have been is a biography of Charlie Chaplin starring Peter Sellers, made right after Chaplin published his autobiography in 1965. Peter Sellers was a brilliant performer and hsi films brought joy to millions (and are still doing so!),but he must have been a real handful to work with or even just to know casually. And, despite the film’s title, it really doesn’t depict Sellers’ death; he makes Being There and thn a closing credit roll tells us that Sellers made just one more movie (a Fu Manchu spoof that died ignominiously at the box office); he was in the process of divorcing his fourth wife,Lynne Frederick, but hadn’t completed the paperwork when he died (there’s a bit of that deleted scene in which Hopkins debates whether or not to include Sellers’ third wife, Miranda Quarry, and ultimately decides not to), so she inherited his multi-million dollar legacy and Sellers palmed off his children with just $2,000 each.

School of Rock (Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, MFP Munich Film Partners GmbH & Company I. Produktions KG, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday,April 19) at about 9:30 I wanted to watch something light and u uplifting after all the gloom and doom of the news, and I found it in School of Rock, a 2003 production by Scott Rudin, directed by Richard Linklater from a script by Mike White. It’s basically another rock-conquers-all youth movie, though it has some interesting “spins” on the formula. Dewey Finn (Jack Black) is the lead singer and guitarist for a rock band called No Vacancy that is going nowhere in particular. People who go to their shows text their friends on social media (which was already enough of a “thing” in 2003 to be part of this movie’s plot, even though neither Facebook nor Twitter existed yet) and say the band sucks, and Dewey is the main reason they don’t like them. Dewey is living rent-free as a house guest of Ned Schneebly (played by Mike White,who also write the script), who was in a previous group with Dewey before he realized he was never going to achieve his dream of rock ‘n’ roll stardom and he needed to find another gig. Ned has become a substitu9te teacher and has acquired a girlfriend, Patty De Marco (Saturday Night Live alumna Sarah Silverman), who wants Ned to throw Dewey out. Dewey insists that as soon as No Vacancy wins an upcoming battle-of-the-bands contest he’ll have the money to pay off Ned’s back rent. Only when he shows u p for his band’s next rehearsal he finds the rest of the members have fired him and hired a new frontman, Spider (Lucas Babin), to replace him. They made this decision after a show during which Dewey did an ill-advised dive into the audience – only no one caught him and he came to in his bed in Ned’s and Patty’s home.

Desperate, Dewey answers a call for Ned offering him a job substitute-teaching at the prestigious Horace Green Preparatory School, and he poses as Ned and gets the assignment. Once there he’s bored shitless by the school’s routie of carefully planned curricula and a system of gold stars to reward the students for doiogn well and demerits for punishing them if they screw up. The forst thing Dewey does in class is tear down the red poster board that hods the demerits. He announces that he’s not going to grade anybody and he’s going to keep callignr ecesses until he figures out what to do. Naturally this arouses the ire of the school’s principal, Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack), who seems to have gone to the same education school as Miss Togar, the fearsome female principal played by Mary Woronov in the film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, to which this film owes quite a lot. Dewey hits on a plan when he hears the school’s band rehearsing a rather lame arrangement of the hauntingly beautiful slow movement from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra, and he’s impressed enough with the musical skills of the students he decides, without telling either their parents or anyone at the school, to start a rock band with them and enter them in the battle-of-the-bands contest. He has to deal with the concerns of the kids not only that their parents will find out but he’ll have to break the school’s ironclad policy against field trips to get them to play at the battle of the bands. Dewey solves the last problem by romancing Rosalie, offering to take her to a “coffeehouse” that is actually a beer bar and getting her drunk. He got the idea to do this from a faculty meeting at which someone mentioned a party at which Rosalie had got drunk and did a killer Stevie Nicks impersonation – so naturally he tanks her up with alcohol and puts on a Stevie Nicks record in the bar’s jukebox.

Dewey’s cover is finally blown when Ned Schneebly receives a check for $1,200 reflecting “his” pay for substituting at Horace Green – where he’s never worked in his life – and Patty calls the police and they show up on the school’s parents’ night to arrest him. Dewey confesses all to the kids and then essentially kidnaps them to go to the battle of the bands, whereupon the parents follow and demand to be let in – only to be confronted by an officious doorman who demands that they buy tickets before they can go in. In a major departure front he way movies like this end [spoiler alert!], the School of Rock does not win the big contest – the prize goes instead to Dewey’s former band, No Vacancy – but the audience demands a second song from the School of Rock, and it dissolves into an extended band rehearsal that for once gives us something to watch during the closing credit roll. An imdb.com “Trivia” post on the film says Mike White’s original plan was to have Dewy and Rosalie fall inlove and end up a couple at the end of the film – which suggests to me a monroe interesting ending than the one we got, in which the School of Rock wins the battle of the bands prize, a group of horrified parents demand that the school fire Rosalie for her dereliction of duty, but Rosalie , Dewey and the parents who are supportive found their own school, the School of Rock, which will offer tough academics but also a rock band program, and the prize money and the support of the parents who are on-board with what being in a rock band has done for their kids would provide the startup capital. )I'd also have liked to hear Joan Cusack do her Stevie Nicks impersonation at the concert.)

School of Rock owes a lot to just about every movie about rebellious youth and their battle with authority figures who don’t like their music – the parallel I thought of was the 1940 film Make Mine Music, in which an elderly classical-music teacher at a high school inadvertently becomes a swing goddess with a school fight song she wrote, then she writes a second hit and explains to the students who have rejected her music for theirs that it’s based ont he Chopin nocturne she was futilely trying to teach them to appreciate in the opening scene. It also has a lot in common with Shake, Rattle and Rock, a 1956 production from Sunset Films and American International that not only dealt with the controversy surrounding rock as “the music of the devil” but actually made it the center of the plot: a young, idealistic activist sets up rock ‘n’ roll clubs for the kids of a big city and argues that such organizations will keep them away from gangs and juvenile delinquency. Of course Chrles and I both noticed the similarities to Rock ‘n’ Roll High School as well – especially the appearance of one of the kids in the final scene wearing a Ramones T-shirt, an homage to the real-life band that starred in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. I quite liked School of Rock despite the sheer preposterousness of its plot– though one thing I give Linklater and White credit for is a seeming awareness of the plot’s sheer preposterousness and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink to the audience to the effect that they don’t take it seriously for a moment and they really don't expect us to, either! Ironically, one gag in the film is that one of the kids, Summer Hathaway (Miranda Cosgrove), auditions for the band with a deliberately dreadful version of “Memory” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats – only when School of Rock was turned into a Broadway stage musical in 2015, Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the score.

The Journeys of Harry Crosby (Cinewest, PBS, c. 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 17) at 10 I watched an intriguing hour-long special on PBS called The Journeys of Harry Crosby. The “Harry Crosby” in question was not singer Bing Crosby (whose official name at birth was Harry Lillis Crosby) or the crazy 1920’s poet who committed joint suicide with his girlfriend ini Paris in 1929, but a photographer who was based in San Diego and became famous for photographing Baja California. Harry W. Crosby was born in 1928 in Seattle, Washington (not far from Bing Crosby's birthplace in Spokane), but his parents moved to the ritzy San Diego suburb of La Jonna in 1935, when Harry was 7, and he grew up here and lived here for the rest of his life. In fact, he’s still very much alive at 94, and though imdb.com doesn’t give a production date for this documentary,the publicity mentioned Harry Crosby as being 92, which would date it at 2021 or 2022. For the first 12 years of his adult career Crosby was a high-school teacher, specializing in science, and in his later years he would organize field trips with his students to take pictures of natural subjects. (One wonders what difficulties a teacher who tried to do that now would face from the students’ parents, especially in this more darkly suspicious age. “You want to take my kid out to the middle of Baja California so you can molest him?” more than one parent would probably say today.)

In 1964 Crosby decided to give up teaching and concentrate on photography for the rest of his career – though one of his grandsons interviewed for this film describes him as a modern-day Renaissance man since he also designed and built his own cameras and his own cars, bred orchids and pursued a number of other arcane interests. He got an assignment to shoot pictures of Baja California for a magazine in 1964, and three years later he ran into Robert Finch, then Ronald Reagan’s lieutenant governor, at an American football game in Los Angeles. Finch hired Crosby to shoot photos of Baja for a bicentennial book honoring both Californias – how nice to be reminded of a time when a Republican politician in high elective office treated California’s Mexican history with respect and didn’t write off all Mexicans as pond scum! Crosby decided for this commission to reproduce the expedition Spanish conquistador Gaspar de Portolá led in 1769-1770, following Native American trails up the California coast and establishing a chain of missions along the way. At first Crosby and company traveled the route in a dune buggy Crosby had designed and built, but the combination of dirt roads and an open car proved too destructive to the delicate photographic equipment. Instead Crosby and his crew decided to abandon the dune buggy and continue the trip the way Portolá had – riding mules. Crosby and company designed special saddlebags that would allow him to retrieve his cameras quickly if he saw anything he wanted to photograph.

On a later expedition to Baja, he discovered a set of giant cave paintings that are one of the five principal surviving centers of paleolithic art, which the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) subsequently declared a world historic site. Crosby was ultimately commissioned to write a book of his own, illustrated with his photographs, on the history of California under Mexican rule. He had never written for publication before but he took to the task readily, producing books with titles like Last of the Californios and Antigua California. He was also in a long-term marriage that produced three children,.though his wife understandably resented his long absences of two to three months at a time while he went on photographic trips. Mrs. Crosby more or less resigned herself to it, saying in the documentary, “Someone had to stay behind to look after the kids.” They had three, including a son named Robbin who was a founding member of the heavy-metal band Ratt until he was fired in 1992 for drug addiction; he announced he was HIV-positive in 2001 and died of a heroin overdose in 2002. (Harry wasn’t the only legendary photographer named Crosby who had a son that became a rock star with drug issues. The great cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who won an Academy Award for shooting Friedrich Murnau’s last film, Tabu, in 1931 was the father of David Crosby of The Byrds and Crosby, stills, Nash and Young, though David ultimately recovered from his various addictions and died only recently in January 2023 at age 81.)

Harry Crosby’s greatest sources of pride were having documented the rachero and vaquero lifestyles of Baja California before theiy disappeared completely – he went back to Baja 20 years or so after publishing Last of the Californios, and found that most of the rahnches where he had taken pictures had since been abandoned by the owners or their heirs) and having discovered the stunning cave paintings, which were distinguished from other surviving cave paintings mostly by their sheer size. The Baja paintings were up to 40 feet tall and Crosby theorized the artists must have had rope ladders or other tools like that to get that high. The popular superstition in Baja at the time the paintings were discovered was that they had been painted by giants, but Crosby pointed to the handprints on the paintings, left there as a sort of artists’ signature, that indicated they were normal-sized humans., The Journeys of Harry Crosby was a fascinating documentary that introduced me to someone I’d never heard of before, though it did get annoying when people were being interviewed in Spanish and the subtitles were white-on-white and therefore virtually illegible, especially to my rapidly aging eyes.

Chaos on the Farm (Fade to Black Films, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 16) at 8 my husband Charles and I watched Chaos on the Farm, a pretty standard-issue Lifetime movie that in some ways was a relief after the impressive but leavy-handed Drunk, Driving and 17 we’d watched the night before. It was pretty typical Lifetime sleaze: a young couple, Jessica Freeman (Brook Sill) and Samuel “Sam” Richards (Billy Armstrong, an actor with at least a bit more physical and emotional definition than most of Lifetime’s “good” male leads), are living in San Diego (though the locations didn’t look much like San Diego to me) and grieving over the long, slow death from cancer of Jessica’s mother Betty. Jessica’s only surviving relatives – at least so far as she knows – are Betty’s sister Susan and her husband Lawrence, both of whom live together on a farm out in the country. Jessica has a check for a substantial sum of money made out to Susan and Lawrence, and rather than entrust it to the mails she decides to take a trip and give it to them in person even though she hasn’t seen either of them since her childhood. They spend the long hours on the road listening to podcasts. And Sam is frustrated that when he finally arrives at the farmhouse virtually the entire property is in a dead zone sp he can’t get cell-phone service. The film began with a prologue depicting a man, seen only from behind and clad in farmers’ overalls ()but showing a nice ass under them). Being strangled by an unseen assailant.

Charles read this as a clue sooner than I did that “Susan” (Clara Kramer) and “Lawrence” (Jake Busey, Gary Busey’s son and also an executive producer on the film) are imposters. Lifetime had largely given away the plot in a preview showing Sam being tortured by “Lawrence” and ordered to tell him the whereabouts of the money, but I had at first thought this would mean that Aunt Susan and Uncle Lawrence were themselves nasty people after not only the share of Betty’s estate they’d inherited legally, but all of it. No-o-o-o-o: the “Freemans” we see (it’s an obvious mistake on the part of screenwriters Derek Sulek, who also directed, and Eric Durham, to give the farmer couple the same last name as Jessica, given that they’re only supposed to be maternal relatives and therefore shouldn’t have the same last name) were just a criminal couple n the run, a sort of modern-dress middle-aged version of Bonnie and Clyde. They killed the real Lawrence and Susan just to use the farmhouse as a hiding place from the law and only later learned that their victims had had a substantial inheritance coming to them and they decided to stick around long enough to collect it.

Sujek and Durham drop some clever hints that the “farm” couple aren’t who they say they are, including their claim that they’ve “retired” from farming as their explanation of why no farm activity actually seems to be going on on their supposed land. Sam has listened to podcasts about agriculture and tries to show off what he’s learned about it, but the imposters couldn’t be less interested in it. They also have “Lawrence” make a big to-do about forbidding the couple from sleeping in the same bed since they’re not legally married to each other, and he watches Sam and Jessica through a cracked-open door as they break his edicts and have sex with each other.. Midway through the film Sulek and Durham introduce another character, a young and pretty obviously drug-addicted thug who comes to town, holds up the local general store and thus attracts the attention of Hank (Dorian Gregory), the local sheriff’s deputy and seemingly the only law-enforcement officer around for miles. The thug comes by the farmhouse and greets “Lawrence” by another name, indicating that they knew each other, but “Lawrence” doesn’t what the guy around and kills him after the thug drives his car to the back of the property on "Lawrence’s” order. “Lawrence” then throws a tarp over the car and leaves it there until Jessica accidentally stumbles across the body. She noticed the car with a tarp over it, lifted the tarp, opened the car door and the thug’s body spilled out.

Meanwhile, “Lawrence” is torturing Sam to find out where the inheritance check is; he and “Susan” threaten his fingers, she with a pair of pliers and he with a kitchen knife with which he says he’ll cut off one of Sam’s fingers for every “wrong” answer he receives. Sam, not surprisingly, wimps out and reveals the whereabouts of the inheritance check (ya remember the inheritance check?) in answer to “Lawrence”’s first question. Jessica tries to get her and Sam to leave immediately, but they run afoul of “Lawrence”, who seems to have an almost supernatural ability to anticipate their plans and foil them. Those include disconnecting the batteries of virtually every motor vehicle on the property. Jessica tries to call 911 on the house phone but “Lawrence” cuts the lien in mid-call, and when the police finally figure it out Hank shows up – only “Lawrence” spears the hapless sheriff’s deputy to death with a farm implement after daring Hank to shoot him. (Charles said that the cop should have shot him, and I was tempted to reply, “He can’t just kill the guy! The guy isn’t Black!”) This looks like another mistake on the part of Sutek and Durham, since surely the local sheriff’s deputy would have known the real Lawrence and Susan and spotted the criminal couple immediately as impostors.

Jessica tries to make her escape in the sheriff’s car, but “Lawrence” comes on her just as she’s trying to get itstarted, and ultimately the movie ends with “Lawrence” approaching Jessica to first rape and then kill her, only Jessica is able to grab tie brown belt with which “Lawrence” was about to strangle her and strangles him instead. More cops show up (where did they come from?) and arrest “Susan” just as she tries to flee, and it turns out that "Lawrence’s” rean name is Brendan and “Susan’s” is Heidi Cokey (at least I think that’s the name that was spat out on the soundtrack). Chaos on the Farm was a pretty dorky Lifetime movie with even more plot holes than usual, but once again, after the sometimes moving and sometimes just dreadful earnestness of Drunk, Driving and 17, it was a lot of sleazy fun!

Drunk, Driving and 17 (Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 15) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime ”premiere” with the salacious title Drunk, Driving and 17 – though the film turned out to be considerably less raunchy than the title and promos for it made it seem. Oddly, there were two pages for it on imdb.com, each listing people in the cast and crew not in the other, and I did my best to fuse them to get as complete a lsit as possible even though neither one listed an actor for Joey Portillo, a pivotal character, though the actors playing his father Jack (Frnaco Castan) and his girlfriend Nikki Marcos (Sydney Bullock) are listed. Drunk, Driving and 17 tells the alcohol-fueled descent of “good girl” Kimberly “Kim” Summers (a quite capable actress named Savannah Lee Smith), an African-American high-school senior who’s never had a drink in her life until one fateful night. One quite remarkable thing about Drunk, Driving and 17 is its frank acceptance of the mixing of white and Black people in contemoprary American suburbia; I’m old enough to remember what a big deal it was for Blacks to move into a white neighborhood and an even bigger deal for white and Black peole to get married and have kids, but Kim is obviously Black, her boyfriend Dan Wright (Antonio Davis) looks mostly white and only slightly Bl;ack, and Dan’s parents Tim (David Shae) and Martha (Michael Michele – yes, the cast list features not only a woman named Michael but a woman named Sydney!), look basically white despite a bit of nappiness in Tim’s hair.

Kim’s downfall begins when Tim and Martha Wright decide to let the local high-school kids have a drunk-fueled party in their home, evidently on the idea that if the kids are going to be drinking anyway at least it’s better if they do it under responsible adult supervision. Only Tim and Martha are anything but responsible: though Martha makes a few stabs at trying to persuade her husband to put brakes on the festivities, Tim couldn’t care less and tells his wife to leave the kids alone and let them have their fun. There are chilling scenes showing the two of them in bed together and Martha is attempting to alert her husband that the party is getting out of hand, but Tim brushes off his wife’s suspicions and at one point plugs a set of headphones into his laptop so he can listen to music in bed and not be bothered either by his wife or their guests. Martha has insisted as a condition of allowing the party that the attendees surrender their car keys and stay there overnight if they get too drunk to make it home safely, but she leaves the keys to their own car hanging on a rack next to the front door – a plot point that becomes important later. Kim, who’s never drunk alcohol before in her life, goes off the rails big-time when she catches Dan Wright in the bathroom making out with another girl, Heather, and she immediately demands a drink, and then another and another and another until she’s chug-a-lugging with the rest of them. She’s also getting herself filmed by the other kids on their smartphones; the video is immediately posted to social media sites by other kids who want to take Kim down a peg because they’re tired of her goody-two-shoes image.

Kim finally realizes she’s overdone it and tries to call her mom Robin (Chantal Jean-Pierre) to come pick her up and take her home, but Robin works the night shift at the local hospital’s ER and can’t pick up Kim’s call. So Kim grabs the keys to the Wrights’ car and uses it to get home, only in the middle of her trip she blacks out, loses control and plows into another car being driven by Joey Portillo. Kim comes to in the ER and realizes she was involved in an accident; she has just a few cuts and bruises but Joey, a star basketball player at the high school before the accident, is paralyzed and ends up in a wheelchair. (There are a few lines of dialogue about how well he’s progressing in rehab, but he’s still using the chair at the end of the movie and it’s left open whether or not he’ll ever be able to walk again.) What makes Drunk, Driving and 17 both more interesting and more frustrating than your average Lifetime movie is the fact that there’s enough blame to go arond: is Joey’s predicament and the collapse of Kim’s life’s ambitions over one stupid mistake. It’s obviuosly Kim’s fault for getting so plastered and stealing a car to try to make it home under the influence,b utit’s also Dan’s fault (as he later acknowledges) for having stage-managed this breakup with Kim by having her catch him with another woman instead of telling her straight-up that it was over between them. It’s also the fault of Tim and Marha Wright for agreeing to host a party at which teenagers wiould be drinking and not doing enough to stop them.

In a way, it reminded me of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – also a story whose tragic outcome is built on a set of coincidences and near-misses – and even more than the play itself it reminded me of a peculiar list of the 10 alleged mistakes that drove the plot of Romeo and Juliet. It was a preface to a versio of the play I read in high school and the first item on the list was that the authorities in Verona waited until the fourth example of violence between the Montagues and the Capulets to ban their feud (the list writer said they shoulde have acted after the first incident) and ends with both Romeo’s and Juliet’s suicides, in which case the bad outcome was that they were “damned” and what they should have done is remained alive and true to each others’ memories. Drunk, Driving and 17 is a lot mroe morally and emotionally complex than msot Lifetime dramas, but Charles put his finger on it when he said it reminded him oef one of the old ABC Afterschool Specials taht regularly aired during our childhoods. Like Drunk, Driving and 17, these were highly didactic and moralistic stories, though since they were only an hour long less commercials they had to be didactic to make both the educational point they wanted to make and a compelling story in which to make it un well undr an hour’s worth of actual running time. The makers of Drunk, Driving and 17, director Russ Parr and writers Amber Benson and Richard Kletter, had a full two hours (actually about 93 minutes) to tell their story and make their didactic points, which in some ways only made the obviousness of the lessons that much more annoying. Still, Drunk, Driving and 17 tells a quite moving story and Savannah Lee Smith vividly brings the character of Kim to life.

Live at the Belly Up: Vokab Company, Brawley (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 14) at 11 I watched one of a peculiar set of KPBS reruns of Live at the Belly Up from 2013, a decade ago. KPBS has been dredging up these old shows from their archives for quite a while now, and this one featured an oddball group called Vokab Kompany and a progressive alt-country group called Brawley. Vokab Company was fronted by two rappers but employed a full band – synthesizer, electric violin, keyboards, bass and drums, along with a guest saxophonist, Jesse Molloy, who was by a wide margin the hottest, sexiest guy in the band (the bass player played shirtless and it was a nice try, but the sax player had it all over himin the looks department). Vokab Komnany played six songs stretching out over half an hour of the 52-minute time slot, and for the most part they7 avoided the infuriating rap mumble that comes from speaking their words in double time – if you’re going to reduce mu sic to just rhythm andlyrics, the very least you can do is render the lyrics actually intelligible instead of spitting them out at warp speed, as so many rappers seem to do. There were a few times the band’s two frontmen did that, but mostly they spoke clearly and understandably. What Vokab Kompany did that made them different is they had an actual band of live musicians backing them up - not just a D.J. spinning records and beats – and the band behind them created some exciting world-music grooves even though I still can’t stand most rap.

They did six songs, most of them about traditional rap subjects like dancing – “Get Up,” “Gunslinger,” “DeLorean,” a medley of “El Axe” and “Wake Up,” “Radio Silence” (also the name of one of Elvis Costllo’s most eloquent songs) and “Keen Eye.” My favorite song of theirs was “DeLorean,” which they prefaced by saying it was inspired by the Back to the Future movies and the use of a converted DeLorean sports car as a time-travel device in those films. The co-leaders mused on how nice it would be to have a DeLorean that could do time travel – and one of the people who would have undoubtedly relished the chance to go back in time and fix some of his own mistakes is John DeLorean himself and his involvement with drug dealers to raise the money to save his company – he was arrested and convicted, but the verdict was reversed on appeal. Brawley, a band whose output is much more to my taste musically, is a project of local singer-songwriter Nena Anderson, who began as a white soul singer who got compared to the Black soul great Etta James. (The prototypical white soul diva, Janis Joplin, covered Etta James’s “Tell Mama\” on one of her last recording sessions, but Janis’s version wasn’t released until 1982 and, predictably, James totally blew her away on the song.)

But Anderson is also a fan of country music, and she started Brawley to showcase her skill at that genre. Though this show was 10 years old, Brawley’s current Web site, https://brawleyup.com/about/, lists the same band personnel – Anderson and Adrian DeMain (who looked oddly Hawai’ian or Polynesian to he) on guitar and vocals, David Berzansky on pedal steel guitar, Jo, Aistom pm p;d=fashioned upright bass and Dale Daniel on drums ≠ as appeared on thai show, and the band still plays live at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach. Alas, Brawley got only four songs – “Promises,” “Everyday” (a band original and not the Buddy Holly masterpiece “Every Day,” alas), “I Fall in Love Too Fast” (also a title that hearkens back to an older song, “I Fall in Love Too Easily”) and “One More.” I certainly would have liked to hear more from them and less from the Vokab Kompany. Anderson sang lead on all the songs except “Everyday,” where she relegated herself to backup vocals to DeMaiin’s lead – and DeMain was clearly the lead guitarist, though Anderson played her rhythm parts on an oversized guitar that reminded me of the ones Sister Rosetta Tharpe used to play.. The best part of Brawley’s music, not surprisingly, is Anderson’s voice; it’s a powerful, well-controlled instrument with enough of an “edge” it’s easy to imagine her singing soul. She brought the soul “edge” to her country vocals in Brawley and she probably brings a bit of country to her soul work as well. I’d like to hear more from this amazing local vocal treasure!

Turtle Odyssey (MacGillivray-Freman Films, Definition Films, Ginclear Films, Ocean 3-D Films, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday, April 13, my husband Charles and I saw three movies during the day and evening that I’ve been wanting to write about. The first was the Omnimax presentation of a 2018 nature documentary called Turtle Odyssey. It’s been a while since Charles and/or I went to a movie in the Omnimax or similar Imax format (I’d forgotten how enveloping the screen is, especially in the Omnimax version in which the screen is a curved semi-circle and you see the movie from inside a half-dome), and it really does look like the world is enclosing you. Turtle Odyssey is a 45-minute documentary narrated by Russell Crowe – who seems to have been picked because both he and Bunjee (Aboriginal for “friend”), the sea turtle at the center of the action, are Australian. It begins on an Australian beach on which Bunjee is the last of her litter to hatch, and the film depicts the mad race Bunjee and the others have to make from the dry ground where they’re hatched to the ocean to be able to survive at all. The narration by Anekia McCarten and Paul Phelan, based on an “original idea” by David Gross (one wonders what his “original idea” was – did he sit or stand at a meeting one day and say, “Let’s do a documentary about sea turtles!”), explains that only one of 100 sea turtle hatchlings ever makes it to the ocean and a shot at life, though it also explains that if htey get all the breaks right a sea turtle can live over 100 years.

Among the predators that cut short their lives are seagulls and crabs, and these predators form an obstacle course through which the sea turtle mast o make it to the water to live – and once they get to the water,then they have to contend with sharks. The biggest vulnerability for a sea turtle is that they’re amphibian and therefore don’t breathe under water through gills like fish do; instead, they have to come up periodically for air, and the sight of a sea turtle’s head poking itself above the water for a gulp of air is often just what an airborne predator needs to spot it, pounce and make it dinner. To avoid this, sea turtles have the ability to slow their heart rate to just one eat per minute so they can stay underwater longer. The film also dramatized the dangers sea turtles are in from us, including the ill effects of climate change, which among other things is ruining the gender balance of the sea turtle population. As the ocean gets warmer,the narration writers explain, for some reason more girl sea turtles are born than boy turtles. That could render the population extinct in no time if there aren’t enough male sea turtles to fuck the females and keep the species alive.

Humans are also screwing up the lives of sea tirtles in a way I knew about already and is documented in the film; there’s a scene of Bunjee swimming past a plastic bag, and Russell Crowe sternly warns Bunjee not to eat the bag because to a turtle, a plastic bag looks like a jellyfish, one of their major food sources, and if she eats it she will choke and die. Turtle Odyssey offers the standard annoying tendency in nature documentaries ever since Walt Disney started making them in 1949: picking certain species as the “good guys” and others as the “bad guys,” and reinforcing those decisions with narration and especially music. It occurred to me that the makers of documentaries like the early-2000’s Academy Award contender Winged Migration would make seagulls the good guys where here they’re definitely the bad guys. Other than that, Turtle Odyssey is a visually extraordinary movie – there’s a separate camera crew credited with the 3-D photography,and they deserve every bit of acknowledgment (and money) they got – even though it’s a pretty standard-issue nature film with only the stunning photography and Crowe’s narration to make it stand out.

Revolt of the Zombies (Academy Motion Pictures, Halperin Brothers Films, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When Charles and I got home April 13 we ultimately watched a DVD I'd picked up from a library sale not long ago: Revolt of the Zombies, a 1936 production of the Halperin brothers – director Victor and producer Edward – who had made the amazing film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi as zombie master “Murder” Legendre, in 1932 and followed it up with a major-studio production, the underrated Supernatural, in 1933, starrng Carole Lombard in a quite surprisingly effective role as a young woman whose body is possessed by the soul of an executed mass murderess (Vivienne Osborne). Despite its high quality – including a performance from Lombard, usually a comedienne, in a role that requires her to switch back and forth between separate personalities (something she does as well as Joanne Wodoward did in The Three Faces of Eve and Sally Field in Sybil) – Supernatural flopped at the box office and Victor Halperin never got a major-studio directing job again. He ended up at a really cheap independent studio called Academy Motion Pictures, where he made a non-horror melodrama called I Conquer the Sea! about a sea captain who loses an arm in an accident and is determined to continue his career, and then he got to make another zombie film.

Alas, instead of doing a straight-ahead sequel to White Zombie or something in a similar vein, the Halperins came up with a bizarre melodrama in which the zombies are not from Haiti but from Cambodia. The prologue is set during World War I, in which a high priest named Tsiang (William Crowell) is engaged by one of the warring countries to create an army of zombies who will keep marching in the face of certain death – the shot of a zombie soldier taking bullet after bullet in his chest and continuing to march as if nothing has happened is by far the most frightening image in this film. After that battle, the warring countries agree not to use zombie troops again for fear of the long-term consequences of zombie warriors, and after the war the French army sends out an expedition to Cambodia to learn the secret of making zombies and destroy it. The film then devolves into a dull romantic triangle between Claire Duval (Dorothy Stone), daughter of the expedition’s commander General Duval (George Cleveland), Clifford Grayson (Robert Noland) and Armand Louque (Dean Jagger, a highly competent character actor way out of his depth in a part that demands the cultured menace of Bela Lugosi).

Armand is obsessed with Claire but she has eyes only for Grayson, Armand visits the temple of Angkor (which suggests to me that the Halperin brothers located an old silent documentary about Cambodia and used it extensively for stock footage and process backgrounds) and learns the secret of zombie-making. Claire agrees to marry Armand if he’ll avoid turning Clifford into a zombie – though he does so anyway – but even after they’re married Claire won’t have sex woth Armand. In a last-ditch effort to get her to be more than a paper wife to him, Armand agrees to free the people he’s zombified – a big mistake, as the newly liberated ex-zombies turn on him, ravage his settlement and kill him. (The film should more accurately have been called Revolt of the Ex-Zombies.) The Halperins used Arthur Martinelli as their cinematographer, as they had on White Zombie and Supernatural, and even on an ultra-low budget he gets some striking images, but it’s all too obvious that the scenes that don’t use process shots from that old silent documentary are being filmed in an Oriental-style park somewhere in southern California. Charles and I had seen Revolt of the Zombies before on a VHS tape from Sinister Cinema, and as Charles said, “I’d forgotten how bad it was!” Anyone who’d seen Revolt of the Zombies when it was new and expected something on the level of White Zombie just four years earlier would have been sorely disappointed – as will anybody who sits through it today; it’s a film that seems to go on considerably longer than its actual 65-minute running time.

Midsomer Murders: "The Curse of the Ninth" (Bentley Productions, ITV, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had picked Revolt of the Zombies largely because I wanted something relatively short that would end in time for us to watch ”The Curse of the Ninth,” a better-than-usual episode of the British TV series Midsomer Murders. Set in the fictional “Midsomer County” in the center of England, in the approximate area of Birmingham and Manchester, this series generally deals with murders centered around an annual festival. Its series star is detective chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), who had a rotating cast of characters including a younger partner named Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix, who unlike his namesake Jimi is white and doesn’t play guitar) and medical examiner Dr. Kam Karimore (Manjinder Virk), who in this episode exits Midsomer County to take a job in Montreal, Canada. (That’s one way of getting rid of an inconvenient character.) I liked this one better than most Midsomer Murders episodes mainly because it deals with the world of classical music: a talented but egomniac composer-conductor, Malcolm Faulconer (James Fleet) is about to premiere his ninth symphony at the local summer music festival. He’s also running a competition for music students and is about to award the top prize to reclusive young violinist Jacob Wheeler (Callum Blake), who supposedly is so absorbed by his musical career he has no time for women. In fact he’s carrying on a secret affair with a married woman in town.

Jacob is killed just after he’s announced as the pricze winner, and among the key suspects is Zak Sowande (Matthew Jacobs Morgan), African-British son of a gardener, Warwick Sowande (Cyril Nri), who’s just been laid off by the wealthy couple who own the estate on which the festival is taking place, Hamish Rafferty (Robert Daws) and his wife Candice (Rosie Holden). Candice has launched a distillery on the property making designer gin, and to finance this she’s got her husband to jack up the ticket prices (the festival used to be free) and turn the event into as much of a cash cow as possible. Jacob is found murdered – predictably, we first learn of this when he’s called to take his palace in the orchestra for the second half of the concert and he doe3sn’t show up – and the priceless Stradivarius violin he was playing, on lona from a Dutch collector, is missing. Ther’es also a power struggle within ht orchestra for the position of first violinist, which has just been vacated by Jacob’s death, and among the claimants are Falconer’s own son Dan (Joseph Prowen) and Jacob’s sister Natalie (Florence Spencer-Longhurst). And if those weren’t enough suspects for you, there’s also Vernon De Harthog (Simon Callow), a violist in the orchestra with a record of petty thefts from previous groups he’s played with, who’s only eliminated when he himself is found dead from hand-ground strychnine poison used in the Raffertys’ garden to control pests. There’s also a frustrated musician turned blogger named Ivo Baxter (Colin Michael Carmichael), who stole the Stradivarius after Jacob’s murder because he didn’t think anyone else in the orchestra was entitled to use so valuable an instrument.

That’s one of the trademarks of Midsumer Murders – the sheer number of crimes uncovered in the main investigation and the large number of characters who end up in police custody at the end – but overall I quite liked this one, especially because of its clever use of the superstition that any composer since Beethoven is cursed to die either just before or just after finishing this ninth symphony. Franz Schubert died after composing just seven finished symphonies and one famously unfinished, though Symphonies 7 and 10 have been cobbled together from fragments he left behind. Anton Bruckner died after completing three of the projected four movements of is ninth symphony (though he’d actually written two earlier symphonies before his numbered ones, and when Bruckner and his friends discovered one of them among his manuscripts and they urged him to publish it but debated on what number to give it, Bruckner famously said, “Just call it Die Nüllte – ‘The Zero’”). Gustav Mahler died after having started a 10th Symphony, though once again he left enough bits and pieces that various musicologists have written their own completions. On the other hand, there have been composers since Beethoven who’ve completed more than nine symphonies; Dmitri Shostakovich made it to 15 and fellow Russian Nikolai Miaskovsky made it to 27. British composer Havergal Brian completed 32 symphonies in the 20th century, and American Alan Hovhaness cranked out 66 – a number approaching Haydn’s 104 and competing with Mozart’s 41 in a much shorter life span.

The Hate U Give (Fox 2000 Pict5ures, Stat Street Pictures, TSG Entertainment, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago, on Wednesday, April 12, my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of one of the finest recent movies I’ve seen in some time. It was called The Hate U Give and it was directed by George Tillman, Jr. (a Black filmmaker whose career dates back to a self-financed indie called Scenes for the Soul in 1994 and a major-studio feature called Soul Food two years later) based on a script by Audrey Wells adapted from a young-adult novel of the same name by Angie Thomas. Thomas was inspired by the shooting of yet another unarmed Black man, Oscar Grant, by police at a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in Oakland, California, The Hate U Give got its title from a rap song by the late Tupac Shakur, with the letter ”U” instead of “you” so the title would form the acronym “THUG.” The story concerns a 16-year-old Black girl named Starr Carter, whois growing up in the fictional ghetto community of Garden Heights (neither Thomas nor Wells specify in what city or state Garden Heights is, thereby giving the story a kind of Everytown setting, as if to say this could be happening anywhere in the U.S. there is a sizable Black population).

She’s the middle child of parents Maverick “Mav” Carter (Russell Hornsby) and his wife Lisa (Regina Hall). Her older and younger siblings are both boys, and Mav has given all his kids empowering names: his oldest son is called Seven (Lamar Johnson), which Mav explains means “perfection,” while Starr means “light” (despite the extra “r”) and her younger brother is called Sekani (TJ Wright), meaning “joy.” Mav owns a grocery store bought for him by King (Anthony Mackie), the head of the King Lords, the local drug gang who have terrorized the law-abiding residents of Garden Heignts into submission and silence. King bought Mav the store after Mav took a three-year prison sentence for a crime King committed, and in order to keep them away from ghetto influences Mav is paying their tuition for a mostly white private school in the nearby neighborhood of Williamson. In one of the periodic bits of first-person narration by Starr that punctuate the film, Starr explains that the public high school is a factory for producing drug dealers, drug addicts and people with STD’s and pregnancies. But the private school has led her to adopt a whole different persona, which she called “Williamson me” as opposed to “Garden Heights me.” “Williamson me” is a polite Black girl who avoids ghetto ways and ghetto slang – even while her trendier white classmates are embracing Blkack slang, much to Starr’s embarrassment – while “Garden Heights me” is a more authentic version of herself but only because around her own people she doesn’t have to work so hard at maintaining the image of the “good Black girl.”

Starr is also caught between two potential boyfriends: a white boy named Chris (K. J. Apa) who’s a classmate at Williamson and a Black man named Khalil (Algee Smith) whom she’s known since childhood. Khalil takes Starr to a party which gets raided by people with guns – thugs, not cops – and Khalil and Starr flee the party in his car. Only Khalil gets stopped by police and, rather than follow the rules Mav had taught Starr to avoid getting shot by the local police – always keep your hands ont he dashboard, politely show them your I.D. and be as submissive as possible – Khalil reacts as a normal human being would with indignation and bravado. A white cop who was one of the two officers that stopped him sees him reach back into the car after the officer had ordered him out of it. Khalil reaches for a hairbrush, and the officer shoots him and later claims he thought Khalil was reaching for a gun. Starr was the only witness to Khalil’s shooting, and she’s under a lot of pressure from her parents from the gang and from the police to keep quiet about it, but April Ofrah (Isaa Rae), a powerful Black woman lawyer representing an organization called Just Us for Justice, comes to town and persuades Starr to give an interview to a local TV station. Though the station agrees to put a voice filter on her and blur her face, Starr nonetheless talks about not only what she actually saw when Khalil was shot, but how she was interrogated by the cops and asked about Khalil’s past as a drug dealer (she concedes he was one but said he only got into that because it was the only available employment for young Black men in the town, referencing the point Malcolm X made in his autobiography that there were plenty of young Blacks with entrepreneurial potential but, because Blacks were denied equal access to capital, had to do so through illegal rather than legal businesses) rather than what the cop did to him, and she also denounces the King Lords and their grip of terror they have on the Garden Heights neighborhood.

This predictably enrages King, who threatens Mav and his entire family and ultimately has one of his thugs throw a Molotov cocktail into Mav’s store. One of the things that makes The Hate U Give a great movie is that Wells and Thomas are constantly taking their pilot in different, unexpected and yet believable directions; it’s the sort of movie that you feel watching it as if you’re in good, steady hands and you’re willing to follow the filmmakers wherever they want to take you. There’s an interesting subplot about Starr’s relationship with her white. best friend Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter), one of the white kids who gets off on trying to act “Black” with almost total cluelessness about what being Black really means. Hailey leads a student strike in protest against the murder of Khalil by a local cop, but Starr suspects it’s just an excuse to ditch school on the day of a really tough math test. Later, when Hailey sees a local TV news show interviewing the family of the cop who shot Khalil and expresses sympathy for what they’re going through, Starr goes ballistic on her. In either that scene or a later one, Starr steals a hairbrush out of Hailey’s purse and starts beating her with it, all the while asking, “Is this a gun? Does this look like a gun to you?”

Starr also has an uncle, Carlos (played by Common, one of the better rappers around and co-composer of the theme song from another recent Black-themed masterpiece, Ava DuVernay’s Selma), who showed up at the police station the night the cops took Starr into custody after murdering Khalil and made sure she was released. But Carlos attracts Starr’s (and our) ire by also taking the cop’s side in the argument and admitting that he would treat a Black person he stopped differnetly than a white person who did the same things – an eerie premonition of the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Black cops in Memphis, Tennessee on February 2023 (plus a white officer who stood on the sidelines and egged them on). The Hate U Give is a film I would recommend just about everybody see – particularly those Americans who wonder why there’s so much hatred and distrust between the police and the Black community. I also liked it because it doesn’t make the Black community seem more heroic than it is; it acknowledges the presence of drugs and the gangs that supply them and hold the community in the grip of terror – and Starr earns our admiration as much for publicly exposing them and shaming the local cops into doing something about them as she does of telling the truth about what she saw the night Khalil was shot.

In an impromptu street protest as she nervously fingers a bullhorn in preparation for speaking to the crowd and identifying herself publicly as the witness, she muses on its similarity to a gun and says that if the cop who killed Khalil had only had a bullhorn instead of a gun, Khalil would still be alive. The ironies mount as Starr encounters the demonstration in the first place – held to protest the predictable refusal of a grand jury to indict the cop for murder or any other crime for Khalil’s death – when she and her white boyfriend Chris are in Chris’s SUV in their way to the hospital to take her brother Sekani to the emergency room after he’s been beaten within an inch of his life by King’s thug enforcers. The film is full of Black music, not only rap but also some old-school soul like Arlissa’s “We Won’t Move,” heard at the closing credit roll and also the music that plays when you load the disc, and though I ordinarily can’t stand rap it works here, not only as the sort of music the characters would be listening to but also as a running commentary of how, as Tupac put it in the lyric that inspired the title, the hate you give to infants follows them and colors their entire lives. The Hate U Give is a great movie that I would recommend to anyone on whatever side of the racial and cultural issues tha so relentlessly divide our country these days.