Law and Order: "A Price to Pay" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV,. aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 27) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show, “A Price to Pay,” starts with a young topless man being held up and threatened with a gun – only the camera pulls back to reveal that this is only a scene being shot for a movie. (I believe the first time this device was used in a movie was the 1937 film Something to Sing About, directed by Victor Schertzinger, but there might be a previous example.) The next scene shows one of the series’ current stars, Black Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), attending a party being given in honor of his former police mentor, Darryl Jones (Demetrius Grosse), when he and his police partner Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) are suddenly called away to work the murder of one of the stars of the film sequence, Johnny Colvin (Colt Prattes), who was making tons of money and had already won three Academy Award nominations. Alas, he was spending it as fast or faster than he was making it, and his ex-wife complains that she’s about to lose her apartment because he keeps falling behind on his alimony payments. It turns out that Johnny has developed a hard-core addiction to the illegal drug ketamine, colloquially known as “Special K” and originally developed as an animal tranquilizer. Johnny has even run a so-called “rehab” clinic out of his apartment in which he uses ketamine to get people off other drugs. The police trace Johnny’s ketamine source to Dr. Simon Neagle (Bart Shatto), a psychotherapist who buys a lot of ketamine not only for his clients but for himself. The investigation leads the police to “Mama K.,” a woman whose real name is Diane Oliver (Amanda Jaros) and who markets herself with a lot of New Age cant as a “spiritual guide” offering people chemically enhanced “enlightenment.” The writers, Scott Gold and William Lapp, were obviously inspired by the real-life ketamine-related death of Friends star Matthew Perry – who’s actually name-checked in the dialogue – though Oliver and Dr. Neagle at least maintain a veneer of caring about Johnny Colvin whereas the real doctors involved in Perry’s fatal overdose wrote each other e-mails boasting of how much money they were able to make from this “moron.”

Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) get an indictment of Diane Oliver for murder, but their case is dependent on the testimony of Dr. Neagle. Unfortunately, though Dr. Neagle has won complete immunity for his own crimes as part of his deal to testify against Oliver, including a vague promise that he could keep his medical license at the end of all this, ultimately on the eve of the day he’s supposed to testify he deliberately commits suicide with an overdose of ketamine. It’s at this point that the two plot strands finally come together; Detective Shaw has spotted his former mentor Darryl Jones’s name on a list of Oliver’s ketamine clients, and Jones protests that ketamine offered him the only relief for his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by what he saw on his three tours of duty with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Jones was scheduled to take his regular delivery of the drug the night Oliver killed Colvin, but when he arrived at her place she was in an agitated state and her shoes – a pair of blue tennis shoes of a make Riley and Shaw had already determined were worn by the murderer – were covered in blood. Price and Maroun are determined to get Jones to testify in Oliver’s trial because, with Dr. Neagle dead by his own hand, Jones is the only one who can definitively link Oliver to Colvin’s murder. But Jones doesn’t want to testify because that will get him dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military, all his veterans’ benefits – including his health care – will be cut off and he’ll be left without a pension and destitute. On the day Jones is supposed to testify, Maroun goes to pick him up and finds that he’s gone; Detective Shaw pulled strings with the U.S. military and got him reassigned to a base on Okinawa. While one would think that Price and Maroun could still have him testify via video link, in the end they cut a plea deal with Oliver in which she pleads guilty to second-degree manslaughter and gets a sentence of up to 10 years, though she’ll probably be let out in six. This was a tough, no-nonsense Law and Order episode, well done and effectively presenting Shaw’s moral dilemma – protect his former partner and mentor, or serve the interests of justice – even though I’d have liked a lot more about the probable fan reaction to so lenient an outcome and I was sort of expecting to see Brittany Weaver (Marissa Rosen), a bonkers Colvin fan whom he agreed to meet with the night he was killed if she’d promise never to seek him out again, kill Oliver out of revenge for the sweet plea deal she got from the authorities given that one of the witnesses against her had committed suicide and the other was safely out of the country.

Law and Order: Special Victim Unit: "The Grid Plan" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV,. aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 27) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “The Grid Plan” (after Manhattan’s famous street grid which alternates named and numbered streets), deals with a middle-aged woman from Council Bluffs, Iowa, Megan Wallace (Donna Lynne Champlin), who comes to New York without her husband Richard (Joe Lanza) intent on seeing at least one Broadway show every day of her week-long visit there. Things go terribly wrong for her when on her sixth day she’s accosted by a stranger in Times Square and raped in full view of the crowds that throng the place, none of whom take notice except for a younger woman who sees her pressing him against an outdoor alcove and assumes that the sex was consensual. Megan also had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and one of the reasons she took the New York trip in the first place was to cross a Broadway theatrical vacation off her “bucket list” of things to do before she got too sick or just croaked. Unlike some of SVU’s other rape victims, who are so ashamed of what happened to them they hide out in their rooms and refuse to cooperate, Megan is cooperative to a fault. She’s determined to track down her assailant and bring him to justice whether the police, stuck in the due-process rigmarole, can do it or not. Among the things she does is make up her own wanted posters and wheat-paste them onto lighting standards in the area where she got raped. She also remembers that her assailant shared a bottle of wine with her and afterwards threw it away, then went back to the scene of the crime to reclaim it. Then he threw it away again and it landed on the awning of a Broadway theatre, where the SVU cops recover it. The wine bottle gives the police the key clue to find the culprit: it’s an Australian bottle of shiraz, an ultra-high-end vintage worth $1,000 per bottle.

Not many bars or liquor stores carry wines that expensive, and the cops are able to trace the bottle to sales representative Gerard Ripley (Christian Mallen), who turns out to be Megan’s rapist. Unfortunately, as they’re about to arrest Ripley, Megan recognizes him in the street and hauls off and punches him one, whereupon the cops arrest her for assault and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) uses her influence to quash her arrest. Prosecutor Daniel Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and the police try to bolster the case against Ripley and uncover one of Ripley’s old girlfriends, who broke up with him once he tried to force himself against her, but Carisi decides that the facts are too different to get that admitted into evidence as an example of a “prior bad act.” Once the case goes to trial, Ripley’s woman attorney (apparently it’s a rule of thumb in the defense bar that a man accused of raping a woman should hire a woman lawyer to defend him), Christine Vega (Michelle Ventimilla), extracts from Megan the information that she’s been diagnosed with MS, and her husband – whom she’d intended to tell about her diagnosis when she got back from New York – understandably feels betrayed that she’d kept that a secret from him and threatens to leave her over it. Megan briefly threatens to bail on the trial and flee with him back to the relative safety of Council Bluffs, Iowa, but Benson talks her out of it and the case ends with Ripley being found guilty and Megan being able to go home with her husband secure in the knowledge that her persistence led to her rapist being punished. This was an O.K. SVU whose most remarkable aspect was the sheer power and energy of Donna Lynne Champlin as Megan; it’s a pity that she’s middle-aged and homely, since there are not going to be that many parts available for her, but she’s damned good and plays with rare authority as well as dramatizing by her very plainness that rape is a crime against women and not a matter of sex. At one point she even expresses wonderment that anyone would target her for sexual assault when she was not only not conventionally attractive but she wasn’t dressed in a “slutty” or especially revealing manner – and Benson, who throughout the show’s 25-year run has been the voice of social consciousness, explains to her that that doesn’t matter: men rape women (or, more rarely, other men) to exert their dominance rather than for sexual gratification.

Elisbeth: "Tearjerker" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Elsbeth episode I watched after the two Law and Order shows was called “Tearjerker” and featured a long opening scene in which an elderly rich man named Nathan Jordan (Larry Pine) is being escorted – in more ways than one – by a hot young, though not too young (director Peter Sollett and cinematographer John B. Aronson give us enough close-ups of her that we can see she’s starting to get crow’s feet and the first visible signs of aging), woman named Chloe (Jordana Brewster). Nathan Jordan was a New York real-estate developer who built, among other projects, a condominium high-rise which was so sloppily constructed it literally sways in a high wind and the trash chute is so long that anything thrown away in it will make the sound of a bomb as it lands. Nathan has become a virtually total recluse; he never leaves his apartment except to eat at an ultra-exclusive restaurant within the building, where Chloe takes him that night before literally tucking him into bed in his room. Overnight he dies of an overdose of a drug called pentobarbitol which Chloe obtained from Dr. Jason Yamamoto (Phil Nee), who was dating and living with Nathan’s estranged wife Deborah (Victoria Clark). When the police find Nathan’s dead body, the case is assigned to Detective Rivers (Braeden de la Garza), who’s quite easy on the eyes but otherwise is a total asshole, trying to browbeat someone, anyone – Deborah Jordan, Dr. Yamamoto, Chloe – into confessing. Fortunately, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) solves the case; based on the fact that Nathan was found wearing button pajamas instead of the snap-on ones he’d been wearing ever since he was diagnosed with a rare muscle disease, and how neatly he was tucked into bed, she realizes that Chloe killed him but it was essentially an assisted suicide. The two had had a meal together at the in-house restaurant where Nathan luxuriated in all the foods he’d been told by his doctors he shouldn’t be eating, then Chloe took him to his bedroom, tucked him in, and waited for the lethal dose of pentobarbital to kick in after she’d spiked his martini with it. Chloe avoided detection by the security cameras in the hall by loading take-out steaks into a to-go bag and throwing it down the trash chute, thereby faking out the cameras which were on motion detectors activated by sounds.

The most interesting character is Chloe, who’s matter-of-fact about being a sex worker – though I wasn’t sure at first whether she was an actual prostitute or an S/M dominatrix. One weird quirk in the anti-prostitution laws is that in order to count as an act of prostitution, actual contact involving sex organs must occur. So a man can pay a woman to beat him, tie him up, physically or verbally abuse him, and do whatever he likes as long as no sexual contact occurs, and it’s perfectly legal for both of them. (I learned this at least in part from memoirs written by former escorts, including a woman who successfully worked her way through college as a dominatrix and wrote about how careful she was to play by the legal rules; according to her, the only trouble she ran into came from men who begged her to masturbate them, which would have crossed the line into illegal prostitution.) The cops uncover three of Chloe’s other clients, two of whom beg them not to tell their wives, while a third says, “Please don’t tell my boyfriend” – which for me was the most intriguing one of all: why would someone in a serious Gay relationship be tricking out with a woman? There’s also a subplot about a $9 million Cézanne painting Nathan bought Chloe out of a secret fund, since his wife had had him declared legally incompetent largely out of all the money he was paying Chloe as “consultant” fees, and a plot twist in which Deborah got jealous of Chloe after she learns she got the pentobarbitol in the first place by seducing her boyfriend Dr. Yamamoto and stealing it from him while she was at his place doing her sex-worker thing. I like the rather loopy humor behind Elsbeth and Carrie Preston’s ability to make this rather bizarre character credible, and after watching the two-part PBS program about the international art market and Bruno Lohse, the Nazi art dealer who made tons of money after the war dealing in art he’d stolen on behalf of Hermann Göring and other Nazi bigwigs, which had made the point that the art market is as effectively unregulated as the trades in weapons or drugs, here was another story about the lawlessness of the market for classic art!

Dead Man Walking (Havoc, Working Title Films, Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Gramercy Pictures, Paramount, 1995)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 26) my husband Charles and I watched a truly great film on Turner Classic Movies: Dead Man Walking, a socially conscious film based on the real-life memoir of Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), a nun in Louisiana who reached out to death-penalty inmates at the notorious Angola state prison in general and one inmate in particular, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). Six years before the main action, Poncelet and an older accomplice posed as police officers on a stretch of Louisiana back country being used as a lovers’ lane, handcuffed a young man named Delacroix and a young woman named Percy and took them to a deserted stretch, where one or the other of them raped the girl and then killed both of them. (The real criminals’ names were changed for the film, and so were the names of their victims.) Dead Man Walking was based on Prejean’s book of the same title and was a personal project for Tim Robbins, who not only wrote and directed the film but cast his life partner, Sarandon, in the lead. What made this film especially remarkable was that, though Robbins and Sarandon were well known in Hollywood and among the celebriati as political liberals, they did not make this film a didactic anti-capital punishment “message” movie. They felt real compassion not only towards Poncelet but the parents of his victims, Earl and Lucille Delacroix (Raymond J. Barry and Roberta Maxwell), and Clyde Percy (R. Lee Ermey, the real-life drill sergeant Stanley Kubrick famously cast as one in his 1987 Viet Nam War film Full Metal Jacket) and his wife Mary Beth (Celia Weston). In one intense scene, Earl tells Sister Helen that his brother was totally against the death penalty until Earl’s son was murdered, after which he was all for it. I’d already been asking myself how I would feel if Charles was murdered: if I would be so angry and revenge-driven I’d want to see his killer put to death or would my overall compassion win out and I’d want to see even the man who took the love of my life away from me spared the ultimate accounting. There’s one line in Robbins’s script in which Sister Helen consciously or unconsciously echoes the late Lenny Bruce’s marvelous line about the death penalty: “Capital punishment means killing people who killed people to prove that killing people is wrong.”

Throughout the film’s two-hour four-minute running time, we not only meet the parents of the victims and feel genuine sorrow for their loss, we also see fragmentary flashbacks of the crime and we learn in the end that, though Poncelet originally attributed both murders to his accomplice (who for some quirky reason that goes unmentioned in the film drew a life-without-parole sentence instead of a death warrant), he ultimately admitted that while the other man in question raped and killed the girl, he shot the young man himself. Prejean’s memoir and the film both controversially claimed that in the end Poncelet felt remorse for his crime, while that’s been questioned. It reminded me of some of the classic 1930’s movies that attacked the death penalty, including The Last Mile (1932) – which carried a written preface by Lewis E. Lawes, then warden at Sing Sing, that read, “The Last Mile is more than a story of prison and of the condemned. To me it is a story of those men within barred cells, crushed mentally, physically and spiritually between unrelenting forces of man-made laws and man-fixed death. And justly or unjustly found guilty, are they not the victims of man’s imperfect conventions, upon which he has erected a social structure of doubtful security? What is society’s responsibility for ever-increasing murders? What shall be done with the murderers? The Last Mile does not pretend to give an answer. Society must find its own solution. But murder on the heels of murder is not that solution” – which could have been used as a preface to Dead Man Walking as well.

The final scene, in which Poncelet is strapped to the gurney and made ready for the three injections that in sequence will kill him (and both Charles and I responded to the irony that the nurse who inserts the IV through which the lethal injections will be administered swabbed the skin with alcohol first; the moment he started chuckling at this, I knew immediately he was savoring, as I was, the irony that she was carrying out the standard precaution against giving the patient an infection when the whole point of the procedure was to kill the person anyway) and faces death with a preternatural calm, couldn’t help but remind me of the classic ending of Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) in which priest Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien), who was the boyhood friend of gangster Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney), asks him to act like a coward as he approached his execution. Cagney did just that, though in his memoir he wrote that the most frequent question he was asked about his career was about that scene and whether he meant to depict Sullivan as really scared to die or feigning cowardice to disillusion the slum kids that idolized him. He didn’t give an answer and said that was a secret he would take to his own grave (which he did). Dead Man Walking won an Academy Award for Sarandon, and arguably Sean Penn (who was nominated but lost to Nicolas Cage for Leaving Las Vegas) deserved one too. It’s a quite impressive movie and Robbins directed it in a quiet, unassertive style that communicates its message effectively. Mention should also be made of the film’s unusual musical score, which was publicly credited to Bruce Springsteen even though he wrote only one song for the film and it isn’t heard until the very end (and it’s a good song but not at the level of his own Academy Award winner, “Streets of Philadelphia” from the 1993 AIDS message movie Philadelphia). Mostly the score was atmospheric (East) Indian music by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with a few rock performers, notably Eddie Vedder and Ry Cooder, briefly chiming in, a score of great subtlety and power that adds immeasurably to the film’s haunting mood and echoes its unwillingness to take sides, its compassion for all affected by a heinous crime and the absurdity that “murder on the heels of murder,” as the foreword to The Last Mile put it, can be part of the solution to any moral dilemma.

Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief (David M. Milch Foundation, Arte, BR, Taglicht Studios, WNET Group, PBS, aired February 19 and 26, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 23) I watched the second half of a PBS Secrets of the Dead episode whose first part my husband Charles and I had seen last week. It was called “Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.” The Nazi art thief in question was a man named Bruno Lohse, who lived until 2007 and profited greatly first from his background as a Nazi art historian during World War II and then, after the war, from his knowledge of the caches in which Nazi art looters had hidden their stolen art and his willingness to sell certain artworks to Americans looking for tax-deductible gifts to musea. Lohse had made a minor name for himself in 1936 when he published a dissertation on an unimportant German painter named Jacob Phillip Hackert. He had already enlisted in the SS in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party in 1937 (a bit surprising to me because I had assumed you had to be a Nazi Party member to be accepted into the SS). When World War II started Lohse was drafted into the Luftwaffe (Germany’s air force) as a member of n anti-tank unit, but soon his background as an art historian came to the attention of Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command as well as the head of the Luftwaffe. Göring hired Lohse to be part of the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a group of art looters Göring assembled when the Nazis occupied France to go through the collections the Nazis had seized from Jewish owners they intended to kill anyway, steal them and then pick out the pieces Göring and the other Nazi bigwigs would be interested in. Since the Nazis in general had very conservative tastes in art and weren’t interested in Impressionist works or anything later than that, the ERR at first discarded such pieces but then realized that they could make money for the Nazi regime by selling such paintings clandestinely to collectors around the world. After Germany lost the war, Lohse fled from Paris to Berlin and then to Munich, where he established himself in Ludwig II’s old castle of Neuschwanstein and waited for American art historians to interview him.

A number of the so-called “Monuments Men,” portrayed as heroes in George Clooney’s film about them but whose real-life role was far more ambiguous, became Lohse’s friends and realized that he was one of the few people left alive who actually knew what had happened to all the artworks the Nazis had stolen, mostly from Jewish collectors. In 1950 Lohse was put on trial before a French military tribunal on charges of looting the art collections of Jews and others singled out for elimination in the Holocaust, and the principal witness against him was a woman named Rose Valland (who’s called “Claire Simone” in The Monuments Men movie and is played by Cate Blanchett), who had literally risked her own life to keep track of all the artworks the Nazis were stealing and putting in their own personal collections. Amazingly, Lohse was acquitted and he treated that verdict as a full exoneration. The first part of this film ends in 1955, when Lohse relocated from Germany to the U.S. and hooked up with art dealers and museum officials throughout the United States, including Theodore Rousseau, who had become the head of the paintings department at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rousseau and Lohse carried on an elaborate correspondence, almost all in German since Lohse never learned more than a smattering of English. With tax rates on the richest Americans in the 1950’s approaching 90 percent (to me, those were the good old days!), it was advantageous for rich Americans to buy a work of art of doubtful provenance for $1,000, then donate it to a museum whose experts would value it for $10,000, and the donor would get the full $10,000 as a deduction from their taxes. Amazingly, it took the fall of the Berlin Wall – literally – to derail Lohse’s double game of posing as an honest art dealer while quietly unloading stolen art to various private collectors. The East German government had been holding various archival records from the Nazi era and, once the wall came down and East Germany ceased to exist as an independent state, those records gave away more of the secret stashes where Lohse and other Nazi art looters had hidden their stolen treasures.

Jonathan Petropoulos, the principal source for this documentary, hooked up with Lohse and started interviewing him extensively in the late 1990’s. Some people have alleged that Petropoulos got too close to Lohse and was therefore an accessory after the fact to some of his crimes. One part of the second half of this documentary deals with a painting by French artist Camille Pissarro called “Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps,” an outdoor street scene Pissarro painted from a balcony window of his home, where he, a Jew himself, was hiding out in an attic from anti-Semitic mobs who were besieging Paris in 1902 (probably as fallout from the Dreyfus case). Petropoulos was told he could go to the Kantonal Bank in Zurich, Switzerland and be permitted to view the Pissarro painting, and when he did so he was offered two more alleged Nazi-looted paintings, one by Monet and one by Renoir. Petropoulos was given an elaborate set of instructions, one that could have been dreamed up by a spy novelist like John Le Carré or James Bond creator Ian Fleming, which involved going to the small home-based office of an art foundation called “Schönart” and meeting with attorney Andrew Baker, who allegedly managed it. It turned out that Baker was also involved with such sketchy “foundations” as Ali, Miselva (one of whose members was accused of dealing in stolen nuclear materials), and the Griffin Trust, which has been accused of laundering art for Russian oligarchs. Needless to say, the whole scheme was an elaborate setup (Petropoulos called it “theatre”) by which the art expert was led to believe the stolen paintings would be returned to him while the whole time they were sitting in the Zurich bank vault under Lohse’s and his business manager Peter Griebert’s control. (Ultimately the Pissarro was ordered returned by a Lichtenstein court to the family of its original owners shortly after Lohse’s death in 2007, and they sold it at auction two years later for $1,850,000.)

One interviewee for the program compared the art market to the traffic in weapons or drugs: an unregulated market in which both buyers and sellers are free to do pretty much whatever they like, without pesky government bureaucrats standing in the way. In the first few weeks of the second Donald Trump Presidency, in which he and his “hand” (to use the Game of Thrones term) Elon Musk seem bound and determined to destroy the federal bureaucracy and forever eliminate it as a check on the power of wealthy individuals and corporations to do whatever they please and make money in whatever scummy ways they can while screwing over ordinary non-rich individuals, Plunderer seemed more timely than ever in detailing how a few unscrupulous men made a ton of money off the social evil of Nazism and never had to look back or face being held to account.

Taxi (20th Century-Fox, EuropaCorp, Robert Simonds Productions, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 25) my husband Charles got tired of watching MS-NBC after Rachel Maddow’s and Lawrence O’Donnell’s shows and asked me to put on a movie. I rummaged through the DVD backlog and found a bootleg copy of the 2004 film Taxi I’d picked up from the free pile at the North Park Library. It’s a remake of a French film from 1998 (which did well enough at the box office it merited three sequelae) written by Luc Besson and directed by Gérard Pirès, described on imbd.com as follows: “To work off his tarnished driving record, a hip taxi driver must chauffeur a loser police inspector on the trail of German bank robbers.” For the U.S. version, directed by Tim Story from a script by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Jim Kouf, the taxi driver was changed into a woman, Isabelle “Belle” Williams (Queen Latifah), and the hapless policeman was called Andrew “Andy” Washburn and was played by current Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon – who’s quite nice in a doofus-y Chevy Chase-esque way. In the opening scene we see Belle leaving her job as a bike messenger and taking proud possession of the so-called “medallion,” the permit you need to drive a taxicab in New York City. (At one point taxicab medallions were so scarce the price for one had reached $1.2 million; the advent of ride-shares dropped the price to just $250,000.) Belle is the widow of a NASCAR driver and before he died he showed her how to soup up an ordinary Ford Crown Victoria into a super-vehicle equipped for speeding. Her cab includes a secret panel activating a supercharger and also concealing its usual license plate and substituting a New Jersey one for her usual New York one. In the opening scene she gets a middle-aged male passenger who offers her $100 over the regulation fare if she can get him to Kennedy Airport in 15 minutes.

She opens the secret controls, activates the supercharger, and drives a hell-bent-for-leather car chase through New York City’s predictably crowded streets until she gets the guy there with 5 ½ minutes to spare – whereupon he’s so unnerved by the whole experience he immediately finds a spare trash can and retches into it. Andy needs a driver because he’s wiped out his previous car; he unknowingly put it in reverse instead of forward gear and backed into a bodega. So he hails Belle and the two set off in the direction of a bank in the process of being robbed by a quartet of hold-up artists who turn out to be four Brazilian women in male drag: Vanessa (Gisele Bündchen), “Redhead” (Ana Cristina de Oliviera), and two identified merely as “Third Robber” (Ingrid Vandebosch) and “Fourth Robber” (Magdali Amadei). Both Belle and Andy are having relationship problems: Belle is dating a hot, sexy Black stud named Jesse (Henry Simmons) but he’s understandably possessive when she misses a dinner date at which he’d planned to propose and offer her an engagement ring to continue to chase the bank robbers with Andy. As for Andy, he’s having a sexual affair with his commanding officer, Lt. Marta Robbins (Jennifer Esposito), but she’s so determined not to let their personal relationship get in the way of their professional one that midway through the movie she suspends him and threatens to fire him. Belle and Andy show up at Jesse’s apartment – coincidentally Andy lives in the same building with his mother (the formidable Ann-Margret) – and Andy tries to explain what he’s been doing with Jesse’s girlfriend but Jesse doesn’t take it well and uses a blowtorch to melt down Andy’s police badge until it’s a hunk of amorphous black metal.

Mostly, though, Taxi is just an endless series of car chases – one wonders how many stunt drivers the producers had to hire and whether they got hazard pay – which Charles called a cross between The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A., and The Blues Brothers. (There are drug dealers in this movie, but not much is made of them. There’s just a scene in which a drug deal goes bad and various people on either side of it kill each other.) Vanessa and her henchwomen take a young, scared guy hostage at one of their robberies, though Lt. Robbins offers to trade places with him and so she ends up in the car during the last chase scene and there’s a quite good stunt scene in which she (or her stunt double) tries to cross from the robbers’ car to Belle’s. There’s also a good scene in which Andy drops his gun in the back seat of Belle’s cab and accidentally shoots out her window as he retrieves it, and a clever shot of Vanessa ripping off the red coat covering her BMW to reveal a blue exterior underneath so the cops won’t know what color car to look for. Ultimately Taxi is a fun film even though it makes almost no sense; and romantically it ends the way you’d expect it to, with Belle and Jesse reunited and altar-bound and Andy apparently back on track with Lt. Robbins both personally and professionally even though I was hoping for a romantic attraction between Queen Latifah’s and Jimmy Fallon’s characters. Charles and I were watching it from a bootleg DVD that cut off about 20 minutes from the original 97-minute running time (though it’s likely that about 10 minutes were just the closing credits, which cut off abruptly), which at least gave us enough time to squeeze in another movie on last night’s cinematic diet. It’s also indicative of how sloppily Taxi is structured and how little of it is important plot-wise that we could watch an abbreviated version and not feel like we were missing anything of consequence – though the sound was pretty hissy (not that that matters much in an action-driven movie like this!). Also, the image was letterboxed on all sides and I missed our old TV that could have corrected for that.

Lili (MGM, copyrighted 1952, released 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Taxi my husband Charles and I switched to Turner Classic Movies for a quite different sort of film: Lili, a 1953 MGM semi-musical (it has one famous song and two spectacular dance scenes) starring Leslie Caron as Lili Daurier, a naïve 16-year-old girl whose innocence approaches mental disability. It takes place in France immediately after one of the world wars – though it’s not altogether clear which one. At least we know it’s in the 20th century, because the carnival Lili attaches herself to moves on mechanical wheels instead of being horse-drawn. But we don’t see enough cars to tell whether this is the aftermath of World War I or World War II. Lili began life as a short story by Paul Gallico called “The Man Who Hated People,” published in the October 28, 1950 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, and it was turned into a screenplay by Helen Deutsch, the woman whose rewrites ruined Douglas Sirk’s film noir Shockproof (1948) after Sirk had accepted the original script by Sam Fuller. Fortunately Deutsch’s sensibility was far more attuned to romantic melodrama than film noir. Lili shows up in a small French town just after the death of her father. She’s looking for the local baker because dad told her on his deathbed that he would take her in, but when she arrives at the bakery she’s told that the baker is dead, too. A neighbor who runs a notions store offers to give her food and a place to stay, but it turns out he’s only interested in lecherously having his way with her, so she flees. Fortunately, Lili runs into Marco the Magnificent (Jean-Pierre Aumont), a magician with a traveling carnival that just happens to be performing in that town. Marco offers to give her a place to stay in one of the carnival wagons and Lili forms a crush on him, but he’s already paired up with his assistant in the act, Rosalie (Zsa Zsa Gabor, who fortunately is given almost no dialogue in this movie and thereby can’t wreck it like she did in so many of her other films, including John Huston’s otherwise great Moulin Rouge). Lili earns herself a job with the carnival by talking back to the puppets run by Marco’s friend Paul Berthalet (Mel Ferrer), and though she does so at first only for her own amusement her contribution becomes such a hit with audiences that Paul hires her to do that every night.

Paul was formerly a ballet dancer until he was injured in World War Whichever, resulting in a permanently damaged leg. There are two big dance sequences representing Lili’s dreams; in one of them she uses Marco’s magic cloak to make Rosalie disappear, and the other is a big dance between Lili and Paul’s four puppets, now grown to full human size and played by dancers, that looked so much like a scene from The Wizard of Oz I joked, “All you have to do is follow the yellow brick road.” Paul appears in that final scene along with his puppets, and as he dances with each one in turn it disappears and this makes Lili realize that she’s really in love with Paul. At the end Lili, Paul, Marco and Rosalie are all offered jobs with the “Folies de Paris,” represented by two rather creepy-looking guys, and Marco’s comic-relief sidekick Jacquot (Kurt Kasznar) goes along with them. I might have liked Lili better if it weren’t such a wrenching change of pace from Taxi; its whimsy struck a cord with movie audiences in 1953 and it was MGM’s most successful musical of that year (though I think The Band Wagon, directed by Vincente Minnelli and co-starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in a script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green that not only addressed the age difference between the leads but made it a major plot point, is much better). Eight years later it got turned into a Broadway stage musical called Carnival! wth Anna Maria Alberghetti in Caron’s role and Jerry Orbach (of all people!) in Ferrer’s. Its big theme song, “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo,” composed by Bronislaw Kaper with lyrics by Helen Deutsch, was a hit for Dinah Shore. The film got several Academy Award nominations, including Leslie Caron for Best Actress; she lost to Audrey Hepburn for Roman Holiday and also lost her leading man, Mel Ferrer, to Hepburn when the two got married for real on September 25, 1954 shortly after Lili was released. But Caron did take a part from Hepburn when she got the title role in the 1958 film Gigi, after Hepburn had played the part on the Broadway stage. Ironically, Hepburn controversially took the role of Eliza Doolittle in another Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical, My Fair Lady, from Julie Andrews when the show was filmed in 1964, so with regard to Lerner-Loewe musical projects Hepburn’s record was “you win one, you lose one.”

Probe: "Computer Magic" (MCA Television, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles returned home an hour earlier than usual, and I responded by making a cooks-itself dinner for us (frozen tilapia filets, baked potatoes, and salad) and gathering around the computer to watch “Computer Magic,” the two-part first episode of a very short-lived science-fiction TV series called Probe. Charles had seen a few episodes of Probe “in the day” – 1988, when the series aired on ABC as a summer replacement – but hadn’t watched it in a while, and I’d never heard of it before at all. Charles was interested in it because Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest science-fiction writers of the 1950’s (I’ve seen all too many Wikipedia pages that designated him, Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as the three iconic sci-fi scribes of the 1950’s, and my reaction is, “Weren’t there a couple of guys named Bradbury and Vonnegut that were kind of important, too?”), was designated as the show’s co-creator along with veteran TV writer Michael Wagner (who’d won an Emmy Award in 1982 for his work on the cop show Hill Street Blues). But it’s hard to tell just what Asimov’s contribution was, especially given that Wagner was designated the sole writer for the two-part pilot script. “Computer Magic” introduces the show’s central characters, super-rich eccentric Austin James (Parker Stevenson, a decade older than he was when he made The Hardy Boys with Shaun Cassidy but still quite attractive, especially since director Sandor Stern gave us lots of mid-shots showing off his crotch) and his newly hired secretary, Mickey Castle (Ashley Crow). Wagner gave Mickey the air of a bimbo, sort of like Valerie Perrine’s character as Lex Luthor’s girlfriend Eve Teschemacher in the 1978 Superman, while the promos for this series made Austin James seem like Sherlock Holmes but he’s considerably more annoying. In fact, my biggest disappointment with this show was that it was way too campy – though Charles pointed out that that approach was all too typical of late-1980’s series television.

“Computer Magic” was written as a two-part episode – there were six later single-part episodes as well – which gave it the 90-minute running time of a feature film. It takes a while for a plot to develop out of weirdly assorted elements, including Austin’s realization that the city’s water department has overcharged him a nickel on a $300 bill; traffic lights that malfunction and give green lights in all directions at once; radios that turn themselves on and off at a will of their own; and a strange wheelchair-using computer genius named Howard Millhouse (Jon Cypher) who’s invented what would today be called an artificial intelligence program called Crossroads, only he’s lost control of it and it has taken over. One of the quirkiest aspects of this show is how modern it seems in some respects and how dated in others; the computers used are still those current in the late 1980’s and it’s really strange to see Austln try to kill the runaway computer program by uploading a kill switch from a 5 ½-inch paper-covered floppy disc. It’s also fascinating to hear him access the Internet via a phone connection, including the familiar sequence of beeps and static noises that accompanied a dial-up connection being utilized. At the same time any story about a rogue computer created by artificial intelligence these days is bound to call up the specters of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and both hero Austin James and villain Howard Millhouse have decidedly Muskian tendencies. Both pursue their high-tech agendas heedless of the consequences to normal humanity or anyone or anything else that crosses their paths.

Indeed, a neat touch in Wagner’s script is that Crossroads is deliberately knocking off retirees because the program thinks it’s doing them a favor. Millhouse taught Crossroads the basics of Judeo-Christian morality, and so when a character is near death anyway, Crossroads thinks it’s doing them a favor by dispatching them from this life to the next ahead of schedule. Eventually Austin and Mickey try to hide from the vengeful Crossroads by holing up in a laundry, though the seemingly universal program tracks them down even there – and there’s a nice role of a middle-aged woman who’s there just to do her laundry and is confronted with all the washing machines opening up, seemingly of their own accord but actually under Crossroads’ control, and spewing forth geysers of water. Ultimately Austin and Mickey are able to defeat Crossroads the way Captain James T. Kirk defeated the malevolent space probe Nomad/Tan-Ru in the original Star Trek episode “The Changeling”: by convincing it that it’s made mistakes and therefore inducing it to destroy itself. Charles said he wouldn’t mind seeing more episodes of Probe, and I wouldn’t mind watching them either, especially since the later ones were only for a one-hour time slot, which means 45 minutes once commercials are excised. He did complain that the sound was muffled, an obvious indication that these YouTube posts came from VHS recordings made “in the day,” probably on a machine that only had an edge track for the sound instead of the full stereo multiplex soundtracks that came later in the VHS format’s history.

Murder in a Lighthouse (Mandy Jane Turpin Productions, ManRo Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 23) my husband Charles and I watched two more Lifetime movies, Murder in the Lighthouse and Don’t Let Him Find You. Charles had joked about the promo for Murder in the Lighthouse because he questioned just how many lighthouses there are left in the U.S. that actually required human operation. Most of the surviving lighthouses are fully automated and need only occasional human intervention to make sure the lights are still burning and the machines are still working. Screenwriter Shawn Riopelle (a name I’ve seen on previous Lifetime movies, though the director’s name, Eric D. Howell, was new to me) actually worked that into the film’s plot; his lighthouse keeper, a middle-aged woman named Adeline (Shelli Manzoline), is hiding at the lighthouse on Lake Superior and living alone there until she rescues a fleeing woman named Lucy (Skye Coyne) who’s washed up on the beach. She makes a few desultory attempts to clean the lighthouse bulbs (which she explains are LED’s) and the windows the light has to shine through, but aside from that the lighthouse is automated and she has almost nothing to do. “Lucy”’s real name is Jessica Vickers, and she’s married to a psychopathic abuser named Colton Vickers (Mark Justice) whom she’s trying to escape by fleeing to Canada. Jessica’s flight plans are complicated by the fact that she can’t go to the police to report Colton because Colton is a police officer himself and his “brothers in blue” will just protect him. Jessica has two men committed to helping her, brothers Anthony (Tyler Noble) and Rory (Brandon Brooks) McCabe, who run a charter fishing boat service. Rory, who’s been in love with Jessica since they were both college students, offers to take her across the border on the lake, but the night they are trying to escape there’s a huge storm on the lake. The storm generates a big wave that capsizes the boat (referencing Gilligan’s Island, Charles joked, “I hope it’s not the Minnow”) and Rory is presumably killed in the shipwreck.

Meanwhile, Colton has already murdered Rory’s brother Anthony after Anthony refused to tell him where Rory and Jessica had gone. So the two most interesting and sympathetic males in the cast don’t make it past the first reel! Jessica is rescued by Adeline and for the first half of the movie Adeline is solicitous and really helpful. Well, this being a Lifetime movie, that isn’t going to last very long, and the situation unravels when Colton shows up at Adeline’s redoubt and Adeline gives Jessica a harpoon gun with instructions to kill Colton with it whenever he shows up with murderous intent. Jessica can’t bring herself to kill Colton when she has the chance, so Adeline does it herself, beating him to death with repeated blows from the handle of her hand-carved cane. Adeline puts Colton’s body in a small boat and sends it out to sea, and once that happens Adeline’s nature does a 180° turn. Instead of a conscientious helpmeet Adeline becomes Jessica’s latest oppressor, insisting that she can’t leave the lighthouse because her knee is still injured from the accident and ultimately literally tying her up. Charles was disappointed that in the second half of Murder in the Lighthouse, it changed from an interesting psychological study of the bond between two women to just another Lifetime movie with a psychopath keeping another woman hostage and being just as oppressive towards her as the psycho husband she was trying to escape. It looks like Jessica will actually be rescued when the African-American sheriff’s deputy, Murray Foster (Rod Kasai), shows up – but Adeline dispatches him by shooting him in the back with her harpoon gun. Adeline also locks Jessica up in an old barn and puts a wooden bar across the entrance door so she can’t escape.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Adeline explains that years before she escaped from her own abusive husband and therefore she knows exactly what Jessica is going through – though that doesn’t stop her from abusing Jessica much the way Colton did when they were together. (There’s a bit of dialogue in which Jessica explains to Adeline that when she and Colton were a couple, he forced her to quit her job and cut herself off from all her former friends – a typical pattern for personally and sexually abusive and dominating husbands.) It ends with a big confrontation between the two female leads in which Adeline rips the harpoon from Deputy Foster’s back after she’s killed him with it and tries to use it to stab Jessica to death – only They Both Reach for the Harpoon Blade and ultimately Jessica uses it to stab Adeline instead. The more I think about Murder in the Lighthouse, the more I agree with Charles: it was a fascinating tale about women-bonding in the first half that went totally off the rails when Shawn Riopelle decided to turn Adeline from warm and nurturing earth mother into out-and-out psycho. To his credit, he did try to explain it by the trauma of Adeline having lived alone all those years and it having warped her brain to the point where she became insanely possessive of the first other person who’d come her way in decades, but it still was an unsatisfying conclusion to a film that had been quite interesting and even moving in its first half. It’s the sort of Lifetime movie that reminds me of a remark made by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, in which he apprehends the man who’s trying to frame a woman for murder by saying, “He had not the supreme facility of the artist, the gift of knowing when to stop.” All too many Lifetime writers simply haven’t known when to stop!

Don't Let Him Find You (Storyteller Studios, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, aired February 23, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Murder in the Lighthouse on February 23 my husband Charles and I watched the next film up on Lifetime, Don’t Let Him Find You. I was really looking forward to this one because Christine Conradt was the director, and in previous Lifetime scripts she’s created characters with genuine moral ambiguity instead of falling neatly into “hero” or “villain” pigeonholes. Alas, Conradt directed but she didn’t write the script this time around, and the person who did, Stephen Romano, totally lacked her gift for creating genuinely complex human characters. It’s about a mystery woman named Alex McDowell (Brianna Foster), who’s living in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband of 15 years, Robert (Philip Boyd), and their 10-year-old daughter, Charlie (Audrey Lynn-Marie). I’m not sure just where Mrs. McDowell got her penchant for giving both herself and her daughter such masculine names – and it is a name she gave herself because, as we eventually learn, “Alex McDowell” is a false identity. Her real name is Rose Forster and she’s on the run from a murder charge in Austin, Texas. The woman Rose is supposed to have killed is her sister Ashley (Ella Frazee), and her motive was that Ashley’s husband Justin (John Castle) was actually in love with Rose. Though Rose couldn’t have been less interested in him “that way,” Justin continued to pursue her with the support of Rose’s and Ashley’s mother, Marnie (Sallie Glaner). Alex’s carefully constructed false identity unravels quickly when she and Robert come on a 60-something woman who’s having a heart attack in a public park. Though supposedly Alex’s own experience with lifesaving techniques was as a high-school lifeguard, she takes command of the situation and uses all the appropriate medical terminology as she talks to the 911 operator her husband has called. (Obviously she worked at a hospital as a trained nurse during the interim before her reinvention.)

Unfortunately, the event is witnessed and filmed by local TV reporter Jane Chance (Courtney Grace). Alex angrily refuses Chance’s request to do an on-the-spot interview but the story gets aired anyway, and it attracts the attention of bottom-feeder true-crime blogger Stuart Cooper Jones (Byron Frank). Jones sees an opportunity for blackmail in the story; he’s able to locate Alex’s phone number and buttonhole her in the park, give her his business card, and demand that she see him. Once they meet he tells her he wants $50,000 in blackmail money to spike his own story, and when she protests that she doesn’t have that kind of money he says he can pay her “in kind” by having sex with him. Then a mysterious stranger wearing the ubiquitous gender-concealing black hoodie that’s become the obligatory wear for Lifetime killers stabs Stuart Cooper Jones and strangles Jane Chance in her car, thus dispatching Alex’s most immediate threats. But the mystery man in the black hoodie is out after Robert – who’s attacked outside their home while he’s taking out the trash, though Robert successfully fights him off but ends up with a concussion that puts him in the hospital. Alex tries to hide out by registering at a seedy no-tell motel, and fortunately Robert is able to trace her when she makes a $2,000 withdrawal at a nearby ATM (in $100 bills – all the ATM’s I’ve used personally only give out $20 bills and I don’t think any real-world ATM’s allow you to withdraw that much money in a single transaction). The climax is split between the hospital, where Alex has gone to visit Robert and she has Charlie in tow – only Alex sees Hoodie Man and flees, while Charlie leaves her father’s hospital room to go see what’s taking her mother so long to get them the promised snacks (she said she was going to go to a vending machine but didn’t have the cash, which struck me as a plot hole since most modern vending machines take credit or debit cards, and Charles tells me that a few modern vending machines only accept electronic payments). This gives Hoodie Man a chance to kidnap her and take her to a safe house where grandma Marnie is waiting for her. Marnie’s and Justin’s (he’s Hoodie Man, and he’s not bad looking; in fact, if you judge solely on physical attractiveness it looks like Alex née Rose traded down big-time in rejecting him for Robert) mad plan is to eliminate Robert and force Rose to stay with them, marry Justin and accept him as Charlie’s “new dad.”

Fortunately Robert is able to track them down, and after the sort of baroque climax beloved of Lifetime’s writers, ultimately Robert, Alex and Charlie are reunited, Marnie and Justin are arrested, and Alex is able to resolve the outstanding Texas warrant against her with a plea deal by which she gets three years’ probation and 200 hours of community service, which she’s allowed to do in Atlanta. (Robert questions why his wife is willing to plead guilty when we’ve seen the flashback sequence of how Ashley really died – Ashley, in a jealous rage, went after Rose with a knife, They Both Reached for the Knife, and Rose stabbed Ashley in self-defense – but it’s an economical way of resolving her criminal liability without her having to go to trial or risk prison time.) The more I think about Don’t Let Him Find You, the more I wish Christine Conradt had written as well as directed it; she might have been able to make Justin and Marnie genuinely pathetic (in both senses) people instead of just stock-figure villains. I give her credit for getting a beautiful etched-in-acid performance out of Sallie Glaner as Marnie – though she only appears in one scene towards the end, she makes an indelible impression (and I fantasized that she could be the “other” Marnie, played as a young woman by ‘Tippi’ Hedren – Melanie Griffith’s mother and Dakota Johnson’s grandmother – in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 Marnie, an underrated work in the Hitchcock canon – grown older) – and for an overall air of suspense and doom. I also liked the implied social comment that the media regard just about anybody as fair game for exaltation and then abuse whether they’ve chosen a public life or not, and then hide behind the First Amendment whenever anybody questions them or their tactics. But despite the way Alex McDowell, t/n Rose Forster, is “outed” when she actually did something positive (her secret could have stayed hidden for years if she hadn’t responded to the pleas of a dying woman and instead had just let her die) and this caused her carefully constructed and concealed backstory to unravel almost immediately, for the most part Don’t Let Him Find You is a pretty average Lifetime movie, good for several frissons but not much in the way of actual terror or thrills.

My Amish Double Life (Juniper Lane Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 22) I put my husband Charles and I through two Lifetime movies, My Amish Double Life and My Husband’s Killer Affair. I was expecting My Amish Double Life to be sexually titillating garbage like most of Lifetime’s other movies involving the Amish (just how the Amish became so kinky in the minds of Lifetime’s writers and producers that Amish-themed movies have become a significant sub-genre on the channel is a mystery to me) and My Husband’s Killer Affair to be more fun. It was actually the other way around: My Amish Double Life was a quite decent thriller and My Husband’s Killer Affair a rather dreary bore. The central character in My Amish Double Life is Emma Miller (Lexi Minetree), a teenage Amish girl whose life is thrown into turmoil when she finds her father dead, his head split open by a rock as he fell on their farm. I was looking at Lexi Minetree’s imdb.com page to see if I could find out how old she is – both Charles and I were curious about her mid-teens appearance (he guessed her age at 14, I guessed 16, but alas her imdb.com page doesn’t give a birthdate) and my only previous moviemagg blog posts on her are for another Lifetime film, The Paramedic Who Stalked Me, in which she (inevitably) played the stalkee (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-paramedic-who-stalked-me.html), and a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “Fractured” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/10/law-and-order-special-victims-unit.html), in which she played a young law student who gets raped by a classmate. I’m guessing she’s in her early 20’s and just presents considerably younger than she is, but the actress playing her mother, Mary (Lesa Wilson), though she looks enough like Minetree they are believable as biological relatives, frankly Wilson’s Mary would be more credible as Emma’s older sister than her mother.

Emma is feeling restive with life as an Amish girl, and especially with the strict sexism of the cult that demands its women can only be wives and mothers. She sees a potential way out when her friend Rebecca (Rachel Coopes) offers to take her out of the Amish compound for a night on the nearby town with “the English” (which is what Amish people call non-Amish people). Rebecca tells Emma that she can’t go out in Amish drag, so she comes up with super-scanty dresses for both of them which led me to joke, “Just because she can’t go out dressed as Amish doesn’t mean she has to wear something that makes her look like a hooker.” The two end up at a sleazy nightclub owned by a hot, attractive young man named Heath (Ty Trumbo, who’s sexy enough I’d love to see more from him) who breaks up a rather nasty pass Emma, whose fake ID calls her “Jade” (though since she’s supposedly never left the compound before, we wonder how she got it; most likely Rebecca had it made for her), gets from Tom (unidentified on imdb.com). Heath invites Emma to spend the night with him at his palatial mansion – it turns out he’s independently wealthy from owning a chain of dance clubs, including the one to which Rebecca steered Emma – only he beats a hasty retreat to a business trip in Chicago but tells Emma she’s welcome to spend the night there alone and leave in the morning. Heath has told Emma he’s just recovering from a relationship breakup, but once she’s alone in Heath’s house she sees a shadowy figure enter and seemingly stalk her. She’s knocked out and when she comes to in the morning she finds a dead body in the living room and the scythe her dad used on the Amish farm that is apparently the murder weapon, since it’s got a big bloodstain on the curved edge. Emma beats a hasty retreat to Amishville and Rebecca helps her burn the bloody Amish clothes she wore on her way back home as well as her fake “Jade Miller” ID.

The dead body in Heath’s home turns out to be Heath’s wife, whom he was legally separated from but couldn’t divorce because the terms of their business partnership said that if one of them had extra-relational activity, the other would receive 100 percent ownership of Heath’s and his wife’s lucrative dance-club enterprise. Writers Ken Sanders, John J. Tierney (“original” story) and J. Bryan Dick (screenplay) carefully set up a red-herring suspect in Emma’s Amish former boyfriend Caleb (Nick Clark), who stalks her through much of the running time and looked to me like a very young John Carradine. (At one point Charles joked that Emma was being stalked by Buster Keaton, since Caleb’s hat had a flat brim, though it was made of straw instead of cloth like Keaton’s famous pork-pies.) Through much of the rest of the movie Emma is being surveilled by the official police, who suspect her of the murder of Heath’s wife, while she’s increasingly alienating the leadership of the Amish community by demanding that her dad’s corpse be exhumed and given an autopsy. She’s become more and more convinced that her father was murdered, possibly by the same people who killed Heath’s wife, and of course she’s right. The real killers are [spoiler alert!] Heath and Rebecca, who’d fallen in love (or at least lust) on Rebecca’s previous excursions out of Amish world. They hatched this elaborate plot to murder Heath’s wife and frame Emma for the crime so Heath could keep his fortune instead of having to cede it to her under the terms of their business partnership, and they could presumably get married and live happily ever after. Only Emma is able to escape the frame and in the end the police bust both Heath and Rebecca, while in a rather surprising turn of events Emma decides that the “English” world is not for her and she settles back into the Amish community and accepts Caleb’s proposal. Most of these “Amish” Lifetime movies end up with the protagonist abandoning the cult and adapting to life among “the English,” but this one ends with Emma apparently being scared off of “English” ways by her experience being framed as a murderess by her supposed best friend and her supposed boyfriend.

My Husband's Killer Affair (Mhka on Film, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

If My Amish Double Life was actually a pretty good suspense story, efficiently directed by Cooper Harrington, the film Lifetime showed as the follow-up, My Husband’s Killer Affair, was mostly a snooze-fest that hardly lived up to the lurid promise of its title. It was credited to a production company called “Mhka on Film,” an incomprehensible name that doesn’t have any other listings on imdb.com, though its distributor was our old friend Reel One Entertainment. It’s actually yet another movie about a nanny having extra-relational activity with the male half of the couple that hire her; her name is Melissa Juneau (Kirsten Comerford) and his name is Will Clark (Matt Wells). The two meet at a bar and she aggressively cruises him; he’s reluctant at first but ultimately the two get it on outdoors in the shadows. Will is married to a woman named Michelle (Kyana Teresa, top-billed), who’s visibly at least part African-American, though he’s white and so is their daughter Lucy (Isabella Astbury). Surely Lifetime’s casting director, Ilona Smyth, could have found a child actress who’d have been more believable as the offspring of a mixed-race couple! We eventually learn that the whole thing has been stage-managed by Will’s brother Carlton (a beautifully honed performance by Ash Catherwood) – we’re told Carlton is the younger brother but Catherwood looks older than Wells – who years before had dated Michelle and apparently never got over her even after she transferred her affections to Will. Both Clarks are the sons of Richard Clark (Peter Nelson), whose vast real-estate holdings in Philadelphia (where this takes place) include a chain of nursing homes. Melissa’s mother Madison (Angela Gei) is a patient at one of the Clarks’ nursing homes, and Carlton is able to blackmail Melissa into doing his bidding by threatening to kill her mom by withholding her crucial medications.

At one point Carlton has a confrontation with dad and kills him by withholding his meds so he dies of a heart attack – during that scene I joked, “Lillian Hellman, you have a lot to answer for.” (I could be committing “first-itis” here, but I think Hellman’s play The Little Foxes, premiered in 1939 and filmed two years later, was the first story to feature someone committing murder by withholding the victim’s life-saving meds.) Thanks to Carlton’s intervention, Melissa got the job as Will’s and Michelle’s nanny the day after she and Will tricked out with each other behind that bar, Carlton also blackmails Melissa into getting him the key to Richard’s house so he can go there and do in his dad. My Husband’s Killer Affair was directed by Roxanne Boisvert from a script by Audrey C. Marie, and it appears to have been a sort of Boisvert family production because both she and Steve Boisvert are listed as producers and Steve is also listed as location manager. Ultimately it turns out Carlton’s motive is to get back Michelle and also to win control of the family business, which dad willed to Will because he thought Will was both more competent professionally and more loyal to his family. Carlton shows Michelle the photos he took of Will and Melissa the night they had their trick-out, and instead of hearing out Will’s explanation Michelle throws him out of their house. (Yet another example of the toxic power of jealousy – or, as Charles would say, the toxic power of cheating.) Melissa correctly guesses that Will has retreated to his dad’s old vacation home – which itself is astonishingly palatial (Charles questioned why anyone, no matter how much money they had, would have as elaborate a home as this when they’d only use it a few months per year) – and the final confrontation takes place there. Carlton announces that he’s going to kill both Melissa and Will and make it look like a murder-suicide, then take Will’s place at the head of the real-estate company and as Michelle’s husband and Lucy’s stepfather.

This is yet another Lifetime movie that gets virtually all its entertainment value from a marvelously controlled performance by the villain, or at least the actor playing him; Ash Catherwood manages to project Carlton’s villainy matter-of-factly, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, with an air of smarmy self-righteousness that projects his sense of entitlement; inevitably, a lot of the time he reminded me of Donald Trump, especially when projecting the character’s bizarre status envy. For Carlton, as for Trump, it wasn’t enough just to be the son and heir of a rich man; he had to be the center of all attention and able to manipulate the world so he could get literally everyone and everything he ever wanted. Ultimately Michelle becomes the dea ex machina and brings the police along to Will’s and Carlton’s redoubt, and Michelle herself clubs Carlton when he’s about to murder Melissa. There’s a tag scene from six months later in which Will and Michelle are having an outdoor birthday party for their daughter Lucy in the park, and Melissa has since moved on but has sent Lucy a present. My Husband’s Killer Affair could have been a reasonably effective suspense thriller in Lifetime’s best manner, but it goes wrong at almost every turn; writer Marie takes way too long on plot exposition and it’s only about midway through the running time that we get an idea of what Carlton’s plot is and what his motives are. Frankly, it might have come off better if Melissa had been an out-and-out femme fatale determined for her own reasons to wreck Will’s marriage so she could have him for herself! I was amused at the scene in which Will, Melissa and Lucy are settling in to have a movie night on home video. We don’t learn exactly what movie they’re going to watch, but we see the familiar Reel One Entertainment opening logo on their TV screen – making me wonder if writer Marie and director Boisvert were going for a Droste (or Mel Brooks in Spaceballs) effect in which the movie they’d be watching is the one they’re all in.

Sherlock: "The Lying Detective" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 21) I watched the next-to-last episode of Sherlock, the quite strange recension of the Sherlock Holmes mythos concocted in the early 2010’s by British TV writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. It not only moved the Sherlock Holmes stories to the present day, it took the whole concept into directions its creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would never have dreamed of even in his wildest flights of fancy. The main thing this show did that ensured its enduring importance was it made an international star of Benedict Cumberbatch, whom Moffat and Gatiss cast as their version of Sherlock Holmes. Their Holmes is out-and-out autistic and even farther removed from normal humanity than Conan Doyle’s version. They also made Dr. John H. Watson (Martin Freeman) a depressingly normal fellow, neither as bright as Conan Doyle’s Watson nor as endearingly doofus as the one Nigel Bruce played in the 1939-1946 series of Holmes films with Basil Rathbone (who was so totally right for the part, with the tall stature, the aquiline nose, the ringing voice and the overall air of imperturbability that, to paraphrase the opening of the Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” to me Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes). For some reason PBS decided to re-run these episodes in sequence in their 9 p.m. Fridays time slot, though since I’d already posted moviemagg comments on the later ones in the series (after my husband Charles and I, both longtime Sherlock Holmes devotées, started watching them as well as the U.S. Holmes reboot, Elementary, which we both found a lot more entertaining) I’d skipped over them this time around and watched last night’s episode, “The Lying Detective,” because I didn’t have a previous moviemagg post on it.

The episode was based on a later (1913) Sherlock Holmes story by Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” in which Sherlock Holmes feigns having been stricken with a rare tropical fever by a man named Culverton Smith, whom Holmes suspects of killing his nephew by deliberately infecting him with the same disease. In “The Lying Detective,” Culverton Smith (Toby Jones) becomes an internationally famous businessman and philanthropist who advertises one of his company’s products, a breakfast cereal, by appearing on the commercials himself and boasting that he’s a “cereal killer.” (There’s a nice scene in which we see Smith take a bite of the cereal on camera and then spit it out again off camera because it tastes so terrible.) Holmes is convinced that Smith is a serial killer; among his charities is a major new hospital in London, and as part of his donation Smith was given keys to the hospital so he could let himself into any part of it whenever he chose. In order to satisfy his lust to kill, Smith set up a special room in which he could let himself in and murder whoever was being treated in that room, and his or her death would be attributed to the illness that had put them in the hospital in the first place. Of course, given that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss worship at the Shrine of the Obscure, it takes a lot of running time to get us to that simple plotline. Among the red herrings we get are Sherlock Holmes’s sudden addiction to crystal methamphetamine (a drug that didn’t yet exist when Conan Doyle wrote the Holmes canon), which is making him even more paranoid and more difficult to live with than usual.

Holmes is put on to the trail of Culverton Smith by his daughter Faith (Gina Bramhill), and we also get a woman therapist, Lady Smallwood (Lindsay Duncan), who’s supposedly Watson’s grief counselor after his late wife Mary Morstan Watson (Amanda Abbington) was apparently killed in a previous episode while saving the life of Sherlock Holmes. Only Mary is still hanging around in Watson’s consciousness and nagging him even though she keeps telling both him and us that she’s dead (sort of like Superman’s father Jor-El in the Superman movies from the 1990’s, in which he was played via leftover video clips by Marlon Brando two years after he died). What’s more, in a last-minute revelation I really could have lived without, “Lady Smallwood” is revealed at the end to be Sherlock Holmes’s sister. It seems that both Holmes and Watson are investigating reports of a previously missing third Holmes brother, Sherrinford (a name Moffat and Gatiss took from Conan Doyle’s preliminary plan to name his detective character “Sherringford Holmes” until he decided at virtually the last minute on “Sherlock” instead), only both Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft (played by Mark Gatiss himself) learn that the fictitious “Holmes brother” is actually Holmes’s sister. If little or none of this seems to make sense, it’s because it doesn’t; Moffat and Gatiss were much bigger on creating vivid images than building plot consistency.

In Conan Doyle’s “The Dying Detective” Holmes gets Culverton Smith to confess to murdering his nephew, Smith insists that it’s his word against Holmes’s, and Holmes then produces Watson, who was hiding behind a curtain in the room and heard the whole thing. In “The Lying Detective” Holmes tells Smith to kill him in the hospital room and extracts the whole story from him, then announces that the whole confession has been recorded. Smith says that it hasn’t been because he already found Holmes’s three recorders and disabled them all, but Holmes makes a comment about the mystical power humans attribute to the number three and then makes the announcement that he’d concealed a fourth recorder in the handle of Watson’s cane (supposedly left in the room by accident) and he had the whole thing on audio. Later Holmes admits that Smith’s confession will be inadmissible in court, but Smith has been arrested and is talking his head off to Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves) while boasting that his legally admissible confessions to the police will make him more famous than ever. Under America’s current political circumstances it’s hard not to read Culverton Smith as a combination Donald Trump and Elon Musk – the super-rich man who boasts of his own infallibility and ability to get away with literally anything – though in the role Toby Jones looks more like the older, bloated, corpulent version of Truman Capote than either Trump or Musk. More than any other episode I’ve seen (and I believe I’ve caught all, or nearly all, of them), this Sherlock program achieved remarkable levels of dramatic incomprehensibility and incompetence, and the few good and quite charming bits in the script didn’t help save it.

Law and Order: "In God We Trust" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 20) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show was called “In God We Trust” and deals with the mysterious murder of an up-and-coming 26-year-old attorney with a penchant for taking on pro bono cases involving government support of religious institutions, always taking the side of First Amendment absolutists like me who argue that any governmental support for a particular religion violates the “no establishment” clause. When he’s found murdered, his head slammed against the marble countertop of the sink in his apartment, the investigating detectives, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), are able to trace his law-school education to Fordham University but are unable to find any information about where he went to school before that. The reason was that he was raised in an ultra-strict religious commune, which broke off from the Mennonites about a century earlier because they didn’t think the Mennonites were strict enough for them. The victim had fallen in love with a woman from his community, Amelia Penner (Laura Heisler), daughter of the church’s leader, Horace Penner (Peter Hans Benson), and even though he’d been ostracized and shunned for leaving the faith, she continued to see him clandestinely and eventually got pregnant by him. The killer turns out to be her former boyfriend, John Albrecht (Michael Devine), who confronted the victim in his apartment, lost his temper and murdered him. The cops learn this through Albrecht’s own confession to Amelia in the police station, but the confession is legally thrown out because under the community’s rules, Amelia was acting as a priest and therefore whatever John told her is protected by priest-penitent confidentiality. No one in the church community, not even the victim’s mother, will testify in court.

While all this is going on there’s a subplot concerning new district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and his interest in supporting alternative forms of punishment to prison. In the episode’s opening scene he’s shown presenting a speech by Martha Fairchild (Ashlyn Maddox) advocating for prison alternatives, and Fairchild turns up in Baxter’s office to support the church’s position that they can punish John more effectively and surely than the secular authorities. The church offers a plea deal by which John will plead to a misdemeanor and get probation, which the church itself will administer. Baxter is horrified at the idea that he should let a murderer walk out of some twisted sense of religious freedom and social justice, especially since his support of Fairchild’s efforts had been predicated on the idea that it would apply to nonviolent crimes only. But his prosecutor, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), is intrigued by the idea, especially since with none of the church members being willing to testify in court against John, his chances of getting a conviction aren’t looking all that great anyway. Amelia returns to the church community and John offers to marry her, which she accepts because, among other things, that will give her baby a father. Ultimately John himself has a crisis of conscience and agrees to plead to second-degree murder, with a sentence of up to 15 years, on the understanding that whenever he’s released he’ll be welcomed back into the religious community with open arms. This was a much better Law and Order than one could tell from my synopsis, touching not only on issues of faith, morality and the First Amendment but also our whole ritual incantation of “In God We Trust” as the basis of our legal and political systems when we pay at best lip service to it in practice. The episode closes with a lingering close-up on the words “In God We Trust” on the courtroom wall, raising the question of how much do we trust God and whether the members of this religious community are the only ones being honest and above-board about the level of trust they place in God.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Extinguished" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Extinguished,” was in its own way pretty good. It starts with a young straight couple going through a park in their neighborhood, Washington Square, looking for rock specimens for their high-school class. (The young man playing the boy in this couple is quite haunting-looking and would be good casting for a biopic of Michael J. Fox if anyone makes one.) Suddenly they’re set upon by an unseen assailant; he’s knocked out and she’s tied with a yellow lamp cord and raped. The central issue in the story is the overall distrust residents of Washington Square have for the police, especially since many of them are immigrants who came from highly repressive countries where the police are feared as agents of doom. As it so happens, one of the SVU detectives, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), has just moved to Washington Heights four months before, and he’s already crossed swords with Danny Rocha (Ethan Jones Romero). Danny is being raised by his grandfather, a retired New York police officer, and he has ambitions to become a cop himself – only he’s written three application letters and none of them have got a response. On the basis of a sketch drawing made by the female victim’s description of her rapist, Danny and a vigilante gang of which he’s a member target a suspect and beat him – but later it turns out he was innocent.

The cops (the real ones) then identify another suspect, James Aquino (Glen Llanes), after the woman victim says her assailant looked “more Asian” than the person in the police sketch. But they have to act fast to catch him before the vigilantes at best rough him up and at worst lynch him. Ultimately the police arrest Aquino before the vigilantes get to him, and Danny makes a plea deal by which he’ll plead to a misdemeanor and still be eligible for the police. Velasco even arranges for Danny to join a police auxiliary unit that, though it’s not allowed to do the work of sworn officers, can participate in crowd control and other “soft” police tasks. The lesson Octavio learns is to be more outgoing towards his neighbors instead of adopting the typical New York attitude of mostly ignoring them. There’s a marvelous scene early on in which Octavio is walking through the neighborhood posting leaflets showing the suspect’s face as shown in the police drawing, and a man shows his basic hostility to the police by ripping down the poster and crumpling it up. Octavio even threatens to arrest him for littering before he thinks better of it. And there’s an odd meet-cute between him and Danny in that Danny lives in the building just above Octavio’s apartment, he’s just got a new Bluetooth speaker and he’s blasting obnoxious music (the dialogue identified it as heavy metal but it sounded more like rap to me) and keeping Octavio awake with the volume. Later at the end Danny is once again playing music that’s once again disturbing Octavio (though not only is the music considerably better – something Latin, reflecting Danny’s origins – he’s playing it softer than whatever it was, metal or rap, he was playing earlier), though this time the encounter between them is much more neighborly and comradely.

Elsbeth: "Foiled Again" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I switched to CBS for another episode of Elsbeth, which I’ve come to like a great deal even though its debt to Columbo – the elaborate schemes used by the murderers to escape being caught, and the tactics of the lead “sleuth” character essentially to annoy the culprits into confessing – is quite obvious. The show was called “Foiled Again” in a bad pun on the fact that fencing plays an important role in the plot. Once again, as on the Columbo show and in most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies even before that, we in the audience know from the get-go who the killer is and what the motives are. The victim is Ethan Brooks (Rob McClure), director of admissions for the upscale elite Bodle College, and his killer is admissions counselor Lawrence Gray (Matthew Broderick). Years before Lawrence Gray had counseled Ethan Brooks and his parents to get him into an elite Ivy League school even though Ethan’s own ambitions were to go to a non-elite college and prepare for a career in theatre arts. Among the sports Lawrence insisted on teaching Ethan so his college application would be more impressive to the Ivy League schools was fencing. As our story begins, Ethan has just been appointed admissions director for Bodle and he’s so appalled at Lawrence’s tactics that he’s decided to blackball all Lawrence’s application clients no matter how qualified they might have otherwise seemed. I was amused that for the second week in a row I was watching a TV show in which a college admissions counselor was the villain; a week ago the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode had been about a college admissions counselor who sets up a side hustle by sending out texts to his student clients, ostensibly from people they know in high school, to extract nude photos of them that he in turn sells to online pedophiles. Lawrence worked out an elaborate plan to knock off Ethan that involves challenging him to a fencing duel for old times’ sake and triggering his long-term chronic asthma by lining the inside of his protective helmet with cat dander, which Lawrence extracted from his daughter’s pet cat, Veritas. (These are the sorts of people who would give their cats names like “Veritas” and “Quadcat,” the latter being one whose front paws have only four toes instead of the usual five.)

As Ethan goes into anaphylactic shock and expires – courtesy of a red string with which Lawrence has tied the back of Ethan’s helmet so he can’t just slip it off – Lawrence puts his foot on Ethan’s chest and says a line about how his application has been denied. Lawrence’s alibi is that he was administering a preparatory exam for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) to a client while Ethan died, but Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) buys a copy of the LSAT prep test herself to time it to see if Lawrence could have slipped out and committed the murder while the student he was prepping was so engrossed in the test he didn’t notice the sudden disappearance of his proctor. There’s also a subplot involving Elsbeth’s son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), who’s coming to visit her and whom Elsbeth invokes for preliminary discussions with Lawrence about hiring him to coach her putative grandson, who hasn’t yet been born or even conceived, in getting into a top college because, as Lawrence likes to say, “it’s never too soon.” One of the things that makes this a great gag is that Teddy is pretty obviously Gay – he has a partner, Rudy (Louis McWilliams), whom Elsbeth waylays and interrogates in the police station for an hour and a half, obviously checking him out as potential son-in-law material – and therefore won’t have to worry about getting his kid into a high-end college unless he and Rudy adopt. There’s also a gag about Teddy’s relatively low level of ambition – he went to college, all right, but at the University of Illinois (remember that Elsbeth used to live in Chicago and practice law there until he got involved with a messy high-end divorce case), and after he graduated he went to work for a nonprofit – and another gag about Lawrence’s own daughter Melanie (Madia Hill Scott), who likewise rejected dad’s remorseless ambitions for her and took a “gap year” instead. She left her cat in Lawrence’s charge and when she returns, Lawrence tells her the cat is dead – but he’s actually just got rid of it out of fear that the living cat would blow his alibi. I really like Elsbeth – and I’ll readily admit that the initial promos for it turned me off because it made the show seem too cute – but I think writers Robert and Michelle King have got the right “sweet spot” between thrills and campy humor and the show is really engaging to me.

Match Point (BBC Film, Thema Productions, Jada Productions, Kudu Films, Dreamworks, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 19) I screened for my husband Charles the DVD of a movie we’d started to watch a few weeks ago on the Tubi free-streaming service: Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005). We had given up on it then partly because it lasts two hours and four minutes (usually Woody Allen is famous for keeping his films at a 90- to 95-minute running time) and also because it was being streamed with commercials. The latter we could have lived with except that the commercials were almost twice as loud as the movie, which judging from how loudly I had to play the DVD was an intrinsic fault in the film and particularly in Allen’s sound mix. Match Point was made in Britain and takes place there; the central characters are Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Myers), Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and Nola Rice (Scarlett Johannson), an American actress from Colorado who’s come to London to make it in the theatre community. Tom and Nola met at a party they were both crashing and instantly fell in love, or at least lust. They became engaged, disappointing Tom’s ferociously ambitious mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton), though Tom’s dad Alec (Brian Cox) finds her refreshingly frank. Chris begins the film with a bit of voice-over narration saying that sometimes it’s more important to be lucky than good. He’s a former world-league tennis player who realized he wasn’t going to be as good as the top professionals, and hired himself out to the Hewett family as a tennis teacher. The opening scene between Chris and Tom is easily the best part of the film – though Allen quickly establishes that both characters are straight it still comes off as a Gay cruise, especially when they realize they’re both opera fans and Tom tells Chris the Hewetts have a box at Covent Garden and Chris is welcome to share it every time there’s an empty seat, which is often.

Chris also starts dating Chloe, and when he declares that he’s ambitious and doesn’t want to be a tennis bum all his life, Chloe sees her chance. She talks her father into giving Chris an office job with his company, and the two get married and move into a preposterously large apartment with giant picture windows that Chris’s father-in-law is obviously paying for. Only Chris has also got the hots for Nola, and even though Chris is married and Nola is engaged to Chris’s brother-in-law, they have sex for the first time outdoors in a pouring rainstorm. (As I joked to Charles, I’ve never had outdoor sex in the rain and I’ve never wondered what it would be like.) Ultimately Chris rises through the corporate ladder and gets a chance to set up a potentially profitable co-venture with a Japanese company, but he’s also ditching his responsibilities at the office and stopping by Nola’s flat every chance he gets. When Tom and Nola break up, Chris considers that a green light to pursue his affair with Nola big-time, taking calls from her even while he’s spending weekends at the Hewett estate. Chloe is also anxious to have sex with Chris, not because she’s all that interested in him physically but because she’s determined to have children. Needless to say, that just turns Chris off; he denounces the sex he gets from Chloe as “routine” and spends more time with Nola. Ultimately, to no one’s surprise (no one’s in the audience, at least), Nola gets pregnant with Chris’s child and insists that she’s going to have the baby and expects Chris to help raise it. Chloe also gets pregnant with Chris’s child (until then I was expecting this film to tread the path of the 1941 Warner Bros. melodrama The Great Lie, in which Bette Davis’s boyfriend, played by George Brent, briefly marries concert pianist Mary Astor, gets her pregnant, but then has the marriage annulled so he can marry Davis, and the titular “great lie” occurs when Davis and Astor pair up for a tense few months in the desert so that Astor can have Brent’s baby and Davis can pass it off as hers), and just when you’re wondering how in his finite wisdom Woody Allen can resolve this conflict, [spoiler alert!] he has Chris get a shotgun from his father-in-law’s gun collection, dismantle it, pack it in his tennis bag, break into Nola’s apartment building, and shoot and kill first Nola’s landlady, Mrs. Eastby (Margaret Tyzack), and then Nola herself.

This happens about 90 minutes into this 124-minute film and of course completely changes its tone. The cops assigned to investigate the case are Inspector Dowd (Ewen Bremmer), who aside from his rather grizzled five-o’clock-shadow resembles Donald Trump advisor Stephen Miller; and Detective Banner (James Nesbitt). Dowd and Banner both assume the killer was a drug addict who killed Mrs. Eastby to steal her jewelry and her meds, and Nola just happened to walk in to the wrong place at the wrong time. Later Inspector Dowd has a dream which reveals to him the actual sequence of events and gives Chris away as the killer, but Detective Banner talks him out of it, saying that Chris has an alibi – his wife and his in-laws all can vouch that he was at a party with them all weekend – and there’s no evidence against him. (One imdb.com “Goofs” contributor said Chris would be a prime suspect as soon as DNA tests on Nola’s fetus revealed that Chris was its father – unless we were supposed to believe that Nola wasn’t pregnant at all but was merely faking pregnancy to get Chris to divorce Chloe and marry her.) The film ends with Chris wracked with guilt but seemingly on his way to a long, prosperous and reasonably comfortable life as a Hewett in-law and father to a third generation of Hewetts. In a “Trivia” post on imdb.com, someone claimed that Match Point is Woody Allen’s favorite of his own films, which quite frankly is hard to believe – especially just days after Charles and I had re-seen Annie Hall after years and had enjoyed it a lot more than Match Point. Of course it helped that Woody Allen was actually in Annie Hall – in fact, he was one of the romantic leads – but the main difference was that in Annie Hall Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) are genuinely lovable characters. Even their flaws make them recognizably human, while as Match Point progresses (like a disease) I was starting to complain that it was like a modern movie in that there was no one truly likable even before Allen took his story down the rabbit hole of murder.

The film I thought it was most similar to was Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1958), another movie set in Britain about a young proletarian trying to crash the office world and torn between his boss’s daughter and another woman with whom he’s having an affair. Clayton and his writers (Neil Paterson and Mordecai Richter, adapting a novel by John Braine) resolved it by having the other woman (Simone Signoret) commit suicide after the protagonist (Laurence Harvey) rejects her, while he goes ahead and marries the boss’s daughter he’s impregnated. Charles mentioned another Woody Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), also involving a romantic triangle (two romantic triangles, in fact), which he liked better than Match Point. Allen lets Chris off the hook for the murder via a “plant” he inserted in his script in which Chris was musing in his voiceover about how sometimes a tennis ball hits the net and bounces forwards, in which case you win, and sometimes it bounces back, in which case you lose. The ending features Chris throwing the jewelry he stole in his fake “robbery” in the Thames, but Mrs. Eastby’s wedding ring falls short of the river and ends up on the sidewalk. At first we’re sure that the police are going to find it and use it to unravel Chris’s elaborate cover story and nail him for the crime, but later on it has just the opposite effect: a longtime drug addict who committed another robbery-murder to get the money to buy drugs is found with the ring, which he picked up off the sidewalk, and the cops assume he did both sets of killings. It’s interesting to see Woody Allen use such an outrageously set-up “plant” for his resolution, but the upshot is that just as we’ve decided we hate Chris, he gets away with murder, though at least one possible reading of the ending is that (like the protagonist of Room at the Top) he’s going to be punished in essence by having to live all his life with the knowledge and guilt over what he’s done.

Captain America: Brave New World (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Studios, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 18) I went to the Bears San Diego movie night at the Mission Valley AMC 20 theatres to see the latest Marvel Comics movie, Captain America: Brave New World. The two big things I knew in advance about this film from the TV ads were that it features a Black Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and a red Incredible Hulk. The Black Captain America apparently took over from the original white one, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), after he was killed in the last Avengers movie (though since I’ve never seen any of the Avengers movies I’m just taking it on faith that that happened). The film starts with the re-inauguration of President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, looking considerably older and more grizzled than he did as the hunky young Prince Charming type in the 1988 film Working Girl), who won re-election despite the big event in the Avengers series in which half the Earth’s human population was wiped out in a catastrophe instigated by the Avengers’ principal villain, Thanos. Since then a mysterious “mass” has arisen out of the Indian Ocean and turns out to be made of adamantium (which I’d previously heard of only as the metal Wolverine’s claws are made of in the X-Men movies), a substance even more powerful than vibranium (the MacGuffin of the Black Panther movies). There’s a passing line of dialogue in this committee-written script (Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman and Dalan Musson get credit for the original story and they along with Peter Glanz and Julius Onah, who also directed, for the screenplay) that at last the world has access to a super-metal that isn’t controlled by an isolationist country like Wakanda.

President Ross has laboriously negotiated an international treaty that gives all countries in the world equal access to the adamantium in this newly formed island – though the only actual world leaders we see are Japanese Prime Minister Ozaki (Takehiro Hira) and the French President (Rick Espaillat), along with a prime minister from one of the Arab countries, Kapur (Harsh Nayyar). Unfortunately, the plans are foiled by the film’s principal villain, Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who was kidnapped by President Ross in his earlier role as a U.S. Army (or was it Air Force?) general, held hostage for 16 years and subjected to experiments that vastly increased his brain capacity but also drove him paranoid. Sterns is determined to break the adamantium treaty and get the nations of the world to fight a war over it. (I wonder if someone on the writing committee had read R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, in which the moon falls to earth and lands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, precipitating a world war over the moon’s resources that ends in the destruction of almost all human and animal life on earth; I’ve long hoped that someone would film Sherriff’s novel even though they’d obviously have to change that dorky title!) To accomplish that he’s developed a system of mind control that he’s able to impose on people by remote control via their smartphones, with the old Fleetwoods doo-wop hit “Mister Blue” serving as the same sort of trigger the queen of diamonds playing card did in The Manchurian Candidate.

Among the people he’s manipulating are President Ross, who has a heart condition and is being kept alive by a medication Sterns has invented – at first I thought they were just nitroglycerine tablets but they contain compounds created by the same gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into the original Incredible Hulk in the first place. What’s more, unbeknownst to Ross, Sterns has upped the gamma-ray dosage of his meds so he’s in danger of turning into a new Hulk, this one red instead of green. Sterns also brainwashes five U.S. soldiers, including Captain America’s friend Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), into an assassination attempt against Ross just as he and the assembled world leaders are meeting in the Oval Office to sign the adamantium treaty (ya remember the adamantium treaty?). Bradley had just got out of a 30-year prison sentence and is scared shitless of going back in, and is even more scared when he’s put in solitary confinement after another Sterns-controlled goon squad guns down the other four men who participated in the attack on the President. The woman who orders him placed in solitary is Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), who’s ostensibly head of President Ross’s security detail but is really a secret agent for “The Widows,” an Israeli-based commando team whose representative, Black Widow (who was played by Scarlett Johannson in a 2021 film I saw on a previous Bears San Diego movie night), had an important role in the Avengers cycle and was one of the characters who sacrificed their lives to save humanity from Thanos’s dastardly plot. (I remember being thrown by the post-credits sequence for the 2021 Black Widow featuring people visiting her grave, since she’d survived the events of the 2021 movie.)

Apparently the original (white) Captain America was also one of the people who got killed in that cycle, passing the mantle of Captain Americahood to Sam Wilson – though Wilson, unlike Rogers, declined taking the super-serum that had given the original Captain America his powers in the first place. This Captain America and his partner, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), have whatever powers they have via winged suits made of vibranium and the overall power of Captain America’s shield, which he can hurl like a combination boomerang and Frisbie as well as use as armor against bullets. (I can still remember the opening lines of the song commissioned by Grantray Lawrence Animation for their 1960’s cartoons based on Captain America and other Marvel characters: “When Captain America throws his mighty shield/All those who chose to oppose his shield must yield.” I still love the triple internal rhyme there!) Not surprisingly, the above plot, such as it is, is only pretext for some amazing action scenes, including a sequence early on in which Captain America recovers an adamantium sample sent to the U.S. by Japan and which Japanese Prime Minister Ozaki accuses the U.S. of stealing. Later on there’s a fight scene in the Indian Ocean and the skies above it in which Captain America and Joaquin try to stop two rogue U.S. pilots from attacking a Japanese carrier fleet outside the adamantium island, and Joaquin ends up nearly drowning in the ocean and so badly wounded he requires hospitalization. The film’s big action climax occurs when President Ross, goaded by Sterns’s promptings via phone, [spoiler alert!] literally turns into the red Hulk at a public event in the Rose Garden to reaffirm the treaty (once again, folks, ya remember the treaty?) and does a surprisingly good job of wrecking the White House before Captain America is able to subdue him.

The film ends with President Ross resigning, admitting responsibility for his actions, and being incarcerated in a super-secure prison literally built under the ocean floor, while the White House is being rebuilt and the treaty implemented – though there’s no indication of who took over as President. (I was hoping it would be a part-Black, part-Asian woman.) The post-credits sequence consists of Samuel Sterns returned to his own secure prison cell and Ruth Bat-Seraph visiting him there, either because she’s part of his dastardly plots (unlikely) or to keep an eye on him (more likely). I’m a bit surprised that the Right-wing weirdos who attacked the 2017 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as being anti-Trump propaganda (and even claimed that after Donald Trump won the 2016 election the film was withdrawn and reshoots were made to make the film even more anti-Trump) haven’t jumped on this one, because at least to me the relationship between President Ross and Samuel Sterns had a lot of Trump and Elon Musk about it: the hot-headed President and the secret (or not-so-secret) manipulation of him by a reclusive multi-billionaire with huge intellectual capacities and almost no social skills. Aside from that, Captain America: Brave New World is a quite good action movie in the modern manner, with just enough plot to give the sense that this film is about things and isn’t just an excuse for one highly stylized, digitally assisted action sequence after another – though the action scenes are, of course, the reasons anyone goes to see movies like this in the first place. The poor actors are pretty much just along for the ride – though I’d give Anthony Mackie points for being properly heroic and disarmingly charming in the lead, and as his sidekick Danny Ramirez is sexy enough I’m looking forward to seeing more of him.