by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I took a break from the news coverage
of the “Super Tuesday” elections by watching a used DVD I had just bought from
the Mission Valley Library when I went there (ironically enough) to cast our
ballots: Garden State, a 2004 film from
Fox Searchlight Pictures (20th Century-Fox’s specialty film
division, which not surprisingly was closed almost immediately once the Walt
Disney Company took over 20th Century-Fox) that was an auteur
de force for Zach Braff, who wrote and
directed as well as starring in it. Charles and I both remembered having heard
vaguely good things about it when it was released, though we hadn’t bothered to
go see it, and it turned out to be a modern-day version of a 1930’s rom-com.
Braff plays Andrew Largeman, who lives alone in Los Angeles in a stark white
apartment whose only unique feature is a medicine cabinet lined with little
bottles of pills, all lined up in neat and meticulously maintained rows. He’s
one of those wanna-be actors in Hollywood who’s working as a waiter at a fancy
Viet Namese restaurant for a living — and the proprietor (played in a cameo by
well-regarded stage director George C. Wolfe) is not only ready to fire but has
his replacement already lined up (and has a head shot of him, indicating that he
too is an aspiring actor). What makes Andrew different from most such
characters is he’s got at least a toehold in the business filming TV
commercials, of which the best-known and the one he sometimes gets recognized
for is one in which he plays a mentally retarded football quarterback. (We’re
never told what product this oddball commercial advertised.) The plot kicks off
into high gear when Andrew gets a call from his father in New Jersey that his
mother has just died — and Braff, who unlike a lot of other modern-day
directors does not believe in
long transitions, cuts directly to her funeral and we see a photo of her in a
wheelchair. We also hear Andrew’s aunt (Jackie Hoffman) at the funeral,
accompanied by a man playing a portable electronic keyboard instrument, doing a
hilariously terrible version of Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” as
Andrew’s mom’s send-off song.
Andrew hasn’t been back to his home town in nine
years — we’re not sure where in
New Jersey it is, though it’s mentioned as being close to Newark — and it turns
out his dad is also his therapist and has kept him on psychotropic drugs,
including lithium, ever since Andrew accidentally caused his mother’s
disability by pushing her into an open dishwasher door when he was 9. Andrew
falls in with friends he knew in high school, including Mark (Peter Sarsgaard,
who frankly did more for me in the looks department than Braff did, at least
partly because he was often shown topless and had some nice chest hair while
Braff’s chest was hairless), a scapegrace druggie who throws (or crashes)
parties with lots of drink, drugs and sex; and Kenny (Michael Weston), who made
a bundle inventing a noiseless version of Velcro and bought a large house where
Mark holds his parties. At one of them Andrew meets Sam (Natalie Portman) and
the two start a rather diffident courtship — she brings him to her home, albeit
while her mom (whom I can’t find identified on the imdb.com page for this film
but who turns in a marvelous
performance that reminded me of Lily Tomlin) is there, and she leads him to her
bedroom but says, “We’re not going to make out” — though eventually they do have sex and, albeit in the course of a two-day
relationship, Andrew falls hard enough that at the end of the film [am I really spoiling it for you?] Andrew decides to stay in the
Garden State. It’s one of those films that’s more a series of vignettes than a
coherent story, and in the film’s final journey Mark insists on tagging along
with Our Couple even though he’s almost literally a third wheel (Mark’s
transport in the Garden State is a World War II-vintage motorcycle, complete
with sidecar, he inherited from his grandfather, and Mark sits in the sidecar
while Sam clings to Andrew in classic biker-chick fashion) to an old boat
parked on the ground in the middle of a geological excavation that derailed
some developer’s plan to build a shopping mall. (Charles said that really dated the movie: today malls are being torn down or
converted to other uses, not built.)
We’re surprised when the man living there
answers their knock with a baby in his arms, and even more surprised when the
kid’s mother is living with him; we expected him to be a drug dealer and a
recluse, and instead he gives Mark a gift from Andrew: a necklace containing
one of those little mini-marble games in which you were supposed to roll a
metal ball into a hole. Mark, who makes his living digging graves at the
cemetery where Andrew’s mom was buried, stole it from the corpse and eventually
— in this quirky, roundabout way — gave it to Andrew on the ground that it was
better that he have it than it be buried with her. Along the way we’ve seen
Andrew visit a doctor (a marvelous straight-comic performance by Ian Holm) who
tells him he can stop taking all the meds his psychiatrist father has prescribed
him and he should seek out a therapist who isn’t his dad. (I was amused that when Andrew shows up for
his appointment the receptionist at the doctor’s office does not ask him for his date of birth. It’s standard
practice for medical personnel to do that in order to confirm a patient’s ID!) Garden
State is a quite amusing and heart-warming
movie of the sort that had a vogue in the early 2000’s but has virtually
disappeared from the screen today; it’s also marked by an excellent use of
music, including songs by Simon and Garfunkel (“The Only Living Boy in New
York”) and the late, great Nick Drake (“One of These Things First”). It’s been
compared to The Graduate, though
other films from that period (notably Tadpole, which also used “The Only Living Boy in New York” —
albeit in a cover by Everything but the Girl rather than the Simon and
Garfunkel original heard here) came closer to The Graduate than this one: Zach Braff may be playing a young naïf but he doesn’t get involved in a cross-generational sexual relationship the way the
central characters in The Graduate
and Tadpole do. Still, it’s a lot
of fun and makes me curious about Braff’s other directorial efforts — which
include two more feature films, Wish I Was Here (2014) and Going in Style (2017), as well as some TV episodes and shorts.
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Game of Thrones, season 3, episodes 5 and 6: "Kissed by Fire" and "TheClimb" (Television 360, Startling, Bighead Littlehead, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I picked up on the Game of Thrones series where we’d left off about a month ago and watched episodes five and six of season three, “Kissed by Fire” and “The Climb,” which quite frankly struck me as the dullest episodes of this show we’ve seen so far. The online synopses of these two episodes on imdb.com —
Charles and I picked up on the Game of Thrones series where we’d left off about a month ago and watched episodes five and six of season three, “Kissed by Fire” and “The Climb,” which quite frankly struck me as the dullest episodes of this show we’ve seen so far. The online synopses of these two episodes on imdb.com —
“Kissed by Fire”: Brienne and Jaime
are delivered to Lord Bolton where Jaime has his wounds treated. He tells
Brienne about the events leading up to killing the King and acquiring the name
Kingslayer. Sandor Clegane engages in mortal combat but succeeds in gaining his
freedom much to Arya’s annoyance. At King’s Landing, Cersei begins plotting
against the Tyrells and seeks Baelish’s assistance. Tyrion discusses the cost
of the upcoming wedding with Lady Olenna and she agrees to pay half the cost.
Tywin Lannister has become aware of the Tyrells’ plans to have Sansa Stark
marry Ser Loras Tyrell but he has his own idea as to who she should marry. Robb
has to deal with the murderers of Tywin Lannister’s young nephews, including
Lord Rickard Karstark, whom he executes against the advice of those around him.
Daenerys’ army is on the move. North of the wall, Jon and Ygritte become
lovers.
“The Climb”: In King’s Landing,
Tywin Lannister and Lady Olenna meet to discuss his children’s proposed
marriages. She puts up a good fight but in the end is forced to admit defeat.
Tyrion and Cersei bemoan their fate. Tyrion is forced to tell Sansa what his
father has decided. Baelish meanwhile eliminates a spy in his midsts. Arya
takes an immediate dislike to Melisandre when she arrives at their camp. That
dislike grows when she learns Melisandre is taking someone away with her. Jaime
negotiates his release and return to King’s Landing. Robb, his army depleted,
realizes he has no choice but to repair relations with the Freys. However,
since Robb didn’t marry one of the Frey daughters as promised, they demand
Edmure Tully marry one of them instead. Jon, Ygritte and many others arrive at
the Wall and begin the 700 ft. climb.
— basically go to show what a convoluted set of plots this
really is and how much the confusing intercutting between them (this show has
more “Meanwhile … ” moments than any film made probably since the 1916 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, of which S. J.
Perelman said, “Everything … happens in the meantime; the characters don’t even
sneeze consecutively”) takes away from the overall appeal of the show. Charles
said something that’s occurred to me as well: he can see why people
“binge-watch” this series on DVD or online via streaming just so they can have
a fighting chance of remembering from episode to episode just who is who and
what side they’re on — for the moment, since the characters are also
continually double-crossing each other. It didn’t help that the two episodes
feature surprisingly little of the three most interesting characters — Tyrion
Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who as I’ve commented before undoubtedly relished
not only being in a long-running series but getting to play a richly defined multidimensional
role instead of the comic-relief sidekicks or sinister villains little-person
actors are usually limited to), Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) and Joffrey
Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), have only teeny-tiny parts in these episodes. It also
didn’t help that most of these episodes took place either at night, indoors or
both — we heave a sigh of relief when the action finally cuts to broad daylight outdoors — and that much of
the show’s action is pointless. In the big scene of “The Climb” (which gives it
its episode title) the trainees of the Knight’s Watch, who are supposed to
maintain the big ice wall that separates “Westeros” (i.e., England and Wales)
from the presumably more primitive, savage kingdom to the north (i.e.,
Scotland), are supposed to scale the 700-foot wall (with surprisingly
modern-looking mountaineering equipment, like pitons and ropes). Apparently
it’s supposed to have something to do with their training, but I couldn’t for
the life of me “get” what this bizarre and dangerous ritual was supposed to
accomplish (and neither could Charles). And the significance of Jon Snow
(illegitimate half-brother of the Starks, principal contenders against the
Lannisters for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms — think of the real-life
Wars of the Roses in 15th century England between the Lancasters and
the Yorks) and Ygritte becoming lovers is that as a trainee for the Knight’s
Watch Jon was supposed to swear a vow of celibacy, but it was Ygritte who came
on to him and got into a hot tub
(O.K., a natural hot tub formed
by a warm mineral stream) with him naked, following which there’s an odd scene
of him fucking her while she’s naked but he’s wearing a long fur coat that
makes it look like she’s being raped by a bear. We’re midway through the third
season already and we’ve only been “teased” by the dragons which were
supposedly a big part of this series’ appeal, and while there are some good
moments here (notably Dinklage’s scene and a Gay sex scene that looks pretty
much like the straight ones, also some innocent fun at the expense of
Christianity, which is ridiculed here as the “Lord of Light” religion and made
to seem just as brutal and unforgiving as the pagan cults it’s up against in
the Game of Thrones spiritual
marketplace), for the most part Game of Thrones (these episodes, anyway) is just dull exposition
livened up occasionally by ponderous action scenes.
Monday, March 2, 2020
His Fatal Fixation (Reel World Management, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a Lifetime movie so mysterious that it didn’t have an imdb.com page, and the movie sites that did mention it lamented that Lifetime didn’t release the names of anyone who worked on it except the two actors who played the leads, Sarah Fisher and Robin Dunne. The movie was called His Fatal Fixation and was about the Stalker from Hell, a young man named Spencer Morgan whom heroine Lily Abrams (Sarah Fisher) had once dated before falling into a more serious relationship with a young, better-looking and considerably more amiable man named Jason. Alas, Spencer accosts Lily and Jason while they’re having a date at a restaurant, giving her a rather crushed-looking lily — which she refuses — and when they decide that instead of remaining at the restaurant they’re going to go back to Jason’s place and order a pizza delivered. Big mistake: the delivery person turns out to be Spencer, who comes in, draws a knife, stabs Jason to death with it and slashes Lily’s face, leaving a huge and very nasty-looking wound. Lily responds by pushing Spencer off the balcony, where he lands in a snow drift and is presumably dead — but the experience has given Lily the Mother of All Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. She keeps having nightmares in which Spencer pursues her, and though both she and we are quickly reassured that these are only dreams, they scare the shit out of her and she’s convinced that somehow Spencer survived and is still stalking her. So she decides to change her name legally to “Stella Gordon” and leave town.
She goes to the Infinity plastic-surgery clinic (their logo is the sideways-eight mathematical symbol for infinity) run by Drs. Michael Marlon (Robin Dunne) and Brendan Caidin, and Dr. Marlon does such a superb job on her operation neither she nor we can see where the scar was before. Since it was established that Lily/Stella was a physician’s assistant before the incident with her stalker, she advises Dr. Marlon on the proper care for her and his other patients and impresses him so much with her knowledge that he agrees to hire her as a temporary replacement when his current assistant, Joyce (the typical African-American best friend who gets knocked off early on), goes into the hospital for reasons the writer(s) never bother to explain. Whatever Joyce has, it’s serious enough that the hospital has hooked her to a breathing tube — only a mysterious stranger comes into her room, kinks the breathing tube and asphyxiates her. Dr. Marlon offers Stella the job of replacing Joyce permanently but without knowing about her past or that she’s currently taking a psychotropic drug for her PTSD that isn’t supposed to be mixed with alcohol. We’re also introduced to several other patients of the Infinity clinic, including a girl with a harelip whom Dr. Marlon has successfully operated on after she’s been teased at school about it (Charles suggested that this was a mistake: parents who have access to any health care at all will have a child’s harelip corrected before he or she ever goes to school) and a mysterious, sinister figure named Joshua. Joshua is a burn victim whose face is being reconstructed by Dr. Marlon, who’s just performed the first of the three plastic surgeries he will need to be normal again, only the moment we see him with his face wrapped up in bandages like the Invisible Man’s and are told he can’t speak (he can communicate only by writing notes, and every time he sees Stella his notepad includes a smiley-face for her), we know he’s going to turn out to be Spencer Morgan, the Stalker from Hell.
Meanwhile the Infinity staff (what’s left of it) goes out for drinks in a wake-style conclusion to Joyce’s funeral and Dr. Caidin pushes Stella to have a drink — even though she tries to beg off since she’s not supposed to drink while on her meds. (Dr. Caidin has seen her take them but assumed she was ripping them off from the clinic’s own stash instead of taking a legal prescription from a doctor outside the clinic.) Dr. Caidin finds Stella outside the bar and takes her home so she can sleep it off — only a mysterious assailant enters Dr. Caidin’s apartment and beats him almost to death, leaving him in critical condition at the local hospital. While all this is going on Dr. Marlon is increasingly attracted to Stella sexually — he offers to take her to dinner even though, as both she and we later learn, he’s married to a woman named Claire who was his high-school sweetheart and also a former patient. The marriage has been strained since Claire had an affair with someone else (whom we never meet), and at one point Dr. Marlon and Stella fuck in his office. When Claire finds out, the Marlons have an argument and she stalks out and is nearly killed when the car she’s driving — which is carefully established in the dialogue as his, not her own — was sabotaged: its accelerator was tampered with so the car would just keep going faster and faster and she’d be unable to stop it. So with both his wife and his business partner in the hospital and his former assistant dead — and with the writer(s) firing one red herring after another at us (including Danny Hart, the manager of the building where Stella lives, who has a penchant for letting himself in with his pass key and also is shown fixing his own car, meaning he could know how to sabotage one), both Dr. Marlon and the police officer investigating Joyce’s death, Praxell Davis (a woman with a page-boy haircut and a slim, boyish figure), conclude that Stella is herself the psycho and the “stalker” doesn’t really exist.
But we’ve known along that the mysterious patient with the all-around bandages would turn out to be Lily’s stalker and the person actually responsible for the criminal assaults on Dr. Marlon’s staff, and there’s a typical Lifetime climax in which Spencer tries to kill Dr. Marlon with Marlon’s own gun, which Marlon took out of a safe for protection, and Stella a.k.a. Lily ultimately grabs the gun and shoots Spencer, though in yet another one of the open-ended endings Lifetime is increasingly using, he escapes and presumably could return for a sequel. The tag scene shows Dr. Marlon and Stella reconciling at the hospital bed of his wife, with Marlon agreeing to keep Stella on as an employee but also recommitting to his marriage — though there’s a tag scene on top of the tag scene which hints that Danny Hart, that obnoxious building manager, might be Stella’s next romantic interest. His Fatal Fixation is actually a cut above most Lifetime movies: the director (whose name I scrawled out as “Stuart Anton” but that could be wrong) has a real flair for suspense and stages the action far more creatively than a lot of the Lifetime hacks, and whoever plays the stalker brings the right sort of restraint to the role (though the idea of the psycho being a superficially nice guy goes back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and, even before that, to Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard) that makes him seem all that sinister when he does go off the rails. Though the writers’ attempts to divert us from the most logical (and obvious) suspect — including a hint towards the end, as Stella is trying to save her life by playing up to Spencer’s delusions, that the two are in this together — are simply annoying, for the most part His Fatal Fixation is good melodrama and a better than average Lifetime movie. (I’m not sure it was originally intended as a Lifetime movie; there are at least two points where the word “shit” is blipped out of the soundtrack, and it’s possible it was intended for a theatrical release — or maybe TV stations in Canada, where this was made, aren’t bound by the same ridiculous Puritanical rules as the ones here.)
Last night’s “feature” was a Lifetime movie so mysterious that it didn’t have an imdb.com page, and the movie sites that did mention it lamented that Lifetime didn’t release the names of anyone who worked on it except the two actors who played the leads, Sarah Fisher and Robin Dunne. The movie was called His Fatal Fixation and was about the Stalker from Hell, a young man named Spencer Morgan whom heroine Lily Abrams (Sarah Fisher) had once dated before falling into a more serious relationship with a young, better-looking and considerably more amiable man named Jason. Alas, Spencer accosts Lily and Jason while they’re having a date at a restaurant, giving her a rather crushed-looking lily — which she refuses — and when they decide that instead of remaining at the restaurant they’re going to go back to Jason’s place and order a pizza delivered. Big mistake: the delivery person turns out to be Spencer, who comes in, draws a knife, stabs Jason to death with it and slashes Lily’s face, leaving a huge and very nasty-looking wound. Lily responds by pushing Spencer off the balcony, where he lands in a snow drift and is presumably dead — but the experience has given Lily the Mother of All Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. She keeps having nightmares in which Spencer pursues her, and though both she and we are quickly reassured that these are only dreams, they scare the shit out of her and she’s convinced that somehow Spencer survived and is still stalking her. So she decides to change her name legally to “Stella Gordon” and leave town.
She goes to the Infinity plastic-surgery clinic (their logo is the sideways-eight mathematical symbol for infinity) run by Drs. Michael Marlon (Robin Dunne) and Brendan Caidin, and Dr. Marlon does such a superb job on her operation neither she nor we can see where the scar was before. Since it was established that Lily/Stella was a physician’s assistant before the incident with her stalker, she advises Dr. Marlon on the proper care for her and his other patients and impresses him so much with her knowledge that he agrees to hire her as a temporary replacement when his current assistant, Joyce (the typical African-American best friend who gets knocked off early on), goes into the hospital for reasons the writer(s) never bother to explain. Whatever Joyce has, it’s serious enough that the hospital has hooked her to a breathing tube — only a mysterious stranger comes into her room, kinks the breathing tube and asphyxiates her. Dr. Marlon offers Stella the job of replacing Joyce permanently but without knowing about her past or that she’s currently taking a psychotropic drug for her PTSD that isn’t supposed to be mixed with alcohol. We’re also introduced to several other patients of the Infinity clinic, including a girl with a harelip whom Dr. Marlon has successfully operated on after she’s been teased at school about it (Charles suggested that this was a mistake: parents who have access to any health care at all will have a child’s harelip corrected before he or she ever goes to school) and a mysterious, sinister figure named Joshua. Joshua is a burn victim whose face is being reconstructed by Dr. Marlon, who’s just performed the first of the three plastic surgeries he will need to be normal again, only the moment we see him with his face wrapped up in bandages like the Invisible Man’s and are told he can’t speak (he can communicate only by writing notes, and every time he sees Stella his notepad includes a smiley-face for her), we know he’s going to turn out to be Spencer Morgan, the Stalker from Hell.
Meanwhile the Infinity staff (what’s left of it) goes out for drinks in a wake-style conclusion to Joyce’s funeral and Dr. Caidin pushes Stella to have a drink — even though she tries to beg off since she’s not supposed to drink while on her meds. (Dr. Caidin has seen her take them but assumed she was ripping them off from the clinic’s own stash instead of taking a legal prescription from a doctor outside the clinic.) Dr. Caidin finds Stella outside the bar and takes her home so she can sleep it off — only a mysterious assailant enters Dr. Caidin’s apartment and beats him almost to death, leaving him in critical condition at the local hospital. While all this is going on Dr. Marlon is increasingly attracted to Stella sexually — he offers to take her to dinner even though, as both she and we later learn, he’s married to a woman named Claire who was his high-school sweetheart and also a former patient. The marriage has been strained since Claire had an affair with someone else (whom we never meet), and at one point Dr. Marlon and Stella fuck in his office. When Claire finds out, the Marlons have an argument and she stalks out and is nearly killed when the car she’s driving — which is carefully established in the dialogue as his, not her own — was sabotaged: its accelerator was tampered with so the car would just keep going faster and faster and she’d be unable to stop it. So with both his wife and his business partner in the hospital and his former assistant dead — and with the writer(s) firing one red herring after another at us (including Danny Hart, the manager of the building where Stella lives, who has a penchant for letting himself in with his pass key and also is shown fixing his own car, meaning he could know how to sabotage one), both Dr. Marlon and the police officer investigating Joyce’s death, Praxell Davis (a woman with a page-boy haircut and a slim, boyish figure), conclude that Stella is herself the psycho and the “stalker” doesn’t really exist.
But we’ve known along that the mysterious patient with the all-around bandages would turn out to be Lily’s stalker and the person actually responsible for the criminal assaults on Dr. Marlon’s staff, and there’s a typical Lifetime climax in which Spencer tries to kill Dr. Marlon with Marlon’s own gun, which Marlon took out of a safe for protection, and Stella a.k.a. Lily ultimately grabs the gun and shoots Spencer, though in yet another one of the open-ended endings Lifetime is increasingly using, he escapes and presumably could return for a sequel. The tag scene shows Dr. Marlon and Stella reconciling at the hospital bed of his wife, with Marlon agreeing to keep Stella on as an employee but also recommitting to his marriage — though there’s a tag scene on top of the tag scene which hints that Danny Hart, that obnoxious building manager, might be Stella’s next romantic interest. His Fatal Fixation is actually a cut above most Lifetime movies: the director (whose name I scrawled out as “Stuart Anton” but that could be wrong) has a real flair for suspense and stages the action far more creatively than a lot of the Lifetime hacks, and whoever plays the stalker brings the right sort of restraint to the role (though the idea of the psycho being a superficially nice guy goes back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and, even before that, to Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard) that makes him seem all that sinister when he does go off the rails. Though the writers’ attempts to divert us from the most logical (and obvious) suspect — including a hint towards the end, as Stella is trying to save her life by playing up to Spencer’s delusions, that the two are in this together — are simply annoying, for the most part His Fatal Fixation is good melodrama and a better than average Lifetime movie. (I’m not sure it was originally intended as a Lifetime movie; there are at least two points where the word “shit” is blipped out of the soundtrack, and it’s possible it was intended for a theatrical release — or maybe TV stations in Canada, where this was made, aren’t bound by the same ridiculous Puritanical rules as the ones here.)
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Frozen II (Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago my husband Charles and I watched the movie Frozen II, which came out on Blu-Ray and DVD just three months after its theatrical release last November (the “window” is getting shorter and shorter!). It was made by most of the same creative team as the original Frozen from 2013; Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee as directors, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez as song composers, and all four of the above plus Marc Smith credited with the film’s “original story” though Lee gets sole credit for the actual script (and apparently there was some last-minute tweaking by Allison Schroeder), with most of the voice actors from the original also returning: Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell as the feuding sisters Elsa and Anna, princesses of the city-state of Arendelle (that’s how it’s spelled on the film’s imdb.com page, though in my comments on the original Frozen I had spelled it “Arundel” since that’s the original British name) — only Elsa has the power to freeze things with a touch or a wave of her hand, while Anna is a normal girl without this superpower. In the original Frozen Elsa got mad at having to restrain herself from using this power, and she froze all of Arendelle and forced Anna to go in search of her in her ice palace and get her to break the spell. She assembled the usual troupe of motley sidekicks, including handsome iceman Kristoff (Jonathan Groff, who in a special feature labeled “Outtakes” was shown as himself on the recording stage for the film — and if anything he’s even hotter as a real person than he is as a computer-animated cartoon in the film!); Sven, the reindeer who pulls his sled; Olaf (Josh Gad), the enchanted snowman (a bit of Elsa’s magic between the first film and this one has made it virtually impossible for him to melt) who’s a sort of cross between Jiminy Cricket and R2-D2; and a new one, a salamander-like familiar who breathes out fire whether the other characters want him to or not. The film opens with a confusing prologue that made me wonder briefly just what connection this film had to its predecessor: it appears to pre-date the prologue of the first Frozen, which featured Elsa and Anna as pre-pubescent girls and showed how Elsa discovered her powers. In this one Elsa (Mattea Conforti) and Anna (Hadley Gannaway) are playing a game of “Enchanted Forest” with toy soldiers made of snow, but their dad comes in and says he’s actually been in an enchanted forest and it’s nothing like the one they’ve invented for their game.
The story he tells is of how a delegation from Arendelle went to the nearby kingdom of Northuldra and the two peoples swore eternal peace and dammed the river as a symbol of their alliance — only the ink was hardly dry on their treaty (though actually no one signed anything and they were probably just doing a verbal agreement) that one side attacked the other [spoiler alert: we assume from the get-go that it was the Northuldrans who attacked the Arendellians and only very near the end of the movie do we learn that it was the other way around — Elsa’s and Anna’s grandfather led the Arendellian army intending from the first to conquer Northuldra and occupy it]. The result was that the spirits of the four elements — earth, air, water and fire — got pissed and put Northuldra under a sort of permanent lockdown from which it can only be saved by … the adult Elsa, who in the main part of the film, set three years after the end of the first Frozen, gets called by a mysterious “vapor voice” (the Norwegian singer Aurora Aksnes, who’s billed only by her first name) to go “into the unknown” and fix whatever’s wrong with this world. Idina Menzel belts out a Kristen Anderson-Lopez/Robert Lopez power ballad called “Into the Unknown” that was trying hard to be this film’s “Let It Go” but fell short both artistically and commercially; though Menzel’s singing voice is as amazing as ever, the song didn’t win the Academy Award (“Let It Go” did win; “Into the Unknown” lost to “I’m Gonna Love Me Again,” the new song Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote together for the Elton John biopic Rocketman so they would have a new song that would be eligible) and it’s simply not as good a piece of material. (Significantly, like “Let It Go,” “Into the Unknown” is heard again over the closing credits in a version by a different performer — only for the original Frozen “Let It Go” was reprised by Demi Lovato while “Into the Unknown” got a more radical makeover by the band Panic! At the Disco, including a male lead singer, Brendon Urie.)
Anyway, Elsa is determined to go to Northuldra alone to see if she can set things right, but Anne, her fiancé Kristoff, the comic-relief snowperson Olaf and the reindeer Sven all insist on accompanying her. Along the way, as Olaf puts it in a rather wry post-credits sequence, “And then a bunch of important things that happen that I forgot but all that matters is that I was right and water has memory, and thus … ” Most of Frozen II is an artistically gorgeous rendering of a plot that makes virtually no sense, with the writers repeatedly making the usual mistake of a lot of bad fantasies: since anything can happen in the fantasy genre, they make anything happen whether it makes sense or not. Their reaction when they realize they’ve written themselves into a corner is to invent a new magic power, a new plot device or a whole new race of beings — like the trolls whose leader appears to rule Arendelle in the absence of princesses Elsa and Anna, or the “Earth Giants” (sort of crosses between the Thing from The Fantastic Four and the Transformers-like creatures who build Noah’s Ark in the Darren Aranofsky version) who come on as dei ex machina at the end to destroy the dam the long-ago bad Arendellians put up as part of their campaign to conquer and occupy Northuldra, despite the concern of Our Heroines that the dam-breaking will create a mega-flood that will inundate Arendelle. One of the coolest gimmicks of the film is a flying horse literally made out of seawater ice which Elsa is able to conjure up and ride. Another is the heart-stoppingly beautiful trail of snowflakes Olaf leaves behind as the enchantment that had kept him intact since the first film wears off and he starts melting.
Frozen II is wonderful to look at; it just makes no sense, or when it does make sense it falls back on plot gimmicks so old and corny Walt Disney himself would probably have rejected them as too obvious. Along the way Elsa realizes that she is the mysterious “Fifth Element” that has to form the bridge to put Arendelle and Northuldra back together (indeed, at times this film seems like a PG-rated version of Game of Thrones without the bloodshed or the sex), and all the principals appear to die — only they all come back to life, and Elsa does so in time to freeze the big wave from the dam destruction before it inundates everyone and everything in Arendelle. Even that damned crystal flying horse that’s made of water (waves) comes back and helps achieve the happy ending. At one point Olaf wonders if this business of saving the world from total disaster is going to be a regular “thing,” and I joked back, “Yes, if this movie does well enough to merit a Frozen III.” (It did; it grossed $476,704,707 on an estimated investment of $150 million.) Frozen II is a dazzling movie to look at but it’s rather anemically powered by a weak story. The original Frozen also was no great shakes as a story film — it was an effective quest narrative but came off as way too familiar — but at least the plot of Frozen made sense and had us rooting for Anna and her friends as she searched for her scapegrace sister (to the extent anyone can be scapegrace in a Walt Disney movie!) whereas this one leads everywhere and nowhere at once. Frankly, Frozen II works best if you can simply not pay attention to what it’s supposedly about and just groove on the hypnotic visuals and ignore the nonsensical plot and the lame, stupid jokes made by Olaf, who was genuinely funny and cute in the original Frozen but just comes off as annoying here.
Two nights ago my husband Charles and I watched the movie Frozen II, which came out on Blu-Ray and DVD just three months after its theatrical release last November (the “window” is getting shorter and shorter!). It was made by most of the same creative team as the original Frozen from 2013; Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee as directors, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez as song composers, and all four of the above plus Marc Smith credited with the film’s “original story” though Lee gets sole credit for the actual script (and apparently there was some last-minute tweaking by Allison Schroeder), with most of the voice actors from the original also returning: Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell as the feuding sisters Elsa and Anna, princesses of the city-state of Arendelle (that’s how it’s spelled on the film’s imdb.com page, though in my comments on the original Frozen I had spelled it “Arundel” since that’s the original British name) — only Elsa has the power to freeze things with a touch or a wave of her hand, while Anna is a normal girl without this superpower. In the original Frozen Elsa got mad at having to restrain herself from using this power, and she froze all of Arendelle and forced Anna to go in search of her in her ice palace and get her to break the spell. She assembled the usual troupe of motley sidekicks, including handsome iceman Kristoff (Jonathan Groff, who in a special feature labeled “Outtakes” was shown as himself on the recording stage for the film — and if anything he’s even hotter as a real person than he is as a computer-animated cartoon in the film!); Sven, the reindeer who pulls his sled; Olaf (Josh Gad), the enchanted snowman (a bit of Elsa’s magic between the first film and this one has made it virtually impossible for him to melt) who’s a sort of cross between Jiminy Cricket and R2-D2; and a new one, a salamander-like familiar who breathes out fire whether the other characters want him to or not. The film opens with a confusing prologue that made me wonder briefly just what connection this film had to its predecessor: it appears to pre-date the prologue of the first Frozen, which featured Elsa and Anna as pre-pubescent girls and showed how Elsa discovered her powers. In this one Elsa (Mattea Conforti) and Anna (Hadley Gannaway) are playing a game of “Enchanted Forest” with toy soldiers made of snow, but their dad comes in and says he’s actually been in an enchanted forest and it’s nothing like the one they’ve invented for their game.
The story he tells is of how a delegation from Arendelle went to the nearby kingdom of Northuldra and the two peoples swore eternal peace and dammed the river as a symbol of their alliance — only the ink was hardly dry on their treaty (though actually no one signed anything and they were probably just doing a verbal agreement) that one side attacked the other [spoiler alert: we assume from the get-go that it was the Northuldrans who attacked the Arendellians and only very near the end of the movie do we learn that it was the other way around — Elsa’s and Anna’s grandfather led the Arendellian army intending from the first to conquer Northuldra and occupy it]. The result was that the spirits of the four elements — earth, air, water and fire — got pissed and put Northuldra under a sort of permanent lockdown from which it can only be saved by … the adult Elsa, who in the main part of the film, set three years after the end of the first Frozen, gets called by a mysterious “vapor voice” (the Norwegian singer Aurora Aksnes, who’s billed only by her first name) to go “into the unknown” and fix whatever’s wrong with this world. Idina Menzel belts out a Kristen Anderson-Lopez/Robert Lopez power ballad called “Into the Unknown” that was trying hard to be this film’s “Let It Go” but fell short both artistically and commercially; though Menzel’s singing voice is as amazing as ever, the song didn’t win the Academy Award (“Let It Go” did win; “Into the Unknown” lost to “I’m Gonna Love Me Again,” the new song Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote together for the Elton John biopic Rocketman so they would have a new song that would be eligible) and it’s simply not as good a piece of material. (Significantly, like “Let It Go,” “Into the Unknown” is heard again over the closing credits in a version by a different performer — only for the original Frozen “Let It Go” was reprised by Demi Lovato while “Into the Unknown” got a more radical makeover by the band Panic! At the Disco, including a male lead singer, Brendon Urie.)
Anyway, Elsa is determined to go to Northuldra alone to see if she can set things right, but Anne, her fiancé Kristoff, the comic-relief snowperson Olaf and the reindeer Sven all insist on accompanying her. Along the way, as Olaf puts it in a rather wry post-credits sequence, “And then a bunch of important things that happen that I forgot but all that matters is that I was right and water has memory, and thus … ” Most of Frozen II is an artistically gorgeous rendering of a plot that makes virtually no sense, with the writers repeatedly making the usual mistake of a lot of bad fantasies: since anything can happen in the fantasy genre, they make anything happen whether it makes sense or not. Their reaction when they realize they’ve written themselves into a corner is to invent a new magic power, a new plot device or a whole new race of beings — like the trolls whose leader appears to rule Arendelle in the absence of princesses Elsa and Anna, or the “Earth Giants” (sort of crosses between the Thing from The Fantastic Four and the Transformers-like creatures who build Noah’s Ark in the Darren Aranofsky version) who come on as dei ex machina at the end to destroy the dam the long-ago bad Arendellians put up as part of their campaign to conquer and occupy Northuldra, despite the concern of Our Heroines that the dam-breaking will create a mega-flood that will inundate Arendelle. One of the coolest gimmicks of the film is a flying horse literally made out of seawater ice which Elsa is able to conjure up and ride. Another is the heart-stoppingly beautiful trail of snowflakes Olaf leaves behind as the enchantment that had kept him intact since the first film wears off and he starts melting.
Frozen II is wonderful to look at; it just makes no sense, or when it does make sense it falls back on plot gimmicks so old and corny Walt Disney himself would probably have rejected them as too obvious. Along the way Elsa realizes that she is the mysterious “Fifth Element” that has to form the bridge to put Arendelle and Northuldra back together (indeed, at times this film seems like a PG-rated version of Game of Thrones without the bloodshed or the sex), and all the principals appear to die — only they all come back to life, and Elsa does so in time to freeze the big wave from the dam destruction before it inundates everyone and everything in Arendelle. Even that damned crystal flying horse that’s made of water (waves) comes back and helps achieve the happy ending. At one point Olaf wonders if this business of saving the world from total disaster is going to be a regular “thing,” and I joked back, “Yes, if this movie does well enough to merit a Frozen III.” (It did; it grossed $476,704,707 on an estimated investment of $150 million.) Frozen II is a dazzling movie to look at but it’s rather anemically powered by a weak story. The original Frozen also was no great shakes as a story film — it was an effective quest narrative but came off as way too familiar — but at least the plot of Frozen made sense and had us rooting for Anna and her friends as she searched for her scapegrace sister (to the extent anyone can be scapegrace in a Walt Disney movie!) whereas this one leads everywhere and nowhere at once. Frankly, Frozen II works best if you can simply not pay attention to what it’s supposedly about and just groove on the hypnotic visuals and ignore the nonsensical plot and the lame, stupid jokes made by Olaf, who was genuinely funny and cute in the original Frozen but just comes off as annoying here.
Dying to Be Me (My Life Productions, Coral, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the latest Lifetime movie at 8 p.m. last night, a minim opus called Dying to Be You which starts out with a woman drowning another woman in a bathtub while the victim was listening to music via ear buds (which sounds hazardous enough — I wondered briefly if her killer would dispatch her by pitching a radio into the bathtub, thereby electrocuting her, along the lines of George Baxt’s A Queer Kind of Death, a pioneering Gay detective story published in 1966 and featuring a Black Gay detective, Pharoah Love, who would later become a series character). At the start we don’t know who either of these two women are, but the story later flashes back to a fourth-grade classroom in Seattle in which the teacher tells every student that he or she is going to have a pen pal, and she hands out letters at random from students at a sister school in Fairbanks, Nebraska and tells each of her students to write a letter in reply. The teacher looks anachronistically dressed, especially her frizzy hair (a style that I’m pretty sure was not fashionable for African-American women 15 to 20 years ago), and the whole idea of a pen pal seems a bit dated in the age of e-mails, texts and social media. But so be it: that’s the plot premise writer Lisa Di Trolio and director Danny J. Boyle (note the initial — this is not the Danny Boyle who’s won the Academy Award but a lesser namesake who’s a Lifetime regular) stuck themselves with. The two weirdly drafted pen-pals are Lily Anderson of Seattle and Molly Cumberland of Fairbanks, and we get brief glimpses of the fourth-grade Lily (Abbie Magnuson) and Lily as a teenager (Angela Robertson) before we get to see her as an adult (Elise Gatien), an aspiring interior designer who works for a nice-looking and easygoing boss we expect to see hitting on her — but he doesn’t. Molly has continued to write and has claimed that she, too, is pursuing a career in interior design, and the two women finally have their first face-to-face meeting when Lily’s boyfriend, aspiring artist and metalworker Matthew Jansen (Tom Stevens, presenting the right mix of sexiness and dorkiness for the role), arranges a surprise birthday party for her and Molly (Natalie Dreyfuss) is the big attraction. Molly is shorter, has darker and wavier hair, and wears a big pair of granny glasses — a late-1960’s, early-1970’s fashion that was already out of style before virtually anyone in this movie was even born — but she’s overall a fairly similar physical “type” to Lily.
Lily has carefully and almost religiously saved all the letters Molly wrote her, and Molly’s acknowledgment that she “lost” her letters from Lily is Lily’s (and our) first hint that there’s something wrong about her. There are enough gaps in Molly’s memory of the things Lily wrote her about — including her failing to remember which ’N SYNC band member Lily got an autograph from and gave it to Molly — that we’re convinced, long before Lily is, that “Molly” is an impostor. What’s more, once screenwriter Di Trolio inserts a brief reference to Molly having a sister named Beth, we can figure out the whole plot right there: “Molly” is really Beth and the opening scene of one woman drowning another in a bathtub was Beth killing Molly so she could take her place as Lily’s pen pal and show up in Seattle for the face-to-face meeting. Beth a.k.a. “Molly” emerges as a full-fledged Lifetime villainess, seeking to displace Lily at her job (she flirts with Lily’s boss to get him to hire her), with Matt (whom she tricks into kissing her neck from behind by wearing Lily’s dressing gown; Lily discovers them and has the predictable jealous hissy-fit) and her own apartment. Beth goes out to Matthew’s live-work space and knifes him to death, stabbing him seven times — we don’t see the gore but we do get a chilling moment in which Lily stops by Matt’s space, knocks, gets no answer and writes a note she slips under his door — which is grabbed by Beth and crumpled, following which the camera pans to the dead Matt, his blood all over the floor — and of course Lily is suspect number one in Matt’s murder when two typically stupid Lifetime cops (Sam Spear as Detective Wolf and an unidentified woman as his partner) show up to investigate. There’s also a dotty old character named Mrs. Blankenship in the apartment building where Lily lives and Beth a.k.a. “Molly” has been crashing, who’s been diagnosed with dementia. Lily has been helping her out with minor chores for years but Beth takes an instant dislike to her, at one point tying her up and putting a gag over her mouth (though one wonders why she doesn’t just kill her) to prevent her from alerting any of the other neighbors what Beth has been up to.
At one point Lily finds the e-mail address of the real Molly’s and Beth’s parents online and writes to them about their daughter and her concern that “Molly” needs help — and she gets a scorching all-caps reply that the real Molly is dead, and if whoever wrote them asking about her keeps playing the sick joke of pretending she is alive they’re going to call the police. (Why it never occurs to them that their still-living daughter Beth might be impersonating the dead Molly for some nefarious purpose is a mystery locked inside Lisa Di Trolio’s head.) It ends as you think it’s going to end, with Beth confronting Lily in Mrs. Blankenship’s apartment, where Lily has gone to rescue her, tying her up and gagging her mouth while she explains to us What Made Beth Run: it seemed that as the younger and less cute sister of the real Molly she grew to hate her because her parents clearly favored Molly over her, and Lily’s parents likewise gave her a privileged upbringing, so she determined to kill her real sister and then impersonate her to bring down Lily as well. Dying to Be You is an O.K. Lifetime movie — Natalie Dreyfuss does a good job as the psycho bitch from hell but she’s too pouty and doesn’t bring quite the venom or the ability to keep a game face Ashlynn Yennie did with her glare-ice mood switches in The Wrong Mommy — and the other actors are O.K., professionally acceptable without being truly great. So is the movie as a whole; the “other” Danny Boyle is a perfectly competent director but not an especially interesting one — though he does give us an expert dispatching of the villainess via a glass shard slid across her throat that startled Charles as the most gruesome death scene he’d ever seen on Lifetime. All in all, Dying to be You is an efficient expression of the Lifetime formula but little more than that … and I found myself very sorry for the heroine’s sake that her boyfriend Matt, the film’s most interesting character, didn’t make it to the end, though there’s the hint of an attraction between her and her boss that seems rather odd and behind-the-times in the #MeToo era.
I watched the latest Lifetime movie at 8 p.m. last night, a minim opus called Dying to Be You which starts out with a woman drowning another woman in a bathtub while the victim was listening to music via ear buds (which sounds hazardous enough — I wondered briefly if her killer would dispatch her by pitching a radio into the bathtub, thereby electrocuting her, along the lines of George Baxt’s A Queer Kind of Death, a pioneering Gay detective story published in 1966 and featuring a Black Gay detective, Pharoah Love, who would later become a series character). At the start we don’t know who either of these two women are, but the story later flashes back to a fourth-grade classroom in Seattle in which the teacher tells every student that he or she is going to have a pen pal, and she hands out letters at random from students at a sister school in Fairbanks, Nebraska and tells each of her students to write a letter in reply. The teacher looks anachronistically dressed, especially her frizzy hair (a style that I’m pretty sure was not fashionable for African-American women 15 to 20 years ago), and the whole idea of a pen pal seems a bit dated in the age of e-mails, texts and social media. But so be it: that’s the plot premise writer Lisa Di Trolio and director Danny J. Boyle (note the initial — this is not the Danny Boyle who’s won the Academy Award but a lesser namesake who’s a Lifetime regular) stuck themselves with. The two weirdly drafted pen-pals are Lily Anderson of Seattle and Molly Cumberland of Fairbanks, and we get brief glimpses of the fourth-grade Lily (Abbie Magnuson) and Lily as a teenager (Angela Robertson) before we get to see her as an adult (Elise Gatien), an aspiring interior designer who works for a nice-looking and easygoing boss we expect to see hitting on her — but he doesn’t. Molly has continued to write and has claimed that she, too, is pursuing a career in interior design, and the two women finally have their first face-to-face meeting when Lily’s boyfriend, aspiring artist and metalworker Matthew Jansen (Tom Stevens, presenting the right mix of sexiness and dorkiness for the role), arranges a surprise birthday party for her and Molly (Natalie Dreyfuss) is the big attraction. Molly is shorter, has darker and wavier hair, and wears a big pair of granny glasses — a late-1960’s, early-1970’s fashion that was already out of style before virtually anyone in this movie was even born — but she’s overall a fairly similar physical “type” to Lily.
Lily has carefully and almost religiously saved all the letters Molly wrote her, and Molly’s acknowledgment that she “lost” her letters from Lily is Lily’s (and our) first hint that there’s something wrong about her. There are enough gaps in Molly’s memory of the things Lily wrote her about — including her failing to remember which ’N SYNC band member Lily got an autograph from and gave it to Molly — that we’re convinced, long before Lily is, that “Molly” is an impostor. What’s more, once screenwriter Di Trolio inserts a brief reference to Molly having a sister named Beth, we can figure out the whole plot right there: “Molly” is really Beth and the opening scene of one woman drowning another in a bathtub was Beth killing Molly so she could take her place as Lily’s pen pal and show up in Seattle for the face-to-face meeting. Beth a.k.a. “Molly” emerges as a full-fledged Lifetime villainess, seeking to displace Lily at her job (she flirts with Lily’s boss to get him to hire her), with Matt (whom she tricks into kissing her neck from behind by wearing Lily’s dressing gown; Lily discovers them and has the predictable jealous hissy-fit) and her own apartment. Beth goes out to Matthew’s live-work space and knifes him to death, stabbing him seven times — we don’t see the gore but we do get a chilling moment in which Lily stops by Matt’s space, knocks, gets no answer and writes a note she slips under his door — which is grabbed by Beth and crumpled, following which the camera pans to the dead Matt, his blood all over the floor — and of course Lily is suspect number one in Matt’s murder when two typically stupid Lifetime cops (Sam Spear as Detective Wolf and an unidentified woman as his partner) show up to investigate. There’s also a dotty old character named Mrs. Blankenship in the apartment building where Lily lives and Beth a.k.a. “Molly” has been crashing, who’s been diagnosed with dementia. Lily has been helping her out with minor chores for years but Beth takes an instant dislike to her, at one point tying her up and putting a gag over her mouth (though one wonders why she doesn’t just kill her) to prevent her from alerting any of the other neighbors what Beth has been up to.
At one point Lily finds the e-mail address of the real Molly’s and Beth’s parents online and writes to them about their daughter and her concern that “Molly” needs help — and she gets a scorching all-caps reply that the real Molly is dead, and if whoever wrote them asking about her keeps playing the sick joke of pretending she is alive they’re going to call the police. (Why it never occurs to them that their still-living daughter Beth might be impersonating the dead Molly for some nefarious purpose is a mystery locked inside Lisa Di Trolio’s head.) It ends as you think it’s going to end, with Beth confronting Lily in Mrs. Blankenship’s apartment, where Lily has gone to rescue her, tying her up and gagging her mouth while she explains to us What Made Beth Run: it seemed that as the younger and less cute sister of the real Molly she grew to hate her because her parents clearly favored Molly over her, and Lily’s parents likewise gave her a privileged upbringing, so she determined to kill her real sister and then impersonate her to bring down Lily as well. Dying to Be You is an O.K. Lifetime movie — Natalie Dreyfuss does a good job as the psycho bitch from hell but she’s too pouty and doesn’t bring quite the venom or the ability to keep a game face Ashlynn Yennie did with her glare-ice mood switches in The Wrong Mommy — and the other actors are O.K., professionally acceptable without being truly great. So is the movie as a whole; the “other” Danny Boyle is a perfectly competent director but not an especially interesting one — though he does give us an expert dispatching of the villainess via a glass shard slid across her throat that startled Charles as the most gruesome death scene he’d ever seen on Lifetime. All in all, Dying to be You is an efficient expression of the Lifetime formula but little more than that … and I found myself very sorry for the heroine’s sake that her boyfriend Matt, the film’s most interesting character, didn’t make it to the end, though there’s the hint of an attraction between her and her boss that seems rather odd and behind-the-times in the #MeToo era.
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
The Lego Batman Movie (Warner Bros., DC Entertainment, LEGO System A/S, Lin Pictures, RatPac, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Exhausted with politics and “seriousness” in general after the two-hour Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate last night, my husband Charles and I watched The Lego Batman Movie, a 2017 follow-up to The Lego Movie and a film that when I first saw the trailer for it I assumed would be terminally and unwatchably silly. But the last time we were at Target Charles found a DVD copy on sale for just $5 and we grabbed it — and it turned out to be an utter delight, an expert spoof of the whole superhero genre and its pretensions. It opens with a black screen and dire music, over which we hear a narration by Batman (Will Arnett) setting up the film’s irreverence: “Black. All important movies start with a black screen... And music... Edgy, scary music that would make a parent or studio executive nervous... And logos... Really long and dramatic logos... Warner Bros. Why not ‘Warner Brothers’?[1] I don’t know... DC... The house that Batman built. Yeah, what, Superman? Come at me, bro. I’m your Kryptonite... Hmm... Not sure what RatPac does, but that logo is macho. I dig it... Okay. Get yourself ready for some... reading. ‘If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change. Hooo.’ No. I said that. Batman is very wise. I also have huge pecs and a nine-pack. Yeah, I’ve got an extra ab. Now, let’s start the movie.” The movie is at once an animated superhero tale, a mad set of references to all the various incarnations of Batman on film and, of all things, a “bromance” between Batman and the Joker (Zach Galafianakis) as well as a father-and-son bonding tale between Bruce Wayne a.k.a. Batman and Dick Grayson a.k.a. Robin (Michael Cera in what imdb.com claims is his first movie with only a PG rating), who in a neat role-reversal essentially adopts him while Batman is lustfully cruising Barbara Gordon a.k.a. Batgirl (Rosario Dawson), who’s just taken over as Gotham City’s police chief following the retirement of her father. (There’s also a weird cameo appearance by Mariah Carey, of all people, as the voice of Gotham City Mayor McCaskill.)
The plot, if it matters, concerns the attempts of two rival camps of super-villains to aid the Joker in his ongoing plan to take over Gotham City (and do what with it we’re never quite told, though there’s a nice seen in which the Joker takes over Bruce Wayne’s island estate and turns it into a hideously garish amusement park), including not only the familiar menaces from the Batuniverse but also King Kong, Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, Voldemort from the Harry Potter tales and even some of the killer dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park franchises. The rivalry is between the terrestrial villains and the ones from Krypton who survived their planet’s destruction by being exiled to the Phantom Zone, only they’re released because Batman has had Robin steal the Phantom Zone Projector from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — he uses Robin because, like the pygmy in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four, he’s little and lithe enough to evade Superman’s security system — and also Batman considers him “110 percent expendable.” Only the Joker steals it and uses it to let all the criminals from the Phantom Zone out to become his replacement gang after Barbara Gordon traps the Earthling bad guys (and gals) in a high-tech prison. The Lego Batman Movie was the brainchild of Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the original story — though a lot of other people (Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jared Stern and Jake Whittington) joined him in making it into a script (thereby making this at least a partial exception to my general field theory of cinema that a movie’s quality is inversely proportional to its number of writers) — and the direction is by Chris McKay. In case you were wondering, they did not do the film as stop-motion animation with Lego blocks; it’s really computer animation, and though I continue to have a problem with the thick, blocky look of computer animation (it has neither the realism of live-action nor the fluidity and artistry of drawn animation), I’ve seen a lot of movies in which the quality of the writing and voice-acting overcame the inherent limits of computer animation, and this is one.
Exhausted with politics and “seriousness” in general after the two-hour Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate last night, my husband Charles and I watched The Lego Batman Movie, a 2017 follow-up to The Lego Movie and a film that when I first saw the trailer for it I assumed would be terminally and unwatchably silly. But the last time we were at Target Charles found a DVD copy on sale for just $5 and we grabbed it — and it turned out to be an utter delight, an expert spoof of the whole superhero genre and its pretensions. It opens with a black screen and dire music, over which we hear a narration by Batman (Will Arnett) setting up the film’s irreverence: “Black. All important movies start with a black screen... And music... Edgy, scary music that would make a parent or studio executive nervous... And logos... Really long and dramatic logos... Warner Bros. Why not ‘Warner Brothers’?[1] I don’t know... DC... The house that Batman built. Yeah, what, Superman? Come at me, bro. I’m your Kryptonite... Hmm... Not sure what RatPac does, but that logo is macho. I dig it... Okay. Get yourself ready for some... reading. ‘If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change. Hooo.’ No. I said that. Batman is very wise. I also have huge pecs and a nine-pack. Yeah, I’ve got an extra ab. Now, let’s start the movie.” The movie is at once an animated superhero tale, a mad set of references to all the various incarnations of Batman on film and, of all things, a “bromance” between Batman and the Joker (Zach Galafianakis) as well as a father-and-son bonding tale between Bruce Wayne a.k.a. Batman and Dick Grayson a.k.a. Robin (Michael Cera in what imdb.com claims is his first movie with only a PG rating), who in a neat role-reversal essentially adopts him while Batman is lustfully cruising Barbara Gordon a.k.a. Batgirl (Rosario Dawson), who’s just taken over as Gotham City’s police chief following the retirement of her father. (There’s also a weird cameo appearance by Mariah Carey, of all people, as the voice of Gotham City Mayor McCaskill.)
The plot, if it matters, concerns the attempts of two rival camps of super-villains to aid the Joker in his ongoing plan to take over Gotham City (and do what with it we’re never quite told, though there’s a nice seen in which the Joker takes over Bruce Wayne’s island estate and turns it into a hideously garish amusement park), including not only the familiar menaces from the Batuniverse but also King Kong, Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, Voldemort from the Harry Potter tales and even some of the killer dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park franchises. The rivalry is between the terrestrial villains and the ones from Krypton who survived their planet’s destruction by being exiled to the Phantom Zone, only they’re released because Batman has had Robin steal the Phantom Zone Projector from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — he uses Robin because, like the pygmy in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four, he’s little and lithe enough to evade Superman’s security system — and also Batman considers him “110 percent expendable.” Only the Joker steals it and uses it to let all the criminals from the Phantom Zone out to become his replacement gang after Barbara Gordon traps the Earthling bad guys (and gals) in a high-tech prison. The Lego Batman Movie was the brainchild of Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the original story — though a lot of other people (Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jared Stern and Jake Whittington) joined him in making it into a script (thereby making this at least a partial exception to my general field theory of cinema that a movie’s quality is inversely proportional to its number of writers) — and the direction is by Chris McKay. In case you were wondering, they did not do the film as stop-motion animation with Lego blocks; it’s really computer animation, and though I continue to have a problem with the thick, blocky look of computer animation (it has neither the realism of live-action nor the fluidity and artistry of drawn animation), I’ve seen a lot of movies in which the quality of the writing and voice-acting overcame the inherent limits of computer animation, and this is one.
[1] — Actually in the 1910’s and 1920’s it was “Warner Brothers,” fully spelled out. In 1931 they
shortened it to “Warner Bros.”
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
The Wrong Mommy (Hybrid/Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Sunday night, February 23, I watched a couple of Lifetime movies that were part of an all-weekend marathon of “Wrong … ” movies featuring Vivica A. Fox, a buxom, middle-aged African-American actress who usually plays the Black authority figure who helps the white characters sort out their problems. The two I watched last night, The Wrong Mommy (2019) and The Wrong Tutor (2018), were both Hybrid LLC productions, with Fox credited as one of the “executive producers” as well as an actor, and both were directed by David DeCoteau, though they had different writing teams. The Wrong Mommy was credited to Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Robert Dean Klein (the first two for “story” and Klein for “script”) while The Wrong Tutor was written, apparently solo, by Adam Rocks-Off — oops, I mean Rockoff. Both adhered quite tightly to the Lifetime formula, though with some intriguing variations. The Wrong Mommy — not to be confused with another Lifetlme movie from 2017, The Wrong Mother, produced by a different team for a different company (Cartel Entertainment) — deals with the Anderson family: dad Alex (the genuinely hot Jason Shane-Scott — for once the innocent husband in a Lifetime movie is played by someone genuinely sexy instead of the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired blah type); mom Melanie (Jessica Morris); and daughter Tina (Jillian Spitz). Melanie’s mother, Carol Graham (Dee Wallace, the mother of the central human family in E.T.), also lives with them but leaves on an extended trip at the beginning of the show and doesn’t return until the end. Melanie is the family breadwinner; she’s got a promotion at the ad agency she works for, owned by Samantha (Vivica A. Fox, in flattering pantsuits and long, flowing hair instead of the “sensible” dresses and butch cuts she usually wears as the African-American authority figure). Alex also has some sort of job, but it’s less well paid and the writing committee never bothers to tell us what it is.
One of the perks of Melanie’s new job is she gets to hire her own assistant, and though she has her eye (so to speak) on a male candidate, ultimately Phoebe Sutton (Ashlynn Yennie) gets the job. Needless to say, given that she’s a character in a Lifetime movie with the word “Wrong” in the title, she’s Up To No Good from the get-go. She seems nice enough but she has a chip on her shoulder that comes, we find out later, from having been an orphan: her mother died of cancer when she was three and her father died when she was six. She was briefly taken in by a grandmother but grandma decided she couldn’t handle going through the child-raising thing again and palmed her off on the foster-care system, where at least one of her foster dads raped her. She frequently tells Melanie that some people have it all and others have nothing, and though Melanie ignores this we know it’s a warning that Phoebe is planning to move in and take over Melanie’s life: her job, her husband, her daughter, her home. Through the whole movie we’re kept in suspense as to What Makes Phoebe Run: she gets cruised by one of the agency’s biggest clients, car dealer Roger (Eric Roberts, who seems to be reduced to playing these seedy old letches on Lifetime films), and they trade dirty pictures of each other’s private parts online and finally meet — only Phoebe strangles him to death, apparently because he resembled the foster father who molested her. She also kills a couple of other people who catch on to her secret, including Jason (Jared Scott), a teenager with a skill for computer hacking who caught on to Phoebe’s real name — Lisa Nolan — and history: she was in a halfway house for two months after having been released from a women’s prison on an assault charge; and Kellyanne (Dominique Swain, a talented actress who deserves better — and longer — parts than this), who was her Lesbian lover in prison, followed her to the halfway house and agreed to serve as a fake “reference” for her so she could get the job with Melanie.
Phoebe also steals a list of potential contacts for new accounts from one of her co-workers and justifies it in an almost Trumpian manner that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you need to do what you have to do to get ahead — and she’s so good she even fools Samantha, who wonders if she should fire Melanie and give Phoebe her job. (It’s ultra-rare for a Vivica A. Fox character to be taken in by the villainess.) Then Carol Graham (ya remember Carol Graham?) returns from her long-term vacation and we find out what this was really all about: for much of the movie I was thinking the Lifetime cliché they were going to pull was that Alex had had an affair — or at least a one-night stand — with Phoebe and Phoebe had formed an obsession about it, but the ultimate resolution is a bit more creative than that. Remember that Phoebe’s mom died when she was three and her dad died when she was six? Well, it seems that in the intervening period after her mom died, her dad remarried — only after dad died his new wife decided she wanted no part of the burden of raising a child as a single mother when she had no biological connection with her at all. So she palmed little Lisa on her dad’s mom, who then threw her onto the untender mercies of the foster-care system — and the woman who did that to Lisa was Carol Graham, Melanie Anderson’s mother. So Lisa, now Phoebe, blames Melanie and her mom for cheating her out of the life she deserved. The Wrong Mommy is an O.K. Lifetime movie redeemed by Ashlynn Yennie’s performance as Phoebe; she manages the barely motivated shifts in the character’s character on a dime and etches a vivid portrait of a woman torn apart by a rough life filled with rejection that has left her literally homicidally crazy. Despite her tongue-twisting mouthful of a name, this is a woman that deserves major stardom!
Last Sunday night, February 23, I watched a couple of Lifetime movies that were part of an all-weekend marathon of “Wrong … ” movies featuring Vivica A. Fox, a buxom, middle-aged African-American actress who usually plays the Black authority figure who helps the white characters sort out their problems. The two I watched last night, The Wrong Mommy (2019) and The Wrong Tutor (2018), were both Hybrid LLC productions, with Fox credited as one of the “executive producers” as well as an actor, and both were directed by David DeCoteau, though they had different writing teams. The Wrong Mommy was credited to Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Robert Dean Klein (the first two for “story” and Klein for “script”) while The Wrong Tutor was written, apparently solo, by Adam Rocks-Off — oops, I mean Rockoff. Both adhered quite tightly to the Lifetime formula, though with some intriguing variations. The Wrong Mommy — not to be confused with another Lifetlme movie from 2017, The Wrong Mother, produced by a different team for a different company (Cartel Entertainment) — deals with the Anderson family: dad Alex (the genuinely hot Jason Shane-Scott — for once the innocent husband in a Lifetime movie is played by someone genuinely sexy instead of the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired blah type); mom Melanie (Jessica Morris); and daughter Tina (Jillian Spitz). Melanie’s mother, Carol Graham (Dee Wallace, the mother of the central human family in E.T.), also lives with them but leaves on an extended trip at the beginning of the show and doesn’t return until the end. Melanie is the family breadwinner; she’s got a promotion at the ad agency she works for, owned by Samantha (Vivica A. Fox, in flattering pantsuits and long, flowing hair instead of the “sensible” dresses and butch cuts she usually wears as the African-American authority figure). Alex also has some sort of job, but it’s less well paid and the writing committee never bothers to tell us what it is.
One of the perks of Melanie’s new job is she gets to hire her own assistant, and though she has her eye (so to speak) on a male candidate, ultimately Phoebe Sutton (Ashlynn Yennie) gets the job. Needless to say, given that she’s a character in a Lifetime movie with the word “Wrong” in the title, she’s Up To No Good from the get-go. She seems nice enough but she has a chip on her shoulder that comes, we find out later, from having been an orphan: her mother died of cancer when she was three and her father died when she was six. She was briefly taken in by a grandmother but grandma decided she couldn’t handle going through the child-raising thing again and palmed her off on the foster-care system, where at least one of her foster dads raped her. She frequently tells Melanie that some people have it all and others have nothing, and though Melanie ignores this we know it’s a warning that Phoebe is planning to move in and take over Melanie’s life: her job, her husband, her daughter, her home. Through the whole movie we’re kept in suspense as to What Makes Phoebe Run: she gets cruised by one of the agency’s biggest clients, car dealer Roger (Eric Roberts, who seems to be reduced to playing these seedy old letches on Lifetime films), and they trade dirty pictures of each other’s private parts online and finally meet — only Phoebe strangles him to death, apparently because he resembled the foster father who molested her. She also kills a couple of other people who catch on to her secret, including Jason (Jared Scott), a teenager with a skill for computer hacking who caught on to Phoebe’s real name — Lisa Nolan — and history: she was in a halfway house for two months after having been released from a women’s prison on an assault charge; and Kellyanne (Dominique Swain, a talented actress who deserves better — and longer — parts than this), who was her Lesbian lover in prison, followed her to the halfway house and agreed to serve as a fake “reference” for her so she could get the job with Melanie.
Phoebe also steals a list of potential contacts for new accounts from one of her co-workers and justifies it in an almost Trumpian manner that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you need to do what you have to do to get ahead — and she’s so good she even fools Samantha, who wonders if she should fire Melanie and give Phoebe her job. (It’s ultra-rare for a Vivica A. Fox character to be taken in by the villainess.) Then Carol Graham (ya remember Carol Graham?) returns from her long-term vacation and we find out what this was really all about: for much of the movie I was thinking the Lifetime cliché they were going to pull was that Alex had had an affair — or at least a one-night stand — with Phoebe and Phoebe had formed an obsession about it, but the ultimate resolution is a bit more creative than that. Remember that Phoebe’s mom died when she was three and her dad died when she was six? Well, it seems that in the intervening period after her mom died, her dad remarried — only after dad died his new wife decided she wanted no part of the burden of raising a child as a single mother when she had no biological connection with her at all. So she palmed little Lisa on her dad’s mom, who then threw her onto the untender mercies of the foster-care system — and the woman who did that to Lisa was Carol Graham, Melanie Anderson’s mother. So Lisa, now Phoebe, blames Melanie and her mom for cheating her out of the life she deserved. The Wrong Mommy is an O.K. Lifetime movie redeemed by Ashlynn Yennie’s performance as Phoebe; she manages the barely motivated shifts in the character’s character on a dime and etches a vivid portrait of a woman torn apart by a rough life filled with rejection that has left her literally homicidally crazy. Despite her tongue-twisting mouthful of a name, this is a woman that deserves major stardom!
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