by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie turned out to be an unusually
good one even though it traces its roots not only to other Lifetime productions
but even farther back, to all those 1930’s movies in which a nice, innocent
young man gets caught up in a crime ring, has a crisis of conscience, then ends
up risking both criminal prosecution by the authorities and murder by the
gangsters in his attempts to get out and regain his integrity. The movie,
produced by Incendo Media and filmed in Montreal — a lot of Lifetime movies are
shot in Canada but not that many have this many French names in the crew (the
director was Jean-François Rivard, the cinematographer Serge Desrosiers, the
costume designer Anie Fisette, and the executive producer Jean Bureau — “and
his business partner, Pierre Armoire,” I joked) — was based on a script by a
writer with the non-French name James Phillips. It was called Secrets of the
Sisterhood — though the first words of the
title were added later and apparently it was just filmed as The
Sisterhood — and, this being Lifetime, the
innocent person sucked into a crime ring was a woman, Ashley Shields (Claire
Coffee, a name which also seems to be designed to inspire bad jokes). As the
film opens she’s going through a bitter divorce from her husband Rick
(Christine Jadah), her workaholic schedule has alienated her daughter Grace
(Taylor Thorne) from her, and she’s also having to deal at work (she’s an
accountant) with a creepy boss named Frank (Guido Cocomello), who denies her a
promotion she deserved but hints that the next one might be hers if … well,
let’s just say he’s obviously an honors graduate of the Harvey Weinstein School
of Management. As if that weren’t enough tsuris in her life, Ashley suddenly gets a visit from her
scapegrace sister Jasmine (Siobhan Murphy), who tells her she’s been clean and
sober for nine months now and she owes it all to this great new women’s
empowerment group she’s joined called “The Sisterhood,” led by self-help author
Desiree Holt (Lisa Berry), a tall, striking, charismatic Black woman who’s highlighted
the top of her hair blonde. She leads the meetings of “The Sisterhood” in a
ceremonial robe and a number of the group’s sessions are held with her acolytes
dressed in long white costumes that look like something from The
Handmaid’s Tale.
Given Lifetime’s usual
iconography, one doesn’t expect an African-American character — particularly an
African-American woman — to be the villain (usually Black women in Lifetime
movies are the heroine’s best friends who stumble onto the villains’ plots but
get killed before they can expose them), but Lisa Berry rises to the challenge
and turns in a vivid but controlled performance expressing total
self-righteousness and unscrupulousness under a thin veneer of projecting
herself as a social servant. Her acting dominates the film, but then in this
sort of story the villain is usually more interesting than the good guys,
anyway. Claire Coffee makes a good innocent — or maybe not-so-innocent —
victim, eager to launder money for the Sisterhood but also warning Desiree that
she shouldn’t get too greedy and expect to channel too much income from the
Sisterhood to the other businesses she owns. (One wonders why Desiree doesn’t
go the route L. Ron Hubbard took with Scientology: incorporate The Sisterhood
as a religion.) As the movie progresses, Claire learns that the Sisterhood’s
activities include extortion, blackmail (that creepy boss of Claire’s finally
gives her a raise after the Sisterhood discovers something on him — we’re never
told what but we assume it was something sexual — and at one point he gives
Claire a manila envelope full of cash and tells her to pass it on to them),
terrorist beatings of former members and even murder. Claire gets appointed the
Sisterhood’s treasurer after the previous one, Pamela Redman (Eleanor Noble),
threatened to leak information about the group’s crimes to the media, and later
she tries to reach out to Pamela. Knowing how far the group’s reach extends —
at one point Claire is stopped by Myra (Caitlin Sponheimer), a cop she met in
the Sisterhood without realizing Myra was a cop, just to hammer home the point that if she reports them to the
authorities it will be futile because they have so many members in law
enforcement word will filter back to Desiree and she will extract retribution —
Pamela offers to meet Claire but puts her through an elaborate set of
instructions, regularly calling her on a “burner” cell phone to tell her where
to meet next, to no avail as Pamela is killed in her home (in her bathtub, with
her wrists slashed to make it look like she killed herself).
Later Claire wires
herself to record Desiree ordering her to commit money laundering and
extortion, but the supposed “journalist” she gives the recording to is yet
another Sisterhood member, and this leads to a climax in which Desiree not only
decides that Claire has to be killed to protect the group’s secrets, but her
sister Jasmine (ya remember Jasmine?)
will have to do the dirty deed herself to prove her own loyalty and “make her
bones.” When Jasmine refuses, Desiree has two of the other Sisters pull a
plastic bag over her head, only she’s rescued in the nick of time thanks to
Claire’s belated realization that she knows at least one police officer who isn’t part of the Sisterhood:
Julie (Michelle Ohm), the policewoman her husband Rick (ya remember Rick?) left her for. The finish shows Desiree and her key
henchwomen busted, Jasmine facing a prison term, Claire released on probation
but barred from ever working as an accountant again, and her homey announcement
that from now on she’s just going to concentrate on being “a mom.” Secrets
of the Sisterhood is actually a
better-than-average Lifetime film, with more multidimensional characterizations
than we’re used to (especially from a Lifetime script not written by Christine Conradt), genuine crises of
conscience powering the plot, and above all a wonderfully chilling performance
by Lisa Berry as a character whose motives — particularly her descent from
honest self-help leader to head of a criminal enterprise — are kept powerfully ambiguous
in James Phillips’ script. Well directed by Rivard, who throws all the neo-noir tricks into a film another Lifetime director might
have shot on autopilot, Secrets of the Sisterhood is the sort of diamond in the rough we veteran
Lifetime watchers hope for and all too rarely get!
Monday, July 8, 2019
The Greatest Showman (20th-Century Fox, Chernin Entertainment, TSG Entertainment, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched a semi-private screening of The Greatest Showman, a 2017 musical biopic of the legendary 19th century show-business entrepreneur Phineas T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) which, ironically, hit the screens the same year that the real-life Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey Circus went out of business, plagued by ill attendance, continuing controversies over their treatment of animals, and the rise of Cirque du Soleil and its imitators, which dispensed with animals and focused on human gymnastics and acrobatics. Doing P. T. Barnum’s life as a musical wasn’t a new idea: there’d been at least two stage versions before, including one that ran briefly on Broadway in 1931 called Ballyhoo and starred the actor who might have been made to play Barnum, W. C. Fields. (It’s unfortunate that Ballyhoo wasn’t filmed during Fields’ odd late-in-life period of movie stardom from 1932 to 1941 — though I’ve long maintained in these pages that the real tragedy of Fields’ life is that no one thought of casting him in a film as Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, a character from 300 years before Fields’ life that eerily anticipated his comic persona.) The next attempt was a 1982 Broadway musical called Barnum, featuring two cast members, Marianne Tatum and Leonard Crofoot, who are “background actors” (i.e., extras) in The Greatest Showman. Not surprisingly, the film’s script by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon (the latter might have made a better director for the project than the actual one, Michael Gracey, yet another music-video veteran making his first full-length feature) considerably whitewashed Barnum, depicting him as a young, penniless man-on-the-make who even when he’s a boy (and played by Ellis Rubin) had a seemingly hopeless crush on a rich girl, Charity (Skylar Dunn as a kid, Michelle Williams grown-up), whose parents can’t stand the idea of her dating or, worse yet, marrying so far “down.” Nonetheless, Charity runs off with Barnum, believing in his promises that somehow he’ll find a way to make them a fortune. One jump-cut later they have two kids, daughters Caroline (Austyn Johnson) and Helen (Cameron Seely), and Barnum is making ends meet — barely — when the shipping company he’s been working for as an accountant goes under after all 12 of its vessels are sunk by a typhoon in the South China Sea. Barnum looks for a new venture and decides to open a wax museum — he’s heard they’re “all the rage in Europe” — called P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. He hoodwinks a banker into giving him a loan for startup costs by offering as collateral the deed to those 12 ships that are currently resting at the bottom of the South China Sea, and the museum duly opens — and flops big-time.
Desperate, Barnum grabs hold of a suggestion made by one of his daughters that “you have too many dead things in your museum” and starts exhibiting freaks, including the little person Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey, who’s genuinely little — 4’ 2” — but was made even littler in the film with the old trick José Ferrer used in the 1952 Moulin Rouge, going about on his knees with shoes fastened to them and the lower half of his legs kept off camera), bearded lady Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle, who in real life isn’t bearded but is incredibly huge and has a rich, stunning voice, the best of anyone in the cast — a biopic of Kate Smith, anyone? Or, as I suggested in my moviemagg post on the 2018 Academy Awards, “Mama” Cass Elliott?), Siamese twins Chang (Yusaku Komori) and Eng (Danial Son) — since they were actually from Siam (modern-day Thailand), Barnum coined the term “Siamese Twins” for conjoined twins, and it stuck — as well as a Black aerialist and other circus performers. The show soon outgrows the American Museum and, struck by the insulting review by drama critic James Gordon Bennett (Paul Sparks) that his shows resemble a circus, he builds a new building and calls it “P. T. Barnum’s Circus.” The movie Barnum is driven by a desire to show up his in-laws and one-up them, including buying a huge house in the same neighborhood to rub it in their faces that he now has just as much money as they do. With a business partner he’s picked up, well-to-do playwright Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron, in one of the few performances he’s given in which he’s been required to do more than just stand around and look cute), Barnum lands the world’s most famous opera singer, Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) and presents her on a concert tour of the U.S., where she’s never performed before — only Lind attempts to seduce Barnum and when he, out of loyalty to his wife, turns her down, she angrily quits the tour after staging a public scene to make it look like she’s having an affair with him anyway.
Meanwhile, back in New York, an angry proletarian mob stages a riot outside the circus theatre and one of them trips over a lantern and burns the place down. Barnum is seemingly ruined, but he’s bailed out by Carlyle, who’s been saving his 10 percent cut of Barnum’s enterprise and uses it to launch a new venture, a circus tent with some of the same performers, only now as a 50-50 partner. The Greatest Showman is a frustrating movie, with some genuinely moving moments and a real sense of pathos — like everyone who’s made a movie about circus freaks (including director Tod Browning and writer Tod Robbins in MGM’s truly weird 1932 Freaks) the filmmakers are trying to steer the thin line between sympathy for the freaks and exploitation of them (though none of the cast members of The Greatest Showman were that “freaky” — the tattooed man in Barnum’s show is played by an actor who has no tattoos at all and wore a body suit to simulate them), and though they don’t always succeed the freaks’ split attitudes towards Barnum, greatful to him for giving them a chance to make a decent living while at the same time suspicious that he regards them just as commodities and doesn’t give a damn about them as people, are vividly dramatized and become a major issue in the plot. The big scene occurs when Barnum presents Jenny Lind’s debut concert in New York and hosts a post-concert reception in which he lords it over all the Manhattan “swells” that he, lower-class impresario of circus freaks, has brought the world’s greatest singer to the U.S. so they can hear her — and the freaks, resentful that Barnum hasn’t invited them to his big reception, crash it and sing the show’s most powerful song, “This Is Me.” (I’d love to hear this adopted as a Queer pride anthem; it’s a much better song than “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles and more “anthemic” than Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”)
“This Is Me” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song but lost to an anodyne ditty from a Disney-Pixar movie, “Remember Me” (though it also had competition from Mary J. Blige’s “Mighty River” from the film Mudbound), and though it’s a great song it also highlights the biggest problem with The Greatest Showman: all its songs sound too much alike. They were all written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also did the songs for La La Land (another modern-day musical with one standout song, “Audition,” in an otherwise serviceable but not great score), and all of them are big, expansive power ballads with lyrics about reaching for your dreams and never letting adversity stand in your way. Individually they might be powerful and emotional, but collectively you start to groan after a while, “Oh, no, not another big ‘inspirational’ song.” The “trivia” section on imdb.com’s page on The Greatest Showman quotes Pasek as saying the decision to use modern-style music instead of attempting to evoke the music actually popular in the mid-19th century was made “to express not just the characters’ feelings, but also how ahead of his time P.T. Barnum was. He wasn’t bound by the world in which he lived; he wanted to create one.” Translation: “We wanted songs that sounded like modern pop so people would buy the soundtrack CD.” The songs are actually more or less appropriate for the dramatic situations except when Jenny Lind makes her long-awaited New York debut and, instead of singing an operatic aria of the kind the real Lind would have sung, she belts out yet another big Pasek-Paul power ballad, “Never Enough,” sung by Loren Allred as Rebecca Ferguson’s voice double. The song is not only wrong dramatically, it loses the entire plot point — that Barnum, impresario for the common people, is going way out of his depth presenting an opera singer to an upper-class audience and he’s going to ruin himself in the process. (This is also a key plot point in classic-era Fox musicals like Dante’s Inferno, King of Burlesque and Hello, Frisco, Hello, in which a lower-class person rises to fame and fortune running popular theatres and then loses it all going after the upper-class trade.)
The Greatest Showman is that most frustrating sort of movie, a good film that could have been great — though one of the biggest challenges was casting the title role: P. T. Barnum was such a larger-than-life figure only a larger-than-life actor could really play him (about the only actor I can think of since W. C. Fields who would have worked in the part would have been Robin Williams in his prime), and as wonderful as it is to see Hugh Jackman in a part where he doesn’t have claws, and as well as he sings and dances, no one is ever going to hail him as one of the comic geniuses of our time. (I still think Jackman gave his greatest performance on film in a movie almost no one saw: Baz Luhrmann’s 2009 Australia.) The other cast members are personable, though Michelle Williams has little to do as the typical long-suffering wife and the actors playing freaks (aside from Keala Settle and Sam Humphrey, who do get chances to create indelible characters) pretty much let their makeup and costuming do their acting for them. I liked The Greatest Showman but I wanted to like it better than I did; in an era in which the President of the United States is a Barnumesque con artist, one might expect a film about Barnum to capture more of why so many of the American people fell for his hype and what they got out of his shows.
Two nights ago I watched a semi-private screening of The Greatest Showman, a 2017 musical biopic of the legendary 19th century show-business entrepreneur Phineas T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) which, ironically, hit the screens the same year that the real-life Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey Circus went out of business, plagued by ill attendance, continuing controversies over their treatment of animals, and the rise of Cirque du Soleil and its imitators, which dispensed with animals and focused on human gymnastics and acrobatics. Doing P. T. Barnum’s life as a musical wasn’t a new idea: there’d been at least two stage versions before, including one that ran briefly on Broadway in 1931 called Ballyhoo and starred the actor who might have been made to play Barnum, W. C. Fields. (It’s unfortunate that Ballyhoo wasn’t filmed during Fields’ odd late-in-life period of movie stardom from 1932 to 1941 — though I’ve long maintained in these pages that the real tragedy of Fields’ life is that no one thought of casting him in a film as Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, a character from 300 years before Fields’ life that eerily anticipated his comic persona.) The next attempt was a 1982 Broadway musical called Barnum, featuring two cast members, Marianne Tatum and Leonard Crofoot, who are “background actors” (i.e., extras) in The Greatest Showman. Not surprisingly, the film’s script by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon (the latter might have made a better director for the project than the actual one, Michael Gracey, yet another music-video veteran making his first full-length feature) considerably whitewashed Barnum, depicting him as a young, penniless man-on-the-make who even when he’s a boy (and played by Ellis Rubin) had a seemingly hopeless crush on a rich girl, Charity (Skylar Dunn as a kid, Michelle Williams grown-up), whose parents can’t stand the idea of her dating or, worse yet, marrying so far “down.” Nonetheless, Charity runs off with Barnum, believing in his promises that somehow he’ll find a way to make them a fortune. One jump-cut later they have two kids, daughters Caroline (Austyn Johnson) and Helen (Cameron Seely), and Barnum is making ends meet — barely — when the shipping company he’s been working for as an accountant goes under after all 12 of its vessels are sunk by a typhoon in the South China Sea. Barnum looks for a new venture and decides to open a wax museum — he’s heard they’re “all the rage in Europe” — called P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. He hoodwinks a banker into giving him a loan for startup costs by offering as collateral the deed to those 12 ships that are currently resting at the bottom of the South China Sea, and the museum duly opens — and flops big-time.
Desperate, Barnum grabs hold of a suggestion made by one of his daughters that “you have too many dead things in your museum” and starts exhibiting freaks, including the little person Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey, who’s genuinely little — 4’ 2” — but was made even littler in the film with the old trick José Ferrer used in the 1952 Moulin Rouge, going about on his knees with shoes fastened to them and the lower half of his legs kept off camera), bearded lady Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle, who in real life isn’t bearded but is incredibly huge and has a rich, stunning voice, the best of anyone in the cast — a biopic of Kate Smith, anyone? Or, as I suggested in my moviemagg post on the 2018 Academy Awards, “Mama” Cass Elliott?), Siamese twins Chang (Yusaku Komori) and Eng (Danial Son) — since they were actually from Siam (modern-day Thailand), Barnum coined the term “Siamese Twins” for conjoined twins, and it stuck — as well as a Black aerialist and other circus performers. The show soon outgrows the American Museum and, struck by the insulting review by drama critic James Gordon Bennett (Paul Sparks) that his shows resemble a circus, he builds a new building and calls it “P. T. Barnum’s Circus.” The movie Barnum is driven by a desire to show up his in-laws and one-up them, including buying a huge house in the same neighborhood to rub it in their faces that he now has just as much money as they do. With a business partner he’s picked up, well-to-do playwright Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron, in one of the few performances he’s given in which he’s been required to do more than just stand around and look cute), Barnum lands the world’s most famous opera singer, Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) and presents her on a concert tour of the U.S., where she’s never performed before — only Lind attempts to seduce Barnum and when he, out of loyalty to his wife, turns her down, she angrily quits the tour after staging a public scene to make it look like she’s having an affair with him anyway.
Meanwhile, back in New York, an angry proletarian mob stages a riot outside the circus theatre and one of them trips over a lantern and burns the place down. Barnum is seemingly ruined, but he’s bailed out by Carlyle, who’s been saving his 10 percent cut of Barnum’s enterprise and uses it to launch a new venture, a circus tent with some of the same performers, only now as a 50-50 partner. The Greatest Showman is a frustrating movie, with some genuinely moving moments and a real sense of pathos — like everyone who’s made a movie about circus freaks (including director Tod Browning and writer Tod Robbins in MGM’s truly weird 1932 Freaks) the filmmakers are trying to steer the thin line between sympathy for the freaks and exploitation of them (though none of the cast members of The Greatest Showman were that “freaky” — the tattooed man in Barnum’s show is played by an actor who has no tattoos at all and wore a body suit to simulate them), and though they don’t always succeed the freaks’ split attitudes towards Barnum, greatful to him for giving them a chance to make a decent living while at the same time suspicious that he regards them just as commodities and doesn’t give a damn about them as people, are vividly dramatized and become a major issue in the plot. The big scene occurs when Barnum presents Jenny Lind’s debut concert in New York and hosts a post-concert reception in which he lords it over all the Manhattan “swells” that he, lower-class impresario of circus freaks, has brought the world’s greatest singer to the U.S. so they can hear her — and the freaks, resentful that Barnum hasn’t invited them to his big reception, crash it and sing the show’s most powerful song, “This Is Me.” (I’d love to hear this adopted as a Queer pride anthem; it’s a much better song than “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles and more “anthemic” than Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”)
“This Is Me” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song but lost to an anodyne ditty from a Disney-Pixar movie, “Remember Me” (though it also had competition from Mary J. Blige’s “Mighty River” from the film Mudbound), and though it’s a great song it also highlights the biggest problem with The Greatest Showman: all its songs sound too much alike. They were all written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also did the songs for La La Land (another modern-day musical with one standout song, “Audition,” in an otherwise serviceable but not great score), and all of them are big, expansive power ballads with lyrics about reaching for your dreams and never letting adversity stand in your way. Individually they might be powerful and emotional, but collectively you start to groan after a while, “Oh, no, not another big ‘inspirational’ song.” The “trivia” section on imdb.com’s page on The Greatest Showman quotes Pasek as saying the decision to use modern-style music instead of attempting to evoke the music actually popular in the mid-19th century was made “to express not just the characters’ feelings, but also how ahead of his time P.T. Barnum was. He wasn’t bound by the world in which he lived; he wanted to create one.” Translation: “We wanted songs that sounded like modern pop so people would buy the soundtrack CD.” The songs are actually more or less appropriate for the dramatic situations except when Jenny Lind makes her long-awaited New York debut and, instead of singing an operatic aria of the kind the real Lind would have sung, she belts out yet another big Pasek-Paul power ballad, “Never Enough,” sung by Loren Allred as Rebecca Ferguson’s voice double. The song is not only wrong dramatically, it loses the entire plot point — that Barnum, impresario for the common people, is going way out of his depth presenting an opera singer to an upper-class audience and he’s going to ruin himself in the process. (This is also a key plot point in classic-era Fox musicals like Dante’s Inferno, King of Burlesque and Hello, Frisco, Hello, in which a lower-class person rises to fame and fortune running popular theatres and then loses it all going after the upper-class trade.)
The Greatest Showman is that most frustrating sort of movie, a good film that could have been great — though one of the biggest challenges was casting the title role: P. T. Barnum was such a larger-than-life figure only a larger-than-life actor could really play him (about the only actor I can think of since W. C. Fields who would have worked in the part would have been Robin Williams in his prime), and as wonderful as it is to see Hugh Jackman in a part where he doesn’t have claws, and as well as he sings and dances, no one is ever going to hail him as one of the comic geniuses of our time. (I still think Jackman gave his greatest performance on film in a movie almost no one saw: Baz Luhrmann’s 2009 Australia.) The other cast members are personable, though Michelle Williams has little to do as the typical long-suffering wife and the actors playing freaks (aside from Keala Settle and Sam Humphrey, who do get chances to create indelible characters) pretty much let their makeup and costuming do their acting for them. I liked The Greatest Showman but I wanted to like it better than I did; in an era in which the President of the United States is a Barnumesque con artist, one might expect a film about Barnum to capture more of why so many of the American people fell for his hype and what they got out of his shows.
39th Annual “A Capitol Fourth” (PBS-TV, July 4, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Thursday I watched back-to-back broadcasts of TV concerts for the Fourth of July. One was the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC and the next was A Capitol Fourth on PBS. To get one thing out of the way first, A Capitol Fourth didn’t contain any of the bizarre military spectacle President Trump gave himself earlier in the day, nor did it show any of his speech. (Previous Presidents have steered clear of big public celebrations of the Fourth of July, though it’s been customary for them to make silent appearances at the Memorial Day commemorations, also broadcast on PBS.) While NBC’s talent list focused mostly on veteran country singers and relatively young current pop artists, PBS’s was skewed both older and younger, mixing veteran performers like the O’Jays (they came out dressed cleverly in colored suits — one red, one white, one blue — and though I’m not sure if they were all the original O’Jays they certainly looked old enough to be them) with younger artists, many of them contestants on American Idol, America’s Got Talent or The Voice. The show was hosted by actor John Stamos, whose 15 minutes expired about 20 years ago, who did a long and unfunny running gag about how he was trying to get to sing with the Muppets — PBS stalwarts whose voice actors croaked out “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” the Sesame Street theme, “This Land Is Your Land” (the “safe” verses only, of course!), “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Happy Birthday” — the last a tribute to America’s putative birthday on the Fourth of July. The musical backing was provided as usual by the National Symphony Orchestra with Jack Everly conducting (he’s handled the “pops” tasks for the National Symphony since the founder of these concerts, Erich Kunzel, died) and it began with someone named Maelin Jarman (at least that’s the best I can make out from my hastily scribbled notes on the show) singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and doing quite well with this troublesome song that has felled many a major musical talent called on to sing it at a ballgame or such.
The O’Jays were up next and they were followed by Laine Hardy, a young white rocker who did a credible cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Then came a 12-year-old girl named Angelica Hale who delivered by far the best and most searing performance all night, a song called “Get On Your Feet.” Though it was modern dance-pop, Hale herself reminded me of the young Judy Garland; like Judy, she’s a 12-year-old girl who sings with all the power, passion, emotion and depth of an adult woman — and all the volume of one as well: I wish she has just as illustrious a public career as Judy and a far happier private life! That would have been a hard act for anyone to follow, but fortunately the next performer was gospel star Yolanda Adams, called on to do a tribute to the late Aretha Franklin (who herself had graced the Capitol Fourth stage more than once). Instead of doing a medley of snippets of various Aretha hits, Adams picked out one song — Aretha’s electrifying rewrite/cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” — and did it to the nines. I’ve faulted her before for overdoing the “soul” devices, but this time around she belted the song while at the same time treating it with, dare I say it, respect. Then came an O.K. country singer named Lee Brice doing an O.K. country song called “American Nights,” and after that a group of disabled veterans (including one in a wheelchair and one visibly using an artificial leg) called the MusiCorps Wounded Warriors, which seems to be a quasi-official project of the Veterans’ Administration. They did a country song I’ve heard before but can’t place the title of — it’s the one about fried chicken on a Friday night that segues into a tribute to our veterans and the sacrifices they’ve made to preserve our freedom — and, aside from their obvious appeal to the heartstrings, they’re also quite good on their own musical merits and I hope to hear more from them.
Alas, they were followed by that dreary and unfunny segment about John Stamos and his continually frustrated desire to sing with the Sesame Street Muppets, and then the National Symphony Orchestra played a medley of appropriately “spacey” themes (including the opening of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra) for a montage of clips paying tribute to the 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. (The fact that no one has attempted a personned lunar flight since the last Apollo mission in 1972 is one of the most bizarre chapters in human history — it’s as if Queen Isabella had received Christopher Columbus at court after his first voyage and said, “Thanks, but we’re not ever going to do that again.”) Then the concert reached another high point with Keala Settle from the cast of the 2017 film The Greatest Showman belting out her big song from the film, “This Is Me” — and while she wasn’t bearded on the Capitol Fourth program she is clearly a “woman of size,” and the part of me that loves Adele and Susan Boyle for appearing live on stage with their natural body shapes also makes me appreciate Settle for the strength of her character as well as the awesome strength of her voice. The next performer was 15-year-old pop violinist Lindsay Stirling, and though I liked her, quite frankly I’d rather hear her unplug her violin and take on the classics. Then came one of the featured tributes of the night — both the real Carole King and Vanessa Carlton, the current actor playing her in the bio-musical Beautiful on Broadway, doing a medley of some of those great songs King wrote with her first husband, Gerry Goffin: “On Broadway,” “The Loco-Motion” and “One Fine Day.” Then came the fireworks — literally and figuratively — with the National Symphony Orchestra playing the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in a typically over-the-top version with cannon fire, bells and a chorus singing the words of the national anthem of Tsarist Russia where Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score.
My husband Charles had come home well before this segment, and he had a lot of fun with the idea that a celebration of American independence in the Trump era would feature the Russian national anthem — along with the use of the French one, “La Marseillaise,” as the song of the bad guys. He joked about wanting to grab the baton à la Paul Henried in Casablanca and get the orchestra to play “La Marseillaise” as a symbol of democracy’s superiority to dictatorship, and I joked that when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin get together and the Russian anthem is played, Trump probably looks doe-eyed at Putin and says, “Hey, Vlad! They’re playing our song!” Broadway star Laura Osnes and the U.S. Army Band (called “Pershing’s Own” to distinguish it from the U.S. Marine Band, which is “The President’s Own”) joined the orchestra for a patriotic medley of “It’s a Great Country” and “I Like to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune” (quite frankly, I’d have liked to hear “Yankee Doodle” itself!) and “76 Trombones” — which Charles once again irreverently commented was fully appropriate for the program, since it’s from a musical about a con man and a con man is currently running the country. The U.S. Army Band played “The Caisson Song” — as an instrumental, which at least kept me from obsessing about the removal of caissons from the current lyrics — and Vanessa Williams emerged to sing a nice version of “America, the Beautiful” before the concert wrapped up with John Philip Sousa’s two greatest hits, “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Washington Post March” — the last cut off early and most of it heard over the credits. The fireworks display wasn’t as big or extravagant as the preceding one on NBC, but precisely for that reason it made better television, and as many weirdly mixed feelings as I have about my country — loving the stated ideals on which it was founded and ruing our all too frequent failures to live up to them — it was still fun to join the national celebration, even vicariously on TV.
Last Thursday I watched back-to-back broadcasts of TV concerts for the Fourth of July. One was the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC and the next was A Capitol Fourth on PBS. To get one thing out of the way first, A Capitol Fourth didn’t contain any of the bizarre military spectacle President Trump gave himself earlier in the day, nor did it show any of his speech. (Previous Presidents have steered clear of big public celebrations of the Fourth of July, though it’s been customary for them to make silent appearances at the Memorial Day commemorations, also broadcast on PBS.) While NBC’s talent list focused mostly on veteran country singers and relatively young current pop artists, PBS’s was skewed both older and younger, mixing veteran performers like the O’Jays (they came out dressed cleverly in colored suits — one red, one white, one blue — and though I’m not sure if they were all the original O’Jays they certainly looked old enough to be them) with younger artists, many of them contestants on American Idol, America’s Got Talent or The Voice. The show was hosted by actor John Stamos, whose 15 minutes expired about 20 years ago, who did a long and unfunny running gag about how he was trying to get to sing with the Muppets — PBS stalwarts whose voice actors croaked out “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” the Sesame Street theme, “This Land Is Your Land” (the “safe” verses only, of course!), “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Happy Birthday” — the last a tribute to America’s putative birthday on the Fourth of July. The musical backing was provided as usual by the National Symphony Orchestra with Jack Everly conducting (he’s handled the “pops” tasks for the National Symphony since the founder of these concerts, Erich Kunzel, died) and it began with someone named Maelin Jarman (at least that’s the best I can make out from my hastily scribbled notes on the show) singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and doing quite well with this troublesome song that has felled many a major musical talent called on to sing it at a ballgame or such.
The O’Jays were up next and they were followed by Laine Hardy, a young white rocker who did a credible cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Then came a 12-year-old girl named Angelica Hale who delivered by far the best and most searing performance all night, a song called “Get On Your Feet.” Though it was modern dance-pop, Hale herself reminded me of the young Judy Garland; like Judy, she’s a 12-year-old girl who sings with all the power, passion, emotion and depth of an adult woman — and all the volume of one as well: I wish she has just as illustrious a public career as Judy and a far happier private life! That would have been a hard act for anyone to follow, but fortunately the next performer was gospel star Yolanda Adams, called on to do a tribute to the late Aretha Franklin (who herself had graced the Capitol Fourth stage more than once). Instead of doing a medley of snippets of various Aretha hits, Adams picked out one song — Aretha’s electrifying rewrite/cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” — and did it to the nines. I’ve faulted her before for overdoing the “soul” devices, but this time around she belted the song while at the same time treating it with, dare I say it, respect. Then came an O.K. country singer named Lee Brice doing an O.K. country song called “American Nights,” and after that a group of disabled veterans (including one in a wheelchair and one visibly using an artificial leg) called the MusiCorps Wounded Warriors, which seems to be a quasi-official project of the Veterans’ Administration. They did a country song I’ve heard before but can’t place the title of — it’s the one about fried chicken on a Friday night that segues into a tribute to our veterans and the sacrifices they’ve made to preserve our freedom — and, aside from their obvious appeal to the heartstrings, they’re also quite good on their own musical merits and I hope to hear more from them.
Alas, they were followed by that dreary and unfunny segment about John Stamos and his continually frustrated desire to sing with the Sesame Street Muppets, and then the National Symphony Orchestra played a medley of appropriately “spacey” themes (including the opening of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra) for a montage of clips paying tribute to the 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. (The fact that no one has attempted a personned lunar flight since the last Apollo mission in 1972 is one of the most bizarre chapters in human history — it’s as if Queen Isabella had received Christopher Columbus at court after his first voyage and said, “Thanks, but we’re not ever going to do that again.”) Then the concert reached another high point with Keala Settle from the cast of the 2017 film The Greatest Showman belting out her big song from the film, “This Is Me” — and while she wasn’t bearded on the Capitol Fourth program she is clearly a “woman of size,” and the part of me that loves Adele and Susan Boyle for appearing live on stage with their natural body shapes also makes me appreciate Settle for the strength of her character as well as the awesome strength of her voice. The next performer was 15-year-old pop violinist Lindsay Stirling, and though I liked her, quite frankly I’d rather hear her unplug her violin and take on the classics. Then came one of the featured tributes of the night — both the real Carole King and Vanessa Carlton, the current actor playing her in the bio-musical Beautiful on Broadway, doing a medley of some of those great songs King wrote with her first husband, Gerry Goffin: “On Broadway,” “The Loco-Motion” and “One Fine Day.” Then came the fireworks — literally and figuratively — with the National Symphony Orchestra playing the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in a typically over-the-top version with cannon fire, bells and a chorus singing the words of the national anthem of Tsarist Russia where Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score.
My husband Charles had come home well before this segment, and he had a lot of fun with the idea that a celebration of American independence in the Trump era would feature the Russian national anthem — along with the use of the French one, “La Marseillaise,” as the song of the bad guys. He joked about wanting to grab the baton à la Paul Henried in Casablanca and get the orchestra to play “La Marseillaise” as a symbol of democracy’s superiority to dictatorship, and I joked that when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin get together and the Russian anthem is played, Trump probably looks doe-eyed at Putin and says, “Hey, Vlad! They’re playing our song!” Broadway star Laura Osnes and the U.S. Army Band (called “Pershing’s Own” to distinguish it from the U.S. Marine Band, which is “The President’s Own”) joined the orchestra for a patriotic medley of “It’s a Great Country” and “I Like to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune” (quite frankly, I’d have liked to hear “Yankee Doodle” itself!) and “76 Trombones” — which Charles once again irreverently commented was fully appropriate for the program, since it’s from a musical about a con man and a con man is currently running the country. The U.S. Army Band played “The Caisson Song” — as an instrumental, which at least kept me from obsessing about the removal of caissons from the current lyrics — and Vanessa Williams emerged to sing a nice version of “America, the Beautiful” before the concert wrapped up with John Philip Sousa’s two greatest hits, “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Washington Post March” — the last cut off early and most of it heard over the credits. The fireworks display wasn’t as big or extravagant as the preceding one on NBC, but precisely for that reason it made better television, and as many weirdly mixed feelings as I have about my country — loving the stated ideals on which it was founded and ruing our all too frequent failures to live up to them — it was still fun to join the national celebration, even vicariously on TV.
Saturday, July 6, 2019
Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular (NBC-TV, July 4, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On July 4 I watched a double-header of two TV shows featuring musical performers and fireworks displays, the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC and the 39th annual A Capitol Fourth on PBS. Typically, the NBC show featured younger performers and the PBS show, in line with the older demographic of public broadcasting’s audience, featured older ones — though the PBS telecast had its share of young talents who’ve won contest shows like American Idol, The Voice and America’s Got Talent. NBC’s show opened with its co-host, a young female R&B singer whose name I naturally assumed was “Sierra” but is actually “Ciara,” doing a song called “One Two-Step” (a title one would more readily expect from a country song!) that would have been more fun if it had been less overproduced, starting with a chorus of four big, strapping male dancers in black-and-white costumes. One wondered where Ciara was, especially since you could hear her voice well before she was actually visible, coming in through the center of her chorus line and dressed similarly. Then the show cut to a gig with Brad Paisley doing his appealing 10-year-old song “American Saturday Night,” and then another city in which Khalid (the heavy-set but still attractive young Black male singer who does neo-soul, not rap as one might assume from his name) did something called “Out of My Head.” As far as I was concerned, by far the standout talent of this show was Maren Morris, who did two songs, “The Middle” and “The Bones.” Neither was at the level of intensity of “My Church,” her star-making hit and one of the greatest pop-soul records ever made, but both were considerably stronger than most of the rather hapless material the other performers were plowing through.
Morris also earned points with me for the minimal physical production of her show: instead of crowding the stage with dancers and elaborate sets and props, she just stood there with her musicians and let her songs and her impassioned delivery of them make the point without all the bric-a-brac in the way. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, between them Michael Jackson and Madonna revolutionized what audiences expect from pop music shows in the 1980’s, but all too many artists have cluttered up their concerts with dancers and elaborate stage effects without the theatricality or the integrity that allowed Jackson and Madonna to put together big concert productions that were genuinely entertaining.) And would someone please cast Maren Morris in a biopic of Janis Joplin while she’s still young enough to play the part? She’s got both the looks and the vocal chops for it! The rest of the performers were appealing without being “special,” including another country star, Luke Bryan, doing a song I think was called “Sunrise, Sunshine, Sunset” (the songs were announced first, which was nice, but the announcements were barked out so quickly they were hard to make out sometimes); Derek Hough, who co-hosted the show with Ciara and did two songs (a really dull rap number called “Bad Man” and a better selection, sung instead of rapped, called “Say It Now”), Brad Paisley returning with a sappy love song to his wife called “My Miracle” (which made me wonder if he’d have to keep it in his set list if they divorce), Ciara returning with a medley of “Think About You” and “Level Up,” and Khalid taking out the musical part of the show with “Free Spirit” before the fireworks display kicked in.
The fireworks display was accompanied by an orchestra doing the usual patriotic treacle interspersed with musical tributes to classic Hollywood — Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox fanfare was played and so was the one from Warner Bros. — and the big themes from John Williams’ scores for Star Wars, E.T. and Superman. (I remember the last time Charles and I watched E.T. and how impressed I was by how dissonant and dark-sounding much of Williams’ score for the film is, and how good it is at portraying loneliness and the bitter sadness of both E.T. him/her/itself and the children E.T. befriends at their ultimate parting, but of course that’s not what got played at this concert!) The one musical highlight during the fireworks display was an unseen Jennifer Hudson singing a quite beautiful and haunting version of “Over the Rainbow” and restraining herself instead of overpowering this simple song with too many “soul” devices and ornaments the way Patti LaBelle did on her hit version in the 1980’s. Like Ray Charles in what is still my favorite non-Judy version, Hudson put a Black “spin” on the song but knew how far to take it and when to stop, and her performance was quite moving even though she was invisible to the cameras and therefore we didn’t get to see her current post-Weight Watchers physique. All in all, the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular was an O.K. show, with musical acts that appealed without shaking the rafters and sort of blended together into an exquisite dullness relieved only by Morris’s soul and passion and the quiet comfort-food aspects of the country songs.
On July 4 I watched a double-header of two TV shows featuring musical performers and fireworks displays, the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC and the 39th annual A Capitol Fourth on PBS. Typically, the NBC show featured younger performers and the PBS show, in line with the older demographic of public broadcasting’s audience, featured older ones — though the PBS telecast had its share of young talents who’ve won contest shows like American Idol, The Voice and America’s Got Talent. NBC’s show opened with its co-host, a young female R&B singer whose name I naturally assumed was “Sierra” but is actually “Ciara,” doing a song called “One Two-Step” (a title one would more readily expect from a country song!) that would have been more fun if it had been less overproduced, starting with a chorus of four big, strapping male dancers in black-and-white costumes. One wondered where Ciara was, especially since you could hear her voice well before she was actually visible, coming in through the center of her chorus line and dressed similarly. Then the show cut to a gig with Brad Paisley doing his appealing 10-year-old song “American Saturday Night,” and then another city in which Khalid (the heavy-set but still attractive young Black male singer who does neo-soul, not rap as one might assume from his name) did something called “Out of My Head.” As far as I was concerned, by far the standout talent of this show was Maren Morris, who did two songs, “The Middle” and “The Bones.” Neither was at the level of intensity of “My Church,” her star-making hit and one of the greatest pop-soul records ever made, but both were considerably stronger than most of the rather hapless material the other performers were plowing through.
Morris also earned points with me for the minimal physical production of her show: instead of crowding the stage with dancers and elaborate sets and props, she just stood there with her musicians and let her songs and her impassioned delivery of them make the point without all the bric-a-brac in the way. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, between them Michael Jackson and Madonna revolutionized what audiences expect from pop music shows in the 1980’s, but all too many artists have cluttered up their concerts with dancers and elaborate stage effects without the theatricality or the integrity that allowed Jackson and Madonna to put together big concert productions that were genuinely entertaining.) And would someone please cast Maren Morris in a biopic of Janis Joplin while she’s still young enough to play the part? She’s got both the looks and the vocal chops for it! The rest of the performers were appealing without being “special,” including another country star, Luke Bryan, doing a song I think was called “Sunrise, Sunshine, Sunset” (the songs were announced first, which was nice, but the announcements were barked out so quickly they were hard to make out sometimes); Derek Hough, who co-hosted the show with Ciara and did two songs (a really dull rap number called “Bad Man” and a better selection, sung instead of rapped, called “Say It Now”), Brad Paisley returning with a sappy love song to his wife called “My Miracle” (which made me wonder if he’d have to keep it in his set list if they divorce), Ciara returning with a medley of “Think About You” and “Level Up,” and Khalid taking out the musical part of the show with “Free Spirit” before the fireworks display kicked in.
The fireworks display was accompanied by an orchestra doing the usual patriotic treacle interspersed with musical tributes to classic Hollywood — Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox fanfare was played and so was the one from Warner Bros. — and the big themes from John Williams’ scores for Star Wars, E.T. and Superman. (I remember the last time Charles and I watched E.T. and how impressed I was by how dissonant and dark-sounding much of Williams’ score for the film is, and how good it is at portraying loneliness and the bitter sadness of both E.T. him/her/itself and the children E.T. befriends at their ultimate parting, but of course that’s not what got played at this concert!) The one musical highlight during the fireworks display was an unseen Jennifer Hudson singing a quite beautiful and haunting version of “Over the Rainbow” and restraining herself instead of overpowering this simple song with too many “soul” devices and ornaments the way Patti LaBelle did on her hit version in the 1980’s. Like Ray Charles in what is still my favorite non-Judy version, Hudson put a Black “spin” on the song but knew how far to take it and when to stop, and her performance was quite moving even though she was invisible to the cameras and therefore we didn’t get to see her current post-Weight Watchers physique. All in all, the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular was an O.K. show, with musical acts that appealed without shaking the rafters and sort of blended together into an exquisite dullness relieved only by Morris’s soul and passion and the quiet comfort-food aspects of the country songs.
Monday, July 1, 2019
Hometown Killer (Reel One Entertainment, Blue Sky Films, Lifetime, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie, Hometown Killer (shot under the more ambiguous but also more sinister title A Killer Is Watching), was an unusually good product of Ken Sanders’ factory — he wrote the story, his frequent collaborator J. Bryan Dick wrote the screenplay and Jeff Hare directed — that achieved some of the moral ambiguity Christine Conradt has in her Lifetime scripts. The story is set in a California (I think) small town and begins with a burglar wearing a ski mask and black clothes — and looking pretty jittery in ways I suspect were supposed to indicate he was a drug addict looking for cash for a quick score — breaking into the home of Tara (Kaitlyn Black) while her husband Charles (Jon Prescott) is still working a late-night shift. The burglar overpowers Tara just as she’s placed a 911 call but before she’s had a chance to talk to the receptionist, but the police get a readout on the address from which the call was placed and send officer Penny (Ashley Gallegos) and her African-American partner Miller (Chris Devlin) to respond. Penny shoots down the burglar and kills him, but the incident has awakened Proust-like remembrances of things past: it seems she grew up in that small town and she and Tara were friends in high school until Tara decided to hang out with the cool kids in general and her boyfriend Nolan (Will Greenburg) in particular. On the night of the seniors’ talent show Nolan and his “buddies” literally kidnapped Penny, tied her to a chair, painted clown makeup on her face, gagged her with a sock, and pushed her on stage in that guise to humiliate her. They also called her “Pig Penny” and used that nickname to bully her throughout her time in high school.
Penny left the small town for a larger city within the same county, trained as a police consultant to solve computer crimes, then decided she wanted the action of actual police work, went through the police academy and qualified as a full-fledged cop. She did well in that work and got decorated … until the administrators of her department decided to reassign her to the small town where she grew up. The experience of re-meeting Tara brings back memories of her high-school humiliation and she determines to exact her revenge on the perpetrators, especially after she gets invited to the 20th anniversary reunion of her high school class on Tara’s insistence that Nolan (played as an adult by Kelly Marcus, tall with close-cropped blond hair and by far the sexiest guy in the film) won’t be invited. Nolan shows up anyway and the classmates re-enact her “Pig Penny” humiliation. Penny starts her revenge plot by pulling Nolan’s car over for a nonexistent traffic violation, forcing him out of the car and then kneecapping him with her metal baton until he admits Tara invited him to the reunion (which she didn’t, by the way). Her ultimate plan is to murder Tara’s husband Charles and frame her for the crime, and among other things she tells Tara that Charles is having an affair with his assistant Lanie (Jensen Bush) and that’s the real reason he’s “working” so many late nights with her. She even shoots her own partner Miller when he catches on to her scheme — he survives but has no memory of how or by whom he got shot — and she finally corners Nolan and Tara at the high school where all this started 20 years ago and tells Tara either she turns herself in for her husband’s (attempted) murder or Penny will simply kill her. Fortunately, the other cops have caught on and sent Nolan into the scene with a body camera; Nolan is shot but before that he’s recorded enough to establish Penny’s guilt and, much to my surprise, she’s arrested alive instead of being shot down by her fellow cops at the end.
What makes Hometown Killer unusually good for something on Lifetime — especially from Ken Sanders, whose specialty is stories about nubile young women prostituting themselves to get enough money to go to Whittendale University — is the moral ambiguity; we sympathize with Penny as a bullying victim even while we hate her for her twisted revenge campaign, and we see Tara as an innocent victim but also a bitch who coldly dismissed her friend and joined (though she says she tried to stop it, and the flashbacks we see are ambiguous on the point) the bizarre humiliation the “cool kids” in school wreaked upon her. It also helps that Ashley Gallegos is so sexy in her black leather uniform — she makes Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit look like Mama Cass by comparison — and when she complains that she can’t find a boyfriend because all the men she meets are just attracted by the kinky thrill of doing a cop, we believe her. It’s also unusually well directed for a Lifetime movie; Jeff Hare has obviously studied the 1940’s film noir classics and stages this script that way, emphasizing its similarities to The Prowler (a 1951 film directed by Joseph Losey — the last movie he made in the U.S. before being blacklisted and fleeing to Britain — which stars Van Heflin as a cop who goes bad after he answers a prowler call at the home of the wife of an all-night D.J., falls for her and hatches a scheme to kill her husband and make it look like an accident), though it’s probably just as well Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick did not build their script around an illicit sexual attraction. We like Penny, we pity her and we hate her, and at the same time we also hate the circumstances that unlocked the evil inside her, first by making her a bullying victim and then bringing her back to the town where she was bullied and bringing all those memories home to her.
Last night’s Lifetime movie, Hometown Killer (shot under the more ambiguous but also more sinister title A Killer Is Watching), was an unusually good product of Ken Sanders’ factory — he wrote the story, his frequent collaborator J. Bryan Dick wrote the screenplay and Jeff Hare directed — that achieved some of the moral ambiguity Christine Conradt has in her Lifetime scripts. The story is set in a California (I think) small town and begins with a burglar wearing a ski mask and black clothes — and looking pretty jittery in ways I suspect were supposed to indicate he was a drug addict looking for cash for a quick score — breaking into the home of Tara (Kaitlyn Black) while her husband Charles (Jon Prescott) is still working a late-night shift. The burglar overpowers Tara just as she’s placed a 911 call but before she’s had a chance to talk to the receptionist, but the police get a readout on the address from which the call was placed and send officer Penny (Ashley Gallegos) and her African-American partner Miller (Chris Devlin) to respond. Penny shoots down the burglar and kills him, but the incident has awakened Proust-like remembrances of things past: it seems she grew up in that small town and she and Tara were friends in high school until Tara decided to hang out with the cool kids in general and her boyfriend Nolan (Will Greenburg) in particular. On the night of the seniors’ talent show Nolan and his “buddies” literally kidnapped Penny, tied her to a chair, painted clown makeup on her face, gagged her with a sock, and pushed her on stage in that guise to humiliate her. They also called her “Pig Penny” and used that nickname to bully her throughout her time in high school.
Penny left the small town for a larger city within the same county, trained as a police consultant to solve computer crimes, then decided she wanted the action of actual police work, went through the police academy and qualified as a full-fledged cop. She did well in that work and got decorated … until the administrators of her department decided to reassign her to the small town where she grew up. The experience of re-meeting Tara brings back memories of her high-school humiliation and she determines to exact her revenge on the perpetrators, especially after she gets invited to the 20th anniversary reunion of her high school class on Tara’s insistence that Nolan (played as an adult by Kelly Marcus, tall with close-cropped blond hair and by far the sexiest guy in the film) won’t be invited. Nolan shows up anyway and the classmates re-enact her “Pig Penny” humiliation. Penny starts her revenge plot by pulling Nolan’s car over for a nonexistent traffic violation, forcing him out of the car and then kneecapping him with her metal baton until he admits Tara invited him to the reunion (which she didn’t, by the way). Her ultimate plan is to murder Tara’s husband Charles and frame her for the crime, and among other things she tells Tara that Charles is having an affair with his assistant Lanie (Jensen Bush) and that’s the real reason he’s “working” so many late nights with her. She even shoots her own partner Miller when he catches on to her scheme — he survives but has no memory of how or by whom he got shot — and she finally corners Nolan and Tara at the high school where all this started 20 years ago and tells Tara either she turns herself in for her husband’s (attempted) murder or Penny will simply kill her. Fortunately, the other cops have caught on and sent Nolan into the scene with a body camera; Nolan is shot but before that he’s recorded enough to establish Penny’s guilt and, much to my surprise, she’s arrested alive instead of being shot down by her fellow cops at the end.
What makes Hometown Killer unusually good for something on Lifetime — especially from Ken Sanders, whose specialty is stories about nubile young women prostituting themselves to get enough money to go to Whittendale University — is the moral ambiguity; we sympathize with Penny as a bullying victim even while we hate her for her twisted revenge campaign, and we see Tara as an innocent victim but also a bitch who coldly dismissed her friend and joined (though she says she tried to stop it, and the flashbacks we see are ambiguous on the point) the bizarre humiliation the “cool kids” in school wreaked upon her. It also helps that Ashley Gallegos is so sexy in her black leather uniform — she makes Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit look like Mama Cass by comparison — and when she complains that she can’t find a boyfriend because all the men she meets are just attracted by the kinky thrill of doing a cop, we believe her. It’s also unusually well directed for a Lifetime movie; Jeff Hare has obviously studied the 1940’s film noir classics and stages this script that way, emphasizing its similarities to The Prowler (a 1951 film directed by Joseph Losey — the last movie he made in the U.S. before being blacklisted and fleeing to Britain — which stars Van Heflin as a cop who goes bad after he answers a prowler call at the home of the wife of an all-night D.J., falls for her and hatches a scheme to kill her husband and make it look like an accident), though it’s probably just as well Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick did not build their script around an illicit sexual attraction. We like Penny, we pity her and we hate her, and at the same time we also hate the circumstances that unlocked the evil inside her, first by making her a bullying victim and then bringing her back to the town where she was bullied and bringing all those memories home to her.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Family Pictures (Lighthouse Pictures, Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movies consisted of a “world premiere” of one of their “Book to Screen” adaptations — their promos have made it sound as if nobody before them had ever thought of making a movie based on a book — called Family Pictures and based on a novel by Jane Green. I’d never heard of her before Lifetime started filming her books, but she’s apparently a best-selling romance fiction writer, born in Great Britain in 1968. It’s not clear from her Wikipedia page just when she moved to the U.S., but she lives here now in Westport, Connecticut with her second husband, Ian Warburg of the Warburg banking family. Green’s Wikipedia page lists 23 published novels and claims her books have sold a total of 10 million copies, making her a solidly successful writer but not exactly a superstar. I first heard of her when Lifetime showed a TV-movie called Tempting Fate that she published in 2014, about a woman who, bitter because her husband had a vasectomy without telling her, has a one-night stand (a one-afternoon stand, actually) with a computer gazillionaire who hired her for a decorating project just to get in her pants, and ends up with one of those “infallible pregnancies at single contacts” David O. Selznick ridiculed in his production notes on Gone With the Wind. (For me the most unintentionally entertaining part of this movie was when the heroine’s daughter, whom she had with her husband before he got his tubes tied because he didn’t want any more kids, chewed her out and told mom, “You suck!” I wanted to yell back at the screen, “Lady, if you’d just sucked, you wouldn’t be in this predicament!”)
Family Pictures is a more unusual story premise than Tempting Fate (incidentally it’s based on one of Green’s novels that’s had different titles in her native country and her adopted one: the U.K. edition was called The Accidental Husband) — though it’s still one Lifetime has done before — though, at least as adapted by screenwriter Ilene Rosenzweig for this film, its plot depends on jaw-dropping coincidences and far-fetched gimmicks. Maggie Hathaway (Elisabeth Röhm from the later stages of Law and Order, top-billed) is the super status-conscious wife of businessman Mark Hathaway (Matt Passmore, who’s hunky enough we’re almost sure from the get-go will turn out to be a villain). They live in Connecticut (as, remember, does the real Jane Green) and as the film begins she’s preparing a big garden-party fundraiser she’s hoping will steal the thunder of her principal status rival, Ruthie Dunbar (Courtney Richter). Meanwhile, at the other end of the country in Los Angeles, Sylvia Hathaway (Justina Machado) is having arguments with her husband Mark Hathaway (Matt Passmore — yep, he is a villain!) over whether they should allow their daughter Eve (Larissa Alberquerque) to move across country to attend New York University or stay in town and go to one of the big colleges in L.A. With dad out of town on one of his frequent “business trips” — the way he’s maintained his bigamous existence for so long is he pretends to be super-busy maintaining his and their lifestyle(s), though Maggie is the one with the big house and the expensive cars while Sylvia is living in a beachfront shack — Sylvia gives Eve permission to go to New York for a pre-admission party to get to know her future schoolmates. Along the way we’re also told that both Maggie and Eve are recovering alcoholics and Eve is getting restive because Maggie keeps insisting she go to rehab every time she has a relapse. Got that? This is going to be important!
Eve flies to New York and attends the party, where she hooks up with Mark’s and Maggie’s daughter Grace (Natalie Sharp) and instantly strikes up a friendship with her with no knowledge whatever that they are (half-)sisters. Unfortunately, she also falls off the wagon big-time and Grace takes charge of her, insisting that she go to their home back in Connecticut to sleep off all the Jell-O shots she had at the party. The two sisters sleep in the same bed (no, nothing kinky happens between them — this is Lifetime, after all!) and when she comes to the next morning Eve sees a photo of Mark, Maggie, Grace and Grace’s younger brother Buck (Grayson Maxwell Gurnsey) on the wall, recognizes Mark immediately and says, “What is my dad doing in your family picture?” So the jig that Mark has carefully maintained for a decade — since we later learn from a flashback that Eve is not Mark’s biological daughter, that one day Sylvia took Eve to the beach and got plastered, Eve swam out too far and nearly drowned, Mark saved her and that’s how he and Sylvia met —unravels all too quickly. Later Sylvia comes to visit Maggie at her big home in Connecticut after a repo man has visited her and taken Mark’s motorcycle and asked her about a Mercedes and a Porsche registered under Mark’s name — yes, in addition to being a bigamist Mark is also an embezzler and a fraudster, he’s run out of money (or at least cut off both wives) and he’s wanted by the FBI. Mark hears Sylvia coming to visit him and Maggie, and he collects his laptop and bolts for parts unknown — though eventually he ends up at Sylvia’s place in California and apparently the two have one more hot night of sex together before Maggie turns up, saying she’s used up her last frequent-flyer miles to get there, and chews out Sylvia for shielding their no-good-man and letting him spend the night.
The repo guys seize just about everything both Mrs. Mark Hathaways own and all that’s left to them are some household items they raise money on via an estate sale (which embarrasses the hell out of Maggie because it means confessing to her 1-percenter former friends that she’s no longer one of them) and a dilapidated mountain cabin in upstate New York that, having nowhere else to go, Maggie moves into with her son Buck. The living room is decorated with a hideous portrait of Maggie, commissioned by her husband, that makes her look like a cross between a Stepford wife and a V. C. Andrews character (by coincidence — or maybe not — many of Lifetime’s house promos for this show were pushing a five-part mini-series they’re going to start airing July 27 based on one of Andrews’ typical five-novel cycles, Heaven). Maggie also gets a job as waitress at a local café — she gets a big speech to the effect that the whole reason she went after Mark in the first place was that her mom had waitressed to support them as a single parent, and she was determined never to go back to that sort of proletarian existence — and she’s cruised by the hot, sexy cook Quinn (James Pizzinato), who offers her food in exchange for a date and ultimately fucks her in the cab of his pickup in this movie’s only soft-core porn sex scene. It’s also established that Maggie let Mark handle all the couple’s finances because she was intimidated by all those numbers, but after Mark fled she took an Internet course in accounting and was able to learn from the records of Mark’s company that he actually took out $3 million in assets before leaving both her and Sylvia (and their kids) out to dry financially — but where is it?
The finale takes place at that deserted mountain cabin, where Maggie and Sylvia are trying to figure out where Mark hid all that money and Sylvia is taunting Maggie about that horrible portrait of her. She goads Maggie into destroying the portrait by slashing it with a kitchen knife — and, wouldn’t you know it, all $3 million is there behind the painting, in cash. Remember this is a story concocted by an author in her mid-40’s whose husband is an investment banker; wouldn’t it have occurred to either Mr. or Mrs. Warburg that modern-day embezzlers don’t make withdrawals in cash and stash the proceeds in physical locations? They set up shell companies through which they open accounts in Switzerland or the Bahamas and deposit their ill-gotten gains electronically. (I can think of one previous movie in which three women teamed up to regain the money stolen from them by a no-good man who was the ex-husband of one of them, the current husband of another and the fiancé of the third, who learned enough computer hacking skills to steal back the money their guy had stolen from them.) Maggie and Sylvia plan to grab the money and split it three ways with Mark, but when he shows up with sinister intent they decide to keep it for themselves and pay off Mark with a few token bundles of cash — and if he complains they’ll call the police and, of course, if that happens none of them will get the money because it will be confiscated as the proceeds of crime. So it ends with the wronged wives seemingly set for life and the man who wronged them in the wind again.
It’s probably just as well for the wives in this one, especially Sylvia, that Jane Green didn’t go as far as Michael Feifer did in the last Lifetime movie about bigamy (at least the last one I can recall), His Secret Family, in which the bigamist was at least savvy enough to use two different names and he was a pharmaceutical salesman who, when he started losing business, responded by deciding that wife number two and their child had become needless expenses and he would downsize by killing them. (Feifer also twisted the knife even more by having the second wife’s daughter have leukemia which only a bone-marrow transplant from her dad can cure.) Family Pictures, befitting its origins in a book by an at least semi-respectable novelist, is a good deal less gory than your average Lifetime movie and relies for its entertainment much more on situations than thrills. That’s a good thing, and the film is also relatively well acted by the leads — Röhm is an especially welcome sight since she’s mostly stayed mired in series TV since the end of her stint on Law and Order (as one of the assistant district attorneys Jack McCoy, Sam Waterston’s character, was both mentoring and having affairs with — in the relatively tolerant early 2000’s Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners could get away with this but today the #MeToo movement would hang them out to dry and demand the character’s head for a “sin” like that!) — and decently staged by director Manu Boyer. It’s just that there are way too many plot holes, from the speed with which Mark Hathaway’s carefully constructed life suddenly unravels to that business with him withdrawing the money in cash and stashing it in a space way too small to hold $3 million, for this film to be as satisfying as it could have been.
Last night’s Lifetime movies consisted of a “world premiere” of one of their “Book to Screen” adaptations — their promos have made it sound as if nobody before them had ever thought of making a movie based on a book — called Family Pictures and based on a novel by Jane Green. I’d never heard of her before Lifetime started filming her books, but she’s apparently a best-selling romance fiction writer, born in Great Britain in 1968. It’s not clear from her Wikipedia page just when she moved to the U.S., but she lives here now in Westport, Connecticut with her second husband, Ian Warburg of the Warburg banking family. Green’s Wikipedia page lists 23 published novels and claims her books have sold a total of 10 million copies, making her a solidly successful writer but not exactly a superstar. I first heard of her when Lifetime showed a TV-movie called Tempting Fate that she published in 2014, about a woman who, bitter because her husband had a vasectomy without telling her, has a one-night stand (a one-afternoon stand, actually) with a computer gazillionaire who hired her for a decorating project just to get in her pants, and ends up with one of those “infallible pregnancies at single contacts” David O. Selznick ridiculed in his production notes on Gone With the Wind. (For me the most unintentionally entertaining part of this movie was when the heroine’s daughter, whom she had with her husband before he got his tubes tied because he didn’t want any more kids, chewed her out and told mom, “You suck!” I wanted to yell back at the screen, “Lady, if you’d just sucked, you wouldn’t be in this predicament!”)
Family Pictures is a more unusual story premise than Tempting Fate (incidentally it’s based on one of Green’s novels that’s had different titles in her native country and her adopted one: the U.K. edition was called The Accidental Husband) — though it’s still one Lifetime has done before — though, at least as adapted by screenwriter Ilene Rosenzweig for this film, its plot depends on jaw-dropping coincidences and far-fetched gimmicks. Maggie Hathaway (Elisabeth Röhm from the later stages of Law and Order, top-billed) is the super status-conscious wife of businessman Mark Hathaway (Matt Passmore, who’s hunky enough we’re almost sure from the get-go will turn out to be a villain). They live in Connecticut (as, remember, does the real Jane Green) and as the film begins she’s preparing a big garden-party fundraiser she’s hoping will steal the thunder of her principal status rival, Ruthie Dunbar (Courtney Richter). Meanwhile, at the other end of the country in Los Angeles, Sylvia Hathaway (Justina Machado) is having arguments with her husband Mark Hathaway (Matt Passmore — yep, he is a villain!) over whether they should allow their daughter Eve (Larissa Alberquerque) to move across country to attend New York University or stay in town and go to one of the big colleges in L.A. With dad out of town on one of his frequent “business trips” — the way he’s maintained his bigamous existence for so long is he pretends to be super-busy maintaining his and their lifestyle(s), though Maggie is the one with the big house and the expensive cars while Sylvia is living in a beachfront shack — Sylvia gives Eve permission to go to New York for a pre-admission party to get to know her future schoolmates. Along the way we’re also told that both Maggie and Eve are recovering alcoholics and Eve is getting restive because Maggie keeps insisting she go to rehab every time she has a relapse. Got that? This is going to be important!
Eve flies to New York and attends the party, where she hooks up with Mark’s and Maggie’s daughter Grace (Natalie Sharp) and instantly strikes up a friendship with her with no knowledge whatever that they are (half-)sisters. Unfortunately, she also falls off the wagon big-time and Grace takes charge of her, insisting that she go to their home back in Connecticut to sleep off all the Jell-O shots she had at the party. The two sisters sleep in the same bed (no, nothing kinky happens between them — this is Lifetime, after all!) and when she comes to the next morning Eve sees a photo of Mark, Maggie, Grace and Grace’s younger brother Buck (Grayson Maxwell Gurnsey) on the wall, recognizes Mark immediately and says, “What is my dad doing in your family picture?” So the jig that Mark has carefully maintained for a decade — since we later learn from a flashback that Eve is not Mark’s biological daughter, that one day Sylvia took Eve to the beach and got plastered, Eve swam out too far and nearly drowned, Mark saved her and that’s how he and Sylvia met —unravels all too quickly. Later Sylvia comes to visit Maggie at her big home in Connecticut after a repo man has visited her and taken Mark’s motorcycle and asked her about a Mercedes and a Porsche registered under Mark’s name — yes, in addition to being a bigamist Mark is also an embezzler and a fraudster, he’s run out of money (or at least cut off both wives) and he’s wanted by the FBI. Mark hears Sylvia coming to visit him and Maggie, and he collects his laptop and bolts for parts unknown — though eventually he ends up at Sylvia’s place in California and apparently the two have one more hot night of sex together before Maggie turns up, saying she’s used up her last frequent-flyer miles to get there, and chews out Sylvia for shielding their no-good-man and letting him spend the night.
The repo guys seize just about everything both Mrs. Mark Hathaways own and all that’s left to them are some household items they raise money on via an estate sale (which embarrasses the hell out of Maggie because it means confessing to her 1-percenter former friends that she’s no longer one of them) and a dilapidated mountain cabin in upstate New York that, having nowhere else to go, Maggie moves into with her son Buck. The living room is decorated with a hideous portrait of Maggie, commissioned by her husband, that makes her look like a cross between a Stepford wife and a V. C. Andrews character (by coincidence — or maybe not — many of Lifetime’s house promos for this show were pushing a five-part mini-series they’re going to start airing July 27 based on one of Andrews’ typical five-novel cycles, Heaven). Maggie also gets a job as waitress at a local café — she gets a big speech to the effect that the whole reason she went after Mark in the first place was that her mom had waitressed to support them as a single parent, and she was determined never to go back to that sort of proletarian existence — and she’s cruised by the hot, sexy cook Quinn (James Pizzinato), who offers her food in exchange for a date and ultimately fucks her in the cab of his pickup in this movie’s only soft-core porn sex scene. It’s also established that Maggie let Mark handle all the couple’s finances because she was intimidated by all those numbers, but after Mark fled she took an Internet course in accounting and was able to learn from the records of Mark’s company that he actually took out $3 million in assets before leaving both her and Sylvia (and their kids) out to dry financially — but where is it?
The finale takes place at that deserted mountain cabin, where Maggie and Sylvia are trying to figure out where Mark hid all that money and Sylvia is taunting Maggie about that horrible portrait of her. She goads Maggie into destroying the portrait by slashing it with a kitchen knife — and, wouldn’t you know it, all $3 million is there behind the painting, in cash. Remember this is a story concocted by an author in her mid-40’s whose husband is an investment banker; wouldn’t it have occurred to either Mr. or Mrs. Warburg that modern-day embezzlers don’t make withdrawals in cash and stash the proceeds in physical locations? They set up shell companies through which they open accounts in Switzerland or the Bahamas and deposit their ill-gotten gains electronically. (I can think of one previous movie in which three women teamed up to regain the money stolen from them by a no-good man who was the ex-husband of one of them, the current husband of another and the fiancé of the third, who learned enough computer hacking skills to steal back the money their guy had stolen from them.) Maggie and Sylvia plan to grab the money and split it three ways with Mark, but when he shows up with sinister intent they decide to keep it for themselves and pay off Mark with a few token bundles of cash — and if he complains they’ll call the police and, of course, if that happens none of them will get the money because it will be confiscated as the proceeds of crime. So it ends with the wronged wives seemingly set for life and the man who wronged them in the wind again.
It’s probably just as well for the wives in this one, especially Sylvia, that Jane Green didn’t go as far as Michael Feifer did in the last Lifetime movie about bigamy (at least the last one I can recall), His Secret Family, in which the bigamist was at least savvy enough to use two different names and he was a pharmaceutical salesman who, when he started losing business, responded by deciding that wife number two and their child had become needless expenses and he would downsize by killing them. (Feifer also twisted the knife even more by having the second wife’s daughter have leukemia which only a bone-marrow transplant from her dad can cure.) Family Pictures, befitting its origins in a book by an at least semi-respectable novelist, is a good deal less gory than your average Lifetime movie and relies for its entertainment much more on situations than thrills. That’s a good thing, and the film is also relatively well acted by the leads — Röhm is an especially welcome sight since she’s mostly stayed mired in series TV since the end of her stint on Law and Order (as one of the assistant district attorneys Jack McCoy, Sam Waterston’s character, was both mentoring and having affairs with — in the relatively tolerant early 2000’s Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners could get away with this but today the #MeToo movement would hang them out to dry and demand the character’s head for a “sin” like that!) — and decently staged by director Manu Boyer. It’s just that there are way too many plot holes, from the speed with which Mark Hathaway’s carefully constructed life suddenly unravels to that business with him withdrawing the money in cash and stashing it in a space way too small to hold $3 million, for this film to be as satisfying as it could have been.
Killer Grandma (Reel One Entertainment, Fell to Earth Films, Lifetime, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Family Portraits Lifetime showed a movie called Killer Grandma — which when I first saw it in the TV listings I thought I’d already seen. It turned out I was confusing it with Psycho Granny, though the premises are similar and Lifetime’s program suppliers, Reel One Entertainment and Fell to Earth Films, shot this one under the working title Killer In-Law (by coincidence — or maybe not — Lifetime also aired a film called Psycho In-Law and another called Psycho Brother-in-Law). The film opens with a prologue in which a woman, Yvonne Hutcherson (Jodi Lynn Thomas) in a house with a pool is alone except for her two kids, seven-year-old Tom (O’Neill Monahan) and four-year-old Meghan (unidentified in the imdb.com cast list, though I suspect the child actress cast later as her niece — more on that later — also played her). Yvonne had solemnly instructed her kids not to play in the pool, but Meghan dared her brother to go in with her, and when she started drowning Tom was too panicked and too immature to save her, while Mom arrived too late. The film flashes forward almost 20 years to the Westlake mental institution, where Yvonne — now older and played by Nana Visitor, with severely short grey hair and a rail-thin bod that has obviously escaped the usual, shall we say, “expansion” that comes with age — is being given a discharge interview by her therapist, a tall Black woman with a similarly short haircut, who reminds her (and tells us) that she was well enough to leave two years earlier but she decided to stay on at Westlake and help her fellow patients, sort of like Jane Eyre becoming a teacher at Lowood School after she graduated there. Yvonne makes a bee-line to the city where her son Tom, now an adult and using the name “Ferriday” (why do the mother and son have different last names? Maybe we were supposed to believe he was adopted after his dad had previously died and his mom went crazy over the death of his sister, and “Ferriday” is his adoptive parents’ name — though the script by Nick Barzini and the film’s director, Danny J. Boyle,[1] doesn’t say this or give us any clue as to how or where Tom spent the rest of his childhood), is living with his wife Melissa (Kelly Sullivan, top-billed) and their daughter Annie (Violet Hicks).
Yvonne is determined to ingratiate herself with her son and daughter-in-law and worm their way into their house so she can ultimately kidnap Annie and use her to replace her late daughter Meghan, whose death she blames on Tom. We then find out what these people do for a living — Tom is an architect who has just got a potentially career-making commission from the city where they’re living to design a new public day-care center (and there’s a marvelously chilling scene in which he’s at his worktable working with his scale models of what the buildings in the center will look like, and mom ridicules him for still playing with toys), and Melissa makes handcrafted jewelry and sells it on line. She’s got a number of helpers, including her business partner Courtney Little (Jessica Blackmore) — who’s shown shooting pictures of her for the business’s Web site — and Yvonne’s most direct competitor, nanny Kendra (Jesi Mandagaran). Melissa loves Kendra and trusts her totally with Annie, but that’s no problem: showing surprisingly good hacker skills for someone who was in a mental institution during most of the development of the Internet, Yvonne discovers Kendra’s address online, goes to her home and clubs her to death. Then Yvonne talks the Ferridays in to letting her stay with them and look after Annie during the day while they’re both too busy to do so (though, mind you, they’re both working from home). At first, in the manner of the usual Lifetime mother-in-law/sister/brother/uncle/aunt/nanny/neighbor/teacher/counselor/gardener/maintenance man/whatever from hell, Yvonne couldn’t be more ingratiating, but her “cover” starts to slip when, out alone with Annie, Yvonne buys her dinner at a fast-food outlet in defiance of Melissa’s edict that she wants her daughter to eat healthily. Then Yvonne is looking after Annie and Courtney’s daughter Penelope (Milan Aguilera), who are playing by — you guessed it — the pool (it seems as if Tom either never left the house where he grew up or he found another one remarkably like it). Only Yvonne has a freak-out, bursts out of the kitchen with a knife in her hand, threatens the kids if they play in the pool, and for good measure calls Annie “Meghan.” Courtney, who’s there to look after her daughter, captures all this on video with her digital camera and uploads it onto her computer, then threatens to send Melissa the clip to convince her that her mother-in-law is really not a fit person to be left around their daughters — only, though she’s white, she meets the fate usually reserved for the heroine’s African-American best friend who stumbles onto the truth about the villain’s plot but gets killed for her pains.
The finale occurs at the surprisingly large and nice house Yvonne has somehow acquired for herself and outfitted so she and Annie can live there together, just the two of them, as soon as she dispatches those inconvenient parents of hers. Yvonne has already knocked Tom down a flight of stairs, though he ends up hospitalized instead of dead, and at the end she picks Annie up from school and kidnaps her, taking her to the house she’s outfitted with a room for Annie that’s an exact duplicate of Meghan’s, down to Meghan’s old toys which Yvonne carefully preserved. She’s even had Annie wear an old black dress of Meghan’s, with a large white collar that when she has it on makes her look like a cross between a Salem witch and what the kid from The Omen would have looked like if he’d been a girl instead of a boy. Only Melissa figures out where Yvonne has taken Annie and goes to confront her. Things don’t go so well for Our Heroine at first — Yvonne surprises her and once again has a large kitchen knife in her hand with which she attacks Melissa and apparently draws blood — but at the end Melissa overpowers Yvonne, stabs her in the chest with her own knife, and gets away with Annie. At the end Melissa, Tom and Annie are reunited as a family — but Yvonne is also still alive, back at the mental hospital and still being looked after by the same African-American therapist who was so spectacularly unsuccessful with her in the first time. Oh, and did I tell you that along the way Yvonne has revealed to both Tom and Meghan that Tom’s dad didn’t just die in an “accident,” but she killed him with a blow to the back of the head with a baseball bat just as he was getting ready to leave her?
The direction by the “other” Danny Boyle and the script he wrote with Nick Barzini are coherent enough we’re not supposed to suspend disbelief through the wild coincidences and happenstances that drove the plot of Family Pictures, but what really saves Killer Grandma and gives it whatever entertainment value it has is the superb performance by Nana Visitor in the title role. One imdb.com reviewer compared her to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the horror films they made in the early 1960’s (jointly in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and severally, Davis in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Crawford in Strait-Jacket), and the praise is high but well earned even though tall, leggy, rail-thin Visitor looks less like Davis or Crawford than Anthony Perkins in the drag scenes in Psycho. She’s totally in command of her role, ingratiating and relatively normal when the script calls for her to appear so and vividly controlling in the Big Moments — and at the same time she doesn’t lapse into the raving madness so many actors of both (mainstream) genders fall into when called on to impersonate psychos. (I find from her list of previous credits that Visitor was in one of my all-time favorite Lifetime movies, Mini’s First Time from 2006, though in my comments on it I didn’t mention her role as the school principal in that delightful black comedy about a teenage girl who seduces her stepfather, then frames him for the murder of her mom and ends up as her high-school class’s valedictorian by arranging an “accident” for the boy who was supposed to have that honor.) She’s been on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and most of her credits are on series TV, but she is certainly an electrifying screen presence here and I have to give special acknowledgment to anyone who’d name her son after the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt!
After Family Portraits Lifetime showed a movie called Killer Grandma — which when I first saw it in the TV listings I thought I’d already seen. It turned out I was confusing it with Psycho Granny, though the premises are similar and Lifetime’s program suppliers, Reel One Entertainment and Fell to Earth Films, shot this one under the working title Killer In-Law (by coincidence — or maybe not — Lifetime also aired a film called Psycho In-Law and another called Psycho Brother-in-Law). The film opens with a prologue in which a woman, Yvonne Hutcherson (Jodi Lynn Thomas) in a house with a pool is alone except for her two kids, seven-year-old Tom (O’Neill Monahan) and four-year-old Meghan (unidentified in the imdb.com cast list, though I suspect the child actress cast later as her niece — more on that later — also played her). Yvonne had solemnly instructed her kids not to play in the pool, but Meghan dared her brother to go in with her, and when she started drowning Tom was too panicked and too immature to save her, while Mom arrived too late. The film flashes forward almost 20 years to the Westlake mental institution, where Yvonne — now older and played by Nana Visitor, with severely short grey hair and a rail-thin bod that has obviously escaped the usual, shall we say, “expansion” that comes with age — is being given a discharge interview by her therapist, a tall Black woman with a similarly short haircut, who reminds her (and tells us) that she was well enough to leave two years earlier but she decided to stay on at Westlake and help her fellow patients, sort of like Jane Eyre becoming a teacher at Lowood School after she graduated there. Yvonne makes a bee-line to the city where her son Tom, now an adult and using the name “Ferriday” (why do the mother and son have different last names? Maybe we were supposed to believe he was adopted after his dad had previously died and his mom went crazy over the death of his sister, and “Ferriday” is his adoptive parents’ name — though the script by Nick Barzini and the film’s director, Danny J. Boyle,[1] doesn’t say this or give us any clue as to how or where Tom spent the rest of his childhood), is living with his wife Melissa (Kelly Sullivan, top-billed) and their daughter Annie (Violet Hicks).
Yvonne is determined to ingratiate herself with her son and daughter-in-law and worm their way into their house so she can ultimately kidnap Annie and use her to replace her late daughter Meghan, whose death she blames on Tom. We then find out what these people do for a living — Tom is an architect who has just got a potentially career-making commission from the city where they’re living to design a new public day-care center (and there’s a marvelously chilling scene in which he’s at his worktable working with his scale models of what the buildings in the center will look like, and mom ridicules him for still playing with toys), and Melissa makes handcrafted jewelry and sells it on line. She’s got a number of helpers, including her business partner Courtney Little (Jessica Blackmore) — who’s shown shooting pictures of her for the business’s Web site — and Yvonne’s most direct competitor, nanny Kendra (Jesi Mandagaran). Melissa loves Kendra and trusts her totally with Annie, but that’s no problem: showing surprisingly good hacker skills for someone who was in a mental institution during most of the development of the Internet, Yvonne discovers Kendra’s address online, goes to her home and clubs her to death. Then Yvonne talks the Ferridays in to letting her stay with them and look after Annie during the day while they’re both too busy to do so (though, mind you, they’re both working from home). At first, in the manner of the usual Lifetime mother-in-law/sister/brother/uncle/aunt/nanny/neighbor/teacher/counselor/gardener/maintenance man/whatever from hell, Yvonne couldn’t be more ingratiating, but her “cover” starts to slip when, out alone with Annie, Yvonne buys her dinner at a fast-food outlet in defiance of Melissa’s edict that she wants her daughter to eat healthily. Then Yvonne is looking after Annie and Courtney’s daughter Penelope (Milan Aguilera), who are playing by — you guessed it — the pool (it seems as if Tom either never left the house where he grew up or he found another one remarkably like it). Only Yvonne has a freak-out, bursts out of the kitchen with a knife in her hand, threatens the kids if they play in the pool, and for good measure calls Annie “Meghan.” Courtney, who’s there to look after her daughter, captures all this on video with her digital camera and uploads it onto her computer, then threatens to send Melissa the clip to convince her that her mother-in-law is really not a fit person to be left around their daughters — only, though she’s white, she meets the fate usually reserved for the heroine’s African-American best friend who stumbles onto the truth about the villain’s plot but gets killed for her pains.
The finale occurs at the surprisingly large and nice house Yvonne has somehow acquired for herself and outfitted so she and Annie can live there together, just the two of them, as soon as she dispatches those inconvenient parents of hers. Yvonne has already knocked Tom down a flight of stairs, though he ends up hospitalized instead of dead, and at the end she picks Annie up from school and kidnaps her, taking her to the house she’s outfitted with a room for Annie that’s an exact duplicate of Meghan’s, down to Meghan’s old toys which Yvonne carefully preserved. She’s even had Annie wear an old black dress of Meghan’s, with a large white collar that when she has it on makes her look like a cross between a Salem witch and what the kid from The Omen would have looked like if he’d been a girl instead of a boy. Only Melissa figures out where Yvonne has taken Annie and goes to confront her. Things don’t go so well for Our Heroine at first — Yvonne surprises her and once again has a large kitchen knife in her hand with which she attacks Melissa and apparently draws blood — but at the end Melissa overpowers Yvonne, stabs her in the chest with her own knife, and gets away with Annie. At the end Melissa, Tom and Annie are reunited as a family — but Yvonne is also still alive, back at the mental hospital and still being looked after by the same African-American therapist who was so spectacularly unsuccessful with her in the first time. Oh, and did I tell you that along the way Yvonne has revealed to both Tom and Meghan that Tom’s dad didn’t just die in an “accident,” but she killed him with a blow to the back of the head with a baseball bat just as he was getting ready to leave her?
The direction by the “other” Danny Boyle and the script he wrote with Nick Barzini are coherent enough we’re not supposed to suspend disbelief through the wild coincidences and happenstances that drove the plot of Family Pictures, but what really saves Killer Grandma and gives it whatever entertainment value it has is the superb performance by Nana Visitor in the title role. One imdb.com reviewer compared her to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the horror films they made in the early 1960’s (jointly in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and severally, Davis in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Crawford in Strait-Jacket), and the praise is high but well earned even though tall, leggy, rail-thin Visitor looks less like Davis or Crawford than Anthony Perkins in the drag scenes in Psycho. She’s totally in command of her role, ingratiating and relatively normal when the script calls for her to appear so and vividly controlling in the Big Moments — and at the same time she doesn’t lapse into the raving madness so many actors of both (mainstream) genders fall into when called on to impersonate psychos. (I find from her list of previous credits that Visitor was in one of my all-time favorite Lifetime movies, Mini’s First Time from 2006, though in my comments on it I didn’t mention her role as the school principal in that delightful black comedy about a teenage girl who seduces her stepfather, then frames him for the murder of her mom and ends up as her high-school class’s valedictorian by arranging an “accident” for the boy who was supposed to have that honor.) She’s been on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and most of her credits are on series TV, but she is certainly an electrifying screen presence here and I have to give special acknowledgment to anyone who’d name her son after the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt!
[1] — Obviously using his middle initial so he doesn’t get
confused with the other Danny
Boyle, the Academy Award-winning director of Trainspotting, Slumdog
Millionaire, Steve Jobs and the
recently released Yesterday, an
odd fantasy in which only one person in the world remembers the Beatles.
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