Monthly Archives: April 2022

Lisa Marie’s Week In Television: 3/27/22 — 4/2/22

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I spent most of this week passed out, to be honest.  Oscar Sunday took a lot out of me.  Here’s a few thoughts on what I did watch:

The Academy Awards (Sunday Night, ABC)

I wrote about the Oscars here.

Allo Allo (Sunday Night, PBS)

Could the British airmen escape from floating down a canal and meeting a submarine?  It sounds like a good idea but …. no, of course it’s not going to work.  Good moaning, indeed!

American Idol (Monday Night, ABC)

Hollywood week!  The genre challenge!  It was boring.  The indie folk group had some of the most annoying singers that I’ve ever seen.  I’m really hoping that the girl who keeps bragging about how “weird” she is will get eliminated early.  If you’re truly weird, you don’t have to beg people to notice.

Baywatch Hawaii (Hulu)

On Wednesday, I finally watched episode two of the second and final season of Baywatch Hawaii.  JD wasn’t being a team player so Sean briefly suspended him and then asked him to help with a rescue.  JD learned an important lesson about putting aside your own concerns and taking one for the team.  Bleh.  Meanwhile, the father of an injured jet skier tried to sue Baywatch Hawaii but then he met the couple who was nearly killed by his son’s carelessness and he dropped his lawsuit.  Yay!  Lessons were learned all around.

On Thursday, I watched episode three.  Jenna was determined to shut down Baywatch and sell the property to the Mafia.  Sean was determined to raise the money necessary to pay his bills.  Fortunately, Jason and Zack saved the gangsters from drowning and, as a result, Baywatch lived to see another day.  You can’t put someone out of business after they save your life.  It’s the Mafia code.

The Brady Bunch (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

All four of Sunday’s episodes centered around the kids playing baseball.  Greg wanted to drop out of school to pursue a career in the majors so Mike used a baseball bat to break his kneecaps.  That seems a little extreme to me but the important thing is that Greg stayed in school.

Couples Court With The Cutlers (Weekdays, OWN)

I watched two episodes on Monday afternoon.  I was too busy making jokes about Will and Jada Smith someday appearing on the show to actually pay that much attention.

The Dropout (Hulu)

I reviewed the latest episode of The Dropout here!

Full House (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

Personally, I don’t see what was so bad about Danny Tanner wanting to have a clean house.  In all four the episodes that aired last Sunday on MeTV, people gave him a hard time for being compulsively neat but seriously, who would want to live in a dirty house?  For instance, while I was watching Full House, I stepped outside for a few minutes and accident stepped on a rock while barefoot.  Once I came back in, I discovered that the den floor had a trail of bloody footprints on it, much like a totally horrific crime scene.  Needless to say, I was not happy about this turn of events so, once I managed to step bleeding, I spent a few hours scrubbing the floor.  It was just the right thing to do.

The Girl From Plainville (Hulu)

I wrote about the first three episodes of Hulu’s latest miniseries here!

King of the Hill (Weekday Afternoons, FXX)

I watched one episode on Monday.  Desperate to make money so that he could afford some nicer clothes, Bobby first tried to get a legitimate job but eventually, he turned to panhandling.  Hank, needless to say, did not approve of his own son being a bum for fun.  He also didn’t approve of the other panhandlers, who were all basically rich kids just pretending to need the money.  They even forced Hank’s favorite homeless man, Spongey, to move to a different spot!  Fortunately, it all worked out in the end and Spongey hopefully got the money he needed.

Last Man Standing (Sunday, Newsnation)

I swear, this show is inescapable.  It’s on at least one channel every hour of every day.  I guess it kind of makes sense.  It’s a sitcom that didn’t really require too much focus on the part of the viewer and, as a result, it makes for nicely acceptable and inoffensive background noise.  Myself, whenever I see this show, I find myself relating to the middle daughter, the one who pretends to be self-centered but is secretly nicer than everyone else.  Anyway, I watched three episodes on Sunday and I don’t remember a thing about any of them, other than one featured the mom and the older sisters trying on wedding dresses and talking about how silly the world was.  That’s just the type of show that Last Man Standing was.

The Love Boat (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

Debbie Reynolds boarded the ship and briefly pretended to be Dr. Bricker’s nurse.  I’m not sure it’s a good idea for a doctor to agree to allow anyone to “pretend to be a nurse.”  I mean, a nurse still has a lot of real responsibility.  I assume everything worked out in the end.  To be honest, I was busy getting ready for the Oscars so I didn’t pay much attention to the show this week.

Open All Hours (Sunday Night, PBS)

Arkwright somewhat desperately tried to convince Nurse Gladys Emmanuel that he wasn’t a monster who is holding Granville hostage.  The nurse (a real one, this time!) was too clever for him.

Saved By The Bell (Sunday Morning, MeTV)

I woke up on Sunday morning and I watched the Christmas episode!  That was the one where Zack and his mom allowed a homeless man and his daughter to move in and then they never mentioned them ever again.  Kind of a strange episode.  I’ve always been worried about what happened to the man and his daughter after the final credits.  It just seems like having two strangers living in the house is something that would have come up again in a future episode.

Survivor (Wednesday Night, ABC)

I wrote about the latest episode of Survivor here!

Talking Dead (Sunday Night, AMC)

Chris did his best to make this week’s episode of The Walking Dead more interesting than it actually was.  Good for him.

The Walking Dead (Sunday Night, AMC)

I wrote about the latest episode of The Walking Dead here!

TV Review: The Girl From Plainville Episodes 1-3 (dir by Lisa Cholodenko and Zetna Fuentes)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

With The Dropout scheduled to air its final episode next week, Hulu is moving on to another 8-hour miniseries about another young blonde woman who was at the center of a media firestorm.  The Girl From Plainville stars Elle Fannie as Michelle Carter, a teenager who was convicted of more or less goading her “boyfriend,” Conrad Roy (played by Colton Ryan, who was one of the few good things about Dear Evan Hansen) into killing himself.

It was a case that got a lot of attention and Michelle was, for a few months, everyone’s favorite heartless villain.  She was eventually convicted of manslaughter and, after several appeals, was eventually sentenced to 15 months in prison.  She served 11 and is currently free.  She’s 25 years old and has already experienced not only prison but also being briefly the most hated person in the country.  And yet, for all the attention that she received, no one has ever been able to determine just why exactly she told Conrad Roy that he should kill himself or why she went as far as to order him to do so, even after he said he had changed his mind.  There was a lot of speculation that Conrad perhaps thought that he and Michelle had a suicide pact, one that Michelle didn’t follow through on.  It’s also undeniable that, after Conrad’s suicide, Michelle made herself the center of attention.  Before her final text messages to Conrad were discovered, Michelle organized a charity softball game in his memory.  Of course, she held the game in her hometown instead of Conrad’s and apparently, she went out of her way not to involve any of Conrad’s friends or family in her efforts.  Could Michelle have pressured Conrad to kill himself just so she could use his death to be the center of everyone’s attention?

The first three episodes of The Girl From Plainville dropped on Hulu earlier this week and they certainly suggest that Michelle could be capable of doing it all for the attention.  At the same time, they also suggest that Michelle herself probably didn’t truly understand what she did or why she did it.  As played by Elle Fanning and Colton Ryan, both Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy come across as two people who didn’t have much of a connection with reality.  Conrad, or Coco as his friends and family call him, wants to escape a home life that is dominated by the constant bickering between his divorced parents.  He’s at his happiest when he gets a summer job working on a fishing boat and he’s miserable when he has to return to the “real” world, where he’s anxious around people his own age and he’s constantly being used as a pawn in his mother and father’s never ending battles.  Meanwhile, Michelle is so detached that she has to watch an episode of Glee in order to come up with something to say after Conrad’s suicide.  Conrad’s family is earthy, loud, and working class while Michelle’s family is reserved and wealthy but both families have raised children who feel like permanent outsiders.  Indeed, it seems almost preordained that they would eventually find each other and both Colton Ryan and Elle Fanning do a good job of bringing Conrad and Michelle to life.

That said, as I watched the first three episodes of The Girl from Plainville, I did find myself wondering if there was anything more to say about this case.  After the endless news coverage, one Lifetime movie, one HBO special, and countless “ripped from the headlines” episodes of Law & Order: SVU, are there any new insights left to be gleaned from the story of Michelle and Conrad?  With a story this terrible, one’s natural tendency is to search for a deeper meaning but is there really one there?  What if, for all the speculation, Michelle really was just a heartless monster who manipulated Conrad into suicide because she knew she could?  In short, is there enough here to really justify spending 8 hours with someone like Michelle Carter?

I guess we’ll find out over the upcoming few weeks.

Music Video of the Day: (Forever) Live and Die by Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark (1986, directed by Leslie Libman and Larry Williams)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today’s music video of the day is the video for one of OMD’s most underrated songs, (Forever) Live and Die.  It’s a performance clip, along with a few shots that incorporate the city and the beach.  The 80s were a good time for videos that featured the members of New Wave bands walking through seemingly deserted European cities.  A few years after the release of this video, INXS perfected the style with their video for Never Tear Us Apart.

There are two directors credited for this director.  Leslie Libman is still directing, though mostly for television shows like NCIS and Bull.  Larry Williams also directed the video for OMD’s Shame.

Enjoy!

Film Review: The Bubble (dir by Judd Apatow)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Meh.

The Bubble is the latest film from Judd Apatow.  Taking place during the first year of the COVID pandemic, it follows a small group of actors as they attempt to make the sixth installment of the Cliff Beasts franchise.  The spoiled, pampered, and pretentious actors find themselves isolated, not allowed to go anywhere other than the set or the hotel.  The film becomes a disaster as the actors are driven mad by all the rules and the inconvenience that comes along with trying to make a film in the middle of the global pandemic.  When the studio hires a security team to keep anyone from escaping, things get only dumber.

Even by the standards of what we’ve come to expect from Judd Apatow, The Bubble is a notably messy and self-indulgent film.  It’s a bit of a shame really because there’s much about the Pandemic that not only deserves to be satirized but also needs to be satirized.  For much of society, satire will be an important step on the road back to sanity.  Unfortunately, the humor in The Bubble often falls flat because Apatow doesn’t seem to really be sure what his main target is.  Is he targeting COVID hysteria?  Is he targeting the pampered rich people who treated the pandemic like a two-year vacation while people who actually lived paycheck-to-paycheck were risking their health just so they could pay their bills?  Is he targeting bad action movies or pretentious indie directors or actors who think that the world revolves around them?  When Maude Apatow shows up as a TikTok star who has been given a role because she has 2,000,000 followers, is Apatow aiming at the shallowness of social media or is he poking fun at the older generation that can’t understand the kids and their wild and wacky ways?  Apatow seems to be going after everything and everyone but, at the same time, he also expects us to care about these characters when they start demanding to be allowed to leave the set.

The film’s action doesn’t really follow any sort of real storyline.  Instead, it feels like a collection of skits, all piled on top of each other and all dragging on for a bit too long.  Though The Bubble is shorter than the average Apatow film, it’s still over two hours long.  After the first hour, the film suddenly becomes obsessed with random dance scenes.  Usually, I love random dance scenes but, in this case, there’s really no humor or point to them beyond saying, “Wow, these people suck at dancing.”  It’s funny the first time but, by the fourth time, it starts to feel a bit lazy.  The film is like the improv student who, instead of building on the situation and working with his scene partners, just shouts out whatever pops into his head and begs the audience for a laugh.  The film does end on what would be a clever touch if not for the fact that it’s all pretty much lifted from the final scenes of Tropic Thunder.

Lest anyone think that I’m totally trashing the film, I did chuckle a few times.  There’s a recurring bit with Kate McKinnon’s studio exec constantly being at either the beach or on safari.  That made me laugh.  And Keegan-Michael Key, as an actor who has written a spiritual guide, delivers the majority of his lines with just the right amount of self-importance.  For the most part, though, The Bubble falls flat.  This is not the Netflix film to watch this weekend.

Music Video of the Day: All She Wants Is by Duran Duran (1988, directed by Dean Chamberlain)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today’s music video of the day is from the Golden Age of MTV, back when MTV still played music videos and when music videos themselves were more than just a clip of the band performing.  Admittedly, you can see the influence of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer here, though All She Want Is would hardly be the first or the last video to be at least partially inspired by the look of Gabriel’s video.

The video was directed by the band’s favorite photographer, Dean Chamberlain and filming took nearly a month.  Because of the band’s schedule, they could only be present for a limited number of days.  Hence, masks were made of each band members and then those masks where placed on mannequins who stood in for the band.  Stop motion animation was used in several scenes.  

Needless to say, this video took a lot of time and effort but it was rewarded with the VMA for “Most Innovative” video.

Enjoy!