Monthly Archives: September 2022

Retro Television Reviews: Fantasy Island 1.3 “The Prince/The Sheriff”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1996.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

Welcome to Fantasy Island!  Is everyone smiling?

Episode 1.3 “The Prince/The Sheriff”

(Directed by Phil Bontelli, originally aired on February 11th, 1978)

The third episode of Fantasy Island is about two men searching for a simpler way of life.

Peter D’Antonoli (Dack Rambo) is the prince of the nation of Andoli.  As Mr. Roarke explains it, Peter is on the verge of becoming one of the last true monarchs, someone who not only wears a crown but who sets governmental policy.  Peter has never known what it’s like to be one of the common people and he feels that he should give it a try before he takes power.

Mr. Roarke arranges for Peter to get a job on a fishing boat.  Apparently, there’s a small fishing village located near the Fantasy Island resort.  I’m just three episodes into the original series and I have to admit that I’m already confused about about how Fantasy Island operates.  The pilot and the first two episodes suggested that Fantasy Island was a magical resort that belonged exclusively to Mr. Roarke.  But, with this episode, it is revealed that there is a fishing village near the resort and that the blue collar fisherman resent all of the people who hang out at the resort.  So, is Fantasy Island actually a nation, one that has many different village and an economic class system?  Is Mr. Roarke the president?  Has Fantasy Island been invited to join the United Nations?  And why is the Fantasy Island fishing village full of people who look like they belong in a second remake of The Fog?  Is Fantasy Island near New England?  Is it off the coast of Maine?  Seriously, this is a confusing place.

Anyway, Mr. Roarke arranges for Peter to get a job on a fishing boat, where he befriends a fisherman named Jamie (Ed Begley, Jr.).  Jamie immediately notes that Peter must be new to the fishing industry because his hands don’t have any callouses.  Jamie explains that he’s been a fisherman his entire life.  (So, did Jamie grow up on the island?)  Peter learns about generosity from Jamie and about rejection from Chris Malone (Lisa Hartman).  Peter falls in love with Chris as soon as he meets her but Chris has lived a tough life and she doesn’t want to marry someone who is just a fisherman.  Peter struggles to explain that he’s actually a prince.  Chris doesn’t believe him.  Peter says that there are things more important than money.  It leads to a big argument but fear not!  Things work out for everyone.  Chis becomes a princess.  Peter learns humility.  And Jamie gets a new boat and remains trapped on the island….well, okay.  Things worked out for almost everyone.

Meanwhile, John Burke (Harry Guardino) is a tough New York cop who wants to go back to a time when there weren’t any liberal DA’s letting criminals out of the street.  He wants to be an old west marshal!  Mr. Roarke mentions that “the old west fantasy” is Fantasy Island’s top seller.  He takes Burke to a western town.  Burke asks about the people who live there.  “They’re not robots, like in that movie, are they?”  No, Mr. Burke, it’s not Westworld!  It’s Fantasy Island!

It turns out that the two men who Burke believes murdered his partner had a similar fantasy and they’re living in the town as well!  Marshal Burke sets out for revenge but, with the help of saloon owner Julie (Sheree North), he learns that upholding the law with mercy is more rewarding than seeking blind vengeance.  Burke and Julie leave the island but fear not.  Mr. Roarke is sure that someone else will show up and request the old west fantasy.  It’s their biggest seller, after all.

(So, Fantasy Island really was just like Westworld….)

The prince storyline was silly.  The old west storyline was also silly but Harry Guardino gave a pretty entertaining performance as John Burke.  This episode also featured a visit to the Fantasy Island disco, which I appreciated.  Why go to the old west when you can dance?

Next week …. more fantasies!

Non Fiction Book Review: The Nashville Chronicles by Jan Stuart

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 2000, Jan Stuart’s The Nashville Chronicles is a look at both the making and the legacy of one of the best films of the 70s, Robert Altman’s Nashville.

Starting with Joan Tewksbury’s fateful journey to Nashville to search for ideas for a screenplay for a film that Robert Altman wanted to make about the capitol of country music and ending with the details of a mercifully unrealized sequel, The Nashville Chronicles details just about everything one could want to know about the making of Altman’s film and it does so in an always entertaining fashion.  Jan Stuart’s love of the film is obvious but so is Stuart’s understanding of the film’s satirical take on politics, celebrity, and Americana.

Much like Altman’s film, Stuart’s book is free-wheeling look at a period of American culture, featuring a large and disparate group of characters. Stuart focuses on the collaborative nature of the film, emphasizing that the actors often brought their own ideas and, in some cases, issues to project.  Stuart interviewed almost every member of the cast who was still alive in 2000.  (The only person he couldn’t track down was Dave Peel, who played Bud Hamilton.)  The actors prove to be as interesting as the characters that they played and Stuart does a wonderful job of capturing not only their quirks but also how their own lives often informed their performances.  Ned Beatty emerges as a plain-spoken but intelligent artist while Henry Gibson is as droll as the character he played was calculating.  Keith Carradine talks about how his dislike of the character he was playing actually made his performance more effective.  Karen Black is wonderfully eccentric while Geraldine Chaplin provides an outsider’s view to the uniquely American experience of Nashville, both as a town and a movie.  The enigmatic Michael Murphy expertly straddles the line between the establishment and the counterculture while Thomas Hal Phillips predicts the next 50 years of American political history with the speeches that he wrote for the often heard but always unseen presidential candidate, Hal Phillip Walker.  And, throughout it all, Robert Altman oversees the production, a talented but mercurial director who could be both amazingly supportive and amazingly cold whenever he felt slighted.  Altman emerges as a genius who could be shockingly petty to those who he felt had disappointed him.

The book covers the filming of all the major moments from the film, including the prophetic finale.  The book also explores a proposed Nashville sequel, which would have featured all of the surviving characters ten years after the first film.  Haven Hamilton, for instance, would have followed in Hal Philip Walker’s political footsteps.  Reading about the proposed outline for the sequel, it’s hard not to feel that it’s a good thing that it never moved beyond the idea stage.  As Stuart’s book makes clear, Nashville was a once-in-a-moment success and not something that could be easily duplicated.  Nashville ended with one tragedy, one surprising act of heroism, and the birth of a new star.  It was the perfect ending and any attempt to continue the story would have just cheapened it.

The Nashville Chronicles is a fascinating look at a fascinating film.

Film Review: Vendetta (dir by Jared Cohn)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s a dangerous world out there, make no doubt about it.

William Duncan (Clive Standen) thought that his days of violence were behind him.  Sure, he did a tour of duty in the military.  And yes, he was trained how to kill a man.  In fact, he was trained how to kill dozens of men and he did just that as a part of his patriotic duty.  But that was the past.  Now, William lives in the suburbs of Atlanta and he’s got a pretty nice life.

Unfortunately, one day, William’s life falls apart, shortly after he picks up his 16 year-old daughter, Kat (Maddie Nichols), from softball practice.  William’s plan is to pick up his daughter, grab some food for dinner, and then head home.  Unfortunately, a gang led by Rory Fetter (Theo Rossi) has a different idea.  The time has come for Rory’s younger brother, Danny (Cabot Badsen), to be initiated into the gang.  At first, it seems like Danny doesn’t even want to join the gang but still, when he’s ordered to murder a random bystander, he does so.  That bystander happens to be Kat.

Danny’s arrested for the murder but he’s released due to the influence of his father, a powerful gangster named Donnie (Bruce Willis).  Having been failed by the legal system, William decides to put his military training to good use and get his vengeance.  At first, he’s armed with only his dead daughter’s softball bat.  Later, he joins up with an arms dealer named Dante (Thomas Jane) and the war truly begins.

It should also be noted that Dante is friends with a shady garage owner named Roach.  Roach is played by Mike Tyson.  Yes, that Mike Tyson.  Tyson doesn’t really get to do much as Roach.  His garage does serve as one of the film’s many battlegrounds but, for the most part, Tyson is something of a bystander.  It’s easy to see that the main reason he was included in the film was because it would inevitably cause at least a few potential viewers to say, “Hey, Mike Tyson’s in this!  Let’s watch!”  That said, even with his limited screen time, Mike Tyson has a surprisingly likable screen presence.  I don’t think that anyone will ever mistake Tyson for being an actor of great range but he does a good enough job here that it would be foolish for someone not to cast him in a bigger role in a future low-budget action flick.

As for Vendetta, it’s about as pulpy as pulp can get.  It’s an action/revenge flick that makes no excuse for being an action/revenge flick and, as a result, it’s difficult not to be entertained by it.  The story moves quickly, there aren’t really any slow spots, and the cast does well with their roles.  That includes Bruce Willis.  This, of course, is one of Willis’s final films.  Watching the films that were released after Willis revealed that he was retiring due to aphasia can feel a bit awkward as it’s obvious that the Willis who appeared in these films was quite a bit different from the Willis who appeared in Die Hard.  That said, Willis is effectively intimidating in Vendetta.  Even if he doesn’t display the wiseguy charm that was his trademark, Willis still has enough of his streetwise, tough guy screen presence that the viewers will be able to buy him as being a feared crime boss.

As far as 2022’s collection of Bruce Willis films go, Vendetta isn’t bad.  It’s maybe a smidgen below Gasoline Alley (which, as of this writing, is the best Willis film of 2022) but it’s a hundred times better than American Siege and A Day To Die.

Music Video of the Day: Dead Ringer For Love by Meat Loaf, featuring Cher (1981, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today would have been Meat Loaf’s 75th birthday.  Though he may no longer be with us, his music will live forever and so will his music videos.

In Dead Ringer For Love, Meat Loaf plays an amiable lunkhead who realizes that there is more to life than just beer and hanging out with his buddies at the local bar.  There is also love and, in this song and video, the object of his affection is played by Cher.

Interestingly, this song was originally written for a sitcom called Delta House, which was an attempt to spin Animal House into a television series.  If John Belushi had not been available or willing to play Bluto in that classic comedy, Meat Loaf was the second choice for the role.

Enjoy!

Vigilante (1982, directed by William Lustig)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1982 and New York City has gone to Hell.  While honest, hard-working people try to make a living and take care of their families, the streets are ruled by gangs and drug dealers.  The police and the legal system impotent in the face of intimidation and corruption.  Maybe it’s time for the citizens to take the streets back, by force if necessary.

That’s what Nick (Fred Williamson) and most of his friends believe.  Eddie Marino (Robert Forster) disagrees.  He says that people taking the law into their own hands will just lead to more violence and death.  The vigilantes will become just a bloodthirsty as the criminals.  While Eddie is debating policy with Nick, Eddie’s wife (Rutanya Alda) is threatening to call the police on a Che Guevara look-alike who she spots trying to set a gas station attendant on fire.  Eddie’s wife is stabbed.  His son is killed.  And when the man responsible is allowed to walk by a crooked judge, Eddie’s courtroom outburst leads to him being sent to jail.

Eddie spends 30 days in jail, fighting off predators and befriending a mysterious inmate named Rake (Woody Strode).  When Eddie is finally released, his traumatized wife no longer wants to be married to him but Eddie has found a new purpose in life.  Working with Nick, Eddie tracks down and murders the men who have destroyed his family.

One of the many films to be inspired by the success and enduring popularity of the original Death Wish, Vigilante is a classic of its kind.  Director William Lustig wastes no time in establishing New York City as being a graffiti-decorated war zone where good is fighting a losing war against evil and most of the victims are just innocent bystanders.  The New York of Vigilante looks even worse than it did in Lustig’s previous film, Maniac.  (Maniac’s Joe Spinell plays one a crooked lawyer in Vigilante.)  The action is brutal and bloody.  While Forster fights for his life in prison, the people who killed his son are allowed to run free.  It’s not subtle but, by the time Forster finally walks out of jail, you’ll be more than on his side and ready to see him get his revenge.  With his trademark intensity, Robert Forster is believable as someone who goes from aborhing to violence to being a stone cold killer who doesn’t even flinch when he shoots a defenseless man.  As Nick, Fred Williamson is his usual confident self.  Williamson may not have much range as an actor but he has such a forceful screen presence that he dominates any scene in which he appears.

Vigilante is a grim film, with Eddie ultimately going further than almost any other screen vigilante before him.  It’s also a deeply satisfying film because it appeals to everyone’s desire for revenge.  In the real world, vigilantes are often as dangerous as the people they’re trying to keep off the streets.  In the movies, though, they’re easy to root for.  They present easy and direct solutions to complex problems.  Even a film as dark as Vigilante works as a sort of wish fulfillment.  With crime on the rise and the constant news reports about innocent victims who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s easy to root for Nick and Eddie as it once was for Paul Kersey.

Retro Television Review: Hang Time 1.7 “Let’s Get Ready To Rumble” and 1.8 “The Candidate”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing Hang Time, which ran on NBC from 1995 to 2000.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

The season continues!

I hate to say it but this terrible theme song is starting to get stuck in my head.  Takin’ my shot …. something something something …. Hang Time …. flying like glockmock …. running with big screen tee ayyy …. Hang Time …. okay, those may not by the exact lyrics but that’s what it sounds like to me.

Episode 1.7 “Let’s Get Ready To Rumble”

(Directed by Howard Murray, originally aired on October 21st, 1995)

Just in case the viewer needed a reminder that this show is from the mid-90s, this episode opens with Sam lustfully comparing her boyfriend, Danny, to Mel Gibson.  Needless to say, Danny looks nothing like Mel Gibson but, at the same time, it also seems like he’s a bit more emotionally stable so I guess it all works out in the end.

This episode was all about relationships.  Mary Beth’s frustration with Chris’s refusal to act like a rich snob led to her being tempted by her childhood friend Charles Landingham (Trey Alexander).  Apparently, Charles used to be overweight but now he’s lost the weight and he wears a sweater over his shoulders and Mary Beth accepts a kiss from him.  Unfortunately, Julie sees Mary Beth kissing Charles and she now has a dilemma.  Should she tell Chris the truth or not?  Considering that Mary Beth and Charles are an adorable couple, a true friend would be encouraging them to get together.

Meanwhile, all the boys head over to Coach Fuller’s house to watch a Mike Tyson fight.  Unfortunately, this means that Danny has to break his regularly scheduled date with Sam.  He claims to be sick and then heads over to Fuller’s house.  However, Sam shows up at the house and it turns out that she’s a fight fan as well!  She gets so into the Tyson fight that she forgets to slap Danny for lying to her in the first place.

Eventually, Mary Beth tells Chris the truth and they have the most peaceful break-up ever.  They agree to be friends, which frees Chris up to date Julie.  It’ll be a relationship based not only on basketball but also the sound of the audience applauding every time one of them gets the ball in the basket.

As I’ve said before, Mary Beth is the only character to whom I can relate on this show because she’s the only character who doesn’t spend all of her time talking about basketball and who shops whenever she gets upset.  This was a good Mary Beth episode and it was the first to really give Megan Parlen a chance to show off her comedic skills.  Still, it’s hard not to be disappointed at how predictably the Chris and Julie relationship is playing out.  It seems obvious that Chris and Julie are going to be a fairly boring couple.  What are they going to do after basketball season ends?

Episode 1.8 “The Candidate”

(Directed by Howard Murray, originally aired on October 28th, 1995)

Mary Beth is running for school president on a platform of doing away with the Future Farmer’s Club and replacing it with the Gold Card Girls Club.  “Membership will be open to anyone, as long as you’re a girl, you have a gold card, and we all like you,” Mary Beth explains.  Having been profoundly moved by reading The Grapes of Wrath for English class, Michael runs against Mary Beth on a platform of saving the Future Farmer’s Club.  (Doesn’t this show take place in Indiana?  Isn’t every student at the school a member of the Future Farmer’s Club by default?)  Danny manages Mary Beth’s campaign.  Sam manages Michael’s campaign.  “I’m running on the issues,” Michael announces.

Oh, get over yourself.  It’s a student council election.  Saved By The Bell, California Dreams, and City Guys all featured the same stupid storyline.  So did Boy Meets World, if I remember correctly.  (“Hold on,” Topagna announced, “we still need to do something about the black mold in the cafeteria!”  Isn’t that the job of the adults?)  Eventually, after all of the usual nonsense that always happens in episodes about student council elections, Michael is elected but declines to accept the office because he’s ashamed of his campaign.  Mary Beth becomes president but promises to be the type of president that “Tom Joad would be proud of.”  Good luck with that.  IT’S JUST THE FREAKING STUDENT COUNCIL, PEOPLE!

While the school picks a new president, Chris and Julie continue their painfully dull courtship and Coach Fuller looks for date to a wedding.  Chris and Julie finally kissed at the end of the episode.  “Woooo,” the audience dutifully responded but even they didn’t sound particularly excited about it.

Anyway, this episode is almost as dumb as suggesting that a high school student is going to be obsessed with John Steinbeck.  To Hell with your grapes of wrath!

Book Review: The KGB Candidate by Owen Sela

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Two weeks ago, I returned to my project of going through all of the paperbacks that I inherited from my aunt and I read The KGB Candidate.

(My aunt, by the way, is fine.  She just moved to a new place and couldn’t take all of her books with her.)

Published in 1988, The KGB Candidate is a brisk read.  It opens with CIA agent Drew Ellis losing most of his men and his lover in Germany and then switches focus to the United States and a presidential election.  Looking to continue their time in the White House, the Republicans have nominated  a decent candidate who happens to be named after Abraham Lincoln but everyone knows that the Democrats have got the momentum.  However, the Democrats also have several candidates competing for the spot at the top of the ticket and, as the convention approaches, none of them has won enough delegates to claim the nomination outright.

Who will win the nomination?  Will it be the woman who announces early on that she has no interest in being vice president?  Will it be the veteran civil rights activist?  How about the dour, bow-tie wearing academic, the one who speaks about nuclear disarmament?  Will it be the veteran politician, the one who feels that it’s his turn to run?  Or will it be the young and charismatic dark horse, the one who no one initially gave much of a chance but who stunned the establishment by becoming a contender?

It’s an important question, not just because the winner of the nomination will probably win the election but also because one of the candidates is secretly pro-Russian!  KGB agent Boris Pomarev is determined to get his candidate into the White House.  He’s even stolen a computer program that can correctly predict how people are going to vote and what answers a candidate should give to the tough questions of the day.  However, Pomarev is responsible for the death of Drew Ellis’s team.  Along with wanting to protect democracy, Ellis is looking for revenge….

The KGB Candidate was an entertaining read.  Author Owen Sela does a good job with the action scenes and the characters are memorable without being particularly deep.  I have to admit that I was amused by the debate scene, in which all of the potential KGB candidates introduced themselves to the convention delegates.  Each candidate represented a different stereotype that most readers would associate with the Democratic Party and the American Left and one gets the feeling that Sela wasn’t particularly impressed with any of them.  Of course, in real life, there’s very little chance of any of us ever seeing a contested convention.  The primary system is designed to force each party to quickly coalesce around whoever has the momentum.  Still, contested conventions are always fun to read about.

For me, the most interesting part of the book dealt with the computer program that could predict who would win the election.  In the book, everyone is shocked that a program could do such a thing and I guess, in 1988, it might have been a shocking idea.  But today, that’s the sort of thing that people take for granted.  I remember that, all through 2016, all I heard was that Hillary Clinton was guaranteed to win because her entire campaign was based on data analysis and algorithms.  At the time, I thought that was kind of a hubristic way to run things and it turned out that I was right.  I also felt it was a bit of a depressing way to look at the world, if just because it assumed that people would always behave in the same way and that it wasn’t even necessary to actually listen to the voters or even ask for their votes.  Algorithms have their place but, in the end, people are more than just data points.

Here’s The Trailer For Smile

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

To be absolutely honest, I would probably be dismissive of the trailer for Smile if not for the effort that Paramount Pictures has put into promoting this damn thing.  Apparently, this weekend, they sent people out to sporting events and had them sit motionlessly in the stands and smile for the entire game.  Not only did it look creepy but it probably ruined the experience of everyone who was sitting near them.  Of course, the people sitting near them actually paid money to get good seats for the game.  Imagine spending a few hundred dollars, just to have to deal with this:

Or this:

I mean, seriously, that’s a bold move!  I thought re-releasing Morbius just because people on twitter were making fun of it was going to be the boldest studio move of 2022 but Paramount might take the title.  Now that we’ve annoyed you, come see our movie.  That’s an interesting gimmick.

Anyway, here’s the final trailer for Smile.  The movie comes out on the 30th.

HBO showcases The Last of Us Teaser Trailer!

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us was one of the first modern videogames to gain my younger cousin’s interest in playing. Although I finished it the normal difficulty, she was able to complete it on its hardest settings and went on to continue with the sequel. So, we’ve been looking forward to HBO’s Live Action adaptation. What I didn’t realize was that Craig Mazin was involved in this, whose work on Chernobyl was amazing. Mazin is handling the writing along with the original author, Neil Druckman.

The Last of Us takes place in a world torn apart, where Joel & Ellie (Pedro Pascal & Bella Ramsey, both featured in Game of Thrones) have a difficult mission to accomplish. The show looks as if it’s keeping most of the elements from the game. The Fireflies and the Clickers, they’re all there. The cast listing even includes some of the voice cast from the game. I’m curious to see how they’ll incorporate that into this.

The Last of Us is set to premiere next year, on HBO and HBO Max.