Yearly Archives: 2022

Spring Break on the Lens: You Get Me (dir by Brent Bonacorso)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ah, the beach.

The beach is a beautiful and fun place and the perfect location to celebrate a spring or summer break.  But beware of getting carried away with your youthful revelries because it can lead to complications that will follow you into the fall.  And those complications can be deadly….

BLEH!

Okay, sorry for all the drama.  I’m just trying to make myself feel some sort of enthusiasm for reviewing the 2017 Netflix film, You Get Me.  You Get Me is technically not a spring break movie but it does take place on the beach and it does feature a moderate amount of drinking, drug-taking, and partying so, it’s close enough.  It also features a cast of 20-something actors cast as high school students.  Some are more believable than others.

Basically, dumb and dull teenager Tyler (Taylor John Smith) is having the best summer of his life because he has a girlfriend named Ali (Halston Sage), who he is totally in love with.  (Ali could probably do better but whatever.  Everyone makes mistakes in high school.)  Tyler is also frustrated because Ali wants to wait before having sex with him and she also doesn’t understand why Tyler has been so hesitant to introduce her to his dysfunctional family.  When Tyler goes to a party and runs into a guy from Ali’s past, he learns that Ali used to be much wilder.  Angry that Ali hasn’t been honest with him, big dumb Tyler gets drunk and runs off with Holly (Bella Throne), a girl who he has only known for an hour.  They go dancing.  Holly offers Tyler a pill.  Tyler isn’t sure he’s ready for that.  “You swallow, I swallow,” Holly tells him.  Tyler and Holly spend a passionate weekend together but, afterwards, Tyler and Ali get back together, with Ali promising that she’ll tell Tyler everything about her past.  “No more secrets,” Tyler agrees, despite the fact that he’s now keeping a secret of his own.

Fortunately, Holly was only visiting for the summer and it’s not like Tyler will ever see her again so …. OH MY GOODNESS, LOOK WHO JUST SHOWED UP AT TYLER’S HIGH SCHOOL!  Holly now goes to the same school as Tyler and her new best friend is Ali!  Tyler asks Holly not to tell Ali anything about their weekend together.  Holly, however, has stopped taking her meds (seriously, that’s a plot point) and has decided that if she can’t have Tyler, no one will.  Soon, Holly is claiming to be pregnant and serving peanut-laced smoothies to people with food allergies.  Have you ever noticed how people in movies like this always have a best friend who suffers from a food allergy?

I’m probably making You Get Me sound more fun than it actually is.  It’s actually an extremely bland movie and a surprisingly tame one.  At her best, Bella Thorne is less an actress and more an agent of chaos.  She gets a few opportunities to be enjoyably evil in You Get Me but the script, for whatever reason, often seems to be more concerned with boring old Tyler.  Perhaps if Taylor John Smith and Halston Sage had at least a little bit of romantic chemistry, we would care about what happens to Tyler and Ali but they don’t.  Since they don’t really seem to be that into each other, it’s a little bit hard to get upset when Holly comes between them.

The beach, I will say, looked lovely.  And I really liked Holly’s house.  And, as I mentioned earlier, there were a few moments when Bella Thorne’s demented performance brought some life to the anemic proceedings.  But, for the most part, You Get Me is forgettable.  It did not get me.

Music Video of the Day: Wind Beneath My Wings, covered by Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwoʻole (2022, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It must have been cold there in my shadow
To never have sunlight on your face
You were content to let me shine
You always walked a step behind

I was the one with all the glory
You were the one with all the strain
A beautiful face without a name
A beautiful smile to ease my pain

Did you ever know that you’re my hero
And everything I would like to be?
I can fly higher than an eagle
You are the wind beneath my wings
You are the wind beneath my wings

I ke iʻa po ke iʻa au me oʻe
Ke ia po ua hoʻi ma I au
He loa ka helena ma ke a la hele
E huli wahi ma ke iʻa au

Mau popo au ua i ke hoʻi
Ka home iloko kuʻu puʻu wai
Uʻa hoʻi mai iʻau ke i ke nei au
Ma oli au au ana hou
Ke mau popo He Hawai’i au
Ke mau popo He Hawai’i au
You are the wind beneath my wings
Ooo ooo oo oo oo
You are the wind beneath my wings
Ke mau popo He Hawaiʻi au

Spring Break On The Lens: Shag (dir by Zelda Barron)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the setting of the 1989 film, Shag: The Movie!

We know that we’re in South Carolina because everyone is speaking with the type of overbaked Southern accents that you only hear in the movies.  And you know it’s the beach because of all the sand, the bathing suits, and the spring breakers.  Everyone’s listening to that rock and roll music.  Everyone’s dancing.  There’s a lot of Confederate flags around, mostly because the movie was made in the 80s and it’s taking place in the South.  If the movie were made today, it would probably take place in New Jersey and everyone would be debating whether or not Christopher Columbus was a hero or not.

Though the movie was made in 1989, it takes place in 1963.  We know that the movie takes place in 1963 because everyone in the movie keeps mentioning how it’s 1963.  One character mentions having sexual fantasies about President Kennedy, which scandalizes all of her friends.  Another character won’t stop talking about how much he enjoyed Paul Newman’s performance in The Hustler.  (The Hustler came out in 1961, though, so I think the dude needs to get with the times and watch Tom Jones.)  Everyone’s dancing the Shag.  Of course, since this is a film about how innocent the world was in 1963, there’s no talk of the growing American presence in Vietnam or anything like that.  This is the 1963 of the popular imagination, the 1963 that one visualizes after watching a hundred movies about spring break in the early 60s.

Anyway, Shag follows four friends as they have a wild week in Myrtle Beach.  They’re recent high school graduates.  Melaina (Bridget Fonda) is the wild preacher’s daughter.  Louanne (Paige Hannah) is the responsible one, who wears horn-rimmed glasses.  Pudge (Annabeth Gish) is the friend who needs better friends or, at the very least, friends who won’t give her a cruel nickname.  Carson (Phoebe Cates) is the responsible girl who is about to marry the level-headed Harley (Tyrone Power, Jr.)  After telling their parents that their going to Ft. Sumter to learn about the Civil War, they instead head down to Myrtle Beach.  Melania enters a beauty contest.  Pudge enters a shag contest with Chip (Scott Coffey).  Carson finds herself tempted by Chip’s friend, the Yale-bound Buzz (Robert Rusler).  And Louanne is tempted by Harley, who eventually comes to Myrtle Beach himself to try to understand why Carson is being so irresponsible.

There aren’t really many surprising moments to be found in Shag.  From the minute that we first see Carson trying on her wedding dress, we know that there’s no way she’s still going to be engaged by the time the movie comes to its conclusion.  By that same token, we also know that Melaina is not going to be as wild as she tries to present herself as being and that Pudge is going to find her confidence and that Louanne is eventually going to let her hair down, if just for a few minutes.  It’s a predictable movie but the cast is likable and there’s a lot of dancing, which is always a plus as far as I’m concerned.  Admittedly, Cates and Rusler are a bit bland as the main couple.  Instead, Annabeth Gish and Scott Coffey are the cast stand-outs.  I also have to say that I really liked the performance of Tyrone Power, Jr.  Harley is kind of a thankless role but Power manages to make him at least a little sympathetic.  At the very least, Carson doesn’t come across like a fool for considering him as a possible husband.

Shag is a likeable film, even if it’s not exactly groundbreaking.  And did I mention that there’s dancing?

Music Video of the Day: Heaven is Here by Florence + The Machine (2022, dir by Autumn de Wilde)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Enjoy!

Oh bring your salt, bring your cigarette
Draw me a circle and I’ll protect
Heaven is here if you want it

Oh bring your boy, bring your bottle
Open your mouth pour it down his neck
Heaven is here if you want it

And all of the fish, let them flounder
I went to the water drank every drop
I’ll turn your sea to a desert

More catholic taste than the devil
All gilded and golden yes I’m your girl
Hell if it glitters I’m going And I ride
In my red dress And time stretches endless
With my gun in my hand
You know I always get my Man

And every song I wrote
Became an escape rope
Tied around my neck
To pull me up to heaven

Band of the Hand (1986, directed by Paul Michael Glaser)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This place is Florida.  The time is the 80s.  Five juvenile delinquents have been given a chance to earn their freedom.  All they have to do is go down to the Everglades and train with Indian Joe (Stephen Lang), a no-nonsense Vietnam veteran who is determined to teach them not only survival sills but also how to work together as a team.  But Joe is interested in more than just reforming a group of youthful troublemakers.  He wants to turn them into a crime-fighting team who can help clean up the most dangerous neighborhood in Miami.  When Joe and delinquents move into and refurbish a previously condemned building, they get the attention of both the local drug kingpin (James Remar) and his main enforcer (Laurence Fishburne).

Band of the Hand is very much a film of its time, not only in its fashion and music choices but also in its full-on embrace of the war on drugs and the idea that the best way to clean up the streets is for vigilantes to do it on their own.  The film was produced by Michael Mann and, as directed by former Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser, the film has the look of an episode of Miami Vice.  That might be because the film itself was originally meant to be a pilot for a television show.  When the networks passed on it, it was released to theaters instead and advertised as being “from the maker of Miami Vice.”    The movie never escapes its television origins.  Things start strong in the Everglades, with Lang proving himself to be a master of glowering and the young delinquents struggling to not only survive Lang’s training but also resist the temptation to kill each other.  It’s less interesting once the action moves to Miami and it becomes Death Wish 3 without the blood or Charles Bronson.  The scenes with the young men goofing around are an awkward fit with the scenes of Remar and Fishburne terrorizing the neighborhood.

Band of the Hand is still worth watching if you want to see some familiar faces early in their careers.  John Cameron Mitchell and Leon both score early roles as two of the delinquents-turned-crime fighters and Lauren Holly plays the romantic interest who is inevitably ends up with the bag guys.  James Remar was always a good villain and Laurence Fishburne channels both his previous performance in Death Wish II and his future performance in King of New York.  It’s a good cast, even if no one really breaks free from the production’s television origins.

The idea of creating a show about a special unit of young crime fighters who battle drug pushers was one that Mann didn’t abandon.  The final episode of Miami Vice was essentially an unsold pilot that followed many of the same plot beats as Band Of the Hand.  (It also didn’t lead to a television series, though some might argue that 21 Jump Street took the same idea and ran with it.)  As for director Paul Michael Glaser, he would later do a much better job with The Running Man.

Spring Break On The Lens: The Real Cancun (dir by Rick de Oliveira)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Remember The Real Cancun?

This 2003 film tells the story of 16 good-looking and not particularly intelligent college students who go to Cancun for spring break.  For 8 days, they all live in the same beach house and they get to know each other.  They drink.  They flirt.  A few of them hook up but perhaps not as many as you would expect.  The dorky virgin dude says that he just wants to see “boobies” and then gets drunk off of one shot.  Two platonic friends debate whether they should take their relationship to the next level.  The women wear bikinis.  The men wear speedos.  There are bare boobs and behinds galore.  Snoop Dogg makes a special guest appearance.  One spring breaker get stung by a jelly fish so her new roommate pours a cup of urine on her ankle.  Good thing he had already had ten beers that morning!  What fun!

If this sounds like a typical spring break film, that’s because it is a typical spring break film but with one big difference.  It was produced by the people behind MTV’s The Real World and, as such, the 16 spring breakers are sold as being real people who are spontaneously acting like a bunch of movie characters.  In 2003, reality tv was still a relatively exotic concept and this film was an attempt to take the genre’s cheap aesthetic to the cinematic level.  Even more importantly, it was an attempt to duplicate the success of Girls Gone Wild, without actually admitting to being inspired by that sleazy enterprise.  As such, there’s a lot of nudity but there’s a strange lack of actual sex.  There’s a lot of drinking but there’s not much drunkenness.  It’s an oddly tame look at spring break, one that promises debauchery but which doesn’t deliver anything that would have kept the film out of theaters or off the cable networks.  I got more wild on my spring breaks than anyone in this film and I don’t even drink.

The film’s “stars” are all pretty bland and it’s not a surprise that, with one exception, none of them have appeared in anything other than The Real Cancun.  (That one exception is Laura Ramsey, who went on to have a somewhat busy acting career after appearing as herself in this film.)  The film manages to make nudity boring.  Seen today, The Real Cancun works best as a time capsule, largely because it was filmed at a time when there was no social media and, even more importantly, no phones.  Everyone is attracted to the crew and their bulky film cameras because there aren’t any other cameras around to record them and make them famous.  Today, anyone can make their own Real Cancun and post it to YouTube.  In 2003, if you wanted a shot at that type of fame, you had to audition and be selected to appear in a “documentary.”

Apparently, The Real Cancun was meant to be the first part of a Real World cinematic franchise.  The first Jackass film had come out the previous year so MTV was enthusiastic about producing cheap reality movies.  However, The Real Cancun was such a huge flop at the box office that it killed those plans.  There would be other Jackass films, of course.  But the Real World Cinematic Universe imploded as soon as it began.  And for that, we should probably be thankful.