Daily Archives: February 22, 2024

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Highway to Heaven 1.22 “An Investment In Caring”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This week, Jonathan encourages everyone to violate federal law.

Episode 1.22 “An Investment In Caring”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on March 13th, 1985)

Helen Spencer (Eileen Heckart) is an annoying old busy body who lives in one of those charming city neighborhoods that are only found on shows like Highway to Heaven.  Even since her husband died, she has kept herself active by working as a cleaning lady at the Halstead Corporation, which is the same company that wants to not only tear down her neighborhood but also turn the local cemetery into a condo subdivision.

Fortunately, Helen’s new boarders just happen to be Jonathan Smith and Mark Gordon.  Jonathan encourages Helen to rally the neighbors to take a stand against Halstead.  He also encourages Paul Tarsten (Dane Clark), who was recently laid off from Halstead for being too old, to help Helen out.  With Jonathan’s guidance, Helen goes through the trash at Halstead, finds some stock reports that really should have been put through a shredder, and then use that insider information to buy and sell a bunch of stock until soon, she and her friends are the majority stockholders.

“Only in America,” Ms. Zabenko (Elsa Raven) exclaims not once but five times, just in case you were wondering how heavy-handed this episode was.

Helen is able to save her neighborhood, save the cemetery where her husband is buried, and also take over the company.  She also finds hints of romance with Paul, who is himself a widower.  Their mission accomplished, Jonathan and Mark leave town….

…. which is good because I don’t see anyway that Paul, Helen, and Ms. Zabenko aren’t eventually going to end up in federal prison.  Just about every piece of advice that Jonathan gave Helen led to her doing something illegal, from insider trading to corporate espionage to stealing from the office.  Only in America, Ms. Zabenko?  In America, we have laws against stock market manipulation.

This episode just irked me.  Whenever people talk about Highway to Heaven being an unrealistic and cheesy show, this is the type of episode that they’re thinking of.  It takes a lot to make a heartless corporation sympathetic but the overacted and rather smug neighborhood activists in this episode managed to do just that.  In previous episodes, Jonathan and Mark have appealed to businessmen to get them to change their ways.  In this episode, the head of Halstead isn’t given that opportunity.  Instead, Jonathan — acting on authority from GOD — encourages a bunch of people with no business experience and no way of knowing any better to commit a bunch of federal crimes.  Helen takes over the company but what does Helen know about running a company?  When Halstead goes bankrupt, a lot of people who had nothing to do with the former CEO’s plans will end up losing their jobs.  Way to go, God.

Finally, I should note that this episode begins with Helen’s former boarder telling her that he’s moving out because a voice in his head told him to move to Alaska.  It’s only because he leaves that Helen has the room to rent to Jonathan and Mark.  So, basically, promoting insider trading wasn’t enough for Jonathan.  He also had to ruin some poor schmuck’s life by telling him to move to a state that he knows nothing about.  Not since the Book of Enoch has an angel behaved so unethically.

14 Days of Paranoia #7: No Way Out (dir by Roger Donaldson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Trust no one in Washington would seem to be the message of this 1987 thriller.

Kevin Costner plays Lt. Commander Tom Farrell, a Naval Intelligence officer who is hailed as a hero after saving a shipmate who falls overboard.  In Washington, Tom is recruited by a friend from college, Scott Pritchard (Will Patton), to work for Secretary of Defense Brice (Gene Hackman).  Brice doesn’t trust the head of the CIA (played by future senator, Fred Dalton Thompson) and he wants Tom to serve as his mole within the service.  What Brice doesn’t know is that Tom is sleeping with Brice’s mistress, Susan Atwell (Sean Young).

Still, Brice does suspect that the woman with whom he is cheating is also cheating on him.  When he confronts her about it, their argument leads to him accidentally pushing Susan over an upstairs railing.  Pritchard, who is implied to be in love with Brice, takes charge of the cover-up and decides to push the story that Susan was killed by a possibly mythical Russian agent who is known only by the name “Yuri.”

Tom assists with the investigation of her death, both because he wants to know who killed Susan and also because he knows that there’s evidence in Susan’s apartment that could be manipulated to make him look guilty of the crime.  For instance, Susan took a picture of Tom shortly before her death.  The picture failed to develop but, through the use of what was undoubtedly cutting edge technology in 1987, Naval Intelligence is slowly unscrambling the picture.  For Tom, it’s a race against time to find the actual killer before the picture develops and he’s accused of both killing Susan and being Yuri.

Everyone has an agenda in No Way Out, from the ambitious Brice to the fanatical Scott Pritchard to the head of the CIA, who wants Brice to approve funding for a costly submarine.  Even the film’s nominal hero has an agenda, which has less to do with finding justice for Susan and everything to do with protecting himself and his future.  In fact, as is revealed in the film’s enjoyable if slightly implausible twist ending, some people in Washington have multiple agendas.  The film portrays Washington as being a place where, behind the stately facade, everyone is a liar and everyone is ultimately a pawn in someone else’s game.  If you have the right connections, you can even get away with murder.  Loyalty is rewarded until you’re no longer needed.

It’s an enjoyably twisty thriller, one that makes good use of the contrast between Kevin Costner’s All-American good looks and his somewhat shady screen presence.  The film introduces Costner as being a character who, at first glance, seems almost too good to be true and then spend the majority of its running time suggesting that is indeed the case.  Gene Hackman is well-cast as the weaselly cabinet secretary, as is Sean Young as the woman who links them all together.  In the end, though, the film is stolen by Will Patton, who plays Scott Pritchard as being someone who has unknowingly given his loyalty to a man who is incapable of returning it.  As played by Patton, Scott is an outsider who desperately wants to be an insider and who is willing to do just about anything to accomplish that goal.  He’s a version of Iago who never turned against Othello but instead devoted all of his devious tricks to trying to cover up the murder of Desdemona.

Even with an over-the-top final twist, No Way Out holds up well as a portrait of how the lust for power both drives and corrupts our political system.

14 Days of Paranoia:

  1. Fast Money (1996)
  2. Deep Throat II (1974)
  3. The Passover Plot (1976)
  4. The Believers (1987)
  5. Payback (1999)
  6. Lockdown 2025 (2021)

Retro Television Review: In The Lion’s Den 1.1 “The Pilot”

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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing In The Lion’s Den, which aired on CBS in 1987.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

Episode 1.1 “Pilot”

(Dir by James Burrows, originally aired on September 4th, 1987)

When she lived in New York City, Dana (Wendy Crewson) had an apartment, a boyfriend, and a job working as a producer on a very successful game show.  But then she got fired and everything changed.  Now, she has moved to San Antonio so she can work as the new associate producer of Lion’s Den, a PBS program featuring a lion puppet named Maynard.

The man behind the puppet is Keith (Dennis Boutsikaris), an infamously temperamental actor who, every day, announces that he’s quitting show business and storms off the set.  Previously, it was up to Jerry (Jack Blessing) to coax Keith into returning to the set and shooting the show.  But now that Jerry has a job with Steven Spielberg, it’s up to Dana to keep Keith happy.

Despite having hired her, Keith does not know who Dana is when she shows up on the set.  He proceeds to re-interview her for the job, which means leering at her legs and trying to convince her to hug the puppet.  Keith, I think, was meant to come across as being a charming rogue but, every time he talked to Dana, I had flashbacks to interviewing for jobs after college and all of the guys who stared at my chest and legs while I explained my passion for art history.  Keith is a creep and the fact that he’s only nice when he’s talking through Maynard does nothing to change that.

It’s an eventful first day for Dana.  One of the show’s sponsors (played by Fred Applegate) offers to allow Dana to rent his house but it soon turns out that he’s a bit of a sleaze.  A neurotic writer (Brian Backer) fears that he’s going to lose his job because he wrote a script about football.  (“I hate football!” Keith yells.  Good luck living in Texas.)  Proving the everyone had to start somewhere, Marcia Gay Harden plays the receptionist who helps Dana get out of having to talk to her ex-boyfriend.  (“She’s meetin’ Willie Nelson.”)  Harden plays the role with a Texas accent and, while it’s definitely exaggerated, she does a good job with it overall.  (A quick check with Wikipedia revealed that, though born in California, Harden spent time in Texas when she was growing up and graduated from the University of Texas.)  Eventually, Keith throws his daily tantrum and Dana has to find her own way to keep him from quitting show business.

The main problem with the pilot is that Keith is too much of a jerk.  It’s hard to really care about someone who throws a tantrum every day, is abusive to his coworkers, and how uses an adorable puppet to sexually harass a woman who hasn’t even figured out where she’s going to be living in her new city.  Personally, I think Dana should have quit as soon as Maynard demanded a hug.

And audiences agreed.  This pilot aired once and that was it for In The Lion’s Den.

4 Shots From 4 Luis Buñuel Films: Special Luis Bunuel Edition

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

Today is the 124th birthday of the great Spanish surrealist filmmaker, Luis Bunuel!  That means that it is now time for….

4 Shots From 4 Luis Buñuel Films

Los Olivados (1950, dir by Luis Bunuel, DP: Gabriel Figueroa)

Viridiana (1961, dir by Luis Bunuel, DP: José F. Aguayo)

The Exterminating Angel (1962, dir by Luis Buñuel, DP: Gabriel Figueroa)

Simon of the Desert (1965, dir by Luis Bunuel, DP: Gabriel Figueroa)

Scene That I Love: Kyle MacLachlan in Dune

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to the one and only Kyle MacLachlan!

Today’s scene that I love comes from MacLachlan’s film debut, 1984’s Dune.  MacLachlan played Paul Atriedes in David Lynch’s unfairly maligned film and his otherworldly vibe made him as perfect for the role as he would later be for Agent Dale Cooper in Lynch’s Twin Peaks.  As good as Timothee Chalamet was in the more recent adaptations of Frank Herbert’s novel, I still feel that MacLachlan is the superior Paul.

In this scene, Paul confronts the people who have been trying to destroy him and he proves his worth in an armed duel with Sting.

Music Video of the Day: HMFHM by Adi Ulmansky (2018, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s music video is this melancholy mood piece from Adi Ulmansky.

For the record, HMFMH stands for Hate Myself For Hating Myself.  Hey, we’ve all been there!  I was there just three weeks ago!  Fortunately, this week has been a marked improvement.

Enjoy!