Daily Archives: May 9, 2024

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 2.9 “The Secret”

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’s in trouble and so is the audience.

Episode 2.9 “The Secret”

(Directed by William Claxton, originally aired on November 27th, 1985)

This is an odd episode.

While heading to visit yet another one of Mark’s former cop buddies, Jonathan stops the car at a country store.  He spots a young man being bullied by three rednecks.  Jonathan politely asks the rednecks to back off.  When the main redneck tries to attack Jonathan, Jonathan responds by punching the guy out.

UH-OH, JONATHAN’S BROKEN A RULE!  He immediately gets summoned back to Heaven for a disciplinary hearing and, as a result, he’s not in the majority of this episode.

I’m going to assume that Landon had something else going on that caused him to skip out on the majority of this episode.  (This was also the first episode of the series to be directed by someone either than Landon or Victor French.)  Still, having Jonathan throw a punch seems out-of-character.  Over the course of the first two seasons, Jonathan has dealt with a lot of bullies and usually, he just uses his powers to make their car break down or to make them trip over a branch.  The Boss has never had a problem with that so you have to wonder why Jonathan didn’t just make the bully’s car radiator start to overheat or something.  As well, it seems like Jonathan was acting in self-defense and to protect the guy who was being bullied.

Anyway, the important thing is that Mark has to visit his friend on his own.  Wes Fowler (Barry Jenner) has been married to Carol Fowler (Linda Miller) for nearly 18 years.  When they first married, Carol told Wes that she couldn’t have children and, as a result, they decided to adopt a young girl that they named Heather.  Shortly after adopting Heather, Carol did get pregnant and gave birth to Shelley.  Having recently turned 18, Heather (played by Leslie Bega) is now curious about who her birth mother was.  A little research leads to her discovering that her birth mother is …. CAROL!

Carol explains that Heather’s father was an ex-boyfriend who left town as soon as he discovered that Carol was pregnant.  When Carol married Wes, she wanted to adopt the daughter she abandoned so she lied about not being able to get pregnant so that Wes would agree to the adoption.  When Wes finds out about this, he gets angry and, along with Shelley (played by a young Shannen Doherty), he moves out of the house.

Can Mark put this family back together again?  Of course, he can.  And you better believe Jonathan returns to Earth during the show’s final moments.  This is Highway to Heaven, after all.

This episode felt off to me.  Some of it was the absence of Jonathan.  Some of it was the fact that, even when working solo, Mark didn’t really do that much other than stand in a corner and observe.  Both the soap opera dramatic and the performances were so over-the-top that they were impossible to take seriously.  This almost felt like a parody of Highway to Heaven as opposed to an actual episode.

Oh well.  So much for this episode.  Hopefully, next week’s episode, which apparently involves a man being mistaken for a monster, will be a bit better.  We’ll find out soon!

The Films of 2024: The Beautiful Game (dir by Thea Sharrock)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

When we first see Vinny (Michael Ward), he is watching a group of children play soccer.  (Yes, I know that both this movie and the rest of the world calls it football.  I grew up calling it soccer.)  He looks at the jerseys of the players and provides a running commentary as they play.  “We’ve got David Beckham, we’ve got a big Messi, we’ve got a little Messi, we’ve got a classic Brazilian Messi….”  Finally, Vinny runs out onto the field and kicks the ball himself until the parents of the children tell him to go away.

Watching Vinny is a legendary scout named Mal Bradley (Bill Nighy).  Mal approaches Vinny and convinces to come meet his “dream team,” a collection of homeless men who all play soccer.  Mal explains that the men are going to be representing England at the annual Homeless World Cup tournament in Rome.  Teams made up of homeless from all over the world will be competing.  Mal explains that it’s not all about winning.  It’s about giving the players a chance to prove something to themselves.  Mal reveals that he wants Vinny to join the team.  Vinny announces that he’s not homeless.  He has a job.  He has a family.  Vinny then goes to the car in which he is currently living.

Eventually, Vinny changes his mind and agrees to accompany the team to Rome.  The team is welcoming but Vinny still struggles to open up to them.  Some of it is due to his pride.  Unlike his teammates, Vinny actually did once play professional soccer, though not for long.  Some of it is due to Vinny being in denial about his status as a homeless person.  When a teammate opens up about being a recovering heroin addict, Vinny leaves the room.  When one player reveals that he’s a compulsive gambler and another talks about his own failures as a father, Vinny tries to change the subject.  What Vinny doesn’t know is that he and Mal have a past connection, one that has left Mal wracked with guilt.

There’s a lot going on in The Beautiful Game.  The film focuses on Vinny, Mal, and England’s team but it also finds room for subplots involving the Italian team, the South African team, the American team, and the Japanese team.  Adlar (Robin Nazari), a Kurdish refugee who plays for England, has to decide whether to play against a team led by a player who was on the opposite side of the Syrian Civil War.  Sister Protasia (Susan Wokoma), coach of the South African team, struggles to get a visa for one of her players.  Rosita (Christina Rodlo) of the American team hopes to play well enough to receive a college scholarship.  Mika (Aoi Okuyama), the young coach of the Japanese team, struggles to inspire her older players.  It can sometimes be difficult to keep track of it all but, at the same time, it does capture the idea of the Homeless World Cup being a truly international event, one that gives hope and opportunity to people across the world.  For Rosita and Vinny, the competition is a way to change the direction of their lives.  For the Japanese team, the competition is way to see the world and enjoy themselves.  And for Mal, the competition is a chance to give something back to the game that he loves.

The Beautiful Game is overlong and a bit overstuffed but it still occasionally brought tears to my mismatched eyes.  It’s a film with a big heart but enough of an edge that it avoids the trap of being overly sentimental.  It’s a well-acted film, especially by Michael Ward and Bill Nighy.  In the end, I think my favorite performances came from Aoi Okuyama and the members of the Japanese team.  Early on, they say that all they want to do is score one goal against another team.  When they do, their joy is infectious.  One might even say it’s beautiful.

Enemy (1990, directed by George Rowe)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

At the height of the Vietnam War, CIA agent Ken Andrews (Peter Fonda) disguises himself as a French journalist, slips into North Vietnam, assassinates a VC general, and then makes his escape into the jungle.  Unfortunately, the helicopter that was meant to take Ken to safety is blown up, leaving Ken stranded in the jungle with a beautiful Chinese spy named Mai Chang (Tia Carrere).

With the VC after both of them, Ken and Mai will have to set aside their initial enmity and work together to make it out of North Vietnam.  In between endless scenes of the two of them making their way through the jungle, there are battle scenes where the VC manage to shoot everything except for the two people that they’re after.

This cheap film was shot in 1988 but it sat on the shelf for two years.  The script, which attempts to be a rumination on the nature of war, feels as if it was written even earlier.  It will always be strange to me how Peter Fonda went from starring as bikers and aging hippies in films like Easy Rider and The Wild Angels to playing CIA agents and military officers in films like this one.  Peter Fonda was a stiff actor but, in this case, it works for his character, who, after all, is meant to be a man who has to keep his emotions under control.  Tia Carrere is beautiful and seems to be trying really hard to give a convincing performance despite being miscast as a grim spy.  Fonda and Carrere do have a surprising amount of chemistry together.  The romance that develops between them actually feels believable.

Enemy suffers from too much padding.  It’s a two-person show and those two people spend a lot of time walking through the jungle.  Some of the action scenes are exciting and the idea of an American spy falling in love with a Chinese spy is interesting but the ending, while action-packed, still feels like a cop out that’s designed to give Ken an easy out.  You can almost hear Ken thinking to himself, “I really dodged a bullet there.”

Retro Television Review: Malibu, CA 1.2 “Surf Sale”

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 Malibu CA, which aired in Syndication in 1998 and 1999.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

As my friend Mark tried to warn me, this show sucks!

Episode 1.2 “Surf Sale”

(Dir by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on October 18th, 1998)

Why am I doing this to myself?

That’s the question that I asked myself as I watched the second episode of Malibu, CA.  Why do I always decide to review the worst shows that I can find?  And when I call Malibu, CA the worst, that’s not an exaggeration.  The second episode, which I just watched, is 21 minutes of pure pain.  Producing bad television was, admittedly, Peter Engel’s trademark but not Malibu, CA goes beyond just being bad.  I mean, this is the first show that I’ve ever seen that makes One World seem brilliant by comparison.

The second episode finds Murray upset because a land developer is planning on tearing down The Surf Shack and replacing it with a luxury condo.  The Surf Shack is exactly what it sounds like.  It’s a shack that sells surfing equipment.  Murray appears to be the Surf Shack’s only employee.  Murray says that Surf Shack is his life.  The Surf Shack must be saved and Scott and Jason are going to help Murray because they think helping Murray will impress their next-door neighbor, Samantha.  Samantha is into causes and stuff.  Plus, Murray has been her friend since kindergarten.

Murray is also the son of a wealthy man so Jason and Scott suggest that Murray ask his father to buy the Surf Shack.  Murray says that he can’t because his father would then demand that Murray go to school, wear socks, and comb his hair.  With the Surf Shack doomed, Murray gets a job working as a dishwasher at Peter’s restaurant but then he nearly burns the place down after he accidentally knocks out the chef by throwing a dish in his direction.

Murray finally agrees to ask his father to buy the Surf Shack.  Murray is prepared to sell out.  But then Peter, to make his sons happy, buys the Surf Shack from Murray’s dad and then makes Murray the manager.  If Peter had the money to buy the Surf Shack, why didn’t they just go to him to begin with?

Meanwhile, Stats the Lifeguard, who desperately wants Scott to notice her, is harassed by Haji (Maulik Pancholy), a guy whose life she saved from drowning.  Haj is Indian so the whole joke here is that Haj has an accent and tends to say stuff like, “In my country, if you save someone’s life, you are destined to be together.”  However, Stats is in love with Scott and Haj isn’t willing to fight for her love because “It looks like he goes to the gym.”  Haj trips over another girl on the beach and decides that she is the one who saved his life.  I’m not sure why.

This was bad.  It’s hard to put into words how bad this episode was.  The storyline was stupid but that’s to be expected from a show produced by Peter Engel.  Instead, this episode was bad because 1) there wasn’t a single likable person in the episode (even Stats ended up being pretty rude to Haj) and 2) there did not appear to be a single person in the cast capable of reciting their dialogue without sounding like they were reading it off of a cue card.  The episode was bad because Murray’s issue with his dad seems to be that his dad expects his teenage son to actually go to school and not be a brain-dead washout.  The episode was bad because the Surf Shack itself sits on the ugliest and smallest part of the beach and it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to put a condo in that location.  (With mountains on either side, there’s really not any room for a condo.)  Finally, the episode was dumb because it had the same plot as the pilot: Developers want build something on the beach so Scott and Jason pretend to care in an effort to impress Sam.  Just as the pilot featured a disaster at Peter’s restaurant, this episode features a disaster at Peter’s restaurant.  It’s only the second episode and this show is already repeating itself.

Oh well!  At least there’s only 50 episode left….

Concert Film Review: Pink Floyd: Live in Venice (dir by Wayne Isham and Egbert van Hees)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’m actually a bit embarrassed to say that Venice is my favorite city in Italy.

I mean, it’s such a cliché, isn’t it?  Tourists always fall in love with Venice, even though the majority of us really don’t know much about the city beyond the canals and the gondolas.  I spent a summer in Italy and Venice was definitely the city that had the most American visitors.  Sadly, the majority of them didn’t do a very good job representing the U.S. in Europe.  I’ll never forget the drunk frat boys who approached me one night, all wearing University of Texas t-shirts.  One of them asked, “Are you from Texas?”

“No, sweetie, ah’m from up north.” I lied.

“You sound like you’re from Texas!” his friend said.

“No, ah’m not from Texas,” I said, “Sorry, y’all.”

I mean, that’s not something that would have happened in Florence or even Naples!  In Rome, handsome men on motor scooters gave me flowers.  In Venice, on the other hand, I had to deal with the same jerks that I dealt with back home!

That said, I still fell in love with Venice.  And yes, it did happen while I was riding in a gondola.  At that moment, I felt like I was living in a work of art.  I can still remember looking over the side of the gondola and watching as a small crab ran across someone’s front porch.  That’s when I realized that, by its very existence, Venice proved that anything was possible.

I’ve often heard that Venice is slowly sinking.  That Venice has a reputation as being a dying city would probably have come to a surprise to the drunk Americans who were just looking for a girl from Texas that summer.  And it would certainly come as a surprise to anyone who watched the 1989 concert film, Pink Floyd Live In Venice.

Just as with last week’s Pink Floyd concert in Pompeii, this was something that I watched more because of where it took place than who was performing.  There are some very good Pink Floyd songs and there are others that are just silly and overly portentous.  As well, I’ll always have mixed feelings about Pink Floyd due to the fact that — bleh! — Roger Waters was a founding member.  Whenever I hear any of their songs, I automatically find myself looking for coded moments of anti-Semitism.  Fortunately, by the time the band played in Venice, Waters had left the group.  As a result, I didn’t feel quite as conflicted over watching the Venice concert as I did the Pompeii concert.

As for the show, the band performed while floating on a barge while some members of the audience sat in gondolas.  It was a lovely sight that captured the otherworldly romance of Venice.  The concert itself was a bit uneven, with the first half in particular dominated by songs that just seemed to go on and on and which often exposed the limits of lead singer David Gilmour’s vocal range.  The second half was a greatest hits collection and it was a notable improvement.  If Gilmour’s raspy vocals seemed limited during the first half of the concert, they were perfect for songs like Comfortably Numb and Money.  The highlight of the concert and the film was undoubtedly the performance of The Great Gig In The Sky, which created a feeling of the heavens descending upon Venice.

In the end, Venice was the true star of the concert.  For a dying city, it looked beautiful and vibrant.  I can’t wait to return.

Scenes That I Love: Albert Finney Hates People In Scrooge

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today would have been the 88th birthday of the great British actor, Albert Finney!

And today’s scene that I love features Albert Finney in the role of history’s most famous miser.  In 1970’s Scrooge, Finney played the title role and, early on, his worldview was perfectly captured by a song called I Hate People.  Finny was only 34 when he played Ebenezer Scrooge but he does a wonderful job of bringing the character to life and he’s just as convincing when he’s being good as he is when he’s being bad.  Finney is the main reason why Scrooge is my personal favorite of all of the versions of A Christmas Carol.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special J.A. Bayona 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, we wish a happy birthday to the great Spanish director, J.A. Bayona!  It’s time for….

4 Shots From 4 J.A. Bayona Films

The Orphanage (2007, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Oscar Faura)

The Impossible (2012, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Oscar Faura)

A Monster Calls (2016, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Oscar Faura)

Society of the Snow (2023, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Pedro Luque)

Music Video of the Day: Jet City Woman by Queensryche (1991, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This song is straight forward by Queensryche standards.  Jet City is a nickname for the band’s then-hometown of Seattle and, at the time this song was written and recorded, Geoff Tate was married to a flight attendant.

The video is also straight forward, focusing on the band performing in front of a crowd of appreciative fans.

Enjoy!