As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be The Octagon!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, find the movie on YouTube and hit play at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! The watch party community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
This is a historically-important video. It’s the final Whitesnake video to feature Tawny Kitaen. After the video, it was all downhill for Whitesnake as far as much videos were concerned. It turns out that people weren’t watching them because they wanted to see David Coverdale’s hair.
Marty Callner should be a familiar name by now. He was one of those music video directors who worked with everyone who was anyone.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sunday, I will be reviewing the Canadian series, Degrassi: The Next Generation, which aired from 2001 to 2015! The series can be streamed on YouTube and Tubi.
Degrassi goes there!
Episode 2.11 “Don’t Believe The Hype”
(Dir by Anais Granofsky, originally aired on December 23rd, 2002)
“A hate crime has been committed here,” Snake declares in this episode. He declares it very seriously. In fact, he’s a little bit too serious. His voice and his expression are so grim that the line actually has the opposite effect of what it intended. The same can be said of this episode itself. Degrassi was always political but, up until its final seasons, it was usually smart enough to understand that encouraging audiences to look between the lines was preferable to hitting them over the head. Occasionally, though, this show did give us an episode like this one.
As for the hate crime, it’s the vandalization of a display about Iraq. It’s International Day and Fareeza (Jessica Rose) made the display to inform people about her home country. Fareeza is sure that her display was vandalized by Hazel because, earlier, Hazel give Fareeza a fashion ticket because her hijab was judged to be “terrorist chic.” Hazel also said that Fareeza needed to back off before “Jamaica declared war on Iraq.”
Fareeza replies that Hazel’s last name — Aden — doesn’t sound Jamaican. (It doesn’t? Really?) “You look Somalian,” Fareeza says.
Anyway, it turns out that the displays was vandalized by two unnamed students. But Mr. Raditch still tells Hazel that she committed a hate crime by joking about declaring war on Iraq. At first, Hazel is defensive but then she becomes so overwhelmed with guilt that she admits that she isn’t Jamaican. She actually is Somalian! Of course, I think one could argue that Fareeza committed a hate crime with her “You look Somalian” comment. I mean, talk about stereotyping! It’s like telling me I look Irish just because I have red hair and I’m half-Irish.
(At this point, I should mention that Andea Lewis, who played Hazel, was not Somalian. In fact, in real life, she’s half-Jamaican. But then again, Jessica Rose, who played Fareeza, was not from Iraq.)
Now, needless to say, Hazel being a Somalian refugee is one of those plot points that will hardly ever be mentioned again. And Fareeza will never appear in another episode of Degrassi. Fareeza showed up. She taught everyone a lesson. Having fulfilled her plot obligations, her character is never seen again.
Hazel later gives a presentation about her Somalian heritage and the school loves her. (We don’t see the presentation that Fareeza gave about Iraq. Sorry, Fareeza, this is Hazel’s episode.) Meanwhile, JT’s friends discover that he’s good at sewing and everyone, except for Liberty, makes fun of him. It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at Liberty’s crush on JT until you remember that JT is destined to end dying on Liberty’s birthday. But that’s far in the future. For now, JT is an adorable scamp who has no idea that he’s going to be literally stabbed in the back.
There’s nothing subtle about this episode and the end result is that it feels almost more like a parody of Degrassi than anything else.
After a patient that he’s sleeping with commits suicide, psychiatrist Ed Altman (Mickey Rourke) moves to Palm Springs and sets up a new practice in the desert. His attorney (Carre Otis) is able to get Altman off the hook legally but Ed is soon in more trouble as he meets and falls for Ally Mercer (Annabel Schofield). When Ally’s husband is murdered, Ed realizes that Ally and her fur coat-wearing boyfriend (Anthony Michael Hall) are trying to frame him for the crime.
Plotwise, this is a standard late night cable neo-noir, the type that was very popular in the late 90s. The one thing that distinguishes this Showtime production from the film that were airing on Cinemax at the time is the lack of explicit onscreen sex. (Despite the pairing of Mickey Rourke and his then-wife, Carre Otis, this is not another Wild Orchid. Carre Otis is somehow even less convincing as an attorney in Exit to Red than she was in the earlier film.) Instead, Ed just talks about sex constantly and even gives us a long monologue about why he loves long legs as if that’s something that makes him somehow unique. Every guy loves long legs but most of us can appreciate them without having to recite a Spalding Gray-style performance piece about them. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to listen to Mickey Rourke read one of those “How To Be A Player” books, you can just listen to his narration in Exit in Red.
Director Yurek Bogajevicz is one of the many 90s filmmakers who went from doing arthouse films like Anna to directing films like Exit In Red. Watching the movie, I got the feeling that Bogajevicz was trying to be subversive with his genre film, in the style of Paul Verhoeven. There are a few times when he almost succeeds but, far more often, his direction seems as if it’s trying too hard to keep audiences from noticing the bad script and the wooden performances. Luckily, Mickey Rourke goes all out as Dr. Altman. The film would have been incredibly dull if he hadn’t.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
This week, the show gets a new co-star.
Episode 5.5 “M.E., Myself, and I”
(Dir by Michael Fields, originally aired on November 1st, 1996)
There’s a new medical examiner in town! Julianna Cox (Michelle Forbes) drinks too much, smokes too much, and she takes her job personally! She drives too fast! She speaks her mind! She fires the incompetent and the corrupt! She shows up at crime scenes! Lewis moves a body before Dr. Cox arrives. She tells him to never do it again!
She’s a new regular and this entire episode is essentially dedicated to hitting us over the head with the fact that she’s awesome. And she is awesome and she’s also played by Michelle Forbes so I’m sure she will be a worthwhile addition to the show’s ensemble. That said, this episode sometimes seem to be so desperate to convince us that we’re going to love Dr. Cox that it forgets to craft a compelling story. She helps Bayliss to solve a case. Bayliss likes her. Well, Bayliss like everyone. Indeed, Bayliss gets so excited whenever an attractive woman appears that he sometimes seems like a cartoon wolf, with his eyes popping out of his head.
In other news, Kellerman is still under investigation and he’s not taking it well. The great Edward Herrmann played the officious FBI agent who took over the Box and spent the episode asking the other Homicide detectives if Kellerman seemed to be corrupt. “How did Detective Kellerman afford a new boat?” Actually, how did Detective Kellerman afford a new boat?
Pembleton went off his blood pressure meds so he could make love to his wife on his anniversary. Pembleton — how are you going to recover from this stroke if you keep finding excuses not to take your medication?
Finally, Brodie got kicked out of Bayliss’s apartment so he moved in with Lewis. Brodie praised a black velvet painting of Teddy Pendergrass, leading to a fight between Lewis and his wife. It was an amusing scene. Brodie, you stand accused of murdering a marriage! The jury finds you guilty!
It was an okay episode. Homicide is one of those shows that is enjoyable watch because of the ensemble and Michelle Forbes seems like she’ll be a good addition. When you’ve got a cast this good, you can get away with an episode where not that much really happens.
Today would have been the birthday of actor Tom Noonan. Today’s scene that I love is a short scene featuring Noonan from 1995’s Heat. Noonan doesn’t have a lot of screentime but his character is key to the plot. In this scene, Noonan shows how much a great character actor can do, even with limited screentime.
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More 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 pay tribute to the year 1993 with….
4 Shots From 4 1993 Films
Mi Vida Loca (1993, dir by Allison Anders, DP: Rodrigo Garcia)
Short Cuts (1993, dir by Robert Altman, DP: Walt Lloyd)
Sliver (1993, dir by Phillip Noyce, DP: Vilmos Zsigmond)
The Last Action Hero (1993, directed by John McTiernan, DP: Dean Semler)
Through the Shattered Lens 