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 celebrate the great director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was born 116 years ago today. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Joseph L. Mankiewicz Films
All About Eve (1950, dir by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, DP: Milton R. Krassner)
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, dir by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, DP: Jack Hildyard)
Cleopatra (1963, dir by Joseph L. Mankiewicz , DP: Leon Shamroy)
A Carol For Another Christmas (1964, dir by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, DP: Arthur Ornitz)
Today’s music video of the day has a weird vibe that I like. Watching it, I found myself thinking about those weird cults that would form communes in the wild and everyone would have the same hairstyle and every night would end with a sing along around the campfire. Admittedly, I’m not sure if these cults actually exist but I always imagine they’re out there somewhere. Personally, I would dread running into them.
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 Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!
This week, Tubbs has an adventure!
Episode 3.17 “The Afternoon Plane”
(Dir by David Jackson, originally aired on February 20th, 1987)
While attending a New Age-y wedding with his latest girlfriend Alicia (Maria McDonald), Tubbs wins a vacation to a tropical island!
It’s about time something …. well, I was going to say something good but honestly, I guess we should just be happy that anything is happening to Tubbs at all. When this show started, Tubbs was the audience surrogate. He was the one who came down to Miami and learned about the drug scene. We saw Miami through his eyes. But, by the time the third season rolled around, it was pretty clear that Miami Vice hard largely become the Crockett show. Don Johnson was the star and Philip Michael Thomas often seemed like a supporting character. Tubbs may have been cooler than Switek but, often times, both of them took a backseat to Crockett. This week, however, Tubbs finally get his own episode. Crockett shows up for a few minutes at the start of the episode and that’s it. This is the Tubbs show!
Of course, it turns out that the vacation does not go the way that Tubbs was expecting. He runs into a drug dealer named Leon Wolf (Vincent D’Onofrio, making his television acting debut), someone who Tubbs previously put in jail. Tubbs soon discovers that his old enemies, the Calderone family, are on the Island and they’re looking forward to getting their revenge on Tubbs. Tubbs, of course, has no legal jurisdiction on the island and the local police certainly aren’t going to help him out. In fact, many people on the island resent Tubbs because they blame America’s war on drugs for their poverty. Drug smuggling is big business and it provides an income to a lot of people who would starve otherwise.
Orlando Calderone (John Leguizamo) is coming on the next afternoon plane and no one is willing to defy Orlando by helping Tubbs get off the island. The episode becomes a Caribbean High Noon, with the clock ticking down and no one willing to stand up and help the endangered law man. There are some on the island who want to fight back and drive away the Calderones. But no one is willing to take the chance.
It would have been a lot more compelling if Orlando had been played by someone other than John Leguizamo, who is just as cartoonishly unconvincing here as he was the first time that he appeared on the show. I know that Miami Vice was early in Leguizamo’s career but his performance here is so unconvincing that it really does make the Calderones just seem like a bunch of low-level punks instead of a feared criminal syndicate. The final gun battle between Tubbs and the Calderones is handled well-enough but it’s never quite as compelling as it would be if Orlando Calderone was actually an intimidating villain. In typical Miami Vice fashion, Alicia is seriously wounded in the battle. It pays not to get involved with either Tubbs or Crockett.
This episode was a slight change of pace. Apparently, everyone but Philip Michael Thomas got to take some time off during filming and, as a result, Thomas gets to show his own unique style as Rico Tubbs. Still, this episode was never as compelling as it needed to be. Hopefully, we are now done with the Calderones.
The late composer Jerry Goldsmith was born 96 years ago today. Over the course of his long career, he composed many classic film scores. He was nominated for 18 Oscars and won for his score for The Omen.
Today’s song of the day comes from Goldsmith’s score for 1968’s Planet of the Apes! Listen to this and try not visualize Charlton Heston being chased by a bunch of gorillas on horseback.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally 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 1998’s Top Of The World!
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, pull up Top of the World on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
On this date, 115 years ago, Lon Chaney, Jr. was born in Oklahoma City. At the time, Oklahoma wasn’t even a state. His father was the actor Lon Chaney Sr.
Originally named Creighton Chaney, Lon Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps. Like many sons of famous men, he often struggled to escape his father’s shadow. While he would never be mistaken for a man of a thousand faces, Lon Chaney, Jr. did make a name for himself, first as Lenny in the Oscar-nominated 1939 film version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and then as Larry Talbot, the unfortunate man who found himself cursed to turn into the Wolf Man whenever the moon was full. Chaney spent the majority of his career appearing in horror films and, later, westerns. Not only did he play The Wolf Man but he was also one of the many actors to take a shot at playing both Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula. Later, he would appear in a series of low budget horror films that were often a far cry from his best-known films. In his later years, he was a favorite of producer/director Stanley Kramer, who cast him in both High Noon and The Defiant Ones and who once said that Chaney was one of the finest character actors in Hollywood. His deep voice and craggily face made an undeniable impression in those later films. Looking at him, you could see had lived a tough life but he had the heart of a survivor.
In today’s scene that I love, Larry Talbot learns the facts about being a werewolf. From 1941’s The Wolf Man, here is Lon Chaney, Jr in his signature role.
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, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Alexander Payne! It’s time for….
4 Shots from 4 Alexander Payne Films
Election (1999, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: James Glennon)
Sideways (2004, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: Phedon Papamichael)
The Descendants (2011, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: Phedon Papamichael)
Nebraska (2013, dir by Alexander Payne, DP: Phedon Papamichael)
Whoops! I was so tired after returning home from some much needed hot tub time that I fell asleep before I got a chance to do my full week in review! Here’s an abbreviated summary.
In previous years, after the Super Bowl, I’ve listed my favorite ads of the night. I’m not going to do that this year because, quite frankly, I don’t have enough ads to list. This year, the Super Bowl was boring. The game was boring and the ads were boring. There were barely any new movie trailers. In previous years, Leonard and I exhausted ourselves trying to keep up with and share all of the Super Bowl movie spots. This year, we could take things easy.
As for the game …. listen, I’m not a football person. Our longtime readers know that. Usually, when I’m bored with a football game, I assume it’s because I’m just not into football. But this year, the game was so slow that even my colleagues here at TSL got bored with it. While the biggest game of the year was being played in New Orleans, we largely used the game as background noise as we talked about everything from HBO’s True Detective to whether or not it was acceptable to nuke all of your enemies in Civ. Once I realized that there weren’t going to be any big commercials, I immediately started thinking about relaxing in a hot tub for an hour or two. It turned out to be a little less than an hour because it’s cold outside, folks!
Actually, now that I think about it, there was one commercial that I really liked, just because it featured a horse.
I’ve seen some speculation online that the commercials were safe and predictable this year because ad agencies are still adjusting to how to advertise in the second Trump era. That’s possible. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Super Bowl commercials that were so determinedly nonpartisan. In the past, I think the general assumption that advertisers made was that the country was full of politically active young people with a lot of spending money and, as a result, it only made sense to tailor commercials to them. Hence, we got Zachary Quinto dramatically reading the ending of 1984 for Amazon Audible and Kylie Jenner defusing tensions at a protest by giving a Pepsi to a cop. We got a commercial for a migraine medicine in which the main character was able to go to a protest because her migraine cleared up. There was even a commercial featuring a teenage girl leading an environmental rally because she had the confidence that went along with having clear skin. All the online complaining was taken as a badge of honor. “We’re making the right people mad,” as the saying goes. But, with the recent elections, it’s now kind of obvious that the supposedly leftward tilt of the country was much overestimated. It felt like the ads this year were trying to reclaim the middle, nonpartisan ground that was originally abandoned in 2017. They did so by playing everything safe. As a result, none of the commercials this year were controversial but, at the same time, none of them were particularly interesting either. It says something about how bland things were that the most talked about commercial was another one of those flaky “He Gets Us” commercials, which feel like almost a parody of the shallow understanding most people have of theology.
(Incidentally, we watched the game on Tubi. Tubi did a very good job of streaming the game, with none of the trouble that Netflix has had with its live events.)
In other words, the Super Bowl was boring this year but I did enjoy watching it with my TSL colleagues. And I love horses! And now, on with the rest of 2025!
Through the Shattered Lens 