Today’s music video of the day is for a song that appeared on the appropriately titled Back To Basics. This video itself takes a pretty basic approach but it works. “Save me from myself,” is something that I used to say to myself quite a bit, though eventually I realized that I only had my best interests at heart.
Enjoy!
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1986. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!
This week, Mr. Roarke reunites a family and arranges for a man to battle a “ghost.”
Episode 2.20 “Birthday Party/Ghostbreaker”
(Dir by Cliff Bole, originally aired on March 3rd, 1979)
This week, Tattoo has both a joy buzzer and a pink carnation that squirts water. He explains to Mr. Roarke that he read somewhere the women love a man with a sense of humor. “I want to be the king of humor on Fantasy Island,” he explains.
“Lucky us,” Mr. Roarke replies while dramatically rolling his eyes and reminding viewers of just how much he despises his scene-stealing assistant.
As for the two fantasies, this is another episode where the fantasies don’t really seem like they should be happening on the same island. One is rather serious. The other is a bit cartoonish.
The first guest to get off the plane is Elliott Fielding (Ken Berry), a librarian who believes in ghosts and who is pretty sure that he knows how to exorcise a ghost from a haunted location. He’s so confident that he’s even written a book about it. However, because Elliott has never actually seen a ghost, no one is willing to publish his book. Elliott’s fantasy is to exorcise a real ghost and prove that his theories are true. Mr. Roarke obliges by taking him to a mansion that Roarke explains was once occupied by a murderer known as the Gentleman Strangler. Now, however, it’s a private all-girls boarding school! (This is one of those episodes that leaves the viewer wondering just what exactly Fantasy Island is exactly. When the show started, it was just a resort. Now, it appears to have become a thriving nation, home to not only industry but also an exclusive boarding school.)
The school’s students have been reporting sightings of the ghost of the Gentleman Strangler. Elliott sets out to exorcise the ghost and along the way, he falls in love with the school’s headmistress (Annette Funicello). He also finds an enemy in the form of the school’s fencing instructor (Larry Storch). Oddly there aren’t any other teachers at the school so I guess the students just spend all of their learning how to fence.
This was an odd fantasy because, on the one hand, you had this ghost potentially threatening to strangle a bunch of teenage girls and, on the other hand, you had the very broad comedy of Ken Berry and Larry Storch facing off. Of course, it turns out that there really wasn’t a ghost haunting the school so, at first, it appears that Elliott’s fantasy didn’t come true. However, after Elliott leaves, Roarke explains to Tattoo that Elliott actually did meet a ghost when he had a conversation with a helpful handyman. That probably would have been a good thing to let Elliott know before he left but …. well, Mr. Roarke does what he wants. If there’s any lesson to be learned from watching Fantasy Island, it’s that Mr. Roarke makes the rules and it is best to never question his arbitrary decisions.
Meanwhile, Carol Gates (Janet Leigh) comes to the island to be reunited with the twins (Skye Aubrey and Christopher Stone) that she gave up for her adoption. I was expecting the twins to reject her or to be angry. Instead, with her support, her son gets signed to a football team and her daughter decides not give her own children up for adoption. Yay! It was a bit of an easy fantasy, with little of the drama that I was expecting. But Janet Leigh was a talented actress and she’s good here, bringing a lot of genuine emotion the story.
The fantasies were a bit mismatched but I like ghost stories (even when they’re a bit silly) and Janet Leigh is one of my favorite actresses so this trip to Fantasy Island was worth it.
The 1971 “pseudo-documentary”, Punishment Park, imagines an alternative America that still feels very familiar.
With America paralyzed by continuing protests against racism, economic inequality, and the war in Viet Nam, President Richard Nixon declares a state of emergency and invokes the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. The law (which is a real law and still on the books, by the way) allows the federal government to detain anyone who is deemed a risk to national security. Anti-government activists are rounded up and put on trial before “community tribunals,” which are made up of a combination of military officers, politicians, businessmen, and housewives. Though the arrested are given a chance to defend themselves against the charges, there’s never any doubt that each trial will end with a conviction. Those convicted are given two options. They can either serve their entire sentence in federal prison. Or they can spend three days in Punishment Park.
Most of them make the mistake of picking Punishment Park.
What is Punishment Park? It’s 53 miles of California desert. Detainees have got three days to cross the desert, without food or water. If they make it to the American flag at the end of Punishment Park, they will be given their freedom. However, along with having to deal with the extreme heat, the detainees are also going to be pursued by a group of police officers and National Guardsmen. If the detainees are caught before reaching the flag, they’ll be sent to prison. The detainees are given a head start but it soon becomes apparent that the head start doesn’t count much for much when you’re in the desert without water. It also becomes apparent that Punishment Park is much more about revenge and reminding people of their place than it is about justice. The rules of Punishment Park only apply to the detainees.
As he did with the majority of his films (including the Oscar-winning The War Game), director Peter Watkins presents the film as being a documentary. Though they’re never seen onscreen, we hear the voices of the British and German film crews asking questions to both the detainees and the people pursuing them. (We also occasionally hear them protesting the brutality of what they’re witnessing, though the cops and soldiers are quick to point out that they really don’t care what a bunch of Europeans thinks about their actions.) The film cuts back and forth from one group being chased through Punishment Park and another group being put on trial and eventually convicted. Watkins cast the film with amateur actors, with the detainees being played by actual anti-war activists while many of the people pursuing them were played by actual guardsmen and police officers. Watkins has subsequently started that the attitudes and the hostilities of the people in the film were mirrored off-screen by those playing them as well. Much like the Stanford Prison Experiment, every one was more than willing to play their roles. It brings a much-needed authenticity to the film’s alternative history. (Interestingly enough, it also leads to several of the detainees coming across as being a bit annoying, as people who are convinced of their own righteousness tend to be. The important thing is that they’re authentically annoying. Even 50 years after the film was shot, both camps are full of people who still seem familiar.) Ironically, the film’s biggest weakness is that everyone seems to be so genuinely worried about whether or not they’ll survive the trek through the desert that it’s difficult to believe that they would actually stop moving so they could have a conversation with the documentary crew.
Still, whatever flaws the film may have, Punishment Park feels sickeningly plausible. In our current era of rising authoritarianism, militarization, reckless accusations of treason, and cries to set aside the Constitution so that “enemies” can be stripped of their rights, Punishment Park continues to feel frighteningly relevant today.
Gordon Lightfoot, rest in peace.
Congratulations! You have survived May Day and you’ve also survived the first four months of 2023! Let us take a moment to celebrate this milestone. The past few years haven’t been easy for a lot of people but we’ve survived. As we look forward to the months to come, there are a lot more movies to watch and a more television shows to binge and more books to read and more to which to listen! Here at the Shattered Lens we have big plans for the rest of the year. Thank you to all of our regular readers for sticking with us and we hope that rest of this year is a great one for you!
With Law Day coming to a close (not to mention Loyalty Day and International Workers Day), it seems like it’s time for another Ace Attorney AMV of the Day. Really, they should just rename this holiday Ace Attorney Day.
Anime: Ace Attorney
Song: The Phoenix (performed by Fall Out Boy)
Creator: Lise Cupcake (please subscribe to this creator’s channel)
Past AMVs of the Day
In case you were wondering what Hillary Swank has been up to (other than starring on that television show about newspaper in Alaska), here’s your answer! She’s playing an alcoholic in Ordinary Angels, which appears to be another “uplifting, based on a true story” film of 2023. This film is scheduled to be released on October 13th. That’s Friday the 13th, by the way.
Actually, I imagine that this film might do well with an October release date. Consider it to be counter-programming for all the folks who aren’t into horror. Here at TSL, we’ll be in the middle of our annual horrorthon. As the song goes, “if it makes you happy….”
Apparently, A Haunting In Venice is not the only crime-related film that Tina Fey (who one does not usually associate with crime films) has coming out this year. On June 16th, she will be co-starring in Maggie Moore(s), along with Jon Hamm and Nick Mohammed. The film was directed by Hamm’s Mad Men co-star, John Slattery. Here’s the trailer:
Based on a true story, eh? To be honest, the trailer make it look like this film might be trying too hard to be quirky and Coenesque but who knows? Sometimes, a good film gets a bad trailer and, more often, a bad film will get a really good trailer. The cast is certainly talented so we’ll see!
Eric Roberts appears about twenty minutes into 2020’s Free Lunch Express. He plays a man standing in line at a Vermont welfare office. He tells a youngish Bernie Sanders (played, at that point in the movie, by Sam Brittan) that the easiest way to make some extra money is to run for public office because there’s no limit on the amount of money you can raise and you can keep whatever you have left after the campaign. Having been recently kicked out of a commune and having no interest in getting a real job, Sanders is intrigued by the advice and soon embarks on his first political campaign. Roberts only appears in that one scene. It probably took an hour or two of his time to film. Roberts spends the entire scene laughing, supposedly because he’s amused over the idea of making a living as a perennial political candidate.
(For that matter, Eric Roberts is not the only familiar face to pop up in Free Lunch Express. Not surprisingly, Kevin Sorbo shows up. He plays the ghost of George Washington and I’ll admit that I chucked at his Elizabeth Warren joke. Far more surprisingly, Malcolm McDowell shows up as the narrator and epically rolls his eyes at every major moment of Sanders’s life.)
As for the rest of the film, Free Lunch Express is an attempt to do an Adam McKay-style satire about the career of Bernie Sanders. Unfortunately, the problem with trying to make fun of Bernie Sanders is that even Bernie’s most fervent supporters already realize and often acknowledge that he’s a vaguely ludicrous figure. Indeed, the very things that the film pokes fun at — like Bernie’s permanently messy hair, his thick Brooklyn accent, his habit of yelling out his comments while pointing upwards, and his apparently inability to make normal small talk — are the same things that most of his supporters find to be appealing about him. I disagree with Bernie on the majority of the issues and I would probably move to another country if he was ever elected President but, at the same time, I can’t help but kind of like him. One reason why so many people voted for him in 2016 is because he seemed to be authentic in a way that other politicians did not. It’s easy to poke fun at a slick politician but it’s far more difficult to do so at someone who looks like he just got out of bed and who tends to say whatever pops into his mind. It’s far easier to satirize the personality of a Hillary Clinton or a Mitt Romney than it is to satirize a Bernie Sanders.
Free Lunch Express follows Bernie through three stages of his life. As a child, Bernie (played by Jonah Britton) swears a blood oath while standing in front of a poster Joseph Stalin and he declares that he’ll never be bullied again. As a young man, Bernie (Sam Brittan) moves to Vermont and annoys all the other hippies to such an extent that he’s forced to take Eric Roberts’s advice and run for political office. And, as an old and ineffective Senator, Bernie (now played by Charles Hutchins) runs for the presidency and only drops out after Hillary (Cynthia Kania) promises to campaign in Wisconsin and Ohio in the general election. There were a few moments that made me chuckle, like the portrayal of Ben & Jerry as being two hippies who can’t have a conversation without shouting out the name of their latest flavor or Bernie cluelessly traveling to dreary Moscow for the worst honeymoon ever. But, for the most part, the humor falls flat and the jokes are often too repetitive to really be effective. Having a young and nerdy Bernie swear his allegiance to Stalin because he thinks that Stalin, who killed millions of his own citizens, will create a world without bullies is funny. However, having the ghost of Stalin randomly speak to Bernie throughout the years is a joke that grows tiresome and never really pays off. It’s pretty much the same issue that I had with Adam McKay’s Vice. Much as Vice did with Dick Cheney, the film tries so hard to take down Sanders with ridicule that it instead makes him seem almost likable. Indeed, by focusing on the times that Bernie was, in the film’s view, humiliated by Hillary Clinton, the hippies at the commune, and basic economic realities, the film actually portrays Bernie as someone who refuses to surrender his principles, regardless of how often the rest of the world tells him that he’s wrong. The film aims to be Tartuffe and instead turns into Candide.
Finally, on a personal note, I think anyone who ever runs for office should be ridiculed, regardless of what they believe or whether or not they’ve done a good job. It’s a good way to keep them honest and to remind theme that they’re supposed to work for us and not the other way around. If one’s beliefs can’t survive a joke or two, that says far more about the beliefs than it does about the jokes.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
Somehow, I missed this trailer when it dropped last week. Well, no matter! The movie’s not being released until September 15th so I still have time to share the trailer for A Haunting in Venice, the latest Agatha Christie adaptation from Kenneth Branagh! This film finds Poirot retired and living in self-imposed exile in Venice. When he attends a séance, he is dragged back into the world of mystery solving.
The cast of suspects includes: Kyle Allen, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarico, and Michelle Yeoh! Not having read Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, I can’t tell you who the murderer is or even who the victim is. But, personally, I suspect Tina Fey did it.
Here’s the trailer!
Through the Shattered Lens 