As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! The movie? 2019’s Never Surrender!
Go behind the scenes of one of our favorite films with Never Surrender! Learn how this comedy classic came to exist and, perhaps more importantly, how it brought together a struggling nation.
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
See you there!
#FridayNightFlix It's a bit of a change of pace this Friday as we present a documentary! Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary is available on Prime! We start at 10 pm et! pic.twitter.com/Viqmn9Hkpx
Dead For A Dollar is director Walter Hill’s first film in six years and Christoph Waltz’s first western since his Oscar-winning turn in Django Unchained. The film will bring Waltz together with Willem Dafoe, as they play two rivals in the old west. Waltz is playing a bounty hunter who is hired to track down the runaway wife of a prominent politician. Dafoe plays a gambler and an outlaw who apparently has a score to settle with Waltz. Rachel Brosnahan (star of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) plays the woman for whom Waltz is searching. The film is scheduled to premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 6th.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing City Guys, which ran on NBC from 1997 to 2001. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!
The Cast of City Guys
The year was 1997 and everyone loved TNBC. Well, not everyone. Actually, I imagine that most people over the age of 30 had no idea what TNBC was. But, if you were a kid in the 90s and the early aughts, you knew that Sunday morning was when NBC aired shows like Saved By The Bell,California Dreams, and Hang Time. Produced by Peter S. Engel, these shows all took place in an idealized teen world where everyone was pretty, the schools were always clean, and every problem could be resolved in 30 minutes.
But, in the early 90s, TNBC was struggling a bit. Saved By The Bell: The New Class was not as popular as the original Saved By The Bell and California Dreams had just ended. For his next show, Peter Engel decided to do something a bit edgier than the sitcoms for which he was best known. He came up with City Guys, a show set not in California or Hang Time‘s Indiana. Instead, City Guys would be set in New York and it would feature a multi-racial cast. It would feature two best friends, one black and one white. It would be relevant and edgy while still recycling the same plots that had already been done to death on Saved By The Bell and California Dreams!
It would be City Guys, a celebration of city people!
So, how edgy was City Guys?
Just check out the theme song!
They’re smart and streetwise! They’re the neat guys! They’re the City Guys! Roll with them!
Neat guys?
I can only imagine what that nickname did for their street cred.
Anyway, I admit that I coming across City Guys on Tubi made me feel just a little nostalgic for the days when I would randomly come across episodes of City Guys and Saved By The Bell playing in syndication so I decided to rewatch the show, which was perhaps a mistake because, so far, City Guys has not been as good as I remembered. In fact, it’s been pretty bad.
Just consider the first two episodes:
1.1 “New Kids”
(Directed by Frank Bonner, aired on September 6th, 1997)
It’s the first day of school at Bayside …. oh, sorry. My mistake. We’re not at Bayside and we’re not in Los Angeles. Instead, we are at Manhattan High and we are totally in New York. Don’t let the fact that the show was obviously filmed on the same sound stage as Saved By The Bell and California Dreams fool you. We are totally in the city!
The first episode of City Guys does what a typical first episode does. It introduces our main characters and portrays them as stereotypically as possible. Alberto (Dion Basco) is quickly established as being this show’s annoying sidekick when he rides up to the school on his bicycle and announces that his name is now “Al Rocket!” Dawn Tartikoff (Caitlin Mowery) is established as being the show’s annoying overachiever when she shows up in her first scene carrying a sign about saving the environment. Tina (Gina McClain) is the pretty model who looks down on everyone else and whose character is destined to be dropped from the show after this episode.
And then there’s Jamal (Wesley Jonathan) and Chris (Scott Whyte). Jamal is black and lower middle-class. Chris is white and rich. That’s pretty much all the characterization that the first episode bothers to give them. They’re both transfer students at Manny High. Jamal was kicked out of his last school for fighting but he explains that he was more of a “punching bag” than a fighter. Chris was kicked out of several schools and apparently “flooded the soccer field.” How exactly did he do that? That’s never explained but everyone still seems to be really impressed when they hear about it.
At first, Chris and Jamal don’t get along. Jamal thinks that Chris is a spoiled rich kid. Chris calls Jamal “homey the clown.” The studio audiences loves it, even while future viewers cringe. Jamal bets Chris $20 that he can’t get a date with Tina. The wise and no-nonsense principal, Ms. Noble (Marcella Lowery), decides that the best way to get these two to shape up is to force them to paint the new school mural.
Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a graffiti already on the wall. El-Train (Steven Daniel) has tagged the wall and he threatens to kill anyone who paints over it. In future episodes, El-Train would become a kind-hearted sidekick to the main characters and would serve largely as comic relief. In this episode, he’s the school bully who everyone fears. Jamal tries to avoid angering El-Train by painting around the tag. But then Jamal sabotages Chris’s attempt to date Tina so Chris paints over El-Train’s name because …. I guess Chris is trying to get Jamal killed? That seems like an overreaction.
Fortunately, Chris learns the errors of his ways and, when Jamal and El-Train have their inevitable fight on the roof of the school, Chris confesses that he was the one who did painted over El-Train’s name. Then Ms. Noble shows up and sends everyone back to class, except for El-Train who gets suspended and whose name is revealed to actually be Lionel. Chris and Jamal make fun of El-Train’s real name, no longer concerned about dying because Ms. Noble apparently has the power to magically quash all beefs.
Still, Ms. Noble isn’t going to just shrug off Chris’s attempt to get Jamal killed. She orders the two of them to work as co-editors of the “video yearbook.” Because, seriously, why shouldn’t the yearbook be used as a behavior modification experiment?
The end credits roll. I’m sure these neat guys will have all sorts of adventures over the next four years of high school!
1.2 “For The Love Of Mother”
(Directed by Frank Bonner, aired on September 13, 1997)
Immediately after the opening credits of the second episode of City Guys, it becomes clear that things have certainly changed from last week.
Chris and Jamal have gone from being weary acquaintances to best friends!
Ms. Noble now knows all of the students and speaks to them as if she’s known them for years!
Tina has vanished and been replaced, as Dawn’s best friend, by Cassidy (Marissa Dyan). Cassidy is just as blonde and pretty as Tina but the actress is a bit less abrasive!
El-Train is nowhere to be seen!
For that matter, neither is the video yearbook that Chris and Jamal are supposed to be working on. Instead, this episode centers around Jamal’s sudden proficiency as a keyboardist and Chris’s desire to have a closer relationship with his mom (played by a very chic Susan Anton). When Mrs. Anderson visits the school, she hears Jamal playing the keyboards that he’s just purchased from Al. Mrs. Anderson takes Jamal under her wing and even arranges for him to play at a fundraiser that she’s hosting for the school’s music department. Chris gets jealous because his mom promised to take him to an Eric Clapton concert on the same night of the fundraiser….
Wait …. Eric Clapton? In the year 1997, were teenagers really going crazy over Eric Clapton tickets? Maybe one can excuse Chris for being into Clapton because he’s supposed to be a rich outsider. But all of the other students at Manhattan High are just as excited as he is about the chance to see Eric Clapton perform live. (What 15 year-old in 1997 wouldn’t be excited about hearing Wonderful Tonight live!?) NBC certainly had its finger on the pulse of youth culture! Of course, the main reason why the students are so excited about Eric Clapton is because the middle-aged people who wrote and produced this show would have been excited about Eric Clapton. It’s an example of how City Guys, a show about young people growing up on the hard streets of New York City, was created by people who were neither young nor New Yorkers.
This episode of City Guys also features a Japanese cook, who, of course, has a temper, bows whenever anyone insults him, and who speaks heavily accented English. He’s portrayed as being such a stereotype that I’m surprised they didn’t have someone hit a gong every time he entered a room. City Guys was a show about how whites and blacks should get along but apparently, the message of respect and defying stereotypes didn’t extend to Asians.
Anyway, it all works out in the end. Jamal impresses all the old white people with his music. Chris gets over being jealous. Mrs. Anderson …. well, she remains the same.
So, that’s it for the first two episodes of City Guys. Will the show get better or was I led astray by nostalgia? Check here next Thursday for my thoughts on episodes three and four!
Welcome to the month of September! Here are twelve things to which I am looking forward!
October — Let’s just admit it. Around these parts, the best thing about September is that it leads to October and TSL’s annual month of Horror! It’s not just that I spend September looking forward to Halloween. It’s also that I spend September selecting and watching all of the horror movies and reading all the books that I’m going to review in October! There’s nothing more fun that watching all the pieces that make up the jigsaw puzzle that is October fall into place.
Labor Day — How can you not be excited by our most confusing holiday? Not only does it involve a long weekend and a chance to see family but it also officially signals the end of wearing white. Plus, Labor Day is the official start of campaign season and this year, I’m actually paying attention to the midterms.
After Ever Happy — The After saga comes to a close. Will the world’s most boring couple manage to stick together? Will that pretentious British dude ever stop feeling sorry for himself? Will the American girl finally realize that she doesn’t have much of a personality beyond whoever she happens to be dating at the moment? And how foolish will people on Twitter act over this movie? The previous After films all made my list for the worst films of the year in which they were released. Will After Ever Happy keep the streak alive?
Pinocchio — It’s easy to be cynical about remakes but the trailers look adorable!
Blonde — Finally, after all the hype about the NC-17 rating, we’ll get to see Blonde for ourselves! That said, it is kind of funny the Blonde was rated NC-17 but it’s going to be showing on Netflix, which anyone can watch whenever they feel like it. Is Netflix going to be like, “Hey, if you’re not 17, stop watching right now!?” In the streaming era, ratings feel like a left-over relic from the past.
Don’t Worry, Darling — Much like Blonde, we’ll finally get to see what all the controversy is about. Personally, I kind of suspect this film will be overshadowed by all the personal stuff involving Olivia Wilde, Harry Styles, Shia, Florence, and that Ted Lasso guy.
A Jazzman’s Blues — Has Tyler Perry finally made a good film? We’ll find out soon.
The Venice and Toronto Film Festivals — The Venice festival has just begun. Toronto will start next week. And the Oscar picture will suddenly become much clearer.
The Return of Ghosts — The second season of Ghosts begins on the 29th!
The End of Big Brother — This season hasn’t been as bad as other seasons but it’s still getting a bit exhausting and I’m glad that it will be wrapping itself up in another few weeks. I’m also looking forward to the end of The Bachelorettes but I have to admit that the show pretty much ended for me the minute that Meatball didn’t get a rose.
New Seasons of Survivor and The Amazing Race — Yay!
Retro Television Reviews — This is a new feature here at TSL. I’ll be launching it tonight, around 5:30 central time. Keep an eye out!
Here are my Oscar predictions for August. By the end of September, the picture should be a bit clearer. Until then, most of the predictions listed below continue to be guesses.
Look back on the 2020 Oscars, it now seems pretty obvious to me that, of the nominated films, The Father was the one that should have won Best Picture. Of course, as far as I was concerned, The Father was actually a 2021 film but, due to the extended eligibility window, The Father was nominated for the 2020 Oscars. Regardless of how one feels about all of that nonsense with the extended eligibility window, The Father was the best film out of the nominees and Anthony Hopkins fully deserved his second Oscar. There are moments from The Father that were so powerful and heart-breaking that I feel as if I just watched them yesterday. On the other hand, I can’t remember a thing about Nomadland, the film that actually won.
The Son has been described as being director Florian Zeller’s follow-up to The Father. However, despite the return of screenwriter Christopher Hampton and the presence of Anthony Hopkins in both films (and despite the fact that Hopkins is playing a character named Anthony in both films), The Son is apparently more of a “spiritual sequel” to The Father than a direct sequel.
Well, no matter! Sequel or not, The Son is expected to be an Oscar contender. The teaser below doesn’t reveal too much, beyond Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern struggling to connect with their son. Hopkins makes a brief appearance. To be honest, the trailer feels a bit tense. One gets the feeling that this is a movie about people who could explode at any minute.
The 1970ish film Toomorrow tells the story of a group of students who are determined to make their way through art school despite not having much money. They do what they can to cut down on costs. For instance, they all live in one big, communal house. And even though they think that the protestors in the streets are totally groovy and happening in a far out way, they decline to really get involved with any of it because bail’s expensive.
(At least, that’s what I assume is going on in the protest scenes. This isn’t exactly the most coherent film ever made.)
The students also pay for college by forming their own band! Calling themselves Toomorrow, they make use of a new instrument called the Tonaliser! The Tonaliser sends out sonic vibrations that put everyone into a good, dancing mood! The Tonaliser is so powerful that the vibrations are even felt in outer space.
It turns out that there’s a group of aliens who have all the technology in the world but who have never figured out how to create music. They really want to learn, though. Music is the one thing that their society needs. The aliens, represented by Johnny Williams (played by the great character actor Roy Dotrice, who looks embarrassed to be in this film), abduct Toomorrow so that Toomorrow can teach them how to appreciate music. Toomorrow has no problem with doing that but they’re going to need help to focus or …. something. I don’t know. This movie is impossible to follow. All I know is that an alien woman goes down to Earth to keep Toomorrow focused and there’s a scene where she’s taken to an adult Swedish movie so that she can learn about human anatomy. Or something.
Yes, it’s Toomorrow! A film about hippies that was meant to appeal to hippies but which was definitely made by people who were not hippies themselves. The film does it best to show off its counter-culture bona fides, what with the commune and the art school and the protests and the band’s lead singer waking up with a different woman every morning and a barely there subplot about a professor having an affair with the member of the band. But none of it feels very authentic, largely because all of the hippies are very clean-cut and none of the protestors are really protesting anything specific as much as they’re just walking around with signs. All of the “shocking” counter-culture behavior takes place off-screen. Randy Newman once described Horse With No Name as being “song about a kid who thinks he’s taken acid” and Toomorrow is a film that was obviously made by that kid’s grandparents. As for Toomorrow the band, their music is nothing special. In fact, there’s really not a single memorable song to be found in Toomorrow the film. The aliens could have just waited a few years and abducted the house band from the Brady Bunch Variety Hour.
You may have noticed that I mentioned that the film was a “1970ish” film. That’s because Toomorrow didn’t receive an actual theatrical release. It was produced by Harry Saltzman (who also co-produced the first 9 James Bond films) and Don Kirshner, the music promoter who was responsible for The Monkees. It was directed by veteran British director Val Guest. When Saltzman and Kirshner failed to pay Guest and the rest of the crew for their work on the film, Guest sued and, as a result, Toomorrow spent decades held up in litigation. It was only released on video because everyone who was suing eventually died with the case unresolved.
If Toomorrow is known for anything, it’s for being the film debut of a young Olivia Newton-John. Olivia played a member of Toomorrow but she doesn’t get to do much, beyond smiling cheerfully while either performing and passing out tea at the commune. Olivia reportedly had such a terrible time on the set of Toomorrow that she swore she would never make another film and nearly turned down Grease as a result. That said, Olivia is probably the best thing about Toomorrow. She’s the only member of the band with any screen presence and probably the only one of them who could have talked the aliens into not blowing up the Earth.
Toomorrow can be viewed on YouTube. It’s interesting as an example of how much the old film establishment struggled to figure out how to appeal to younger filmgoers in the late 60s and early 70s. Every moment in the film has been calculated to appeal to “the kids” but it’s precisely because it’s so calculated that the film ultimately fails. There would be no tomorrow for Toomorrow.
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to the great William Friedkin. As a director, William Friedkin revolutionized both the horror genre and the crime genre. The car chase from 1971’s The FrenchConnection has been much imitated but rarely equaled.
A few years ago, I attended a showing of The French Connection at the Alamo Drafthouse. As exciting as this chase is, it’s even more amazing when viewed on a big screen.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, we are watching 1994’s Zero Tolerance! Selected and hosted by @SweetEmmyCat, Zero Tolerance stars two great character actors, Robert Patrick and Titus Welliver! It also features musician Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac fame. I’m not sure who Fleetwood plays but there was probably a lot of cocaine on set. Here’s the trailer:
That’s really all I know about Zero Tolerance! I plan to find out more tonight and I invite you to join me. If you want to join us, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy. And a review of this film will probably end up on this site at some point this week.
Enjoy!
#MondayActionMovie invites you to join us for ZERO TOLERANCE (1994) when hair was big, but guns were bigger
Starring Robert (T2, X-Files) Patrick, Titus Welliver being scummy 😂, Mick Fleetwood (yes, THAT Mick Fleetwood) & lots of ammo💥 pic.twitter.com/9h6Pbx2n9q
— EmmyCat's AFK forevah🌈Sep05,14 (@SweetEmmyCat) August 28, 2022
Through the Shattered Lens 