The TSL’s Grindhouse: Avengement (dir by Jesse V. Johnson)

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’m not really sure if “Avengement” is actually a word but, regardless, that’s what Cain Burgess is determined to get. AVENGEMENT!

Martial artist Scott Adkins plays Cain in this 2019 British film. When we first meet Cain, he’s in prison but that quickly changes once he manages to escape. Cain heads to a pub, one that’s owned by his brother, Lincoln (Craig Faibrass). After he’s taken everyone in the pub hostage, we learn about how Cain not only came to be a prisoner but also how he ended up with some rather prominent facial scars. It turns out that Cain likes to tell a story and, for whatever reason, the gangsters are willing to sit around and listen. Through the use of flashbacks, we see how Cain went from being an innocent martial artist to being the most feared man in prison. We see how he learned to kill and how not even getting acid thrown in his face could slow him down. Cain’s a scary dude and he’s out for revenge! Or avengement!

Of course, we also can’t help but notice that a lot of Cain’s adventures feel as if they’ve been lifted from other British crime films. The talkative gangsters bring to mind the films of Guy Ritchie. A lengthy chase scene owes more than a little to the opening on Trainspotting. Even the fight in the pub owes a bit to the finale of Shaun of the Dead. It’s all a bit familiar but then again, that’s part of the appeal of the modern British crime thriller. We watch these films specifically for the posh villains and the pub fights and the often indecipherable dialogue. The familiarity is often exactly what the viewer is looking for. (That said, I was a little bit surprised by the lack of Russian mobsters wearing track suits. That was a missed opportunity.) I think the other reason why Americans, in particular, like British gangster films is the novelty of seeing that British gangsters can be just as unnecessarily violent as American gangsters. It’s nice to be reminded that America isn’t the only country that breeds violence.

Speaking of violence, Avengement is a very violent film and it’s also often a very bloody film. When you consider how much of the film takes place in prison, it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of stabbings. (What is somewhat surprising is that there are also a lot of stabbings outside of prison, even when there are guns nearby.) I’m usually not a fan of gratuitous violence but Avengement handles it all with a certain wit. The violence is so over-the-top that it’s hard not to suspect that the filmmakers are commenting on the excessive nature of other British gangster films. There’s a lengthy montage of Cain just fighting anyone who comes near him and it goes on for so long that it actually becomes somewhat humorous. It’s hard not to feel at least a little admiration for Cain’s determination to start a fight with every single person that he sees. He certainly doesn’t give up. Scott Adkins is a gymnast, along with being a martial artist, and there’s a grace to his movements that comes through even when the film is at its most brutal. Early on, I joked that the film would only work if its ultraviolent protagonist turned out to be likable and strangely enough, that’s exactly what happened. Scott Adkins, to my surprise, turned out to be not only an exciting fighter but also a pretty good actor. He shows enough screen presence in Avengement to make viewers hope that he’ll someday get a major action role.

Avengement is a ferocious but entertaining and unpretentious action film. Watch it. Experience it. Just don’t worry about trying to understand what everyone’s talking about. Just assume that everyone has a reason to want Cain dead and Cain has a reason to want the same for everyone else and there should not be any trouble at all.

Here’s The Teaser For Thor: Love and Thunder

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Thor is one of the more remarkable success stories of the MCU.

He started out as the kind of boring super hero whose origin didn’t make much sense and who felt a bit out-of-place with the other Avengers. (It was always funny to him how quickly they all were to accept the fact that Norse mythology was based on reality.) But, thanks to director Taika Waititi and actor Chris Hemsworth, he’s been transformed into one of the most beloved characters in the MCU. Waititi and Hemsworth both realized Thor was a ludicrous character and the best way to handle that would be to embrace the silliness of it all.

That was the approach that they took with Thor: Ragnarok and it appears to be the same approach they’ll be taking with Thor: Love and Thunder. And, of course, Chris Pratt and the Guardians of the Galaxy are the perfect people to help them do that!

Here’s the teaser for Thor: Love and Thunder!

Lisa Marie’s Week in Review: 4/11/22 — 4/17/22

Posted on April 17, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week was all about family. I spent the holidays with my sisters and I didn’t really watch any movies or …. do anything else for that matter. But I guess I needed the rest.

I was a bit upset when I discovered that ABC was not showing The Ten Commandments on Saturday. I may have even sent an angry tweet to my local ABC affiliate about it. (Okay, I did send it and I was a little bit rude, which I feel bad about.) Watching the first 30 minutes of The Ten Commandments before leaving for Easter Vigil and then the rest afterwards is a Bowman family tradition! But this Saturday, a basketball game aired instead and I was not happy.

“BASKETBALL!?” I raged, “How dare they!?”

Anyway, I subsequently discovered that ABC had apparently aired The Ten Commandments last week and I just missed it. I really didn’t have anyone to blame but myself and I feel kind of bad for yelling at ABC on twitter over it. To be honest, The Ten Commandments is on Prime so I can watch it whenever I want but I guess I was upset because watching it on TV with commercials is a family tradition and I don’t like change in general.

Anyway, turns out my sister Megan had the movie on DVD so, even as I type this up, my sisters and I are watching Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments!

Here’s what else I watched this week:

Films I Watched:

Television Shows I Watched:

61st Street
The Girl From Plainville
Hard Cell
Law & Order
The Outlaws
Survivor
Yellowjackets

Music To Which I Listened:

The Beatles
Big Data
Blanck Mass
Britney Spears
The Chemical Brothers
Crystal Medthod
Haim
Madness
Radiohead
Saint Motel
Swedish House Mafia
Yvonne Elliman

News From Last Week:

Links From Last Week:

Links From The Site:

Erin shared a scene about the Easter Beagle and 7 pictures of the sun: Looking for the Sun, Let The Sun Come In, Sunset at the Park, Thursday Sunrise, Sunset on Friday, Sun, and View of the Sun!
Jeff shared music videos from U2, The Hooters, Shine, The Beach Boys, Belinda Carlisle, Warrant, and David Bowie! He also reviewed The Hard Hombre, Law of the Rio Grande, and Hell-Fire Austin!
I paid tribute to Uli Edel and I shared my week in television and a scene from Apocalypse Now! I reviewed Death on the Nile, The Girl From Plainville, and the 103rd Ballot!
Leonard shared the trailer from Crimes of the Future!

More From Us:

Ryan has a patreon! Consider subcribing!
At Days Without Incident, Leonard shared a song from Jesus Christ Superstar!
At her photography site, Erin Shared: path, lizard, base of the rainbow, house, friendship, flowers, and faith!
At my music site, I shared songs from The Beatles, Madness, Swedish House Mafia, Haim, Saint Motel, Britney Spears, and Blanck Mass!
For the Realty TV Chat Blog, I reviewed the latest episode of Survivor!

Check out last week by clicking here!

Lisa Marie’s Week in Television: 4/10/22 — 4/16/22

Posted on April 16, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Because of the holidays, I haven’t seen the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead yet. It’s on the DVR, along with American Idol and all the British comedies that I usually watch. I’ll review it in the upcoming few days, even though I’m sure everyone has moved on by now. One fun thing about having your own site is that you can set your own schedule.

Here’s a few thoughts on what I did watch:

61st Street (Sunday Night, AMC)

Arriving with very little fanfare, 61st Street is AMC’s latest original series. It takes place in Chicago and it deals with a burned-out defense attorney (Courtney B. Vance) and a high school track star (Tosin Cole) who is just trying to survive long enough to make it to college. Unfortunately, Cole is in the wrong place at the wrong time and, as the premiere episode came to a close, he was being pursued by the Chicago cops.

Judging from the pilot, the show is attempting to do for Chicago what The Wire did for Baltimore. The problem, however, is that 61st Street never feels as authentic, unpredictable, or downright dangerous as The Wire. In the pilot, at least, the characters came across as being caricatures and, for a show that is set in a very real neighborhood, there was little sense of place to be found. The show could have been taking place in any generic city.

Interestingly enough, the show as created by Peter Moffat, an British writer who is best-known for writing a series of films and television shows about recent British history. He also wrote the script for the worst film that Clint Eastwood ever directed, Hereafter. You have to wonder just what exactly led Moffat to try to capture the spirit of Chicago. For that matter, why do we even need yet another show about Chicago? There are other cities in America.

2022 Masters Golf Tournament (Sunday, CBS)

I watched a bit of it with Jeff on Sunday afternoon. The golf course was really pretty. I’m going to learn how to play golf. I already kind of know but I want to learn how to play golf well! Why should my boyfriend have all the fun?

The Brady Bunch (Sunday Morning, MeTV)

During this Sunday’s block of The Brady Bunch, Bobby became a pest after saving Peter’s life, Jan freaked out because she wasn’t good at anything, Bobby and Peter imagined what it would be like to live on another planet, and some weird new family showed up as a part of backdoor pilot! While it’s best not to spend too much time thinking about The Brady Bunch, I have always been amused by backdoor pilots. It’s always like, “Oh, hey, people we’ve never seen or head about before! Wait …. why is the show following them to their home?”

Full House (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

The Tanners are going to Hawaii!

Sunday’s 4-episode bloc of Full House opened with an episode in which Danny, the girls, the uncles, and aunt Becky all went to Hawaii to celebrate the two-year anniversary of Joey and Jesse moving into the house. The cool thing about this episode is that it had plenty of Hawaiian scenery and Becky got mad at Jesse for talking about Elvis all the time. You tell him, Becky!

This was followed by three episodes in which everyone learned an important lesson. DJ and Stephanie learned about the importance of going to school. Becky and Jesse learned how to communicate as a couple. Stephanie learned not to make fun of her nerdy friend and Danny really should have learned to stop inviting Joey to appear on Good Morning San Francisco.

The Girl From Plainville (Hulu)

I reviewed the latest episode of The Girl From Plainville here.

As I mentioned in that post, I’m pretty much over the show and I will probably, from now on, only offer capsule reviews of the 3 remaining episodes in my Week in TV posts.

Hard Cell (Netflix)

This British sitcom takes place in a women’s prison in which the majority of the characters are played by Catherine Tate. I watched the first two episodes on Wednesday and, unfortunately, neither one of them really worked for me. There really wasn’t much gained by having Tate play multiple characters and the mockumentary approach no longer feels that fresh. Tate is undeniably talented but the show just fell flat.

It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown (Apple TV+)

Erin and I watched this on Saturday afternoon. Erin wrote about this special a few years ago.

Law & Order (Thursday Night, NBC)

This week’s “ripped from the headline” case was based on the Ed Buck murder trial and featured a wealthy, old white man who liked to pick up young black men and then shoot them up with drugs. Occasionally, the younger men died. He was brought to justice, just as Ed Buck finally was. This was an okay episode and it gave Camryn Manheim a chance to shine.

I do have to say that I still always find it amusing how the Law & Order franchise has imagined a world in which a bunch of blue collar, unsentimental New York cops all talk like panelists on MSNBC. I kind of doubt that many cops voted for Bernie Sanders but you wouldn’t know that from watching this show.

The Love Boat (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

On this week’s cruise: Telma Hopkins, Theresa Merritt, Brian Stokes Mitchell, James Noble, Raymond St. Jacques, Holland Taylor, Adam West, and Alan Young! The highlight was Adam West, parodying himself in the role of an overly macho buffoon.

Midnight Mass (Netflix)

This horror-themed miniseries from Mike Flanagan was released in October of last year but, at the time, I really didn’t feel like watching a show about a demonic priest. However, with the Emmy nominations coming up, I figured that I should go ahead and give the show a try. At the very least, I wanted to see if it lived up to all the acclaim.

It’s a show about life on an isolated island and what happens to the community when a mysterious priest shows up. I watched the first episode on Sunday night and it was pretty effective, even if some of the dialogue felt a bit overwritten. Flanagan knows how to create a creepy and intriguing atmosphere and I liked Hamish Linklater’s menacing-but-friendly portrayal of Father Paul Hill. I did not like the episode’s final scene, which involved a bunch of dead cats washing up on the beach. Normally, that’s the sort of thing that would make me stop watching but, because of my faith in the storytelling abilities of Mike Flanagan, I decided to make an exception in the case of Midnight Mass.

That said, Holy Week (especially one that I was spending with my sisters) didn’t really feel like the right time to watch a miniseries about an evil priest so I decided to put off watching the rest of the show until next week.

The Outlaws (Amazon Prime)

This British comedy/drama hybrid deals with seven strangers who are forced to due community service as punishment for breaking the law. At first, they start off as strangers but then they bond and steal a lot of money. You can probably guess the story. Christopher Walken plays Frank, an old con artist who has recently been released for prison. He’s a delight, as always.

I watched the first episode of this show on Monday night and I have to say that it kind of annoyed me. I appreciated the performances of Walken, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Darren Boyd but otherwise, the show itself often seemed to be trying a bit too hard and the mix of comedy and drama occasionally played a bit awkwardly. Largely due to the fact that it was only a 6-epiosde series and the presence of Christopher Walken in the cast, I decided that I would give the show a second chance but that first episode didn’t do much for me.

I watched the second episode late on Tuesday night. It was a definite improvement on the second episode and featured plenty of good Walken moments but the hour length still made the episode feel as if it was punishingly overextended and the show’s balance between comedy and drama continued to be a rather awkward one.

I’ll watch the four remaining episodes of the show next week.

Survivor (Wednesday Night, CBS)

I reviewed the latest episode of Survivor here!

Yellowjackets (Showtime)

I finished up Yellowackets on Monday afternoon. I cried with Laura Lee blew up. I was also really upset when Jackie froze to death. And don’t even get me started on the dog! This was actually kind of a traumatic series. Still, it was a fascinating show to watch and I look forward to seeing how things plays out during the second season.

TV Review: The Girl From Plainville 1.5 “Mirrorball” (dir by Pippa Bianco)

Posted on April 12, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, I tried.

I really did. Coming off of the high that I got off reviewing each episode of The Dropout, I thought it would be pretty easy to review all 8 episodes of The Girl From Plainville but, having watched the fifth episode last night, I think I’m done.

Don’t get me wrong. I will continue to watch the series. (There’s only three weeks left.) And I’ll certainly include any thoughts that I have about the show in my “Week in Television” post. But I think I’m done with trying to come up with 500-1000 words to use to review each episode because, quite frankly, there’s just not much to say about The Girl From Plainville. The story of how Michelle Carter encouraged Conrad Roy to commit suicide is well-known. The fact that Michelle Carter was put on trial and convicted is also well-known. This show is trying to build-up suspense about a story that most viewers will already know.

It perhaps wouldn’t matter if The Girl From Plainville had something new or unexpectedly insightful to say about the case. But the fact of the matter is that Michelle Carter is not that interesting of a human being. Everything that I’ve read and seen about the case seems to suggest that she really didn’t have much going on inside of her brain. Because she lacked an actual personality, Michelle learned how to behave and how to interact through social media and television. Conrad’s death allowed her to live her life as if it was an episode of Glee, or at least that’s what Michelle was hoping. And now, years after Conrad’s suicide, Michelle is out of prison and being played in a miniseries by Elle Fanning. It doesn’t seem to be quite fair, does it?

As for last night’s episode, it felt pretty much like a filler episode. The prosecution team continued to build a case against Michelle while Michelle had to deal with going from briefly being the most popular girl in school to being an absolute pariah. We also got a few clumsily handled flashbacks to Michelle texting Conrad. Last weekend, I watched Dopesick, which also aired on Hulu and also used a jumbled timeline. The timeline in Dopesick did occasionally get confusing but, at the same time, it worked because it took place over several years and the actors could be made to look older or younger, depending on the timeline. If Michael Keaton had a hint of hair, you know the show was taking place in the 90s. If he was bald, you know it was 2004. The Girl From Plainville, on the other hand, is only dealing with a two-year period and, as such, it’s hard to keep track of what’s happening when. The characters played by Elle Fanning and Chloe Sevigny pretty much look and act the same in 2012 as they do in 2014. It’s a very clumsily constructed story structure, one that does the miniseries little good.

That said, Elle Fanning continues to give a convincingly unhinged performance as Michelle and Colton Ryan is appropriately vulnerable as Conrad. (Sorry, I’m not going to call him Coco.) I think if the miniseries had done away with all of the flashback nonsense and just told their story in chronological order, Fanning and Ryan’s strong performances would have been better served. For now, I’m done with doing full reviews of this show but, if next week’s episode is a surprisingly good one, that could change.

Book Review: The 103rd Ballot by Robert K. Murray

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Cinematically, the 1968 Democrat Convention has been done to death.

There have been a lot of movies made about the 1968 Democrat Convention and certainly, I can understand why. Not only did you have an epic battle taking place in the Convention Hall between the Democrat establishment and the reformers but there were also riots in the streets. The police were beating up protestors and slogans were being chanted and Haskell Wexler was filming footage for Medium Cool. Yes, it was all very cinematic but again, it’s just been done to death. We don’t need another movie about what happened in 1968.

Instead, what is needed is a movie about the 1924 Democrat Convention, which was held in Madison Square Garden and which lasted for two and a half weeks because none of the men running for President could get enough votes. The two major candidates were Al Smith of New York and William McAdoo of California. Smith was an anti-prohibitionist and was seeking to become the first Catholic to be nominated by a major political party. McAdoo was the son-in-law of America’s greatest monster, Woodrow Wilson. Smith’s campaign was managed by a young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was making a political comeback after being previously struck down by polio. Though he was not himself a member and had no use for the organization, McAdoo found himslef being supported by the Ku Klux Klan, who was then at the height of its political influence and which opposed Smith because of his Catholicism.

With neither Smith nor McAdoo able to command a majority of the delegates, other “favorite son” candidates emerged. U.S. Sen. Oscar Underwood of Alabama, a longtime opponent of Klan, was not only nominated but also fought a heroic but losing battle to insert a plank condemning the Klan into the Democrat platform. West Virginia’s John W. Davis was nominated, as was Kansas’s Jonathan M. Davis. Meanwhile, in the wings, William Jennings Bryan managed the presidential campaign of his brother, Charles, and waited to see if the Convention would perhaps turn to him and put him on the national ticket for a record fourth time. (Little did Bryan know, of course, that the Scopes Monkey Trial was waiting for him, right around the corner….)

In the end, 58 men received votes for the presidential nomination at the 1924 Democrat Convention. It took a record 103 ballots for the party to finally nominate a candidate who, after all of that, would still have to run against the enormously popular incumbent, Calvin Coolidge. Along the way, there were fist fights, political chicanery, and many accusations of lies, bad faith, and prejudice. FDR re-launcher his career with his pro-Smith speech but, in doing so, he also inspired the jealousy that would lead to Al Smith becoming one of the leading opponents of the New Deal. Meanwhile, the aging William Jennings Bryan struggled to control a party that no longer had much use for him.

It’s a fascinating story, and one that I know about because I read a book called The 103rd Ballot, which tells the story of not only the convention but also the election that followed it. The book was written by Robert K. Murray and it was originally published in 1976. It’s been around for a while but the issues that it deals with and the politicians that are profiled all feel very familiar. Today, control of the major political parties is still being fought over by the activist who do the work and the politicians who reap the rewards. Extremism is still a threat. Just as the Democrats did in 1924, Americans are still trying to figure out what the country’s role in the world should be. As described by Robert K. Murray, historic figures like FDR, Al Smith, McAdoo, Calving Coolidge, and John W. Davis all come to life. Their motivations are often petty but their actions change the course of history.

The next presidential election is going to be the 100-year anniversary of the 1924 debacle and the issues that made that convention so chaotic are the same issues that political types are still dealing with today. In 1924, America was recovering for a war and a pandemic. In 2024 …. well, you get the idea. The main difference, of course, is that we now have air conditioning. At the 1924 convention, air conditioning was still a relatively new concept and the delegates spent two and a half-weeks jammed into Madison Square Garden in the summer. Agck!

So, seriously, some aspiring Aaron Sorkin (though not Sorkin himself, that’s the last thing we need) needs to buy the rights to this book and get to work on a movie or a miniseries about what happened in 1924. I can’t wait to see who plays Al Smith!

Film Review: Death on the Nile (dir by Kenneth Branagh)

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The main mystery at the heart of Kenneth Branagh’s adaption of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile is not who committed the film’s murders but just how seriously we, the audience, are meant to take what we’re watching.

In this much-delayed (by COVID and a cast full of actors who could not escape personal scandal) follow-up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh again plays the eccentric detective Hercule Poirot. Poirot is again in an exotic land, this time Egypt. And again, circumstances have conspired to isolate him and a group of wealthy and glamorous suspects from the rest of the world. In Murder on the Orient Express, everyone was stuck on a train. Here, they are stuck on a boat. Admittedly, the boat provides a nice view of the pyramids but, eventually, even those testaments to engineering seem to be mocking the people stuck on the boat. The pyramids, after all, have survived for centuries. The same cannot be said for the people who have come to see them. Over the course of the film, there are several murders. (Indeed, Death on the Nile is significantly bloodier than Murder on the Orient Express and, unlike what happened on the Orient Express, the majority of the victims have done nothing to deserve their grisly fate.) Like Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile is based on a novel by Agatha Christie. Branagh changes a few details from Christie’s novel, which is understandable since it’s important to keep the audience guessing. For instance, Bouc (Tom Bateman), who was Poirot’s assistant in Murder on the Orient Express, returns in Branagh’s film version and provides some continuity between the two films. It also provides a nice side-mystery as the audience tries to figure out how Poirot and Bouc could just happen to run into each other in Egypt. Fear not, the film offers up a solution.

As is to be expected, the victims and the suspects are brought to life by a cast of stars and familiar character actors, all of whom act up a storm. Some, of course, do a better job of embracing the melodrama than others. Armie Hammer and Gal Gadot play a glamorous couple and, regardless of how we feel about Hammer as a human being, it works because Gadot and Hammer both look they could have stepped out of a sophisticated, 1930s RKO comedy. (Hammer’s stiff line readings, which are totally appropriate for his character, would actually be a highlight of the film if he wasn’t Armie Hammer.) Russell Brand is oddly subdued as the doctor with the secret while Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders show up to keep all of the British comedy fanatics happy. Sophie Okonedo plays a jazz singer and how you react to her character will depend on how much patience you have for anachronistic musical numbers. (There’s a surprisingly large amount of them.) Annettte Bening plays Bouc’s mother and there’s really not a subtle moment to be found in her performance but again, it works because Death on the Nile is not a particularly subtle film. It’s a film that demands a certain amount of calculated overacting and Bening is enough of a veteran performer to deliver exactly what the film needs.

No, there’s nothing particularly subtle about Death on the Nile but then again, that’s always been a part of Kenneth Branagh’s appeal. Branagh’s endless (and often justified) faith in his own abilities as a director and an actor means that Branagh is willing to do things that others would avoid, whether that means making a 4-hour version of Hamlet or a black-and-white film about growing up in Belfast or, for that matter, a gaudy Agatha Christie adaptation in which he plays the lead detective. Death on the Nile is a celebration of melodrama, beautiful people, and nice clothes. Even the fact that the Egyptian backdrops are obviously phony works to the film’s advantage, giving the proceedings a bit of a retro, Hollywood studio system feel. At its best, Death on the Nile is an homage to old-fashioned camp..

And yet, there are hints that Branagh means for the film to be something more. The films opens with a prologue, one that is not included in Christie’s book or in anything else that Christie wrote about Poirot. The prologue, which is filmed in black-and-white, features Poirot getting terribly wounded during World War I and growing his famous mustache to cover his scars. We also discover that the great love of Poirot’s life was a nurse who died during the war. Later, while solving the murder, Poirot often talks about how he has shut himself away from the world, never wanting to risk falling in love again. There’s even a hint that Poirot has fallen for one of the suspects. Branagh’s a good actor and can obviously pull off Poirot’s inner turmoil but those little serious asides still feel out of place in a film that features Armie Hammer and Russell Brand as romantic rivals. It’s hard not to wonder if Branagh is in on the joke or if he’s seriously attempting to use Poirot as a symbol for an alienated and traumatized society.

One could argue that Poirot uses his mustache to hide from the world in much the same way that many people have spent the past two years using their masks to hide from COVID. Except, of course, Death on the Nile was actually filmed three years ago, before anyone had even heard of COVID-19. The film was first delayed by the theaters shutting down. It was delayed a second time by the scandals surrounded Armie Hammer. (Indeed, this film will probably be the last major studio release to feature Armie Hammer.) It was finally released in February of this year and, within a month, it was on Hulu and HBOMax. It didn’t exactly kill at the box office but I think Death on the Nile will be rediscovered over the years. It’s a minor entry in Branagh’s filmography but it’s still enjoyably silly, regardless of whether that was Branagh’s intention or not.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Uli Edel Edition

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 75th birthday to German director, Uli Edel! It’s time for….

4 Shots from 4 Uli Edel Films

Christiane F. (1981, dir b Uli Edel, DP: Justus Pankau and Jürgen Jürges)

Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989, dir by Uli Edel, DP: Stefan Czapsky)

Body of Evidence (1993, dir by Uli Edel, DP: Douglas Milsome)

The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008, dir by Uli Edel, DP: Rainer Klausmann)

Scenes That I Love: “I Love The Smell of Napalm in the Morning” from Apocalypse Now (Happy birthday, John Milius!)

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, the Shattered Lens celebrates the 78th birthday of the iconic screenwriter and director, John Milius!

While director Francis Ford Coppola definitely put his own stamp on 1979’s Apocalypse Now, the film started life as a script written by John Milius and the film itself is full of dialogue that could only have been written by Milius. The most famous example is Robert Duvall’s monologue about the smell of napalm in the morning. Actually, the entire helicopter attack feels like pure Milius. Reportedly, Duvall’s character was originally named Colonel Kharnage but, by the time the movie was made, his name had become Kilgore. It’s still not exactly a subtle name but it’s not quite as obvious as Kharnage.

(When James Caan read the script, he loved the role so much that he was offended to not be offered it and, as a result, he turned down offers to play not only Willard but also Kurtz.)

Happy birthday, John Milius!

Lisa Marie’s Week In Review: 4/4/22 — 4/10/22

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Slap discourse has gotten old and, at this point, most of the conversation surrounding it feels performative. Will Smith has been banned from attending the Oscars for the next ten years. Considering how few people watch the Oscars anymore, you can decide for yourself whether or not the punishment fits the crime. At this point, I’m just hoping that another celebrity will do something stupid in public so that we can move on to another subject.

As for me, I didn’t too much this week but sometimes, I really do need to get my rest. I’m looking forward to spending this upcoming week with my family and to also being a lot more active! Yay!

Also, the Oscars are over but the Emmys are coming up. I’ve got a lot on which I need to get caught up.

Lent is also almost over. I gave up cursing Lent and if you read over what I’ve posted since March 1st, you’ll notice that I have yet to slip up. Double yay!

Anyway, here’s what little I watched this week:

Films I Watched: