The 2017 film, A Very Merry Toy Store, asks the age-old question: “Could any couple possibly be more adorable than Melissa Joan Hart and Mario Lopez?”
Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina!) and Mario Lopez (Slater!) play rival toy store owners. (Their fathers once owned one big toy store but that didn’t work out.) Hart’s idealistic toy store is struggling. Lopez’s more commercial toy store is thriving. But they’re going to have to set aside their differences (and accept that they’re totally in love) because a big chain store is coming to town!
It’s a cute movie, one that works because the leads are so likable. (Brian Dennehy and Beth Broderick are both well-cast in supporting roles.) What can I say? I like this movie! Maybe I just always wanted to own a toy store.
(If I had a toy store, I would so a “Buy a Toy, Get A Free Book” promotion.)
Back in December, Lisa agreed to watch a baseball movie with me to make up for making me watch The Catcherin 2023. The one we picked was Stealing Home, because it starred Mark Harmon and Jodie Foster and it looked like it would be a sweet movie.
Stealing Home opens with Billy Wyatt (Mark Harmon), a minor league baseball player who is getting ready to take the field and who is standing for the National Anthem. I immediately liked Billy because he was standing for the Anthem and not taking a knee. I also like aging minor leaguers because they’re still playing the game even though they know they’ve probably missed their window to move up to the majors. Billy Wyatt loves both the game and his country.
As Billy waits to play ball, he thinks about another type of love, the love that he had for Katie Chandler (Jodie Foster). Katie was six years older than him and encouraged him to always pursue his dreams, whether it was in baseball or love. The movie flashes back to Billy living in a motel with a cocktail waitress and getting a phone call from his mother who tells him that Katie has committed suicide and she wants Billy to spread her ashes at a special place. Billy then flashes back to his childhood and his teen years, in which he’s played by William McNamara who does not look like he could ever grow up to be Mark Harmon. Billy’s best friend is Alan Appleby, who is played as a teenager by Jonathan Silverman and as an adult by Harold Ramis. Jonathan Silverman growing up to be Harold Ramis seems even more unlikely than William McNamara becoming Mark Harmon. Billy remembers losing his virginity to Appleby’s prom date, losing his dad to a car wreck, and a Fourth of July weekend that he spent on the beach with Katie and his mom (Blair Brown).
Only Jodie Foster plays Katie Chandler and we only see Katie thorough Billy’s eyes. Jodie Foster gives a lively performance as Katie but she always more of a plot device than a fully rounded character. We never find out why Katie killed herself. Her father says that Katie was unhappy during her adult life but why? Even after Billy gets her ashes and tries to figure out where she wanted him to spread them, he never thinks about why she killed herself. In fact, he hadn’t even talked to her for years. That really bothered me.
The movie ends with Billy stealing home during a game and proving that he’s still got it as far as baseball goes. I love baseball but I still felt like Katie’s untold story was probably more interesting than Billy’s. I liked Mark Harmon’s performance and I really wanted to like Stealing Home more than I did. I wish the movie had been more about who Katie was instead of being about who Billy thought Katie was.
In 2021, I finally saw the infamous film, The Bonfire of the Vanities.
I saw it when it premiered on TCM. Now, I have to say that there were quite a few TCM fans who were not happy about The Bonfire of the Vanities showing up on TCM, feeling that the film had no place on a station that was supposed to be devoted to classic films. While it’s true that TCM has shown “bad” films before, they were usually films that, at the very least, had a cult reputation. And it is also true that TCM has frequently shown films that originally failed with audiences or critics or both. However, those films had almost all been subsequently rediscovered by new audiences and often reevaluated by new critics. The Bonfire of the Vanities is not a cult film. It’s not a film about which one can claim that it’s “so bad that it’s good.” As for the film being reevaluated, I’ll just say that there is no one more willing than me to embrace a film that was rejected by mainstream critics. But, as I watched The Bonfire of the Vanities, I saw that everything negative that I had previously read about the film was true.
Released in 1990 and based on a novel by Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities stars Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, a superficial Wall Street trader who has the perfect penthouse and a painfully thin, status-obsessed wife (Kim Cattrall). Sherman also has a greedy mistress named Maria (Melanie Griffith). It’s while driving with Maria that Sherman takes a wrong turn and ends up in the South Bronx. When Sherman gets out of the car to move a tire that’s in the middle of the street, two black teenagers approach him. Maria panics and, after Sherman jumps back in the car, she runs over one of the teens. Maria talks Sherman into not calling the police. The police, however, figure out that Sherman’s car was the one who ran over the teen. Sherman is arrested and finds himself being prosecuted by a power-hungry district attorney (F. Murray Abraham). The trial becomes the center of all of New York City’s racial and economic strife, with Sherman becoming “the great white defendant,” upon whom blame for all of New York’s problems can be placed. Bruce Willis plays an alcoholic journalist who was British in the novel. Morgan Freeman plays the judge, who was Jewish in the novel. As well, in the novel, the judge was very much a New York character, profanely keeping order in the court and spitting at a criminal who spit at him first. In the movie, the judge delivers a speech ordering everyone to “be decent to each other” like their mothers taught them to be.
Having read Wolfe’s very novel before watching the film, I knew that there was no way that the adaptation would be able to remain a 100% faithful to Wolfe’s lacerating satire. Because the main character of Wolfe’s book was New York City, he was free to make almost all of the human characters as unlikable as possible. In the book, Peter Fallow is a perpetually soused opportunist who doesn’t worry about who he hurts with his inflammatory articles. Sherman McCoy is a haughty and out-of-touch WASP who never loses his elitist attitude. In the film, Bruce Willis smirks in his wiseguy manner and mocks the other reporters for being so eager to destroy Sherman. Hanks, meanwhile, attempts to play Sherman as an everyman who just happens to live in a luxury penthouse and spend his days on Wall Street. Hanks is so miscast and so clueless as how to play a character like this that Sherman actually comes across as if he’s suffering from some sort of brain damage. He feels less like a stockbroker and more like Forrest Gump without the Southern accent. There’s a scene, written specifically for the film, in which Fallow and Sherman ride the subway together and it literally feels like a parody of one of those sentimental buddy films where a cynic ends up having to take a road trip with someone who has been left innocent and naïve as result of spending the first half of their life locked in basement or a bomb shelter. It’s one thing to present Sherman as being wealthy and uncomfortable among those who are poor. It’s another thing to leave us wondering how he’s ever been able to successfully cross a street in New York City without getting run over by an angry cab driver.
Because the film can’t duplicate Wolfe’s unique prose, it instead resorts to mixing cartoonish comedy and overwrought melodrama. It doesn’t add up too much. At one point, Sherman ends a dinner party by firing a rifle in his apartment but, after it happens, the incident is never mentioned again. I mean, surely someone else in the apartment would have called the cops about someone firing a rifle in the building. Someone in the press would undoubtedly want to write a story about Sherman McCoy, the center of the city’s trial of the century, firing a rifle in his own apartment. If the novel ended with Sherman resigned to the fact that his legal problems are never going to end, the film ends with Sherman getting revenge on everyone who has persecuted him and he does so with a smirk that does not at all feel earned. After two hours of being an idiot, Sherman suddenly outthinks everyone else. Why? Because the film needed the happy ending that the book refused to offer up.
Of course, the film’s biggest sin is that it’s just boring. It’s a dull film, full of good actors who don’t really seem to care about the dialogue that they are reciting. Director Brian De Palma tries to give the film a certain visual flair, resorting to his usual collection of odd camera angles and split screens, none of which feel at all necessary to the story. In the end, De Palma is not at all the right director for the material. Perhaps Sidney Lumet could have done something with it, though he would have still had to deal with the less than impressive script. De Palma’s over-the-top, set piece-obsessed sensibilities just add to the film’s cartoonish feel.
The film flopped at the box office. De Palma’s career never recovered. Tom Hanks’s career as a leading man was momentarily derailed. Bruce Willis would have to wait a few more years to establish himself as a serious actor. Even the normally magnanimous Morgan Freeman has openly talked about how much he hated being involved with The Bonfire of the Vanities. That said, the film lives on because De Palma allowed journalist Julie Salomon to hang out on the set and the book she wrote about the production, The Devil’s Candy, is a classic of Hollywood non-fiction. (TCM adapted the book into a podcast, which is how The Bonfire of the Vanities came to be featured on the station.) Thanks to Salomon’s book, The Bonfire of the Vanities has gone to become the epitome of a certain type of flop, the literary adaptation that is fatally compromised by executives who don’t read.
One of the first rules of moving to a new place, avoid any location that has a potentially ironic name.
Seriously, don’t live near a virgin spring. Don’t move into the house at the end of Charity Drive. Avoid Peaceful Meadows at all costs. Happy Street? Don’t even think about it. And Purity Falls?
Listen, there’s no way that moving to a town called Purity Falls is a good idea.
Still, that’s what Nicole and her children do in the Lifetime film, The Madam of Purity Falls. The recently widowed Nicole (Kristanna Loken) even gets a job as the guidance counselor at Purity Falls High School! Since the family is still struggling to come to terms with the death of Nicole’s husband and the children’s father, the hope is that a new home can help them move on. Younger sister Justine (Sloane Avery) is willing to give it a try. But older brother Jason (Trevor Stines) is resistant from the beginning. Even meeting and befriending Chad (Jonathan Bouvier) doesn’t seem to help with Jason’s angst. Of course, Chad is soon found floating in a swimming pool, dead. Can you believe such a thing could happen in Purity Falls?
Trying to adjust to a new school, Jason joins the wrestling team and even meets a girl who seems to like him. But how can Jason go on a date when he doesn’t have a car!? And how can he get a car if he doesn’t have any money!? Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t his new neighbor, Courtney (Olivia d’Abo), mention that she had some odd jobs that she needed done around the house and that she would be willing to pay him to do them? At first, Jason is reluctant to work for Courtney but one of his fellow wrestling teammates assures him that working for Courtney will be the greatest experience of his life.
Courtney has a nice big house and a lucrative job selling organic cosmetics. Everyone in Purity Falls seems to know her. She puts Jason right to work, paying him for landscaping and sex. Realizing that there’s a lot of money to be made from being a suburban prostitute, Jason agrees to become one of Courtney’s “boys.” Soon, he’s sleeping with almost every frustrated housewife in Purity Falls, making all sorts of money, and getting into all sorts of danger!
Of course, Nicole is curious as to why her son keeps sneaking out of the house and then staying out for so long. And some of Jason’s clients are into some things that make Jason uneasy. And, of course, there’s the fact that people are dying. Hmmmm …. being a suburban prostitute might not be as easy as it looks! But is Jason already in too deep to escape his new life?
The Madam of Purity Falls is an enjoyably over-the-top in execution as it is in its name. This is one of those films where everyone lives in a nice, big house and they’ve all got nice, big secrets to hide. Don’t take the film too seriously. Just enjoy it for the melodrama and the sex and for Olivia d’Abo’s enjoyably villainous turn as the Madam of Purity Falls.
(I recorded Seduced By Neighbor off of Lifetime on November 11th, 2018.)
Awwww, what a happy couple!
That picture above is of Mike (Trevor St. John) and Sarah (Andrea Bogart) relaxing in Sarah’s hot tub. Sarah’s a single mother who recently lost her husband in a traffic auto accident. Mike is the self-appointed head of the neighborhood watch and he also recently lost his spouse in a tragic accident. As soon as Sarah and her daughter, Allie (Sierra McCormick), moved into their new house, Mike introduced himself and made it a point to always drive by the house in his little golf cart and make sure that everything was safe. How couldn’t Sarah fall in love with such a great, considerate guy?
Or, at least, that’s the way that Mike likes to imagine it. See, that picture above is just Mike’s fantasy. That’s the future that he imagines awaits him and Sarah. What Mike doesn’t take into account is that, while Sarah appreciates his dedication to keeping the neighborhood safe, she’s not interested in being seduced by her neighbor. Instead, she’s far more interested in Chris (Rocky Myers), the superhot fireman who comes by the house after one of Allie’s friends sets the kitchen on fire.
Realizing that he’s running the risk of losing his fantasy, Mike decides to take action. He challenges Chris to a game of ping pong, one that quickly spirals out of control. Mike may win the game but he’s such an obnoxious player that it certainly doesn’t make him look any more attractive in the eyes of …. well, just about anyone.
Well, if ping pong didn’t work, how about murder?
Yes, it turns out that Mike is a psycho. That really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever watched a Lifetime film. In the wold of Lifetime, your neighbor is always likely to turn out to be an obsessive psychopath. The more friendly he is, the more likely it is that he’s filled your house with hidden cameras and that he’s spending all of his time watching you on his laptop. We all know how these things work.
So, Seduced By My Neighbor may sound like a typical Lifetime film but, in general, I like Lifetime films so that wasn’t a problem for me. Plus, Trevor St. John does a good job playing the psycho, making him friendly and creepy at the same time. From the minute that Mike shows up, it’s obvious that there’s something a little bit off about him but, at the same time, you can understand how someone still struggling to recover from losing her husband could be taken in by someone who says that he just wants to make sure that everyone in the neighborhood is safe and happy.
And, finally, there’s that ping pong game. Yes, I’m coming back to the ping pong game because it was definitely the highlight of the film. Strutting around and yelling every time he scores a point, Mike becomes every dudebro that you’ve ever seen playing pool in a frat house. Wisely, Chris just kind of smiles and lets Mike have his moment. That scene was just so over the top and fun that it pretty much epitomized everything that you could want from a Lifetime film.
I won’t spoil it but Seduced By My Neighbor had a good ending, one that revolved around an earlier plot point that, until the final few minutes of the film, I thought the movie had merely abandoned. It was a properly chilling moment, one that definitely felt appropriate for our paranoid age.
(Hi there! So, as you may know because I’ve been talking about it on this site all year, I have got way too much stuff on my DVR. Seriously, I currently have 193 things recorded! I’ve decided that, on January 15th, I am going to erase everything on the DVR, regardless of whether I’ve watched it or not. So, that means that I’ve now have only have a month to clean out the DVR! Will I make it? Keep checking this site to find out! I recorded A Very Merry Toy Store off of Lifetime on November 26th!)
As I watched A Very Merry Toy Store, I found myself wondering, “Could any couple possibly be more adorable than Melissa Joan Hart and Mario Lopez?”
Hart and Lopez play rival toy store owners in this movie and they are the main reason to watch. Hart is Connie Forrester. Lopez is Will DiNova. At one time, their fathers owned one toy story but when a conflict led to the end of their partnership, it also led to Connie and Will growing up to be rivals. Connie’s toy store is struggling. Will’s toy store is thriving but he’s struggling personally as he tries to deal with a divorce. However, Will and Connie will have to set their differences aside because Roy Barnes (Billy Gardell) has just arrived in town and he brings with him the promise of the type of big chain store that puts independent toy stores out of business!
So, obviously, the main appeal here is that Mario Lopez was A.C. Slater and Melissa Joan Hart was Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. The film even highlights the Sabrina connection by casting Beth Broderick as Connie’s mother. (Broderick gets a subplot of her own, a sweet love story with old pro Brian Dennehy.) Lopez and Hart are so overwhelming likable that it’s easy to overlook the fact that nothing surprising at all happens in A Very Merry Toy Store. Whenever they get together and smile, the blinding likability on display keeps you from worrying about things like plot holes or the fact that Roy is a bit of a cartoonish villain. Lopez and Hart are fun to watch and you hope that their characters end up together. If nothing else, you know they’re going to have amazingly likable children.
Speaking of Mario Lopez, does he have a picture of Dorian Gray in his attic or what? The same day that I watched A Very Merry Toy Store, I also watched an old episode of Saved By The Bell and I was once again shocked by the fact that Lopez has apparently not aged in twenty years. As for Melissa Joan Hart, she’s all always be Sabrina to me. She’s also a pretty good actress with a very genuine screen presence. This is the second time that Lopez and Hart have played a couple and hopefully, they’ll do so again next Christmas.
A Very Merry Toy Store may be a predictable holiday film but it is more than saved the charisma of its two leads.
In this episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch (which was originally broadcast on October 26th, 2001), Sabrina (Melissa Joan Hart) is upset to discover that none of her friends have the proper Halloween spirit. So, Sabrina arranges for all of them to spend Halloween on a Murder Mystery Train. However, it quickly turns out that the train is magical and now, Sabrina and her friends have to solve an actual murder!
Things like that always seemed to happen to Sabrina…
Incidentally, Salem was always my favorite character! Are you surprised?
For today’s televised horror, we have another episode of a show that I loved when I was growing up! In this episode of Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, Sabrina attempts to hold a Halloween party and ends up having to give marriage advice to Frankenstein and his wife!
This episode was originally broadcast on October 27th, 2000.
I used to love watching Sabrina The Teenage Witch when I was younger! This was mostly because I wanted to grow up to be a teenage witch.
Sabrina’s very first Halloween episode was first broadcast on October 25th, 1996. In A Halloween Story, Sabrina must use magic (surprise! surprise!) in order to be able to attend two Halloween parties at the same time. As so often happens with Sabrina, the laughs are surprisingly clever and the ending is nicely heart-warming.
Through the Shattered Lens 