Tag Archives: Gary Hudson

I Watched Defending Santa (2013, Dir. by Brian Skiba)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

After finding a portly man with a big white beard passed out in a snowbank, small town Sheriff Scott Hanson (Dean Cain) brings him to the hospital.  When the man wakes up, he says that his name is Kris Kringle (Bill Lewis) but you can call him Santa Claus.  Kris uses his powers to give the children in the hospital what they want.  (He creates a miniature pony for one girl.)  District Attorney Robert Nielson (Gary Hudson) thinks that Kris is a public danger and wants to have him put in the mental ward.  Public defender Sarah Walker (Jud Taylor) defends Kris and falls back in love with her ex-boyfriend, Scott.  Santa Claus spreads his magic across town.  He detoxifies the town drunk but not even Santa can save the life of a dying child.  That scene was very sad.

Have you ever wanted to see Santa Claus play football with Dean Cain and Full House‘s Jodie Sweetin?  This is the movie for you!  Santa Claus plays in the park and even does a front flip.  Go Santa Claus Go!  But then old St. Nick also uses his powers to cause another player’s pants to fall down during a key play, which allows Dean Cain’s team to win the game.  That’s cheating, which I was always told put you on the naughty list.

Speaking of being on the naughty list, it doesn’t ever make sense that the district attorney is so obsessed with putting Kris Kringle.  Santa Claus never hurt anyone.  Trying to put Santa Claus in jail before Christmas is definitely worth a lump of coal in your stocking!  Defending Santa is an okay Hallmark Christmas movie but don’t spend too much time trying to make it make sense.

Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Three’s Company (2003, directed by Jason Ensler)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Do you remember Three’s Company?

The sitcom was a big hit when it aired in the 70s and 80s and it still gets a lot of play in syndication today.  Based on a British sitcom (and you would really be surprised to how closely the first season followed the original series), Three’s Company starred John Ritter as Jack Tripper, an aspiring chef who moved in with two single women, Janet (Joyce DeWitt) and Chrissy (Suzanne Somers).  Because their impotent landlord (Norman Fell) didn’t want people of the opposite sex living with each other unless they were married, Jack pretended to be gay.  Every episode centered around a misunderstanding, though it was Suzanne Somers’s performance as the perpetually bouncy and braless Chrissy Snow that made the show a hit.  The show fell apart when Somers asked for more money, Ritter and DeWitt got angry with her, and the studio bosses lied to everyone.  Today, the show is legendary as an example of how backstage tension can end even a popular series.

Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Three’s Company attempts to dramatize the success and eventual downfall of Three’s Company.  Joyce DeWitt appears at the beginning and the end to talk about how important she thinks the show was.  In the movie, she is played by Melanie Paxson.  John Ritter is played by a lookalike actor named Bret Anthony while an actress named Jud Taylor plays Somers.  Brian Dennehy plays ABC president Fred Silverman and other executives are played by Daniel Roebuck, Wallace Langham, Gary Hudson, and Christopher Shyer.  The movie recreates all of the drama that went on during Three’s Company without offering much insight or really anything new to the story.  Even though the movie was co-produced and hosted by Joyce DeWitt, Suzanne Somers is really the only sympathetic character in the movie.  DeWitt comes across as being jealous while Anthony plays John Ritter as being a bland nonentity who chooses his own success over being honest with his costars.  The network executives are more interesting, just because watching them provides a glimpse into how real producers and showrunners picture themselves.  They just wanted to make a good show about a sex addict pretending to be gay so he could live with two attractive, single women but the agents and the network presidents just keep getting in the way!  Won’t someone please think of the mid-level network executives?

Bland though this recreation was, it was enough of a rating hits that NBC went on to produce several more Behind The Camera films.  Three’s Company was only the beginning.

Retro Television Review: All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story (dir by Lloyd Kramer)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 2000’s All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

In 1996, a 34 year-old teacher named Mary Kay Letourneau decided that she had fallen in love with someone who was not her husband.

A 34 year-old deciding that they are no longer happy in their marriage and subsequently deciding that that they’ve found love with someone else is hardly an unusual or even surprising occurrence.  What made Mary Kay Letourneau’s case a national scandal was that the person that she decided that she was in love with was a 12 year-old student named Vili Fualaau.  Mary Kay started her affair with Vili when she was his sixth grade teacher.  When she was arrested and charged with two counts of second-degree rape of a child, Letourneau was pregnant with Vili’s child.  Even after being arrested, Letourneau insisted that she and Vili were soulmates.  After giving birth to Vili’s child, Letourneau was sentenced to six months of prison and somehow managed to avoid having to register as a sex offender.  After serving her sentence, Letourneau was promptly arrested again with Vili and was sent back to jail, where she gave birth to Vili’s second child.

All-American Girl opens with Mary Kay Letourneau (Penelope Ann Miller) in jail, insisting that everything that happened between her and Vili was consensual and that their love is real.  The majority of the film is shown in flashbacks.  Some of those flashbacks deal with Mary Kay, her husband (Greg Spottiswood), and Vili (Omar Anguiano).  Watching the flashbacks, I couldn’t help but notice that the film really did seem to be on Mary Kay’s side, to an almost ludicrous extent.  Her husband is portrayed as being a soulless sociopath, even before Mary Kay starts sneaking around with Vili.  As for Vili, he is presented as being the one who initiated his relationship with Mary Kay, flirting with her in class and comforting her when she starts crying in a school hallway.  The actor playing Vili looked, acted, and sounded considerably older than just 12 years old.  At times, he appeared to be nearly as old as Penelope Ann Miller.  And I’ll admit that it’s totally possible that Vili could have looked older than his age and maybe he did have a surprisingly mature vocabulary.  But still …. he was 12 years old!  Apparently, Letourneau cooperated with the film’s producers and that’s pretty obvious from the first minute we see Vili giving Letourneau a wolfish smile in the 6th grade.

The flashbacks dealing with Letourneau’s childhood are a bit more interesting, if just because Letourneau was the daughter of a congressman who ran for president in 1972.  (One of her brothers served in the first Bush White House.  Another served as an advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign.)  At one point, she taunts a group of protestors that have gathered outside of her family’s home and her father praises her courage.  The film hints that it was the twin traumas of her brother’s death and the discovery that her beloved father had fathered two children with a mistress that led to Letourneau’s subsequent instability.  Perhaps that’s true, though I think the film is a bit too eager to accept that as an all-purpose explanation.

You may have guessed that I had mixed feelings about this film.  Penelope Ann Miller gave an excellent performance as Mary Kay but the film’s attempts to portray May Kay as being even more of a victim that Vili were undeniably icky.  

As for the real Mary Kay, she married Vili four years after being released from prison.  They separated a year before Mary Kay died in 2020.  Their relationship inspired several films, most recently May/December.

Back to School Part II #41: She’s Too Young (dir by Tom McLoughlin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

shes_too_young

“Guess what, guys!  I’ve got syphilis!”

— Actual Line Of Dialogue From She’s Too Young (2004)

Yes, indeed, 14 year-old Dawn (Miriam McDonald) has syphilis.  But she’s not the only one!  It turns out that there’s a syphilis epidemic raging at Dawn’s Canadian high school.  It all comes down to a 16 year-old aspiring man-whore named Nick (Mike Erwin) and Nick really isn’t that concerned about it.  When the school’s counselor informs him that he’s patient zero in the syphilis epidemic, Nick holds out his arm and says, “Give me my magic bullet and I’ll be on my way.”  Nick also jokingly refers to syphilis as being “the big S.”

Meanwhile, Nick’s girlfriend, Hannah (Alexis Dziena), is shocked to discover that she has a mouth sore, despite having never had intercourse with Nick.  Uh-oh … it turns out that syphilis is a lot easier to contract than she originally believed!  Luckily, her incredibly overprotective mom (Marcia Gay Harden) is doing her best to make sure that nobody in Canada ever gets syphilis again.  If that means going from house to house and announcing, “My daughter has syphilis!,” that’s what she’s going to do!

One of Hannah’s best friends is Dawn.  Her other best friend is Becca (Megan Park), who regularly sneaks off to a motel with her boyfriend.  Seriously, every teenager in town is having sex, except for Hannah.  That said, Hannah does try to convince her photographer friend, Tommy (Joe Dinicol), that it’s time that they both lose their respective virginities.  Tommy, however, refuses and says, “We have ages to do that…”

(Really? A teenage boy turning down sex?  Maybe he’s just worried about getting syphilis…)

Anyway, after Dawn reveals that she has syphilis, every student at the high school is forced to get a blood test.  Becca gets pretty mad about being inconvenienced and decides that she doesn’t want to hang out with either Dawn or Hannah anymore.  (Even worse, her ultra religious parents threaten to send her to private school!)  While Dawn can at least hang out with her mother and her younger sister, Hannah now has no one to be friends with.  After all, Nick’s has apparently succumbed to an internet pornography addiction, Tommy rejected her, and her mother is too busy telling everyone in the neighborhood that Hannah has syphilis.  So, Hannah spends all of her time hanging out on a website and chatting with Dawn (whose user name is Dawn69 and I’m sure that’s just meant to be a coincidence).

The site, by the way, is called Teenplaya.com.  I don’t know if Teenplaya.com is a real site and I’m not planning on finding out.  Any site called Teenplaya.com is probably going to be crawling with all sorts of viruses, not to mention syphilis…

(“Lisa,” you’re saying, “you can’t catch syphilis from a website…”  Whatever.  That’s the same thing they told Napoleon before they sent him to Elba and we all know how that worked out.)

I have spent a lot of time on this site defending Lifetime films but occasionally, I do see a movie that pretty much lives up to every single pre-conceived notion that people have about Lifetime films in general.  She’s Too Young is one such film.  It’s so overwrought and earnest and it has so little understanding of the way that teenage girls actually talk that She’s Too Young actually is a classic of a certain kind.  It’s like the Reefer Madness of Canadian STD films.

Speaking as a Degrassi fan, one of the things that made She’s Too Young especially memorable was that Dawn was played by Miriam McDonald.  On Degrassi, McDonald played Emma Nelson and, in a two-part episode that was considered to be too controversial to air in the United States, she contracted gonorrhea.  It’s interesting to compare the rather level-headed and always honest approach of Degrassi to the far more histrionic style of She’s Too Young.

(On Degrassi, when Emma finally told her stepfather that she was sick, he assured her that she would be okay and that the most important thing was that she learn from this experience.  In She’s Too Young, when Hannah confesses that she’s sick, her mother responds by running around the neighborhood and telling everyone that her daughter has syphilis.)

For all the talk about how the original Mother, May I Sleep With Danger is the ultimate over-the-top and unintentionally funny made-for-TV film, I would argue that She’s Too Young is actually far more memorable.  From the overwrought dialogue to the overwrought performances to the painful sincerity of the film’s intentions, She’s Too Young is a classic that deserves a James Franco-produced remake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLnNBN7-LA8