Tag Archives: Glenn-Michael Jones

Stripes (1981, directed by Ivan Reitman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Bill Murray and Harold Ramis join the army.

Wait, that can’t be right, can it?  Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were cinematic anarchists.  Early in his career, Bill Murray was the ultimate smart aleck slacker who did not have any respect for authority.  Harold Ramis was hardly a slacker but he came across as someone more likely to be marching on the Pentagon than guarding it.  Stripes is one of the ultimate examples of a comedy where the laughs come from things  that don’t seem to go together suddenly going together.

John Winger (Murray) at least has a reason to join the army.  He has a dead end job.  He has just broken up with his girlfriend.  The country appears to be at peace so why not spend four years in the Army?  It’s harder to understand why John’s friend, Russell (Ramis), also decides to enlist, other than to hang out with John.  Along with Ox (John Candy), Cruiser (John Diehl), Psycho (Conrad Dunn), and Elm0 (Judge Reinhold), they enlist and go through basic training under the watchful eye of Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates).  John and Russell go from treating everything like a joke to invading East Germany in a tank that’s disguised as an RV.  They also meet the two sexiest and friendliest MPs in the service, Stella (P.J. Soles) and Louise (Sean Young).  Russell goes from being an proto-hippie who teaches ESL to asking John if he thinks he would make a good officer.  John goes from not taking anything seriously to picking up a machine gun and rescuing his fellow soldiers.

It’s a comedy that shouldn’t work but it does.  It’s actually one of my favorite comedies, full of memorable lines (“Lighten up, Frances.”), and stupidly funny situations.  The cast is full of future comedy legends and P.J. Soles shows that she deserved to be a bigger star.  This was early in Bill Murray’s film career and he was still largely getting by on his SNL persona but, in his confrontations with Hulka, Murray got a chance to show that he could handle drama.  With all the comedic talent in the film, it’s Warren Oates who gets the biggest laughs because he largely plays his role straight.  Sgt. Hulka is a drill sergeant who cares about his men and who knows how to inspire and teach  but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about having to deal with a collection of misfits.  (Watch his face when Cruiser says he enlisted so he wouldn’t get drafted.)

The movie does get strange when the action goes from the U.S. to Germany.  What starts out as Animal-House-In-The-Army instead becomes an almost straight action movie and the movie itself sometimes feels like a recruiting video.  Join the Army and maybe you’ll get to steal an RV with PJ Soles.  That would have been enough to get me to enlist back in the day.  But the combination of Murray, Ramis, and Oates makes Stripes a comedy that can be watched over and over again.

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Highway to Heaven 1.17 “As Difficult As ABC”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, Jonathan and Mark fight drug dealers and promote literacy!

Episode 1.17 “As Difficult As ABC”

(Dir by Victor French, originally aired on January 30th, 1985)

Brian Baldwin (Glenn-Michael Jones) appears to have a great future ahead of him.

Growing up in a poor neighborhood, Brian was tempted to get involved in the gang life, like so many of his friends did.  However, Brian turned out to be a great basketball player and was given a full scholarship to a major university.  As long as he played basketball and led the team to victory after victory, Brian wouldn’t even have to worry about going to class.  As he points out, he got an A in his French class even though he never stepped into the classroom.

However, one day, Brian has chest pains and passes out.  When Brian goes to the doctor, he is told that he has a heart condition but that it can be managed.  However, Brian will never be able to play basketball again.  His coach stops returning Brian’s calls and, when Brian confronts him in the gym, the coach explains that he only cares about winning and Brian can no longer help him do that.  The coach complains about wasting a scholarship on Brian.

Brian drops out of school and returns to his old neighborhood.  It’s there that he tells his mom (played by Beah Richards) the secret that he’s been hiding.  Brian is illiterate!   Because he was such a good basketball player, the school system never worried about teaching him anything.  Now, Brian has lost his scholarship and, it would appear, his future.

Fortunately, Jonathan and Mark roll into town.  Mark gets a job working as a janitor at an adult literacy school.  Jonathan gets a job working at the community center.  Jonathan encourages Brian to both learn how to read and to date his teacher, Julie Reynolds (Deborah Lacey).  (Fear not, they’re the same age.)  Brian also gets a job as a neighborhood basketball coach and tries to keep all of his players from getting hooked on drugs.

Luckily, Jonathan and Victor are able to help with the drug situation.  They go undercover and, in a rather weird scene that features Jonathan in a leather jacket and Terminator-style shades, they offer to pay the local drug dealer two million dollars in return for cocaine.  The dealer agrees to meet with them at the school, where he and his associates steal the briefcase with the money and make a run for it.  However, they are grabbed by the cops and suddenly, all of the money in the briefcase turns into cocaine!  Off the dealers go to prison.  With the dealers gone and Brian reading, it’s time for Jonathan and Mark to move on.

This was one of those well-intentioned episodes that attempted to do a bit too much.  Not only did the episode feature Brian learning that he could still be an important member of his community even if he couldn’t play basketball but it also featured him learning to read and trying to clean up the neighborhood.  Instead of focusing on one story, this episode focuses on three and, as a result, each story feels a bit rushed and simplistic.  Brian is reading in no time and the drug dealers turn out to be pretty easy to fool.  This episode is optimistic but rather unconvincing.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #66: Desperate Lives (dir by Robert Michael Lewis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

DL-cov2YouTube, my old friend, you have failed me.

For the longest time, the 1982 anti-drug melodrama Desperate Lives has been available for viewing on YouTube.  I first watched it two years ago, after I read an online article about a scene in which a teenage Helen Hunt takes PCP and jumps through a window.  And, when I watched it, I was stunned.  I knew that the film was going to be over-the-top and silly, largely because it’s hard to imagine how a film featuring a teenage Helen Hunt taking PCP could be anything other than that.  But, even with my experience of watching over the top message movies, nothing could have quite prepared me for Desperate Lives.

So, I figured, for this review, that I’d say a few snarky words about Desperate Lives and then I’d just add something like, “And you can watch it below!”  And then I would embed the entire movie and all of y’all could just click on play and watch a movie on the Lens.

Unfortunately, Desperate Lives has been taken off of YouTube.  I assume the upload violated some sort of copyright thing.  And really, it’s kinda stupid because seriously, Desperate Lives is one of those films that really deserves to be seen for free on YouTube.

Oh well.  You can still watch a video of Helen Hunt jumping through that window.  The video below also features some additional elements from Desperate Lives.

For instance, you get to see Diana Scarwid playing the angriest high school guidance counselor in the world.  Scarwid knows that students like Helen Hunt are using drugs and that her fellow faculty members are turning a blind eye to everything’s that’s happening.  From the minute she first appears on screen, Scarwid is shouting at someone and she doesn’t stop screaming until the film ends.

And you also get to see Doug McKeon, playing Helen Hunt’s brother.  McKeon goes for a drive with his girlfriend, who has just taken PCP herself.  As their car goes flying off a mountain, she says, “Wheeee!”

In the video below, you also get to see that the only reason Helen Hunt used drugs was because her boyfriend begged her to.  That’s a scenario that seems to show up in a lot of high school drug films and it’s strange because it’s something that I’ve never actually seen happen or heard about happening in real life.  In fact, in real life, most users of hard drugs are actually very happy to not share their supply.

Unfortunately, the video below does not feature any scenes of Sam Bottoms as the world’s most charming drug dealer and that’s a shame because he gives the only good performance in the entire film (sorry, Helen!).

Even worse, the video doesn’t include any scenes from the film’s memorably insane conclusion, in which Scarwid searches every single locker in the school and then interrupts a pep rally so she can set everyone’s stash on fire in the middle of the gym.  Making it even better is that all the students are so moved by Scarwid’s final speech that they start tossing all of the drugs that they have on them into the fire.

Which means that the film essentially ends with the entire school getting high off of a huge marijuana bonfire.

No, that scene cannot be found in the video below.  But you can find Helen Hunt jumping through a window so enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEpyLzHeozY