Hi, everyone! Tonight, on Mastodon, I will be hosting the #TubiThursday watch party! Join us for the original Red Dawn (1984)!
You can find the movie on Tubi and Prime and you can join us on Mastodon at 9 pm central time! (That’s 10 pm for you folks on the East Coast.) We will be using #TubiThursday hashtag! See you then!
Red Dawn (1984, dir by John Milius, DP: Ric Waite)
Today is Jane Campion’s birthday and today’s song of the day comes from Michael Nayman’s beautiful score for her best film, 1993’s The Piano.
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to Gal Gadot.
Perhaps not surprisingly, today’s scene that I love comes from the film that made Gadot a star worldwide, 2017’s Wonder Woman. Steve Trevor thinks that no one can cross No Man’s Land. Wonder Woman (played, of course, by Gal Gadot) is going to prove him wrong.
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 70th birthday to cinematic provocateur, Lars Von Trier!
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Lars Von Trier Films
Europa (1991, dir by Lars Von Trier, DP: Henning Bendtsen,
Edward Kłosiński, Jean-Paul Meurisse. Released as Zentropa in North America)
Breaking the Waves (1996, dir by Lars Von Trier, DP: Robby Muller)
Dogville (2002, dir by Lars Von Trier, DP: Anthony Dod Mantle)
Melancholia (2011, dir by Lars Von Trier, DP: Manuel Alberto Claro)
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.
This week, OJ’s in trouble!
Episode 3.12 “Of Scalpers and Superstars”
(Dir by Bruce Seth Green, originally aired on December 9th, 1987)
O.J. Simpson gets arrested!
Okay, technically, OJ Simpson is not the one being arrested. He’s just playing TD Parker, the Bulls’s general manager. TD is the one who is arrested at the end of this episode after being framed for stealing 5,000 ticket to the Championship Game and selling to a ticket scalper. Still, as is so often the case with this show, the casting of OJ Simpson does bring a while new layer to the action of meaning to the action onscreen.
Who framed TD? The answer is Dolph Crane (Forry Smith), a former player who was cut from the team. Dolph has never appeared on the show before but, judging from what TD says when he sees Dolph hanging around the stadium, it seems that Dolph was cut last season. One of the things that I’ve noticed about 1st & Ten is that new characters will often pop up out of nowhere and people will act as if they’ve been there the whole time. Dolph appears to be one of those pop-up character. Dolph mentions that he’s now dating TD’s former mistress. Dolph and the owner of Arizona’s team are the ones who conspire to take out TD. Hopefully, they didn’t plant a bloody glove anywhere in the office.
The Bulls are going to the Championship Game …. again! Maybe they’ll actually win this time. This is their third trip to the game, after all. It’ll be kind of sad if they win without Coach Denardo, though. Coach Grier just isn’t as much fun as foul-mouthed Ernie Denardo.
The entire team gets mad at Yinessa. After getting injured during a game, he decides that he needs to make as much money as possible so he allows his agent (Bobby Hosea) to promote him as being the “star” of the team. The rest of the team feels that isn’t fair. The thing is, though …. Yinessa is kind of the star. He’s the quarterback. If he has a bad day, the team doesn’t win. The Bulls are a bunch of crybabies. When they find out that a team music video is being reimagined as a Yinessa music video, they literally look like they’re about to break down in tears. No wonder they always lose the Championship Game.
This episode ended wth the Bulls heads to the Championship and OJ heading to jail. That seems about right. Good luck to the team!
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986! The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!
Set sail for adventure, your heart on a new romance….
Episode 7.17 “Aunt Emma, I Love You/Hoopla/The First Romance”
(Dir by Don Weis, originally aired on January 21st, 1984)
This episode is just silly.
Sid Casear and Rose Marie play newlyweds who are on their honeymoon cruise. The only problem is that Rose Marie has brought along a picture of her Aunt Emma, who never approved of Sid Caesar. Aunt Emma always wanted to go on a cruise but having her picture around is seriously cramping Sid Caesar’s style.
Teenage Philip McKeon is expecting to meet his father (Bert Convy) on the boat. Instead, he meets Convy’s secretary (Irena Ferris). Son and secretary fall for each other. The only problem is that the secretary has already fallen for the father! And soon, the father is on the boat as well!
That said, neither one of those stories really matter. This episode’s main focus is on the Harlem Globetrotters, who are taking the cruise to Mexico, where they’re supposed to play an exhibition game. Isaac’s friend (Darrow Igus) is the manager of the Globetrotters and he’s already sold a lot of tickets to the game. Unfortunately, when the stadium is flooded, the game is cancelled. It looks like Igus is going to be broke and fired. Wait a minute — what if the Globetrotters play a game on the boat? And what if the other team is made up of the Love Boat crew!?
Uhmm …. would that really be a workable solution? I mean, imagine that you spent a lot of money to see a basketball game in a stadium. Now, imagine being told that the game will instead take place in a small dining room on a cruise ship and that one of the teams is going to be exclusively made up of middle-aged white people, with the exception of one unathletic teenage girl. I might not demand all of my money back but I would probably ask for at least half of it.
Needless to say, the Globetrotters win the game. The Love Boat band plays a really sad-sounding version of Sweet Georgia Brown. The whole thing is just odd.
As I said, it was a very silly cruise.
Today’s song of the day comes from 1971’s Dirty Harry. Composer Lalo Schifrin’s moody score remains one of the best cop film scores of all time. It’s efficient, relentless, and deceptively low-key, just like “Dirty Harry” Callahan himself.
In honor of what would have been Fred Zinnemann’s 119th birthday, today’s scene that I love comes from 1953’s From Here To Eternity, one of the two Zinnemann-directed films to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
In this scene, Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) proves that he’s still a skilled boxer. That’s not something that Prewitt wants the world to know because he’s still guilt-stricken over accidentally blinding one of his sparring partners. Captain Holmes wants Prewitt to fight on the regimental team. Prewitt would rather just play the bugle but, as he shows in this scene, he can still throw a punch if he’s forced to. It leads to a lot of drama, the majority of which is forgotten in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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 76th birthday to Australian filmmaker, Phillip Noyce. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Phillip Noyce Films
Heatwave (1982, dir by Phillip Noyce, DP: Vincent Monton)
Dead Calm (1989, dir by Phillip Noyce, DP: Dean Semler)
Blind Fury (1989, dir by Phillip Noyce, DP: Don Burgess)
Sliver (1993, dir by Phillip Noyce, DP: Vilmos Zsigmond)
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.
This week, we start season 4!
Episode 4.1 “Glass Houses”
(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on July 26th, 1998)
The fourth season of Pacific Blue opens with many changes.
Palermo and Victor have retired. Cory is now dating Doug Fraser (Owen McKibbin). At the start of the episode, Cory and Doug accompany TC and Chris to Vegas, where they are married by — you guessed it! — an Elvis impersonator.
TC is now in charge of Pacific Blue and, while Chris and Cory both make plans to take the sergeant’s exam, TC focuses on bringing in some new blood. At the police academy, he recruits two recent graduates — hyper-competent Jaime Strickland (Amy Hunter) and edgy rebel Russ Granger (Jeff Stearns). He asks and gets undercover cop Monica Harper (Shanna Moakler) transferred to Pacific Blue so that she can go undercover to break up a meth operation at the local college. Everyone is shocked when Monica turns out to be young and blonde. Were they expecting a 40 year-old undercover college student?
Not happy about having to ride a bicycle, Russ decides to insert himself into Monica’s undercover operation. Monica and Russ meet the two main dealers, Quincy (Joe Michael Burke) and Cherry (Michelle Beauchamp). They discover that they’re getting their drugs from a chemistry professor (Robin Thomas). What they don’t do is make an arrest. Quincy and Cherry murder the professor and escape after setting off a bomb in the chemistry lab.
TC is not happy with his new cops. In fact, the episode ends with him telling them that he has doubts about whether or not to keep them at Pacific Blue. Fortunately, we the viewers know that they’ll be okay because they are all now listed in the opening credits.
Also listed in the opening credits is Bobby Cruz (Mario Lopez), the campus cop who drags Monica out of the laboratory right before it explodes. Bobby has a history. He was a member of the LAPD but, disgusted by the anti-Mexican racism that he saw, he became a campus cop instead. (Where I went to college, the campus cops were the biggest joke around.) TC offers Bobby a chance to be a member of Pacific Blue. Bobby says that he’ll think about it. We all know that means yes.
And that’s a good thing because this show could definitely use more Mario Lopez! In fact, the only reason I started reviewing this stupid series was because I knew Mario would be joining the cast eventually. Let’s hope Mario’s magic starts to make things better soon!
As for this episode, it was …. well, it wasn’t good. Other than Lopez, none of the new characters really made much of an impression. But, I am an optimist. I have hope.
Never give up hope.
Through the Shattered Lens 