Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!
This week, Bill Paxton and Wesley Snipes walk the streets of Miami!
Episode 3.10 “Streetwise”
(Dir by Fred Walton, originally aired on December 5th, 1986)
I was excited to see that this week’s episode of Miami Vice featured guest turns from not only Wesley Snipes but Bill Paxton as well! Then I remembered that guest stars never survive their episode and I felt a little bit sad. I know what was coming. Miami Vice is not a show that features happy endings. Anyone who gets involved in Miami’s vice trade is destined to end up dead, regardless of how innocent or guilty they may be. It’s a dark world in Miami.
Paxton plays Vic Romano, a vice cop from a neighboring precinct who is arrested during a prostitution bust. Romano has been having an affair with Carla Cappoletti (Alice Adair), an emotionally fragile prostitute who is abused by both her pimp, Silk (Wesley Snipes), and almost all of her clients. She knows that Vic is a cop and Vic knows that she’s a prostitute but neither one of them cares. As Vic puts it, they’re in love.
The Vice Squad is shocked to find that Carla is carrying cocaine that is almost totally pure. Trying to track down who is supplying Silk with the cocaine, the squad discovers that neither Carla nor Vic want to cooperate. While Vic tries to explain things to his wife, Tubbs goes undercover as a pimp. He bails Carla out of jail and tells her that she works for him now. When Silk shows up to object, Tubbs easily beats him up. Silk may talk tough but, without a gun to back him up, he’s not much of a fighter.
When Tubbs demands that Carla go to Silk and find out where he’s been getting his cocaine from, Carla refuses. Tubbs, still pretending to be a pimp, proceeds to yell at her and tear up a hotel room. A sobbing Carla begs Tubbs not to hurt her “too much,” and Tubbs realizes that he’s gone too far in trying to maintain his cover. He shows Carla his badge. It’s always kind of easy to laugh at the way that Tubbs trots out his fake Caribbean accent whenever he’s pretends to be Rico Cooper but Thomas does a really good job in this episode and he is genuinely frightening when he starts yelling at Carla. I found myself wondering just how far Tubbs actually would go to maintain his cover and I was actually relieved when he pulled out that badge.
It ends, as things often do with this show, in a shootout. Silk is gunned down by Crockett and Tubbs but not before Romano is shot by Silk. Romano dies in Carla’s arms and I felt a little teary-eyed. Bill Paxton was a wonderful actor and he gave a likable and sincere performance as Vic Romano. Watching the episode, I never once doubted Romano’s love for Carla. Both Snipes and Paxton were well-cast as their doomed characters. Neither one survived the hour but I doubt anyone who watched the show ever forgot them.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!
This week, a man from the past returns to haunt Castillo.
Episode 2.9 “Bushido”
(Dir by Edward James Olmos, originally aired on November 22nd, 1985)
This week’s episode opens with yet another intricately plotted drug bust going awry. This time, a dealer ends up dead, a DEA Agent ends up knocked out and tied up in a bathroom, and $50,000 goes missing. Watching the tapes of the bust, Castillo is shocked to spot a familiar face on the scene. Castillo says that Jack Gretsky (Dean Stockwell) was his partner when he was working for the CIA in Vietnam. Gretsky has long been thought dead but there he is, on tape and ruining Castillo’s bust.
Realizing that Gretsky was sending him a message, Castillo decides to deal with the situation personally. After visiting two CIA agents (Jerry Hardin and Tom Bower) who work out of an adult novelty shop, Castillo tracks Gretsky down to a Buddhist temple. The two of them talk. Gretsky reveals that he’s married to a Russian woman and that he has a son. He asks Castillo to watch over them if anything happens to him. The stoic Castillo agrees and then gives Gretsky a hug. Castillo says that he has to arrest Gretsky. Gretsky says he knows and then pulls a machine gun, forcing Castillo to kill him. The CIA agents are happy to no longer have to deal with Gretsky.
A day later, the coroner’s office calls Vice and says that Gretsky was terminally ill with cancer and probably only had a few days left to live. When Crockett and Tubbs go to tell Castillo, they find his badge and a note sitting in the office. Castillo is fulfilling Gretsky’s final wish and protecting his wife (Natasha Schneider) and his son, Marty (Robin Kaputsin). Castillo sees it as being a part of the samurai code by which he lives his life. Meanwhile, a rogue CIA agent named Surf (David Rasche, giving a wonderfully unhinged performance) is working with the KGB to track down Gretsky’s family.
Directed by Edward James Olmos, Bushido is a wonderfully odd episode. With a combination of skewed camera angles and deliberately eccentric performances from Dean Stockwell and David Rasche, this episode plays out with the relentless intensity of a fever dream. (The opening drug bust even features Zito burying himself in the sand and using a straw to breathe until its time to emerge and knock out one of the bad guys. It’s weird but it’s great.) Olmos contrasts Castillo’s trademark stoicism with the more verbose characters played by Stockwell and Rasche and, as a result, Castillo emerges as an honorable man who hides his emotions because he knows that’s the only way to survive in his world. To fall in love like Jack or to get cocky like Surf can only lead to one’s downfall.
After a few uneven episodes, Bushido is a nice reminder of what Miami Vice was capable of at its best.
(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR! It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet. So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR! She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by Wednesday, November 30th! Will she make it? Considering that she only has a day left, probably not. But keep checking the site to find out!)
I recorded Careful What You Wish For off of Starz on November 4th. It’s one of two films in which Nick Jonas appeared in 2016. (The other film was the underrated Goat, which I really should get around to reviewing some day. Maybe if I ever finish cleaning out this damn DVR, I’ll finally get a chance to get caught up on reviewing all of the other movies that I’ve seen this year.)
Anyway, in Careful What You Wish For, Nick plays Doug. Doug is kind of a dorky, creepy guy who spends the summer at his parent’s lakehouse. His neighbors are the Harpers. Elliott Harper is super rich banker and he’s played by Dermot Mulroney so you know he’s no good. Lena Harper (played by Isabel Lucas) is blonde, young, and always seems to be in the process of removing her bikini top whenever Doug comes around.
Doug is soon lusting over Lena and Lena appears to feel the same way. Soon, they’re having an affair that is probably about as torrid as anything involving Nick Jonas can be. Lena tells Doug that Elliott abuses her. Doug says that she needs to get away from her husband. Lena says that Elliott would kill her if she ever tried to leave…
And then Walter Neff shows up and starts talking about insurance…
Okay, no, he doesn’t. But he might as well because Careful What You Wish For is pretty much a by-the-numbers film noir. It’s obvious to everyone what’s going to happen. Or, I should say, it’s obvious to everyone but Doug. Doug is such a goony dumbass that his whole reaction to everything that happens can be summed up as: “At least I got laid.”
Personally, I think the film made a huge mistake by not having Doug wear a purity ring that he could dramatically remove before having sex with Lena. Seriously, this film could have used some moments of self-awareness like that. (And I do feel a little bit guilty about making fun of Nick here because he actually gives a pretty good performance in Goat.) But no, instead, we get a scene where a bare chested Nick eats an Oreo cookie and it’s kinda gross because he really gets into eating that cookie. I mean, Nick really tries to show us every second of pleasure that Nick gets from that Oreo. But the thing is, Oreo cookies are gross and overrated and to me, there’s nothing more disgusting than watching as someone dips an Oreo into milk and then gets milk all over their chin when they eat it. UGH!
But, listen — if you’ve ever wanted to see Nick Jonas roll an Oreo cookie over his lover’s bare ass, Careful What You Wish For is definitely for you.
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
On Tuesday night, if you were suffering from insomnia at midnight, you could have turned over to HBO Signature (commonly listed as HBOSIG) and watched Fair Game, a remarkably mindless action film from 1995.
Originally, my plan was to start this review of Fair Game by telling you, in quite a bit of detail, just how sick I am of the Russian Mafia. Seriously, Russian mobsters have become the default villain for lazy crime films everywhere. And, quite frankly, I’m getting bored with them. I’m bored with how the head Russian mobster is always described as being “former KGB” and is always found sitting in the back room of restaurant, wearing an overcoat and smoking filterless cigarettes. I am bored with how his main henchman is always some big guy with a crew cut and that guy always has a thin sidekick who wears his hair in a pony tail and has a bad mustache. I’m sick of the overexaggerated accents of American and British accents trying to sound Russian and the way they’re always listening to EDM while driving. It’s all so predictable and tedious.
But then I considered that Fair Game was made 20 years ago. Even if the villains are Russian mobsters and even if they are some of the least interesting Russian mobsters in cinema history, it’s totally possible that, when Fair Game, was made, there was still some sort of novelty about the Russian Mafia.
However, even if we give Fair Game a pass on using the cliché of the Russian mob, the villains still weren’t particularly interesting. Kazak (Steven Berkoff) is … well, the film isn’t really that clear on what Kazak’s big plan is but he has a lot of henchmen and they certainly do end up killing a lot of people. Kazak runs his operations off of a yacht that belongs to a Cuban criminal named Emilio (Miguel Sandoval). Emilio is in the process of getting divorced and attorney Kate McQuean (model Cindy Crawford, who made her film debut here and has never played a leading role since) is determined to repossess his boat. So, Kazak decides that the perfect solution would be to murder Kate…
Which makes absolutely no sense. Kazak doesn’t want anyone to discover his operation so he decides to blow up a good portion of Miami, all in pursuit of one person. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Kazak to just blow up the boat and buy a new one?
Anyway, as the film opens, Kate is out jogging when suddenly someone driving by in a car opens fire on her. She ends up getting grazed in the arm, not that it seems to bother her. She wears a bandage for a few scenes but it soon vanishes. Kate is all business so, even after getting shot, she still goes into the office and starts to make plans to repossess that yacht. Personally, if anyone ever shot at me, I would probably be so freaked out that I would never leave the house again.
Now, you may be thinking that Kate was shot because of Kazak but actually, it turns out that the shooting was just a random thing that happened. Apparently, the shooter was trying to shoot someone else and Kate just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, we never find out who actually shot Kate and that really bothered me, as that seems to be kind of a huge plot point to bring up and then refuse to resolve.
Anyway, Kate meets a detective named Max Kirkpatrick (William Baldwin) and, soon, they’re on the run from Kazak’s assassins. The majority of the film is made up of Max and Kate running from one location to another. One thing that really bothered me was that literally everyone that Max and Kate talked to ended up getting killed just a few minutes later. At one point, Kate flirts with a computer service expert to get him to help them out. The scene is played for laughs but then, five minutes later, that same innocent technician guy is being brutally tortured by a bunch of Russians and, though we don’t see it happen, it’s safe to assume that he was eventually murdered by them. And no point do Max or Kate appear to feel any guilt or concern about the number of innocent people who are killed just for associating with them.
Anyway, Fair Game is a completely mindless film that has a rather nasty streak of sadism to it. (I imagine, when this film was released, it probably set a record for close-ups of people getting shot and stabbed in the crotch.) William Baldwin and Cindy Crawford both have perfect bodies and give totally wooden performances, which leads to them having a dimly-lit sex scene that is both physically hot and emotionally cold at the same time.
(I have no idea what entropy at absolute zero means but it sounds like a pretty good description of the chemistry between Cindy Crawford and William Baldwin in Fair Game.)
One good note: Salma Hayek has a small role as Max’s ex-girlfriend. Whenever she shows up in the movie, she starts screaming at everyone. I don’t blame her.
There’s a lot of reasons why a movie might become a guilty pleasure. Often times, it’s because the film is technically terrible and yet still, for whatever reason, it’s fun. And then sometimes, it’s because the film was made at a different time and, as a result, our modern cultural overlords demand that we dislike it regardless of how much we may also enjoy it.
And then there are films that you literally feel guilty for owning, watching, and sometimes enjoying. These are the films that you always find yourself making excuses for owning, Whenever I let anyone know that I have 2003’s From Justin To Kelly on DVD, I always make sure to point out that I also own the Criterion edition of Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game and several films directed by Werner Herzog.
“Don’t judge me!” I shout, as my guests stare down at Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini’s retouched smiles beaming at them from the cover of From Justin To Kelly, “I actually do have good taste….”
And, if worst comes to worst, I just tell them that it was a gift from an old boyfriend who, just two days after giving me the DVD, was tragically killed while doing charity work in Vermont. “The enemy is hunger…not the hungry!” I say and, while they sagely nod in agreement, I always push the DVD to the side.
However, the fact of the matter is that I do own From Justin To Kelly and I actually have watched it more times than I’m willing to admit. It’s difficult for me to explain why. It’s not that From Justin To Kelly is a good film. There’s a lot of people who claim that From Justin To Kelly is one of the worst films ever made and, while I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, it’s hard to deny that the film really is pretty terrible.
FromJustin To Kelly, of course, is the American Idol film. By coming in first and second at the end of Idol‘s first season, Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini were contractually obligated to appear in a movie that would be written by Kim Fuller, the brother of Idol‘s producer. From Justin To Kelly was quickly written and filmed so that it could both appear in theaters and be released on video before the start of Idol‘s second season. If From Justin To Kelly had been a success, I imagine that all future American Idol winners and runner-ups would have been forced to appear in similar films. And I have to admit that it’s kind of disappointing that From Justin To Kelly was not a success because I would have loved to have seen a beach movie starring Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee.
However, From Justin To Kelly was not a success. In fact, it was such a failure that the producers of Idol decided to give up on movies and instead concentrate on doing what they’re good at — i.e., neutering otherwise interesting singers by forcing them to sing ballads written by Kara DioGuardi. For the most part, the only time that you hear about From Justin To Kelly is when Kelly Clarkson talks about how much she hated making it.
(Reportedly, Kelly spent hours sobbing after reading the script.)
As for the film itself, it’s a romantic comedy musical beach party movie sort of thing. Texas-born Kelly Clarkson plays Kelly, a girl from Texas. Pennsylvania-raised Justin Guarini plays Justin, a guy who was raised in Pennsylvania. Kelly is a waitress who gets dragged down to Florida for Spring Break by her friends, Alexa (Katharine Bailess) and Kaya (Anika Noni Rose). (Bailess and Rose deliver their lines in the least convincing Texas accents ever. However, since Kelly won American Idol and is very much a Texan, her movie friends had to be Texan too.) Justin, meanwhile, is the “King of Spring Break,” which is odd since he and his friends Brandon (Greg Siff) and Eddie (Brian Dietzen) host parties that feel like they’d be more appropriate for a church camp. (Then again, maybe Justin was meant to be the King of Bad Spring Break. Maybe, if Idol had continued to make movies, Adam Lambert would have eventually gotten to play the King of Good Spring Break.)
Anyway, Kelly and Justin eventually meet. Justin likes Kelly. Kelly thinks he’s a player. Justin’s like, “No, I’m not a player.” Kelly’s like, “Okay, I guess we can be in love.” But then Alexa decides that, no, Kelly and Justin should not be in love and, whenever Justin tries to text Kelly, Alexa texts back that Kelly’s not interested. And, meanwhile, Kaya falls in love with a surly busboy (Jason Yribar), Brandon keeps getting ticketed by the same policewoman, and Eddie keeps failing to hook up with a girl that he met online. Because, you know, the kids are so crazy with their text messages and their online dating and their … busboys.
(Seriously, did From Justin To Kelly really warrant that many subplots?)
During the whole time, everyone keeps singing songs and breaking out into choreographed dance numbers on the beach. The film’s director, Robert Iscove, also did She’s All That and From Justin To Kelly at times feels as if it’s just a 80 minute version of She’s All That‘s prom dance-off, except in this case it’s performed by people who really can’t dance.
And yet, I’m going to take a minute to defend From Justin To Kelly. While it’s true that the film’s songs don’t have anything to do with the film’s plot and they all lean a bit towards the vapid side, it’s also true that a few of them are catchy. One reason why Kelly Clarkson is one of the few Idol winners to actually make a career for her outside of Idol is because she can make almost anything sound good. For that matter, Justin Guarini is a far better singer than most people seem to remember him as being. While it is true that, judging from their work here, neither Kelly or Justin can act, they’re both likable. (Unfortunately, they also have next to no chemistry. I was actually surprised to learn that Kelly and Justin apparently dated while making From Justin To Kelly because, for the most part, they both look terrified whenever they actually have to kiss on camera.)
From Justin To Kelly also has a massive nostalgia value. After so many seasons and so many forgettable winners, it’s easy to forget about what a big deal American Idol was during that first season. I was 16 years old and I watched every episode and I got so emotionally involved in who was staying and who was going home. Today, it seems incredibly silly that a movie would have been a part of Idol but, back then, it made total sense. (That said, I know a lot of people who loved the first season of American Idol but I don’t know anyone who actually saw From Justin To Kelly in a theater.)
But, ultimately, I think the main reason why From Justin To Kelly remains an oddly fascinating bad film is because it takes place in a world that has absolutely nothing in common with the real world. Nobody at Spring Break acts anything like any of the characters to be found in From Justin To Kelly. Imagine a Spring Break where no one touched liquor, no one did drugs, and no one got laid. Imagine a Spring Break where college students danced on the beach while wearing the most modest of bathing suits and flashing the most eager and innocent of smiles. Even the film’s whipped cream bikini contest feels oddly chaste. From Justin To Kelly might as well be science fiction and it’s just so odd to watch.
As you watch, you can not help but imagine how the people involved with both Idol and the film reacted to it all. It’s actually fun to try to imagine what the cast talked in between shooting scenes. Did they spent their time laughing at how bad the movie was going to be or did they try to fool themselves into thinking that it would all be okay? (I’ve been involved in some bad community theater productions, which is what From Justin To Kelly resembles. I know how darkly humorous thinks can get back stage as people try to come to terms with what’s happening.) You watch and you ask yourself, “Did Kim Fuller actually think this is how American teenagers act when there’s no adults around?” Even more fun, you can try to imagine what Randy, Paul and Simon said when they first saw the film. I imagine it when something like this:
“Yo dawg, that was just alright for me, I don’t know, man, that was strange. Paula?”
“Argle bargle margle largle. Simon?”
“It was rather like watching a small parakeet attempt to eat a 60 year-old man…”
And, as such, From Justin to Kelly remains a pleasure of mine.
It’s just one that I feel guilty about admitting to.
Through the Shattered Lens 