October True Crime: In Broad Daylight (dir by James Steven Sadwith)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

On July 10th, 1981, Kenneth Rex McElroy was gunned down in Skidmore, Oklahoma. He was shot while sitting in his truck. Over 40 bullets were fired into the truck but only two actually hit McElroy. His fourth wife, Trena (who Kenneth first met when she was 12 and he was 35), was sitting beside him at the time but was not hit by any bullets. McElroy was 47 years old when he was gunned down in broad daylight. There were reportedly 46 witnesses who saw the shooting occurred. When interrogated by the police, not a single one said that they saw anything. Quite a few did mention that Ken McElroy had gotten exactly what he deserved.

Ken McElroy was a high dropout, a barely literate career criminal who rustled cattle, burned down houses, raped his fourth wife when she was just 12, and then killed her family’s dogs in order to intimidate them into not pressing charges against him. He was known as the town bully, a surly man who had 17 children with 6 different women and who would shoot anyone who disagreed with him. Whenever he was charged with a crime, he would intimidate the witnesses into not testifying against him. In 1980. he got angry at a store owner after one of his kids was accused of shoplifting candy. McElroy shot the man and was put on trial for attempted murder. For once, he was convicted but he was freed on bail while awaiting appeal. When it become apparent that McElroy would not be going to prison for a while, the citizens of Skidmore….

Well, I should probably chose my words carefully. The truth of the matter is that no one has even been charged with or convicted of killing Ken McElroy. It is known that several citizens did have a meeting a few night before McElroy’s death and that they discussed what they could best do to keep McElroy from hurting anyone else. It’s also knoqn that, a week before he was shot, McElroy walked into the local bar with his rifle and dared anyone who wanted him dead to come get him. Does that mean that a group of concerned citizens took it upon themselves to dispense vigilante justice? That’s what Trena always claimed but again, no one was every charged, indicted, or convicted. The death of Ken McElroy remains officially unsolved.

Perhaps that’s why the names were changed for the 1991 made-for-television movie In Broad Daylight. Brian Denney may be playing a character named Len Rowan but, for anyone familiar with the case, it’s obvious that he’s playing Ken McElroy just as Marcia Gay Harden is obviously playing Tena McElroy, even if her character is called Adina. The film doesn’t change the name of the town and it doesn’t change the circumstances that led to McElroy’s death. W watch as McElroy intimidates the owners of a grocery store (played by Cloris Leachman and John Anderson) and even attempts to bully the local police (represented here by Chris Cooper). The film features a gun-toting crowd surrounding Len Rowan’s vehicle but it’s shot in such a way that their faces are blurry.

In Broad Daylight was filmed in Texas and it definitely captures both the beauty and the potential danger that comes with living in a rural community. Everyone in town knows everyone else. There’s a strong sense of community but, because the community is so small and isolated, it’s easy for a man like Len Rowan to bully the entire town. Some of the actors lean a bit too hard into their country accents. (Lord protect us from Yankees trying to sound Southern.) But the main members of the supporting cast — Cloris Leachman, John Anderson, Chris Cooper, Marcia Gay Harden — all give convincing performances. As for Brian Dennehy, he’s absolutely horrifying as the astoundingly cruel Len Rowan. Dennehy plays Len as being a man who might not exactly intelligent (the real Ken McElroy dropped out of school early) but who is positively brilliant at intimidating people. Dennehy plays Rowan as if he has a death wish. All of his threats and his speeches make it clear that he’s just daring someone to shoot him. Even when he realizes he’s about to get shot while sitting in his truck, he sit there and accepts the inevitable. Perhaps even he was getting sick of dealing with himself.

After watching In Broad Daylight, it’s easy to understand why no one came forward as a witness. By his own actions, Ken McErloy was destined to die violently. A few people just decided to speed things up a little. Who knows who?

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 4.4 “A Doll’s Eyes”

Posted on August 31, 2025 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, Lisa will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.

This week’s episode made me cry and cry.

Episode 4.4 “A Doll’s Eyes”

(Dir by Kenneth Fink, originally aired on December 1st, 1995)

Here in America, there’s recently been a lot of debate about how much of a problem crime actually is. It’s a bit of an odd debate because much of it is based on telling people to ignore what they’re seeing and experiencing and to instead, just take comfort in abstract statistics and numbers. “Actually,” we’re told, “crime is down from last year,” as if the claim that there’s slightly less of it being reported somehow negates the fact that it exists.

Those who say that crime is not a big deal often forget that crime is not just a matter of statistics and police reports. Crime is something that happens to people. It’s something that scars people. It’s not something that most people can just shrug off. Every crime is different and everyone reacts to being a victim in their own individual way but react, they do. It’s easy to be dismissive of people’s concerns about crime when you’re not the one getting your house broken into or hearing gunshots in the night. It’s easy to say “It was just a mugging,” when you’re not the one getting mugged and losing whatever trust you may have once had in the system. Seth Rogen once tweeted that he didn’t care that his car got broken into because he wasn’t into worrying about possessions. That’s easy to say when you can just buy a new car whenever you feel like it. For someone who can’t and is now stuck with the knowledge that they’re not even safe in their own car, it’s considerably more difficult to be so cavalier. Crime is about more than just statistics and numbers. For those who have been victimized, it’s about loss. It’s about never feeling truly safe or secure again.

This week’s episode of Homicide fellows Pembleton and Bayliss as they investigate a shooting at a mall. A young boy was caught in the crossfire and now, he’s on life support at the hospital. For Pembleton and Bayliss, it starts out as another case. Tracking down the shooters is not difficult. Getting the shooters to confess is not difficult. Pembleton and Bayliss aren’t dealing with master criminals here.

For the boy’s parents (played, in two heart-breaking performances, by Marcia Gay Harden and Gary Basaraba), the shooting of their son is the moment that their lives stopped. They’re the one who eventually have to make the decision to take their son off of life support. Hearing that their son’s organs were donated and are helping other people provides cold comfort. Their only son is dead and, as this episode make clear, they’re not going to be okay. Some would describe their son as just being another statistic, part of the count of how many people died in Baltimore during any given year. For his parents, he’s Patrick, a 10 year-old who loved dinosaurs and science and whose life was ended because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Bayliss runs into the father of a girl who got an organ transplant as the result of the Patrick’s death, the girl’s father muses on how strange it is that one child died so that his girl could live. It’s a powerful moment, one that really captures the humanity at the heart of this show’s best episodes. Patrick’s parents will never recover but his murder has led to other people being saved. Was it worth the cost? The show is smart enough to leave the question for us to ponder.

This episode made me cry. It reminded me a bit of season 2’s Bop Gun, with its mix of the family trying to deal with an unimaginable tragedy while, for Pembleton and Bayliss, it’s another day at work. I would actually say this episode was superior to Bop Gun. Bop Gun tried too hard to wrap things up. A Doll’s Eyes understands that sometimes, this is no way to wrap things up. Life just keeps moving.

I review SPACE COWBOYS (2000) – starring Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner!

Posted on May 26, 2025 by Bradley Crain

Here at The Shattered Lens, we’re definitely celebrating Clint Eastwood’s May 31st birthday. As part of that celebration, I decided to revisit his 2000 film, SPACE COWBOYS.

SPACE COWBOYS opens in 1958 on the day that Air Force Test Pilot Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood) and his team of Hawk Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones), Jerry O’Neill (Donald Sutherland), and Tank Sullivan (James Garner) find out that their test program is being shutdown due to the formation of NASA. Their dreams of someday making it to space are crushed, and to make it worse, they were stabbed in the back by their leader Bob Gerson (James Cromwell) and not invited to be part of NASA’s new testing program. Fast forward to the present time, where a Soviet communications satellite seems to be unresponsive and NASA is working with Russian General Vostov (Rade Serbedzija) to figure out how to keep it from crashing back to Earth. The satellite is a relic of the Cold War that somehow ended up with a guidance system on board that’s so old that it was designed by Frank, and the young folks don’t know how to work with it. And to complicate things even further, the guidance system can only be fixed on site, which means in space. So it seems that NASA finally needs Frank after all this time, and he’ll only agree to help if he’s able to bring his old team on board. Their old nemesis Bob, the project’s manager at NASA, reluctantly agrees. We see that he’s still the same bastard he’s always been as he and General Vostov are holding back critical information about the cargo of the satellite. So let the training and preparation for the mission begin!

The premise of SPACE COWBOYS may not be very realistic, but I think it’s one hell of a fun movie, especially during its first half. I really enjoy watching this amazing cast of veteran actors do their thing. Of course they get the cool walk into NASA headquarters wearing sunglasses and leather jackets, while N’ Sync’s “Space Cowboy” plays over the soundtrack. Clint Eastwood plays the character he has perfected over his career, that of the tough, grizzled leader with a dry sense of humor. Tommy Lee Jones is the fearless hotshot who has never been good at following orders, but has the kind of talent that everyone wishes they had. Jones is actually by far the youngest of the primary cast, a full 16 years younger than Eastwood. Donald Sutherland gets some of the best laughs as the ladies man of the team. The scene where he answers Jay Leno’s question about his reputation as a lothario made me laugh out loud! James Garner’s character became a Baptist minister after his days with the Air Force and prays often for the group. He’s good here, but his character is the least memorable. With their mission labeled “The Ripe Stuff” by the media, watching these great older actors go through their training, and deal with their much younger counterparts and the NASA brass, is a joy. I also want to shout out William Devane as the NASA flight director for the mission. He has a couple of really strong scenes.

The legendary cast of this film can’t help but give a seasoned moviegoer like me a warm sense of nostalgia based on their amazing body of work. I remember introducing KELLY’S HEROES to my son when he was a boy. He watched my DVD over and over again. Seeing Eastwood and Sutherland together here brought those memories back. One of my very favorite revenge films is ROLLING THUNDER with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones. Seeing them together here helps me remember just how great they are in that badass classic. Heck, Garner’s character name of “Tank” Sullivan takes me back to one of the very first movies our family rented when we got our VCR in the mid-80’s! Do y’all remember Garner’s film TANK from 1984? I certainly do!

I will admit that once the crew takes off and begins the actual mission, which comprises about the last 45 minutes of the film, the entertainment level goes down a couple of notches for me. The technical aspects of completing the mission are not as interesting to me as the character interplay in the earlier portions of the film. With that said, there are still some exciting moments to be had, including the nailbiter of a landing at the end.

I enjoyed revisiting SPACE COWBOYS after quite a few years. This movie is ultimately a crowd pleaser, and for me, it does its job well. Enjoy the trailer below:

Retro Television Review: In The Lion’s Den 1.1 “The Pilot”

Posted on February 22, 2024 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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing In The Lion’s Den, which aired on CBS in 1987. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

Episode 1.1 “Pilot”

(Dir by James Burrows, originally aired on September 4th, 1987)

When she lived in New York City, Dana (Wendy Crewson) had an apartment, a boyfriend, and a job working as a producer on a very successful game show. But then she got fired and everything changed. Now, she has moved to San Antonio so she can work as the new associate producer of Lion’s Den, a PBS program featuring a lion puppet named Maynard.

The man behind the puppet is Keith (Dennis Boutsikaris), an infamously temperamental actor who, every day, announces that he’s quitting show business and storms off the set. Previously, it was up to Jerry (Jack Blessing) to coax Keith into returning to the set and shooting the show. But now that Jerry has a job with Steven Spielberg, it’s up to Dana to keep Keith happy.

Despite having hired her, Keith does not know who Dana is when she shows up on the set. He proceeds to re-interview her for the job, which means leering at her legs and trying to convince her to hug the puppet. Keith, I think, was meant to come across as being a charming rogue but, every time he talked to Dana, I had flashbacks to interviewing for jobs after college and all of the guys who stared at my chest and legs while I explained my passion for art history. Keith is a creep and the fact that he’s only nice when he’s talking through Maynard does nothing to change that.

It’s an eventful first day for Dana. One of the show’s sponsors (played by Fred Applegate) offers to allow Dana to rent his house but it soon turns out that he’s a bit of a sleaze. A neurotic writer (Brian Backer) fears that he’s going to lose his job because he wrote a script about football. (“I hate football!” Keith yells. Good luck living in Texas.) Proving the everyone had to start somewhere, Marcia Gay Harden plays the receptionist who helps Dana get out of having to talk to her ex-boyfriend. (“She’s meetin’ Willie Nelson.”) Harden plays the role with a Texas accent and, while it’s definitely exaggerated, she does a good job with it overall. (A quick check with Wikipedia revealed that, though born in California, Harden spent time in Texas when she was growing up and graduated from the University of Texas.) Eventually, Keith throws his daily tantrum and Dana has to find her own way to keep him from quitting show business.

The main problem with the pilot is that Keith is too much of a jerk. It’s hard to really care about someone who throws a tantrum every day, is abusive to his coworkers, and how uses an adorable puppet to sexually harass a woman who hasn’t even figured out where she’s going to be living in her new city. Personally, I think Dana should have quit as soon as Maynard demanded a hug.

And audiences agreed. This pilot aired once and that was it for In The Lion’s Den.

Fever (1991, directed by Larry Elikann)

Posted on March 18, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Ray (Armand Assante) is a formerly viscous ex-con who has just gotten out of prison and is now determined to go straight and live on the right side of the law. After spending nearly a decade behind bars, all he wants to do is to reunite with his girlfriend, Lacy (Marcia Gay Harden), and make her his wife. However, there’s a problem. While Ray was locked up, Lacy moved on. She’s now engaged to Elliott (Sam Neill), a liberal attorney who, unlike Ray, is a pacifist. Even though Lacy is still attracted to Ray, she does not want to get back together with him.

Unfortunately, there’s a second problem. Ray may have gone straight but his former criminal associates don’t believe him. They want Ray to help them pull off a major crime and when Ray says that is no longer his thing, they react by kidnapping Lacy. If Ray ever wants to see Lacy again, he’s now got to return to his life of crime.

There’s also a third problem. Ray may be an experienced criminal but Elliott insists on tagging along with him while he’s following the kidnappers’s orders. So now, Ray not only has to commit several crimes but he has to do it with an inexperienced partner who doesn’t even believe in firing guns!

Fever is one of those HBO films that used to show up all the time on cable in the 90s. I watched it a few times back in the day, just because I was a teenage boy and the movie featured a good deal of nudity. Even at that time, though, I thought it was a slow and frequently boring movie. Rewatching it for this review, I was shocked to discover that it was even slower than I remembered. It seems like it takes forever for Ray and Elliott to finally team up and for the movie to get going. Though the plot description may make it sound like a buddy comedy, it’s actually a very tough and grim picture. Armand Assante and Sam Neill are not actors known for their light touch and they both give very serious and gritty performances. Unfortunately, the film’s pace never really matched the intensity of its stars and the film’s storyline isn’t strong enough to hold up under scrutiny. Once you start to wonder if Ray would really let Elliott tag along with him, the movie itself falls apart.

Armand Assante is a good actor who rarely seems to appear in good films. Fever is a good example of that. Assante gives an excellent and complex performance (and both Sam Neill and Marcia Gay Harden are pretty good too) but Fever itself never really clicks.

A (Not-So) Brief Note On WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT (20th Century Fox 2004)

Posted on June 22, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Sometimes while scrolling through the channels one come across a pleasant surprise. So it’s Saturday afternoon,a thundershower has cancelled my plan to hit the beach, the Red Sox don’t start for awhile, and I’m clicking the old clicker when I land on WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT. I wasn’t expecting much, just a way to kill time; instead, I found an underrated little gem of a comedy that kept me watching until the very end.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT is an undiscovered classic or anything like that. It’s just a solidly made piece of entertainment about small-town life starring Ray Romano (riding high at the time thanks to his successful sitcom EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND) and Oscar winning Gene Hackman. Romano uses his nebbishy TV persona to portray Mooseport, Maine’s local hardware store owner “Handy” Harrison, who gets involved in a mayoral campaign against Hackman’s Monroe “Eagle”…

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Catching Up With The Films of 2018: Fifty Shades Freed (dir by James Foley)

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Mrs. Grey will see you now.” (Insert your own eye roll GIF here.)

Occasionally, you see a film and, even though you know you should, you just never get around to reviewing it. For instance, I saw Fifty Shades Freed when it was originally released in February and then I watched it again when it was released on DVD. Both times, I thought to myself that I should write down my thoughts on the film, if for no other reason than the fact that I previously reviewed both Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker for this site. And yet, I never did. To be honest, it was difficult to really think of anything to say about this movie that I hadn’t said about the previous two films.

Fifty Shades Freed opens with Christian (Jamie Dornan) and Ana (Dakota Johnson) getting married and going on their honeymoon. It’s fun! It’s sexy! And it’s kinda creepy because, as always, Christian has control issues and he has to have his security team following them all over the place. Christian freaks out with Ana removes her top on the beach. Ana gasps at the sights of handcuffs. There’s one hot sex scene that will temporarily make you forget about the fact that Jamie Dornan doesn’t seem to be that good of an actor. It’s everything that you’d expect from a Fifty Shades honeymoon.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon ends way too quickly and then we have to deal with the marriage. On the plus side, marrying Christian Grey means that you get to live in a really nice house and fly around in a private jet. On the negative side, Christian is still basically an immature douchebag and, now that’s she rich, Ana has become a lot less likable.

Christian freaks out when he discovers that Ana is still using the name “Ana Steele” in her email address. Ana explains that she’s Ana Steele at work but then, when she meets an architect named Gia Matteo (Arielle Kebbell), Ana tells her to stop flirting with her husband and announces, “You can call me Mrs. Grey!” with all the intensity of Kelly Kapowski announcing that she’s going to prom with Zach Morris on Saved By The Bell.

The marriage continues to play out like a perfume commercial written by Sartre’s bastard child. Fortunately, there’s a few more sex scenes that are designed to again remind us that a good body can make up for a lack of everything else. Unfortunately, Ana gets upset when Christian tries to humiliate her for real and a pouty Christian walks out of a shower as soon as Ana steps into it. Ana is told that she’s pregnant and Christian totally freaks out because he still has all sorts of things that he wants to do with his money. Christian’s a douchebag but he’s got a good body and he’s like super rich. Have I already mentioned that?

Anyway, it turns out that Ana is being stalked by her former boss, Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson). Fortunately, all of the stalking allows Ana and Christian to rediscover their love for each other. There’s a kidnapping. There’s a car chase. There’s a lot of music and a lot of scenes of Dakota Johnson looking confused and Jamie Dornan looking blank. It’s a Fifty Shades movie. What else were you expecting?

The usual argument that critics tend to make with the Fifty Shades trilogy is that the movies are terrible but Dakota Johnson does the best that she can with the material. Actually, both Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan are pretty lousy in all three of these films but Ana was at least kind of a sympathetic character in the previous two films. Unfortunately, Fifty Shades Freed sees Ana and Christian becoming a boring married couple and what little chemistry Dornan and Johnson had in the previous films completely vanishes. As a result, Ana doesn’t seem like someone lucky enough to have fallen in love with a man who just happens to be super wealthy. Instead, she just comes across like someone who sold her soul for a private jet.

Fifty Shades Freed is the weakest of the trilogy, done in by the fact that there’s really not much of a story to tell. Ana and Christian get to live blissfully ever after and it’s always good to see happy mannequins. I saw this movie with my best friend and we talked through the entire movie and I imagine that’s what we’ll do every time we rewatch it.

Film Review: Fifty Shades Darker (dir by James Foley)

Posted on February 10, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy is shaping up to be the cinematic equivalent of a twitter parody account.

That’s the conclusion that I reached today after my BFF Evelyn and I watched the second part of the trilogy, Fifty Shades Darker. Since we had both read the book, we weren’t shocked when Fifty Shades Darker turned out to be a bad movie. Hell, we weren’t surprised when Fifty Shades of Grey turned out to be bad, either. Each subsequent book was worst than the one that came before it so, when the film version of Fifty Shades Freer is released next year, it should be the worst of all.

Still, nothing could have prepared us for the amount of laugh-out-loud moments and odd details that were offered up in Fifty Shades Darker. Consider just a few:

Having broken up with Christian “I’m fifty shades of fucked up” Grey at the end of the previous film, Ana Steele (Dakota Johnson, doing penance in the hope of being sprung from Purgatory) is now working for a hip and trendy Seattle publishing company! How do we know that it’s hip and trendy? Well, it’s in Seattle and it’s called Seattle Independent Publishing! (As opposed to Seattle Corporate Press.) Her boss, Jack (Eric Hyde) leers at her in a style that basically screams, “Lifetime movie villain!” There’s a scene in which Ana tells her editors that they should be making more of an attempt to reach readers in the “18-24 demographic” and everyone reacts as if this is the first time that they’ve ever heard about this concept. You half expect someone to say, “18 to 24 year olds! WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT!?” Seriously, after seeing this, I’m going to send my resume to the Dallas Observer, along with a note that says, “18-24. Hire me for more info.”

When Christian (poor Jamie Dornan, who I’m pretty sure was trying to blink out an S.O.S. signal at certain points in the film) and Ana first reunite, it’s to attend an art show. Ana’s artist friend has filled an entire gallery with photos of Ana, the majority of which resemble the “sexy” photos that Darcy posted to her MyRoom page in that very special episode of Degrassi. Christian buys all the pictures because he can’t handle the idea of anyone else having Ana on their wall. This obsessive and controlling act is just enough to apparently make Ana reconsider her decision to dump Christian because he was being too obsessive and controlling.

Christian eventually confesses to Ana that he’s only attracted to women who look like his mother and he punishes them because he’s angry with her. “Oh, Christian, your Oedipal complex is so sexy,” Ana coos. Okay, she doesn’t say that. I said that and then Evelyn said something that I can’t repeat. And then we laughed and laughed. Don’t get me wrong. I know that everyone has their issues and God knows, I’ve got a few myself. But the minute a guy tells me that he’s only dating me because I look like his mother, that’s the minute I leave.

When Christian tells Ana about his messed up childhood, Ana responds by drawing on his chest with lipstick. And I swear, that lipstick remains on his chest — without a smudge — for at least a few days. Every time we would catch a glimpse of those perfect lipstick markings on Christian’s chest, Evelyn and I would start laughing. I mean, drawing on your partner (or having your partner draw on you) can be fun but most people wash it off after a while.

(Incidentally, when the Scary Movie people get around to parodying this movie, you know that the lipstick scene is going to be recreated.)

Christian’s childhood bedroom is decorated with a poster of Vin Diesel. When Christian is pouring out his heart, Vin Diesel is glowering in the background. It would have been neat if the poster had suddenly come to life. Perhaps Vin could have suddenly appeared in the bedroom and said, “Someday … BUT NOT TODAY!”

And I’m not even going to talk about the Ben Wa balls.

Anyway, there’s really not much of a plot in Fifty Shades Darker. Ana gets back together with Christian but says that she wants to have a “vanilla” relationship. Christian agrees but he still keeps doing controlling stuff, like buying Ana’s company and freezing her bank account. Ana gets mad. Ana breaks up with him. They get back together. This happens a few times. Christian tells Ana to stay away from a man. Ana gets upset but then the man tries to rape her which feels like the film’s way of putting her in her place for doubting Christian’s instincts when it comes to men. Kim Basinger pops up as the woman who introduced Christian to BDSM and tells Ana that Christian will never be happy in a vanilla relationship. Ana says that vanilla is her favorite ice cream. Here’s my thing: why can’t Ana come up with a more complimentary term than “vanilla” to describe her relationship goals? I mean, Ana’s clever. She came up with that whole 18-24 thing, after all.

There’s also a crazy woman (Bella Heathcote) who shows up occasionally. We know she’s crazy because she’s dressed like someone who lives in an abandoned subway tunnel. She occasionally grabs Ana and says, “I’m nobody!” Hmmm….I wonder what that’s about…

(Well, don’t wonder too much. There’s not a single mystery or question in Fifty Shades Darker that isn’t solved a scene or two after it’s raised.)

One of the redeeming things about Fifty Shades of Grey is that neither Dakota Johnson nor director Sam Taylor-Johnson seemed to be taking it all that seriously. Dakota would pause meaningfully before delivering the worst of her dialogue, a sign that even she couldn’t believe what she was about to say. Meanwhile, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s direction suggested that she found the story to be just as ludicrous and stupid as everyone else. However, Fifty Shades Darker is directed by James Foley. Foley is a veteran director, one who has been making films since before I was born. He does a workmanlike job and you can almost hear him shouting, “Now, where’s my paycheck!?” during certain scenes. Under Foley’s direction, there’s no winking at the audience. There’s no hints of subversion. Foley’s direction is very literal and more than a little dull. He was hired to direct a big-budget version of a Chanel No. 5 commercial and that’s exactly what he does.

The other big issue with Fifty Shades Darker is that Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan have very little romantic chemistry. They both look good naked but that’s about it. Jamie looks miserable to be there and Dakota seems to be trying to keep herself amused. The lack of chemistry was less of a problem in Fifty Shades of Grey. In that film, all that mattered was that Christian was rich and hot and Ana didn’t really haven’t anything better to do. But, in Fifty Shades Darker, we’re asked to believe that they’re actually deeply in love and … no, it just doesn’t work.

Evelyn and I laughed through the entire movie. In the past, we’ve gotten in trouble for doing this because we do have a tendency to get a little bit loud. However, nobody in the audience seemed to mind.

Anyway, Fifty Shades Freer will be coming out next year. Hopefully, someone will read this review and work my idea about the Vin Diesel cameo into the film.

Seriously, it would be great!

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

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“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

Film Review: Fifty Shades of Grey (dir by Sam Taylor-Johnson)

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

If there’s anything that’s obvious from looking over some of the reviews of Fifty Shades of Grey, it’s that only after you’ve read the book can you properly appreciate the film.

If you haven’t read the book, you’ll probably watch the film and dismiss it as being a draggy film that has some truly terrible dialogue and which features two actors who look good naked but who have absolutely no chemistry. You might appreciate that fact that Dakota Jonson, at the very least, appears to be trying to give a good performance. You might even acknowledge that director Sam Taylor-Johnson manages to capture a few pretty images. You might even be happy that she resisted the temptation to cast her husband, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (a.k.a., the least interesting bankable actor working today), in the role of Christian Grey. But, even with all of that, you’ll probably still probably watch the film and, even with its artfully composed and shot sex scenes, think to yourself, “That was two hours of my life that I’ll never get back.”

However, if you have read the book, then you will be capable of watching the film and understanding that, as flawed as it may be, 50 Shades of Grey probably should have been a thousand times worse. It may seem weird to praise Sam Taylor-Johnson for managing to create a below average film but, considering her source material, below average is probably the best that could be hoped for.

Both the film and the book tell the same basic story. Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a 21 year-old English lit major. We know that she’s intelligent because she knows the difference between Thomas Hardy the writer and Tom Hardy the actor. We know that she’s innocent because, the first time that she interviews Christian Grey, she wears a sweater.

As for Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), he’s a 28 year-old multibillionaire. We are constantly assured that he’s the most interesting man in the world, despite the fact that he actually seems to be rather dull. He likes Ana. She likes him. But Christian doesn’t do the relationship thing. Instead, he explains, “I fuck. Hard.” (As opposed to doing so limp…) He’s not interested in having a “vanilla” relationship with Ana. Instead, he wants her to sign a contract in which she’ll agree to be his submissive.

That’s right — Christian claims to be into BDSM. And, in order to prove that point, he has a red dungeon that’s full of stuff that he apparently picked up at a BDSM yard sale. The dungeon’s red, of course. In both the book and the film, a good deal of time is spent attempting to explain BDSM and, in both cases, you’re left with the feeling that Christian got most of his knowledge from reading Wikipedia. In many ways, Christian comes across like someone who has never had a drink pretending to be drunk. He tries really hard but … no.

Anyway, a lot of the film comes down to Christian trying to get Ana to sign a contract. Ana agrees to give up her freedom. When she asks what she gets in return, Christian replies, “Me.” Which, if Christian was being played by Ryan Gosling or Michael Fassbender, might be an incentive. But instead, he’s being played by Jamie Dornan who, quite frankly, looks embarrassed to be there.

Those who have read the book will be pleased to discover that Christian’s immortal line of “I’m fifty shades of fucked up!” has been included in the film. Dornan delivers it like an actor who has given up and who can blame him? To her credit, Dakota Johnson manages to keep a straight face.

Here’s the main problem. Christian Grey is a stalker asshole. He’s an obsessive control freak who is basically using the BDSM lifestyle as a way to cover up the fact that he’s a sociopath. Though that was not author E.L. James’s intention when she wrote the book, that’s who Christian Grey ultimately turns out to be. And that’s the way that Jamie Dornan plays the character. It’s not that Dornan is a bad actor. Just watch him in The Fall and you’ll see that Dornan is capable of giving a very good performance. Instead, you just get the feeling that he looked at the 50 Shades script, saw that Christian was an impossible character to play sympathetically, and decided to give the most literal performance possible. When you were reading the book, you could always imagine some redeeming features for Christian. But, when you watch the movie, you’re forced to accept this very literal interpretation of the character and it quickly becomes apparent that the only reason why anyone would possible love Christian is because he’s rich.

Meanwhile, in the role of Ana, Dakota Johnson actually does a pretty good job. Fortunately, the film jettisons Ana’s narration and we don’t have to hear any details about what her inner goddess is doing while being ordered around by Christian. As a result, Johnson’s interpretation of Ana is far different from how the character was portrayed in the book. Whereas the book’s Ana seems to be desperate to be loved by Christian, Johnson’s Ana often seems to be struggling to keep a straight face. Whereas the book’s Ana took the whole contract thing very seriously, Johnson’s Ana always seems to be on the verge of rolling her eyes. It gives the film an interesting subtext in that you never quite believe that Johnson’s Ana could be as intrigued by Christian Grey as both the book and the film insist that she is. Instead, she mostly seems to put up with him and his kinks because he buys her expensive gifts.

And, since Christian is such a jerk, you really don’t mind the possibility that Ana’s main motivation might be materialistic.

(Another great thing about Dakota Johnson is that she seems to be sincerely embarrassed whenever she has to tell anyone that her name is “Anastasia Steele.”)

Finally, a word about Sam Taylor-Johnson. On the basis of Nowhere Boy, she’s a talented director and, as far as 50 Shades of Grey goes, I think she does the best that she could possibly do. At the very least, she seems to realize that the film is a bit ludicrous and she wisely plays some of the book’s worst moments for subversive laughter. Considering that 50 Shades of Grey is one of the worst books ever written (and, by that, I mean that the book’s prose is so clunky and overdone that it’s damn near unreadable), Sam Taylor-Johnson probably does deserve some credit for making a movie that’s only below average as opposed to disastrous. At the very least, I hope that 50 Shades of Grey will not damage her career in the way that Twilight damaged the equally talented Catherine Hardwicke’s.

I forced my boyfriend to see it with my on Valentine’s and there were a lot of couples in the theater. But, for all the talk of how 50 Shades of Grey launched a thousand fantasies, it’s not a particularly erotic film. The sex scenes are well shot but, since Jamie and Dakota have no chemistry, they also feel very clinical and detached. (Add to that, for a film that’s being identified as being a chick flick, the camera spent a lot more time lingering on Dakota’s naked body than on Jamie’s.) All the sex that followed couples viewing 50 Shades on Saturday night had more to do with the romance of Valentine’s Day and the glory of being in love than with the film itself.

(That, of course, is one of the huge differences between 50 Shades of Grey and Magic Mike.)

50 Shades of Grey apparently made a lot of money this weekend and, if you’re reading this review, chances are that you’ve already seen the film. So, I’ll just conclude by saying that the film is not as bad as most people were expecting. It’s just not particularly any good either. I’ll be looking forward to seeing what Dakota and Sam Taylor-Johnson do in the future but Christian Grey can just stay in his red room for all I care.

(And now that you’ve read the review, why not have some real fun and check out the Fifty Shades of Grey text generator!? Click on refresh a few times and you’ll have an erotic best seller of your own, ready to be published and to make you rich!)