Tag Archives: Matthew Faison

Life Stinks (1991, directed by Mel Brooks)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Goddard Bolt (Mel Brooks), the massively wealthy CEO of Bolt Enterprises, wants to buy up a huge area of Los Angeles’s slums and tear them down, transforming the area into a chic neighborhood and moving all of the poor residents and street people out.  Rival businessman Vaughn Craswell (Jeffrey Tambor), who grew up in the slum and dreams of destroying it himself, has the same plan.  He and Bolt make a bet.  If Bolt can survive for 30 days on the streets, Craswell will allow Bolt to have the property.  Bolt agrees and soon, he is penniless and sleeping in alleys.  While Bolt befriends Sailor (Howard Morris) and Fumes (Theodore Wilson) and falls in love with a former dancer named Molly (Lesley Ann Warren), Craswell schemes to take over Bolt’s company and keep Bolt on the streets permanently.

Life Stinks was one of Mel Brooks’s attempts to make a straight comedy that wasn’t a parody and which had a serious message underneath the laughs.  The mix of comedy and drama doesn’t really gel,  because the drama is too dark and the comedy is too cartoonish.  Life Stinks is often guilty of romanticizing living on the streets.  With the exception of two muggers, everyone whom Bolt meets is a saint.  It is still interesting to see Brooks creatively at his most heartfelt and humanistic.

Life Stinks does feature some of Mel Brooks’s best work as an actor and it’s also features an excellent turn from Lesley Anne Warren.  At first, I thought Warren would be miscast as a woman who spent her days in a soup kitchen and her nights sleeping in an alley.  But she actually gives a very sweet and believable performance.

No matter what else, Mel Brooks is a true mensch.

 

Retro Television Review: Fantasy Island 5.22 “The Ghost’s Story/The Spoilers”

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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1984.  Unfortunately, the show has been removed from most streaming sites.  Fortunately, I’ve got nearly every episode on my DVR.

This week, season 5 comes to an end.

Episode 5.22 “The Ghost’s Story/The Spoilers”

(Dir by Don Chaffey, originally aired on May 8th, 1982)

The latest batch of guests are arriving and Julie is nowhere to be seen!  Perhaps that’s because, as Mr. Roarke explains to Tattoo, Julie is helping out a guest who has an invisibility fantasy.  Tattoo and Roarke watch as the guest walks by.  His body may be invisible but his pants are not.

This is the final episode of the fifth season and it’s also the final episode in which Wendy Schaal will be credited as a part of the cast.  I wasn’t a huge fan of the Julie character but it still seems like a bit of a shame that she didn’t get to do anything in the finale.  Then again, this episode doesn’t really feel like a finale.  I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes during the fifth season but it’s hard not to feel, with the way that Julie and Tattoo have randomly shown up in different stories, that the season’s episodes were not shown in the order in which they were filmed.  Maybe all the Julie episodes were filmed at one time, while Herve Villechazie was off doing something else.  Who knows?  It’s just been a strange season.

That’s all wonderful and interesting, Lisa …. But what about this week’s fantasies!? you may be asking.

They both feel a bit familiar.  That’s not always a bad thing, of course.  Fantasy Island is a comfort show and a part of the comfort is knowing that things are always going to play out in a certain way.  But, with this episode, both fantasies felt as if they had been done better in the past.

Harry (Bo Hopkins) is a bounty hunter who comes to the Island to track down fugitive Nick Tanner (Robert Fuller).  Nick has been accused of robbing a bank and is hiding out on a nearby island.  Harry goes to the island but he soon discovers that Nick is innocent and that the real bank robbers have also come to the island in search of Nick.  Luckily, there’s a widow named Juliet (Jo Ann Pflug) who is also living on the island.  Harry and Nick hide out at her place before they all team up to defeat the real bank robbers.  Nick and Juliet fall in love and Mr. Roarke performs one of his trademark wedding ceremonies.  Nick and Juliet then board the plane back to America and …. wait a minute, what about Harry?  It was his fantasy!  We don’t ever see Harry leave Fantasy Island.  Maybe he’s still living there.

(Personally, I think he married Julie and that’s why she was no longer working there once season six began.  I like that.  Consider it to be canon.)

The other fantasy is a haunted house story.  Amanda Parsons (Tanya Roberts) comes all the way from Baltimore to spend 24 hours in one of Fantasy Island’s many haunted houses.  Two other paranormal investigators attempt to do it before Amanda but they end up fleeing after two minutes.  I’m not sure why.  The manor looks creepy but it turns out that the ghost is a rather wimpy and not at all frightening guy named Timothy Black (Dack Rambo).  Cursed by his own father after Timothy refused to fight a duel with Captain Fitzhugh Ross (John McCook), Timothy has spent two hundred years haunting the old manor.  Amanda takes sympathy on him.  It turns out that Ross’s descendant is also on the Island.  Timothy challenges him to a duel, causing the latest Ross to run in fear.  Timothy and his ghost dad (John Myhers) realize it’s okay to be scared of getting shot.  Ghost Dad asks Roarke to bring Timothy back to life so that he can pursue his romance with Amanda.  Roarke does just that, despite the fact that, in many previous episodes, Roarke has specifically said that he cannot bring the dead back to life.

Usually, I enjoy Fantasy Island‘s haunted house fantasies but this one didn’t do much for me.  I think it’s because the ghost was just too wimpy.  There’s nothing more annoying than a whiny a dead guy,

And so ends this very odd season.  Next week, we being season 6!

Retro Television Review: St. Elsewhere 1.6 “Legionnaires: Part One”

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 Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988.  The show can be found on Hulu!

This week, Peter White continues to disappoint everyone.

Episode 1.6 “Legionnaires: Part One”

(Dir by Thomas Carter, originally aired on December 7th, 1982)

Dr. Peter White (Terence Knox) is perhaps the most incompetent doctor at St. Eligius.  Over the course of the first few episodes, we have watched as he’s taken advantage of his fellow residents, been rude to patients, misdiagnosed obvious medical conditions, and complained nonstop about how difficult his life is.  Dr. White is struggling to balance the punishing schedule of being a resident with also being a husband and the father to a young girl and a newborn.  He’s in over his head.

What’s interesting is that, despite all of his problems, he’s not a particularly sympathetic character and I don’t think he’s meant to be.  He’s never going to be a good doctor and he doesn’t have the courage to admit it.  Instead of finding a career for which he’s suited, he insists on being a doctor and risking the life of anyone unlucky enough to be his patient.  What makes Dr. White an especially disturbing character is that there are probably a lot of doctors in the real world who are just like him.  They’re overwhelmed and they make stupid mistakes.  I get overwhelmed sometimes too, as does everyone.  And, like everyone, I occasionally make mistakes.  However, my mistakes usually amount to something like missing a cringey typo that causes me to feel embarrassment until I get a chance to fix it.  A doctor’s mistake can lead to people dying.

This week, Dr. White attempts to give penicillin to a patient who is allergic.  Fortunately, Dr. Westphall is able to stop White from putting his patient into a coma.  Dr. White also manages to lose his hospital-issued pager and, when he’s told that it will cost him $300 to get a new one, he freaks out.  A chance meeting with a lawyer in the hospital cafeteria leads White to offer to sell out the hospital by recommending the lawyer to anyone willing to sue because they ended up with a doctor like Peter White.  White finally raises the money by donating his sperm.  The nurse at the sperm bank says that it’s really generous for a doctor to donate.  Not this doctor!

While Peter is screwing up his life, Dr. Westphall is dealing with what appears to be an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease in one of the wards.  Westphall wants to immediately shut down the ward.  Dr. Auschlander and board member H.J. Cummings (Christopher Guest — yes, that Christopher Guest) disagree.  However, after another young woman dies of what appears to be Legionnaire’s, Westphall orders the ward to be closed and the patients to be relocated.

Meanwhile, Kathy Martin broke up with Fiscus because she felt their fling was turning into a relationship and Dr. Cavanero dealt with a nurse who disliked her.  Neither one of those subplots did much for me, though Kathy is emerging as one of my favorite characters on this show.  Before breaking up with Fiscus, she goes to a funeral of a stranger just so he won’t be buried without someone there to mourn him.  She wears white to the funeral.  One doctor comments that she’s never seen Kathy wear white before.  Kathy’s a great character and deserves better than just being Fiscus’s girlfriend.

This episode was an improvement over the last episode I watched.  According to the title, it’s also only “Part One” so I imagine there will be some fallout over closing that ward next week.  We’ll see what happens.

A Movie A Day #70: Wired (1989, directed by Larry Peerce)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Sometimes, you watch a movie and all you cay say, at the end, is “What the Hell were they thinking?”

Wired is one such movie.  Based on a widely discredited biography by Bob Woodward, Wired tells two stories.  In the first story, John Belushi (Michael Chiklis, making an unfortunate film debut) wakes up in a morgue and is told by his guardian angel that he has died of a drug overdose.  Did I mention that his guardian angel is Puerto Rican cabbie named Angel Vasquez (Ray Sharkey) and Angel drives Belushi through a series of flashbacks?  Belushi meets Dan Aykroyd (Gary Groomes, who looks nothing like Dan Aykroyd).  Belushi gets cast on Saturday Night Live.  Belushi marries Judy (Lucinda Jenney).  Belushi uses drugs, costars in The Blues Brothers, dies of a drug overdose in a sleazy motel, and plays a pinball game to determine whether he’ll go to Heaven or Hell.  While this is going on, Bob Woodward (J.T. Walsh) is interviewing everyone who knew Belushi while he was alive.

There are so many things wrong with Wired that it is hard to know where to even begin.  I haven’t even mentioned the scene where Bob Woodward travels back in time and has a conversation with Belushi while he’s dying on the motel room floor.  Wired tries to be a cautionary tale about getting seduced by fame and drugs but how seriously can anyone take the message of any movie that features Ray Sharkey as a guardian angel?  The scenes with Woodward are strange, mostly because the hero of Watergate is being played by an actor best known for playing sinister villains.  (Seven years after playing Bob Woodward, J.T. Walsh was actually cast as Watergate figure John Ehrlichman in Nixon.)  Considering that this was his first movie, Michael Chiklis is not bad when it comes to playing a drug addict named John but he’s never convincing as John Belushi.  He never captures the mix of charisma and danger that made John Belushi a superstar.  Wired wants to tell the story of Belushi’s downfall but never understands what made him special to begin with.

Wired tries to be edgy but it only succeeds for one split second.  During the filming of The Blues Brothers, a director who is clearly meant to be John Landis walks over to Belushi’s trailer.  Listen carefully, and a helicopter can be heard in the background.

As for the rest of Wired, what the Hell were they thinking?

Horror on TV: Tales From The Crypt 1.4 “Only Sin Deep” (dir by Howard Deutch)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

You may remember, from previous horrorthons, that I like to end each day in October by sharing a classic example of televised horror.  Over the previous two years, I shared several episodes of The Twilight Zone and everyone seemed to enjoy them.  I know I certainly did.

Unfortunately, I can’t do that anymore.

All of the episodes of the Twilight Zone that were on YouTube have been taken down.  Copyright infringement, they say.  And, unfortunately, Hulu is no longer allowing people to watch The Twilight Zone for free.  I can still embed Hulu videos on this site but unless you’re a subscriber, you wouldn’t be able to watch them.

Which sucks, by the way!  Seriously, I was soooooo mad when I discovered what had happened…

However, fear not!  While I may not be able to share any Twilight Zone episodes this October, it turns out that every episode of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt has been uploaded to YouTube!  And what could be more appropriate for Halloween than a little trip to the crypt?

So, with all that in mind, here’s the fourth episode of Tales From The Crypt.  It’s called Only Sin Deep and it originally aired on June 14th, 1989.  It tells the story of a prostitute named Sylvia Vane (played by Lea Thompson) who agrees to sell her beauty for $10,000 and the chance to marry a rich man.  Sylvia doesn’t take the deal seriously.  You won’t be surprised to learn that was a mistake.  Only Sin Deep is an entertaining little morality tale.  Don’t mess with karma.

(As well, I’m going to assume that the name Sylvia Vane is meant to be an homage to the name of Angela Lansbury’s character in The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

Only Sin Deep was directed by Howard Deutch, who also directed Lea Thompson in Some Kind of Wonderful.  (And, of course, he also married her.)  It was written by Fred Dekker, who directed the classic Night of the Creeps.

And yes, the story is introduced by the infamous Cryptkeeper.

Enjoy!