Retro Television Review: All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story (dir by Lloyd Kramer)

Posted on April 14, 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 Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 2000’s All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story! It can be viewed on YouTube.

In 1996, a 34 year-old teacher named Mary Kay Letourneau decided that she had fallen in love with someone who was not her husband.

A 34 year-old deciding that they are no longer happy in their marriage and subsequently deciding that that they’ve found love with someone else is hardly an unusual or even surprising occurrence. What made Mary Kay Letourneau’s case a national scandal was that the person that she decided that she was in love with was a 12 year-old student named Vili Fualaau. Mary Kay started her affair with Vili when she was his sixth grade teacher. When she was arrested and charged with two counts of second-degree rape of a child, Letourneau was pregnant with Vili’s child. Even after being arrested, Letourneau insisted that she and Vili were soulmates. After giving birth to Vili’s child, Letourneau was sentenced to six months of prison and somehow managed to avoid having to register as a sex offender. After serving her sentence, Letourneau was promptly arrested again with Vili and was sent back to jail, where she gave birth to Vili’s second child.

All-American Girl opens with Mary Kay Letourneau (Penelope Ann Miller) in jail, insisting that everything that happened between her and Vili was consensual and that their love is real. The majority of the film is shown in flashbacks. Some of those flashbacks deal with Mary Kay, her husband (Greg Spottiswood), and Vili (Omar Anguiano). Watching the flashbacks, I couldn’t help but notice that the film really did seem to be on Mary Kay’s side, to an almost ludicrous extent. Her husband is portrayed as being a soulless sociopath, even before Mary Kay starts sneaking around with Vili. As for Vili, he is presented as being the one who initiated his relationship with Mary Kay, flirting with her in class and comforting her when she starts crying in a school hallway. The actor playing Vili looked, acted, and sounded considerably older than just 12 years old. At times, he appeared to be nearly as old as Penelope Ann Miller. And I’ll admit that it’s totally possible that Vili could have looked older than his age and maybe he did have a surprisingly mature vocabulary. But still …. he was 12 years old! Apparently, Letourneau cooperated with the film’s producers and that’s pretty obvious from the first minute we see Vili giving Letourneau a wolfish smile in the 6th grade.

The flashbacks dealing with Letourneau’s childhood are a bit more interesting, if just because Letourneau was the daughter of a congressman who ran for president in 1972. (One of her brothers served in the first Bush White House. Another served as an advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign.) At one point, she taunts a group of protestors that have gathered outside of her family’s home and her father praises her courage. The film hints that it was the twin traumas of her brother’s death and the discovery that her beloved father had fathered two children with a mistress that led to Letourneau’s subsequent instability. Perhaps that’s true, though I think the film is a bit too eager to accept that as an all-purpose explanation.

You may have guessed that I had mixed feelings about this film. Penelope Ann Miller gave an excellent performance as Mary Kay but the film’s attempts to portray May Kay as being even more of a victim that Vili were undeniably icky.

As for the real Mary Kay, she married Vili four years after being released from prison. They separated a year before Mary Kay died in 2020. Their relationship inspired several films, most recently May/December.

Retro Television Review: So Here’s What Happened 1.1 “Pilot”

Posted on February 1, 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 So Here’s What Happened, which aired on CBS in 2006. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

The first and only episode of this show has one message for all the mooks out there. And that message is …. NEW YORK, BABY!

Episode 1.1 “Pilot”

(Dir by Michael Lembeck, aired on May 1st, 2006)

What to say about Vince Brophy (Bobby Cannavale)? Hey, he’s a New Yorker, you know what I mean? Hey, he starts every sentence by saying, “Hey,” y’know? He knows the name of every single athlete who ever played for a New York sports team, y’know? He meets a woman named Rochelle Jeter (Rashida Jones) and immediately asks her if she’s related to Derek Jeter, you know what I’m saying? She says, “Yeah,” and she’s being sarcastic but Vince thinks that she’s being serious because who in their right mind would come into the old neighborhood and make a sarcastic joke, y’know?

Vince is such a New Yorker that he narrates the entire episode while sitting in his favorite barber chair. His barber (Hector Elizondo) hangs on his every word, which is good since he presumably can’t see the flashbacks that the audience is forced to sit through. Vince works at his family’s car lot and he wears solid suits and pinky rings and the pilot finds several excuses for him to say the word “Escalade.” He’s not smart but he’s a stand-up guy, that Vince. His co-worker asks him to be the godfather to his newborn and Vince agrees but then he nearly drowns the kid at the christening because he gets distracted when someone tells him that Derek Jeter don’t have no sister named Rochelle. What a New Yorker!, y’know what I’m saying?

There’s a lot of talented people in this show. Rashida Jones was months away from appearing on The Office. Hector Elizondo is a comedy veteran. Steve Park, a favorite of the Coen Brothers, appeared as Vince’s boss. Mercedes Ruehl plays Vince’s mother. And then you’ve got Bobby Cannavale in the lead role. Cannavale is one of my favorite actors, a guy who is as good at playing sensitive as he is at playing tough. Cannavale can play drama and he can play comedy and he’s easy on the eyes. Unfortunately, all of these talented people were let down by a script that was written by none other than Paul Reiser.

The main problem with the show is that none of the characters have much of a personality beyond being from New York. Obviously, New Yorkers are a unique group of people but every New Yorker I’ve met has also had their own individual personality to go along with their identity of being a citizen of America’s largest city. The characters in this episode, on the other hand, have no identity beyond being a New Yorker in the most cliched ways possible. Even worse, none of the jokes are particularly funny. Vince crosses the line from being amiably dumb to being a buffoon far too quickly.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this was the only episode of this show. The pilot did not lead to a series. Fortunately, everyone involved went on to better things, y’know?

Insomnia File #34: The Minus Man (dir by Hampton Fancher)

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

Last night, if you were unable to sleep at one in the morning, you could have turned over to Starz and watched the 1999 film, The Minus Man!

The Minus Man is a strange little film about a rather odd man. Vann (Owen Wilson) is a drifter. He avoids questions about his past with the skill of someone who specializes in being whatever he needs to be at the moment. When he rents a room from Doug and Jane Durwin (Brian Cox and Mercedes Ruehl), he tells them that he’s only drunk one beer over the course of his entire life, he always works, he always pays his rent on time, and that he’s never smoked “the dope.” He says it so earnestly that it’s difficult to know whether you should take him seriously or not. And yet, Vann is so likable and so charmingly spacey that you can’t help but understand why people automatically trust him. Vann succeeds not because people believe him but because they want to believe him.

Vann’s new in town. As he explains to a cop who pulls him over, he’s just interested in seeing the countryside. From the minute that Vann shows up, he’s accepted by the community. He goes to a high school football game and befriends the local star athlete (Eric Mabius). He tries to help repair Doug and Jane’s marriage, which has been strained ever since the disappearance of their daughter. With Doug’s aid, Vann gets a job at the post office and proves that he wasn’t lying when he said he was a hard worker. Vann even pursues a tentative romance with the poignantly shy and insecure Ferrin (Janeane Garofalo).

In fact, it’s easy to imagine this film as being a sweet-natured dramedy where a drifter comes into town for the holidays and helps all of the townspeople deal with their problems. However, from the first time we see him, we know that Vann has some issues. As Detective Graves (Dennis Haysbert) puts it, Vann is a “cipher, a zero.” There’s nothing underneath the pleasant surface. Of course, Graves doesn’t really exist. Neither does his partner, Detective Blair (Dwight Yoakam). They’re two figments of Vann’s imagination. They appear whenever Vann is doing something that he doesn’t want the world to find out about.

Whenever the urge hits him, Vann kills people. When we first meet him, he’s picking up and subsequently murdering a heroin addict named Casper (Sheryl Crow). Vann makes it a point to use poison because he says that it’s a painless death. Vann also says that he’s doing his victims a favor, as he feels that the majority of them no longer want to live. Vann is the type of killer who, after having committed his latest murder, sees nothing strange about volunteering to help search for the missing victim.

Like a lot of serial killer films, The Minus Man cheats by giving all of the best lines to the killer. In real life, most serial killers are impotent, uneducated losers who usually end up getting caught as a result of their own stupidity. In the movies, they’re always surprisingly loquacious and clever. While Vann may not be a well-spoken as Hannibal Lecter, he’s still a lot more articulate than the majority of real-life serial killers. As I watched the film, it bothered me that we didn’t really learn more about Vann’s victims. (It would have been a far different film if someone had mentioned that Vann’s third, unnamed victim was “Randy, who was just having a bite to eat while shopping for a present for his little girl’s birthday.”) Too often, The Minus Man seemed to be letting Vann off the hook in a way that a film like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or even American Psycho never would.

That said, The Minus Man may be occasionally uneven but it’s still an intriguing and sometimes genuinely creepy film. The Minus Man makes good use of Owen Wilson’s eccentric screen persona and Wilson gives a very good performance as a man who has become very skilled at hiding just how empty he actually is. Much like everyone else in the film, you want to believe that there’s more to Vann than meets the eye because, as played by Wilson, he’s just so damn likable. Over the course of the film, Vann and Doug develop this weird little bromance and, as good as Wilson is, Brian Cox’s performance is even more unsettling because we’re never quite sure what Doug may or may not be capable of doing. Even Janeane Garofalo gives a touching and believable performance as a character who you find yourself sincerely hoping will not end up getting poisoned.

With all that in mind, I wouldn’t suggest watching this film if you’re trying to get over insomnia. This is the type of unsettling film that will keep you awake and watching the shadows long after the final credits roll.