Tag Archives: review

What Lisa Marie Watched Last Night #224: Ice Road Killer (dir by Max McGuire)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I watched Ice Road Killer on the Lifetime Movie Network!

Why Was I Watching It?

It had been a while since I had last watched a Lifetime movie and, with this year soon to come to a close, I figured that last night would be a good time to start catching up.

What Was It About?

While on her way to pick up her daughter from college, Helen (Sarah Allen) nearly runs over a young woman named Carly (Zoe Belkin).  Carly claims that she’s stranded.  Because the roads are icy and a heavy snow is falling, Helen agrees to give Carly a ride to wherever Carly is going.  Needless to say, Helen’s daughter, Lauren (Erica Anderson), is not amused.

Of course, what Helen doesn’t realize is that Carly and her boyfriend, Boyd (Connor McMahon), are planning on robbing her.  But what Carly and Boyd don’t realize is that they are being followed by a psycho trucker (Michael Swatton), who is looking for revenge.  

What Worked?

For a Lifetime film, Ice Road Killer had some effectively scary moments and some creepy locations.  (The motel where Helen, Lauren, and Carly initially attempted to spend the night was memorably run-down and it brought back some memories of my own childhood road trips.)  The ice, the snow, and the howling wind all added up to create an otherworldly atmosphere and Christopher Guglick’s original score was appropriately ominous.  

Michael Swatton was wonderfully creepy as the psycho trucker.

What Did Not Work?

A huge issue that I had was that Carly and Boyd’s robbery scheme never made sense to me.  Instead of just robbing Helen when she first stopped to pick up Carly, Boyd instead followed behind Helen and Carly while they drove down the icy road.  If you’re going to rob a random driver, it seems like it would make more sense to just do it and make a run for it instead of dragging it all out.

Another issue that I had was with the idea that anyone, in the year 2022, would actually pick up a hitchhiker, especially someone like Helen who had reason to not trust people in general.  I get that the weather was bad but still, it seems like a stretch that Helen would give Carly a ride, arrange for Carly to spend the night in a motel with Helen and her daughter, and then leave Carly — a total stranger — alone with the $500 that Helen could not afford to lose. 

You always have to be willing to suspend your disbelief when it comes to Lifetime films, that’s usually a part of the fun.  This film just asked you to suspend it even more than usual.

“Oh my God!  Just like me!” Moments

I am a fairly compassionate person and I do believe in helping those in need but there’s no way in Hell that I would ever pick up a hitchhiker, regardless of how bad the weather conditions are.  If I see a person stranded on the side of the road, I might feel bad for them but I’m still not going to let them get in my car.  I might encourage someone driving behind me to pick them up but I’ve seen too many horror films to make that mistake myself.  So, I couldn’t relate to that part of the film.

However, I also don’t drive well in cold weather.  When Helen ran her car off the icy road and nearly ran over Carly, I could totally relate to that.

Lessons Learned

Don’t pick up hitchhikers and by nice to truck drivers!

Retro Television Review: City Guys 3.1 “Greece Is The Word” and 3.2 “Mr. Baseball”

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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing City Guys, which ran on NBC from 1997 to 2001.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

Season 3 of City Guys begins with a new school year!  Interestingly enough, everyone was either a junior or a senior when this show began so you really do have to wonder why they’re all still going to Manny High.  I mean, L-Train was investigating colleges just a few episodes ago!

It’s almost as if TNBC just didn’t care….

Episode 3.1 “Greece Is The Word”

(Directed by Frank Bonner, originally aired on September 11th, 1999)

Oh, Christ.  Let’s get into this….

A new school year has begun!  Al and L-Train are looking forward to hazing freshmen.  Dawn has sworn that she is not going to spread herself too thin this semester.  Jamal shows up on campus and all of the students applaud.  Chris shows up and explains that he spent his summer in Greece and had a romance with a girl named Ariana.  Chris and Jamal do not do their stupid radio program so maybe that’s something that the show has finally abandoned.

Anyway, Ms. Nobel thinks that a school dance will be the perfect way to start the year.  Cassidy and Chris immediately volunteer to organize the dance.  It can be a 50s dance, they decide.  Everyone can wear leather jackets and poodle skirts and they can have a hula hoop contest!  Is there some reason why these schools can never have a normal dance?  

In order to research the 50s, Chris and Cassidy go to an arthouse theater that is showing …. you’ve already guessed, I’m sure …. GREASE!  Chris and Cassidy end up making out while watching the movie so they are now officially dating.  Except …. uh-oh, what’s Ariana doing in New York!?  Her father is in New York on business so Ariana decided to come with him so she could see Chris.  It turns out that she still thinks that she’s dating Chris.  It also turns out that Ariana delivers all of her lines in heavily accented broken English and the audience thinks it’s hilarious.

What’s dumb is that Cassidy already knows that Chris had a romance in Greece.  He told her about at the movie.  So, it’s not like she doesn’t know who Ariana is.  Cassidy got into a relationship with Chris fully aware that he had feelings for Ariana just a few weeks previously.  But, instead of telling Cassidy that Ariana is in town, Chris decided to lie to both of them.  He tells Ariana that he doesn’t have a New York girlfriend and he doesn’t tell Cassidy a thing.  Chris thinks that he can pull it off because Ariana is only going to be in town for a day but what if Ariana decides to stop by the dance before she leaves the country?

And yes, that’s exactly what happens.  Ariana gets upset and yells in broken English, which the audience finds hilarious.  Chris, who is dressed up like Elvis, apologizes to Cassidy.  Cassidy says that they’re going to have to take their relationship slowly.  So, I guess that means the writers still hadn’t decided whether they really wanted to commit to Cassidy and Chris as a couple.  We’ll see if this is another one of those storylines that gets abandoned or not.

This was the type of episode that drives me crazy, in that all of the conflict could have been avoided by people not being stupid.  It’s certainly not a good start to everyone’s second senior year at Manny High.  Hopefully, things will get better in our next episode….  

Episode 3.2 “Mr. Baseball”

(Directed by Frank Bonner, originally aired on September 11th, 1999)

After spending the previous two seasons as an unathletic goofball, Jamal is suddenly revealed to a star baseball player in this episode.  In fact, Jamal is so good that he has never been struck out and there’s also a scout coming to the game to check him out.  Of course, Jamal lets the fame go to his head.  And, of course, Jamal strikes out with the scout watching.  Jamal’s immediate reaction is to announce that he’s quitting baseball and then to get into a fight with a random Paul Rudd look-alike on the roof.  Ms. Nobel, however, gives him a good talking to and Jamal decides to keep playing.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Chris and Jamal do still have their radio show but, with Jamal devoting all of his time to baseball, L-Train takes over as Chris’s co-host.  While the whole radio station thing has never made much sense to me, I do have to give credit where credit is due.  In the role of L-Train, Steven Daniel was often this show’s secret weapon and he shows it here, managing to get laughs from even  the lamest of jokes.  L-Train often got the worst lines but Daniel always delivered them with such sincerity that it was impossible not to smile.

Meanwhile, Dawn is upset that the Manny High’s mascot is a hunter.  She wants to change the mascot to a big apple.  Everyone laughs at her until she mentions that the Big Apple will always be accompanied by cheerleaders.  Did the Manny High Hunter not have cheerleaders?

Anyway, this wasn’t a bad episode at all, even if it was all a bit predictable.  Wesley Jonathan was not the most convincing athlete that I’ve ever seen but he did do a good job of portraying both Jamal’s anger and his shame after he struck out.  Even Cassidy gets a decent storyline, one which sees her getting thrown out of the game for excessive trash talk.  You go, Cassidy!

Maybe season 3 won’t be so bad after all….

(We’ll find out next week!)

Film Review: Don’s Plum (dir by R.D. Robb)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Filmed in 1996 and given a very limited European release in 2001, Don’s Plum is a micro-budget indie film.  It’s about a group of young friends who meet up at a diner called Don’s Plum and spend the entire night talking to each other.  It’s filmed in grainy black-and-white and the majority of the dialogue is improvised.  The main characters continually let us know that they’re friends by referring to each other as “bro.”  There’s a lot of conversations but none of it adds up to much.  In many ways, it feels typical of the type of indie films that were inspired by the early work of Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith.  Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly good or interesting film.

That said, Don’s Plum has achieved a certainly level of infamy due to the fact that two of the talkative friends are played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire.  DiCaprio plays Derek, an arrogant, abrasive, and manipulative womanizer.  Tobey Magurie plays Ian, a weirdo with a spacey smile.  DiCaprio and Maguire were both up-and-coming stars when they filmed Don’s Plum.  DiCaprio, who had already received his first Oscar nomination and who had just finished shooting William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was a year away from Titanic.  Maguire was also a year away from his breakthrough role in The Ice Storm.  DiCaprio and Maguire not only starred in Don’s Plum but they’re also responsible for the film having never been commercially released in North America.

There’s a lot of conflicting stories about why DiCaprio and Maguire have both attempted to keep the film from being released.  DiCaprio’s story is that neither he nor Maguire were aware that they were shooting a feature film.  Instead, they thought they were making a short film and the only reason that they even showed up during the two nights of filming was because they were friends with the director, R.D. Robb.  The film’s producers, on the other hand, claimed that DiCaprio and Maguire always knew that they were making a feature film and that the reason they objected to the film’s release was because they were embarrassed by how much personal information they revealed while improving.  The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Of course, it’s also possible that DiCaprio and Maguire didn’t want the film to be seen because the film kind of sucks.  The dialogue is tedious, the film’s pace is painfully slow, the grainy black-and-white cinematography is dull, and the film’s soundtrack is so muddy that it’s difficult to understand what the characters are actually talking about.  Playing a total douchebag, DiCaprio does get to show off his natural charisma but Tobey Maguire appears to be dazed and confused in the role of Ian.  To be honest, both DiCaprio and Magurie are outacted by Kevin Connolly, who plays one of their friends and who would later go on to play the only vaguely likable character on Entourage.  (Connolly also directed the Brechtian gangster movie, Gotti.)  Connolly may not be as showy as DiCaprio or Maguire but his steady presence provides a nice contrast to Maguire’s fidgety mannerisms and DiCaprio’s need to always be the center of attention.

DiCaprio, Maguire, and Connolly are joined by Scott Bloom, playing the boring friend who will sleep with anyone.  Jenny Lewis gives a good performance in the role of DiCaprio’s quasi-girlfriend.  Amber Benson plays a hitchhiker who is abruptly chased out of the diner (and the movie) by an incredibly obnoxious DiCaprio.  At one point, Ethan Suplee wanders through the diner, playing a character who is identified in the credits as being “Big Bum.”  Everyone gets their chance to improv a monologue, often while staring at the bathroom mirror.  Eventually, DiCaprio’s character reveals a tragic secret from his past and it would have been an effective scene if not for the fact that it comes out of nowhere.

Oh, improv.  Improv has led so many directors and performers down the wrong path.  It’s an attractive idea, I suppose.  Get a camera.  Get some of your best friends to visit for the weekend.  Shoot a movie!  Who needs a script when you can just make it up as you go along.  Unfortunately, what’s often forgotten is that improv only works if you have a solid story idea or theme that you can continually return to if and when the improv itself starts to lose focus.  Curb Your Enthusiasm is a famous for being improved but all of the improvisations are based on a plot that’s discussed and set in stone ahead of time.  Don’s Plum feels more like one of those weird shows that George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh came up with for HBO in the mid-aughts.  (Remember that one with the acting class?  Frank Langella played a pompous acting teacher named Goddard Fulton and one of his students got a role on One Tree Hill.)  Don’s Plum meanders without any real direction, with none of the actors really trying to challenge each other.  An improved film like this needs a force of chaos, like Rip Torn provided for Norman Mailer’s Maidstone.  Instead, this film can only offer DiCaprio caricaturing his pre-Aviator persona as a hard-partying and often abrasive movie star.  (If nothing else, this film shows just how much DiCaprio has benefitted, as both an actor and a public personality, from collaborating with Scorsese.)

Don’s Plum is one of those films that is only well-known because of how difficult it is to see it.  But now you can see it on YouTube!  You can watch it and then you can ask yourself what all the controversy was about.  At this point, I think both DiCaprio and Maguire have proven themselves as actors and allowing for Don’s Plum to get, at the very least, a proper video release wouldn’t hurt the reputation of either one of them.  If anything, the best way to get people to forget about Don’s Plum would be to give them to the chance to try to sit through it.  There’s nothing about this film that sticks with the viewer, beyond the fact that neither Leo nor Tobey want anyone to watch it.

Retro Television Reviews: The Love Boat 1.13 “Too Hot to Handle / Family Reunion / Cinderella Story”

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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986!  The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

It’s Love!

Episode 1.13 “Too Hot to Handle / Family Reunion / Cinderella Story”

(Dir by James Sheldon and Richard Kinon, originally aired on January 7th, 1978)

It’s time for another cruise with three separate stories!

Newlyweds George (John Rubinstein) and Sally Allison (a youngish Kathy Bates) board the Pacific Princess, hoping to enjoy the ideal honeymoon.  Instead, it turns out to be one disaster after another.  Sally gets sunburned.  George gets poison ivy.  Having gotten off the boat in Mexico, Sally returns to discover a totally different couple staying in what she thinks is her cabin.  Uh-oh.  It turns out that Sally accidentally got on the Sun Princess and the Pacific Princess has already set sail without her!  This was a pretty simple storyline and, if anything, it mostly seemed to exist so that the show’s writers could see how many bad things that they could do to one perfectly innocent couple.  But John Rubinstein and Katy Bates are so likable as George and Sally that the story works.  You can’t help but hope the cruise gets a little better for them.  Kathy Bates was 29 when she appeared on The Love Boat and there’s nothing about her performance that would necessarily make you say, “Hey, that’s a future Oscar winner!”  But still, both she and John Rubinstein do a good job with the material that they’ve been given.

Meanwhile, Tommy (Bob Crane) is a middle-aged man who has been hired to work as a steward on the ship.  Captain Stubing takes an immediate dislike to the irresponsible, womanizing Tommy.  When he discovers that Tommy has been drinking on the job, Stubing comes close to firing him.  However, Tommy confesses that he’s drinking because he’s just discovered that the daughter who he abandoned years ago is on the cruise.  Wendy (Dori Brenner) has always believed that her father died in a shipwreck and she hopes that Stubing might know something about the wreck.  Seeking to help out Tommy, Stubing tells a lot of lies about Wendy’s “deceased” father but Tommy finally breaks down and confesses the truth.  At first, Wendy rejects Tommy but, with the help of her understanding husband (Robert Hays), she eventually forgives her father.

This storyline hinges on a huge coincidence.  What are the chances that Tommy and Wendy would just happen to end up on the same cruise together and that Tommy would be assigned to serve as Wendy’s steward?  On top of that, what are the chances that Wendy would just happen to have a picture of her mother sitting out where Tommy could see it?  It’s all fairly predictable but, if you’ve seen Auto Focus, it’s interesting to watch Crane’s performance here.  This episode aired just a few months before Crane was murdered in Arizona and it’s easy to see the charismatic but irresponsible and self-destructive Tommy as being a reflection of who Bob Crane himself had reportedly become at the time of his death.  Tommy is a character who lives with a lot of emotional pain and regret and Crane is so surprisingly effective in the role that it’s hard not to wonder if perhaps, on some level, he related to Tommy.

Finally, in the show’s final storyline, Bill Edwards (Bruce Solomon) is a supermarket manager who has booked a cruise with his wife, Doreen (Judy Luciano).  When a wealthy advertising exec cancels his trip, Julie and Gopher decide to let Bill and Doreen stay in the man’s luxury cabin.  This, of course, leads to Stubing mistaking Bill for the ad exec!  Suddenly, Bill and Doreen are sitting at the captain’s table and competing for an advertising contract!  Eventually, the truth comes out but business tycoon Greg Beatty (David White) is so impressed with Bill’s ideas that he arranges for Bill to get a job with an actual advertising company.  Mad Men it’s not!  However, it’s still a charming little story, largely due to the performances of Bruce Solomon and Judy Luciano.

If last week’s episode was a “lesser Love Boat,” this week’s episode show just how much fun The Love Boat could be.  Yes, all of the stories are fairly predictable but the guest stars all perform their roles with a lot of energy.  Bob Crane brings a poignant sense of regret to his performance as Tommy while Bruce Solomon and Judy Luciano are exactly the type of attrative couple that you would want to meet on a cruise.  And, as I said already, it’s impossible not to like John Rubinstein and Kathy Bates as the newlyweds who just can’t catch a break.  The regular cast is used sparingly but effectively in this episode.  Fred Grandy gets a nice scene where he has to explain to John Rubinstein that Kathy Bates got on the wrong boat.  Bernie Kopell plays Doc Bricker as being an agent of chaos.  It’s a fun episode and what more can you ask for?

Music Video of the Day: The Last Goodbye by David Cook (2011, dir by Nigel Dick)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Don’t worry, everyone, David Cook’s alright!

Incidentally, I was one of the few members of my family to vote for David Cook over David Archuleta.  I worried that Archuleta was just too young to be burdened with the title of American Idol and I stand by that decision.

Enjoy!

Retro Television Reviews: Fantasy Island 1.12 “King For A Day/Instant Family”

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 1986.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, Mr. Roarke proves himself to be the expert at granting fantasies and teaching lessons.  One group of visitors deals with international diplomacy.  The other group deals with taking care of children.  It’s time for …. FANTASY ISLAND!

Episode 1.12 “King For A Day/Instant Family”

(Directed by George McGowan, originally aired on May 6th, 1978)

There are a lot fantasies in this episode.

For instance, Ernie Miller (David Doyle) is a plumber who wants to be treated like a king.  When he arrives on Fantasy Island, he is informed that he is now the King of Carpathia and that he is married to Queen Auroroa (Diane Baker).  What Ernie doesn’t realize is that there actually is a country called Carpathia and that he just happens to look exactly like the nation’s recently deceased king.  It turns out that Aurora is not just an actress hired to pretend to be the Queen.  Instead, she actually is the Queen!  Aurora had a fantasy of her own.  She wanted the king to come back to life so that he could prevent the country by being taken over by the sinister Ambassador Soro (Theodore Bikel).

Roarke combines their two fantasies into one.  Ernie gets to become king, on the condition that he abandon his former life and identity.  (That’s something that Ernie has no problem with and, quite frankly, actor David Doyle wasn’t exactly the most convincing plumber that I’ve ever seen.  Some actors were just meant to play men who wore suits to the office and David Doyle was one of them.)  Aurora gets her husband back, except of course it’s not actually her husband.  It’s just someone who looks like him.  But Aurora is cool with that.  This is kind of a weird fantasy.  One has to wonder what would have happened in Ambassador Soro had announced that his fantasy was  to conquer Carpathia.  WHAT THEN, MR. ROARKE!?

As for the other fantasy, it involves a woman named Gail Grayson (Melinda Naud), whose fantasy is to get a job working for the world’s number one expert on how to raise children.  Gail, it turns out, has written a thesis about how housewives are unnecessary and how being a mother isn’t as difficult as everyone says.  (It’s hard for me to imagine any woman actually writing something like that but whatever.  We’ll just go with it.)  Gail gets to put her thesis to the test when she discovers that she’s been hired to act as a babysitter!  It turns out that the world’s number one expert on raising children has several unruly children of his own.

Accompanying Gail is her mother, Mildred Grayson (Jane Wyatt).  It turns out that Mildred didn’t appreciate Gail’s thesis (and really, who can blame her?) and her fantasy is for Gail to discover firsthand just how difficult it is to take care of a house and several bratty children.  Again, Mr. Roarke decided to combine everyone’s fantasies.  Gail gets to work for her mentor and Jane gets to watch as Gail is humiliated by the children.  Eventually, Mildred comes to feel guilty about wishing so much trouble on her own daughter but everything work out in the end.  Gail gets her dream job and Mildred gets to say, “I told you so.”

Yay!  Everything works out for everyone!

This is one of those episodes where you really have to wonder if Mr. Roarke actually had a plan or if he was just making it all up as he was going along.  If Ernie hadn’t agreed to become the king in real life, Carpathia would have been conquered by the communists.  If Gail hadn’t realized her thesis was wrong, one of the children could have died on the island.  Sometimes, I just think that there are better ways to teach people a lesson than taking them to a mystical island that is ruled in a somewhat arbitrary manner by a friendly but occasionally condescending host.  That said, I would totally go to Fantasy Island if it did exist.  I imagine the same was true of the majority of the people who watched the show when it first aired.

After all, who doesn’t have a fantasy or two?

Retro Television Review: Hang Time 2.11 “Superman Brodis” and 2.12 “Green-Eyed Julie”

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 Mondays, I will be reviewing Hang Time, which ran on NBC from 1995 to 2000.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

Ugh.  I can’t get the theme song out of my head.

Episode 2.11 “Superman Brodis”

(Directed by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on November 16th, 1996)

Teddy’s long-absent father retires from playing professional basketball and moves to Indiana so that he can be close to his son.  Because “Superman” Brodis has spent the past 15 years playing across the country and in Europe, he’s been absent from most of Teddy’s life.  At first, Teddy can’t stop talking about how excited he is to finally have his father in his life.  However, Teddy’s father turns out to be kind of a jerk, constantly telling Teddy that he needs to lose weight and work harder.  Teddy says that it doesn’t bother him but, as usual, Josh decides that it is his place to tell everyone else how to live their lives.  Josh tells Teddy that he should be angry and soon, Teddy is angrily telling his father to stay out of his life.

(And don’t get me wrong.  Teddy’s father deserved to be told off but it still really wasn’t Josh place to get involved.)

Meanwhile, because this season’s writers were incapable of writing the character as being anything other than self-centered and overdramatic, Julie will not shut up about having a toothache.  Eventually, things work out on both fronts.  Teddy and his father agree to try to build a relationship.  Julie goes to Amy’s dentist and, after discovering that she will need a root canal, she blames Amy.  Actually, Julie, maybe you should blame yourself for not brushing and flossing.  Going to the dentist may be unpleasant but it’s still preferable to dying of blood poisoning.

This episode continues this season’s theme of Josh and Julie being the best players and the worst human beings on the team.  While Julie whines and moans about having a toothache, Josh tells Teddy how he should feel about his father.  That said, this episode also shows why Anthony Anderson went on to have a successful career after leaving Hang Time.  He gives a touching and sincere performance here, especially in the episode’s final scene.  There’s a lot of emotional honesty to be found in Anderson’s performance, which isn’t necessarily something that you would expect from an episode of Hang Time.

Episode 2.12 “Green-Eyed Julie”

(Directed by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on November 23rd, 1996)

Julie upset when she discovers that there’s a new waitress named Nicole at her favorite after-school hangout and, for once, it’s kind of understandable.  Not only Nicole played by a pre-American Pie Shannon Elizabeth but Nicole obviously has a crush on Josh!  Josh’s efforts to set Nicole up with Danny fail, largely because Danny is kind of a loser.

Eventually, it’s revealed that Chris Atwater (who was the first season’s version of Josh) cheated on Julie in between the first and second seasons and that’s why they broke up.  It’s also why Julie is incapable of trusting anyone.  It doesn’t help, of course, that Julie happens to see Nicole kissing Josh.  Later, when she finds out that it was Nicole who made the first move and that Josh did not reciprocate, she tells Josh that he’s way better than Chris.  I have to wonder how David Hanson, the actor who played Chris during season 1, felt about this episode.

Meanwhile, the school is throwing a disco party!  Everyone dresses like they’re from the 70s and breaks out some disco moves.  That was cute, silly, and fun and provided a nice (and needed) relief from all of the Julie drama.

Next week, season 2 ends!  Will Deering made it into the playoffs?  We’ll find out in December.

Music Video of the Day: Don’t Say You Love Me by M2M (1999, dir by Nigel Dick)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Why exactly this chirpy tribute to abstinence was included on the Pokemon soundtrack is anyone’s guess.  Apparently, M2M had never heard of Pokemon until they were told that their song was going to play during the film’s end credits.  They were also not happy to learn when they were told that they would have to change some of the lyrics to make the song Pokemon-appropriate.  “You start kissing me, what’s that about?” was changed to “You said you love me, what’s that about?”

I’m not a huge fan of this song, as you may have picked up on.  But I do think the video is kind of cute.  Maybe it’s just because I wish there was a drive-in near my house.  Who knows?

Enjoy!

Retro Television Reviews: Sarah T — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (dir by Richard Donner)

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 Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1975’s Sarah T — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic.  It  can be viewed on YouTube!

In 1975, two years after shocking audiences in and receiving an Oscar nomination for The Exorcist, Linda Blair played Sarah Travis.  Sarah is fourteen years old.  She has a high IQ.  She lives in a nice suburban home.  She has an older sister named Nancy (Laurette Sprang) and she makes a good deal of money working as a babysitter.  Sarah lives with her mother, Jean (Verna Bloom) and her stepfather, Matt (William Daniels).  She misses her father, a chronically unemployed artist named Jerry (Larry Hagman).  Jerry is the type who will complain about how no one is willing to give him a chance while he’s day drinking early in the morning.  Jerry’s an alcoholic.  That’s one of the many things that led to Jean divorcing him.  (Matt is fairly regular drinker as well but it soon becomes apparent that he can handle his liquor in a way that Jerry cannot.  Matt has a glass of Scotch after work.  Jerry has his daughter by a slushy so he can pour his beer in the cup.)  Jean is always quick to keep Sarah from drinking.  When someone offers her a drink at a party, Jean replies that Sarah only drinks ginger ale.

Of course, the name of this movie is Sarah T. — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic so we already know that Jean is incorrect about that.  When we first meet Sarah, she is fourteen and she’s been regularly drinking for two years.  She’s even worked out a system where she gets liquor delivered to the house and then tells the deliveryman that her mother is in the shower but she left the money for the booze on the dining room table.  Like many alcoholics, Sarah has become very good at tricking people and hiding her addiction.  Of course, Sarah doesn’t think that she’s an alcoholic but …. well, again, just check out the title of the film.

When Sarah goes to a party with Ken (Mark Hamill, two years before Star Wars), the handsome captain of the school’s swim team, she ends up having too much to drink.  Nice guy Ken not only takes her home but also takes the blame, telling Jean and Matt that he was the one who gave Sarah the alcohol.  Jean, convinced that this is the first time that Sarah has ever gotten drunk, forbids her from spending any more time with Ken.  In the morning, Jean comments that Sarah will probably have a terrible hangover and maybe that’s punishment enough.  The joke, of course, is on Jean.  Sarah doesn’t even get hangovers anymore.

Soon, Sarah’s grades start to slip and she starts to skip class so that she can drink.  Still blaming Ken for all of Sarah’s problems, Jean finally takes Sarah to a psychologist, Dr. Kitteridge (Michael Lerner).  Dr. Kitteridge announces that Sarah is an alcoholic and recommends that she start attending A.A. meetings.  Sarah does go to one meeting, in which she meets a surprisingly cheerful 12 year-old alcoholic.  However, Sarah still has a way to go and so does the movie.  I mean, we haven’t even gotten to the scene where Sarah begs a group of older boys to give her the bottle of wine that they’re clumsily tossing in the air.  By the end of the film, she’s even managed to hurt poor, loyal Ken.

Myself, I hardly ever drink.  Some of that is because, like Sarah, I’m the daughter of an alcoholic and a child of divorce and I’ve seen firsthand how difficult it can be to live with an addiction.  (My Dad has been sober for five years and I am so proud of him!)  Of course, another reason why I hardly ever drink is because my tolerance for alcohol is amazingly low.  I get drunk off one sip of beer.  Long ago, I realized my life would be a lot easier and simpler if I just didn’t drink and so I don’t.  Watching the film, I wondered if I was watching what my life would have been like if I had gone the opposite route.  Would I have ended up like Sarah T?

Probably not.  Sarah T is one of those films that was obviously made with the best of intentions but it just feels inauthentic.  A lot of that is due to the performance of Linda Blair, who often seems to be overacting and trying too hard to give an “Emmy-worthy” performance.  There’s not much depth to Blair’s performance and, as a result, the viewer never really buys into the story.  At her worse, Blair brings to mind Jessie Spano shouting, “I’m so excited!” during that episode of Saved By The Bell.  (Blair was far better served by B-movies like Savage Streets, in which she got to kick ass as a vigilante, than by films like this.)  As well, the film’s portrayal of A.A. is so cheerful, upbeat, and positive that it almost felt like a Disney version of Intervention.  Who are all of these happy addicts? I wondered as I watched the scene play out.

Because I’ve been a bit critical of his acting abilities in the past, I do feel the need to point out that Mark Hamill gives the best performance in this film.  He plays Ken as being a genuinely decent human being and it’s hard not to sympathize with him as he gets in over his head trying to deal with Sarah.  If Blair plays every emotion on the surface, Hamill suggests that there’s a lot going on with Ken.  Deep down, he knows that he can’t help Sarah but he still feels like he has to try.  Though Blair may be the star of the film, it’s Hamill who makes the biggest impression.

As a final note, this film was directed by Richard Donner, who is best-known for directing The Omen, Superman and Lethal Weapon.  This was Donner’s final made-for-TV film before he moved into features.  There’s nothing particularly special about Donner’s direction of Sarah T.  If anything, the film’s pacing feels a bit off.  Fortunately, just as Linda Blair would get to prove herself as one of the queens of exploitation cinema and Mark Hamill would go on to achieve immortality as Luke Skywalker, Donner would get plenty of opportunities to show himself to be one of Hollywood’s premier, big budget maestros.

As for Sarah T., I would recommend watching it on a double bill with Go Ask Alice.

Music Video of the Day: Smile by Katy Perry (2020, dir by Matthew Cullen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

We could all take a lesson from Katy Perry.  Get out there and enjoy life, despite all of the people who are determined to keep others from doing just that.  We live in a world where some people are addicted to spreading misery and, fortunately, Katy Perry is not one of those people.

Enjoy!