Tag Archives: review

Book Review: Godzilla: The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters by Graham Skipper

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Do you like Godzilla?

You better!  Seriously, for over 60 years, Godzilla has been the rightful king of the monsters and not even a few less-than-perfect films have been able to knock him off of his throne.  He started out as a symbol of the nuclear age, a prehistoric monster brought back to life by man’s arrogance and war-like nature.  He eventually became mankind’s protector but then deciding that he no longer cared for mankind. And then, like many international stars, he ended up making movies for the American studios.  It’s an epic story and it’s hard not to like the big monster at the center of it.  If, for some reason, you don’t like Godzilla, maybe Graham Skipper’s new book, Godzilla: The Official Guide To The King of the Monsters, will change your mind.

Godzilla: The Official Guide To The King of the Monsters is exactly what the title says.  It’s a guide to all of Godzilla’s adventures, from his first appearance in the 50s all the way through his animated films and the current American version.  (Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1998 version of Godzilla is only afforded a few paragraphs.)  Helpfully, Skipper divides his overview into ears, so you can see how Godzilla changed as he moved from studio to studio.  Skipper also takes a look at Godzilla’s existence outside of the movies, as a comic book mainstay and an occasional television guest star.  The book is written with a lot of obvious affection for Godzilla in all of his incarnations and reading it will remind you of why Godzilla’s films — yes, even Son of Godzilla — are so much fun to begin with.  Skipper includes a lot of trivia, some of which was new to even me.  Such as, did you know that Luigi Cozzi re-edited and colorized the original 1954 Gojira for a 1970s release in Italy?

The book is also heavily-illustrated, featuring a lot of shots from the films and behind-the-scenes pictures of Godzilla and all of his colleagues.  As I read the book, it occurred to me that, as goofy as Jet Jaguar was, it’s still nice that Godzilla had a friend.  As well, as I looked at the pictures, it occurred to me that, even in the later films when Godzilla had been transformed from a truly fearsome symbol of the nuclear age to a somewhat goofy rubber monster, there was still an undeniable majesty to him as a creation.  Even at his worse, Godzilla still looks like a king.

I picked up a copy of this book on the day after Christmas and I’m glad I did.  Not only does it celebrate Godzilla but it also provides me with a guide because, over the next 12 months, I hope to watch every Godzilla film that’s ever been made.  (I’ve seen the majority but, as this book reminded me, there’s still a few that I missed.)  For the record, I still think that Godzilla vs Destoroyah is the best of the Godzilla films but who knows?  Maybe my mind will have been changed by December.

Humanity has survived a lot over the past few years and I’m happy to say that Godzilla has survived with us.  Graham Skipper’s Godzilla helps to explain why.

Retro Television Reviews: Making of a Male Model (dir by Irving J. Moore)

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 1983’s Making of a Male Model!  It  can be viewed on YouTube!

While visiting the set of an outdoor shoot in Nevada, high-powered modeling agent Kay Dillon (Joan Collins) spots a ranch hand named Tyler Burnett (Jon-Erik Hexum).  Tyler is tall, athletic, handsome, and polite.  When Kay asks Tyler if he’s ever modeled, Tyler scoffs at the idea.  Him?  A model?  He’d rather stay in Nevada and work on the ranch.  However, when the girl he likes turns him down because he doesn’t have any money, Tyler reconsiders Kay’s offer.

Before you can say Midnight Cowboy, Tyler is walking around Times Square while dressed like a cowboy.  At first, Tyler is resistant to Kay’s suggestions on how to improve his look.  He doesn’t want anyone messing with her ear or trimming his eyebrows.  But, after a humiliating meeting with a photographer who tells him that he just doesn’t have the right look, Tyler agrees to let Kay turn him into a male model.  Not only does she fix his look but she also takes him to bed.

Soon, Tyler is one of the country’s most well-known faces.  He branches out into commercials, using his sex appeal to sell products to the men who want be him.  And yet, Tyler still feels lost.  He’s not sure if Kay actually loves him or if she’s just using him.  Meanwhile, his roommate, Chuck Lanyard (Jeff Conaway), is a former model who is now hooked on drugs and who constantly warns Tyler that all models are washed up by the time they hit 35.  Tyler becomes disillusioned with his life as a model but is he capable of giving up the fame and the money and returning to Nevada?  Or is he destined to follow in Chuck’s footsteps and head down a path of drugs and self-destruction?

Welcome to the world of decadence, 80s style!  Making of a Male Model is one of those films where the synthesizer-heavy soundtrack plays through every scene and the only thing more dramatic than the line readings is the hair and the shoulder pads.  It’s all a bit silly, none more so that when Tyler and Kay go to a costume party.  Kay dressed up like Cleopatra.  Tyler wears a cowboy hat.  One random extra wears an oversized headpiece with two gigantic eyes painted at either end.  It’s not so much Studio 54 as much as it’s Studio 54 as imagined by someone who has heard of the place but never visited.  It’s decadent but it’s never quite authentic.  The film captures the joy of not only looking good but also knowing that you look good but it never captures the tedium that can go into being on a shoot.  It’s a film about the reality of modeling that never bothers to get that real but so what?  You don’t watch a film called Making of a Male Model because you’re looking for reality.

Joan Collins appears to be having fun in the role of Kay.  John-Erik Hexum, who was a real-life model, gives a rather stiff performance in the role of Tyler.  He looks good but he struggles whenever he has to show any emotion beyond being slightly annoyed.  If anyone really stands out in the cast, it’s Jeff Conaway.  Conaway brings a bit of genuine sadness to his role but you’ll guess what’s going to happen to Chuck long before it actually does.  Finally, Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the Congressman) plays one of Kay’s business rivals.  He doesn’t get to do much but it’s always nice to see Kevin McCarthy playing yet another sophisticated but ruthless businessman.

In the end, the film doesn’t have anything surprising to say about the world of modeling and Tyler is never that interesting of a protagonist.  However, there’s just enough 80s melodrama and 80s fashion to keep things watchable.

Catching Up With The Films of 2022: White Elephant (dir by Jesse V. Johnson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

White Elephant is not that bad.  In fact, for a B-action movie it’s actually pretty good.  If nothing else, it featured one of Michael Rooker’s best performances.

It’s important to start out this review by making that clear because I think a lot of people are going to be tempted to judge this film based solely on the fact that this was one of the last films that Bruce Willis made before his family announced that he would be retiring from acting due to health reasons.  When the big story was published in the L.A. Times about Willis’s recent struggles and how those struggles led to him accepting countless roles in straight-to-video fare like American Siege, several people who worked on White Elephant were quoted, with many saying that Willis always did his best but that he was definitely not the Willis that they all remembered.  The film’s director, action maestro Jesse V. Johnson, publicly stated that he would not make another film with Willis because “the arrangement felt wrong” and that Willis deserved a better end to his career.

And it must be said that Bruce is obviously not himself in White Elephant.  As with many of his recent films, Bruce is cast as a villain in this piece.  He’s a crime lord named Arnold and he spends the majority of his time taking meetings and giving order to his underlings.  Eventually, he does pick up a gun and fire it but there’s very little of the cocky attitude and swaggering charisma that made Bruce Willis into a superstar.  He still has the physical presence to play a tough guy.  Bruce Willis still looks intimidating and the film uses him sparingly, never allowing us to spend too much time focusing on how different he seems from the Bruce Willis who starred in Die Hard and Pulp Fiction.  One never gets the feeling that Bruce is being deliberately exploited in White Elephant, that alone sets it above some of the other recent films that have featured Willis.  But, at the same time, Arnold is a fairly generic bad guy.

Fortunately, the majority of the film follows Michael Rooker in the role of a far more interesting criminal.  Rooker plays Gabe Tancredi, a former Marine turned hitman.  He’s about as ruthless as they come but he still has enough of a code of ethics that he realizes that he can’t kill a police officer named Vanessa (Olga Kurylenko), no matter how much Arnold wants her dead.  Ordered to kill her, Gabe instead protects her, which leads to Arnold sending all of his men after them.  It leads to several shootouts and explosions as Gabe puts his life at risk to finally do the right thing.

It’s a simple story but it’s told well.  Jesse V. Johnson started out as a stuntman and he clearly knows his way around an action scene and the final shootout in genuinely exciting.  The film is also helped by Michael Rooker, who brings a good deal of unexpected depth to the role of Gabe.  Even though Rooker obviously knew that White Elephant was a B-movie, he still refuses to phone in a single minute of his performance and, instead, he turns Gabe into a surprisingly complex killer.  Gabe’s relationships with his agent Glen (John Malkovich), his protegee Carlos (Vadhir Debrez), and Vanessa are all genuinely interesting.  I especially liked the early scenes between Rooker and Debrez, in which the two actors wonderfully play off of each other and we get the feeling Carlos is almost like a son to Gabe.  Of course, being genre savvy, we know that Carlos is eventually going to be assigned to take Gabe down but, because their friendship seemed so real, we find ourselves dreading that confrontation.  White Elephant is a B-movie but, much like last year’s Corrective Measures and Gasoline Alley, it’s a B-movie with a heart.

Music Video of the Day: Why by Herve Villechaize (1981, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For the past few months, I’ve been watching and reviewing episodes of the original Fantasy Island.  One of the keys to that show’s success was the enigmatic partnership between Mr. Roarke and Tattoo.  Even though it’s usually pretty easy to see that Ricardo Montalban and Herve Villechaize did not like each other, their exchanges are usually the highlight of any episode.  Of course, after years of high ratings and television fame, Villechaize was fired from Fantasy Island when he demanded more money.  Without Tattoo, the series was canceled after one season so …. well, they probably should have just given him the money.

Anyway, one thing that I recently discovered about Herve Villechaize is that he had a musical career!  In 1981, at the height of the show’s popularity, he released a song called “Why?”  It’s all about trying to understand why people have to fight and why people cannot just accept the wisdom of peace-loving children.  The video at the top of this post was recorded for a TV show on which Villechaize appeared.  Unfortunately, I don’t know which show it was for and the video upload itself is not the best quality.  Apparently, the split-screen visual effect that gives us two Herves singing at once was a part of the show.

That said, this is as close as we have to an actual music video for Herve Villechaize’s Why? so I’m sharing with it.  What better way to start a new year than with a plea for peace?

Why do we always have to fight?

Enjoy!

Lisa Marie’s Week In Television: 12/25/22 — 12/31/22

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to my final week in television for 2022!  I spent most of the past week with my sister Megan and her family.  We probably watched the news more than anything else, what with that guys getting arrested for committing those murders in Idaho.  Here’s some thoughts on the non-news programming that we watched.

1923 (Paramount+)

On Tuesday, my sister Megan and I watched the first two episodes of the latest Yellowstone prequel.  It wasn’t bad, though I do have to admit that I was only half-paying attention to it.  Harrison Ford is ideally cast as an aging western icon.

California Dreams (YouTube)

Megan and I love this show and we watched several episodes this week.  The reviews will be available every Saturday!

The Circle (Netflix)

I swore to myself that I was not going to allow myself to get sucked into another stupid reality show but then, on Wednesday, I decided to just take a quick peek to discover what The Circle was like.  I wasn’t planning on watching much of the latest season.  I just wanted to get maybe a 5-minute sample.

Of course, as soon as the show started, I discovered the Brett was on the show.  Brett was a part of Big Brother 20.  He was a total jerk but he was honest about it and he was frequently one of the funniest people in the house.  He was the type of bad boy that I’ve always had a weakness for.  As well, his betrayal of Rockstar (yes, that was the name she used in the House) led to the classic moment of Rockstar yelling about how she had been betrayed on “my daughter’s birthday!”

Anyway, Brett was one of the first people voted out of the Circle but, fortunately, he and Xanthi are still secretly playing the game.  Brett and Xanthi are a cute couple and if we don’t see some sort of evidence of them hooking up by the end of next week, I can only assume that the show is hiding it from us.

Also, one of the contestants is a British comedian named Tom.  He mentioned that he lived in the Tower of the London.  “I’ve never heard of the Tower of London,” the other contestants said while I screamed internally.  Anyway, Tom’s adorable.

Despite my best efforts, I’ve been sucked into The Circle.

Dragnet (YouTube)

I watched two episodes of this 1960s cop show on Thursday.  One featured Joe Friday on a talk show, where he debated a snide hippy and a pompous professor.  The other featured Friday taking a class at night school and justifying his decision to arrest one of his classmates for possessing marijuana.  Welcome to the 60s!

The Love Boat (Paramount+)

I wrote about the Love Boat here!  Megan and I watched several episodes this week.  We both agreed that the ship looked nice.

Night Flight (Night Flight Plus)

Late Saturday night, I experienced New Year’s 1983!  It was a bit trippy.

Upstart Crow (Sunday Night, PBS)

On Sunday night, my sister Megan and I watched all of the Upstart Crow Christmas specials.  I had already seen them but I enjoyed introducing them to my sister.

Retro Television Reviews: California Dreams 3.4 “Blind Dates” and 3.5 “Yoko, Oh No!”

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 Saturdays, I will be reviewing California Dreams, which ran on NBC from 1992 to 1996.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week is all about romance and total defiance!

Episode 3.4 “Blind Dates”

(Dir by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on October 1st, 1994)

Oh my God, Sly has been talking to a girl on a brand new thing called the Internet!  When he meets Allison (played, quite well, by Nikki Cox), he is shocked to discover that she’s blind.  Allison brings out Sly’s rarely seen good side and Allison appreciates that Sly is too much of a jackass to treat her differently just because she’s blind.  At first, Sly is worried about taking her to the school dance but then he takes her anyway.  Yay!

Meanwhile, Tony and Sam also get on the internet and both of them think that they’ve found their soul mate.  But it turns out that they’ve just been talking to each other.  By the end of this episode, Tony and Sam have begun their relationship.  This is a huge moment in the history of California Dreams because, in the end, Tony and Sam had most (and maybe the only) stable relationship on the show.

Unfortuntely, as we’ll see next week, things wouldn’t last as long for Sly and Allison, which is a shame because Nikki Cox and Michael Cade had tons of onscreen chemistry and they were a sweet couple.  Oh well.  Such is life.

Episode 3.5 “Yoko, oh no!”

(Dir by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on October 8th, 1994)

It’s time for another Battle of the Bands!

In this episode, we meets the Dreams’s rival band, Total Defiance.  We’re supposed to dislike Total Defiance because they’re constantly making fun of the Dreams and their manager is an obnoxious girl named Rosie who has a crush on Mark Winkle.  The thing is that Total Defiance, which appears to be a rap/heavy metal hybrid band, actually does appear to be a lot better than the Dreams.  From what little of what we’re allowed to hear from them, their sound is a bit more interesting than the California Dreams.  I mean, let’s be honest.  The California Dreams did have a few good songs but, for the most part, Rosie has a point when she says that the Dreams are a generic pop band.  Jake may wear a leather jacket and talk about being a rebel but, even after Matt Garrison leaves the band that he founded, the Dreams still specialized in coming up with mellow, feel-good tunes that really could have been sung by anyone.  Total Defiance was all about taking risks.  They were the true rebels!

They were also all about giving the Dreams a hard time.  When Rosie dismisses Lorena as just being a “groupie,” Lorena tries to prove them wrong by auditioning for the band.  The good thing is that she gets to wear a really pretty dress when she auditions.  The bad thing is that she can’t carry a tune.  (See?  There’s something else that Lorena and I have in common.)  Blinded by love, Jake insists that Lorena be allowed to sing with the band.  However, when Lorena hears the rest of the band talking about how bad her voice is, she fakes laryngitis so they’ll perform without her.  As a result, the Dreams not only win the Battle of the Bands but everyone also learns an important lesson about being honest.  Yay!

I liked this episode because it was a Jake and Lorena episode and those are always my favorites.  They were a cute couple.  That said, Total Defiance should have won the Battle of the Bands and if Tony Manero had been there, he would have handed the trophy to them at the end of the contest.

 

Retro Television Review: One World 3.9 “Jane Cops Out” and 3.10 “Marci’s In Hot Salsa”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Fridays, I will be reviewing One World, which ran on NBC from 1998 to 2001.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

The Cast of One World

Wow, I’m nearly done with this show!  Yay!

Episode 3.9 “Jane Cops Out”

(directed by Mary Lou Belli, originally aired on November 18th, 2000)

Ugh.  It’s a Jane episode.  I actually liked Jane during the first season and for the first half of the second season but she’s been pretty much unbearable during the third season.  There’s a difference between being edgy and just being annoyingly rude.  Of course, if I was living with the Blakes, I’d probably develop a bit of a bad attitude as well.

Anyway, in this episode, Jane gets a job at a SCUBA gear store and starts dating the owner’s grandson, a rookie cop!  Jane is copping out …. oh wait, that’s what the title says!  Jane freaks out over dating a cop because she’s a former criminal.  The cop freaks out because all of his coworkers have arrested Jane in the past.  Jane being a criminal is a bit like Neal being a genius or Ben being an alcoholic, in that it’s one of those plot points that’s never really been that convincing but which the show tends to randomly bring up.

In the B-plot, Dave’s snoring is keeping everyone awake.  Eh, who cares?

Episode 3.10 “Marci’s In Hot Salsa”

(directed by Mary Lou Belli, originally aired on November 25th, 2000)

I’ve often stated that Sui is my favorite character on this show.  Marci is a close second.  Unfortunately, Marci rarely seems to get to do much.  With this episode, she finally get to be at the center of the main plot but it turns out that the plot is pretty much lifted from the “Dancing Isn’t Everything” episode of California Dreams.

Feeling that she doesn’t have any one thing that she’s good at and worried that she’s destined to be the average member of the family, Marci decides to make dancing her thing.  She enters a salsa contest that is, of course, being held at the Warehouse, Miami’s “hottest under 21 club.”  I would think this would be a problem, as Marci is also the assistant manager of the Warehouse and usually, employees are not allowed to enter contests that their employer is sponsoring.  But no matter!  By this point, The Warehouse pretty much only exists to cater to the whims of the Blakes.

Marci enters the contest with one guy but discovers that there’s another guy who is a far better dancer.  Will Marci stay loyal to her original partner or dump him for the better dancer?  You can probably guess exactly what happens in this episode but I still liked it because it featured a lot of dancing and the audience applauded when Marci said she was looking forward to death of Fidel Castro.

In the B-plot, Neal is grounded when he comes home late.  (Was he grounded for helping Jane cheat on the SATs?  Anyone remember that?)  But he sneaks out and goes to a baseball game while Dave and Jane go to a modern art show.  Dave says he doesn’t understand modern art.  That’s because Dave’s a moron.

Just three more episodes to go!

What Lisa Marie and Megan Watched Last Night #225: Mommy’s Little Star (dir by Curtis Crawford)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, my sister Megan and I watched Mommy’s Little Star on the Lifetime Movie Network!

Why Were We Watching It?

For the past week and a half, I’ve been visiting my sister Megan and her family.  This is kind of our holiday tradition.  Everyone gets together for Christmas and then, from Christmas Day to New Year, Megan and I catch up and bond and talk about how we’re feeling about the past year and what we’re hoping to get out of the upcoming year.  Plus, we watch a lot of TV and movies!

I’ve always loved watching movies with my family and I especially love Lifetime movies.  (Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to watch as much Lifetime as usual this year.)  So, when I saw that the Lifetime Movie Network was broadcasting something called Mommy’s Little Star, I literally fell on my knees and begged Megan to stay up and watch it with me.

What Was It About?

12 year-old Olivia (Maja Vujicic) thinks that she’s found a way bring her parents back together.  She’ll become a social media star by posting dancing videos online.  If she can get her mother, Lauren (Rebecca Amzallag), to appear in the videos with her, she’ll become an even bigger star and maybe even win a contest because people love to watch young influencers dance with their moms.

Lauren’s new boyfriend, Aiden (Roderick McNeil), offers to act as Olivia’s agent and to guide her to social media stardom.  Olivia is excited but soon, she becomes so addicted to being popular online that she starts neglect her friends, her schoolwork, and her well-meaning but strict nanny.  Meanwhile, Aiden is actually a con artist who is willing to go to any lengths, including murder!, to get what he wants.

What Worked?

I always enjoy a good Lifetime moral panic film.  This film had the typical Lifetime plot of the handsome but sinister man who was trying to take a daughter away from her loving parents but, to that, it also added a fear that I imagine many parents have, the fear of what their children might be doing online.  One thing that both Olivia’s mom and her father (played by David Lafontaine) had in common is that neither one of them was really sure what it was that Olivia was getting so excited about and watching them, I was reminded of my aunt’s reaction when I first tried to explain to her what Twitter was.  The film suggested that all of the trouble that Olivia and her family go through is worth it because it encourages Olivia to eventually take a break from social media.  It’s all rather silly and campy but that’s what makes Lifetime movies so much fun.

I really enjoyed Roderick McNeil’s performance as Aiden.  He had the whole charming sociopath act down to perfection.

What Did Not Work?

The film missed an opportunity by not having Olivia herself turn evil in her attempts to win the big contest.  Maybe Lifetime had already met their quota for murderous children by the time they got around to Mommy’s Little Star.

“OMG!  Just like me!” Moments

Right after my parents divorced, I had a fantasy that lasted for about two years where they would both come to see me performing with the New York City Ballet and they would be so moved by my dancing that they would get back together.  That never happened, of course, but still, I could relate to what Olivia was trying to do even if I didn’t quite agree with her methods.

Both Megan and I agreed that Rebecca Amzallag, who did a great job playing Olivia’s mother, looked just like our friend Lea so that was kind of neat.  We spent a lot of the film asking ourselves, “Is that what Lea would do?”

Lessons Learned

Social media is evil!

Music Video of the Day: Alcoholic by Chanel West Coast (2013, dir by Nicholaus Goossen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Wow, look at you getting ready for New Year’s Eve!

If you’re ever feeling like you’ve reached a dead end, just remember that Rob Dyrdek’s receptionist is more famous than you are and …. well, that probably won’t help.

Enjoy!