Tag Archives: Rosalind Chao

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 5.3 “Heart of Night”

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 Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

This week, Castillo gets an adventure of his own.

Episode 5.3 “Heart of Night”

(Dir by Paul Krasny, originally aired on November 18th, 1988)

This is season 5’s Castillo episode.

Castillo got to be at the center of one episode per season.  Usually, it involved someone from his past resurfacing and Castillo having to go full samurai (or ninja, as the case may be) to protect them.  That’s certainly the case here, in which Castillo’s ex-wife (Rosalind Chao, replacing Joan Chen) approaches Castillo because she and her husband (James Saito) are being targeted by Rivas (Bob Gunton), an Ecuadorian drug dealer who — *sigh* — has connections to the CIA.

This episode wasn’t really bad.  It just felt awfully familiar.  Even Edward James Olmos, who usually shined whenever he got a solo adventure, seems kind of bored in this episode.  At this point in the series, there was really nothing surprising about the revelation that a South American drug lord was working with the CIA.  Just about every drug lord on the show was portrayed as working for the CIA.  It’s also not a surprise when Castillo’s ex’s new husband turns out to be corrupt.  The episode ends with Castillo watching as the women he still loves walk away from him and, again, been there done that.  Almost this entire episode felt like Miami Vice on autopilot.

Crockett appeared for about two minutes in this episode.  He has his memory back and he’s working for the Vice Squad again.  Castillo points out that Crockett is still being investigated for numerous murders and he suggests that Crockett take some time off.  Crockett reluctantly agrees.  Shouldn’t Crockett be in prison right now?  The man was the biggest drug lord in Miami.  He killed a cop (albeit in self-defense).  I’m surprised he would be allowed back into the Vice Squad with all that hanging over him.  If not sitting in jail, Crockett should at least be under suspension.

It’s just another weird day in Miami.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992, directed by John Carpenter)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

An accident at a laboratory renders stock analyst Nick Holloway (Chevy Chase) invisible.  CIA agent David Jenkins (Sam Neill) wants to recruit Nick to be an assassin but Nick doesn’t want to kill people.  He just wants to make his date with Alice (Daryl Hannah).  With Jenkins and his agents in pursuit, Nick flees to a beach house belonging to his friend George (Michael McKean) and tries to figure out what to do with his life now that no one can see him.  Fortunately, Alice is staying at the beach house too.  Nick and Alice fall in love but Jenkins is close behind.

Based on a science fiction novel by H.F. Saint, Memoirs of an Invisible Man started out as a vanity project for Chevy Chase, who felt that the film’s mix of comedy and drama would establish him as a serious actor.  The project went through a series of directors, including Ivan Reitman and Richard Donner, but in the end no one wanted to work with the special effects necessary to create the impression of invisibility and, even more importantly, no one wanted to work with Chase.  When the film was finally offered to John Carpenter, he was reluctant to do another studio film because of his bad experience with They Live.  He finally agreed because it had been four years since his last film.

The special effects in Memoirs of an Invisible Man are still impressive and the chase scenes show off Carpenter’s abilities as an action director.  The movie flopped with critics and audiences but that was not Carpenter’s fault.  Carpenter keeps the story moving and gets good performances out of Sam Neill and even Daryl Hannah.  The problem with the movie is that Chevy Chase is miscast as an action hero and he tries too hard to give a serious performance.  Carpenter later said he wanted to add more comedy to the film and to emphasize Chase’s talent for physical comedy but Chase refused to do so.  Chase also resented wearing the blue bodysuit that would be used to render him invisible onscreen and often removed the suit early, ruining whatever else Carpenter had planned to shoot during the day.  You can add John Carpenter to the long list of directors who have said they will never work with Chevy Chase again.

One good thing did come out of Memoirs of an Invisible Man.  Carpenter met and enjoyed working with Sam Neill.  (Memoirs of an Invisible Man probably would have worked better in Neill and Chase had switched roles.)  Neill would go on to star in Carpenter’s next film, In The Mouth of Madness.

Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge (1979, directed by Ron Satlof)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This, the final of the three Spider-Man “feature films” that were basically edited episodes of the Spider-Man TV series, finds Peter Parker (Nicholas Hammond) in Hong Kong.  Spider-Man having adventures in Hong Kong sounds like it should be fun and the 2nd half of this “movie” was filmed on location but, even with all those elements (and a young Ted Danson in a small role), Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge is just dull.

Min (Benson Fong) is a rich Chinese businessman who stands to be appointed to a position in the Chinese government but only if he can prove that he didn’t sell secrets to the U.S. during World War II.  Min needs to find three Marines who can clear his name.  Because Min is an old friend, J. Jonah Jameson (Robert F. Simon) assigns photographer Peter Parker to help Min track the men down.  Why would Jameson give that responsibility to Pater Parker?  I don’t know.

Min’s granddaughter, Emily (Rosalind Chao), thinks that Peter is a coward because he always disappears whenever Min is attacked.  It’s a good thing that Spider-Man always mysteriously shows up whenever Peter isn’t around because otherwise, Min would be in a lot of trouble.  It turns out that a steel baron named Mr. Zeider (Richard Erdman) wants to stop Min from clearing his name because Min would stop Zeider from getting a big construction contract.

Eventually, Peter, Min, Emily, and a former marine who can clear Min all end up in Hong Kong, where Spider-Man gets to fight kung fu masters and hopefully save the day.

Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge has all the elements to be an enjoyably cheesy 70s adventure film but it fails because it’s not really a movie.  It’s just two episodes of a TV show that have been edited together and, with the exception of a few of the fight scenes in Hong Kong, there’s nothing cinematic about it.  As opposed to the previous two Spider-Man “films,” Nicholas Hammond just seems bored in this outing and the scenes with Rosalind Chao scolding Peter for being a coward are too much like Lois Lane complaining about Clark Kent never being in the same place as Superman.

Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge also misses the opportunity to bring in any members of Spider-Man’s gallery of wonderful villains.  How hard would it have been to replace Mr. Zeider with Wilson Fisk?  The Silver Samurai could have at least made an appearance.  Instead, Spider-Man’s just fighting another corporate villain.  It’s a wasted opportunity.

The two episodes that make up this film were also the final two episodes of the Spider-Man TV show.  Despite the fact that CBS was constantly moving the show around on the schedule and that the second season only featured 7 episodes, the series still got good ratings.  However, CBS apparently feared that, by airing not only Spider-Man but also The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman, it would run the risk of becoming known as a “comic book” network.  Since the Hulk and Wonder Woman both got good ratings and, unlike Spider-Man, had the support of the critics, they were allowed to remain while Spider-Man was given the boot and canceled in 1979.  That’s a strong contrast to today, when most exec would probably sell their first born to get a chance at some of the Marvel action.

After this, it would be another 23 years before Spider-Man again appeared on a movie screen, this time in the form of Tobey Maguire.  While Nicholas Hammond would never again play Spider-Man, one fan of his time on the show was director Quentin Tarantino, who later cast Hammond as director Sam Wanamaker in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Film Review: Stockholm, Pennsylvania (dir by Nikole Beckwith)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

MV5BMTYwODA2NzA0Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjk0Mzg4MzE@._V1_SY317_CR47,0,214,317_AL_I think I’m going to start writing Stockholm, Pennsylvania fanfic.  It’s not that I’m a fan of this particular movie.  It’s just that, after watching it last night, I’m convinced that I could probably write a better version of the same story.  At the very least, I could come up with a better ending.

(And who knows?  Pennsylvania is technically close enough to Canada that I could do a Degrassi/Stockholm crossover.)

Stockholm, Pennsylvania premiered on Lifetime last night and, as a result, it will always be known as being a Lifetime movie.  However, unlike such excellent films as Babysitter’s Black Book and Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal, Stockholm was not originally made for television.  Instead, it was meant to be the feature film directorial debut of playwright Nikole Beckwith.  Earlier this year, it played at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received some memorably mixed reviews and the film’s star, Saoirse Ronan, received more attention for her work in Brooklyn.  And while Brooklyn was picked up by Fox Searchlight and declared an early Oscar contender, Stockholm, Pennsylvania was ultimately purchased by the Lifetime network.

Unfortunately, Stockholm, Pennsylvania is not the type of film that is served well by premiering on television.  For the first 45 minutes or so, it’s a low-key film that moves at its own deliberate and moody pace.  The film doesn’t have the right rhythm to remain compelling when combined with frequent commercial interruptions.  And make no mistake about it — the interruptions were frequent!  The 99 minute film was padded out with enough commercials so that, on television, it ran for 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Or, as I put it on twitter when I discovered that the movie wasn’t as close to being finished as I had originally assumed:

The film opens with kidnapping victim Leanne (Saoirse Ronan) being returned to her parents after spending 17 years living in the basement of Ben McKay (Jason Isaac).  As we see in flashbacks, Ben kept Leanne isolated from the rest of the world and raised her as his own daughter.  Ben also renamed her Leia but, at the same time, he apparently never let her watch any movies.  (“He said I was named after a princess,” Leia cluelessly says at one point.)  Ben also taught Leia to regularly pray to the Universe (“Dear Universe…”) and … well, that’s all we really learn about Leia’s relationship with Ben.  And while I love cinematic ambiguity, the ambiguity of Stockholm, Pennsylvania just feels lazy.

Having been rescued (under circumstances that are left ambiguous because this is a lazy fucking movie), Leia is reunited with her parents, Marcy (Cynthia Nixon) and Glen (David Warshofsky).  Leia doesn’t remember either of them and resists all of Marcy’s awkward attempts to force any sort of emotional relationship.

And, for the first half of the film, it’s actually fairly interesting.  Nixon gives a good performance and Ronan proves again that she’s one of the best actresses working today.  The film is moody and properly creepy and I was really interested in seeing what would happen…

And then, out of nowhere, an entirely different movie started.  Suddenly, Marcy’s character completely and totally changed.  Nixon stopped giving a good performance and instead became shrill and one-note.  Ronan continued to give a good performance but the entire film crashed and burned around her.  It all led up to quite possibly one of the worst endings that I have ever seen.  It was seriously one of those endings that made me want to throw my high heels at the TV.

Seriously, it was terrible.  In fact, it was so terrible that it didn’t matter that the first 45 minutes of the movie were not neccesarily bad.  It did not matter that Saoirse Ronan was giving a great performance.  It did not matter … well, nothing mattered.

Once I saw that ending, all I could think of was that I had just wasted two hours and 30 minutes on a film that was apparently made by someone who studied both Martha Marcy May Marlene  and We Need To Talk About Kevin without ever understanding what made those two films worth studying in the first place.

Saoirse Ronan saved the film from being a complete disaster.  It truly says something about her talent that she can give a good performance even when appearing in something like Stockholm, Pennsylvania (or Lost River for that matter).  She’s like Meryl Streep without the condescending attitude.

I’m looking forward to seeing Saoirse Ronan’s work in Brooklyn.  But Stockholm, Pennsylvania is best forgotten.

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