Tag Archives: Steven Barr

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 2.19 “Lost and Found”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night 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 Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network!  It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.

This week, the bike cops screw up another case.

Episode 2.19 “Lost and Found”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on March 2nd, 1997)

I’ve often felt that the most interesting thing about Pacific Blue is witnessing just how totally incompetent the bicycle cops really are.

This episode centers around a girl who has run away from home.  Chris and Palermo are holding her at the station and they release her to the first guy who shows up claiming to be her father.  They don’t bother to ask the man for any sort of proof that he’s her father.  They don’t even ask to see his ID.  Instead, they just let her go with him.

Guess what?  That guy wasn’t her father!

Her actual father shows up a little while later and, needless to say, he’s pretty pissed off.  Instead of apologizing or in any way accepting accountability for screwing up, Palermo and Chris snap at the guy to calm down and then say that they’ll track down his daughter.  What’s funny is that we’re supposed to be on the side of the bicycle cops because the father is angry and yelling.  Well, the father has every right to be angry and yelling.  THE IDIOTS LET HIS RUNAWAY DAUGHTER LEAVE WITH THE FIRST GUY WHO SHOWED UP!

Now, the show later reveals that the father was abusive and that his daughter ran way because he was beating her.  Yeah, he’s not a good father and he should lost custody of his daughter.  That doesn’t make the bicycle cops any less incompetent, though!  It just amuses that this show continually tries to convince us that we should take these people seriously as cops but every episode seems to feature them making some sort of terrible mistake.  This show really seems to think that, as long as Chris is shooting people the death glare, that means she’s not responsible for any of her screwups.

This episode also featured a subplot in which Cory tried to protect her no-good brother from some hitmen.  She did a better job with her storyline than Chris and Palermo did with the case of the runaway.  Maybe Cory should be in charge.

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.

Playing Catch-Up With The Films of 2017: Transformers: The Last Knight (dir by Michael Bay)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, I’m just going to be honest here.

I did watch Transformers: The Last Knight.  I didn’t see it at the theaters, of course.  To date, I’ve only seen one Transformers movie on the big screen.  It was the fourth one and not only did I get motion sick but when I left the theater, I discovered that I was having trouble hearing.  Even though I watched Transformers: The Last Knight on a small screen, I still made sure to take some Dramamine beforehand.  That may have been a mistake because this movie somehow drags things out for 2 hours and 30 minutes.  That’s a lot of time to spend trying to stay awake while watching something that doesn’t even try to make sense.

So, yes, I did watch Transformers: The Last Knight but I’m not really sure what I watched.  I know that there was a lot of camera movement.  There was a lot of stuff blowing up.  Robots would fly into space.  Robots would return to Earth.  Robots turned into cars.  All of the robots spoke in these gravelly voices and half the time, I couldn’t really understand what they were saying.  Mark Wahlberg was around and he spent the entire movie with this kind of confused look on his face.  His Boston accent really came out whenever he had to deliver his dialogue.  One thing I’ve noticed about Wahlberg is that the less he cares about a movie, the more likely he is to go full Boston.  To be honest, if I just closed my eyes and listened to Wahlberg’s accent and tuned out all of the explosions and robot talk, I probably would have thought I was watching Manchester By The Sea.

Anthony Hopkins was also in the movie, playing a character who might as well have just been named “Esteemed British Person.”  It’s always fun to see Hopkins in a bad movie, just because he knows that his deserved reputation for being a great actor isn’t going to suffer no matter how much crap he appears in.  He always goes through these movies with a slightly bemused smirk on his face.  It’s almost as if he’s looking out at the audience and saying, “Laugh all you want.  I’ll still kick anyone’s ass when it comes to Shakespeare…”  Anyway, Hopkins is mostly around so that he can reveal that the Transformers have been on Earth since time began.  Why, they even saved King Arthur!

The plot has to do with a powerful staff that can be used to bring life back to the Transformers’s home planet.  The problem is that using the staff will also destroy all life on Earth or something like that.  So, of course, the good Transformers are trying to save Earth and the bad Transformers are like, “Fuck Earth, let’s blow stuff up.”  Or something like that.  The main good Transformer — Optimus Prime, I guess — gets brainwashed into becoming an evil Transformer.  Of course, since Anthony Hopkins is in the movie, the majority of the film takes place in England and that can only mean a trip to Stonehenge!

And…

Look, I’ve exhausted myself.  I’m not going to say that Transformers: The Last Knight is a terrible movie because, obviously, someone out there loves this stuff.  I mean, they’ve made five of these movies so someone has to be looking forward to them.  They’re not for me, though.

Some day, I hope Micheal Bay directs a Fifty Shades of Grey movie.  I look forward to watching Christian and Ana discuss consent while the world explodes behind them.