Change Your Image
newmediatalent
Reviews
7th Heaven (1996)
Phenomenal
We need more shows like 7th Heaven, with a much more realistic, non-histrionic representation of the "modern American family." The kids aren't perfect, but they're good, and the parents aren't stupid, though they make mistakes. The show is not religious at its core but is a family show whose protagonist happens to be a preacher. The "minor" issues that premise each episode harken back to the Brady Bunch, but much more convincingly.
We need more positive examples that reflect reality, though the adultified children are a bit of a mistake.
Everwood (2002)
Formulaic, poorly-written crap that is way too impressed with itself
Throw a bunch of TV tropes into a cuisinart and you get Everwood, the story of a widowed doctor who "escapes" Manhattan (my hometown) for the better life, and presumably better people, of Everwood, Colorado. Rather than spend 1,000 words rightfully trashing this show, I'll leave the reader with a shining example of its TERRIBLE writing:
In one story arc, Ephram meets his ex, Madison in Manhattan by chance on the day before his Julliard audition, when he's playing a piano in public on a Manhattan plaza park near an office tower during a busy afternoon. Madison can't talk because she's "at work" but agrees to meet the next morning for coffee, before Ephram's audition. She makes an emotionally explosive revelation that causes Ephram to miss the audition. A few days later, Amy calls Julliard and begs them to give Ephram another chance, "He had his chance...last SUNDAY at 4:30 p.m."
If the audition was Sunday, why was Madison and everyone else at work on a SATURDAY?
Like I said, crap writing. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond that, it's typical life-lesson crap that paints the world as a good place, a world where we let homeless people live like animals and whistleblowers be retaliated against. The cast is exceptionally hot (or was) so if you like eye-candy with "white people problems" (replete with a magical african-american to solve them), you'll like this show, or if you're like me, you'll hate yourself just a little more for being white.
Find Me in Paris (2018)
Ten Star Actress In A Four-Star Show
Even without female lead Jessica Lord, Find Me In Paris is solid enough to attract a large audience, including me, but with her, the experience is memorable. Ten minutes into the first episode, she was far out in front of both the writing and a cast hired more for its dance ability than its acting chops. Her coworkers will flood television for decades, but Lord is on a fast track to a big-budget, A-list feature. She checks literally every box: young, blond, pretty (even "hot"), can cry on cue like a soap-opera queen, and convey an innocence which suggests blissful unawareness that Center Stage, Kate & Leopold, Back To The Future, and Time After Time were pulverized in a Cuisinart to yield this show.
We have a time-traveling (Back To The Future) ballerina (Center Stage), separated by more than a century from her boyfriend (Kate & Leopold), and chased by psychotic Brit criminals (Time After Time). The story literally writes itself, but is humorously executed. Massive scenery is chewed. The only reason this works is Jessica Lord being talented enough to convince us not to root against Helena, and the bad guys adhering to their own rigorously moral code as much as the "good guys" try, and fail, to adhere to theirs.
Some of the dance scenes are phenomenal, though it has that "Empire" feeling to it in that the fictional verdict on the content is stronger than its real-world counterparts.
Grand Hotel (2019)
God-Awful Actors Who Look Great
We have Roslyn Sanchez, who almost singlehandedly ruined Rush Hour, Bryan Craig, a typical soap actor (like a AAA baseball player, a cut below major-league talent), and a cast that looks much better than it can act, with awful writing to match. ABC seems to have created a repository for its no-talents in order to prevent them from infecting other shows.
If you like eye candy, this is Hershey, PA. If you want quality in your TV entertainment, look elsewhere.
The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)
Funny film, HORRIBLE leads....
Kunis is a mediocre actress, but Kate McKinnon is about as bad as any "successful" actress in history. It's as if she thinks her audience has an IQ of 20 and absolutely no standards. Why she keeps getting work is beyond me.
The film is standard chicks-survive-while-everyone-around-them-dies fare, but hilarity does not ensue. The film is predictable, and funny at times, but swallowing the leads' performance just to get to that is barely worth it.
Not recommended.
Attack of the Killer Donuts (2016)
Don't be fooled: Kayla Compton can act...
And she's incredibly sexy to watch. Look at how she delivers the line "and tell -the police- what: that an army of murderous donuts are on the loose?" Perfect diction, highly intelligent, good timing, perfect body.
Hey Hollywood: you can do a lot worse. Give this girl some material!
As for the film, it's as if Gremlins and Harold & Kumar go to White Castle had a baby.
The film is everything you expect, and then some. Definitely worth a watch.
24 (2001)
Everyone has bad days....
Ostensibly a government procedural, bordering on a parody of the self-important histrionics of this genre, 24 tells a much simpler, yet more profound story, against a backdrop of national security with the fate of civilization (and a few political careers) on the line. 24 is about those awful days we all have, that start out bad and just keep getting worse, where nothing seems to go right until the very end, and even then it takes days (the offseason months) to recover.
Jack Bauer, an everyman with top security clearance and a federal badge, personifies the everymen and everywomen in the audience who have had days so terrible they'll never forget. His stories are our stories: betrayal by our friends and coworkers, office politics, bureaucratic nonsense, and all kinds of mishaps designed to thwart us in our fight of the good fight.
Cobra Kai (2018)
The Karate Kid and Massacre At Central High had a baby....
...and the result is Cobra Kai, which uses the characters from The Karate Kid not to continue the story, but to turn that classic film into a retelling of the 1976 landmark so-bad-it's-good film Massacre At Central High. This series bears much more resemblance to the latter than the former, with the former used mostly as a 1980s-nostalgia device that gives the show a flavor of a thirty-year high-school reunion on steroids. The message, however, is clearly the same as Massacre At Central High.
"David" (Miguel), is a bad kid turned good, who takes on the bullies at a school where, as in Massacre at Central High, violence reigns supreme, and adults in authority are nowhere to be found. The once-bullied teens who become bullies is also straight out of the 1976 film, whereas Danny's message was more spiritual, and overcoming his demons, though this reboot correctly addresses that Johnny was never really the bad guy, but portrayed in the exaggerated fashion in which Danny perceived him, while Danny himself then, like now, is a passive-aggressive little s**t who turned provoking the beleaguered Johnny into an art form.
In this series, Johnny is clearly the good guy, though hardly sympathetic. Danny, like an SNL character of a politician who kept running negative ads after the election, cannot resist his addiction to sticking it to Johnny even after he has become one of life's winners, unable to confront the evils that surround him, from a wayward daughter that Johnny had to protect from her own self-destruction, or refusing to believe that Johnny's intentions were good, at least until well into season two, when they reminisce about the past, and realize that they have a lot more in common.
Season three is obviously set up for the soap-opera "bigger enemy" trope as Danny and Johnny will unite to take down Kreese, with the students combining the best each sensei has to offer: Danny's patience and discipline, and Johnny's toughness.
Back in 1984, no one ever anticipated the internet, or that we'd be able to keep tabs on our teenaged peers, so we just assumed those petty conflicts would be over now. Not here, especially with even more surprises from the past ready to show up in season three.
I gave this show ten stars not because I like it -- the violence message is horrible, and a line about asthma being faked could be fatal if taken to heart by viewers -- but rather as an acknowledgement of how exceptionally well the writers have brought their crystal-clear vision to life.
The actor who plays Miguel is just toying with the material. Once he's done with this folly, he'll become the dominant force in Hollywood for the next twenty years, likely winning multiple Oscars. It is a shame to see him wasted on this material, but he has plenty of time to write that ship, and seems to be having a great time carrying on a time-capsule film that definitely could use a reunion. A guilty pleasure for the old, and a lesson for millennial snowflakes that, once upon a time, people insulted you to your face, rather than from behind a computer monitor, and that sometimes, when the PC reality meets the road, the road wins. Those who claim the material is not feminist are also wrong. The female characters are not whining about equality, but, like my late mother did by running the largest tape-transcription service in New York City in the 1970s, proving it by competing with the boys on equal terms.
All in all, a fun ride, though I wouldn't call it a great story. Not all entertainment has to be.
Felicity (1998)
The 1972 Phillies had Steve Carlton; this show had Amy Jo Johnson
The 1972 Phillies finished the year with a record of 59-103, one of the worst ever. Steve Carlton, their ace pitcher, went 27-10, netting more than forty percent of the team's wins. That team's talent disparity pales in comparison to this show's, including Scott "Whiskey Cavalier" Foley's one-noter, and several other bombs, including a nearly-comatose Amy Smart. Even these poor actors pale in comparison to the lead, however.
Keri Russell is perhaps my least favorite actress on the planet, though the coming of age of Grace Van Dien (The Village) is giving that title a run for its money. Van Dien has double-cursed DNA from her parents, Casper Van Dien and Catherine Oxenberg, while Russell has the genetic misfortune of inheriting the "talent" of her parents, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. I had seen Russel almost singlehandedly destroy Eight Days A Week, wondering who greenlit that project, and now I see it was the result of this series, set at a fictionalized NYU, across the street from the chess tables where I spent a few summers in my late teens. Out of curiosity, I watched the amusing plotlines.
Very quickly, I found the show to be horrible, except for the standout performer that is Amy Jo Johnson, a young woman whose combined sexuality, intelligence, and acting talent exceeds just about anything I have ever seen on screen. The show is loaded with "hotties" who quickly bored me, but I kept binge-watching on Hulu (as background while I train at chess) pretty much only for her scenes, from which I'd switch out of the Internet Chess Club to watch. Even the finest milk expires rapidly, and Johnson is now pushing forty, but I've never seen a female in her prime even come close to matching what she pulled off on a show with absolutely dreadful writing that she somehow made watchable. I've never seen anything else Johnson has done, nor do I want to, because I don't think even she can improve on that perfection, especially not now.
As for the show, it fell off a cliff when Johnson left in Season 3, but before then some of the shows were interesting. The Twilight Zone homage took me back to my tweens, when I'd watch at 1:30 a.m. on Channel 9, in my dark bedroom on a small set that often left me chilled on schoolnights, while the episode where they are stuck underground on the subway is something any native New Yorker could love, and maybe only they could truly understand.
The show captures the essence of Manhattan very nicely, but from the perspective of mostly transients and bridge-and-tunnel types more enamored with the hustle and bustle of the city, rather than the dead quiet of a warm summer morning, shortly after dawn, when I'd skate up a storm on the empty pavement of Park Avenue, or late at night when I'd fly through the First Avenue UN tunnel on my ten-speed to save time, risking life and limb if I didn't beat the cars with a red-light head start.
Often when I played chess in the park next door, an NYU film student would pass by to complete his or her senior project, while a few law students would eat lunch and play a few games. Surprisingly, none of the characters attended Tisch, though an extremely untalented Amy Smart's character managed to land a movie role during the show.
I long ago gave up on demanding quality from my television shows, and this makes it easier to watch them. This show has its moments, almost all of them involving Amy Jo Johnson, but it also gave New York City a better look than many other shows which were set there. For that reason alone, I'd give it five stars, but Johnson, a perfect ten at this point in time, left a dazzling memory. If any young actress in the past twenty years has outshined what she exuded at this stage of her life, I missed it.
God's Not Dead 2 (2016)
Atrocious Film, Great Song
Not since 1987, when the arm-wrestling "classic" "Over The Top" gave us Kenny Loggins' hit single "Meet Me Halfway," or the home-nursing "epic" "Disorderlies" gave us Bananarama's hit single "I Heard A Rumor," have I witnessed such divergence between the quality of a film and its signature song.
I found "God's Not Dead 2" after hearing an incredibly uplifting, belongs-in-a-credit-card-commercial song from this film called "Silence You" by (Sarah) Hayley Orrantia, better known as Erica "Chuck Cunningham" Goldberg on The Goldbergs (Erica, like Chuck from Happy Days, is the nonexistent daughter of the Goldbergs, who had three sons), an actress I've enjoyed watching since that show debuted in 2013. Like The Goldbergs, however, one of the most raw-talented actresses of this generation has been abandoned much like Jesus himself on the cross, left to play against some of the worst "talent" Hollywood has ever employed on a continual basis. The film amounts to little more than a glorified acting class for Ms. Orrantia, whom Hollywood has yet to provide with a vehicle even remotely capable of highlighting her nearly-infinite acting capabilities. As for the remainder of the cast, I'll do my best to adhere to the Christian principle of not saying anything about someone if I can't say something nice, to the extent possible.
Pat Boone, six decades removed from his reformed-badboy turn in 1957's "April Love" (another atrocious film but for another singing female star, Shirley Jones) should have channeled George Burns from Oh! God, and played Jesus himself in the court scene, as this would have been more believable to me, since I had not realized he was even still alive. Rather than put Christianity itself on trial, as in the film, I'd be more inclined to indict Ms. Orrantia's "people" for encouraging her to lend her name to this abomination. Thankfully, she is seventh-billed, which minimizes any fallout towards her career, though what is easily the best song she has ever recorded has been "Silenced" from mainstream radio by its association with this "Crybully" religious propaganda, which attempts to portray America's majority religion as persecuted, as if 2016 America were Ancient Rome. The premise is simply ludicrous. The remainder of the cast includes two of my least-favorite relics from ABC's sitcom past, Melissa Joan Hart and Robin Givens, the latter of whom seems to have made a wrong turn on the way to a Satanic thriller in her long journey from the divorce court where she ended her marriage to Mike Tyson; talk about playing against type. Jesse Metcalfe, fresh off his turn in ruining another rebooted 1980s show, Dallas, also lands here.
Kurt Vonnegut's advisory to pity the audience was clearly lost on the producers, who clearly could have benefited from a religious studies course which explored things like First Cause (how do you get something from nothing), or the many scientific bases upon which the "defense" of Jesus could have been based, such as how we are born "knowing" things via our DNA, which was obviously created in that other world inhabited by God and His Only Son. Rather than defend Jesus, questioning the wisdom of scientists who stop at the point of creation with highfalutin' technical terms like "Big" and "Bang," is ripe for a big-screen treatment, but, like better chess moves, were simply not played on this board. My personal favorite rebuttal to any disbelievers, Christian or otherwise, comes from a billboard I once found while living in Albany, GA in 2000 (my dad was from Cedartown, GA): "God doesn't question YOUR existence." Instead, we get the same tired, science-averse Chrisitan preaching which makes films like this not only forgettable, but painful to watch. The film's defense of destroying the wall between church and state is also short-sighted, given the abuses by all religions which would result. God is kept out of our schools for a very good reason. The proselytizing of the film renders moot the religion-as-academic-topic exception to the Establishment Clause. Finally, as a former paralegal, I'll say only that the legal scenes were in dire need of a script doctor.
I definitely felt
something watching this film, but that something was nausea, particularly when I realized that it was what literally impaled Silence You on the mainstream radio stake. It is clear that Ms. Orrantia is a devout Christian, not from her acting, but her literally inspired singing, which far exceeds her previous musical range. Indeed, the voice she laid onto that song is more compelling evidence of divine existence than everything else in the film put together. That the larger radio stations have ignored this song because it diverts from their secular message is a pox on their house, given the pollution of today's music by no-talents. Two listens is all it took for me to place Silence You atop my YouTube Playlist. The song – which can be taken to heart by Christians and non-Christians alike -- is THAT good, but because it is attached to a film which is THAT bad, most of the world will never get to hear it.
Ms. Orrantia is a great talent in both singing and acting who will one day shine. The remainder of the cast is the opposite, who hopefully will one day be doing whatever unemployed actors do once their Hollywood run has ended. Were this film a final exam at Julliard, she'd be given an A, as she made the most of what limited opportunity she was provided, but someone with the comedic timing, nuance, and range she has repeatedly displayed on The Goldbergs deserved better than to be buried underneath "stars" whose careers should have ended twenty years ago. Hopefully, she will one day make a film where the abilities of those surrounding her match or exceed her own. This film certainly wasn't it.
Ray Gordon
A Girl Like Her (2015)
Thirteen Reasons Why This Is The Better Teen-Suicide Story
1-13. Alexandra Danielle "Lexi" Ainsworth (Jessica Burns)
"A Girl Like Her" effortlessly achieves what "13 Reasons" reaches for so stridently – and expensively -- but will never attain, thanks to the award-caliber talent of its star, Lexi Ainsworth, who takes a decent film to the next level with her total mastery of one of the more difficult raw skills in an actor's repertoire: the ability to cry on cue. One need not have seen her as the abused girlfriend of Keifer on General Hospital (where she dances on the career dumpster of the writers who fired her in 2011), and later the stalked-by-her-lesbian college professor, Parker, which netted her a daytime Emmy. One should not see her fine performance in So This Is Christmas, a film with drug dealers and a shootout never crossing path with Eric Roberts, though her turn as Sara Cowan, where she is bleached blonde to play a character whose real-life counterpart was brunette, in the so-bad-it's-good Death Clique 2014 is good for a dark laugh. Lexi's character's parents were murdered while she was away making out with her boyfriend on an episode of Criminal Minds, and she was even threatened with violence by Courteney Cox on Cougartown. Put simply, Lexi knows crying like Bo knows football, with an ability not just to cry on cue, but to actually feel and transmit genuine terror, horror, hopelessness, and despondence, and to do so without chewing the scenery as would say a Pomeranian on caffeine.
As Jessica Burns in A Girl Like Her, you don't have to ask the protagonist about the validity or extent of her suffering, because she literally wears it on her face, as it seeps through her every vocal intonation and movement, all accomplished so flawlessly that it is like watching Kevin Durant slam-dunk it for Lexi's hometown OKC Thunder. Casting Hunter King as the crumbling villain was also smart, since even mere mortal soapies can play in the emotional big leagues, though not at Lexi's level. Fortunately, she does not outstrip the writing as badly in this film as she has in her other vehicles, and the writers do an excellent job of balancing the story between bully and victim, a creative detour from how I would have steered such a film Lexi is like an NFL player who can run the 40 in 4.25 seconds without breaking a sweat. The formula for stardom is very simple: get a big budget, write a script with a relatable, sympathetic, yet still-hot female lead, tell a story so compelling the audience would cry even reading it, hand her the script, turn on the camera, and get out of her way. This seems to be what director Amy S. Weber did.
Having been bullied, and studying the bully mindset for my entire life, I commend her for showing that in any bullying situation, there is a lot of pain to go around, and a lot of children who may be acting intentionally but who really don't understand the harm they are inflicting until it is too late. I learned much later in life over the internet that a grade-school quasi-tormentor of mine had lost his father prior to moving into my building, where my intact family could not have helped his state. ON the other hand, we might not have been friends anyway, and ran in different circles. My friendships-gone-wrong never soured to the depths in this film but some have, especially among girls.
The one missing link in the script, however, is that it rushed Jessica from happy-go-lucky student into a nearly-successful suicide attempt, by reinforcing the idea that she was a pure doormat, when most who end their lives or contemplate doing so are not, and cry out rather loudly before actually making an attempt, at least to their inner circle. Despite this scripting limitation, Lexi's Jessica was not the "crybully" who weaponized her victimhood in a manner which makes Thirteen Reasons more akin to Scream, almost a parody of those very-special episodes and movies of the week. You can clearly see Jessica is on the way to attempting suicide, a process so self-absorbing that thoughts shift from revenge to simply ending one's pain.
The film's conclusion was expected though still inspiring, in a way that almost had to be made.
After seeing this film, and then watching 13 Reasons, I could not stand the self-aware, almost self-mocking latter. Lexi's day will come relatively soon. She is one tear-jerking script and a proper budget away from a major award.
13 Reasons Why (2017)
Unimpressive "retelling" of A Girl Like Her with an inferior cast
Copycat films (or shows) can be fine. "Bait" was more or less a copy of "Enemy of the State," but was very well done with a sharp cast that made it almost as good. The same cannot be said, however, for "13 Reasons Why," which hearkens back to the "very special" episodes of the 1970s, and the movies-of-the-week which would preempt them. Making us feel GUILTY for not watching something, as if we somehow contributed to poor Hannah Baker's suicide, is a tried-and-true marketing tactic for "important" fiction. Unfortunately for the audience, but fortunately for shareholders of Netflix, the series proves more than distribution kills superior independent work as efficiently as bullying killed Hannah.
It's not clear how much "A Girl Like Her" was inspired by 13 Reasons, but the buzz created by that film (also on Netflix) certainly sparked interest in a big-budget version of this project, later abandoned and which would have had Selena Gomez in the lead. Gomez, a fine singing talent, and someone for whom the underlying issues have hit home, would have effectively been playing an exaggerated version of herself, without the intricate skillset required to pull off an emotionally-charged role in a manner which wins major awards.
A show like this is going to rise and fall with the performance of its lead, in this case the very inexperienced Katherine Langford, an actress who is pretty enough, but clearly lacking in the nuance and depth which makes Lexi Ainsworth such a thrill to watch on General Hospital. A longtime fan of Lexi's, I was glad to see her career take a big step forward with her acclaimed performance in A Girl Like Her, only to watch that film's thunder be stolen much like life itself was taken from Hannah. Put simply, knowing what Lexi could have done with his material makes Katherine extremely painful to watch, but casting Lexi (as should have been done here) would have drawn attention to the similarities, so that must have been out.
This show has the same annoying self-aware tone which torpedoed Riverdale, making the series almost a parody of itself. Even in the scenes which are supposed to drive Hannah to suicide, we see no genuine expressions of congruent emotions, but actors throwing tokens at these extremes as one might tokens at a turnstile. Crying on cue, relating to the audience, and actually FEELING the terror and horror experienced by someone like Hanna is a very specific acting skill Lexi possesses in boatloads, and Katherine Langhorn clearly does not. Because of this, 13 Reasons Why falls apart almost from the get-go, at let to the trained Hollywood eye, though the Netflix audience seems not to notice or care.
13 Reasons Why is a good watch solely because others are watching it, and it has sparked discussions about important issues, but none of this was driven by memorable acting. I look forward to the day when an actress like Lexi, or the indies who produced A Girl Like Her, can get the muscle of a Netflix behind one of their projects, because if they ever did, the result would blow away a show like this, and the distribution would ensure that everyone in the world would know it.