Category: Arts and Entertainment

This category is about arts and entertainment.

Review: ‘The Wrong Missy,’ starring David Spade, Lauren Lapkus, Nick Swardson, Geoff Pierson, Jackie Sandler, Molly Sims and Rob Schneider

May 13, 2020

by Carla Hay

David Spade and Lauren Lapkus in “The Wrong Missy” (Photo by Katrina Marcinowski/Netflix)

“The Wrong Missy”

Directed by Tyler Spindel

Culture Representation: Taking place in Hawaii and Portland, Oregon, “The Wrong Missy” is a comedy with a predominantly white cast (with a few Asians, Latinos and African Americans) representing the middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: A lovelorn, middle-aged bank executive mistakenly invites a “blind date from hell” to be his companion at a corporate retreat.

Culture Audience: “The Wrong Missy” will appeal mostly to people who like very raunchy comedies and David Spade.

David Spade and Molly Sims in “The Wrong Missy” (Photo by Katrina Marcinowski/Netflix)

Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions has been making comedy films for Netflix for the past several years, with varying levels of quality—from mediocre to terrible. “The Wrong Missy” falls on the mediocre end of the scale, and maybe it’s because Sandler isn’t a star or writer of the movie.

Except for 2019’s award-winning drama “Uncut Gems,” Sandler hasn’t been a good movie in decades. Still, there are signs that Sandler’s influence is all over “The Wrong Missy,” since the movie has plenty of jokes and gags about vomiting and other bodily functions. And several of Sandler’s relatives (his wife Jackie Sandler; his wife’s brother Chris Titone; and his nephew Jared Sandler) all have roles in the film, as do frequent Sandler collaborators David Spade, Nick Swardson and Rob Schneider.

In “The Wrong Missy,” Spade stars as bank executive Tim Morris, who is nursing a broken heart after his ex-fiancée cheated on him. Tim (who lives and works in Portland, Oregon) has reluctantly gotten back in the dating pool again. In the beginning of the film, he’s going to a restaurant/bar to meet a blind date in person.

His date texts him that she’s at the bar wearing a blue dress, but that a “meathead” is giving her a lot of rude and unwanted attention. She asks Tim to help her get away from this jerk. Tim sees that there’s only one woman (played by Candace Smith) wearing a blue dress at the bar, and she’s sitting next to a tall and muscular guy (played by Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoai), who strongly resembles actor Jason Momoa.

When Tim tries to get the woman (who’s pregnant) to leave the bar and sit with Tim at his table, the guy tells Tim to get lost because the woman is with him. Tim insists that the woman leave with him, and the man gets up and threatens to fight Tim and have management get involved. Not wanting to make a scene, Tim backs off and sits at his table, confused over what just happened.

Just then, his blind date Melissa, who goes by the name Missy (played by Lauren Lapkus), shows up at the table and admits that she played a prank on Tim and that he passed with flying colors. She tells Tim that she usually plays this prank on blind dates she’s meeting for the first time, as a test to see how far they would go to get in a fight for her.

It’s clear from Missy’s loud, over-the-top and pushy demeanor that she has no social graces and is very unaware of how embarrassing her behavior is. The date goes from bad to worse, when Missy keeps badgering Tim about him being a teetotaler, as she seems fully intent on getting drunk. Missy then gets belligerent with the couple at the bar, which causes Tim to feel even more humiliated.

Tim makes an excuse to go to the men’s restroom, but as he tries to escape through the window, Missy unexpectedly surprises him by coming out from underneath one of the bathroom stalls. (How she got there so quickly is one of those “only in a movie” situations that require a certain suspension of disbelief.) Tim is too nice to hurt her feelings and reveal that he was trying to escape from the date, but he privately vows never to see Missy again.

While he’s in an airport to go on a business trip, Tim and a beautiful blonde (played by Molly Sims) accidentally bump into each other. As he’s about to board his plane, Tim realizes that he accidentally has the woman’s carry-on bag, which is identical to his. He sees from the name tag that the woman’s name is Melissa Doherty.

As Tim frantically looks for her, he sees her in the waiting area, and they give each other their bags back with a lot of relief. Tim and Melissa strike up a conversation at the bar, since they’ve both missed their flights. During their conversation, they find out they have a lot of things in common: They’re both teetotalers, they both like the same types of music, and they’re both even reading the same book (James Patterson’s “Cross the Line”), which they have tucked in their carry-on bags.

Their attraction to each other leads them to have a spontaneous makeout session in a janitor’s closet at the airport. But their intimate encounter is interrupted because Melissa’s flight is boarding, so they quickly exchange numbers and promise to keep in touch with each other. For the first time in a long time, Tim think he’s might have found true love. During their texting sessions, Tim also finds out that she has a sexually adventurous side because she immediately asks him to send photos of his penis, which he does to comical results.

Meanwhile, back at his job, the bank that Tim works for (the fictional Credit of America) is going through some major changes. A merger has resulted in an abrasive and arrogant new CEO named Jack Winstone (played by Geoff Pierson) taking over, and he’s looking for a new president of the company. Tim’s nosy co-worker pal Nate (played by Nick Swardson), who works in the bank’s human resources department, tells Tim that he’s on the short list to be promoted to president. Tim’s biggest competition is co-worker Jess (played by Jackie Sandler), who’s nicknamed “The Barracuda” because she has a reputation for being ruthless.

Tim tells Nate about his memorable airport encounter with Melissa and how they’ve been “dating” by phone texting until they can see each other in person again. They look her up on the Internet and find out that she was a star student-athlete at Georgetown University (where she graduated summa cum laude in 2002) and that she was Miss Maryland in 2009. Nate encourages Tim to invite Melissa to the company’s upcoming corporate retreat in Hawaii.

Tim is very reluctant to make this offer, since he thinks the relationship is too new for this type of invitation. But Tim eventually changes his mind, and his invitation is eagerly accepted. Nate arranges for Melissa to be on the trip, by booking her on the plane seat next to Tim and making sure that she’s booked to stay in Tim’s hotel suite.

But when Tim is on the plane for the trip, he sees to his horror that “the wrong Missy” is the one who got the invitation. Somehow, Tim made the dumb mistake of texting “the wrong Missy” the entire time. And now he’s stuck with the Missy who was the “date from hell” for the entire trip. She tricks Tim into taking an animal tranquilizer by literally shoving it in his mouth.

She’s also very horny and not afraid to show it, since Tim wakes up to Missy sexually fondling him with her hand underneath a blanket. Missy later uses a similar tactic to have sexual intercourse with Tim, when he wakes up to find her on top of him in bed. It says a lot about the double standards in society when a woman sexually assaulting a man in this way is used as comedy in a movie, whereas if the genders were reversed, there would be a lot of public outcry and controversy over this content.

Although “The Wrong Missy” has a lot of bawdy predictability, what makes this film stand out from other Sandler-produced comedies is the gleefully unhinged performance of Lapkus, who could pass for a taller, brasher younger sister of Kristen Schaal. Missy is such a train wreck, especially when she’s drunk and stoned, that much of the film is about Tim being humiliated by her antics and trying to clean up messes that Missy makes. Missy is also a non-stop talker—at one point in the movie, Tim calls her a “blabalanche,” as in a combination of a blabbermouth and an avalanche.

And wouldn’t you know, Tim’s ex-fiancée Julia (played by Sarah Chalke) works for the company too, so she’s also on this corporate retreat. Tim and Missy have an awkward meeting in the hotel lobby with Julia and her good-looking but conceited new man Rich (played by Chris Witaske), who also works for the company. Rich is the guy whom Julia cheated with when she was engaged to Tim, and the infidelity led to Tim and Julia breaking up.

Before the trip, Tim had been bragging to his co-workers about Missy’s beauty and accomplishments. But now that he’s stuck with “the wrong Missy,” much of the movie is about Tim trying to convince his co-workers that the Missy who’s with him is the same Missy he told them about, because his pride won’t let him admit that he made a dumb mistake in this identity mix-up.

Schneider has a supporting role as a reckless boat captain named Komante, a loopy burnout who encounters the group when his boat is charted by the company for an outing in the ocean. Head honcho Jack, who wants to prove to his employees that he’s a tough alpha male, insists on going in the water for shark sighting. And, predictably, he insists that a reluctant and frightened Tim go with him. Missy doesn’t help matters, because she berates Tim into going shark sighting with his boss, thereby further embarrassing Tim in front of his co-workers. There are some very slapstick moments in this scene that involves chum and vomit, further establishing Missy as a walking nightmare.

There’s also a somewhat silly subplot where Missy has skills as a hypnotist, which she uses on Jack to improve his marriage and change how he perceives Tim and Jess. This subplot is intended to show that as crazy-acting as Missy is, deep down she has a heart of gold, is a lot more emotionally intelligent than she first appears to be, and she really does care about true love.

Some of the gags in the movie work pretty well for some genuinely funny moments, such as the opening “blind date” scene and another physically comedic scene involving a sexual threesome with Tim, Missy and another woman on the retreat. (This review won’t reveal the spoiler info about who the other woman is.) Meanwhile, other scenes don’t work at all, such as a scene with the employees participating in a talent show during the retreat and a scene with a hypnotized Jack thinking that he’s a mermaid and insisting on interviewing Tim (who’s also dressed as a mermaid) and Jess in the ocean.

And what about the Missy whom Tim think is his Ms. Right? Tim tries to frantically get her to come to the retreat anyway, but she says she can’t because of work obligations. When she does show up toward the end of the movie, the results are very predictable.

And there’s a random cameo from Vanilla Ice. It’s a scene that will probably be funniest to people in Vanilla Ice’s and Adam Sandler’s generation (Generation X), who remember when Vanilla Ice went from being the hottest rap star in pop music to being a laughingstock has-been when he was exposed for lying about having a “street cred” background.

Spade doesn’t really do anything new in this movie that he hasn’t done already in several other films, since he often plays the “horrified straight man” to a wacky comedic partner. “The Wrong Missy” screenplay by Chris Pappas and Kevin Barnett also won’t be a considered a classic in the subgenre of raunchy romantic comedies. The movie has its best moments mostly because of the eye-catching and memorable talent of Lapkus, who seems to have above-average improv skills. “The Wrong Missy” can definitely be considered a breakout movie role that could lead to better things for her.

Netflix premiered “The Wrong Missy” on May 13, 2020.

Review: ‘Capone,’ starring Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Noel Fisher, Jack Lowden, Matt Dillon and Kyle MacLachlan

May 12, 2020

by Carla Hay

Tom Hardy in “Capone” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

“Capone”

Directed by Josh Trank

Culture Representation: Taking place in Miami Beach in 1947, the drama “Capone” has a predominantly white cast (with some Latino representation) and tells the story of the last year in the life of notorious mobster Al Capone.

Culture Clash: Suffering from neurosyphilis, a demented Capone has flashbacks to his gangster life and has conflicts with family members over his failing health.

Culture Audience: “Capone” will appeal mainly to people who are fascinated with famous American mobsters, but this incoherent movie gives little insight into Capone’s last days.

Tom Hardy in “Capone” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

Just like the way that the title character acts in the movie, the dramatic film “Capone” is a lumbering, stumbling mess that has trouble focusing and has difficulty finding a purpose. Tom Hardy, who seems to be attracted to playing a lot of menacing characters who mumble a lot, is notorious Chicago gangster Alphonse “Al” Capone in the film. The once-powerful mob boss is a shadow of his former self in the last year of his life in 1947, when Capone was a 48-year-old recluse with neurosyphilis at his mansion in Miami Beach.

“Capone” (written, directed and edited by Josh Trank) is basically a 103-minute slog through various scenes of Capone (who insists that people call him Fonz, not Al) either hallucinating, having angry outbursts, or losing control of his bodily functions. Hardy—in grotesque makeup that makes him look like something out of a horror movie—gives it his best shot at delivering an earnest performance of Capone on a downward spiral, physically and mentally. But, unfortunately, the film is so poorly written and directed that “Capone” will be considered one of the low points of Hardy’s career.

There is no real plot to the movie, which takes place almost entirely at the mansion where Capone (released early from prison for tax evasion) is holed up with his loyal wife Mae (played by Linda Cardellini) and employees, including his main goon Gino (played by Gino Cafarelli). Instead of having a coherent story, the movie is supposed to be more like a fever dream that culminates in a machine-gun massacre that didn’t happen in real life.

At different parts of the film, Capone has visions of himself as a child. And there are scenes of him having elaborate dinners with relatives that include his son Junior (played by Noel Fisher), who spends most of the film looking mournful over his father’s pathetic decline. Throughout the movie, a character named Tony (played by Mason Guccione), who’s supposed to be Capone’s long-lost son, keeps calling from Cleveland. Sometimes, Tony talks on the phone when he calls, and other times he calls and says nothing. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.

There’s a character named Dr. Karlock (played by Kyle MacLachlan), who occasionally comes to visit and fret about Capone’s declining health. When the doctor tells Capone’s relatives that cigar-loving Capone has to give up smoking, the relatives act as if the news is as bad as getting a limb amputated. The doctor suggests that Capone chew on a carrot as a substitute for a cigar, and Dr. Karlock demonstrates how it can be done. In response, Gino mocks the doctor for looking like Bugs Bunny. However, for the rest of the movie, viewers will see the bizarre spectacle of Hardy trying to look tough with a carrot in his mouth.

There’s also a laughable scene where Capone is watching “The Wizard of Oz” in a private screening room, when he gets up and sings along to the Cowardly Lion song “If I Were King of the Forest.” In the scene, Cardellini has a hard time keeping a straight face. And most people watching will either laugh or be horrified that Hardy (who’s capable of doing Oscar-caliber work) sunk this low to do this poor-quality film that’s so bad, it’s almost campy.

Capone also has a friend who comes to visit named Johnny (played by Matt Dillon), whose history with Capone isn’t really explained, except that it’s implied that they’ve known each other since before he was in prison. And they know each other well enough for Capone to confide in Johnny while they’re on a fishing trip that Capone has $10 million hidden, but he can’t remember where he hid the money.

But is this real or all in Capone’s head? That question can be asked about many things in the movie. While Johnny drives the car that they take to the fishing trip, Capone is disguised as a woman because he’s paranoid about the government agents who are on his property and watching his every move. If the world needed to see a movie with Capone in drag, you now have writer/director Trank to thank for that.

Trank, by the way, cast himself in “Capone” in a cameo as a FBI agent named Clifford Harris, who accompanies another FBI agent named Stone Crawford (played by Jack Lowden) when they visit the ailing Capone at his home. The FBI agents are on a fruitless quest to get Capone to reveal the secret places where he might have hidden a fortune worth millions. Capone’s attorney Harold Mattingly (played by Neal Brennan) sits in on this pointless interview, and answers most of the questions on behalf of Capone, who can barely grunt answers to the questions.

And then there’s Capone’s nasty temper. He yells at the Latino employees who do yard work on his property, and shouts at one of them that if this servant touches a certain statue, Capone will blow the employee’s head off. While on the fishing trip with Johnny, Capone shoots an alligator for “stealing his fish.” And something as simple as seeing Gino eating at the dinner table is enough to set off Capone, who flings the tablecloth and food, and stomps around and howls like a gorilla that’s been stung by a bee.

Capone is also abusive to his wife Mae. When he spits on her, she hits him so hard that he falls down and hits his head on a hard-surface floor. There’s no purpose to this scene, except to put some of the blame on Mae for the head injury that further causes Capone’s mental deterioration. Like many things in the movie, do not assume that any of it happened in real life.

And that’s not all the violence in the film. Capone has flashbacks or hallucinations about fatal shootings and brutal stabbings. There’s also a scene where he hallucinates that Johnny has pried his own eyes out and served the bloody eyeballs to Capone on a bedsheet. What’s the point of all this gore? Nothing, really, except to remind people that this is supposed to be a movie about a gangster.

Even the most die-hard fans of Hardy will have their patience tested by watching this mindless film, which has moments that are downright embarrassing to everyone involved in the movie. One can only assume that Hardy was attracted to this “Capone” role for a chance to play dress-up as one of the most famous American mobsters of all time. But he’s reduced to being a grunting, marble-mouthed caricature that can barely put a thought together. The movie has no impactful flashbacks that show Capone in his prime, except for a silly scene that has Capone imagining himself at a party where he gets up on stage with the band leader to sing Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill.”

The blame for this sewage dump of a movie lies mostly with writer/director/editor Trank, whose previous film was the 2015 remake of “Fantastic Four,” another stagnant and messy flop. An epilogue in “Capone” says that most of Capone’s relatives changed their names after he died. After making the disastrous “Capone,” Trank might want to think about changing his name too.

Vertical Entertainment released “Capone” in select U.S. virtual cinemas and on digital and VOD on May 12, 2020.

Review: ‘How to Build a Girl,’ starring Beanie Feldstein, Alfie Allen, Paddy Considine, Chris O’Dowd and Emma Thompson

May 11, 2020

by Carla Hay

Beanie Feldstein in “How to Build a Girl” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“How to Build a Girl”

Directed by Coky Giedroyc 

Culture Representation: Taking place in early 1990s England (and briefly in Dublin), the comedy film “How to Build a Girl” has a predominantly white cast (with some representation of black people and Indian people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: A 16-year-old girl who’s a misfit in school reinvents herself as a hotshot music journalist and becomes the type of bully she used to hate.

Culture Audience: “How to Build a Girl” will appeal mostly to people who like coming-of-age films about teenagers or movies about entertainment journalism, but viewers should not expect this film to have a realistic portrayal of what it’s like to be a beginner journalist.

Alfie Allen and Beanie Feldstein in “How to Build a Girl” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“How to Build a Girl” tries very hard to be a charming, coming-of-age comedy with a heavy dose of nostalgia (in ways that writer/director Cameron Crowe’s 2000 Oscar-winning dramedy “Almost Famous” did so well), but “How to Build a Girl” suffers from presenting too many unrealistic fantasies about magazine journalism, in order to serve the movie’s cutesy plot. The results are mixed.

Beanie Feldstein gives a winning performance as the main character, and there’s solid direction from Coky Giedroyc in this movie that ultimately has a feel-good feminist message. But that message is cheapened by Caitlin Moran’s screenplay, which overloads the story with an abundance of “too good to be true” moments that gloss over the harsh realities of showbiz and journalism.

Moran adapted the “How to Build a Girl” screenplay from her 2014 semi-autobiographical novel of the same title, which was based on Moran’s real-life experiences of being a teenage journalist in the early 1990s for the now-defunct British music magazine Melody Maker. Moran also had some ’90s fame in her native Great Britain, as the host of the short-lived Channel 4 music show “Naked City.” She went on to write for several publications and became the author of multiple books.

In the “How to Build a Girl” movie, Feldstein plays Johanna Morrigan, a moody and bookish 16-year-old who comes from a working-class family in Wolverhampton, England. Johanna is the oldest of five children, and all of her siblings are brothers, including newborn twins. Her father Pat (played by Paddy Considine) is a frustrated drummer/wannabe rock star who’s been waiting for his “big break” for decades. Her disheveled mother Angie (played by Sarah Solemani) is overwhelmed with taking care of a large family and suffers from post-partum depression.

Angie is a homemaker and Pat can’t keep a steady job, so the family mainly lives off of government assistance and whatever questionable “get rich quick” schemes cooked up by Pat. (At one point in the movie, Pat gets busted for fraudulently claiming disability benefits, while he breeds Border Collies for extra money.) At school, Johanna is an outcast who has no friends. Her closest companions are her dog Bianca and her gay teenage brother Krissi (played by Laurie Kynaston), who confides in Johanna about his boy crushes and tentative first steps in dating.

Johanna has an eclectic myriad of historical figures whom she admires and whose pictures she keeps plastered on her wall. They include Sigmund Freud; Elizabeth Taylor; Karl Marx; Sylvia Plath; Donna Summer; Cleopatra; the fictional Jo March from “Little Women”; Maria von Trapp of “The Sound of Music” fame; and writer sisters Emily Bronte and Charlotte Bronte. Johanna has a vivid imagination, so one of the memorable aspects of the film is that it sometimes brings these pictures to life, as they speak to Johanna and give her advice. Several well-known entertainers have cameos with these roles, such as Michael Sheen as Freud, pop star Lily Allen as Taylor, Jameela Jamil as Cleopatra, Gemma Arterton as von Trapp and Lucy Punch as Plath.

In fact, the most whimsical moments of “How to Build a Girl” come from Johanna’s numerous fantasies that are depicted on screen of what’s going on inside her head. For the most part, they work well in boosting the comedy level when the movie tackles some dark subjects, such as Johanna’s anxiety and depression that lead to suicidal thoughts. What doesn’t work well in the movie is the unbelievable way that she skyrockets from being an unknown teenage student to being a famous writer at a major rock magazine without any experience or knowledge of rock music.

Johanna has dreams of being a writer, but she hasn’t quite figured out what type of writer she wants to be. She enters a poetry contest with a poem titled “My Best Friend,” about her beloved dog Bianca. To her surprise, she ends up winning the contest. So, Johanna is invited to recite the poem on a local news/talk show called “Today in the Midlands,” hosted by a slick TV personality type named Alan “Wilko” Wilkinson (played by Chris O’Dowd, in a cameo).

Unfortunately, Johanna is extremely nervous when she gets to the TV studio, so she ends up embarrassing herself by being overly touchy-feely with the host and rambling on about how she and Bianca are a lot like the famous cartoon characters Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Needless to say, Wilko can’t get her off the air fast enough.

Back at school, Johanna gets the expected teasing and bullying from her classmates for her disastrous TV appearance. She sinks even further into her emotional shell and starts having thoughts about killing herself. (Johanna’s imaginary friends on her wall try to cheer her up, but notoriously depressive poet Plath whispers that she can give Johanna some tips on suicide.)

Meanwhile, Johanna’s family falls further into a financial hole, as the family’s TV (which is the center of their household’s social activities) gets repossessed. But wouldn’t you know, here comes another contest. This time, it’s from the London-based rock music magazine Disc & Music Echo (D&ME), which is having a Young Gunslinger competition for aspiring young writers. The winner will get to write for the magazine on a part-time basis.

Johanna knows almost nothing about rock music (even though her dad is a rock musician, albeit an unsuccessful one), but she enters the contest anyway. She writes a sincere essay praising one of her favorite songs: “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” from the musical “Annie.” And in yet another unrealistic plot point, she gets a call that she’s won that contest too.

So off she goes to London to D&ME headquarters, with excited dreams of becoming a glamorous music journalist. (D&ME is the movie’s obvious parody of real-life British music magazine NME.) However, Johanna gets a rude awakening when she discovers that the congratulatory call that she received was just a cruel prank from the sexist managing editor Derby (played by Ziggy Heath), who leads an all-male team of writers and editors.

Derby and his D&ME co-workers are skeptical that someone of the female gender can be taken seriously as a music journalist. One of the writers on the staff is the lecherous Tony Rich (played by Frank Dillane), who eyes Johanna in a way that makes it obvious that he sees her as “fresh meat.” (The age of consent in the United Kingdom is 16.)

When Johanna finds out that the D&ME editors think her writing submission was a joke and that they had no intention of hiring her, she refuses to leave. She begs, pleads and talks her way into being hired on the spot for an intern-type of position. It’s one of many unrealistic things that happen in the movie.

And she immediately gets a plum assignment: a concert review of Manic Street Preachers, who were one of the hottest bands in England at the time. So off Johanna goes to the club in Birmingham to see the band play. She’s accompanied by her father Pat, since Johanna doesn’t have her driver’s license. It’s Johanna’s first time at a rock concert, and she’s blown away by the experience.

Meanwhile, her father thinks that he can use Johanna’s new position at D&ME to pass on a demo tape to her to hopefully get it reviewed in the magazine. He even starts to sit in as a drummer for a young local band called the Strange Cases that come over to the Morrigan house to rehearse. As Pat Morrigan tells Johanna, he was raised to believe that the three best ways to get rich are by being a “boxer, a footballer or a pop star.”

Johanna doesn’t think her real name is cool enough for the magazine, so she comes up with the alias Dolly Wilde for her articles. She also changes her image, by ditching her mousy brown hair and dyeing it scarlet red. Johanna also stops wearing schoolgirl clothes and starts wearing outfits that look like shopping-mall versions of Victorian Goth, complete with black top hats and fishnet stockings.

When she hands in the concert review, which naturally gushes about the band in the review, Derby tells her that it sounds like a review written by a teenage girl. She’s crushed by the criticism because she was expecting to get a bigger assignment. However, Derby refuses because he thinks she’s an annoying girl who doesn’t know anything about the music she’s supposed to cover.

And then Derby does something very creepy in full view of several staffers: He tells Johanna to sit on his lap. Even though it’s obvious sexual harassment, Johanna uses it to her advantage, by playfully moving heavily around his lap and putting Derby in a headlock until a red-faced Darby relents and gives her another assignment, in yet another very unrealistic movie moment. This time, Johanna gets to fly to Dublin to do an interview with a British rock star on the rise named John Kite (played by Alfie Allen), even though she has absolutely no experience doing interviews and doesn’t know anything about John’s music.

Although “How to Build a Girl” tries to have a teachable moment with the sexual-harassment scene, it’s almost offensive how the movie brushes it aside with a slapstick response that pokes fun at the body size of the female target of the harassment. Would that scene have been done that way if Feldstein were a thin actress? Probably not, because the gimmick of the scene was that she was “too big” for Derby’s lap, and therefore caused him physical pain when she moved around on his lap. And he gave Johanna the assignment not because he thought she deserved it but because he just wanted her to get off of his lap and go away.

Johanna is woefully unprepared for the interview (how unprofessional), and she admits to John that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s lucky that John is such a gentleman that not only does he give her a good interview, but he also shows her around Dublin. At the concert, she gets a backstage pass, so she watches the show from the side of the stage. Predictably, she’s transfixed and star-struck.

And when Johanna gets too tipsy from alcohol, John takes her back to his hotel room and lets her sleep on his bed, while he sleeps in the bathtub. And not once does he sexually harass her or try to take advantage of this obviously unworldly and gullible teenager. By the end of the trip, Johanna thinks she’s “in love” with John.

“How to Build a Girl” has the same problem that the 2019 comedy “Late Night” (starring Mindy Kaling) had in portraying a spunky heroine who’s chosen as the “token” female writer/co-worker in a male-dominated media job, even though she has no experience and is clueless about what it takes to do the job. Both movies make the mistake of having the main character fall into a bunch of “dumb luck” situations that lead to rapid career advancements that an inexperienced beginner would never get in real life, unless they have inside connections.

The heroines in both movies have neither experience nor inside connections, since each story relies on the premise that these newcomers are naïve outsiders when they get their dream jobs in showbiz. They were hired as “tokens” to be pitied or ridiculed, not to be respected. It panders to the worst negative stereotypes about affirmative action—that “token” people really aren’t qualified, and a “token” is getting a spot that should’ve gone to someone who is qualified. Affirmative action, when done right, is supposed to give qualified people a chance. (Coincidentally, both movies have Emma Thompson playing a boss, although her role in “How to Build a Girl” is essentially a cameo.)

It’s a disservice to feminism to portray these female protagonists as very ignorant, unqualified tokens who easily get a dream job that they didn’t work hard to get. It’s why “Late Night,” in its blatant and cynical pandering to forced diversity, flopped with audiences. And it’s why “How to Build a Girl” won’t win over a large audience either. Having a “cute” personality without working hard doesn’t entitle someone to great opportunities, even if you try to cloak it in a “feminist” message.

People in the real world don’t like it when filmmakers have a smug attitude that a female lead character with a plucky personality should be enough for audiences to root for that character. Audiences want a character who also has substance, starting with the character showing genuine appreciation for all the dumb luck that comes her way when she has her unrealistic, quick career ascension. It’s probably why “How to Build a Girl,” just like “Late Night,” isn’t going to find a wide audience, or even a cult audience that will enthusiastically recommend this movie to other people.

“How to Build a Girl” takes the protagonist’s dumb luck to new levels of “only in a movie” stupidity. While she’s still working part-time for the magazine, Johanna makes enough money to support her family, and she becomes very arrogant about it. This movie apparently doesn’t want the audience to know the reality that no magazine in the Western world pays a part-time beginner enough money to support a family of seven.

Johanna becoming the family’s breadwinner is an extreme plot development that’s unnecessary and undermines this movie’s potential to make this story relatable to a lot of people. It’s an insult to the audience’s intelligence for the movie to try to make people believe that an underage teenager who’s basically on the level of a magazine intern can suddenly support a large family with what everyone knows would be a very low salary in real life. A better-written screenplay would’ve kept it more realistic, by having Johanna make enough money to have more disposable income for just herself, not her entire family.

Johanna gets a minor setback when she’s about to be fired for writing articles that fawn too much over the artists. Derby and the other editors think she’s too immature and “girly” for the job. Tony is somewhat willing to defend Johanna, but it’s only because he has sleazy ulterior motives. He privately tells Derby, “There’s never been an organization that wasn’t improved from hiring jailbait.”

Once again, in an unrealistic way, Derby changes his mind about getting rid of Johanna, after she alters her Dolly Wilde persona to become a cruelly derogatory critic who uses over-the-top insults to get attention. Johanna’s change in writing style from star-struck fangirl to angry cynic was the result of a conversation that Johanna had with her smarmy co-worker Tony. “In order to get ahead, you have to get a hate,” Johanna says in an “a-ha” moment. In a voiceover, Johanna says, “Nice girls get nowhere, but a bitch can make a comeback.”

And in yet another unrealistic aspect of the story, Johanna actually becomes famous. She gets fan mail and is recognized in public by adoring admirers, all because of her writing in the magazine. Keep in mind, the movie takes place years before social media existed. Music journalists in the ’90s didn’t get the level of attention that Johanna gets in this movie, unless the journalists were on TV a lot. And in the movie, Johanna is a print journalist only, not a TV personality.

The rest of the movie shows what happens after Johanna’s “fame” goes to her head and she becomes everything she used to hate about people who bullied her. “How to Build a Girl” also explores Johanna’s sexual liberation (she loses her virginity and has various sex partners), and how it affects her attitude about herself and other people. The movie shows how she handles the issue of female journalists getting sexually involved with people they interview or co-workers, and how those choices can affect the reputation of a woman differently than a man who makes the same choices.

Issues about social classes are also addressed, since most of Johanna’s co-workers at the magazine are privileged young men who went to prestigious universities, while Johanna comes from a very different background. Although Johanna tries her best to fit in with the guys, there are a few scenes in the movie that effectively show how her elitist co-workers really feel about the gender/social barriers that keep someone like Johanna from truly being a part of their clique. Johanna also faces some ethical dilemmas that demonstrate how much she’s willing to “sell her soul” to impress her co-workers.

Feldstein (who’s an American) does an admirable but not outstanding job in portraying the Wolverhampton accent and the transformative character arc that Johanna goes through in the story. However, it’s time for Feldstein to move on to a better variety of roles, because she’s in danger of being typecast as the “awkward misfit.” So far, most audiences know her for playing awkward, misfit teens in films such as “Lady Bird,” “Booksmart” and “How to Build a Girl.”

And for a movie about music journalism, it’s a huge letdown that the soundtrack to “How to Build a Girl” is very forgettable. There isn’t one single scene in the movie that will make people remember a particular song, so don’t expect this movie’s soundtrack to be an award-winning hit, like the Grammy-winning “Almost Famous” soundtrack.

It’s also disappointing that Moran couldn’t use her real-life experiences as a music journalist to write a more realistic screenplay. This movie was clearly intended for adults (based on the adult language and sex in the film), but “How to Build a Girl” is also like a children’s movie in the way that it removes a lot of showbiz realities and replaces them with wide-eyed, unrealistic fantasies about how the business works. You can’t really have it both ways, because the end result is a movie with an uneven tone. “How to Build a Girl” wants to be edgy, but it’s as edgy as a melted popsicle.

IFC Films released “How to Build a Girl” on digital and VOD on May 8, 2020. The film’s U.K. release is on July 20, 2020.

2020 TV Upfronts: Fox announces 2020-2021 schedule; see photos and videos

May 11, 2020

by Carla Hay

Gerald McRaney, Aubrey Dollar and Kim Cattrall in “Filthy Rich” (Photo by Alan Markfield/Fox)

Fox has officially announced its 2020-2021 schedule. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox’s in-person upfront presentation (which is usually held at the Beacon Theatre in New York City) was cancelled and the announcement was made online instead. Most of the existing shows had previously been announced as renewed. However, the upfront presentation made it official that the following shows have been cancelled: “Empire,” “BH90210,” “Almost Family” (originally titled “Not Just Me”), “What Just Happened??! With Fred Savage,” “The Orville” (which has moved to Hulu) and “Deputy.” Fox has not yet announced the fates of “Last Man Standing,” “Prodigal Son,” “The Resident,” “Outmatched,” “Spin the Wheel,” “Labor of Love” and “The Ultimate Tag.”*

*[May 19, 2020 UPDATE: Fox has announced that it has renewed “Last Man Standing” and “The Resident.”]

*[May 21, 2020 UPDATE: Fox has announced that it has renewed “Prodigal Son.”]

New scripted shows on Fox include “Call Me Kat,” “Filthy Rich,” “The Great North,” “Housebroken,” and “neXt.” The cop drama “L.A.’s Finest,” which originally premiered exclusively on the Spectrum cable system in 2019, will be re-aired on Fox. Also moving from cable TV for repeat airings on Fox is National Geographic’s alternative programming series “Cosmos: Possible Worlds,” hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Several actors who are familiar to TV audiences are starring in these shows, including “Call Me Kat” star Mayim Bialik (formerly of “The Big Bang Theory” and “Blossom”); “neXt” star John Slattery (formerly of “Mad Men”); “Filthy Rich” stars Kim Cattrall (an alum of “Sex and the City”) and Gerald McRaney, whose numerous former TV shows include “House of Cards,” “Promised Land,” “Major Dad” and “Simon & Simon”; and “L.A.’s Finest” stars Jessica Alba (who became famous for starring in the “Dark Angel” TV series) and Gabrielle Union, who previously starred in “Being Mary Jane.”

Fall premiere dates will be announced at a later time. Please note that shows picked up but not listed on the schedule below will have their season debuts at other times in the 2020-2021 season. They include new shows such as “Call Me Kat,” “The Great North” and “Housebroken,” as well as renewed shows such as “9-1-1,” “9-1-1: Lone Star,” “Beat Shazam,” “Duncanville,” “Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell & Back,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” “MasterChef” and “So You Think You Can Dance.”

The following is an excerpt from a Fox press release:

FOX FALL 2020 SCHEDULE

All times listed are Eastern Time only.

MONDAY

8-9 p.m.   “L.A.’s Finest”
9-10 p.m. “neXt”

TUESDAY

8-9 p.m.   “Cosmos: Possible Worlds”
9-10 p.m. “Filthy Rich”

WEDNESDAY

8-9 p.m.   “The Masked Singer”
9-10 p.m. “MasterChef Junior”

THURSDAY

7:30-8 p.m. “Fox NFL Thursday Presented by Verizon”
8-8:19 p.m.  “GMC Kickoff”
8:20 p.m.      “Thursday Night Football Presented by Bud Light Platinum”

FRIDAY

8-10 p.m.      “WWE’s Smackdown Live”

SATURDAY

7-10:30 p.m. “Fox Sports Saturday”

SUNDAY

7-7:30 p.m.  “NFL on Fox”
7:30-8 p.m.  “The OT”/Fox Encores
8-8:30 p.m.  “The Simpsons”
8:30-9 p.m.  “Bless the Harts”
9-9:30 p.m.  “Bob’s Burgers”
9:30-10 p.m. “Family Guy”

NEW DRAMA SERIES

“FILTHY RICH”

Aaron Lazar, Deneen Tyler, Mark L. Young, Melia Kreiling, Benjamin Aquilar, Gerald McRaney, Kim Cattrall, Aubrey Dollar, Corey Cott, Olivia Macklin and Steve Harris in “Filthy Rich” (Photo by Justin Stephens/Fox)

From writer/director Tate Taylor (“Ma,” “The Help,” “The Girl on the Train”) comes FILTHY RICH, a southern Gothic family drama in which wealth, power and religion intersect – more correctly, collide – with outrageously soapy results. Meet the Monreauxes, a mega-rich Southern family famed for creating a wildly successful Christian television network. On the cusp of launching a digital retail arm of the company, the family’s patriarch, EUGENE (Emmy Award winner Gerald McRaney, “This Is Us,” “24: Legacy”), dies in a plane crash (or so we think), leaving MARGARET (Emmy Award and Golden Globe nominee Kim Cattrall, “Sex and the City”), a now-“Oprah” to the religious and Southern communities, to take charge of the family business.

Not surprisingly, Eugene’s apparent death greatly impacts the Monreaux children: ERIC (Corey Cott, “The Good Fight,” “Z: The Beginning of Everything”), the couple’s ambitious son, who assumes he will now run the show; and daughter ROSE (Aubrey Dollar, “Battle Creek”), a budding fashion designer, who constantly struggles to evade the vast shadow cast by her mother. If that wasn’t enough, the Monreauxes are stunned to learn that Eugene fathered three illegitimate children, all of whom are written into his will.

Now, Margaret must use her business savvy and Southern charm to control her newly legitimized heirs, whose very existence threatens the Monreaux family name and fortune: GINGER (Melia Kreiling, “Tyrant,” “The Borgias”), the tough-as-nails daughter of a Vegas cocktail waitress, whose life was virtually destroyed by Eugene’s rejection; ANTONIO (Benjamin Levy Aguilar, “Straight Outta Compton”), a single dad and boxer from Queens, NY; and JASON (Mark L. Young, “The Comeback,” “We’re the Millers”), another scion, who is not what he seems to be. With monumental twists and turns, not to mention lies, deceit and shade from every direction, FILTHY RICH presents a world in which everyone has an ulterior motive – and no one is going down without a fight. The series is based on the New Zealand format created by Filthy Productions Limited.

“L.A.’S FINEST”

(previously aired on Spectrum)

Gabrielle Union and Jessica Alba in “L.A.’s Finest” (Photo by Erica Parise/Sony Pictures Television)

From the universe of the Jerry Bruckheimer “Bad Boys” franchise and Sony Pictures Television, the one-hour series L.A.’S FINEST follows Syd Burnett (Gabrielle Union), last seen in Miami taking down a drug cartel, who has seemingly left her complicated past behind to become an LAPD detective. Paired with a new partner, Nancy McKenna (Jessica Alba), a working mom with an equally complex history, Syd is forced to confront how her unapologetic lifestyle may be masking a greater personal secret. Taking on the most dangerous criminals in Los Angeles while skirting the rules, and speed limits, Syd and Nancy become a force to be reckoned with – on the streets, and in each other’s lives.

“neXt”

John Slattery in “neXt” (Photo by Ed Ariquel/Fox)

From creator and executive producer Manny Coto (“24: Legacy”) and executive producers and directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (“This Is Us”), neXt is a propulsive, fact-based thriller about the emergence of a deadly, rogue artificial intelligence, a series that asks us to look closely not only at our relationship to technology, but to one another. Silicon Valley pioneer PAUL LEBLANC (Emmy Award nominee John Slattery, “Mad Men,” “Veep”) built a fortune and legacy on the world-changing innovations he dreamed up, while ignoring and alienating the people around him, including his own daughter, ABBY (Elizabeth Cappucino, “Jessica Jones,” “Deception”), and his short-sighted younger brother, TED (Jason Butler Harner, “Ozark,” “Ray Donovan”), who now runs Paul’s company.

After discovering that one of his own creations – a powerful A.I. called neXt – might spell doom for humankind, Paul tried to shutter the project, only to be kicked out of the company by his own brother, leaving him with nothing but mounting dread about the fate of the world. When a series of unsettling tech mishaps points to a potential worldwide crisis, LeBlanc joins forces with Special Agent SHEA SALAZAR (Fernanda Andrade, “The First,” “Here and Now”).

Having escaped crime, poverty and a deadly criminal father to remake herself as a force for good, Salazar’s strict moral code and sense of duty have earned her the respect of her team – a talented but contentious group held together by her faith in their ability to defy expectations and transcend their differences, including GINA (Eve Harlow, “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” “Heroes Reborn”), a high-strung cybercrime agent; BEN (Aaron Moten, “Disjointed,” “Mozart in the Jungle”), a straight-laced, buttoned-up hard worker, who is boring to the point of being interesting; and CM (Michael Mosley, “Ozark,” “Seven Seconds”), an ex-con hacker with a genius IQ.

But the demands of Shea’s challenging job have taken their toll on her home life, where Salazar’s young son, OWEN (Evan Whitten, THE RESIDENT, “Mr. Robot”), has been raised primarily by his father, TY (Gerardo Celasco, “How to Get Away with Murder,” “The Haves and the Have Nots”), a recovering alcoholic. Now, LeBlanc and Salazar are the only ones standing in the way of a potential global catastrophe, fighting an emergent superintelligence that, instead of launching missiles, will deploy the immense knowledge it has gleaned from the data all around us to recruit allies, turn people against each other and eliminate obstacles to its own survival and growth. Marrying pulse-pounding action with a layered examination of how technology is invading our lives and transforming us in ways we don’t yet understand, neXt presents us with a villain unlike anything we’ve ever seen – one whose greatest weapon against us is ourselves.

NEW COMEDY SERIES

“CALL ME KAT”

CALL ME KAT stars Mayim Bialik and is executive produced by Bialik and Jim Parsons. Nor further details were provided by Fox.

“THE GREAT NORTH”

From executive producer Loren Bouchard (BOB’S BURGERS), animated comedy THE GREAT NORTH follows the Alaskan adventures of the Tobin family, as a single dad does his best to keep his weird bunch of kids close, especially as the artistic dreams of his only daughter lead her away from the family fishing boat and into the glamorous world of the local mall. The voice cast includes Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Jenny Slate, Will Forte, Paul Rust, Aparna Nancherla and Dulcé Sloan. Alanis Morissette makes a guest appearance in the voice cast.

“HOUSEBROKEN”

Details are to be announced for this animated series.

NEW ALTERNATIVE SERIES

“COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS”

(previously aired on National Geographic)

Neil deGrasse Tyson in “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” (Photo by Patrick McElhenney/Fox)

Returning for its third installment, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning COSMOS will once again be executive-produced, written and directed by Ann Druyan (NASA’s Voyager Record, “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” “Contact”); executive produced by Seth MacFarlane, Brannon Braga and Jason Clark; and hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famed pop-culture icon and astrophysicist. Continuing the legacy of its predecessors, COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS will translate the revelations of science into a lavishly transporting experience, taking audiences on a series of spiritual voyages of exploration. Created and produced in partnership with the National Geographic Channel, which aired the series this spring, the new season will reveal previously uncharted realms, including lost worlds and worlds to come, and those that we may one day inhabit in a thrilling future we can still have.

Review: ‘Call Your Mother,’ starring David Spade, Louie Anderson, Awkwafina, Roy Wood Jr., Norm Macdonald, Kristen Schaal, Bridget Everett and Fortune Feimster

May 10, 2020

by Carla Hay

David Spade and his mother, Judy Todd, in “Call Your Mother” (Photo by Jenna Rosher/Comedy Central)

“Call Your Mother”

Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

Culture Representation: The documentary “Call Your Mother” features a racially diverse (white, African American and Asian) group of mostly American comedians talking about how their mothers have affected their lives, with some of the comedians’ mothers also participating in the documentary,.

Culture Clash: Some of the comedians describe having nonconformist or dysfunctional childhoods that are often used as material for their stand-up comedy acts.

Culture Audience: “Call Your Mother” will appeal primarily to people who want to learn more about the family backgrounds of some well-known comedians.

Louie Anderson with a picture of his mother, Ora Zella Anderson, in “Call Your Mother” (Photo by Alex Takats/Comedy Central)

If you ask any stand-up comedian who’s the family member most likely to inspire material for their stand-up comedy act, chances are the comedian will answer, “My mother.” With that in mind, the documentary “Call Your Mother” interviews a variety of comedians (and some of their mothers) to talk about how with these mother-child relationships have affected the comedians’ lives. Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, “Call Your Mother” might not have a deep impact on society, but it accomplishes what it intends to do. The film is a mostly light-hearted, sometimes emotionally moving and occasionally raunchy ride that will give some psychological insight into how and why these comedians ended up where they are now.

“Call Your Mother” includes interviews with a notable list of comedians (almost all of them are American), including Louie Anderson, Awkwafina, Jimmy Carr, Bridget Everett, Fortune Feimster, Rachel Feinstein, Judah Friedlander, Jim Gaffigan, Judy Gold, Jen Kirkman, Jo Koy, Bobby Lee, the Lucas Brothers, Norm Macdonald, Jim Norton, Tig Notaro, Yvonne Orji, Kristen Schaal, David Spade and Roy Wood Jr.

In some cases, the mothers of these comedians are interviewed alongside their comedic children: Everett, Feimster, Schaal, Spade and Wood all have wisecracking moments with their mothers, who are also shown in the audiences while their children are on stage, as well as backstage or at home. Former “Saturday Night Live” star Macdonald is also interviewed with his mother.  (For whatever reason, no Latino comedians are in the documentary, which is a shame, because there are many Latino comedians who talk about their mothers in their stand-up acts.)

Bridget Everett’s mother, Freddie Everett, is memorable for being as foul-mouthed and crude as Bridget. (Freddie even gives the middle finger to the camera, but all in good fun.) Bridget Everett says, “My mother is really one of a kind. She’s the person you meet that you never forget. She can be kind of mean, but somehow she gets away with it.”

Bridget continues, “She’s got a real naughty streak in her,” when describing how her mother was the type to wear very revealing outfits in places where it would be inappropriate for a woman’s breasts to be openly displayed. “There’s something really liberating about that in a small, conservative town.”

Like many of the comedians interviewed in this documentary, Bridget Everett is a child of divorce. After her parents’ divorce, her mother Freddie (who raised six kids) would take a pre-teen Bridget with her to stalk her ex-husband, mainly to see if he was dating anyone new or other reasons to spy on his post-divorce love life.

Bridget remembers her mother telling her to look in windows and report what she saw to her mother. These experiences are part of Bridget Everett’s stand-up act.  And just like her mother used to do when she was young, Bridget Everett dresses in cleavage-baring outfits on stage. “My mom pulses through my performance,” she says. “It’s really a tribute to her.”

British comedian Carr says although his mother “was the funny person in the house,” she often suffered from depression. He turned to comedy to help cheer her up. He says of stand-up comedians: “Most of us come from unhappy childhoods.”

Fans of Louie Anderson already know about how he grew up in a home with an abusive, alcoholic father and a loving mother, because he’s used his childhood as joke material in his stand-up act for years. In the documentary, Anderson (who’s been doing stand-up comedy since 1978) says that he started out doing self-deprecating fat jokes, but he eventually switched to mostly jokes about his family when he saw that it got a stronger reaction from audiences. He also says that dressing in drag for his Christine Baskets character in the FX comedy series “Baskets” was a tribute to his mother, Ora Zella Anderson.

Anderson believes that there’s a reason why so many stand-up comedians come from dysfunctional, often abusive households: “I think comics are about control. They’re trying to control the whole situation, because we had no control growing up.”

Anderson also echoes what most stand-up comedians said in Comedy Central’s documentary “This Is Stand-Up” about gravitating to stand-up comedy because it was their way of being the center of attention and getting unconditional love from people, even if it’s for the limited time that the comedians are on stage.

Spade is another child of divorce. His father left his mother when he was a child, and he says it had long-lasting effects on him and undying respect for his mother, Judy Todd. “My mom is very positive and upbeat and also very funny and clever.”

Todd is seen visiting the set of her son’s talk show “Lights Out With David Spade” on her 82nd birthday, where the audience shouts “Happy Birthday” to her, and she’s invited on stage with the interview guests. Todd is somewhat “normal,” compared to what other comedians have to say about their mothers. She’s almost downright reserved, since she doesn’t do anything to embarrass her son.

The same can’t be said for what comedians Koy, Lee and Gold have to say about their mothers, whose cringeworthy mothering techniques have been fodder for much of these two comedians’ stand-up comedy acts. Koy, who was raised by his divorced Filipino mother, Josie Harrison, remembers how his outspoken mother would inflict terror on anyone who would dare to criticize him.

Bobby Lee talks about how his Korean immigrant mother, Jeanie Lee, used to call his name to get his attention, just so she could fart in front of him. And when they would go to a shopping mall, she would encourage Lee and his younger brother to play in the shopping-mall fountain, while she would take a nap on the floor in a store. Lee, who is a recovering alcoholic/drug addict, also claims that his mother was fairly good-natured about his multiple trips to rehab, whereas most other mothers would be horrified or ashamed. He describes a moment during a family rehab meeting where his mother got the family to laugh so hard in what was supposed to be a serious gathering, they almost got kicked out of the meeting.

Judy Gold says in the documentary that she had the quintessential nagging, over-protective Jewish mother, Ruth Gold, who liked to leave long, demanding phone messages. Gold’s mother passed away in 2015, but Gold still plays some of her mother’s phone messages in her stand-up comedy act. She also plays some of the phone messages in the documentary and remembers that she did not get much overt affection from her parents when she was growing up.

Gold also says that her parents weren’t the type to hug their children and say, “I love you.” Instead, in her family, people would be rewarded based on whoever did the best to “one-up” the others with a quip. Still, Gold says that toward the end of her mother’s life, she did express her love more openly, and she shares an emotionally touching memory of what happened the last time she spoke with her mother.

One of the issues that the documentary covers is how mothers react when they find out that their children want to be professional comedians. Roy Wood Jr. says it was a very uncomfortable experience for him, since he had dropped out of Florida A&M University after being put on probation for shoplifting. He secretly started doing stand-up comedy in 1999, and when he told his mother, Joyce Dugan Wood, that he wanted to do stand-up comedy full-time, she was very upset.

“She definitely felt my priorities were in the wrong place,” he says. So, in order to please his mother, Roy went back to Florida A&M. And when he graduated, he gave his mother the plaque of the college degree that “I didn’t need” and began pursuing a full-time comedy career. Now that he’s become a successful comedian (including a stint as a correspondent on “The Daily Show”), Wood says of his mother’s approval: “These days, I feel supported.”

When comedian/actress Awkwafina (whose real name is Nora Lum) was 4 years old, her mother died, so when she was growing up, her paternal grandmother was Awkwafina’s main mother figure. While most people in Awkwafina’s family had expectations for her to going into a traditional profession, her paternal grandmother encouraged Awkwafina to pursue her dreams in entertainment.

Although many of these comedians say vulgar things about their families in their stand-up acts, the documentary shows that a lot of stand-up comedians have a soft spot for their mothers and like to hang out with them. Kristen Schaal and her look-alike mother, Pam Schaal, are seen shopping together at a fabric store. Norm Macdonald and his mother, Ferne Macdonald, play Scrabble and golf together. Wood’s mother Joyce accompanies him to a tuxedo fitting.

But not all of these mother-child moments are warm and fuzzy. Some of the comedians, such as Norton and Spade, admit to changing their shows to being less offensive and less raunchy if they know their mothers are going to be in the audience.

Norton says that he’s felt uncomfortable at times when his sex life (which he talks about in his stand-up comedy routine) is a topic of conversation with his mother. Norton remembers how after he did a stand-up show where he talked about his experiences of hiring hookers, he got a call from his mother suggesting that he join a gym to meet new people and improve his dating life. (In the documentary, he even plays the voice mail from 2001 to prove it.)

As for talking about their mothers in their stand-up comedy acts, Koy says that it was hard for him to do at first, but his mother and the rest of his family have gotten used to it. Feinstein says about her mother: “She likes it when I impersonate her. She gets upset if I don’t.”

Fortune Feimster says something similar, in an interview seated next her mother, Ginger Feimster: “She would rather me talk about her and be the center of attention than me not talk about her at all,” Fortune says. “She’s a good sport and she likes the attention.” Ginger Feimster says in response, “That is so true.”

Whether these comedians’ relationships with their mothers have been good or not-so-good, one thing that most people can agree on is a sentiment that Gold expresses in the movie that is a tried and true cliché: “There’s nothing like a mother’s love.” And at the very least, this documentary might inspire people to get in touch with their mothers to express gratitude if their mothering wasn’t a complete disaster.

Comedy Central premiered “Call Your Mother” on May 10, 2020.

Review: ‘Driveways,’ starring Hong Chau, Brian Dennehy and Lucas Jaye

May 9, 2020

by Carla Hay

Brian Dennehy, Lucas Jaye and Hong Chau in “Driveways” (Photo courtesy of FilmRise)

“Driveways”

Directed by Andrew Ahn

Culture Representation: Taking place in Evansdale, New York, the dramatic film “Driveways” is about a middle-class Asian single mother and her pre-teen son who have traveled from Michigan to look after her recently deceased sister’s house, and they encounter a racially diverse group of people (white, African American and Latino) during their stay in Evansdale.

Culture Clash: The mother and son find themselves being affected by the neighbors, some of whom are more annoying than others.

Culture Audience: “Driveways” will appeal mostly to people who like low-key, “slice of life” independent dramas that have relatable moments about family and friendships.

Hong Chau and Lucas Jaye in “Driveways” (Photo courtesy of FilmRise)

As a dramatic film, “Driveways” does not have a lot of sweeping emotional arcs or pulse-pounding action. Instead, this quietly moving drama is more of a character study/meditation about the effects of not spending enough time with family and whether or not it’s to late to do anything about it. “Driveways” is the second-feature length film directed Andrew Ahn, who shows a lot of talent in authentic portrayals of everyday people.

In the beginning of the film, single mother Kathy (played by Hong Chau) and her son Cody (played by Lucas Jaye), who turns 9 years old during the course of the movie, are seen taking a road trip to Evansdale, New York. The movie includes montages of mother and son doing regular road-trip things, such as going to a rest stop and eating at a diner. It’s clear from the motel that they’re staying at that these two are on a very tight budget.

The movie also shows that Kathy and Cody have a fairly easygoing mother-son dynamic. Cody, who is quiet and obedient, keeps himself amused by constantly using his computer tablet. Kathy is a somewhat strict and protective mother, who tells Cody not to talk to strangers. The only tension in their relationship seems to be about Kathy’s smoking habit. Cody somewhat chastises her for not quitting smoking. She impatiently tells him that she’ll quit smoking when she’s less stressed out over their financial situation.

Viewers soon learn that Kathy and Cody are on the road trip because Kathy’s sister April, who was 12 years older than Kathy, has recently died, and April’s house in Evansdale is going to be put up for sale. April lived alone, and Kathy (who is April’s is closest living relative) has the responsibility of packing up the house to make it ready to sell.

Kathy and Cody plan to temporarily stay at the house during this process, but when they arrive at house, there’s no electricity. The electric bill hasn’t been paid since April’s death, so the company has cut off the service. But what’s even more surprising to Kathy and Cody is that when they first arrive at the house, it’s the first time that they see how April was living. She was a serious hoarder. The messy house is filled to the brim with a lot of junk, and there’s barely enough room to move around the house.

Back at the motel the next day, Kathy is on the phone trying to literally keep the lights on at the house of her recently deceased sister. She explains the situation to the customer service agent to ask that the house’s electricity be turned back on, and the request is granted.

The movie never reveals the cause of April’s death, and she isn’t seen in any photos or flashbacks. It gives the April character an air of mystery that can open up a lot for interpretation by viewers. Snippets of information come out about April, based on what Kathy tells Cody.

Because of the sisters’ age difference, Kathy and April weren’t really very close, especially toward the end of April’s life. As children, April was smart and and quiet, while Kathy says, “I was the wild one.”

The two sisters had somewhat of a falling out of their aging mother (who’s also now deceased) because Kathy and Cody ended up having to live with Kathy’s mother in cramped living quarters after splitting up with Cody’s father. Kathy couldn’t understand why April, whose house is big enough for more than one person, didn’t invite their mother to live with April.

But looking at the shocking condition of the house’s interior, Kathy is now faced with the realization that April knew how bad her hoarding was and was ashamed of it, which is why April never wanted their mother to live with her.

Viewers also get a sense of what April was like, based on the things that she hoarded. She collected a lot of knick knacks that are sold at discount stores.) And they make a pretty gruesome discovery: a dead cat in the bathtub. It’s implied that the cat probably starved to death because its owner wasn’t around to feed it.

While they’ve temporarily moved into April’s house, Cody and Kathy notice their elderly next-door neighbor Del (played by Brian Dennehy) has been observing them by sitting on his porch. Del is a Korean War veteran (which he proudly displaces on a baseball cap that he often wears) and a widower who lives alone.

At first, Del comes across as a grumpy curmudgeon who wants to be left alone, so Cody and Kathy try to stay out of his way. But one day while waiting on his porch, he mentions to Kathy that the ride he’s been waiting for is late to pick him up for an appointment, so Kathy offers to drive Del to where he needs to go. It turns out that the place where Del need to go is the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Center, which is where most of his social activities and where all of his friends are.

Slowly but surely, Del and Cody develop a grandfather-grandson type of bond. Del tells Cody about his memories as a war veteran and about his late wife Vera. Cody opens up to Del about his anxieties and feelings of loneliness. Del even lets Cody come over sometimes so they can have snacks together.

Kathy and Cody also meet some other neighbors. Miguel (played by Jeter Rivera) and Anna ((played by Sofia DiStefano) are friendly siblings who are around Cody’s age, and they introduce him to their love of manga.

Then there’s nosy neighbor Linda (played by Christine Ebersole), who makes thinly veiled racist comments about Mexicans in the neighborhood who have loud parties and have a lot of children because they’re Latino. Linda (who’s the type of annoying person who smiles to your face and then gossips about you behind your back) also intrusively asks Kathy if she can look around April’s house because April was a recluse who never invited people into her home. Kathy politely declines and says, “Maybe some other time.”

In a minor subplot, Linda introduces Cody to her bratty grandsons 11year-old Brandon (played by Jack Caleb) and 12-year-old Reese (played by James DiGiacomo), who have a thing for wrestling. They wrestle each other in yards, and they love to watch wrestling matches on TV.

One day, Cody is hanging out with Jack and Caleb in their living room while the two brothers watch wrestling on TV and Cody is more absorbed in playing games on his tablet. Jack and Caleb aggressively challenge Cody to a wrestling match. He tries to ignore them, but the persist. And then Cody vomits.

The next scene is of Del calling Kathy to tell her that Cody is at his place because Jack and Caleb did something to upset him. Kathy then asks Del if Cody had vomited, and the answer is yes. Kathy then tells Del that Caleb vomits when he feels overwhelmed and anxious.

After that Del tells Cody in a private conversation that he used to get vomit from nerves before he went into combat. it’s a turning point in Del and Cody’s relationship, and they become more emotionally attached to each other. They spend time together at the library and at the VFW Center. Del also opens up to Cody about regretting not spending enough time with his daughter Lisa when she was growing up because he was too busy working. Lisa is now a judge in Seattle, and Del is very proud of her, because he shows Cody a newspaper clipping of her when they’re at the library.

“Driveways” screenplay by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen lets viewers know in subtle and quiet moments that Del and Kathy are on similar emotional journeys as they look back on relationships with family members and feel remorseful about how they could have done things differently. It’s through these emotional journeys that decisions will be made that impact the futures of these Kathy, Cody and Del.

Chau, Dennehy and Jaye demonstrate in beautifully understated ways in their facial expressions (without over-emoting) what regret of family relationships feels like and how letting go of pride and resentment can start the healing process. The movie wisely resisted gimmicks of creating a controversy in the story or putting in familiar tropes such as making the Del character an Ebenezer Scrooge type. Instead, because the characters in “Driveways” are ordinary people, viewers can see more of themselves and their family members in these character. “Driveways” doesn’t hit people over the head with any preachy messages but it definitely will remind people about how important it is to make the most out of the time spent with friends and loved ones.

FilmRise released “Driveways” in select U.S. virtual cinemas, on digital and on VOD on May 7, 2020.

Little Richard dead at 87; flamboyant singer-musician was a pioneer in rock and roll

May 9, 2020

by Carla Hay

Little Richard, who is considered one of the leading pioneers of rock and roll from the 1950s, died of bone cancer at a family home in Tullahoma, Tennessee, on May 9, 2020. He was 87.

Little Richard’s longtime attorney Bill Sobel told the Associated Press: “He was not only an iconic and legendary musician, but he was also a kind, empathetic and insightful human being.”

Little Richard was born Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia, on December 5, 1932. He was the third of 12 children in a Baptist family led by his parents Charles “Bud” Penniman (who was a brick mason and church deacon) and Leva Mae Penniman. His father’s charismatic style of preaching later influenced Richard’s performance style.

In the early 1950s, a new genre of music called rock and roll was causing controversy in the United States because of its sexually suggestive lyrics. In its earliest years, rock was a music genre mostly performed by African American artists, so it was frequently called “race music.” Little Richard (who became famous for his pompadour hairdo, heavy makeup and foot-stomping piano playing) was one of the first stars of rock and roll. His best-known hits included “Tutti Frutti,” “Lucille,” “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Long Tall Sally.”

Fats Domino and Chuck Berry were also among the first rock stars, but as the music became more popular, white artists such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis started to perform rock music and took over the segregated pop charts, whereas black artists performing the same music were usually relegated to charts and radio stations for black artists. White artists eventually began to dominate rock music and got preferential treatment for radio airplay and other media attention, while the African American pioneers of rock could no longer get big hits and had to rely on their early breakthrough hits to keep their careers going as nostalgia acts.

For decades afterward, Little Richard complained about how rock music was “stolen” from the African Americans who invented the genre. In 1988, Little Richard (who also called himself the Architect of Rock and Roll) was among the first group of artists inducted in the inaugural Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. He received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1993, which is a non-competitive Grammy Award.

He also branched out into acting, by doing commercials, TV shows and movies, usually by portraying himself or characters that were versions of himself. His most notable movies included 1986’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and 1993’s “The Last Action Hero.”

Little Richard was married to Ernestine Harvin from 1957 to 1964, with the marriage ending in divorce. When they were married, the couple adopted their son Danny Jones, who is Little Richard’s only child.

Little Richard also led a life of extreme contrasts. At various times in his life, Little Richard publicly identified his sexuality as either bisexual or gay. He was open about his penchant for sexual voyeurism and exhibitionism, and he was arrested a few times in his life for lewd public conduct. Sometimes he publicly condemned homosexuality, while at other times, he publicly embraced it. In 1957, he became a born-again Christian and left show business, but then he returned to being a being an entertainer in the 1960s.

According to his 1985 official biography (“The Life and Times of Little Richard”) and interviews that he gave over the years, Little Richard also went from someone who abstained from drugs and alcohol early in his career to becoming a drug addict hooked on heroin, cocaine and PCP in the 1960s and 1970s. He became a preacher in the 1970s and later went back to being a full-time entertainer. His last concert was on August 25, 2014, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Review: ‘Spaceship Earth,’ starring John Allen, Marie Harding, Kathelin Gray, Mark Nelson, Linda Leigh, Tony Burgess and Sally Silverstone

May 8, 2020

by Carla Hay

Biosphere 2 dwellers in “Spaceship Earth.” Pictured from left to right: Jane Poynter, Linda Leigh, Mark Van Thillo, Taber MacCallum, Roy Walford (in front), Abigail Alling, Sally Silverstone and Bernd Zabel posing inside (Photo courtesy of Neon)

“Spaceship Earth”

Directed by Matt Wolf

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in Arizona and California, the documentary “Spaceship Earth” has an all-white cast of people who are interviewed about their involvement in the environmental experiment Biosphere 2, where eight people lived in a giant sealed dome from 1991 to 1993.

Culture Clash: The Biosphere 2 principals and participants were accused of being cult members and frauds by several legitimate members of the scientific community.

Culture Audience: “Spaceship Earth” will appeal mostly to viewers who have an interest in documentaries about eccentric people or futuristic ideas about how to sustain Earth’s environment.

Biosphere 2 in “Spaceship Earth” (Photo courtesy of Neon)

The documentary “Spaceship Earth” isn’t actually about a ship in outer space. It’s about a well-publicized, non-scientific experiment where eight people volunteered to live in an elaborate, sealed bio-dome called Biosphere 2 covering 2.5 acres in Tucson, Arizona, from 1991 to 1993. The idea was that Biosphere 2 could be a prototype for humans to have colonies in outer space. This bio-dome was called Biosphere 2 because the group considered Earth to be Biosphere 1. Although this documentary (directed by Matt Wolf) is certainly fascinating, it raises some questions that aren’t really answered in the film.

The first half of this two-hour movie is an extensive history of the group of eccentrics (who were hippies in the 1960s) that launched Biosphere 2 with the help of Texas billionaire Ed Bass. The group’s leader is John Allen (also known as Johnny Dolphin), a former member of the U.S. Army and a graduate of Harvard Business School. Allen was much older than the mostly young people in their late teens to 20s whom he recruited to join an experimental performing arts group in the late 1960s and early 1970s in San Francisco. The group would call itself the Theater of All Possibilities and would perform around the world.

Allen and several of the group members are interviewed in the documentary, including Marie Harding, also known as Flash, who would become Allen’s wife and chief financial administrator; Kathelin Gray, also known as Salty; William Dempster, also known as Freddy; and Mark Nelson, also known as Horse Shit. They all “dropped out” of their conventional lives to live in a commune and follow the leadership of Allen. All of this sounds like a cult, but the group members deny that they are a cult.

Unfortunately, the “Spaceship Earth” documentary doesn’t interview anyone with a more objective perspective of what this group was about, since everyone interviewed in the movie has been in the group for years or benefited financially from the Biodome 2 spectacle when it launched in the early 1990s. The only real voice of skepticism in the documentary is archival 1990s TV footage of an interview given by whistleblower David Stumpf, a former Biosphere 2 scientist, who said that Biosphere 2 was a scientific fraud and that it was just “trendy ecological entertainment.”

By 1969, the group was fed up with the commercialism of the San Francisco hippie scene and moved to New Mexico to live at a place called Synergia Ranch. It was at this ranch, where the commune members grew their own food and had a self-contained sustainable lifestyle, that Allen started to delve more into the idea of building an enclosed biosphere environment where humans could live. They funded their lifestyle by starting different businesses and doing performances.

The Synergia Ranch group was inspired by several books, including Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth,” the Whole Earth catalog and the works of William S. Burroughs. Even though the Theater of All Possibilities group lived a counterculture, hippie lifestyle, Gray says that the group “didn’t take drugs, which would kind of blow it.” It’s very hard to believe that statement, considering much of the group’s performances (shown in archival footage) look a lot like people whacked-out on psychedelics drugs.

Whether they used drugs or not, this group certainly had an unusual mindset that worshipped Allen. Nelson was a native of Brooklyn, New York, who had drifted from job to job before joining the group at the Synergia Ranch in 1969. Nelson says in the documentary that he was a taxi driver, a proofreader, a court reporter and a social worker before leaving New York for the alternative lifestyle offered by Allen and the group. “I really was looking for something different,” Nelson says.

Nelson, Gray and other members of the group talk about Allen being a brilliant visionary, with the word “genius” used quite a bit to describe him. Nelson says Allen is like “a father figure” to him and that Allen is “charismatic,” “tempestuous” and a “genius.” Gray gushes, “I met geniuses before, but no one like John Allen.” Gray hints that she was in love with Allen too, but is purposely vague in saying how intimate she got with him.

Allen’s wife Harding, who said she was never the marrying kind, explains why she agreed to marry him: “It wasn’t for the normal married life type of thing. We were married to make a project.” In other words, their relationship is more of a business arrangement than a traditional marriage.

By 1974, the group members relocated back to California, this time to Berkeley, with the ambition to build a giant Noah’s Ark-inspired ocean ship in nearby Oakland. They succeeded in that goal, and named the ship the Heraclitus. They sailed around the world in the ship and used their construction skills to get jobs by helping construct various buildings.

The group’s adventures in the Heraclitus planted the idea of building a sealed colony that could possibly be used in outer space. In the documentary, many of the group members talk about wanting to “make history” and being at the forefront of futuristic living. One of the key members of the group was Margaret Augustine (also known as Firefly), who started out in the group as a 19-year-old neophyte with no construction work experience and ended up as a chief architect of many of the group’s projects.

It was in the 1970s that the group found an enthusiastic supporter in billionaire Bass, who wanted the group to go to different areas and improve the land. Bass (who is not interviewed in the documentary) is described as someone who was a rebel from a conservative family and is obsessed as the group is about futuristic living. Gray comments about Bass, “He really liked the sense of exploration and adventure.”

Having a wealthy benefactor gave the group more clout, and they began hosting conferences with international intellectuals and “forward thinkers.” Allen is quick to take credit for these conferences being among the first to introduce to the public the concepts of global warming and climate change.

Phil Hawes, a sustainable architect who frequently spoke at these conferences, is credited by the group for coming up with the idea of an adobe spaceship that could be a colony for humans in outer space. Another big influence on the Biosphere project was the 1972 movie “Silent Running,” starring Bruce Dern as a scientist who makes a greenhouse in a space station after all plant life on Earth has been destroyed.

The documentary gets a lot more interesting in the second half, which details the construction, launch and controversy of Biosphere 2. For the massive undertaking of Biosphere 2, which was largely funded by Bass, several scientific consultants were used, including those from the University of Arizona, the Smithsonian Marine Systems Lab and the New York Botanical Garden.

Augustine was Biosphere 2’s chief executive officer, while Harding was the chief financial officer. Harding says that it took most of the 1980s to build Biosphere 2, and it cost $200 million back then. Tony Burgess, a desert ecologist, was recruited to design Biosphere 2’s desert. About 3,800 species of plant and animal life were brought into the dome. The idea was that Biosphere 2 would be completely sustainable on its own, with nothing from the outside to assist for the two years that the people would stay in the dome.

And then by 1990, there was the massive search to find volunteers who were willing to live in Biosphere 2 and not come out for two years. Allen said that he wanted to select “free thinkers,” not followers. There’s archival footage of the auditions, which basically look like Allen telling people to do weird performance antics and exercises. The dwellers could still communicate with the outside world by telephone and videoconferencing, but Allen would be the one to decide who could talk to the dwellers and vice versa. That kind of extreme control by one person doesn’t exactly sound like an atmosphere conducive to “free thinking.”

In the end, eight people were chosen to be the Biosphere 2 dwellers: Jane Poynter, Taber MacCallum, Abigail Alling, Bernd Zabe, Linda Leigh, Mark Van Thillo, Roy Walford and Sally Silverstone. MacCallum and Poynter were a couple, and so were Zabe and Alling. The documentary doesn’t mention if any of the Biosphere 2 dwellers had children.

Although all the Biodome 2 dwellers worked together in communal duties to maintain the space while living there, most of them had a particular specialty. Poynter was in charge of the agriculture and animals. MacCallum did a lot testing of the atmosphere and soil. Alling was the resident marine biologist. Zabe was the repairman. Walford, the oldest member (he was in his early 60s at the time), was the physician. Silverstone was the main cook, and she says in the documentary that only natural ingredients were used in the Biosphere 2 food.

Leigh remembers what she thought of being part of this select group of Biosphere 2 dwellers: “This is a great, bright group of people that are really into what they’re doing … They’re wacky, and I fit right in.” Silverstone says, “I loved science-fiction movies where people were all living under glass domes.” In other words, Biosphere 2 was a dream come true for her. Silverstone later says in the documentary that after the two-year isolation period was over, she didn’t want to leave Biosphere 2 and that she would’ve lived there as long as she could if she were allowed to do it.

The day that the eight Biosphere 2 dwellers entered the dome was met with great fanfare and media attention from all over the world. The documentary has interviews with two of the people who were part of the publicity campaign: Kathy Dyhr, who was Biosphere 2’s public relations director, and public-relations strategist Larry Winokur, who was brought on board because, as Dyhr says in the documentary, she didn’t really know what she was doing and they needed someone with more professional PR experience.

The fact that all of the people chosen to live in Biosphere 2 were white and from Western countries (most from the United States, a few from European nations) probably wouldn’t be considered acceptable today in a more diverse-conscious society. When the Biosphere 2 project decided to raise money by opening up a visiting area, so visitors could look in the dome like people look at a fish bowl, some African Americans are shown in archival footage commenting on the lack of racial diversity of the people in the dome.

But that was just one criticism in a growing list of skeptical observations. Many scientists said it would be inaccurate for Biosphere 2 to be considered real scientific research, since it was an experiment that wasn’t going to be duplicated to double-check results, and there were too many unknown variables.

Things got even more controversial after Poynter accidentally got the tip of one of her fingers cut off in a grain threshing machine, and she had to go outside the dome to get medical attention. Having someone leave Biosphere 2 before the end of the two-year period automatically invalidated the highly touted main goal of the experience: that all eight dwellers would not leave Biosphere 2 for two years.

And then it was discovered by the media that when Poynter returned to Biosphere 2 after getting medical treatment, she broke another rule, by bringing in two duffel bags of outside supplies. And with another goal destroyed, tensions and conflicts grew inside and outside Biosphere 2.

The atmosphere in Biosphere 2 began to have dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide, so oxygen had to be pumped into the dome. It was another failure in the Biosphere 2 goal of not bringing in anything from the outside during the two-year period. According to Dyhr, as the media began to have more questions about the validity of the experiment, “Margaret [Harding] and John [Allen] became more secretive, and that reinforced the idea that they had something to hide.”

And criticism began to grow about the control that Allen (who’s not a scientist) had over the group, which further fueled accusations that the group is a cult. Desert ecologist Burgess tells a story about being threatened and terrified by Allen, after Burgess was accused of being disloyal for expressing his concerns to the media.

Burgess and Allen later put asides their differences. In the documentary, Burgess is quick to defend the group: “Frankly, I don’t know any organization that does an innovative start-up that doesn’t have cult-like aspects, especially in the corporate sector. We are hard-wired to create cults in the innovative phase of an organization.”

And then things really began to fall apart when more scientists quit the project and billionaire Bass, the group’s chief investor, got disillusioned. And then, Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon, the same one who later became famous for founding Breitbart News and being Donald Trump’s political adviser) got involved in the whole mess. Although the end results of Biosphere 2 have been widely reported and are in the documentary, that spoiler information won’t be included in this review.

After the controversy, this is what Allen has to say about Biosphere 2 all these years later: “We were people who recognized that climate change is a threat and tried to develop the means to counteract that threat.”

Because Allen and his group control so much of the narrative in this documentary, director Wolf fails to answer some basic questions. For starters, did any of the people in this commune group have children? There’s absolutely no mention of any of these people being parents, and how raising kids affected what they did for the group and for Biosphere 2. This is a documentary about a group of people obsessed with how future generations are going to live on Earth and possibly outer space, so it’s very strange for this documentary not to include information about if these people have any children.

Another glaring omission is that the documentary doesn’t have interviews with any scientists who weren’t on the Biosphere 2 payroll, in order to get more objective observations. Instead of spending a lot of time covering the history of this commune group, that screen time in the film should have been for putting into context what, if any, effects that Biosphere 2 had on today’s scientific plans or theories about environmental issues.

Although the documentary makes it clear that there were many scientist critics of Biosphere 2, the filmmakers never bothered to interview any of them for this documentary. It would have been a welcome balance to the obviously biased gushing about Biosphere 2 from Allen’s group members. It would’ve been more interesting to get further details over why so many scientists quit the project. Surely, some of them are still alive to interview, but the documentary doesn’t answer those questions.

It also would’ve been interesting to get Allen’s response to all the criticisms that he was a bully who ran a cult and why his group seems to be lacking in diversity, in terms of age and race. Allen’s group seems to be a bunch of old, white former hippies. If this group is so great at “forward thinking,” where is this group’s next generation of members? They’re certainly not in this documentary.

These are questions that “Spaceship Earth” fails to answer, much like a lot of the mythology around Biosphere 2. It seems as if Allen has control over not just his group of followers but he also exerted a lot of control, directly or indirectly, in how this documentary was made. “Spaceship Earth” leaves viewers with the impression that the filmmakers could’ve dug deeper for more information, but chose not to do it because they didn’t want to lose Allen and his flock to provide the documentary’s majority of interviews and archival footage.

Neon released “Spaceship Earth” in select U.S. drive-in theaters, pop-up city-scape projections, virtual cinemas, on digital and on Hulu on May 8, 2020.

2020 IDCon: Investigation Discovery’s annual fan event goes online-only with IDCon: Home Together

May 8, 2020

Joe Kenda (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

The following is a press release from Investigation Discovery:

ID’s beloved fan engagement event, IDCON, is going virtual for 2020 with IDCON: HOME TOGETHER. For the first time ever, ID fans are welcome to pour their favorite beverage, cuddle up with their cat and join ID for a network fan event that takes you behind the scenes of your favorite TV channel – right from the comfort of your own couch. This year will focus on keeping us all safe at home together, while still offering the chance to interact with ID’s stars. Attendees will be encouraged to ask their burning fan questions and will be treated to surprises, activations and special guest appearances throughout the two-hour event. Additionally, attendees will receive sneak peeks of upcoming programming for the network’s exclusive true-crime programming event, ID PRESENTS: NINE AT 9, kicking off on Memorial Day and featuring premium headline-making cases at 9 p.m. ET every night. ID Addicts can join the fifth annual IDCON: HOME TOGETHER on Zoom on Thursday, May 21 from 6-8 p.m. ET, sign up at IDCON2020. In lieu of an attendance fee, ID is encouraging donations to nonprofit organizations that we support at the channel, including: the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) , and  One Love.

“Connectivity is something we’re all longing for right now, and we know how devoted our ID Addicts are to our network and stars,” said Henry Schleiff, Group President, Investigation Discovery, Travel Channel, Destination America and American Heroes Channel. “For the past five years, fans have come to us in New York City and now, as a special treat during these trying times, we are coming to all of you. No lines. No sold-out venue – just the ID stars you love, the true crime content you crave, and you, from the comfort of your own home.”

IDCON: HOME TOGETHER will consist of four sessions running from 6 p.m. ET on Thursday, May 21st, and is scheduled to go until 8 p.m. ET. The session schedule is as follows:

FROM COUCH TO CAPTURE

Join crusaders of justice John Walsh and Callahan Walsh as they discuss their careers in crime-fighting and the meaningful work that they do on “In Pursuit with John Walsh.” The series alone, which relies on help from an active and engaged audience, in its past two seasons has helped bring 15 featured fugitives to justice and five missing children home. The Walshes will also discuss the inspiring work that they do with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and how their work keeps Adam Walsh’s legacy alive. Discussion will be moderated by SVP of production at ID Sara Kozak.

INSIDE JUSTICE

Take an inside look at how the justice system works through three unique perspectives – retired homicide detective Chris Anderson (“Reasonable Doubt”), former New York prosecutor Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi (“True Conviction”), and criminal defense attorney Fatima Silva (“Reasonable Doubt”). What cases are they following now?  How is the justice system adapting to change? How common are wrongful convictions?  How is self-isolation changing the crimes committed today?  Join ID for a conversation about convictions of the past and crimes of the present. Moderated by CBS’ “48 Hours” correspondent Maureen Maher.

CRIMINALLY ADDICTIVE

These are the stories that make headlines. The cases you think you know, but never really do. Join our panel of expert crime reporters, legal analyst Ashleigh Banfield, crime journalist Diane Dimond, and psychotherapist Dr. Robi Ludwig, as they discuss famous crimes that always seem to pose more questions than answers. From the purported suicide of Jeffrey Epstein to the suspicious death of Hollywood starlet Brittany Murphy, this is a discussion you won’t want to miss – and you won’t have to leave your own home to get the scoop. Moderated by Pamela Deutsch, Vice President of production for the “ID Mystery” franchise.

AT HOME WITH JOE

After 9 seasons and 142 episodes, it’s time to see a new type of Joe! Fans of the long-running hit “Homicide Hunter” were devastated to hear that the series had come to an end this past January. But with a brand-new series coming to ID later this year, we have not seen the last of Joe Kenda. Fans are invited to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear from Joe himself in the comfort of his own home – and we all know who will be operating the camera behind the scenes and hopefully make a special guest appearance! Fans are encouraged to submit video questions to Joe in advance – he might choose your question to answer in his own signature style! Moderated by Thomas Cutler, Vice President of production for “Homicide Hunter.”

About Investigation Discovery

Investigation Discovery (ID) is the leading crime and justice network on television, delivering the highest-quality programming to approximately 80 million U.S. households. From harrowing crimes to in-depth investigations and heart-breaking mysteries behind these “real people, real stories,” ID is the #1 destination for true crime stories on television. For exclusive web content and bonus material, fans can follow ID on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook or check out the network’s true crime content anytime and anywhere through ID’s TV Everywhere offering, IDGO.

Investigation Discovery is part of Discovery, Inc. (Nasdaq: DISCA, DISCB, DISCK), a global leader in real life entertainment, serving a passionate audience of superfans around the world with content that inspires, informs and entertains. Available in 220 countries and territories and 50 languages, Discovery delivers over 8,000 hours of original programming each year and has category leadership across deeply loved content genres around the world. For additional information about ID, please visit InvestigationDiscovery.com.

May 21, 2020 UPDATE: Here is the entire livestream of IDCON: Home Together:

Total running time: 2 hours, 21 minutes

Review: ‘Valley Girl’ (2020), starring Jessica Rothe, Josh Whitehouse, Logan Paul, Mae Whitman, Jessie Ennis, Chloe Bennet and Alicia Silverstone

May 8, 2020

by Carla Hay

Jessica Rothe and Josh Whitehouse in “Valley Girl” (Photo courtesy of Orion Classics)

“Valley Girl” (2020)

Directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area, this musical remake of the 1983 romantic comedy “Valley Girl” has a predominantly white cast of characters (with some African Americans, Latinos and Asians) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A sheltered San Fernando Valley “good girl,” who’s about to graduate from high school, has a romance with a “bad boy” musician from Hollywood, much to her friends’ disapproval.

Culture Audience: “Valley Girl” will appeal mostly to fans of the original “Valley Girl” movie or fans of 1980s pop music, but they will probably be disappointed in this musical remake, which is too slick for its own good.

Camila Morrone and Alicia Silverstone in “Valley Girl” (Photo courtesy of Orion Classics)

The 1983 romantic comedy “Valley Girl” (starring Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman) is the kind of movie that doesn’t need to be remade/re-imagined/rebooted for a modern audience, because it’s a movie about a particular youth subculture that’s meant to stay in the past and shouldn’t be resurrected. Although the 2020 musical remake of “Valley Girl” (directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg) wisely chose to make the movie primarily as a flashback memory to the ’80s, almost everything about this musical smacks of an inauthentic, forced recreation of the effortless 1980s charm that made the original “Valley Girl” movie a cult classic.

In the beginning of the “Valley Girl” musical remake, a pouty, young woman named Ruby (played by Camila Morrone), who’s in her early 20s, stumbles out of a nightclub and asks her mother (whom she still lives with) to come pick her up from the club. Ruby is apparently too tipsy to drive and apparently doesn’t want to call a taxi or ride-sharing service. When they get home, Ruby tells her mother Julie (played by Alicia Silverstone) that she’s in a bad mood because she just broke up with her boyfriend.

The mother is supposed to be the Julie Richman character who was the teenage titular protagonist in the original “Valley Girl” movie. Julie is now a middle-aged fashion designer, who has fond and rosy memories of her teenage years in California’s San Fernando Valley, where she still lives.

As a San Fernando Valley teenager in the ’80s, Julie’s life was like a carefree bubble that revolved around school, going to shopping malls (like the famous Sherman Oaks Galleria), dating, hanging out at the beach, and going to parties with other teens, usually at someone’s house. (Frank Zappa’s 1982 song “Valley Girl,” featuring vocals by his then-teenage daughter Moon Unit Zappa, inspired the idea for the 1983 “Valley Girl” movie. The Zappas were not involved in the movie, and Frank Zappa lost a lawsuit that he filed to prevent the film from being made.)

When she was a senior in high school, Julie fell in love for the first time with a slightly older Hollywood rocker named Randy, who was played by Cage in the original “Valley Girl” movie. As for who Ruby’s father is, he’s mentioned but not seen in the “Valley Girl” remake, which reveals at the end of the film whether or not Randy and Julie ended up living happily ever after.

Julie is very sympathetic about her daughter’s boyfriend breakup, but Julie also starts to tell Ruby about the “good old days,” when her name was Julie Richman and she was a very sheltered teenager in the early-to-mid-80s. (Although the original “Valley Girl” was released in 1983, the ’80s music in the “Valley Girl” musical remake was released in or before 1984. Only true music trivia buffs would notice this change in the movie’s soundtrack.)

Julie’s daughter tries to pretend she doesn’t care about her mother’s nostalgic memories, by groaning to her about her boyfriend problems: “You wouldn’t understand!” And that’s when Julie launches into her “let me tell you about when I was young” story. The rest of the movie occasionally cuts back to the middle-aged Julie and her daughter for exposition purposes, but the majority of the film consists of the flashback memories of Julie, with the characters from the ’80s often singing their dialogues, since this is a musical.

Here we go. Get ready for the cheesiness. Although Jessica Rothe as the teenage Julie does a fairly good job as a singer, she is not convincing at all as a naïve, straight-laced high schooler, which is what Julie is supposed to be. Rothe looks like she’s graduated from high school years ago, instead of someone who’s supposed to still be in high school. Putting her in cutesy and frilly ’80s outfits doesn’t make her look like a teenager.

Deborah Foreman, who played the teenage Julie in the original “Valley Girl” had a mix of innocence and sexiness that made her irresistible to a lot of guys in her orbit. Rothe (who was in her early 30s when she made this “Valley Girl” remake) looks like she’s playing dress-up as a teenager. Because she looks way past the age of a student in high school, it looks ridiculous for her to play such a sheltered goody-two shoes teen. It’s not quite as bad of an age miscast as Olivia Newton-John in the movie “Grease,” but it’s pretty close. At least “Grease” was a great musical. This version of “Valley Girl” is most definitely not.

As for “bad boy” rocker Randy, the original “Valley Girl” had Cage playing him as a kind of a misfit weirdo who didn’t care about the social taboos of a sheltered high school girl from the San Fernando Valley dating a “freak” from Hollywood. In this musical version of “Valley Girl,” there’s nothing quirky, dangerous or even edgy about Randy, who’s played by Josh Whitehouse, in a very bland performance and with very limited singing talent.

In this remake, Randy looks more like he wants to be a heartthrob teen idol (like John Stamos was back in the early ’80s), instead of being a slightly scuzzy, down-on-his-luck rocker, which is what the Randy character is supposed to be. Even the tattoos that the Randy character has in this “Valley Girl” remake look fake, because they probably are. Randy in both “Valley Girl” movies is supposed to be slightly older than Julie, which is one of the reasons why their relationship is slightly taboo. While in the original movie, Cage looked the part, Whitehouse actually looks younger than Rothe, which he is in real life.

The nightclub scenes in this remake also don’t look real at all. You can tell it’s a movie set, compared to the original “Valley Girl” which filmed on location at a real nightclub. The nightclub where the original “Valley Girl” was filmed was called The Central back then, but it became more famous in the 1990s when it was renamed the Viper Room. In the original “Valley Girl,” there was a scene with The Plimsouls performing their song “A Million Miles Away” at the club. In the remake, the female rock duo Deap Vally performs the song.

In fact, almost everything about the “Valley Girl” remake  (written by Amy Talkington) feels overly sanitized. It scrubs out all the adult content from the original movie (in other words, some of the funniest scenes) and turns this film into a too-cutesy musical. The only nudity in the remake is when some male students briefly moon someone at the high school. There’s no drug use in the remake, and sex is hinted at but not shown.

The costumes in the “Valley Girl” remake also look very much like costumes (and some of it is intentional, since many of the movie’s scenes take place at a costume party), while the movie’s hair, makeup and production design for the San Fernando Valley scenes are overly exaggerated in pastels and neon. Perhaps this “movie set” look to the film serves a purpose, since it’s supposed to represent the glossy memories of someone nostalgic about their teenage years in the ’80s. But people who’ve seen the original “Valley Girl” (which was directed by Martha Coolidge) will be turned off by this remake’s glibness.

Although the remake removed the gritty and realistic aspects of the original “Valley Girl,” the plot of the original “Valley Girl” is mostly the same in this musical remake, with some notable differences. In both “Valley Girl” movies, Julie (who’s a popular girl at her school) breaks up with a guy that most people expect someone like her to date: a preppy jock who’s also popular at school. But he also happens to be very self-centered, cocky and possessive, which is why Julie breaks up with him. He swears that she’ll regret it, and he arrogantly predicts that she’ll beg him to take her back.

In both movies, Julie meets Randy shortly after the breakup. And it’s the kind of scene where they look at each other in a way that’s obvious that they’re attracted to each other and will eventually get together. In the original “Valley Girl,” Randy and Julie meet at a house party, where he’s shown up uninvited. In the remake, Randy and Julie meet briefly on the beach, and then have their first major flirtation later at a house party.

In the original “Valley Girl,” Julie’s obnoxious ex-boyfriend was named Tommy (played by Michael Bowen). In the “Valley Girl” remake, the ex-boyfriend is named Mickey Bowen (get it?), and he’s played by YouTube star Logan Paul, who’s famous for also being obnoxious in real life, so there doesn’t have to be a lot of acting from him. It’s unknown if the character was named Mickey before or after the filmmakers decided to put Toni Basil’s hit “Mickey” as a big musical number in the film. Yes, it’s as cringeworthy as it sounds.

The choreography by Mandy Moore (of “La La Land” and “So You Think You Can Dance” fame) is actually one of the better aspects of the “Valley Girl” remake. It’s just too bad that the watered-down story and corny dialogue make this movie much more inferior to the original. The remake is essentially a “jukebox musical” with a lot of ’80s hits stuffed into the plot.

There are a few modern updates to the “Valley Girl” remake. The cast is a little more diverse than the first “Valley Girl” film. In the original, all the girls in Julie’s close circle of friends are thin and white. In the remake, Julie’s clique includes an African American named Loryn (played by Ashleigh Murray), whose dream is to be a dancer in music videos, especially for her idol Janet Jackson; plus-sized Stacey (played by Jessie Ennis), who’s unfortunately the butt of jokes and not treated very well by some of her so-called “friends”; and petty-minded Karen (played by Chloe Bennet), who ends up dating Mickey after Julie breaks up with him.

In the original “Valley Girl,”  Julie’s friend Loryn (played  Elizabeth “E.G.” Dailey) is the one who fools around with Julie’s ex-boyfriend at a party, and they keep their short fling a secret. In the remake, Mickey and Karen openly date each other after Julie has dumped him. His rebound relationship with Karen essentially ends Karen’s friendship with Julie.

But in both movies, all of the San Fernando Valley girls in Julie’s clique still have the same stuck-up attitude about Hollywood, which they think is a place for freaks and weirdos. This social snobbery is why Julie’s friends pressure her to break up with Randy and get back together with her ex-boyfriend. If you know the formula of romantic comedies, you can guess how Julie handles this conflict and how it gets resolved in the end.

Both movies also have teen parties that are chaperoned by adults. Fun fact: Original “Valley Girls” co-stars Foreman and Dailey have cameos in the “Valley Girl” remake. Foreman plays someone who compliments Julie in a store that sells prom dresses (how very meta), while Dailey plays a drunk parent at one of the teen parties. However, the remake doesn’t have the original “Valley Girl” subplot of a “Mrs. Robinson”-type character trying to seduce the teenage guy whom her daughter wants for herself.

Julie’s parents are very different in each movie. In the original “Valley Girl,” Julie’s former hippie parents are much more lenient (her father also smokes marijuana in the movie) than Julie’s parents in the “Valley Girl” remake. For example, in the original “Valley Girl,” Julie’s parents Steve and Sarah (played by Frederic Forrest and Colleen Camp), who run a health-food restaurant, were okay with her staying out all night and dating Randy. In the remake, Julie’s parents Steve and Diana (played by Rob Huebel and Judy Greer) are much more conservative (Steve is a corporate business type), much more protective of Julie, and they don’t approve of her dating Randy.

Another big difference is that in the original “Valley Girl,” Randy’s family is not seen or mentioned at all. But the “Valley Girl” remake goes more into the backstory of Randy’s family, when he reveals that his father abandoned him, and his mother kicked Randy out of their home. And the original “Valley Girl” never showed the bachelor pad where Randy lived (which made him kind of mysterious), whereas the remake shows that Randy (who’s a wannabe rock star) lives in a dumpy apartment in Hollywood with his two band mates: a lesbian bass player named Jack (played by Mae Whitman) and a kooky drummer named Sticky (played by Mario Revolori). Jack is Randy’s best friend/sidekick, which was the role of Fred Bailey (played by Cameron Dye) in the original “Valley Girl” movie.

The “Valley Girl” remake also gives Julie career ambitions, which she did not have in the original movie. In the musical remake, Julie is an aspiring fashion designer who dreams of going to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, but she’s pressured to conform and go to California State University at Northridge, a school that many of her peers from high school also plan to attend.

The other girls in Julie’s Valley Girl clique only have ambitions to go to college so that they can find a husband. As Loryn says to her friends while they’re sunning themselves at the beach, “If I’m not married by the time I’m 23, I’ll kill myself!” If that sounds like an outdated mindset, even for 1980s California, consider that a lot of teenage girls and young women still think this way in very conservative communities.

The “Valley Girl” remake’s hokey dialogue and mediocre acting might be forgivable, but the movie does something that’s pretty unforgivable for fans of the original “Valley Girl” movie. It changed the plot so that Modern English’s “I Melt With You” (the signature song from the original “Valley Girl” soundtrack) is supposed to be written by Randy for Julie. In other words, that means Randy and his band play “I Melt With You” in a serenading scene that’s as dumb as you think it is. Pure garbage.

Since the “Valley Girl” remake ruined “I Melt With You,” here’s a list of ’80s songs that the movie’s cast members remade for the musical scenes, in a less offensive but still fairly cheesy way: Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”; Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation”; a-ha’s “Take on Me”; The Cars’ “You Might Think”; A Flock of Seagulls’ “Space Age Love Song”; The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry”; Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”; and a medley of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” Madonna’s “Material Girl,” Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” and Soft Cell’s cover version of “Tainted Love.”

There are also some songs in the movie that are the original artists’ studio recordings, such The Cars’ “Magic,” Duran Duran’s “Rio,” Men at Work’s “Be Good Johnny,” Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That” and Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance.” It’s obvious that the filmmakers spent a great deal of the movie’s budget on licensing these hit songs, because there doesn’t appear to have been much of the budget invested in creating a quality film.

Orion Classics released “Valley Girl” in select U.S. drive-in theaters, on digital and on VOD on May 8, 2020.

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