11/27/02

One good, one boring. You can't have everything, especially if it has to star Brian Austin Green (now officially "Brian A. Green".)

The first half hour starred Frank Whaley, who I've liked ever since "The Freshman" with Matthew Broderick & Marlon Brando. He was a poor schlub with a miserable life. I love the way these shows have to take everything to the extreme; his life wasn't just bleak, it was miserable. His off-camera wife screamed at him relentlessly and his off-camera kids had to be screamed AT relentlessly by the shrill wife. His boss at his crappy retail job yelled at him for being three minutes late. And then some unrealistically large-fonted and loud pop-up ad kept appearing on his computer, both at home and at work, asking if his life sucked and offering him a better one...through Future Trade.

He showed up at the Future Trade offices, to be greeted by Dean Winters. Hooray! (Dean plays Ryan O'Reilly on Oz, which means that I've seen him completely naked. He also once winked at me, downstairs at Chelsea Market when I couldn't stop staring at him.) Dean explained the service: people trade lives with each other, and after 48 hours (I think) the trade becomes permanent. A disbelieving Frank says he wants a gorgeous wife who cooks & cleans (uh-huh), a great car, a ritzy house, lots of money, and a great job. Dean makes the deal. Frank forgets to ask one really good question: why would anybody want HIS life? What if nobody does? Frank doesn't care.

He gets his wish. Suddenly he's driving a swanky car, living in a massive house, making love to a gorgeous wife. He gets to the office and the board votes him a 300% salary increase. (!!) He sneaks back to his old house to see how things are going and finds some guy there instead of him, being treated lovingly by his exhausted wife, who's still yelling at the bad kids. (Neither one of the wives seems to have noticed a massive change in their husbands' personalities, by the way.) He returns home, thrilled with his trade, baffled by why anybody would give up the life he has now, and gets poisoned by his wife. D'oh! Turns out he was a cheating bastard and she hates him. He ends up face down in the pool, Sunset Boulevard-style.

Good story, cheesy writing, nice acting, and some good directing by Bob Balaban.

The second story was all about how Brian A. Green gets taunted by Moira Kelly until he realizes what a terrible bastard he was in his past. He goes back, undoes the damage, and lives happily ever after. The directing & editing were distractingly bad, and really, I thought Frank Whaley was much more deserving of a happily ever after than annoying calculating ultra-successful creepy Brian A. Green. The only interesting thing about it was that one of the story credits went to Bill Mumy, a Twilight Zone vet from the original series. (He was also the kid on "Lost In Space".) Remember him as the scary little kid who sent people to the cornfield? He also talked to his dead grandmother on a toy phone.

11/20/02

This show seems to be fun no matter how cheesy it gets.

The first story starred Wallace Langham, who I've liked since his Larry Sanders days, as an office nebbish with the biggest asshole in the world for a boss, played in over-the-top style by Christopher McDonald. (I know him from his guest turn in a particularly memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) It was Wallace's birthday, and he was such a loser that he told his cake-giving co-workers gathered around him that he wasn't doing anything special that night, "unless you call doing laundry special". Nebbish!

His boss came thundering in, yelled at him for wasting time, and then gave him a motivational dummy for his birthday, this ugly doll-thing that said annoying slogans when you pressed its head. Shortly after the boss-man went into his office, the doll started saying all kinds of things to Wallace that weren't quite generic enough to make sense. Eventually it berated him for having no backbone, hit on the chick he liked -- the line "nice buns" mysteriously resulted in a dinner date -- and tried to kill his boss by tripping him with an electrical wire.

The doll seemed to be evil, and wouldn't let itself be thrown away, but in the end helped convince Wallace to steal the document his boss was about to destroy, one that would prove that a whole shipment of birth control pills had expired and should be recalled. In the end, the boss got fired, Wallace got the chick AND the job, and when he acted like a dick to one of his underlings, the doll admonished him into apologizing. The doll turned out to be good instead of evil! Twist! It was fun.

Dumbest bits: the office workers who had nothing better to do than chant "kick his ass!" when Wallace & his boss got into a physical fight. And the boss' insistence that Wallace spend his birthday looking through six months' of documents in two hours, with the instruction "You let me down and you're fired!" You can't fire nebbishes like that, because they're irreplaceable. D'oh!

Second story co-starred Elizabeth Berkley, unfortunately, so it was hard to stop thinking about how dumb (but fun) "Showgirls" was as I watched. Rob Estes was a sports agent who got stuck in a traffic jam and darted through the bushes to pee. When he was done, he tried going back through the same bushes but ended up in the woods instead of back on the road. He wandered around for an hour, then found a big gorgeous house with a pool and a view and a chick (Elizabeth)! He was hoping she lived there, but she said she'd been wandering around for an hour, she'd also been stuck in traffic having a fight with her fiance, and ran out of the car. There were no phones, their cells didn't work, but there was plenty of food and a beautiful view and a pool and all kinds of amusements. They ended up falling in love and hanging out together in their dream house, until a NEW chick showed up in a leather jacket. Her cell phone worked, although she still couldn't find a way out of the woods. Elizabeth started getting jealous, and every time she & the chick spent some time together, weird scary things appeared, like a scorpion and a snake. The new chick finally convinced Rob Estes to use her cell to call his biggest sports star, and that's when Eden was shattered, the chick laughed menacingly, and they were returned to their cars and their traffic jam with no memory of their glorious relationship.

Both stories were entertaining, and very imaginative! I'm glad there's still a show on where writers get to have some fun.

11/13/02

Who is Scott Bairstow? They were hyping him this week and I've never heard of him. More familiar guests included Greg Germann (formerly of Ally McStool fame, but a good actor nonetheless), and Jaime Pressly (not know for her great acting skills, but perfectly cast in this one).

They're obviously spending a bit of money getting name actors, which is great if they're good, but sucks when you end up with your Portia De Rossis, Ione Skyes, and next week's ill-chosen Elizabeth Berkley.

The Greg Germann story was silly but fun. Greg was engaged to some chick who -- for some inexplicable reason -- thought they should wait to have sex "again" until they were married, with the wedding date six months away. Just to make it dumber, they were living together and slept in the same bed, but weren't going to do it. I don't quite get the logic of all that, or why anybody would go along with it, but I've learned that I spend much more time thinking about these things than the people who write them, so I try to let it go. I'm...trying.

Frustrated Greg gets to his office -- conveniently filled with gorgeous models, as he's a photo editor for a magazine -- and his buddy suggest the perfect solution to his unfulfilled woes: Beta-test a new virtual sex goggles, conveniently designed by his finacee's software company. He puts on the goggles, and he's in a curtained room with Jaime Pressly and her sexy outfit. They do it, she compliments him and tells him he's different from everybody else, and he goes home happy...a little guilty maybe, but happy. And then the phone rings.

It's Jaime! She just wants him to hold her and be with her again. He promises to come visit, but of course doesn't, since she's just a computer program. From there it gets more fun as she stalks him, doing everything from appearing on his computer screen to trapping him in an elevator, which particularly freaks him out as he has extreme claustrophobia. He gets his buddy to erase all the software, but Jaime tracks him down again -- she was hiding -- and the stalking resumes. Finally, he agrees to meet her, and as they kiss, he spits a virus into her mouth. She fades away.

End of story? Nay! Our twist ending hits when the fiancee, bored at home, puts on HER goggles and we see that she too is carrying on a cyber-affair...with Jaime Pressley. Ooo, lesbians. I suppose that would have been more exciting if I were a gay woman or a straight man, but it WAS funny. It didn't make any sense in the whole "let's not have sex again until we're married" scenario, but it did make me laugh. Forest Whittaker seemed to be enjoying it too.

The second story was good & scary...a team of volunteers went out to hunt a mysterious creature in the woods who was killing all these people. All the volunteers were totally freaked because they lived in a violence-free society. The creature seemed to be invisible and had a nasty habit of dismembering its victims. In the end, the creature turned out to be the last human being alive -- they never explained the invisibility part -- and the hunters were androids! Ooo!

The scary parts had a nice Blair Witch kind of feel to them, and they did a nice job on the side characters. I liked the chick who kept forcing Scott Bairstow to be more of a leader. SHE should have been the leader! I like when they take the time to give people personalities as well as dialogue.

And did I mention that the title of the first story was "Sensuous Cindy"? That was also the name of the dirty software program. Funny.

11/06/02

Hit & miss this week, but fun along the way.

The first story starred Usher as a cop who worked the beat in his old 'hood. He rescued a prostitute from the pimp who was about to kill her, but had to shoot the pimp dead to do it. Then he started getting creepy phone calls from the dead guy, saying he was going to cut the ho's throat from ear to ear. Usher tried telling his partner about it but she thought he was just dealing with guilt in his own way, and then the prostitute turned up dead. Then SHE started calling Usher and screaming into the phone. It was creepy and fun and just a tiny bit reminiscent of that old Twilight Zone ep where the old lady was getting calls in the middle of the night...from the graveyard. They even included the scary moment where the origin of the call was traced, this time to a phone booth that had been out of order for months. Eventually Usher went back to the scene of the crime -- or the scene of the rescue, I guess -- and later they found him there dead by what appeared to be a self-inflicted bullet wound. His partner's phone rang, and it was him, saying now he could protect the hooker and keep her safe.

I thought all the acting was good, and the story was nice too, they built in just enough layers to keep it interesting -- the hooker was the sister of a friend of Usher's who was in jail -- and it moved nicely. I also think they do a nice job of adding sidekicks in general, and mixing up the ethnicity of the actors. They seem to be having a good time on this show, and it's fun to watch.

I have to confess that I dozed a bit during the second story, so it may have been better than I thought. I was exhausted! Sorry. This one starred Jake Busey and Nick Turturro, Jake started getting visits from a mysterious duo who said he'd been "chosen". They gave him a personalized DVD saying he was someone special, only then he found out everyone else got the same one. He acted like a jerk for a while and they unchose him, although they happily took Nick Turturro with them. Um....it got a bit slow there and that's where I napped. D'oh! I think they were actually saving people from Armaggedon and Jake missed out, but I can't be 100% sure. I'll have to catch this one again in re-runs.

10/30/02

Great show this week!

The first story starred Lukas Haas, remember him? He was the little kid in Witness, among other things. He played an aspiring rock star named Cory Williams with a bad case of hero-worship for Bobby McCain, a rock & roll guitarist who blew his own brains out. He and his buddy -- played by Sticky Fingaz, formerly in the group Onyx -- were hanging out at a guitar store and noticing how crappy Cory's playing was. Then he picked up an old Stratocaster from the 50s and started playing like a pro.

He got the guitar home and noticed it had blood all over it...and that it was indeed the guitar belonging to Bobby McCain. Scary! He auditioned for a rock band and was soon a star himself, thanks to the help of his new management team, which included a hot chick named Ashley. Cory tended to play until his fingers bled, but since his playing just got better & better, they let him keep going.

Eventually he & Ashley started making goo goo eyes at each other, and he took her home. She had to remind him to take off the guitar so they could get all naked & stuff, and he was startled to find that it had somehow managed to set itself up in the stand at the edge of the bed, where it could watch them. Spoooooky. He had to close his eyes just to stop thinking about it!

They puttered around his place afterwards, all happy in the afterglow, until the guitar strap strangled Ashley and killed her! "Take these pills" advised Cory's manager. "Don't you get it? The strat killed Ashley!" Cory threw the guitar into a closet and yelled at it, while we (the viewers) were treated to a great point-of-view shot through the slats on the closet door...yes, the GUITAR'S pov. It was fun.

The guitar then showed up on set while Cory was shooting his video, and tried to electrocute him! He finally got i in the car and drove furiously...and then there it was in the back seat! AAAHH! He crashed the car, killing himself and hoping to destroy the guitar, but of course it survived, and the final scene showed a chick picking it up and deciding to buy it. D'oh!

It was fun. Pure Twilight Zone. "Just ask Cory Williams, currently on tour in the Twilight Zone". Fabulous tag line too.

The second story starred Susanna Thompson, best known (by nerds like me) as the Borg Queen on a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. She moved into her new house and put up a portrait of her family, then as they tumbled in after her, arguing and behaving badly, she voiced her wish that they be more perfect, just as they appeared to be in the picture. And then her dog changed!

No I mean it, they had this cute little dog and suddenly there was this ugly poodle there instead and everybody looked at her strangely when she insisted it wasn't their dog. And boo! the poodle was suddenly in the picture instead of the cute fluffy dog they had before.

Then it happened to her son. And then her daughter. And then her husband! It was really fun watching her freak out as everybody changed, feeling rotten because her kids were so freaked out but still thinking they weren't really her kids. I thought everybody was going to change back at the end to teach her a lesson, but instead, in the final moments, SHE changed! She was replaced by a trim short-haired chick who didn't freak out about anything. Creepy!

10/23/02

So this one was actually the pilot, and they gave the story a full hour. Frankly, I think a half hour would have done nicely. Jonathan Frakes' directing was great, as usual, but the effects were cheesy and so was Jeremy Piven's distractingly bad hairpiece. I guess they were trying to make him seem younger & cuter, since they were matching him up with Olivia D'Abo (best known as the sister on The Wonder Years).

Jeremy was a technician for the phone company that got sent up the pole in a storm by Oliva. D'oh! He got shocked, and woke up in the hospital, being doctored by Zeljko Ivanak, who plays Governor Devlin on Oz and shows up on Law & Order regularly. And suddenly he could read minds.

(I just have to mention here that the whole getting shocked scene was just about the silliest thing I've seen in a long time. They would have been better off using a scary sound effect and the horrified reactions of the people watching instead of letting us see a shaking Jeremy Piven with fake sparks & lightning all over him.)

The reading minds thing started out gently, and Jeremy, who was sick of being broke his entire life, realized he could make money (poker games) and get with a chick (Olivia). Then things started spinning out of control and he became arrogant, paranoid, and overwhelmed by everybody's thoughts. (I suppose it didn't help that he amped up the effect by jamming microwave rays into his body. Gross!) While consuming large amounts of alcohol seemed to help dull the messages coming in, it really didn't do a lot for his personality, and before long he'd alienated Olivia AND the best friend he'd had since childhood. (He chased Olivia around a playground, pushing her around...with his mind...saying "Love me! LOVE ME!")

In the end, he went back up the pole, had the good fortune of being struck by lightning AGAIN, and woke up in the hospital with Governor Devlin standing over him....and the voices louder than ever. AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!

Yeah. It just wasn't that fabulous.

10/16/02

No bad actresses this week! Just Lou Diamond Phillips and Rory Culkin, both of whom did fine.

Lou was first, he was a "pool guy" with his own business. His whole story had all those homo-erotic overtones, which didn't seem to be quite related to anything, but was there nonetheless. Some gardener dude came up to him while he was cleaning the pool and told him that he had a great job (as the pool guy) because he got to work out in the sun all day, and have the ladies watch him because he was so sexy. Later, Lou woke up screaming from a nightmare and his "roommate" happened to be standing right next to his bed, and getting dressed. Lou kept yanking his shirt off and the roommate would stare at his chest. (Okay, he had a big bullet wound there, but still.)

Actually, it was kind of a cool story, if plagued by some bad dialogue writing and a bit of not-great acting from the side players. (The roommate was particularly bad.) Lou kept waking up from a dream that he was shot by this mysterious guy -- who always said "WAKE UP" -- and he'd find scars from a wound, and then the guy would show up and shoot him again, and he'd wake up, and the guy would shoot him again, and then he realized that every time he woke up, he was still in a dream and he was still getting shot. Then it started to look like he was in some lab, doing dream therapy, but when he got away, he STILL got shot and the cycle started up again.

In the end, we found out that he was a criminal, and he had killed the guy who was shooting him in his dreams, and he still had 47 more "deaths" to go through before his punishment was over, each one more traumatic than the last. It was the alternative to prison. Cool!

By the way, Voyager had an episode like that. Tom was accused of killing someone, and that planet's punishment was to implant the memories of the murder into the murderer, so he had to relive the crime over & over again from the victim's perspective.

The second story had better acting -- with the exception of Patrick Warburton as a comic book superhero. Rory Culkin was living with his abusive dad & terrified mom, and brought Azoth The Avenger to life. Azoth defended him from bullies, told him of his own failure to protect his family, and told him he had the power to defend himself. Azoth let Rory's dad beat him up to make his point. Then Rory said the same magic words that brought Azoth to life, and turned his dad into an action figure. It was all kind of stupid, but those Culkins, no matter what you think of them, can act. He's a pretty compelling kid.

Next week: the Jonathan Frakes-directed episode with Jeremy Piven. Should be cool!

10/9/02

This week was not quite as fun as the last two. They're still plagued by bad, attractive actresses. This week's worst performance was delivered by Portia de Rossi (of Ally McStool fame). Her story started out in court, where a man was on trial for murdering her husband. They dropped PILES of exposition to let us know that she had a substance problem, and that the murder and the trial were putting a lot of pressure on her. When she asked for her husband's things back, she got his glasses, and whenever she put them on, she could see the events leading up to the murder through his eyes. She confided in her best friend, who told her she was hallucinating, and tried to be nice, and invited her to a cabin for the weekend. Bit by bit she watched more of the murder and then just as her friend arrived to pick her up, she found out it was HER after all! The friend! She'd been having an affair with Portia's husband and then killed him. D'oh!

All of this would have been a lot more exciting if Portia could act.

The second story was a lot better, if somewhat confusing. It was about a hospital orderly, engaged to a nurse. A patient they were checking on had a Secret Service agent waiting outside, and all they knew was that he had been up to no good. The orderly suddenly blinked and boom! he was in a hotel room in Portland, not knowing why, and owning a gun. Every time he tried to make his way back home -- after calling his rather unsympathetic financée -- he found himself in another place, closer and closer to....The President's Daughter! (Well, that's how they were saying it.) He ended up trying to shoot her, hitting someone else, and then finding himself in the hospital bed, having replaced the guy who was there before. Creeeeeeepy.

It was a cool story, ruined only by the McDonald's commercial starring Donald Trump. First of all, it's kind of gross to think of one of the biggest richest corporations on the planet paying tons of money to one of the biggest, richest individuals. And when Donald put his arm around Grimace and said "Together Grimace, we can own this town" I almost puked, because they already do! It just strengthened my resolve not to go to McDonald's ever again, no matter how delicious their fries are.

10/2/02

Two more fun stories, one much better than the other due to some crappy acting by Ione Skye. The first one was about a time traveller who went back to kill Hitler as a baby. (Did you know that back in 1889, everyone in Austria spoke English with a German accent?) They made it very clear at the beginning that she was the only one who could do the job because her DNA was uniquely suited to the job -- and they also said that she wouldn't be able to come back. And off she went. She had 48 hours to do it, because she was posing as a housekeeper that would actually arrive eventually and blow her cover.

The Hitler family was full of charm, with a domineering racist evil father (who was having an affair with the nanny) and a terrified mother (who wasn't allowed to touch her own baby). Our heroine finally got her chance alone with the baby, so she took him and ran. The nanny, terrified for her own safety if anything happened to baby Adolf, went after her. Futuregirl did the only thing she could think of: she jumped off a bridge, babe in arms, and that was that. Unfortunately, the nanny was just terrified enough to cover her own ass, so she paid a street gypsy for HER baby and no one was any wiser. D'oh! So much for preventing World War II.

The second story would have been a lot better with a different actress. Ione Skye is just awful! Ione went out walking with her dog and nearly got hit by a car. After that, all kinds of strange things started happening, the strangest of which was that a big black bus kept pulling up on her street and everyone on it would stare at her expectantly. She found herself forgetting things, like how she met her fiancé, and as she went through her bridal fitting and all the business of getting married, the bus kept following her -- and her dog kept wanting to get on board. She finally decided that the bus was death and all she had to do was stay off it, but she was wrong. Oooops. The bus was actually LIFE and her dog managed to save himself but it was too late for her and she ended up vanishing into the wind as if she had never existed. Her fiancé ended up with no memory of her and new girlfriend to boot. Honestly, it would have been a LOT better if they'd gotten a decent actress to play the lead.

9/18/2002 & 9/25/02

I started watching this show with some skepticism, perhaps due to that cheesy remake that came out back in 1985. CBS cancelled it and a Canadian network picked it up, but it looked VERY Canadian and was definitely shot there.

But this UPN version has just enough cheese to make it fun, and so far, some really fun stories. It's an hour long, and they do two stories, which is just about right, timing-wise.

The first episode started with a gated community story -- always a favorite of mine. (My all-time favorite gated community story is a TV movie called "The Colony" with Hal Linden as the evil guy who runs it and John Ritter & Mary Page Keller as the innocent couple who moves in.) But in this one, rebellion teens get taken away in a paddy wagon to a tough boarding school. . .but not really. Really, they're turned into fertilizer, and their parents seem happier for it! Nice. The second one starred the tiresome Jason Alexander, but he did a nice job playing world-weary Death who befriended a young (life-saving) doctor, and insisted on taking a holiday. Corpses started coming back to life, which wasn't really good for anybody, and when the doc finally convinced Death to go back to work, he became the very next victim.

They do a nice job with Forest Whitaker too, in true Rod Serling style. The camera pans from the scene to a spot some distance away, and out steps Forest. His little intros & outros are just right, done in the spirit of the original shows, but without the cigarette. Interesting choice for a host. . .I bet he's getting a lot of money for that thirty seconds of copy a week.

The second show had a great first story and a slightly boring second one, but you have to forgive that when you acknowledge that the original show had its fair share of duds, especially when they did any kind of Western cowboy theme, or civil war story. In the first one, a white guy's driving along when some black guy pounds on his window and begs to be let into his car. White guy drives away in a panic, then sees the black guy getting the shit kicked out of him in his rear view mirror. Oops! He reads about the death in the paper the next day and finds out the dead guy was a college professor. He realized he could have saved him & becomes overcome with guilt...then just overcome as he slowly starts transforming into the murder victim. First he gets all his injuries, then he starts turning black! By the end, he has completely transformed to the point that his wife doesn't recognize him and the cops in his neighborhood persecute him, as they do any black man who wanders in. He tries going to the dead guy's family for absolution, which fails miserably. I think the best part was when he tried to rent a hotel room and handed over his picture ID...which of course looked nothing like him. At the very end, he's left roaming around outside and gets attacked by white thugs, then sees a car and runs for it. Inside is -- of course -- HIM as a white guy. The white guy drives away, but ends up coming back for him and saves his life. Good story!

The second one was a typical UPN or USA network kind of story, where a cartoonist actually creates his dream girl, unfortunately played by Shannon Elizabeth. Blah blah. Not so exciting.

I read that Jonathan Frakes actually directed the pilot (starring Jeremy Piven), so I'm interested to see if that's airing anytime soon. I love his directing, I wish he'd do more of it. He has a good eye for action and works really well with actors.

Nice to have a new show to add to my review section, huh?