Disc Reviews

When we last saw Miss Fine (or should I say Mrs. Sheffield), she fell off her husband’s yacht on her honeymoon. I have previously written about The Nanny: Season 5 in January and Season 4 in September of last year, so go back and look up all the previous shenanigans. The first episode of the final season has the newly married couple stranded on a deserted island, and Fran Drescher is up to her usual ridiculous antics as Fran Fine. You can expect a lot of silly and moderately racy sexual innuendo. As usual, there are lots of celebrity cameos. In one Hollywood Squares episode alone, there are nine celebrities interacting with Max Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy) who is one of the squares. Fran is trying to get pregnant, and she has to climb up to get Maxwell because they have to follow a strict time schedule. Then since these episodes take place in 1999, there is an episode with Hillary and Bill (celebrity impersonators) which is an embarrassment for all involved. We get Aunt Frieda (Lainie Kazan), who is still obsessed and upset that she didn’t get to sing at Fran’s wedding. Frieda finally gets to sing, and Lainie has a fine voice. Another person who gets to sing is Fran’s father, Morty (Steve Lawrence). He also sounds great. We have never seen Morty before in the previous seasons, but in a very special episode, Sylvia (Renee Taylor) is seeing a hot doctor (Joseph Bologna, Renee’s real life husband) and everyone thinks she is cheating on Morty.

Then there is the constant rivalry between Mr. Sheffield and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, which culminates in a fight for the rights of Yetta’s Letters (don’t ask, but Yetta (Ann Morgan Guilbert) is Fran’s absentminded grandmother). Then there is time for another wedding when Maxwell’s little daughter, Maggie (Nicole Tom), grows up and gets married to an empty-headed male model. All of this leads up to the two-part series finale which juggles two disparate story lines. Niles (Daniel Davis), Maxwell’s fey butler, and C.C. Babcock (Lauren Lane), Maxwell’s business partner and jealous lover, reveal that their six seasons of hatred and insults was actually covering deep animal magnetism. Will they or won’t they stop treating each other like idiots and finally give into deep burning passion? Then we have Fran at Maggie’s wedding, very close to her due date when she gets stuck in an elevator with C.C. Babcock. I don’t have to tell you what happens next. Well, I could, but I won’t. We do finally get to find out what C.C. stands for.

It comes as no surprise that even in 2016 we continue to have issues with how we handle and discipline criminals while they are incarcerated.  We have a system that pulls in troubled youths that seem to come and go through the judicial system and seem to spend a majority of their lives behind bars.  Hollywood has seemed have an eye on this problem and has churned out many films about misunderstood inmates that are incarcerated and are unfairly treated by the system and those who are in control of the inmates.  Cool Hand Luke, Sleepers, and The Shawshank Redemption are a couple films that jump out at me, and today it’s Stealing Cars that dares to explore this problem.

Billy (Emory Cohen) is basically your rebellious teenager who we meet in the opening scene as he is stealing a car and having a little joyride before the police finally catch up to him.  As anyone can expect, when Billy arrives to the detention center he receives a less than warm welcome from one of the guards, Conrad (Paul Sparks) who seems to have it in for Billy from day one.  To be fair though, Billy is far from being the model inmate and wastes no time making an obnoxious spectacle of himself during his first days in custody.

From the opening credits I knew this was movie intended to be a hard-hitting examination on how drugs could compromise a promising future. In most respects Curveball hits the mark; even the inclusion of the unorthodox methods which the lead character’s mother utilizes in order to help him is a welcome addition. However, there is a disconnect between the film’s introduction and conclusion that does some pretty considerable damage to the story overall.

Nolan is a pitcher with a promising future ahead of him. He and his best friend Sam are closer than brothers. Since childhood, when Sam protected Nolan from a beating from a group of boys, Nolan has felt extreme loyalty to his friend, covering for him anytime he makes a mistake. Sam, unlike Nolan, is a foster child in an at least verbally abusive home. To escape his situation, he turns to drugs and eventually pulls Nolan into that world as well. It starts off recreationally and rapidly becomes all-consuming

After screening Payback, I did a decent amount of research to find information about the director in an effort to better understand the film from a production standpoint. After searching on the web for a bit, I discovered that there is really not much information about the film outside the fact that it is a Hong Kong production, written and directed by first timer Fu Xi. This is a bit strange, considering the fame of the lead actors Francis Ng and Fan Siu-Wong. Anyone who has a mild interest in the action cinema of Hong Kong would recognize Fan Siu-Wong from Ip Man, Ip Man 2, or my personal favorite, the gore-filled Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.

Francis Ng plays a lowly, disheveled cab driver (very well, I might add) who picks up a newly released prisoner, Zhang Jin (played by Fan). In typical action-thriller fashion, Zhang Jin becomes the target of an assassination plot to tie up loose ends, and he finds an unlikely ally in the cab driver. Although I’m much more familiar with Fan Siu-Wong’s performances, Francis Ng’s acting in this film is absolutely fantastic. Distraught with the recent murders of his wife and daughter, watching him spiral into insanity both emotionally and physically was quite an enjoyable ride. As a matter of fact, the picture on the DVD sleeve which depicts Ng holding a gun is rather misleading. Throughout the film, Ng’s acts recklessly out of grief, but is believably clumsy in his mannerisms: He is an outraged civilian who happens upon a gun, who takes matters into his own hands without knowing anything about firearms or the repercussions of revenge. I believe this, ultimately, is Payback’s saving grace.

Any time I would catch the show Storage Wars, I always would watch with this morbid curiosity with the hopes that one day they’d open a storage unit and discover something more than a few lost boxes.  With the millions of storage units that are spread throughout the country, you’d have to imagine that hidden away in a couple of these units are some pretty awful things that would turn the stomachs of most.  Is this simply a thought I have from watching too many horror films? Most likely, but I can’t be the only one out there; after all it would seem this line of thinking is what brought The Hoarder to the screen.  In the new horror release we get to discover there is more to fear than a few old dust bunnies when venturing out to the local storage unit; in fact it can possibly turn into a trip you may never return from.

Ella (Mischa Barton) is having doubts about her current boyfriend; they are the kind of doubts that lead her to believe he has something to hide in his storage unit.  After she’s swiped his card key to the unit, Ella drags her best friend Molly (Emily Atack) along to see what all they can find.

Earlier for our Maude Review I talked about the All In The Family "coaching tree” and the number of spinoff that show produced. Maude was the first, but the most successful by far has to be The Jeffersons. The family moved into the house next door to Archie Bunker early in the first season of All In The Family. While Norman Leer always intended Sherman Hemsley to play Archie's black nemesis, the actor wasn't available for the role. Thinking ahead, the show introduced another actor as Uncle Henry to spar with Archie for a while. The son Lionel would also change actors over the years. There is no doubt that when Hemsley finally appeared as George Jefferson, the chemistry between him and Carroll O'Connor was instant magic.

The families would be neighbors for four years when the network, seeing the popularity of the Jefferson family, decided it was time for them to move it on up to the Eastside. George's chain of dry cleaners was making good money, and they could finally afford a "De-Lux" apartment in the sky. In addition to Hemsley as George and Isabel Sanford as wife Louise "Weezie" Jefferson, the cast included Mother Jefferson, played by Zara Cully. She hated her daughter-in-law and was always turning up her nose at the woman. She thought George was such a wonderful husband. Of course, he wasn't. Like Bunker he was racist and a crude man. He also had a temper, often coming out of his insecurity at being rather short. He never spoke when shouting worked just as well.