Made-for-TV

The Perfect Nanny

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Three stars

Delicious trash!  We lounged in twin beds, a hotel room’s fill of homies and flipped between this glorious garbage and Nick Jr.  Outside San Fran was getting started, inside we nurtured hangovers, took turns taking showers, flipped on our backs giggling and screaming and kicking air.  We goofed, we improved, we pillow fought, we cuddled.  I prayed “get it gurl” as Tracy Nelson shot one liners, clubbed exes, stabbed CEO’s.  Awestricken by harlequin romance dream sequences.  Buy the slow burn buildup of TV transgression.  Oh the soapy, campy, filth of it all!  During commercial breaks we were offered make-up and cleaning products.

D: Robert Malenfant; W: Mark Castaldo, Christine Conradt, Richard Gilbert-Hill, & Victor Shiller; P by: Don E. FauntLeRoy, M by: Richard Bowers, E by: Gregg London & Robert Pergament; w/Tracy Nelson, Bruce Boxleitner, Dana Barron, Scott Terra, Susan Blakely, Katherine Helmond, Darren Gray Ward, Cindy Guyer, etc…90 min, USA, 2000
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Parallels

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Three stars

God-the-father, a top floor junkie in a derelict building downtown.  He awaits true love’s kiss.  In his beard are spiders and pizza bits.  Every 36 hours the building hops to an alternate dimension. 

In one of the dimensions they dropped the bomb.  God’s children stowaway and hop with him.  They’re incestuous cage fighters who just wanna get home. 

In one of the dimensions technology is really really advanced.  God’s friends stowaway and hop with him.  They’re tommy-gun toting baddies who look like Woody Harrelson.

In one of the dimensions everything’s underwater.  Nobody can find God even though he’s just above them.  The stairwell is sealed and the elevator busted. 

Did you think, like me, that the Zero Day Fox logo was a parallel universe joke?  A russian nesting doll?  The movie-in-itself hailing from an alternate reality, one where 20th Century Fox doesn’t exist but is Zero Day Fox instead?  Yeah, turns out it’s just a subsidiary.

D & W by: Cristopher Leone, More W: Laura Harkcom, P by: Bryce Fortner, E by: Ian Duncan & Thomas Verrette, M by: Corey Allen Jackson, w/Mark Hapka, Constance Wu, Jessica Rothe, Eric Jungmann, Davi Jay, Ian Casselberry, Yorgo Constantine, Michael Monks, etc…, 83 min, USA, 2015

The Snapper

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Three stars

This one was recommended to me by attractive marrieds.  They’d come to see me drink menstrual blood and shake my butt under a big tent during an evening of orgiastic Klezmer and glitter and then they wrote to me via Facebook and suggested this Irish comedy about a quirky family and a teenage pregnancy.  I fear I’m obfuscating the connection in an ill-conceived effort to be a wise-guy.  The connection is love.

D by: Stephen Frears, W by: Roddy Doyle. P by: Oliver Stapleton, E by: Mike Audsley, w/Tina Kellegher, Colm Meaney, Ruth McCabe, Fionnuala Murphy, Diedre O’Brian, Pat Laffan, Karen Woodley, Brendan Gleeson, 91 min, Ireland, 1993