What Did You Watch? 2024-11-26 (Tuesday)

I spent most of yesterday (day) cleaning my place for the coming holiday. I didn't even finish yesterday, but I did make a lot of progress, enough that my cleaning today will be mostly finishing up...
But I did get through a couple more movies, and soaps:
soaps:
    DOOL - Mon's & Tue's ep's. Alex ends up not ratting Joy and Johnny out to Chanel. Johnny still feels guilty, but doesn't tell Chanel. Paulina puts pressure on Jada to find Hattie, but Jada kind of swats her away; later, Paulina loses it on Marlena when she thinks Marlena is Hattie. Leo has another amusing session with Marlena. Javi still wants nothing to do with Leo... Tue's ep was the Thanksgiving ep. By contrivance, most of the cast gathers at the diner for Thanksgiving, including NuPhilip, which causes friction with Alex (both Alex and Philip seem to be vying for Stephanie - Stephanie's crazy if she ends up with Philip!) and Xander (as Philip is trying to take Titan away from Xander).
    GH - Tue's ep. Ava's trial is underway, and Ric does a pretty good job discrediting Dante, and then successfully does get Kristina to melt down on the stand. Sasha talks with Maxie (Zenon!!) about potentially being preggers (though she doesn't tell Maxie about Michael) - at the end, it's confirmed that Sasha is preggers. By coincidence, Cody picks up the escaping NuNuLulu on the side of the road, and takes her into town - it was unclear to me if Cody recognized who Lulu was and kept quiet about it or not (there would be no way that Cody wouldn't have seen pictures of Lulu at Dante's place, so he should have known who she was...) - at the end, Lulu was about to walk into Maxie's place (with Sasha there): this will be a good scene on Wed's ep.
    Y&R - Mon's ep. Filis[sic!] is irate that Nick is still defending Sharon, and is more irate that Michael is defending Sharon as her lawyer! Sharon "wishes" Linden Ashby's ghost(!) to the cornfield. After talking with Faith and Mariah, I think Nick is starting to figure out that Sharon is being framed for running Filis off the road. Billy's and Sally's "morning after" puts Adam off; then Victor pokes the bear - I don't think Sally likes Billy's thirst for REVENGE! against Victor (even though it is totally justified!!).
Then, I picked up where I left off with the flicks on Tubi:
Sidenote: Once again, both of these flicks looked crappy. The recurring theme here seems to be that all of the 2000's-era direct-to-video flicks look lousy (at least on Tubi). I've got to think that's because they're all DVD-rips, and DVD-rips just look bad on HDTV's, no matter what you do...
Cruel Intentions 2 (Tubi) - Like the "Center Stage" flicks, "Cruel Intentions 2" & "3" are leaving Tubi in a few days. So I decided to revisit them too.
    This 2000/2001 flick is the one that was originally a Fox TV series, but Fox cancelled it in the middle of filming episode #2 (due to controversy), so they turned it into a direct-to-video flick by filming a few extra scenes and throwing in some naked nudity (but not enough!! ;p  ).
    Considering this was to be a TV show, the cast for this is kind of mind-blowing - they had Mimi Rodgers playing Kathryn Merteuil's mom, and they had Amy-friggin'-Adams playing Kathryn Merteuil!
    It blows my mind that Amy Adams was almost in a TV series. AFAIR, Adams never really did TV in her early career, though apparently she did an episode of "Charmed" very early in her career that I had forgotten about! (and later did an episode of "Smallville", in a fat suit!!) - so I must have seen her back then.
    Adams is so young here that she's almost kind of unrecognizable. The other thing that amazes me is that Amy Adams is a multiple-Academy Award nominee, but Sarah-Michelle Gellar *blows Adams away* in this role. And it just can't be chalked up to the writing or "the character is younger" here - Adams just isn't nearly as good at the role as Gellar.
    Overall, this is fine, as long as it's tracking what the TV show filmed. But they must have tacked on the "twist" ending (I hope the TV series wasn't intending to end up in the same place!), and it doesn't work at all, IMO. (Movie/TV #1: You need to have somebody to "root for" - if you don't, you have nothing.)
Wild Things: Foursome (Tubi) - The fourth, and final, "Wild Things" flick from 2010 (which I had never seen before, and indeed don't even think I even knew existed until maybe a decade later!).
    This one interested me because it stars Jillian Murray early in her career (this is just a year after she recurred on "Sonny with a Chance" and had done the flicks "Forget Me Not" and "The Graves") - and she does look like a virtual baby here - along with Marnette Patterson! I'm actually shocked to see that Marnette Patterson is still working, though she's fallen *way* down the Hollywood ladder from her heights (esp. compared to Murray!) and as you might expect she didn't really keep her looks.
    This is easily the worst of the "Wild Things" flicks IMO, despite sporting Murray in slutty trailer park short-shorts and a bikini top through most of the film, and even sporting a flash of Murray toplessness! (I am quite sure that everyone got stunt butts here, tho...)
    For one, I think this flick lost something by replacing Linden Ashby from "2" and "3" as the detective cop with John Schneider. (Though, considering the fate of the character, it maybe makes sense why they didn't brink Ashby back...) (Sidenote: I like how Marc Macaulay was in 3 of the 4 "Wild Things" flicks, each time playing a different character! - in "4", he plays Schneider's police captain boss...)
    For another, this one seems to start out being centered around a male lead (Ashley Parker Angel), though that's a bait-and-switch and Murray and Patterson are indeed the leads through most of the film.
    And then there's the fact that the third girl in the "foursome" just basically disappears from the last 2/3 of the flick.  :/
    Like "2", much of "4" concern's Schneider's detective trying to figure out what is going on and what Murray and Patterson are up to.
    Anyway, this one was only interesting to see Murray early in her career, and to see Patterson play against type as a scheming femme fatale-type (OTOH, Murray has been playing those since the beginning of her career...).
    But I thought the ending of this one was particularly weak, esp. compared to the endings of "2" and "3", which largely worked IMO.
What did you watch?