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

On 11/27/24 2:51 PM, shawn wrote:

On Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:19:38 -0800, Arthur Lipscomb
<arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

On 11/27/2024 8:50 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

 

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:
>
[snip]
>
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!

>
I know!  The last time I watched the movie Amy Adams probably wasn't
even on my radar.  But now I was like, she's in this?
>

     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.

 Only around 25 when she did this.

That's a lot older than I would have guessed... [checking] Yeah, wow - I didn't realize that Adams is only 3 and 1/2 years younger than I am! So she just turned 50 - I figured she was only in her mid-40s.

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.

>
Agreed.

Its not that Adams is "bad" here. It's just that she's playing a brat, and doesn't bring anything more to the take than that.
Comparatively, Gellar *owned* this role.

Interesting take. I looked it up over on Wikipedia and see that some
reviewer had a very different take on her performance.
 "In Los Angeles, Adams auditioned for whatever parts came her way, but
she was mostly given roles of "the bitchy girl".[14][19][20] Her first
assignment came within a week of her relocation in the Fox television
series Manchester Prep, a spin-off of the film Cruel Intentions, in
the lead role of Kathryn Merteuil (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in
the film).[4] Following numerous script revisions and two production
shutdowns, the series was canceled.[21] Adams later said a
controversial scene in which her character encourages a girl to
masturbate on a horse was the primary reason for its cancellation.[19]
The three filmed episodes were re-edited and released later in 2000 as
the direct-to-video film Cruel Intentions 2.[4] Despite a negative
critical reception, Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club wrote that Adams
plays her "alpha-bitch role with vicious glee largely missing from
Sarah Michelle Gellar's sterile take on the character".[22][23]"

Well, here's the thing - even in the realm of "internet reviewers", I consider A.V. Club to be a *joke*, and have for years.
So, if Variety had said this, I would just have to write it off as a bad take.
But if A.V. Club says it, I can just dismissively laugh at them for once again getting absolutely everything wrong.

Wow.. The next paragraph says that she was in PSYCHO BEACH PARTY
which I watched because of Nicholas Brendon but enjoyed because of
Lauren Ambrose. Don't remember Amy Adams from that movie so she
clearly didn't make much of an impression on me back then.

I still have never seen this, IIRC.

     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.)

>
I wouldn't call it a "twist" ending.  Like you said, it was tacked on.
Had the series not been cancelled, the younger brother would have been
the protagonist.  I'm seeing the same thing play out in the new Amazon
series.  The new series has a very similar plot structure as the movie
and the cancelled Fox series where the sister orders her step brother to
help her in her latest evil scheme.  The brother agrees to do it, but
it's all under the sister's thumb.  With the Fox series being cancelled,
they had to link it to the movie where at the start of the movie he's
going to do her bidding instead of challenging her.

Eh... I still think "Cruel Intention 2's" ending is awful.

So is Cruel Intentions 3 worth checking out before it leaves?

I am about to find out - I'm watching this tonight before I go to bed. I remembering being incredibly underwhelmed by it when I saw it two decades ago... But I enjoyed the "Wild Things" direct-to-video sequels more than I was expecting, so I may be surprised.

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!).

>
There's a fourth one?!?

Yes - but if you think about it, there wasn't a fifth one. Draw your own conclusions!!
Basically, the fourth one really only has Jillian Murray and John Schneider to recommend it. (Marnette Patterson is OK in it, but I can't say she adds anything special to it.) And the story and especially the ending are crappy.