Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-03-01 (Saturday)

On 3/2/25 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:

What did you watch?

Got through a movie and a Lifetime flick yesterday, plus some soaps:
soaps: Y&R - Wed's ep. This was such a nullity of an episode, that I don't think there was anything worth synopsizing except that Chelsea is just an incredible loser, falling back into Adam's lap. [roll]
    DOOL - Fri's ep. This ep was also mostly a loser - if it hadn't had sweet Holly The Brat, it might have been a total write-off! And I still don't like the NuSophia compared to the old one... Holly tells Maggie that Doug III is into her, and claims that she's not, but at worst she seems ambivalent about it (and, at best, Holly can probably parlay this into a Devil's threesome if she knows what she's doing!!  :p  ). NuSophia lies about Johnny and Chanel to her mommy, and then drops a surprise lunch with her mommy on them. Johnny and Chanel talk over the adoption angle with grandma and mom, respectively. I don't think anything else happened here.
Strange Darling (Pee+) - A highly stylized 2024 (the 2023 festival premiere doesn't count!) - but filmed in 2022 - ...well, I'd put this much more firmly in the thriller genre than the horror genre, so "thriller film", told in non-linear fashion that consists of 6 Chapters (they cheat - the "Epilogue" actually makes it 7 Chapters!).
    Sidenote #1: Surprisingly, Giovanni Ribisi both (co-)produces and is the *director of cinematography* for this film - I wonder if Ribisi feels like he's at the end of his acting career, and is transitioning to behind the camera stuff.
    Sidenote #2: I cannot believe that Miramax is still operating as a studio! At the very least, somebody should have renamed/rebranded the studio! Sheesh!... And it sounds like Miramax still almost ruined the film anyway! (see Wiki).
    The opening text should have clued me in that something was going on here - it's deliberately vague. (It also implies that this is based on a real story, which it is not!!)
    As you will ask - no, this film would be much, much worse if it was told in "linear" fashion. In fact, I suspect that, like some of Tarantino's stuff, if this film was shown in linear fashion, my guess is that it might not work at all.
    Overall I liked this flick (hey! look! - Ed Begley, Barbara Hershey and Madisen Beatty all show up in this flick!), though I didn't love it, and Willa Fitzgerald's performance is quite good. I didn't totally love the ending either (it sports an apparent dropped plot point), but the film and its ending was interesting I guess.
Killing the Competition (Lifetime) - This new flick turned out better than I expected. It wasn't as much of a slog as I was anticipating, and Lily Brooks O'Briant's character is at least sympathetic.
    The star here, of course, is Melissa Joan Hart, and she doesn't just play the mom - she's playing a Momster!
    Returning to her hometown where she was once the Queen Bee of the high school apparently drives Hart's character nuts (as she's pretty much a "nothing" now). She becomes obsessed with her daughter (O'Briant) recapturing her former glory - obsessed to the point where she does stuff like go to the school board to publicly complain, and sit in on the cheer practices wearing a weak "disguise". But worse than all that, she starts becoming emotionally abusive to O'Briant's character, constantly running her down and belittling her for not being as great as Hart's character was in high school.
    They pretty much wimp out on the ending (the movie's title is a lie!!), though I did appreciate that the very final scene lets us know that Hart's character was still a nut job, and any contrition on her part was almost certainly an act!
    So, as "mothers from Hell" flicks go, this might have been one of the better ones.
    P.S. Please get whoever played the tall cheerleader girl her own Lifetime flick to headline!  ;p
What did you watch?