The Cool and the Crazy

The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a television movie called The Cool and the Crazy, starring Alicia Silverstone and Jared "Jordan Catalano" Leto. It was set in the '50s, and I don't know what it is with TV movies being set in the '50s, but there you go. Alicia and Jordan play a high-school couple who get married right after graduation in a double ceremony with their best friends, and then they all get apartments near each other and get pregnant at the same time. So Alicia and her friend (played by Jennifer Blanc who was Kate, Bailey's girlfriend, on Party of Five) get bored with hanging out with their babies all the time, and Kate starts having an affair with a total greaser and hooks Alicia up with her boyfriend's friend, who is not just a greaser but also crazy like a shithouse rat. So they all sneak out all the time and have sex with their boyfriends and stuff and Alicia spends most of the time whining because she's just not a very good actress. And also I think the script was not quite finished when they started filming, so every scene begins and ends with improvised business and Alicia and Kate couldn't quite pull it off so every scene starts with them giggling and shoving each other and skipping and shit and then they deliver their lines and then they giggle some more. So Alicia's crazy greaser boyfriend starts making more and more demands on her and I'm not quite sure what she was doing with her baby while she was off getting naked on the beach with crazy greaser boyfriend but whatever. Jordan busts her with her boyfriend and leaves home. So then there's this whole subplot where Jordan hooks up with Mark Greene's ex-wife Jen, who is a beatnik. And Jordan starts hanging out at her apartment and then Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady come by (no, I'm not kidding) and do drugs and wave guns around. So Jordan gets scared because he's bourgeois at heart. And Alicia gets scared because of her crazy greaser boyfriend (oh, and did I mention that he's also married?) and breaks up with him and gets back together with Jordan. So one night, crazy greaser boyfriend kidnaps Alicia, and Jordan chases them down but the crazy greaser friends won't give her back, so Jordan goes to Jen Greene's place and gets Jack Kerouac's gun and then there's another car chase and then Jordan gets Alicia back. And then some drug dealers come and beat up crazy greaser boyfriend because he scammed them out of some money or something. And then Alicia and Jordan realize that they got married too young and decide to split up amicably. The end.

Jailbreakers

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. Merging recent themes, the most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a movie called Jailbreakers starring Shannen Doherty (a.k.a. Brenda Walsh) and Antonio Sabato, Jr. (a.k.a. Jagger from General Hospital). Supposedly, this movie was set in the '50s, but I didn't figure that out until about halfway through because the theme was so half-assed, and Brenda's hair was totally '70s, and her outfits were all very contemporary. I like to think that Brenda refused to wear stupid poodle skirts and threw a hissy and got her way. Anyway, so Brenda is a good girl who falls for Jagger, the bad boy. And her parents don't approve, of course. And the part that made me laugh the hardest was when they were making out and Jagger tried to slide into third base and Brenda said she thought he promised to wait until she was sixteen. Meanwhile, in real life she was, like, thirty. So then they go out and Jagger steals a car, and robs a diner, and steals jewelry for Brenda, which she thinks is totally cool. Until they get pulled over by the cops and Jagger goes to jail. So the whole small town knows that Brenda is tainted so her parents have to move to a new town, like, whose parents would do that? So Brenda gets all new friends and a new boring boyfriend but then she can't take it anymore and she writes Jagger a letter in jail and he busts out of jail and comes to her house and she runs away with him. And meanwhile there's this whole subplot where Jagger and his best friend (played by, weirdly enough, Oscar nominee Adrien Brody) are trying to sell a stolen horse and split the money. So Jagger totally dicks Adrien Brody over and takes all of the money and he and Brenda head to Mexico. And Brenda still thinks it's all cool until they get pulled over by a cop and Jagger kills him with a knife. Like, it was all fine when it was larceny and shit, but murder is too far. So then she makes a few pathetic attempts to get away from him, but finally they end up at the border and they're surrounded by cops and snipers and even Brenda's dad is there with a shotgun, but Jagger is using Brenda as a human shield, but then Adrien Brody roars up on his motorcycle and saves Brenda and Jagger gets shot a million times. And then the absolute most awesome part was that, as Adrien Brody is arrested by the cops and Brenda is reunited with her parents, Brenda steals away and tells Adrien Brody that she'll wait for him until he gets out of jail. Because even though her last jailbird boyfriend turned into a murderer and kidnapper, and was shot down in front of her face, she just wants another bad boy. And meanwhile, Jagger's dead body was lying practically at Brenda's feet. Awesome.

90210

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week has already been written about by Sars, except where she thinks it was bad and yet she couldn't stop watching, I think it was awesome. Yes, I'm talking about the early seasons of 90210. I recently saw what is, to me, the single most awesome scene of the entire series: the one where Dylan and Kelly told Brenda that not only were they together, but they had hooked up over the summer while Brenda was in Paris. And then Brenda's response was to just walk away. Which then led to the ridiculous (and yet awesome) episode where Brenda had a daydream in which she tried to kill Dylan and Kelly with an ax, and one where she cut all of Kelly's hair off. Which then led to Dylan's dad being "killed" by a car bomb, which then led to Dylan finding out that his dad was really a government informant, which then led to Dylan living with the Walshes for a while, which then led to Kelly deciding she needed to start taking diet pills. All of which led to me wondering what the hell kind of drugs the writers were doing. And I'm not even getting into David's shitty recording contract or Brandon's laughable gambling addiction or Donna's complete lack of storyline or the fact that Andrea is clearly about fifteen years older than anyone else on the show including Dylan "Receding Hairline" McKay and Steve "Could My Pants Be Any Tighter?" Sanders and Brenda "Check Out My Crow's Feet" Walsh. All of which is to say, every Saturday and Sunday you will find me on the couch watching a few hours of 90210 reruns, at least until Brenda leaves the show, because then it all goes downhill.

Shattered Innocence

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw On TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a movie called Shattered Innocence, and just from the title, you can tell that it's going to be awesome. And it's based on a true story, which is another sign of awesomeness. So this girl lives in Kansas and she's the prettiest girl in her town, but it's Kansas, so that doesn't mean much. And she has, like, eight sisters and lives in a farmhouse with her parents and is really bored. So she decides to move to California with her boyfriend, Super Mullet. And she doesn't want to get a minimum-wage job, so she answers an ad in the paper to become a model. Well, everyone but this girl obviously knows what's going to happen next. It's semi-nude modeling, and then nude modeling, and then Super Mullet dumps her when he finds out about the nudity. And then the big photographer tells her she's too fat, so she starts doing cocaine, and she loses a whopping six pounds, like that would make that big a difference, although maybe it would since she was, like, a hundred pounds to start out with. And then she gets into Playboy and shit, but then the jobs dry up because she's overexposed. And then she goes home to Kansas for Christmas and buys everyone really expensive presents and shows off her nude modeling pictures to her preteen sisters and her mom gets all mad and her teenaged sister says that the whole family is ashamed of her. So then this cheesy manager convinces her to do hardcore porn to be shown in those little booths in porno shops, of course, and she needs the money to pay for drugs, of course, so she does it. And then -- in what seemed to me to be a backward move on the downward spiral -- she moves into regular porn and she wins a porn award and does a lot more coke. So then she gets recognized and realizes that people actually watch porn and might know she's a porn star, so she refuses to do another movie. So she hooks up with this coke dealer, who is actually a pretty nice guy and lets her move to his house in Palm Springs and work in his store, but she keeps doing coke and gets nosebleeds and shit and he tries to cut her off. But then he gets arrested and thrown in jail and she totally bails on him instead of staying in his house and paying his bills and running the store like he asked. So she has to do another porn movie to get some money and she goes back to the house in Palm Springs one last time to pack up her stuff and she finds a gun in the closet. But it's not even like a shotgun or a pistol. It's like an automatic weapon. And somehow she uses it to shoot herself, but she didn't even die instantly, and her parents had to come out from Kansas and take her off life support. So the moral of the story is, don't move away from Kansas. I guess.