Cover Story

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 Cover Story. It starred Elizabeth "Jessie Spano" Berkley as a magazine editor. Go ahead and laugh. I did. Anyway, Jessie Spano is the editor of some magazine that I guess was supposed to be like Vanity Fair, in that it covered celebrities and scandal, but wasn't a tabloid. Their newsstands sales were down, so they needed a big cover story -- hencethe title of the movie. I also learned what a magazine editor does. She circles some things with a red marker, and then crosses out others. She stands in front of a bunch of cover mock-ups and talks to her staff. And she wears really slutty clothes, but offsets the skank factor by wearing glasses. All of this is done in a montage fashion. Anyway, the actual plot was confusing, but it involved an anonymous informant sending journal pages to the magazine that implicated some sort of crime and a love affair or something. And Jessie Spano figured out that it involved Jason "Brandon Walsh" Priestley and his brother, who were financing a new dam with their mob connections. Like, who pitched this movie, and then got to that part of the plot, without making anyone laugh? A dam? Financed by the mob? And this is the heart of the movie? So Jessie wants an interview with Brandon, but he's a recluse, so she works on his brother. And she goes back to Brandon and his brother's house (they live together?), and the brother starts hitting on her, and Jessie flirts back, and then he tells her that they are going to make love together, and instead of bursting out laughing, she gets pissed off and clocks him with a statue of Don Quixote (could I make that up?), and he ends up dead. So in most movies, the trial would be the rest of the film, but this one went on and on and it was totally unclear why Jessie would be acquitted of the murder charges, and why she would then start an affair with Brandon, and why her gay sidekick kept letting you know he was gay in every scene by talking about how he doesn't like women and he loves fashion. And then somehow Costas Mandylor got involved, and he was a cop and also Jessie's ex-boyfriend. And then just about everyone died, including Brandon Walsh, and Jessie quit the magazine and her sidekick got the editor position, and Jessie and Costas Mandylor ran off together and lived happily ever after. And I'm still not quite sure how we got from point A to point B, but it was awesome.