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Tag: Mothers and Daughters Page 1 of 2

Baby for Sale: Dana Delany Child-Shops on eBay

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On February 27, 2024

In TV Movies

Dana Delany’s a tough mother in Lifetime’s Baby for Sale.

The problems start when Nathalie Johnson (Dana Delany), desperate to adopt, goes online without parental supervision. It’s 2004, and while you could engage in human trafficking on Craigslist and Backpage then, Target didn’t yet offer BOGO sales on human infants.* Dejected after another fruitless meeting with an expectant mother, Nathalie searches for ‘adoption’ and clicks the first result. She impulsively submits an application that requires financial disclosure and is soon offered Gitta, a four-month-old from Budapest.

Surgeon husband Steve (Hart Bochner) and their adoption lawyer, Kathy (Ellen David, exuding Roma Maffia energy), urge caution. They’re based in Minnesota and the baby broker, Gábor Szabó (Bruce Ramsay) — not to be confused with the guitarist — is in New York. “I have no way to properly screen him,” Kathy warns. “This is a man we know nothing about. There’s a lot of risk here.” The red flags only multiply once the Johnsons travel to meet Gitta, but Nathalie, already a stepmother to Steve’s son, is blinded by her desire for a child to call her own.

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Passions: Lindsay Wagner and Joanne Woodward Brawl at a Funeral

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On February 7, 2024

In TV Movies

Joanne Woodward rumbles with Lindsay Wagner in Passions.

There’s a quiet dignity to the way Joanne Woodward instigates a catfight with Lindsay Wagner at her straying husband’s funeral in Passions (1984). Catherine Kennerly, her patrician homemaker, doesn’t want to engage in fisticuffs, but what else is she to do when Wagner’s Nina Simon, the other woman, has the temerity to attend his church service and dab her eyes in front of God and everyone? Confronting Nina in private, a seething Catherine exclaims “You are filth!” — and still her rival persists, asserting her right to be there.

“I think you’d better leave before you make a fool of yourself,” the younger woman coolly replies. Having silently choked on her anger throughout the priest’s eulogy (“He was that rare individual who really cared about his fellow men, and acted upon his feelings”), Catherine is thrilled to have a living target for her rage. Then Nina drops a bombshell: she was with Richard (Richard Crenna) for eight years, and they have a six-year-old son together. The widow launches herself at the stylish marital interloper almost automatically, propelled as much by grief as fury.

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A Magical Christmas Village: Marlo Thomas Practices Witchcraft

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On December 1, 2023

In TV Movies

Marlo Thomas and Alison Sweeney in A Magical Christmas Facelift Village.

There’s a mother-daughter horror movie tucked within A Magical Christmas Village (2022), cloaked by spruce and tinsel. But until Hallmark develops a line of greeting cards and snow globes commemorating intergenerational trauma, it must remain suppressed. In its absence we’re left with another holiday romance between a hardworking single parent and a peripatetic professional, one that again culminates, as is often the case, in a public display of affection cheered by townspeople that seem to voyeuristically assemble specifically for that purpose. (That Brian De Palma hasn’t directed a Hallmark film is one of the great tragedies of his career.)

The players here are Summer Ashby (Alison Sweeney), a small-town architect, and civil engineer Ryan Scott (Luke Macfarlane of A Shoe Addict’s Christmas), whose job takes him around the country. She’s remodeling a city-owned building when he arrives in search of storage space for toy drive donations. It’s an odd request (who wants stuffed animals covered in sawdust?) until you realize her general contractor’s duties primarily consist of moving Christmas trees and adjusting speakers that play seasonal music. Their awkward introduction gives way to instant attraction and the usual ritualized Hallmark bonding over shared values.

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A Mother’s Justice: Meredith Baxter Goes Charles Bronson

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On November 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Meredith Baxter and G.W. Bailey in A Mother’s Justice.

There are worse tales of maternal vigilantism than Meredith Baxter’s A Mother’s Justice: John Schlesinger’s notorious Eye for an Eye, starring Sally Field, springs immediately to mind. But don’t take that as an endorsement of Baxter’s film, which premiered on NBC in 1991 and found a second home on Lifetime. It’s still quite bad, just not as grotesque as Field’s revenge fantasy. The closest it comes is a misguided scene at an Italian restaurant that brings new meaning to the slogan “When you’re here, you’re family.”

Justice, directed by Noel Nosseck (No One Would Tell), opens suspensefully, with a predator prowling the streets. His abduction of Debbie (Carrie Hamilton), a 23-year-old aspiring nurse, is more graphic than her subsequent rape, which she immediately reports to police. Det. Bogardus (Blu Mankuma) assures her it wasn’t her fault and awkwardly tells her “I know I’m the same color as the man who attacked you, but I just want you to know, we get ’em in all colors. Like I said, don’t worry. If he goes on, we’ll get him.”

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Right of Way: Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart’s Suicide Pact

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On October 30, 2023

In TV Movies

Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart cuddle and fantasize about death in Right of Way.

If I told you that Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart costarred in an HBO movie about an elderly couple in a suicide pact, you’d probably think I was yanking your chain — and that’s without mentioning that Stewart’s character nibbles on cat food* or that Davis makes tuna casserole, something she certainly never did as Charlotte Vale, Judith Traherne or Margo Channing. It happens in the long-forgotten Right of Way (1983), which was produced in the network’s pre-Michael Patrick King era. In laymen’s terms, that means our octogenarian protagonists keep their clothes on and don’t break up with their daughter via Post-it note.

Instead, Miniature ‘Mini’ Dwyer (Davis, and there’s a long story behind that diminutive) and husband Teddy (Stewart) summon daughter Ruda (Melinda Dillon) to their Los Angeles home, which she finds unkempt and overrun with stray cats. Mini explains their lack of concern: “You see, we’re not worried about the house, the lawn these days, or the cats’ bowls or the weeds. We aren’t worried about any of it. We know we haven’t been attending to these things. We’re not blind and we haven’t forgotten. In fact, it’s just the opposite. We have chosen not to.” Indeed, they’ve been busy with weightier matters, like plotting their deaths.

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Stalked by My Doctor: The Return Improves on the Original

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On October 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Eric Roberts and Claire Blackwelder in Stalked by My Doctor: The Return.

When last we saw Dr. Albert Beck (Eric Roberts), the world’s second-most dangerous cardiothoracic surgeon, he was starting a new life as an international fugitive following a kidnapped patient’s daring escape from captivity. Stalked by My Doctor: The Return (2016) finds him in Acapulco, and one can only assume that Lifetime couldn’t afford to license the Four Tops’ “Loco in Acapulco,” which would’ve been the perfect soundtrack to a sequel that zestfully embraces the abject terribleness of its slightly more serious predecessor.

Its villain, now posing as a pediatrician named Victor Slauson, practices his own form of self-acceptance by ignoring the advice — and pharmaceuticals — offered by his psychiatrist, Dr. Clark (Tiffany Adams). Their online appointments convey Beck’s commitment to indulging his madness, as when he confidently tells the doctor of his plan to stalk 18-year-old Amy Watkins (Claire Blackwelder), who he recently saved from drowning. “I’m thinking I can date the mother, which would help me get closer to the daughter,” he muses. “The mom likes me, I can tell. But don’t worry, she won’t be bothering us for long.”

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Behold the Magic and Wonder of Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story

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On July 11, 2023

In TV Movies

Joan and Melissa Rivers in Tears and Laughter.

You can keep your Mildred Pierce and Mermaids, your Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment—Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994) is the greatest mother-daughter movie of all-time. “But what about Mommie Dearest?” you might counter. “What about Volver, Imitation of Life, Freaky Friday or Postcards from the Edge?”

To which I can only reply that Tears and Laughter is a dramedy about producer Edgar Rosenberg’s suicide starring his actual widow, Joan Rivers, and their daughter Melissa, a non-actress whose performance is the made-for-TV equivalent of Sofia Coppola’s maligned turn in The Godfather Part III. If you love things that are terrible, it gets no better than this, a tearjerker that opens with liposuction jokes and excerpts from a typical Rivers routine: “I went to Las Vegas, I threw my hotel key up at Tom Jones. He took it and burglarized my room.”

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No One Would Tell: When Teen Romance Turns Deadly

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On May 22, 2023

In TV Movies

Candace Cameron and Fred Savage in No One Would Tell.

There’s a power in the casting of No One Would Tell (1996) that might be lost on younger viewers, but for children of the ’80s and ’90s, Kevin Arnold abusing D.J. Tanner was about as shocking as “Beaver” Cleaver giving Gidget a black eye. Based on the chilling true story of 14-year-old Amy Carnevale’s murder at the hands of her high school boyfriend, it stars Fred Savage as senior Bobby Tennison, a standout wrestler who can’t control his anger when girlfriend Stacy Collins (Candace Cameron) acknowledges the existence of anyone who isn’t him.

His rages — and her hidden bruises — multiply each time she laughs with pals, wears a miniskirt in public or exchanges pleasantries with male classmates. “Yeah, so he gets a little jealous, OK? Guys are like that,” she tells worried friend Nicki (Heather McComb). It’s a lesson she picked up at home, where mother Laura (Michelle Phillips) excuses the controlling behavior of boyfriend Rod (Paul Linke) despite Stacy’s concerns. After lashing out physically, Bobby turns into the domestic violence version of a Fisher-Price See ‘n Say.

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Lace: Motherhood’s a B*tch

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On May 12, 2023

In TV Movies

“Is that any way to talk to your mothers?”

Let’s say it now, in unison, to get it out of the way: “Incidentally, which one of you b*tches is my mother?” That notorious question, from 1984’s Lace, is Phoebe Cates’s most enduring contribution to cinema that doesn’t involve a red bikini. And it cuts jaggedly to the neon-pink heart of this ABC miniseries, a soapy, sprawling maternity mystery that plays like the most scandalous Facts of Life episode never made.

Adapted by Elliott Baker from Shirley Conran’s saucy novel, Lace is first set in 1960 and tells the story of three friends and roommates at a Swiss boarding school: the pouty French Maxine Pascal (Arielle Dombasle); sardonic Brit Jennifer ‘Pagan’ Trelawney (Brooke Adams); and adventurous American Judy Hale (Bess Armstrong), who entertains her friends with passages from a bodice ripper she scribbles between classes that features a heroine called Lucinda Lace. It’s a name the pals use interchangeably when one of them finds herself pregnant on the eve of graduation, and the trio form an unusual pact of secrecy to protect her at any cost.

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For the Love of Nancy: Tracey Gold’s Anorexia Movie

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On April 16, 2023

In TV Movies

Tracey Gold in a scene from For the Love of Nancy.

A hazard of the message movie is that disparate audiences can take very different lessons from it. My wife was already anorexic by the time she arrived in middle school, where one of her teachers played For the Love of Nancy on videocassette during free periods, presumably in an attempt to reach at-risk students. She recalled this recently after spotting the DVD on my desk. “Did you learn anything from it or were you hostile to its message?” I asked, suspecting I already knew the answer. A sheepish smile tugged at her lips after a moment’s reflection: “I learned you can hide food in walls,” she replied with a laugh.

That is most assuredly not the wisdom screenwriters Nigel and Carol Evan McKeand sought to impart with Nancy, about a family’s struggle to save its daughter from an eating disorder. But what they hoped to accomplish wasn’t entirely clear to me, either. We never get close enough to 18-year-old Nancy Walsh (Tracey Gold) to understand who she was prior to her illness, and even once she’s in the throes of it, we watch the terrible proceedings from a curious emotional remove. Then there’s the brazenness of Gold’s casting itself. She was still early in her own recovery from anorexia in 1994, which raises uncomfortable questions viewers must answer for themselves about responsibility and sensationalism.

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