Shared Darkness

At the time I didn’t really think I’d yearn for the comparative high entertainment value of a woman accidentally crapping on the stairs of Public Enemy hypeman Flavor Flav’s house, as happened early during the second season of his VH-1 dating show, Flavor of Love. Little did I know that was probably the last moment before this series jumped the shark. Later, Flav’s spurned flame from season one, the comically over-confident bitch-on-wheels nicknamed New York, was brought back, and the hijacked show became a vehicle of her own outlandish self-promotion.

All of which brings us to the recently concluded Flavor of Love 3, now available on DVD. If catty antagonism and a near-endless mangling of the English language — including frequent invocations of the word “romantical,” and the fact that, when faced with drama between two ladies, Flav says, “I confronted all two of them!” — is your idea of high entertainment, then you’ll likely love Flavor of Love 3; others, however, are advised to skip it, or at the very least utilize the series as some sort of communal drinking game.

It wasn’t just the shock value of seeing a (rap star? professional jester? convicted felon?) inimitably zonked celebrity like Flavor Flav shack up with a bunch of bickering skanks looking for a hand-out young women looking for love that made the first iteration of Flavor of Love, and part of the second, so compelling. Remember, he’d already done several other reality series — a season of The Surreal Life and then a couple Twilight Zone-esque romantic spin-offs with Brigitte Nielsen. No, part of what was so fresh about the original incarnation of the show was the shrieking class collision it produced, with women tripping over one another to lap up the material run-off of his fame, and the genuine befuddlement all this seemed to set off in Flav.

Now, after several seasons, the formula is busted and bleary-eyed, and the seams all show. Part of it is that Flavor of Love has been co-opted by similar series like Rock of Love, yes (and it certainly doesn’t help that co-creators Chris Abrego and Mark Cronin have had a hand in almost every single one of these VH-1 shows since 2005’s Strange Love), but no amount of screwball interstitial commentary from Flav can hide the tire tracks of previously visited terrain. More group family dinners where someone says something awkward? Check. Countless scenes where girls sidle up to Flav and impart some back-stabbing information in cooing fashion. Check. Really… another bit where the ladies react with disgust to having to clean bathrooms and showers in advance of family visits? Yawn.

It’s perhaps like criticizing the sun for not being the moon, I guess, asking or expecting new tilled ground from a piece of anarchic, decidedly of-the-moment entertainment like Flavor of Love 3. Still, one would like to think there’s been at least some emotional growth or development, at least on par with what a viewer has experienced. Here, there’s not really that; we just get re-hashed scenarios and for the most part unenlightening confessionals. The sole moment of creativity may be a phony dating show (“The Neverwed
Game,” I believe) in which contestants’ exes are dragged out and asked
a series of questions. We do learn, too, that Flav really loves to bowl. And he may have been wearing his Viking helmet too long, because he manages to rock a twisted braid/horn look that really shouldn’t be worn by anyone older than 4, let alone a man.

The Flav-nicknamed contestants are largely the usual assortment of silicone-enhanced pin-up models, desperate single mothers, conniving up-traders and starry-eyed would-be entertainers, with a few notable exceptions, headlined by a set of twins, Thing 1 and Thing 2. After narrowing things down to a final four ladies — consisting of Black (because she’s white… ha!), Thing 2, the refined Seezinz and the scheming Sinceer — Flav brings in their families to meet his mother, who could pass for Yoda in a pinch. Trimmed to three and then two, the shoe heads to Paris, where the drama gets even more “dramatical” and, after suffering elimination, one contestant offers these words to her erstwhile competitor turned rooting-favorite, without irony or sarcasm: “You better use your thizzle fo’ shizzle, and keep it fuckin’ real.” Errr… OK.

Housed in a sturdy cardboard slipcover that holds four discs in three plastic, slimline cases, Flavor of Love 3 comes presented in full screen, which of course preserves the aspect ratio of its small screen origins. The stereo audio track, meanwhile, easily captures the meager aural demands of the series, which of course makes liberal use of both placed and on-person microphones to ensure no bitchy quip goes uncaptured. A touted “super-trailer,” an extended piece of promotional goosing, kicks off the supplemental extras, which also includes a casting special a highlight-reel-type featurette entitled “Flav Filosophies” (read: him saying crazy shit) and several other featurettes. “Girls Gone Flav” offers up viewers highlights of the women’s (frequent) arguments, and extra footage of Flav’s Parisian dates is also included. Points for sheer volume, I guess. More entertaining, though, might be the series’ hour-long reunion special, in which Sinceer shows off her boob implants and another woman, a Hooters waitress named “Ice,” sums up how her life has changed as a result of the show: “The tips have gotten a lot more better.” Niiiiiiice… To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. D (Show) B+ (Disc)

A sort of spiritual sequel to the touchstone adolescent cinema of the 1980s, The Lather Effect is a wistfully engaging ensemble flick about the emotional grappling of the generation that grew up on MTV and the Rubik’s Cube — like the characters of a John Hughes comedy getting back together for one last meeting of the breakfast club and finding out things aren’t what they use to be. The cinematic equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” it’s a movie about fond reminiscences as well as the receding tide of the big-haired new wave — a bunch of friends and part-time rivals coming to grips with social and familial responsibilities and the fact that the best times of their lives might still be in front of them, if only they could stop looking over their shoulders. So why isn’t Eric Stoltz in this movie? Oh wait… he is? Awesome!

Written and directed by Sarah Kelly (above right), the movie is centered around the hung-over morning after a wild, back-in-time theme party (“Come as you were!”) thrown by Valinda (Friday Night Lights‘ Connie Britton, above left), who decides she wants to reunite all of her high school friends. Confronting unresolved romantic feelings toward her ex-flame Jack (William Mapother), who went on to marry close friend Zoey (Ione Skye), Valinda is forced to face down her current reality, which includes the possibility of starting a family with uptight husband Will (Tate Donovan), who wishes his wife would stop letting what he views as petty teenage nostalgia rule her daily life.

Also thrown into the mix are Valinda’s 25-year-old, weed-dealing brother Danny (Peter Facinelli); the prim and proper Claire (Sarah Clarke); sexually promiscuous Katrina (Caitlin Keats), now a doctor; Corey (David Herman, of Office Space), a former star who’s crashed and burned via drugs and alcohol, and recently discovered that he’s a father; and Valinda’s ear-ringed, party-crashing neighbor, Mickey, portrayed by the aforementioned Stoltz. It’s a retro-bash reunion fueled by some of the most memorable music of the decade (hits by Billy Idol, the Ramones, Simply Red, A-Ha, Night Ranger and Elvis Costello all get a workout, along with many others), a chatty flick that unabashedly stands on the shoulders of past movies like The Big Chill, Some Kind of Wonderful, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say AnythingŠ and of course all the iconic Hughes films of the era.

And yet it’s not just a rip-off or retread; The Lather Effect is more than just a nostalgic trip back to the days of checkerboard Vans, Cutting Crew and Atari videogames. The film works as a backwards glance for those who lived in the era, certainly, but in similar fashion to Dazed and Confused — another movie very specifically rooted in time — one needn’t have grown up back then to recognize the strivings and yearnings of the characters, which are examined sincerely and amusingly. Kelly, whose only previous directorial credit is the From Dusk Til Dawn documentary Full Tilt Boogie, has a romantic streak that doesn’t tip over into the mawkish, and creates a convivial atmosphere where even familiar characterizations come off as more or less fresh. The ensemble cast, meanwhile, all mesh together beautifully, and give one the realistic sense of the thrill, anxiety and tedium such a reunion brings.

Housed in a regular Amray case, The Lather Effect is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with English language Dolby digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Supplemental features kick off with a warm, open-hearted audio commentary track featuring writer-director Kelly (who points out the Monica Keena cameo), editor Darren Ayres and actor/associate producer Stoltz. A well produced 16-minute making-of featurette includes interviews with Kelly and almost all of the cast, as well as The Big Chill co-writer Barbara Benedek; it opens with Kelly playing the assembled crew a special shout-out from Los Angeles deejay Richard Blade, and features a lot of talk about both the specific players and general nature of ensemble pieces. Herman in particular assays the back-stabbing competitiveness of most such group-focused gigs, but says that this experience has revealed, for him, “positivism and unicorns.” Donovan, meanwhile, (jokingly?) talks about how “it’s funny to see all these actors from the ’80s, kind of washed-up… like me.”

Twenty minutes of deleted scenes are also included, many of which feature legitimate laugh-out-loud moments, as when Herman’s character accidentally visits the bathroom with Britton’s character in the tub, and talks about his “crowning” bowel movement. Two other small but funny featurettes, meanwhile, shed additional light on the bonhomie of shoestring-budgeted independent filmmaking. First is the five-minute “The Importance of Being an Earnest Production Assistant,” in which Kelly recounts her personal experiences on Gettysburg and Killing Zoe and talks — along with others — about how P.A.s are instrumental to a movie’s success, but also a great learning ground. Next up is the seven-minute “The Cameron (Crowe) Effect,” in which Kelly, after having connected in writing with the Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire writer-director through Stoltz and a pair of Los Angeles Times editorials about the role of music in film, anxiously awaits a potential set visit from her spiritual artistic mentor, and talks about his influence on her work. He doesn’t come during production, alas, but there is a happy ending, which is fitting for this poignant, nicely fashioned, light-touch dramedy — a state-of-the-union postcard from a generation never much for emotional self-examination. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B+ (Mov
ie) A- (Disc)

Not all music history is about the Beatles and Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and James Brown, as Dancing in the Street, which gathers a quartet of respected artists who combined for more than 100 hit songs, amply demonstrates. A 90-minute, rare “lost” concert that was part of a roadshow that toured 21 cities in the summer of 1987, as U2’s The Joshua Tree lit up the airwaves, this disc throws a welcome spotlight on Mary Wells, David Rufflin, Martha Reeves and Eddie Kendricks.

Shot during the second show of the series at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles — the former home of the NBA’s Lakers, during the “Showtime” era, ironcically — this title holds a sadly nostalgic value apart from its separate, standalone musical merits: Wells, Rufflin and Kendricks would all die within five years, and this would mark their last public tour. Wells sings “You Beat Me to the Punch,” “Two Lovers,” “The One Who Really Loves You” and “My Guy,” while also dueting with Curtis Womack on “Wonderful World,” “He Will Break Your Heart,” “Shout,” “Bye Bye Baby” and “Chain Gang.” Reeves, meanwhile, gives the following tunes a workout: “Ready for Love,” “Come and Get These Memories,” the classic “Nowhere to Run,” “I’ll Have to Let Him Go” and the equally inimitable “Jimmy Mack” and “Heat Wave.” The energy here is high, and the musicianship certainly fantastic as well. Housed in a regular Amray case, this region-free disc comes with Dolby digital stereo surround sound, animated menu screens, artist biographies and discographies, a photo gallery and a small clutch of interviews. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Concert) C+ (Disc)