Starting early next year, the ad-option will be the default for those that subscribe to the e-commerce giant's membership option.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/amazon-commercials-prime-video-ads-1235598166/

https://youtu.be/BKYJ5AIOU9I

Frasier's wealth in the Frasier series is finally explained by writer and executive producer Joe Keenan. Kelsey Grammer is reprising his most iconic role in the upcoming Frasier reboot on Paramount+, which will mark the character's fourth act. The new adventure will see him back in Boston — the same city where he was introduced as seen in Cheers. It's uncertain what Frasier's new work will be as he resettles in New England, but it shouldn't really matter, considering how wealthy he has been.

Ahead of the premiere of Paramount+'s Frasier reboot, Keenan talked to Metro UK (before the ongoing strikes) to look back on the character's time in Seattle. He finally offered an explanation for the character's wealth in the original show despite being just a local radiotherapist. Apparently, Frasier was already rich before he even moved back to the Pacific Northwest. Read his full answer below:

We think Frasier made a lot of money in private practice in Boston, and he had investments. What we imagined to be the salary of a local radio personality was perhaps a little bit inflated. On the other hand, when you looked at Niles and his house with Maris, this baronial mansion that they lived in, Frasier’s apartment didn’t seem all that… His dining room only seated four people.

Who Is Richer: Niles or Frasier?

As explained in the Frasier's original pilot, the psychiatrist left Boston because of a bevy of reasons. The list included his separation from Lilith, nightly drinking at Cheers, which he deemed unhealthy, and his private practice going stale. So while the Boston-set sitcom never really fully explored his life beyond the walls of Sam Malone's pub, this made it clear that he had a stable job. Frasier never said anything about his clinic failing. Instead, he just started to lose interest in his day-to-day routine, so when he moved to Seattle, he opted for a different career path.

Despite his personal wealth, it's likely that Niles was richer than his older brother. Aside from his own money, it's also worth noting that he married money in Maris. In fact, there were even suspicions that Niles only chose her because of her wealth — something that was eventually debunked when he opted to separate from her. Assuming that Niles earned similarly in his practice, it means that he likely saved up a significant amount, considering that he never stopped working privately. While a good chunk of that may have been lost during his divorce, chances are that he was eventually able to earn it all back.

The Frasier reboot has some lingering questions that it needs to answer, including what kept Grammer's character busy in the last two decades. At the end of the show, he was supposed to move to San Francisco for a better job, but he opted to follow Charlotte in Chicago. That was the last official information about him. It's unclear whether grand romantic gesture did, and what his means of living were in the years that followed.

WGA's message to members:

DEAR MEMBERS,

We have reached a tentative agreement on a new 2023 MBA, which is to say an agreement in principle on all deal points, subject to drafting final contract language.

What we have won in this contract – most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2nd – is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days. It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal.

We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional – with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.

What remains now is for our staff to make sure everything we have agreed to is codified in final contract language. And though we are eager to share the details of what has been achieved with you, we cannot do that until the last “i” is dotted. To do so would complicate our ability to finish the job. So, as you have been patient with us before, we ask you to be patient again – one last time.

Once the Memorandum of Agreement with the AMPTP is complete, the Negotiating Committee will vote on whether to recommend the agreement and send it on to the WGAW Board and WGAE Council for approval. The Board and Council will then vote on whether to authorize a contract ratification vote by the membership.

If that authorization is approved, the Board and Council would also vote on whether to lift the restraining order and end the strike at a certain date and time (to be determined) pending ratification. This would allow writers to return to work during the ratification vote, but would not affect the membership’s right to make a final determination on contract approval.

Immediately after those leadership votes, which are tentatively scheduled for Tuesday if the language is settled, we will provide a comprehensive summary of the deal points and the Memorandum of Agreement. We will also convene meetings where members will have the opportunity to learn more about and assess the deal before voting on ratification.

To be clear, no one is to return to work until specifically authorized to by the Guild. We are still on strike until then. But we are, as of today, suspending WGA picketing. Instead, if you are able, we encourage you to join the SAG-AFTRA picket lines this week.

Finally, we appreciated your patience as you waited for news from us — and had to fend off rumors — during the last few days of the negotiation. Please wait for further information from the Guild. We will have more to share with you in the coming days, as we finalize the contract language and go through our unions’ processes.

As always, thank you for your support. You will hear from us again very soon.

We have reached a tentative agreement on a new 2023 MBA, which is to say an agreement in principle on all deal points, subject to drafting final contract language.

https://www.wgacontract2023.org/announcements/negotiations-update-tentative-agreement

Tonight I felt like revisiting an old favorite, so I put on Hair (1979).

This is a particularly important film for me. I was already a long-haired weirdo who had just discovered Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles when I first saw a scene from this movie play on TV, probably on MTV or VH1. It was the jail scene, where the Tribe sings the title track, Hair. It was like someone had pulled all the words I could never find to explain why I looked the way I did out of my brain and set them to music. I asked my parents if they had ever heard the song before, and my mother pulled out her box of vinyl records. She handed me a stack including the albums for not only Hair, but Jesus Christ: Super Star and, bizarrely, Monty Python Sings, a collection of the songs from their movies. I was obsessed. I started making my own tie-dye and wearing Buddhist prayer flags as headbands, and I wore so many beads and bangles that I sounded like a walking beaded curtain.

We lived in a small town in Texas, and not only did I not look, act, or dress like the other kids my age, I didn't even fit in with the other weirdos, because I was fixated on a counter-culture that was decades in the grave. My folks probably should have taken that as a sign to have me evaluated for autism on its own, but the mainstream understanding of neurodivergency at the time was, let's say, lacking. I watched the film version of the musical a lot during those years, and it paved the way for me to discover Rocky Horror, and Little Shop of Horrors, and a whole universe of weirdos who served as my guiding stars throughout my childhood.

When I was 16, we took a trip to New York and spent ten days in Manhattan, during which I got to see the Hair revival off-Broadway. During the ending reprise of Flesh Failures (Let the Sun Shine In) the cast started pulling people out of the crowd to dance. I was, predictably, fully adorned in my home-made hippie accoutrements, and they pulled me up on stage to dance and sing with the main cast. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, and one of the touchstone moments that helped me start to explore my identity and self-image with a confidence and validation that I had never felt before.

All of that is to say that I have no way of objectively approaching a review of this film. It is too wrapped up in core associations for me to disentangle, so I'm going to just get the rating out of the way up front, and give it a glorious 5/5, with the understanding that you may feel very differently about it.

The film follows the plot of the stage musical pretty closely, though it omits several of the best songs, it does incorporate some elements that were impossible on stage, like live animals and vehicles. We begin with Claude Hooper Bukowski (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) leaving his home in Oklahoma, sharing a touching moment with his father before boarding the bus to New York, and the Induction Center. As he travels across the country we see the countryside give way to New England cities and a funky riff falls in. In short order Claude finds himself in Manhattan and we get our first glimpse of the Tribe, a street-roaming gang of hippies led by George Berger (Treat Williams, Deep Rising). The opening number, Aquarius, is performed by Renn Woods, and her flower-studded afro is a glory to behold.

The core members of the Tribe besides Berger are Hud (Dorsey Wright), Woof (Don Dacus, who played guitar with Stephen Stills and Chicago in the 70s), and Jeannie (Annie Golden) who is pregnant with either Hud or Woof's child. We first see the Tribe as they burn their draft cards, panhandle around central park, and mildly harass the horseback-mounted Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), a privileged college student and debutante. After meeting Claude and acquiring some cash, the Tribe rent a horse of their own and Woof serenades Sheila and her friends with the single funniest song in the film, Sodomy.​

The next song is Donna/Hashish, led by Berger, which plays out over Claude re-encountering the Tribe and joining up with them to smoke dope and sleep on the street. This transitions into Colored Spade, an intensely racially charged number that is well done in the film, but was absolutely electric to see live. It consists entirely of Hud calling out slurs that he's been identified with, and when the actor who performed the song in the revival gave his rendition he roared the words into the crowd like a challenge. The film's rendition is comparably much more sedate, but a little of that anger does bleed through, particularly as the song is framed as a response to Woof's racism and the possibility that Jeannie's baby will be black. Hud is proud to be a young, strong, black man, and he wants his potential child to share that pride (although this exchange feels very different in hindsight after later revelations regarding Hud's character).

Claude, being a newcomer to pot-smoking and the general hippie lifestyle, is rendered nearly catatonic by the hash smoke. He eventually comes around to the number Manchester​, where first Berger, then Claude profess "I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in Claude, that's me!"

The racial tension between Hud and Woof is then resolved during the song I'm Black/Ain't Got No, which was covered and mashed up with the song from later in the musical, I Got Life​ in an incredible performance by Nina Simone, which you should absolutely watch if you are a music lover.

The following day, Claude awakens on the street, huddled amongst the Tribe, and begins to wander off, unsure of how to proceed after his brush with a wild lifestyle unlike anything he had experienced before. I identify so strongly with Claude during the first half of this movie. I too was once a painfully naive hick encountering drugs and parties and rebellion for the first time, and everything from his posture to his awkward, halting gait is painfully familiar to me. When Berger calls out to him and asks him to come back, a little bit of the brittle icy shell surrounding my heart melts away.

The party in question is a high-society function where Sheila, the horse girl, will be debuting. Both Berger and Claude seem to have taken an interest in the Sheila, and so the Tribe attends, having seen the announcement in a paper that Berger was pissing on. In the stage version there is an incredible song, My Conviction in which a posh party goer expressed her (contextually) hot take of the evening, that long hair and decoration on men is the natural way of things, and should be embraced instead of rejected. It is a real shame that the film skips over it, although a 'lady in pink' as she is credited, is featured who is clearly meant to be the character from the stage version. She enthusiastically dances with Berger atop the banquet tables and admires his grungy style.

After delivering his rendition of I Got Life (Which is just so good) Berger and the rest of the tribe, including Claude, are arrested and thrown in jail. This is where the title song, Hair, comes in, and the film presents it in a very cool way, by having the opening stanzas delivered as Woof's internal monologue as he decides how to respond to the prison psychologist's questions. It's a great song, and I find myself singing it under my breath absolutely all the time. The interview also includes a fantastic exchange when she asks Woof if he's a homosexual and he responds "I wouldn't kick Mick Jagger out of my bed, but no, I'm not a homosexual." which I also spend a lot of time thinking about.

Then, for the first time, Claude's relationship with the Tribe is tested. He has the cash to pay his fine and walk free, but only enough to free himself. He likes Berger, and he seems fond of Jeannie too, but he's just met these people and they've already gotten him thrown in jail. Eventually Berger's charm offensive breaks through his barriers though, and Claude gives Berger the money instead, so that Berger can go round up enough cash to spring the rest of them. This he accomplishes by first carjacking Sheila and her brother Steve (Miles Chapin) and asking them for the dough, and eventually by going home and asking his folks. Berger's mother, played by Antonia Rey, is delightful, and we see a brief glimpse of the life that Berger and presumably the rest of the Tribe have given up to roam the streets and live among the hippies, weirdos, and dropouts.

The next segment of the film, as in the stage version, depicts Claude and the Tribe attending an anti-war rally and dropping acid, with it being Claude's first experience. The LSD/dream sequence isn't particularly true to my experiences with acid, but John Savage's facial performance certainly is. He rattles between terror and ecstasy as the experience washes over him, colored by the marriage proposal that Jeannie has just laid before him as a way to escape the draft (as they don't take married men with children). Eventually Claude runs off into the crowd, overwhelmed by the experience.

In the stage production there is a somewhat controversial group nude scene during the song Where Do I Go? which is replaced in the film by a skinny dipping sequence, where we mostly see Beverly D'Angelo topless. The song instead plays out as Claude roams the city, angry at a prank played by Berger, as well as frustrated at the casual disdain they have for his decision to go through with his induction. It's a solid song and a solid performance. The nudity in the stage version, even in the early runs of the musical, is extremely brief and mostly serves as a reference to a tactic used by real anti-war protesters. It was pretty cool as a 16 year old seeing nudity and the human body celebrated instead of shamed, and by a huge crowd of people, for probably the first time in my life.

Claude's wandering finally delivers him to the induction office and we get one of the most hilarious scenes in both versions. As the parade of nude inductees (including one young man who refuses to remove his socks until he is physically hoisted into the air and they are pulled from his feet to reveal a fully painted set of toenails) are presented to the Army staff, we get the songs Black Boys and White Boys which unabashedly celebrate the female gaze (and in the film version, the Gays as well). The juxtaposition of the raunchy sex-positive musical number and the fact that Claude is (seemingly) passing the point of No Return makes this a weird one, but they're such fun songs that you'd hardly notice on the first viewing. Afterwards Claude is whisked away to boot camp where he undergoes basic training set to Walking in Space which rises to the repeated phrase "My eyes are open" as the reality of his situation begins to finally set in.

There is a time-skip, where the intermission takes place in the stage version, and then the narrative picks up again at wintertime. Sheila receives a letter from Claude, and shares it with the Tribe. As they are discussing a trip to go visit him at the military base in Nevada where he is being trained, a woman and a small child approach the group. The woman calls out to Hud, calling him by the name LaFayette, and asking him what he's doing there, with those people. Asking him if the visibly pregnant Jeannie is carrying his child. This is, despite the deeply bittersweet ending, the emotional low point of the film and the musical. Cheryl Barns, playing Hud's jilted fiance and the mother of his already existing child, belts out a rendition of Easy To Be Hard, demanding to know "how can people be so heartless?" that brings me to full-on tears every single time.

If this movie has a single, serious flaw, it is that Hud's treatment of his fiance, left unnamed, is forgiven nearly instantly by the film, if not the character. There is an inkling that Hud is not a true flower child, committed to peace and love and harmony, so much as a selfish asshole who abandoned his old life and responsibilities to pursue easy sex and drugs among the free love generation. We see him arguing angrily with the other members of the Tribe between devastating shots of Barns' solo, but the content of that argument is not shared with us, and we simply have to accept, as the fiance apparently does, that some resolution has occurred. A later moment between Jeannie and the fiance gives the lie to this, but from that point on she and LaFayette Jr. silently accompany the Tribe on the next leg of their adventure. Jeannie comes across as cruelly blind to the suffering of this poor woman, and Hud is actively hostile to her the entire time.

I don't now why Hud was singled out to be the only member of the Tribe who is depicted as a genuinely bad or selfish person, but it gives us the most powerful solo in the film, so there is some good that comes of it. A charitable reading of the Hud situation might tie it into the otherwise fairly subtle critique of the flower-power generation that runs throughout the film, where the members of the hippie community that are the most vocal about peace, love, and understanding are sometimes the least committed to living that lifestyle, and even members of radical social-justice movements can be blind to the injustices occurring under their own roofs. The fringe lifestyle led by the hippies was deeply appealing to a lot of narcissistic abusers because of the permissive attitudes towards sex, drugs, and alternative philosophies. Hud represents those people, and it's a little weird that there are no consequences for his actions whatsoever.

The tribe carjacks Steve a second time, picking up Sheila in the process, and make their way to Nevada to visit Claude before he ships out to Vietnam. The song Three-Five-Zero-Zero is another racially charged anti-war number, inspired by a Ginsberg poem, and rising to an upbeat chant of "Prisoners in N*****town, it's a dirty little war" which I felt guilty just hearing on the record as a kid, but it has remained with me as a powerful mental image my entire life. It is arranged with What a Piece of Work is Man, and the jolly recitation of the violent phrases helps drive home the horror settling down on Claude despite his best efforts to hide it. In the film the songs play out over a hijacked PA system at the base as well as at another anti-war demonstration in Washington DC, and there is a bit of vaudevillian humor as soldiers try desperately to turn off the music.

Once the Tribe arrives in Nevada they engage in some more carjacking and kidnapping, this time of an Army officer, in order to sneak onto the base, where Berger takes Claude's place while he visits with the rest of the Tribe. One of the funniest lines in the movie comes as Berger, dressed as an Army officer and with freshly cut hair, orders Claude out of the barracks and into his waiting car. Maintaining his drill sergeant voice, Berger demands of Claude "Are you an Asshole, soldier?" and when Claude responds 'No sir' he fires back "Well that's too bad, because I am" and reveals his identity. It's a great moment.

While the two are switched, orders to deploy come down, and Berger is marched onto a plane with Claude's unit, reprising Manchester and singing out "I believe that God believes in Claude, that's me!" as though trying to convince himself, while the chorus chants "the rest is silence" behind him. Manchester becomes Good Morning Starshine/Flesh Failures and Berger's fate is made immediately clear as we jump to the tribe visiting his grave at Arlington. It is a startlingly bleak ending to a musical that deals with some heavy themes but is overall very cheerful and funny throughout. The refrain of Let the Sun Shine In is as powerful today as it was the first time I heard it. The credits roll to footage of hundreds of hippies descending on the White House lawn, singing those words, in a spectacle that recreated for the film, at almost full scale, the anti-war demonstrations that had occurred there only a decade prior in real life.

This is already a much longer review than I intended, so I will sum up my thoughts here. Hair is a triumph of musical theater, and the film adaptation does a fantastic job of translating the experience from the stage to the screen. There are a lot of great songs missing, but that is only because there are no bad songs in the musical, so any cuts will necessarily be bangers. I have strong mixed feelings about the character of Hud and the way that the film treats his transgressions, but overall the social commentary on offer is sharp, funny, and uncompromising. The music composed by Galt Macdermot and the lyrics written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado are as powerful as they are endlessly listenable. This film means so very much to me, as a turning point in my own life, and as a piece of that weird filmic vision of the past into which I so frequently find myself yearning to escape. I stand by my score of 5/5. There are elements that could be worth docking a half star here or there, but overall this film truly is a masterpiece.

https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/writers-strike-wga-amptp-contract-talks-2-1235733340/

https://www.wgacontract2023.org/announcements/negotiations-update-9-23-23

https://deadline.com/2023/09/writers-strike-deal-close-1235554418/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/23/business/wga-bargaining-negotiations-saturday/index.html

After the sad dearth of Grier that was Fortress 2, I went back to the peak of the exploitation era and watched The Arena (1974), which is indeed 'Female Spartacus'. So much so that Spartacus is explicitly referenced in the dialogue.

This one stars Pam Grier (obviously) as Mamawi, a Nubian dancer captured by a Roman slave patrol. She co-stars with Margaret Markov's Bodicia, (who I'm confident is meant to be a Briton but who repeatedly claims to be from Brittany, which is a little bit funny if you're a big old nerd like me and you know that Britons didn't colonize Armorica and start calling it Brittany until after the fall of the Roman empire) a druidess and fellow slave. Grier and Markov had previously co-starred in 1973's Black Mama, White Mama, another classic exploitation flick.

I'll get right out in front of this thing and mention that there are several instances of forcible sexual assault in this movie, and in one instance it is depicted as a sort of just punishment for one of the film's villains, so if that's a non-starter for you, you might want to give this one a miss. For what it's worth, the first time this happens to a character, as much or more screen time is devoted to the grotesque, leering faces of the men watching on as to the actress' body, making it pretty clear that the film is not intended to be an amoral spectacle, presenting the assault as pure entertainment, there is a grain of commentary underlying all of the violence, sexual and otherwise, which gets highlighted here and there.

Beyond that element, this is an absolutely classic gladiator/sexploitation flick. Both Margaret Markov and Pam Grier are absolutely gorgeous, and the film paints them in fabulous golden sunlight frequently throughout the runtime. They are joined by Deidre (Lucretia Love, which could be a character name in this flick as well) a cheerfully drunken redhead, and Livia (Marie Louise Sinclair) a roman woman sold into slavery. The women are overseen by the head of the household, Cornelia (Rosalba Neri, as Sara Bay), a frightfully loyal enforcer who answers to Timarchus (Daniele Vargas), the girls' new owner.

Now, I could watch Pam Grier fold laundry for 90 minutes and be fully content, but luckily she's given a lot more fun things than that to do in this movie. From her sensual dance performances at the beginning, to her ass-kicking, trident-wielding, bad-assery during the rebellion, every moment with Mamawi on screen is fantastic. There is a brief bathing scene with full-frontal nudity of all the girls, including Pam, which is pretty standard for this kind of skin flick. Otherwise the nudity is mostly restricted to the love/sexual assault scenes, and both Mamawi and Bodicia's incredibly sheer gladiatrix tops.

The fight choreography ranges in quality, but notably Mamawi seems to visibly improve with practice in a way that feels natural. Having the girls actually learn and grow as fighters, even just a little, rather than be superhuman Amazon warriors from the start was something that I appreciated. Each of the girls also had a distinct fighting style. Mamawi starts off with a sick trident, and makes use of spears later on, and Pam Grier does a fantastic job with her choreo. Bodicia uses a sword, and Markov is believable with it, if not quite as flashy as Mamawi's more exotic weapon. Deidre notably does not want to fight anyone, and when she is forced to it drives her deeper into drinking. We see this play out through both dialogue and some visual bits involving her gulping down wine during the big fight scenes. She reminds me of a stock character from Vietnam war movies; the pacifist druggie who progressively loses their cool as the tension mounts, and always dies before the credits roll.

The interplay between the women is fairly well done. Livia the Roman is an absurd caricature of a person, but she's also representative of an attitude that very much exists among some people. Her character fairly well embodies the well known LBJ quotation about white supremacy and its role in keeping the wealthy in power, even down to her making racist remarks about Malawi and Quintus (Jho Jhenkins) and praising her slave master. The other girls each have their own perspective on their captivity and how best to endure or resist it. Bodicia finds solidarity and comfort with the other gladiators, including the terrifying Septimus (Pietro Ceccarelli), and Mamawi embraces the sexual freedom of the gladiator stable while plotting her escape. Deidre drinks. They initially find little in common despite their shared bondage, but the different approaches they take to their situation ultimately contribute to the success of their escape plan.

The actual plot revolves around the arena of Brundisium and the fact that the local crowd are hilariously bored of watching dudes murder each-other. Initially purchased as a lot by one of Timarchus' servants to work as serving girls, our heroines are thrust into the ring to provide a novel spectacle for the audience. The women predictably are not super jazzed about the prospect of fighting each-other to the death, and the rest of the film details their efforts to survive and to escape.

The editing is very rough, and several scenes end abruptly with hard cuts that don't seem 100% intentional, like they just ran out of film and so the shot ended. Part of this is up to the transfer I watched not being the best quality, and partly to the fact that it was a cheap B movie when it was made and they used the cheapest available film stock. That doesn't really excuse the parts where the music cuts out mid-scene, or actions that are the focus of the shot go un-dubbed. The grainy, scratchy, slightly yellowed effect caused by the cheap film is actually kind of cool most of the time. It's the aesthetic that Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez based their whole careers around, but it's the real thing rather than a meticulous and expensive facsimile.

By contrast, the cinematography is surprisingly competent, and in places actually quite beautiful. There is a close-up shot of Mamawi's face as she bears down on a fallen Aristo during the rebellion, with the sun flashing out from behind her hair, that is absolutely gorgeous. I want it as a big print to hang up on the wall.

There is some pretty distasteful homophobia in this picture. One of Timarchus' primary flunkies is the heavily queer-coded Priscium (Priss-ium) who expresses flamboyant disgust at the idea of touching any of the shudder women. By contrast the sex scenes are genuinely quite artful, and the presentation of sexuality as something that can be used to comfort and heal is a surprisingly positive, and even sensitive one. The contrast between the humanity shown to the women in this picture and the queer stereotype is one of the elements that makes it hard to judge this one overall. I love this movie, but I don't like a lot of things about it.

Ultimately this film represents, for me at least, the archetypal exploitation flick. The basic draw is sex, violence, and spectacle, but once you're invested in the premise the film has some solid social commentary underpinning its narrative. A lot of Pam Grier's films from this era, specifically, embody this duality between low-brow hind-brain engagement and a fairly radical political understanding. It makes a lot of sense, in a way. These kinds of B movies were made outside the big studio system for the most part, and thus were saddled with the dual attributes of not having any money and not having to self-censor to keep the bigwigs happy. Foxy Brown has a whole scene where Black Panthers discuss the distinction between justice and revenge, and at what point the use of violence becomes justifiable in the pursuit of either. It also has a lot of Pam Grier's incredible rack. The Arena doesn't present nearly so cogent a thesis on violence as Foxy Brown, but it does a passable job, and it embraces the camp and spectacle of 50's gladiator films in a way that is enjoyable and fun entirely on its own merits.

I'm going to give this one 4/5 stars. Half a star off for the rough editing and music, and half a star for the presentation of rape as a deserved punishment for one of the characters, and in particular the somewhat indulgent way that that assault is lingered on by the film. I know I filled a lot of space talking about this movie's flaws, but it is eminently watchable, and far less gross in the way that it presents (most of) the sexual content than a lot of its contemporaries. I heartily recommend this movie to Pam Grier appreciators, Gladiator aficionados, and habitual schlock consumers.

Huuuge deep dive on the show and awesome nostalgia fest for lovers of this (probably underrated) show!

During the latest day of negotiations, artificial intelligence, viewership-based compensation and the size of writers' rooms continued to be top issues.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/writers-guild-and-studios-conclude-latest-bargaining-session-more-talks-expected-friday-1235596641/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/21/media/writers-strike-negotiations/index.html

Based solely on the fact that Pam Grier was listed among the cast, I decided to go ahead and watch Fortress 2: Re-Entry (2000).

Christopher Lambert is the only cast member from the original to reprise his role (John Brennick) for this low-budget follow up ($11mil budget vs $48mil for the original). Pam Grier plays the head of Men-Tel, but clearly shot her parts in a single afternoon, mostly in one room, so very disappointing on that front. I suppose that's why she wasn't credited higher despite legitimately being the biggest name in the film beside Lambert. Patrick Malahide plays Peter Teller, Pam's step-son and the supervisor of this movie's new and improved Fortress. It's in space this time. Karen is replaced by Beth Touissant (who played Tasha Yar's sister in an episode of Star Trek) but it's okay because she's even less important to the plot this time around despite playing exactly the same role in it.

The core group of cellmates this time around includes Stan (Willie Garson) who's implant (oh yeah, there are implants again) malfunctions, leaving him absent minded and delirious, Rivera (Liz May Brice) one of Brennick's fellow renegades, Marcus (Anthony C. Hall, who is not listed on IMDB or Wikipedia's pages for this film for some reason, despite having more lines than several of the other characters) the comic relief/tech guy, and Max (Nick Brimble) a secret Russian spy.

Teller runs the prison station with the aid of several bored guards and one total psychopath, Sato (Yuji Okumoto). The tension between Sato and his fellow guard Gordon (Fredric Lehne) gives them something to do other than be faceless goons, which is a decent effort for this kind of film. The prison itself looks worse than the original, and there are fewer shooting locations. Teller's office (and a few of the other locations as well) looks like a dressed-up hotel room, and the control center for Zed this time around is little more than a closet. Also Zed is a kiwi now, and hearing her pronounce 'Death Sentence' as 'Dith Sintince' every time is utterly hilarious.

The dialogue is still terrible, but less fun most of the time. There are a handful of good lines, mostly between Brennick and Marcus, with probably the only clever line in the movie coming while they discuss their escape plan, and building a particular device. The gang has just discovered that their implants allow Zed to see through their eyes, so when Brennick asks if Marcus can build the device they need, and he responds "With my eyes closed," Brennick quips back "That would be the way to do it." so kudos for the exactly one good joke in the movie.

The film manages to be both more and less sleazy than the original. There is no actual rape scene in this one, but the threat of sexual violence is still presented as a joke. There is a lot more nudity, but it is nearly all female. Definitely no conga line of wieners in this one. Pam Grier remains fully clothed as well, so further disappointment abounds.

The plot is essentially the same as the original. Brennick gets caught while on the run with his family, including their now seven year old son Danny (Aiden Ostrogovich), and is spirited away to a supposedly inescapable prison. The actual escape plot is a little more involved this time, and there are a lot of little moments that make me think someone in the writer's room actually cared about this one. It wasn't enough to right the ship, but it was enough to keep me entertained long enough to finish the film. The two characters that sort of sparked my interest, Rivera and Max, get a smidgen of plot focus (and Rivera's breasts get some camera focus) but are left underutilized like many of the best elements of this film.

Overall this is an uninspired follow-up with bad CGI, bad miniature work, and a criminal under-use of Pam Grier. I'll give it back the half-star I shaved off of the original because they made some progress on the sexual assault front, but that still leaves this one hovering around 2.5/5. I would only recommend this one if you saw the first one and loved it exclusively for Christopher Lambert's performance, because there's not really anything else from the original here, and less to recommend it on its own merits.

My final thought is that Wikipedia claims this is an American-Luxembourgish production, and I am just floored at the idea that this is what Luxembourg is doing with all of that gold they have. They're the richest country in the world by density of capital, and they apparently use their hoarded lucre to make bad Christopher Lambert vehicles. I thought that maybe Lambert was from Luxembourg, given his bizarre accent (despite the fact that I had always assumed he was French-Canadian), but that isn't the case. He was born in New York and raised in Switzerland, by French parents. What mad Luxembourgish person decided that the world needed Fortress 2, and why? Anyway, I'm going to watch something with more Pam Grier in it next time.

Kino CEO Daril Fannin sees a new era of independent production aided by technology

https://www.thewrap.com/hollywood-strike-tech-independent-production/

https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/writers-strike-ceo-talks-movement-deal-1235731476/