ACCIDENTALLY CHRISTMAS MOVIES....3 FILMS WITH JUST A LITTLE DAB 'O HOLIDAY CHEER!

Holiday movies, by their very nature, revel in the holiday season....in which the days leading up to Christmas provide the fuel for the plot, the characters, basically the reason for the movie's very existence....

.......and then there are the movies in which Christmas seems to make a glancing, cameo appearance...it's not there to do much for the movie....it's just there. And it makes the movie a tad more colorful, what with the blinking lights and the caroling and all.  Here's a few odd selections BQ came across and we continued our eclectic viewing through vintage movie-land....

BELL BOOK AND CANDLE (1958)  I can't help but love the idea of a romantic comedy about modern day witchcraft in New York starting out with "Jingle Bells" on its soundtrack. Yep it's the holiday season, the quaintly replicated Manhattan streets have a light dusting of fluffy movie-studio snow. And once again, 'Vertigo' romantic sparks, this time played for comic effect, strike up between aw-shucks-y, stammering James Stewart and ethereal, otherworldly blonde Kim Novak.  Christmas gets dispensed with early on as Novak applies her something-wiccan-this-way-comes charms on Stewart, and the rest of it is a smooth, bubbly concoction that we don't mind watching again. We cast 3 broomsticks upon it.....

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969) stands staunchly out by itself in the James Bond catalog for featuring the one-shot Bond George Lazenby paired up with the karate-chopping goddess now addressed as Dame Diana Rigg. And wouldn't you know, it's Christmas Eve when George and Diana end up battling arch-fiend Blofeld (Telly Savalas) at his snowy mountaintop fortress. There's even an extra-gooey sugar-plum Christmas song, "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Made?" sung by someone billed only as Nina along with a chorus of warbling kiddies. And gift giving too....Blofeld, warming to the holiday spirit, spreads the joy amongst his cadre of deeply hypnotized voluptuous international babes. Each hottie receives a prettily wrapped perfume atomizer to spread crop-killing bacteria around the world. Merry Christmas and to all a good night!  We gift it 4 1/2 stars.....

1941 (1979)  Steven Spielberg's notorious all-star disaster of course hurls Christmas into the mix (along with multiple kitchen sinks) since it deals with one night of supposed comic hysteria in Los Angeles following the Pearl Harbor attack. Along the way Japanese sailors disguise themselves as Christmas trees, holiday shoppers riot at a department store, giant plastic Santas topple as fighter planes dive and swoop amidst the Hollywood Boulevard decorative lights.... and the application of a Christmas wreath sends a house sliding off a cliff, reducing it to splinters. Joy to the world.  Until you endure it, '1941' remains indescribable....it's sort of Spielberg's own misbegotten version of "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad,Mad World" with comedians screaming at each other in the midst of spectacular special effects. As you might imagine, Spielberg's film is a resplendent visual wonder compared to Stanley Kramer's 'Mad World'.....after all, Kramer barely knew which end of the camera to point at his actors. Therefore, for the holiday touches and loony scenes you won't see anywhere else (like a Ferris wheel rolling off a pier, a tank smashing through a paint factory) we'll gift '1941' with 2 & 1/2 gingerbread cookies.......   

THE HURT SHOCKER: WE "EYEWITNESS" A FORGOTTEN ODDBALL THRILLER/DRAMA!

EYEWITNESS (1981), a long forgotten romantic thriller with William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver, commanded BQ's attention mostly due its curious unavailability.....it's one of those rare films that somehow has fallen through all the cracks of the various venues through which you can watch movies. No DVDs on the store racks (apparently you can order a ridiculously rare, overpriced one online), no Blu-Ray, no streaming,  no regular TV appearances.

The only place this strange little concoction of suspense and heartfelt drama surfaces, as far as we can tell, is on a basic cable channel called 'Movies!', which prides itself on not whittling down its offerings in order to jam in umpteen commercials within a 2 hour timeslot. On the contrary, 'Movies' includes the unedited film as well as their umpteen commercials,  with all this content leisurely stretching out their showings to 2 and a half hours or more.(Not quite, 'unedited' though, 'Movies' won't slice a frame of film, but they most assuredly will blank out the F-bombs and pixilate the nudity in their R-rated selections.)

So we finally managed to catch up with "Eyewitness" while it popped its head out of the ground like Phil The Groundhog in Puxatawney, Pa. Written by esteemed playwright/novelist Steve Tesich ("Breaking Away") and directed by Peter Yates ("Bullitt") "Eyewitness" plays out as a weird hybrid stitched together from  Hitchcock films and the kitchen sink dramatics of Paddy Chayevsky's "Marty". William Hurt plays a returned Vietnam war hero biding his time as a New York City office building janitor. It's a lonely, quiet life he leads....he spends his spare time romantically obsessing over a patrician TV newswoman (Sigourney Weaver) whose reportage he tapes every night on his VHS machine. When a shady Chinese businessman, a tenant in the building Hurt cleans, turns up with his throat cut, Hurt spots Weaver doing an on-the-street crime scene report.....and seizes his opportunity to romance her. When Weaver predictably recoils from his advances, Hurt, in a hail-Mary move, maintains her interest by dangling the possibility of his having witnessed the crime. Adding to the complications is Hurt's best friend Waldo (James Woods) a fellow Vietnam vet, Unlike Hurt, Waldo's a snivelling, babbling, cowardly loser (played to twitching perfection, of course, by Woods)  who quickly becomes a prime suspect in the Chinese crook's murder.

Screenwriter Tesich, a stranger to thrillers who primarily excelled in dramatic clashes of characters, labors mightily (and uncomfortably) to bend this material into a suspense nail-biter. Hence the suave, well tailored villain of the piece, (Christoper Plummer) who's courting Weaver while working with her parents to raise money to smuggle oppressed Jews out of Russia....the script vaguely implies he's doing this in the service of the Israeli government, and he comes fully equipped with a formidably silent Israeli hitwoman at his side. Plummer, as you might have guessed, is a means-justifies-the-end guy who has no problem with murder and though Tesich makes a few half hearted attempts to throw red herrings in your direction, you don't have any trouble figuring out who's doing what to whom.

The pleasures of "Eyewitness" come from Tesich regularly ditching the thriller elements of the film for the pure quirky joy of watching his well drawn characters interact. To Hurt's everlasting credit, he makes his moonstruck, adolescent crush on Weaver seem endearingly innocent, instead of a case of unhinged psychotic stalking(which it would be taken for today.....Tesich skims and skirts over Hurt's objectifying and unreal idealization of Weaver's uppercrust Grace Kelly-type character.....Hurt really knows nothing about her and she's properly bewildered at first. But eventually, as we the audience fully expected,  Tesich has her melt for Hurt. In that regard, her character's not much different from the rich teen queens who fall for the nerdy shlubs in John Hughes movies)  The script also throws in Hurt's unhappy relationship with his embittered, crippled father (the late,great Kenneth McMillan)....who's given a small unforgettable scene with Hurt that could have easily served as separate, gut-wrenching drama all by itself. The movie even takes a time out for some angst-ridden byplay between the two cops chasing after Woods (Steven Hill and Morgan Freeman).

Director Peter Yates, however, fulfills his appointed task of adding propulsive thrills to Tesich's overt dramatizing. You know Yates knows his stuff (Exhibit A:the "Bullitt" car chase up and down the San Francisco hills)....and he orchestrates some memorable set pieces, including a motorcycle/car duel and an unnerving method of attempted murder which we won't spoil if you haven't seen the movie.

Sure, "Eyewitness" remains a lumpy mixture of Hitchcockian chills, unlikely romance and squeezed in family drama......but for us, that's part of its unique charm, a strange convergence of an action movie director and a celebrated theater dramatist that we doubt will ever happen again. But BQ lives in hope.....we say 4 stars.

VIVA "THE PROFESSIONALS" ON ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY!

THE PROFESSIONALS (1966) came stampeding into movie theaters about 50 years ago.....and half a century later it's as robust,muscularly red blooded and legendary as ever, a timeless showcase for the kind of primal no nonsense filmmaking that simply doesn't exist anymore....as well the iconic actors who populated these films. Compared to the chopped up rubbish that passes for action movies today, "The Professionals" looks and sounds practically mythic....like watching the Greek gods party up on Mount Olympus.

Directed by Richard Brooks ("Lord Jim", "In Cold Blood", "Looking For Mr.Goodbar") the film is a men-on-a-mission adventure set on the Mexico border around 1915. A ruthless land baron (Ralph Bellamy) collects a team of four battle-hardened mercenaries (Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode) to rescue his young Mexican wife (Claudia Cardinal). She's been kidnapped and spirited across the border by revolutionary turned bandit Jesus Raza (Jack Palance). Marvin and Lancaster are tough crusty cynical compadres, having come away disillusioned from their days of fighting along side Pancho Villa. Ryan is the horsemaster for the team, way too compassionate and gentle-hearted for his own good while Strode serves as the mostly silent tracker and scout, deadly with a bow and arrow.

Into Mexico they go, surviving bloody skirmishes with Palance's men until finally reaching the bandit's hacienda headquarters....and his captive, Cardinale. From this point, director-screenwriter Brooks throws in an astonishing twist while keeping up the literally explosive action sequences....right up to the film's satisfyingly ironic conclusion. And it's all perfectly capped off with Marvin's final line of dialogue....still one of the best ever in movie history.

Brooks fills his script, taken from a novel by Frank O' Roarke, with pithy, funny world-weary zingers. (Lancaster: "Well, I'll be damned..." Marvin: "Most of us are...") Palance, of all people, is the only cast member afforded long eloquent speeches about  the Revolution and the men who fight it. Lancaster takes full advantage of his prowess as a former circus acrobat, doing almost all his own stunts and Marvin, as the group leader, epitomizes cool grace under fire.

Throw in cinematographer Conrad Hall's vivid Southwest landscapes (filmed mostly in Nevada) and Maurice Jarre's pulsating score, driven by castenets and pounding drums, you have a classic delivering close-to-orgasmic movie pleasure. As Frank Sinatra opined during his section of "That's Entertainment"....'you can wait around and hope, but you'll never see the likes of this again.'

How true. Another FIND OF FINDS...."The Professionals" easily earns 5 stars.

4 DEAD BODIES ON THE NYC MAYOR'S LAWN? THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB....FOR MALLORY!

BLIND SIGHT by Carol O' Connell continues the BQ's favorite mystery series featuring the stunning....and the stunningly dysfunctional, brilliant young Detective Kathy Mallory. (Never dare to call her Kathy....Mallory only). We've already raved on about these books in a previous post, so we couldn't wait to pounce on and devour this one in a matter of days. (Now, the depressing news...O'Connell takes her time with these novels....it's been three years since the last one, "It Happens In The Dark")

Mallory, a supermodel-like blonde with electric green eyes, functions as an almost unworldly, superhero figure within her Special Crimes Unit detective bureau. A ruthlessly efficient computer hacker with a killer wardrobe, a large caliber handgun and an ice cold, sociopath's thirst for justified vengeance, Mallory confounds, aggravates, and generally stuns everyone who comes in contact with her....suspects, fellow detectives and the murderers she hunts down. The pure joy of O' Connell's books comes from watching the unforgiving force-of-nature Mallory cut a swath through the convoluted, gruesome cases thrown in her path.

The plots that O'Connell challenges Mallory with are staggering in their mixture of heartbreaking tragedy and shocking violence.....and the complex storylines inevitably relate back to Mallory's own tortured childhood, spent roaming the streets of New York as an orphaned, feral street thief until caught and adopted(and only partially civilized)  by kindly New York detective Lou Markowitz. O'Connell always carefully rations out these nuggets of Mallory's horrendous backstory and you'll greedily gobble them up whenever they appear.

As we headlined, Mallory's new case involves four murdered kidnap victims, minus their hearts, dumped on the lawn of Gracie Mansion, currently occupied by Mayor Andrew Polk. Polk's a former Wall Street scumbag swindler and the horrific crime left on his front door may or may not throw suspicion on a group of one-percenters who lost millions in one of his trading scams. Adding to the mayhem....a poignant and harrowing subplot involving a 12 year old blind boy, the nephew of one of the murder victims. Mallory races to solve the case while the boy literally lives on borrowed time...., held captive by the monstrous hit man contracted to kill the random victims and slice out their hearts... for later mailing to the Mayor.

O'Connell's prose cuts as deeply as any writing you'd find in a lauded mainstream novel and ultimately, in her books' final pages, you see Mallory as O'Connell sees her.....as a star-crossed, potentially tragic figure. And Beached Quill counts "Blind Sight" among the very best of this series. Get your hands on this book ASAP.....and dive right into the others, if you haven't already. We give it a FIND OF FINDS....5 stars.

PSYCHO BABYSITTERS AND ELEPHANT VAGINAS....THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!

It's quarter to three.....there's no one in the place....'cept you and me.....and 300 gloriously atrocious movies running rampant through our cable movie insomnia-ridden nights.....here's two more haunting us in dark-night-of-the-soul wee hours......

EMELIE (2015) The makers of this nasty brief little horror outing must have thought they stumbled on to a unique concept....the deranged, homicidal babysitter. Not quite new, boys. Marilyn Monroe gave this familiar archetype a spin in "Don't Bother To Knock", which dates all the way back to l952.

Here we have Sarah Bolger playing a seemingly mild mannered young woman embarking on an evening of watching over three young kids, two sugar-fueled, ADD tots and one sullen older boy (about 11) who resents being babysat.  Well, pretty soon all three of them resent the sitter as she quickly reveals herself as an unhinged sadist, feeding the little girl's hamster to the little boy's pet snake and settling them all down in front of the TV to binge-watch porn.  Plus she plans to cap off the evening by abducting the youngest boy as a replacement for her own dead child........we bet her hourly rate is even more shocking than the rest of that stuff.

This all descends rapidly into the usual by-the-numbers horror movie tropes, which movies like this adhere to as rigidly as Kabuki theater or haiku, A few curves pop up, such as the loony sitter's mysterious accomplice, who turns out as dopey and unlucky as his cohort. The filmmakers top off their little nothing of a scarefest with a delusion-of-grandeur final shot....setting up a sequel. Nobody should hold their breath waiting for "Emelie 2: The Devil's Daycare" or whatever they planned to call it. BQ can only scare up 1 star.......with or without children, you won't want to bring this sitter home.

THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY (2016) effectively demotes its whip-smart writer-director Sasha Baron Cohen from cutting edge social satirist ("Borat", Bruno") to worn out British imitation Adam Sandler. The plentiful gross out gags are all in place but none of them, a parade of bodily fluids, genitalia and assorted anal abuse, serve to highlight Cohen's withering view of humanity's foibles. Don't look for any ironic subtext here....the gags are just there to make you go "eewwwwwww." Nothing more.

Cohen plays Nobby, a lower (or we should say lowest) class soccer-besotted lunkhead who reconnects with his long lost brother. The brothers,separated when they were young orphans, have certainly become different people.....Nobby's brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) is now an efficiently lethal MI6 superspy, a Bondian/Bourne killing machine. You can easily figure out the rest....Nobby ends up as his brother's unwanted sidekick, while they're pursued by thugs in the service of an international archvillainess (Penelope Cruz). In the course of their misadventures, they inadvertently shoot a wheelchair-bound child and infect Daniel Radcliffe with HIV (don't ask). In the film's centerpiece sequence (we get the feeling Cohen wrote the entire movie around this scene), the brothers hide from their pursuers inside an elephant's vagina....and yes, if you expect Cohen to double down and triple down on this gag, he will not disappoint you.

"Brothers Grimsby"primarily takes aim at an easy, soft target....casting its farcial eye at all the dreary conventions of today's action movies and their depressing similarity to first-person shooter video games. Cohen particularly gets a kick out of amping up the bloody collateral damage done to innocent bystanders to ridiculous levels. ("The Nice Guys" with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling makes a far funnier attempt at this same idea.)  Although you have admire his ingenuity in devising brutal sight gags involving pain inflicted on his bare ass, Cohen does nothing more than lazily slum around here...... it's an Adam Sandler-type paycheck grab.  While Sandler's content hitting the ceiling of lowlife comedy and staying there, we can only hope Sasha Baron Cohen has more ambitious things on his mind.  We'll shoot down "The Brothers Grimsby" with only 2 stars.

GIVE OUR DISREGARDS TO BROADWAY.....A FAMOUS SCREENWRITER ENDURES "THE SEASON" OF HIS DISCONTENT....

THE SEASON, by William Goldman remains, 46 years after its initial publication, a biting, intoxicatingly funny, bitchy read. Novelist Goldman had just begun to make his reputation as a star-quality screenwriter with his "Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid.'  He grew up loving theater and devoted "The Season" to an exhaustive, incisive look at both the art and business of Broadway plays and musicals. And what better way to do this than sit through every Broadway show that hit the footlights in the theater season of l967-1968.

As he enjoyed, endured and sometimes painfully grimaced through all the shows presented, Goldman, possessed of a withering wit and a rabid gossip's love of dirt, examined every aspect(and every personality type)  of what and who it takes to mount a Broadway show, He casts a sharp unforgiving eye on preening actors,struggling playwrights, hapless directors, power mad producers and all the peripheral hangers on (ticket scalpers, theater party bookers) who make up the New York theater food chain. Very few of them get away unscathed in Goldman's overview.

And why does Goldman take such great effort to apply his breezy vitriol to Broadway?  His book makes a devastating point.....while the country and its culture were enduring monumental upheavals during the mid to late 1960's, Broadway and its shows remained stagnantly mired in decades gone by, presenting the same sort of plays and musicals that had graced the Great White Way since the l940's. While 60's cinema was bursting with bright new diversive talent and a dazzling variety of subject matter, Broadway theater still trudged through written-in-stone imitations of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals and hoary, arthritic comedies afflicted with stale gags and washed up Hollywood actors seeking refuge from their long gone film careers.

Not a pretty picture.....but Goldman, as he later does in his subsequent, equally sardonic books about his screenwriting career, sugar coats his impassioned rants with the chatty sarcasm of a brilliant raconteur. We loved the way he dished out scorn and a theater buff's loving enthusiasm in equal measure, sometimes in the same sentence. . He's not above punching up his observations with gleeful, show-bizzy exaggeration......movie directors often complained his screenplays included impossibly over the top descriptions for them to follow, like,...."when they kiss, it's the greatest kiss ever in all movie history...."  Goldman finds a perfect subject for this kind of hyperbole in describing the embarrassing foibles of the '67/'68 theater offerings, such as the worthy, but ultimately star-crossed musical "Mata Hari". That show, a legendary flop, cemented its notorious status when Marisa Mell, the movie Euro-starlet playing Mata Hari. absent-mindedly wiped her nose after she'd been shot dead by a firing squad. Yikes, you might think....but you'd be surprised at the wise generosity with which Goldman treats the show itself and its creators, another reason we love this book and return to it again and again.

Since Beached Quill can't afford to take out a second mortgage to buy "Hamilton" tickets, we simply take "The Season" off our shelf for a re-read.....and it has everything you'd want in a hit show....laughter, drama, and thoughtful insight. We rate it a FIND OF FINDS...with a full 5 bright footlights.

IS THAT A BROADSWORD IN YOUR HAND OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME? WE DO BATTLE WITH "THE WAR LORD"

THE WAR LORD (1965) in its own strange little way, stands apart from the usual overblown 1960's clanging-swords-and armor costume epic. These films,featuring Charlton Heston clenching his jaw, along with vast collections of horses, crowds. castles and flaming arrows, usually filmed overseas in Spain or Italy ("Ben Hur", "El Cid", "55 Days In Peking", etc)  "The War Lord", however, didn't stray far from Los Angeles, shooting entirely on the back lot at Universal studios.

This strategic choice makes sense for the film, since it functions more as an overheated romantic drama that also happens to throw in Viking pirates, catapults and arrow-perforated stunt men hurling themselves off rickety battle towers.

Heston, ably doing his template signature character, the battle-hardened but conflicted epic hero, plays a Medieval knight charged by his boss, The Duke of whatever to seize and control some scrawny patch of coastal real estate. Why anyone wants this place is beyond me.....it features a lone prop department castle and a raggedy bunch of villagers who pay little attention to their priest (Maurice Evans) since they've all become orthodox Druids, dressing up as prancing chickens and goats at their official ceremonies, like weddings and such.)

But Heston's gotta do what Heston's gotta do, shlepping along his small army, including his grizzled, gruff mentor (the reliably grizzled and gruff Richard Boone) and his wild card jealous brother (Guy Stockwell, having a ball chewing the scenery.) Not long after parking themselves in the crumbling castle, a newly smitten Heston exercises his knightly privilege to pluck a Druid ingenue (Rosemary Forsyth) for sexual sampling on the eve of her wedding, This, needless to say, doesn't sit well with the Druid-babe's intended, her childhood BFF.(James Farantino) So Jimmy and the villagers round up the rampaging Viking guys, whose leader has a long standing beef with Heston,having slain Chuck's dad way back when....., and further aggravated by Heston and company having inadvertently captured the Barbarian Chief's toddler Prince..during their last clash. Yes, boys and girls....time to fire up the flaming arrows and check the spring action on the catapults.

Director Franklin Schaffner struggles to give this stuff a more literary, intimate sheen....but ultimately, it comes down to how many guys you get to see swan diving off the top of the castle with arrows stuck in their bellies. Without access to thousands of Spanish army recruits like the other competing epics of the time,  Schaffner  makes do with a moderately large company of Hollywood stunt men who put in a lot of Universal studio overtime falling, screaming, clutching their spear-pierced tummies and running around on fire.

The film does come with a nice bonus, though.....a superb score, both beautiful and rousing, by master movie composer Jerome Morross...also the composer  for William Wyler's "The Big Country" arguably one of the best movie scores ever written.

Okay, now that you know bloated costume battle epics are yet another Beached Quill guilty pleasure, we hold our ceremonial sword over this movie and dub it with 3 flaming arrows.

THE ITSY BITSY SPIDER CLIMBED UP THE BQ'S SHELF......WE SPRAY SOME QUILL-ICIDE ON 'THE HATCHING'

THE HATCHING by Ezekiel Boone aims to make your skin itch and crawl with its apocalyptic depiction of our world overrun by hordes of flesh eating spiders....wow, it's the world wide web for real.....

We'll say this much for "The Hatching".....the first two thirds of it is enjoyably creepy, gory and fast paced as it hops, skips and yes...skitters across a spider-ravaged globe.And then, as the book reached its final chapters, I lost all respect for this author.....cause it started to read as if he'd stopped writing and turned the book over to the publisher's marketing department for completion. The book finishes up with some skimpy,barely written scraps designed to make readers salivate for next book in what we now realize is a series, with the sequel due sometime in 2017. So instead of an ending, you get a trailer for the next book.

 Beached Quill memo to Ezekiel Boone....if you want people to stay with you for a potential series.....WRITE A WHOLE BOOK THE FIRST TIME OUT. Don't pass off on your readers nothing more than a slimy, corporate advertisement for your next book. Man up and write....you're supposed to function as the author, not the marketing team. There's a difference.

Ahhh, that was a fun rant. Beached Quill normally loves and adores rampaging bug stories, but the cynical calculation involved in this book's presentation made our skin crawl worse than the spiders. Sorry, but we spin only 1 1/2 webs. It's strictly an Arachna-phony.

A TRIO OF SMALL MOVIES FOR THE WEE HOURS......BQ WANDERS THROUGH A LATE NITE TOUR OF INDEPENDENT FILMS ON CABLE.....

3 in the morning and our itchy fingers busily work the FIOS remote, scrolling through a dense forest of little movies that probably no one outside of the Middle-Of-Nowhere Film Festival heard of.....

SAFELIGHT (2015) Crippled-from-birth teen, an aspiring photographer, is befriended by the 18 year old hooker who plies her trade at the truck stop near the convenience store he clerks at.  As you might expect in an independent film, a gentle, tender friendship develops, overshadowed by the girl's pimp, a raving, violent nutcase, annoyingly over-acted by some actor we won't even bother naming. He's that bad, dripping flop sweat as he struggles to outdo every previous movie psycho-pimp  Typically for an Indie, the film ends abruptly, leaving you with more questions than answers. 2 stars

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER (2015) Gay California teen boy plans to come out to his family during their trip to a relatives get together picnic in Nebraska. Things go quickly awry when it appears to the family that he may (or may not) have molested his 10 year old niece while they were alone together in the barn. Arid, quietly creepy and unsettling, the film revels in its inconclusiveness, hidden motives and deep family secrets left unexplained. By the time this uneasy little anecdote grinds to a halt, you'll wonder what the hell went on and why you even bothered to care,   1 1/2 stars.

ONE MORE TIME (2015)  A washed up, Sinatra-type crooner (Christopher Walken) plots a comeback as he gathers round his dysfunctional family, all of them wounded in some form or another by his lifetime of self-absorption, emotional neglect and string of broken marriages. Hardest hit : one of his daughters (Amber Heard) an unstable 31 year old would-be singer songwriter and random sex addict who's just been kicked out of her apartment. Easily the most watchable of the three films discussed here....Heard and Walken's acidic verbal clashes keep it interesting, and you have to love Walken's slightly satiric recreations of those signature Sinatra/Tony Bennet swingin' song stylings. You'll wish it had a little more oomph to raise it slightly above the usual remote observational mood of independent films. 2 and 1/2 stars.

PUCKER UP, HOLIDAY LOVERS! BQ STANDS NOT UNDERNEATH, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH TO MISTLETOE....THE MISTLETOE BOOKS BY RICHARD PAUL EVANS!

We unabashedly admit to wallowing in the whole onslaught of Christmas merchandising.....it NEVER gets old for us, no matter how manipulative and corny. The music? All hail Andy Williams, happy purveyor of "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year." The movies?  Deck the TV with round the clock Hallmark Christmas movies....(which we promise to cover soon). Even the commercials....where Santa and his elves work tirelessly to sell us toys, clothing. new cars and chicken McNuggets......bring 'em on.  Beached Quill finds it all theraputic and as comforting as an extra blanket on a frosty winter night.

For holiday reading, the season's incomplete until you've inhaled (usually at one sitting) the charming little "Mistletoe" romances penned annually by Richard Paul Evans. He's up to three of them now and they're virtually identical in plot and formula.....which is why we embrace them. Each year, it's like breaking open and gorging on a box of red-and-green Dunkin Donuts. Basically, a Lonely Guy and a Lonely Girl (yes, they have names, but we'll simply refer to them as such), both shell shocked survivors of assorted divorces of toxic ex-mates, find each other and true love during the holidays.,

THE MISTLETOE SECRET has Lonely Guy enraptured by Lonely Girl's blog, in which she bemoans her fate as...as Lonely Girl. Lonely Guy, having no idea about her identity, sets out to track her down, travelling from his Daytona Beach home to Lonely Girl's tiny town in the middle of frigid Utah. Complications ensue, as Lonely Guy keeps knocking on the wrong doors in his quest, but....oh no, I dare not spoil the rest......

THE MISTLETOE PROMISE, has already been adapted as a Hallmark channel movie, This one presents a Lonely Guy and Lonely Girl so besieged by the social demands of the busy holiday season, that they make a pact to pose as each other dates at the many functions and parties they're obligated to attend. Before long, Lonely Guy and Lonely Girl succumb to the close proximity they've put each other in...and before you can say 'Joy To The World, the two of them.....no, no, our lips are sealed....

THE MISTLETOE INN places Lonely Guy and Lonely Girl, both aspiring writers, together at a writer's retreat in a snowy, picture postcard Vermont inn.(Which is why you'd never see these books taking place in Key West or Aruba....)  Lonely Girl hopes to meet the retreat's premier guest speaker, a reclusive romance writer but in the meantime she falls for Lonely Guy, another would be writer who harbors secrets of his own, including........ooops.....almost made the naughty list by spilling it.....

If the holidays frazzle you to the point of madness....we can't recommend these gems enough to calm you down, soothe your soul and maybe even make you tolerate the TV spots where Santa pitches used Suburus......they go down as smoothly as hot chocolate or pumpkin lattes....the books, we mean, not the cars. BQ jingles the bells for this series, giving them the FIND OF FINDS....and 5 bright red ornaments.......

STRANGLERS IN THE NIGHT.....EXCHANGING GLANCES......ANOTHER GRISLY GRABBER WHERE THERE'S MORE THAN MEETS THE FBI.

ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS by J.T.Ellison.  We'll admit, when it comes to mysteries, BQ rarely picks up what they call 'police procedurals'. Yes I know....zillions of readers dearly love these, following the cops as they painstakingly, doggedly sift through clue after clue, stumble as they follow false leads pointing them in the wrong direction.....but ultimately connect the dots and corner the killer. For us, it comes down to how well the author conceives the sleuths......whether the cops are straight arrows or drunken burn-outs, it comes down to this....are these people we want to spend any time with and do we really care if they finally catch whoever's leaving dead bodies on the road every three days?

The dynamic duo in Ellison's thriller didn't exactly thrill us with any special quirks or qualities.....we found them standard issue, like two characters awaiting their own "Law And Order" spinoff series. Nashville Homicide Detective Taylor Jackson, a tall, gorgeous blonde, conveniently co-habits with FBI profiler John Baldwin as they jointly hunt down the 'Southern Strangler'.  The 'SS' keeps them busy as he abducts and strangles the numerous pretty girls of the book's title, then chops their hands off and leaves the hands in the vicinity of his next victim....whose missing hands will next appear....well, you get it, right?.

What lifts this book above the pack of procedurals and kept us reading til the end.....its plot, not the cops. . Ellison intersects the strangler's trackdown with the tangled lives of twin sisters who share a dark, disturbing history....having been kidnapped and sexually assaulted when they were 12 years old. As the puzzle unravels and the killer unmasked, the turn of events turns genuinely twisted and ultimately heartbreaking. You expect satisfying solutions in a book like this..Ellison makes good enough on the delivery that we wouldn't mind checking out his next effort......BQ arrests this one with a gruesomely good 2 1/2 stars, (And we used great restraint in not saying something like "hands down, it's top notch!"  Ooops....)

DRECK THE HALLS! BEACHED QUILL FONDLY TAKES AN UBER SLEIGH RIDE TO A HOLIDAY GUILTY PLEASURE, "SANTA CLAUS THE MOVIE"!

SANTA CLAUS - THE MOVIE (1985) forever remains our favorite holiday guilty pleasure and also a  warm, fuzzy way to recall big budget 1980's movie making.

Concocted by the Salkinds, the  P.T. Barnum-ized international movie hustlers who managed to put together the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve, "Santa Claus" strictly follows the same story construction as 'Superman'. Like the Reeve epic (also co-written by the 'Santa' screenwriter David Newman), the film is split into two separate halves......the first half a dreamy, otherworldly fantasy depicting Santa's origins, the second half, a jolting switch to big city reality, where Santa and his chief elf (Dudley Moore) cross swords...or more likely, candy canes, with  a rapacious tycoon (John Lithgow), a guy so greedy, he longs to create a sequel to Christmas shopping in March.  (Haven't Target and Wal-Mart done that already?)

This sounds like a recipe for a perfect snow-storm movie disaster, but somehow the film still survives and endures with its charms intact.  For Dudley Moore, it pretty much signaled the end of the line for his brief but busy career as an A-List comedy star. (Attempting to shoehorn popular comedians into big-budget special effects fantasies was not uncommon... Richard Pryor uncomfortably trooped through the Salkinds' "Superman 3",... and Eddie Murphy came close to crashing a Star Trek movie) Lithgow works feverishly overtime to outdo Gene Hackman's hammy stint as "Superman"s Lex Luthor....and the Big Jolly Guy himself is played by no less than the other Big Lebowski, David Huddleston.

Critics, at the time of its release, roasted the film as an insincere, mass-merchandised piece of lumpy holiday fruitcake.....their unkindest cut, that the film looked like something John Lithgow's evil magnate character would foist on the public. But thirty one years later.....and compared to the utterly soul-less  machine-tooled CGI monstrosities churned out by the studios today,  "Santa Claus" comes off as downright charming and innocent. The whole first half, photographed and staged as if taking place inside a Hallmark store snow globe, can still cast a greeting-card glow on you, whether you like it or not. Even when the film makes its jarring left turn into metropolitan Lithgow-land, there's minimal damage overall.

We say Bah Humbug! to all those l980's movie critics...and give "Santa Claus" 3 1/2 ornaments.....

MALLORY, OUR FAVORITE DYSFUNCTIONAL CRIME-FIGHTING GODDESS RETURNS! AND YOU PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF HER....HIDDEN TREASURE ALERT!

Detective Sergeant Kathleen Mallory of the NYPD.....remember that name (and call her 'Kathy' at your peril, she prefers 'Mallory' only)....she's the striking, unforgettable creation of mystery/thriller novelist Carol 'O Connell in a series of 12 books, the newest of which, "BLIND SIDE" came out a few months ago.

How to describe 'O Connell's Mallory? Try to picture Dragon Tattoo's Lisabeth Salander as a blonde, six foot tall, drop dead gorgeous  New York City detective. And like Salander, Mallory's childhood backstory almost defies description in its horror......orphaned, and sadistically victimized, the child Mallory, a waif with a core of steel, winds up as a scrabbling, homeless street thief in NYC until she's arrested and adopted by Detective Louis Markowitz. Markowitz and his wife raise Mallory, attempting their best at coating this implacable force of nature with a veneer of civility and humanity. But Mallory remains Mallory, with a single-minded, cold, unforgiving moral compass to strike back and avenge wrongs....to herself and others. And what better career for her than a a police detective in New York City.....where the murderers she pursues discover, to their utter terror, that the cop hunting them is every bit their equal in monstrous, amoral behavior.

We haven't cracked open 'Blind Side' yet (we promise a review soon), but Beached Quill can tell you without reservation that the previous eleven books challenge the formidable Kathy Mallory with a masterfully written array of intricate twisting plots and suspects. You'll have your own personal favorites as you read through the series, but most of all, you'll stay with them for the sheer joy of watching the relentless, remorseless Mallory cut a swath through the storylines like an avenging angel. And you'll come to savor the extraordinary moments when 'O Connell reveals that underneath all the emotional scar tissue, there lies hidden a surprisingly warm, beating heart somewhere inside Mallory,,,,, which virtually no one ( except you, the reader) ever sees.

Oddly enough, two of our all time best-loved Mallory novels take her outside the confines of New York City.....STONE ANGEL sends Mallory back to the sleepy deep South town of her birth, where she arrives to wreak Mallory-style vengeance on the man who incited a mob to stone her mother to death. She suits up like Clint Eastwood's spaghetti western Man With No Name and the town's deep-fried Faulkner rednecks soon face Mallory-geddon. Our other best-of-Mallory, FIND ME, puts her out on historic Route 66, where a heartbreaking caravan of grieving parents has taken to the highway in search of their missing abducted children. Mallory must deal the with memory of her own horrendous childhood while travelling to the inevitable 'High Noon' encounter with a psychotic pedophile.

If you haven't heard of these books, or have heard of them and haven't gotten to one yet......know that Beached Quill loudly declares this series the FIND OF FINDS. We aim a full 5 .357 Magnums.....

'THE CHASE' - TEXAS BAR-B- Q'D BRANDO....YOUR HONOR, WE PLEAD.....GUILTY PLEASURE! A DISTURBINGLY DUMB MOVIE WE LOVE TO PIECES!

THE CHASE (1966) stands out gloriously as one of the guiltiest of all Beached Quill's Guilty Pleasures, a megaton disaster sporting a high pedigree and a once-in-a-lifetime cast of superstars.Imagine a single movie that includes no less than Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall and a host of classic character actors like E.G.Marshall, Janice Rule, Martha Hyer, Clifton James, Malcolm Atterbury and Miriam Hopkins.

Produced by powerhouse mogul Sam Spiegel, written by the legendary playwright and author Lillian Hellman and directed by Arthur Penn (soon to upend American cinema with 1967's "Bonnie and Clyde"), "The Chase" serves up a nightmarish tour of one blood-drenched melodramatic night in a small Texas town. This hellish hamlet, controlled by an oil baron (E.G.Marshall) is almost entirely populated by a frenzied Basket Of Deplorables....race-baiting, gun-toting, wife-swapping bigots, their drunken slutty wives and an assorted Greek chorus of teens as depraved as their elders. The upstanding Sheriff Calder (Brando) serves, protects and mumbles incoherently as the only beacon of decency and morality in the madhouse surrounding him.

It doesn't take much to bring this vile village to a full boil... just.the prison escape and return of the town's soulful, James Dean bad boy, Bubber Reeves (Redford), Bubber's got issues and histories with what seems like the entire town, including his wife (Fonda) who's currently canoodling with his best friend, the Oil Baron's beloved son.(James Fox, providing that 1960's staple, the Brit actor working his Southern accent)  As the the loony populace heat themselves up into panic and hysteria, Brando helplessly cruises around town trying to keep the peace while drawling out disgusted asides....it even sounds like he puts an extra third syllable into "Bubber".

Before the night's over, innocent blacks are intimidated and pistol whipped, the crazed residents set an auto junkyard ablaze and blow it to smithereens, Brando is mercilessly beaten into the consistency of cherry jello by the bigot brigade and even more death, surprise murder and beatings ensue.  Folks, welcome to Dante's Inferno with a barbecue buffet.....

It's crazy, delirious fun to watch, though obviously not the high purpose editorial its makers envisioned. Supposedly Spiegel took the film out of Hellman and Penn's hands, editing his own version.....so it's anyone's guess what the movie was supposed to look like.....in the context of the here and now, Hellman's depiction of small town Southwest as a seething hotbed of racism, violence and depravity comes off as Hollywood condescension, the kind of elitist attitude that pundits believe undid Hilary Clinton. But coming out in 1966, the film was definitely ahead of the curve in its introduction of nihilistic violence into big-budget mainstream movies......the aura of hopelessness, of useless struggle against malignant authority started here and would fully bloom in  70's cinema.  It wasn't until 77's "Star Wars" that the good guys started winning again....

So how does BQ rate a Guilty Pleasure?  Good question....since we'd feel...uh...guilty applying our normal rating system to such an over-the-top detonation like "The Chase",....we decided to rate it strictly as a Guilty Pleasure, for the sheer screwy, undiluted entertainment value it provides...BQ, without guilt....bastes a full 4 Texas spare ribs for this one..

BEAM ME OUTTA THIS MOVIE, SCOTTIE.....BQ BOLDLY SURVIVES 'STAR TREK BEYOND'......

STAR TREK BEYOND (2015) upon its release to the world, probably made TV series creator Gene Roddenberry spin so fast in his grave, the sheer propulsion sent his bones hurling into an alternate universe. We can only hope it's a universe where Paramount wouldn't turn over 'Star Trek' to an action movie hack with ADD and no discernible thought in his head beyond how loud and long the next explosion should be.

Watching 'Fast and Furious' director Justin Lin grind up this franchise into just another brainless, migrain inducing CG-Eyesore for 11 year old popcorn gobblers makes for a mind-numbing, eardrum piercing experience. 'Beyond' fits the title of this movie.....beyond the pale, beyond human consumption, beyond the other worst movies of this year.  I'm old enough to remember how Roddenberry used 'Star Trek' as a clever conduit for his love of human drama mixed with a concerned but fundamentally optimistic worldview.  The feature films struggled to hold those elements together while still delivering the special effects whambams, some more successfully than others. But with 'Star Trek Beyond', all that's out the window....there's nothing left now but what sells summertime tickets and garners the most youtube hits on the trailers....explosions, crashes,chases and that trailer favorite.... characters falling from high places (usually with no physical consequences).

We can't fault the cast, they're all still game and it's damn fun to watch them have their thoughtful and/or comedic moments whenever they aren't dodging raygun blasts or intergalactic debris. Here they do furious battle with an alien badass named Krall (Idris Elba, somewhere underneath 15 pounds of styrofoam or whatever they craft his rippled, fake head out of). No doubt he's named Krall......well, cause he's a mean outer space villain.....and you don't see too many Wal-Mart greeters or Avon ladies with 'Krall' on their name tags. Krall's backstory holds this movie's one paltry plot surprise....but amidst all the thunderous destruction.....really, who cares?

Beam us down and out on this one....but on behalf of the entertaining excellent cast....we'll bump it up to as least 2 stars.

I LET YOU GO by Clare Mackintosh - ANOTHER THRILLER COCKTAIL WITH A TWIST.....

Another book we randomly plucked off our "the next Gone Girl!" pile that now stacks up close to the ceiling. Most of these thrillers never quite deliver on their Gillian Flynn aspirations,but "I Let You Go" ably fulfills its promise to pull the rug out from under you with a jawdropper that makes you straight-arm the book (or Kindle, or Nook) in front of you. After you're done gasping out, "Say whaatttt?", you'll find yourself unable to walk away from the storyline that swirls around the hit-and-run death of a toddler in front of his mother's horrified eyes.

That's about all the plot details the BQ can dare to disclose without spoiling your fun when you hit the Big Reveal. The rest of the story comfortably settles into a familiar, but still entertaining back-and-forth between the detective duo struggling to crack the case and the unnerving clash between our vulnerable protagonist and the hateful psycho who's the cause of everyone's misery. I duly forgave Ms.Mackintosh for employing a well worn horror movie trope at the climax.....it's a thriller, after all....so go ahead and thrill me any which way you can. Overall a fine chilly read for these upcoming chilly nights. BQ stalks this one with 3 stars.

YOUR BLEATIN' HEART.....WE FIGURE OUT WHY TOM HIDDLESTON'S HANK WILLIAMS BIO CRASHED AND BURNED...

I SAW THE LIGHT (2015)  BQ takes deep satisfaction in watching a particular type of movie drop into obscurity and oblivion....and that's the film that egotistically trumpets its supposed high purpose and distinguished credentials. These films exist for one goal only....not to be watched by an audience...but to collect accolades from critics and assorted culture approvers along with the accompanying statuettes during the grueling December through February movie awards season. Trying to sit down and endure these movies while they relentlessly beg for their undeserved prizes would depress and demoralize most viewers....that's why The Beached Quill manned up and took this bullet for you......

"I Saw The Light" , which you could think of as "Walk The Line"-Lite, no doubt saw itself as this year's Biography awards contender. High toned casting? Check. Brit-Of-The-Moment Tom Hiddleston (the galactic weasel of Avengers movies and past-expiration-date Taylor Swift squeeze) plays legendary country music star Hank Williams. A pretty low bar was set for Tom, since the last actor to play Williams was the tanned Adonis George Hamilton in 1964's "Your Cheatin' Heart".  Even better, the film includes a genuine BQ fave, Elizabeth Olsen, sporting a Miley Cyrus whine, and a....um...striking singing voice as Williams' problematically ambitious first wife Audrey.

So what went wrong? Pretty much everything....from the moment "I Saw The Light" saw the light of a projector, the film festival culture vultures weren't havin' any....they quickly(and correctly) judged it a pretentious bore and consigned it to the $9.96 section on the Wal-Mart racks. The key problem with "Give Me My Awards!" movies like this one.....they have all the trappings of a great movie without actually being one. And "I Saw The Light" stands as a punishing example.  Deadly pacing, scenes that go nowhere with characters whispering unintelligible dialogue to each other, and artsy cinematography that paints the entire film in a barely lit brownish-orange...(looking like the movie was shot in a closet with the door only slightly open.) Hiddleston and Olsen put forth their best efforts,  but they're  swimming in the filmmakers' quicksand pool here. At 124 minutes, you could potentially lose the will to live before the end credits start rolling.

A total miss......BQ twangs out 1 star.

1957 BREAKING NEWS! POP CULTURE TV DEMAGOGUE SWEEPS AMERICA!....(NO,THIS CAN'T POSSIBLY HAPPEN....CAN IT?)

A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957) written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan lays out a frighteningly prescient view of mass media manipulation crossed with a dangerous cult of personality. Almost 60 years later, this film makes Schulberg and Kazan more accurate than Nostradamus in their corrosive depiction of a gullible public wooed and seduced by a braying charlatan and his cynical media enablers.  Any of this sound familiar yet?

Schulberg's script creates one of cinema's greatest Frankenstein monsters.....not one created in a mad scientist's lab, but assembled by ratings-hungry media executives and beamed out to millions of unsuspecting listeners and viewers. The monster here is Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith,a long way from Mayberry RFD)  a mean spirited, dissolute hobo transformed overnight into a radio-TV sensation with a faux-folksy 'good ole boy' persona effectively camouflaging his truly vile, ruthless personality. Lonesome uses his new bully pulpit as a radio and and TV raconteur to wield absolute power over networks, advertisers, politicians seeking his favor....and most terrifying of all....public opinion. (Schulberg's real inspiration here was Arthur Godfrey, a much beloved CBS TV host later revealed to the public as a hot-tempered, power mad bully)

As for the architects of Lonesome's ascendancy (Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau, Anthony Franciosca), they discover too late what a slimy creature they've unleashed upon America. By the time it dawns on them, Lonesome is already schooling witless politicos on how to sell themselves like a new brand of toothpaste....or a new Lonesome Rhodes. Some of Schulberg's scenes here will take your breath away in their on-the-money predictions of the pop culture circus we wallow in today.....the sequence where Lonesome instructs a drug company exec on how to market his worthless, placebo 'energy' pills is grimly hilarious. But take a look at your own medicine cabinet before you laugh.

The only major difference between Schulberg and Kazan's 1957 vision and 2016  events is the fate they concocted for Lonesome.....as opposed to, well, let's say our current situation. In the 1950's, even a voyage into the darkest aspect of humanity like "A Face In The Crowd" required a moral light at the end of the tunnel. Audiences of that era wouldn't tolerate anything less...(witness 1956's "The Bad Seed", in which Warner Brothers had to hurl a climactic lightning bolt at child-murderess Patty McCormack or risk the censors' wrath)  But in our uncivil age, where we've just a elected a President who brags about sexual assault, those rules don't apply.....a Lonesome Rhodes can triumph.

If you haven't seen this film yet, check it out NOW.....if you haven't seen it in some time, watch it again for a refresher course as you compare it to what we're living through.   Beached Quill liked the movie's ending way better than today's ending.....but then, we live in a different time, don't we?....sigh.......BQ awards  the FIND OF FINDS....5 bigly, huuuuuge stars.

CAPTIVE GIRL THRILLERS....FLASHLIGHT IN HAND, THE BQ BRAVELY DESCENDS INTO THIS DARKEST OF GENRES!

GOOD AS GONE by Amy Gentry falls into the ever growing pile of kidnapped-and-enslaved-women thrillers inspired by the horrific ordeals of Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard and the three similarly victimized women in Cleveland. While Emma Donaghue's Room set a high literary bar for fictionalizing this story, mystery/suspense writers, sly devils that they are, don't hesitate to embrace all manner of lurid plot opportunities these atrocities provide. Not content to simply connect the true-crime dots, you can expect these authors to upend their captive girl thrillers with uniquely perverse curveballs.  Gentry's book works from a standard blueprint......the return of a now grown young woman to her astounded, overjoyed family many years after her childhood abduction. BUT.....and this is the big ole 'but' that keeps us riveted.....is Julie Whitaker really the Whitaker family's long lost child or a scheming imposter who's inserted herself into a family she never belonged to?  You don't think I'm going to spill it, do you?  Briskly paced and deftly plotted, one of the better efforts in this strange sub-genre. We'll say.....3 stars.

DEAR AMY by Helen Callaghan throws in all the proper ingredients for a 'damaged-abductee-versus-her-vile-enslaver tale, but keeps the story at a maddening slow simmer. A Brit schoolteacher, survivor of a well hidden drug-addicted, psycho-ward adolescence, moonlights as an advice columnist for a local paper. After a teen girl at her school goes missing, the teacher's tentative hold on normality goes further off the rails when her column receives desperate, pleading letters from a supposedly long dead girl, presumed abducted and murdered over 15 years ago. A compelling enough premise....and yes, the author serves up her BIG TWIST about halfway in. But the pacing just about murders this book....it moves slower than an oil painting. After dawdling around through mounds of mind numbing description, Callaghan finally applies the defibrillator paddles to her plot somewhere in the last 20 pages or so.....by that time, you may have decided to give up before the book jolts back to life.. A decently satisfying and brutal wrap up....but be forewarned, it's a bit of a slog to get there. Sorry, BQ can only come up with 1 1/2 stars.......if it snags a movie deal, a film version might improve it.

HBO MY GOD! BEACHED QUILL SURVIVES THE STRANGEST DOUBLE FEATURE OF THE YEAR!

We're guessing you're not supposed to stay tuned to one particular HBO channel all night long....since unlike the Big 3 networks, they don't have to worry about programming one entire night for 18 to 35 year old males living in their parents' basements or the 18 to 35 year old females who think those 18 to 35 year old males are taking longer to mature than fine wine......

 So....stretched out on the couch and too lazy to hit the remote, we absorbed, from 8 pm to Midnight, back to back movies on one single HBO channel....and what a gloriously insane combination they were!  The pairing of these two cinematic tub-o-butter popcorn confections reminded the BQ of the kind of insanely odd double features you could scarf up at neighborhood theatres long before they were twinned, multiplexed and Imaxed into corporate entities. Back then....we're talkin' l930's to l960's....you could take in a western and a sci-fi epic, or a weepy romance paired with a horror film, or a biblical tale on the same bill with a....well, you get the idea......so God bless you for an eclectic unforgettable evening, HBO....when you slapped together.....

GODS OF EGYPT  The old epic-meister Cecil B.DeMille must drool in envy as he looks down from heaven at the way they make costume spectacles nowadays. No more shlepping thousands of extras, camels and horses into an actual desert. These overheated myths now get made with a few gym-hardened actors working in a downtown warehouse draped in green screens....everything else (crowds, pyramids, monsters, earthquakes, tsunamis, abs) gets digitally drawn in by 1,479 computer artists in college sweatshirts, Bermuda shorts and flip flops....and whose names make the film's credit crawl longer than the uncut 'Heaven's Gate'.

This movie's nutball premise depicts an ancient Egypt where the teeming mortal hordes are actively governed by their deities,,,,you can tell the gods apart from the mere humans cause they've been digitally enlarged so they all look like XXL-sized NFL linebackers when standing next to the regular folk. And also, they're almost all played by Brits....since gods should always sound classy and important. I'll make no foolhardy attempt to belabor the plot, which involves a scrawny human and his cute girlfriend running afoul of a badass god (Gerard Butler) who has just staged a divine coup by fatally stabbing his own brother (so much for godlike immortality) . If you like this sort of stuff, GOE does not disappoint.....there's trips to the underworld,(you go down there by screwing downward into the sand, like a Phillips--head nail) gods turning into shiny metal birds, and the BQ's personal favorite, two smokin' hot god-babes bronco-busting some giant worm dragons....yowza. BQ walks like an Egyptian and gives it 2 1/2 pyramids.....

Of course, all god things must come to an end and after taking a delightful nap while the flip-flopped digital artists names inched upward on the TV, it was time for the next HBO goodie, as far away from Gods Of Egypt as the earth is to Jupiter....and we settled in to view...

HOW TO BE SINGLE....which was this year's New York City rom-com traditionally dumped into theatres on the weekend closest to Valentine's Day (the only other approved date for films like this is Super Bowl weekend, giving girls ample reason to flee the man-caves and head for the multiplex)  Not much to say about HTBS....other than it could be alternately titled "She's Just Not That Into Anybody."  You know the drill....attractive yuppie girls fall in and out of love with a variety of guys, some of whom are touchy-feely sensitive souls, while others remain unrepentant douchebags or somewhere between the two extremes. Dakota Johnson, of "50 Shades" does winsome to perfection and at least here nobody ties her up. Rebel Wilson,at regularly scheduled intervals, fullfills her required task of energizing the film with her "Pitch Perfect"  Fat Amy party animal persona. The guys? Other than Damon Wayons Jr's single dad character (designed to make you cry), I can't remember anyone memorable.....except the one guy awarded the screenplay's only standout moment....in which he does a lengthy, borderline psychotic version of that tiresome scriptwriter's gag..."....I'm just kidding with you....no, I'm not kidding.....no, I was just messin' with ya...no, I'm really not kidding..."  Sporadically funny, once and awhile romantic....we'll blow it 2 kisses only....

Stroke of midnight ended our mash-up double feature and the BQ happily went to bed dreaming a combination of the two films.....in which  Dakota Johnson yelled 'Yeehaa' while astride the huge dragon-worm thing and Rebel Wilson turned into a silver bird and swooped down on the annoying "just kidding with you" guy....we abruptly woke up at the point where Gerard Butler was rotating us downward into the sand.......Keep 'em comin', HBO.....

BETTER DEAD THAN WED DEPT.......ANOTHER COUPLE WHOSE PROPOSAL DIDN'T MAKE THE STADIUM JUMBOTRON....

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS  by B.A.Paris. Little ditty 'bout Jack and Grace.....a perfectly exquisite couple, or so this book would have you believe for a few of its opening pages. You won't have any problem figuring out what their real deal is here and hiding it from you isn't this author's game anyhow.. What we've got here, folks, unfolds as an excruciating study in psychological sadism, domination and torture. Or as some married couples would refer to it....Tuesday. It's a toss up as to how this book might strike you.....you'll either find it strangely engrossing or the equivalent of watching someone pick the wings off flies for days on end. Let's just say....I wouldn't gift wrap a copy for Katie Holmes if she's on your Christmas list)   Your move entirely. Proceed with caution. Beached Quill blessedly bestows 2 1/2 Las Vegas marriage licenses.....

DAMAGED SOULS ALERT! DAMAGED SOULS ALERT!

BECAUSE I'M WATCHING by Christina Dodd.   Stumbled upon this one while browsing through one of my favorite bookshops in the world, the Poison Pen in Old Scottdale, Arizona...(don't fail to stop in there when you're basking in the Valley Of The Sun). It's genre-coded as Romantic Suspense, which I suppose excludes me from its target demographic....but I read everything, so what the hell.The main ingredients here, like cheese and sauce on a pizza.....one thoroughly PTSD'd Army Vet and one equally screwed up deer-in-the-headlights manic pixie (accent on manic) who has miraculously (or suspiciously) managed to outlive her serial-massacred dorm-mates and throat-slashed late husband. If these two lost souls aren't enough on your plate, there's a whole Cozy Mystery cast of townsfolk.....some wise, some wifty, more than a few who should be sporting XXL "Hi! I'm a Red Herring!" t-shirts. Okay, I'll admit I enjoyed the hell out of it.....and you can't help but love the 'meet cute' between the leads. Manic Pixie crashes her SUV into Tormented Army Guy's living room. (I personally would have loved to see Meg Ryan do that to Tom Hanks in "You've Got Mail", especially right after he put her bookstore out of business...)  Anyway, a solid, entertaining read. BQ awards 4 sets of serial killer cutlery.....

BQ's MOVIES BY THE AUTUMN FIREPLACE.....OR ANY COMFY, WARM ROOM!

With the nights turning chilly, nothing's better than curling up with a bowl of popcorn and cinematic comfort food....(followed by a good book, of course). Mysteries always seem uniquely Fall-like to me....so here's my first batch to highly recommend.....cook up the corn, turn up the thermostat and snuggle under your Snuggie with some of these gems....

THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963)  A deliciously Agatha Christie-ish puzzler with the added gimmick of five superstars (Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) popping up in cameos, all heavily disguised. George C. Scott (rolling his tongue through a perfectly plummy British accent) unravels a diabolic murder plot, linking up connections between a series of seemingly unrelated accidental deaths.....and gets to the bottom of things at a potentially lethal fox hunt. Flavorful score by the brilliant Jerry Goldsmith. Directed by John Huston, who also pops up for a cameo....and no, it isn't Col. Mustard,in the library with a candlestick. By jove,we give it 5 full Tally-Ho's...... 

THE HOUSE OF CARROLL STREET (1988) Bittersweet brew of nostalgic romantic suspense, blending  l950's communist witch-hunts with unnerving thrills 'n chills. Young NYC woman (Kelly McGillis), unjustly blacklisted by a slimy unctuous HUAC lawyer (Mandy Patinkin) appeals (in more ways than one)to a stalwart FBI guy (Jeff Daniels) when she stumbles upon Patinkin's loathsome conspiracy to smuggle in Nazi war criminals. Subdued and restrained in its evocation of l950's New York City.....but works up a generous share of dangerous and tender moments for its two sympathetic leads....and heads steadily for its memorable, blatantly Hitchcockian showdown sequence The BQ hand out 4 1/2 ledges to dangle from....                                                                                                          

THE PRIZE (1963)  Glossy, colorful-the-max MGM thriller, taken from an Irving Wallace best seller. As scripted by Ernest Lehman, it's more or less a remake of Lehman's original script for Hitchcock's classic "North By Northwest" Drunk, cynical, wisecracking novelist (Paul Newman), bemused by his Nobel Prize award for Literature, dodges assassins in Stockholm when he uncovers a sinister East German plot to replace a fellow Nobel recipient (Edward G. Robinson) with an imposter. You'll recognize the re-cycled "North By Northwest" sequences but it's still loads of fun...with a take-your-breath-away gorgeous Elke Sommer and a tingling, propulsive Jerry Goldsmith score. Newman has way more fun in this faux-Hitch thriller than he had 3 years later starring in an actual Hitchcock film, "Torn Curtain".....he and Julie Andrews glumly trudged through that one as if they were undergoing joint root canal. "The Prize" (like "Charade", which I'm sure I'll get around to) stands as one of the best, most entertaining imitation Hitchcocks.  BQ bequeaths it 4 Nobel Prize gift shop replicas.....

SPANDEX MARKS THE SPOT......SOME NOVEL SUPERGIRLS....LITERALLY!

Imagine the possibilities.....three gifted novelists delve into the fractured, frenzied lives sci-fi/fantasy fanboys 'n girls and assorted universes of super-folk they adore. Up, up and away!

SHE CAME FROM BEYOND by Nadine Darling takes on the increasingly convoluted life of Easy Hardwick, who at age 30 still happily toils as a sexed up Barbarella wannabe on a local TV station's low rent version of 'Mystery Science Theatre 3000'. Easy's on-line beau easily impregnates her with twins, then moves in with her, bringing along his own teenage daughter and a crazy ex-wife into the mix....witty familial dysfunction and much sci-fi trivia ensue, powered by Darling's richly sharp prose. I give it 4 1/2 ray guns.

THE REGIONAL OFFICE IS UNDER ATTACK! by Manuel Gonzales forgoes the read world altogether, spinning a blissfully arch saga about an all out civil war raging among the crime fighting super-babes of....what else, the Regional Office. Think of the R.O. as a chaotically run Temp agency where the temps are so busy Kung Fu-ing each other into oblivion, there's little time for their regular save-the-world-from-archvillain assignments. As the girls furiously have at it, Gonzales bounces around time periods, casting a novelist's sardonic eye on his femme fatales' tortuous origin stories, rife with star-crossed romance amidst the numerous ass kickings. Huge fun in spurts, but overall it feels like Gonzales merely skims stones across the superhero pond, so it ultimately comes off as a bit half baked and incomplete. BQ awards it 2 1/2 karate chops.

A HUNDRED THOUSAND WORLDS by Bob Proehl is by far the best of this bunch and BQ's first official nominee for the FIND OF FINDS for November. In other words, grab this book NOW as soon as you finish reading this blog. A banquet of riches awaits you here, starting with the book's captivating primary plot engine......Valerie Torrey, a TV star of a beloved cult series (think "Fringe") stops off for multiple, cross country Comic Con meet 'n greets while on a heartbreaking odyssey to return her 9 year old son to the custody of his father, Valerie's former co-star and ex-husband. At the Cons along the way, mom and son encounter a quirky coterie of comic book writers and artists....and best of all, a riotously funny Greek chorus of Cosplay girls whose verbal byplay will unmercifully tickle you .Proehl knows this world well and he serves up a devastatingly accurate roman a clef on the battling empires and characters (both real and drawn) of DC and Marvel. Heartfelt, at times hilarious, not to be missed. BQ bestows a full 5 red capes to this one.

Welcome to The Beached Quill!

I'm thrilled and delighted you stopped in to the BQ, even if you stumbled on it accidentally. I'll labor mightily to make it a fast, fun read for you......I know your time's precious and there's lots of other breaded 'n deep fried snacks on the vast Web buffet you can sample....so I'll try to make mine irresistibly Extra Crispy. Enjoy the posts and I hope to hear from you!