"SHADOW ON THE LAND"......CHEESEBALL DREK OR SCARY CRYSTAL BALL?

Shadow On The Land (1968) a two hour pilot for an unsold ABC series, hit the airwaves as a Made-For-TV movie in December of '68....and what a fitting film to conclude that horrifying, tortuous year, filled with assassinations, riots, the raging Vietnam war and the election of the Crook-In-Chief, Richard Nixon.

           The movie depicts a crisis-wracked America that has succumbed to a fascist dictatorship. The unseen strongman who now rules the country, known only as "The Leader", deploys his own personal Gestapo, the ISF (Internal Security Force) to wipe out dissenters and control the populace. The ISF flies its own spiffy flag very similar to the symbology of World War II's  You-Know-Who from You-Know-Where....just look up the German word for 'the leader' in case you don't catch the subtlety. But wait! All is not lost......armed resistance fighters, dubbing themselves The Society Of Men, have risen up to do furious battle with The Leader and his ISF minions.

           From that premise, we're off and running, with the movie bookended by two spectacularly violent firefights between The Society of Men and the ISF.......keep in mind by 1968, American feature films had begun to fully embrace gory nihilistic violence, so "Shadow On The Land" eagerly became one of the first TV films to jump on the Blood Wagon,

           Sadly, "The Leader" himself remains off screen during all this hysterical hoo-hah. The principal villain, an oily ISF business suit who walks like a man (John Forsythe) barks orders to his chief enforcer (Marc Strange) while consumed with standard fascist paranoia about enemies lurking within the very bowels of the ISF.  Forsythe has no idea how right he is.....Strange is in fact a double agent mole for the resistance and periodically gets to spew out freedom-loving patriotic homilies. Strange has to grimace and bear it when his closest pal, an Army Lt.Colonel (Jackie Cooper) is beaten and tortured to death by the ISF....but not before spilling their latest evil scheme, blowing up the West Coast power grid and blaming it on the rebels. To help thwart the plot, Strange appeals to the Colonel's surviving brother, a holier-than-thou priest who looks upon all this political strife with sanctimonious disdain....and who's played by none other than.....drum roll, please....a young Gene Hackman, fresh off his breakthrough 'Bonnie And Clyde' appearance.

           Bullets fly freely, bodies tumble off of high places and cute starlet Carol Lynley, briefly playing Strange's g.f., strips to her underwear.....presumably for those viewers who didn't mind a little cheesecake thrown with the struggle against totalitarianism.

            Our favorite scenes....(and we swear we're not making this up...)The Leader makes life miserable for innocent travelers at airports, confounding and detaining them with ridiculous, sinister rulings (Oh Thank God, that could never ever happen in real life!!)  Since the film takes place on Christmas week, the ISF goons wrestle Santa Claus to the ground during their brutal round up of dissidents.....presumably to check his bag for explosive-laden candy canes.

            Our favorite insane factoid about "Shadow On The Land"......all this craziness was created by Sidney Sheldon, who also gave you those hard-hitting projects  "I Dream Of Jeannie", "The Patty Duke Show" and the scripts for numerous frothy MGM musicals. ('Shadow' owes more of a kinship to Sheldon's other fabulously lucrative career as the author of pulpy melodramatic bestsellers, mostly consumed by women readers under beauty parlor hair dryers.)

              The question is.....is "Shadow On The Land" a silly alarmist daydream.....or a preview of Coming Attractions?  (We know what the bookstores think....they're loading up on copies of "1984" and Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here")  While you ponder, BQ fires off 4 glorious freedom loving stars (****) for "Shadow On The Land" a feverishly entertaining piece that didn't realize how Nostradamus-like it could become. Long Live the Society Of Men...and Women.

THE ID FROM OUTER SPACE......WHY, 61 YEARS LATER, "FORBIDDEN PLANET" STILL RESONATES TODAY....

Forbidden Planet (1956)  still towers like a colossus over the multitudes of cheesy, tiny-budgeted science fiction movies that ran rampant through the 1950's. Lavishly produced and polished to a high gloss by MGM, the film's script cleverly reworked Shakespeare's "The Tempest " for its out-of-this-world adventure......that of a red-blooded all male space crew investigating a far flung colony of Earth scientists who've gone incommunicado. They find only three individuals left on the planet, the brilliant, cantankerous Dr.Morbius(Walter Pidgeon), his adorable daughter (Anne Francis)....and the amazing, instantly iconic Robby The Robot, somehow assembled by Morbius even though he has no scientific background in engineering or robotics.

            And how did Robby come about? That's our main topic here....we're not out to trumpet our deep love of this movie....it's already been exhaustively declared by millions of writers, bloggers and fans. What intrigues BQ more than ever about "Forbidden Planet"..... is.how it sticks in our mind every time we turn on the news....

            Back to Robby......Dr. Morbius, with a lot of time on his hands since his fellow explorer/colonists ended up ripped to shreds by an invisible, murderous  'planetary force', has increased his intellect to the point where constructing a wonder like Robby The Robot proved no more difficult than snapping together some Legos. He's accomplished this by discovering and absorbing the centuries-advanced technology left behind by the Krell, the long extinct mighty race who once ruled the now deserted planet. The Krell, as far as Morbius can surmise, wiped themselves out in one horrible night, undone by the massive machines they devised to boost their brain power to....uh....well, let's say Infinity and Beyond.

            The movie hinges on what decimated the Krell........the Id. In jacking up their IQs to the Nth power, the Krell unleashed the hidden, worst parts of their minds.....every base instinct, every vicious impulse, every psychotic animalistic thought not only escaped and ran free, but were given form and shape by the unlimited energy they generated.......in essence, the Krell combined suicide and genocide all in one final gory Armageddon.....

             Lately we've come think.....So that's how the Krell really died....they created the Internet, Reality TV, and Twitter.....Watching current events, we're starting to fear that we're living out the Krell's story......except in excruciating slow motion instead of one night. The gradual but inexorable loss of civility, the impulse to instantly lash out with whatever opinion pops into one's head,, the end of intelligent debate and discourse, the warping of truth into internal personal fantasy.....we've not only unleashed all our Ids, we've surrendered ourselves to a leader who's nothing but pure, unadulterated Id, with no thought for anything but itself.

            In "Forbidden Planet" the invisible  Monster From The Id, unwittingly born out of Morbius's own mind by his tinkering with Krell technology, finally manifests itself.  Brought to life by an animator lent to MGM by Walt Disney, the Id's a raging, roaring thing, stomping around,  consumed with hatred, looking to settle scores........sound familiar?

           To "Forbidden Planet" and its vividly memorable Id, we always award 5 stars (*****)....for the actual real life Id whose shadow we live under now.....no stars whatsoever.....only minus numbers.

             

'INFERNO' MOVIE VS.BOOK: RON HOWARD HANKS YOU ALL VERY MUCH, BUT DE-BROWNS BROWN....

Inferno (2016)   We only got around to cracking open our copy of Dan Brown's "Inferno" when it would serve its primary purpose in life......to lessen the unendurable pain of a 5 hour cross country flight in economy class. (We figure we only have a few years left before the airlines rip out the sardine can seats to reduce the weight of the plane....and simply stuff us all in the overhead compartments.....try not to shift in flight...)

             To be fair to Dan, his latest adventure featuring the museum-hopping Professor Robert Langdon, extracting arcane clues from  Palazzos and cathedrals like a middle-aged Nancy Drew, kept us suitably engaged.....even as we lost all feeling in our legs during the flight's third hour. Langdon, spewing out the answers to 'Ancient Civilization'  Final Jeopardy questions while villains stay hot on his heels, desperately searches for a clear plastic bag of lethal virus hidden by a madman to decimate the World As We Know It. This Lunatic Du Jour is kind of the Al Gore of Overpopulation....except he's a little more hands-on than Al, deciding to use his virus to severely thin out the Earth's teeming billions.

           Or so it seems.....surprising us in a true "say whaaa?" moment, Brown takes his story's climax into a bizarre left turn that's impossibly hard to swallow if you give it any real thought...we doubt Brown gave it any thought either, happy to find an off-the-wall way to end his tale.

           But the caretaker/proprietor of Brown's film adaptations, Ron Howard did give it some real thought,,,,,and Ron wasn't havin' any Big Budget Sony franchise wrap up with Brown's strangely sour, head-scratching what-the-hellapalooza..

           So rest easy, America....Ron and his screenwriter David Koepp bury that Brown finale deeper than one of Prof. Langdon's sought after clues,  imposing their own traditional, action packed, Multi-Plex-friendly conclusion. Tom Hanks, looking as confused and exhausted as you might, while you try figure out what's going on, races around the usual historic European landmarks like he can't wait to go home. Along the way, Howard literally splatters around nightmarish imagery resembling stock footage from Netflix horror movies and has Hanks pursued by a host of villains who probably lost out in the last Bond film auditions......a motorcycle Terminatrix and the Fun Guy of the bunch, a shifty Indian character who murmurs sarcastic asides under his breath. Lots of them favor wicked little knives to have it out with each other........ as if they're staging a 'West Side Story' revival in Istanbul.

           BQ recommends you definitely not waste any precious funds adding this to your DVD or Blu Ray collection....a one day rental from Redbox or ITunes would suffice, but only if you have a coupon or a gift card....or just wait till it hits cable.  ** (2 stars) for "Inferno" the Movie, *** (3 stars) for "Inferno" the book - and that's mainly for the book's aid in helping us survive the Dante's Inferno of airline travel which encompasses all nine circle of hell......

'STEVEN SPIELBERG: A LIFE IN FILMS (JEWISH LIVES}' REVIEW...THE BOY WONDER'S MATURING JOURNEY

Steven Spielberg: A Life In Films (Jewish Lives) by Molly Haskell  is less a biography and more of a perceptive movie critic's chronological overview of the Spielberg filmography. Starting with Spielberg's teenage 8mm movies and finishing with "Bridge Of Spies", Haskell seasons her critiques of these films with well documented chunks of the filmmaker's life, most of it gleaned from other previous exhaustive biographies. Haskell aims for a step by step reportage, the kind you'd read in one of those coffee table "The Films Of..." books, combined with illustrating her opinions with the ups and downs of Spielberg's life.  So for Spielberg completists and movie buffs in general, you'll want to dive into this one right away.

            You won't find earth-shaking revelations in here.....just a thoughtful application of biographical sub-text to all the films.... in Haskell's view, .even the director's most ultra-commercial mega-budget blockbusters reveal something of the man himself, his long estrangement from his absent father, his rocky, doomed relationship with Amy Irving, the founding of his large extended family with actress Kate Capshaw....and most importantly, the maturing of his worldview.  (As both Haskell and Spielberg point out, only a young bachelor director would create a character like Richard Dreyfuss's Roy Neary in "Close Encounters"....a Dad who abandons his family to hitch a UFO ride to Outer Space....) One tidbit did genuinely take us by surprise regarding "A.I.", that odd, posthumous collaboration with the late Stanley Kubrick..... with Spielberg claiming,contrary to conventional wisdom,  that the film's cold, distant Kubrick-ian scenes were his doing, , while the warm, fuzzy emotional stuff came from Kubrick  Hmmm....fascinating, who'd a thought?

            BQ found it a fast, entertaining tour through the Spielberg canon and personal life.....we couldn't help thinking as we sped through it..... how many of those neophyte Sundance Film Festival auteurs would hold up if they had to face Joan Crawford on their first professional directing gig? 

             We'll tear off four Multiplex tickets **** for this incisive little bio. 4 stars.    

'RIVERDALE' REVIEW.......ANDY HARDY MEETS A RANDY ARCHIE.......

Riverdale (2017) Season 1, Episode 1  -  The BQ normally wouldn't bother with another Teen Noir series pumped out by the CW network, whose target demographic falls about 200 years younger than than us......except that this one was Frankensteined into existence from the Archie comic books that date back to before even we were born.....1941. What can we say.....we took an interest.

            The Archie comics, way back when, were introduced to compete with MGM's beloved, sweetly All-American "Andy Hardy" movies.....a series of cheaply made family comedies in which the irrepressible Andy (Mickey Rooney) comically navigates a studio sanitized adolescence under the stern but benevolent guidance of his father, the formidably wise Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone). Since MGM used the Hardy series as on-the-job training for rising starlets like Judy Garland and Lana Turner, the "Archie" creators fashioned their own starlets to beguile their Andy Hardy clone, Archie Anderson......the adorable blonde-next-door Betty and the vampy, dark-haired maneater Veronica. Along with a host of other apple pie characters living in apple pie Riverdale, the Archie crew traipsed through the decades, establishing themselves as pop culture icons.

           As Archie and friends moved through more unsettled turbulent times, liberties and assorted re-inventions were taken to freshen up the franchise.....at one point the gang battled a zombie apocalypse, (When in doubt, always trot out generous crowds of shuffling corpses....what the hell, they invaded 'Pride and Prejudice',  so why not Archie?)

           So we're not here to begrudge the CW for transforming the once sunny universe of Archie into a forboding, hormonal 'Twin Peaks in which Arch, Betty, Veronica and company are all roiled by a schoolmate's mysterious death.  In fact, we don't mind the network's  dedication to noir it up a little, They periodically interrupt the angst by sprinkling the actors' lines with rapid fire pop culture bon mots that sound stolen out of Lauren Graham's 'Gilmore Girls" dialogue. .Archie's once blazing red hair,to fit the tone of the piece,  seems ten shades darker now....and he has little time for Betty or Veronica, what with pursuing his twin ambitions of football hero and pop star while carrying on an affair with one of his teachers. 

          What we liked the most....in no particular order.....Archie's teacher/hottie/lover wears those ridiculous huge fake glasses that Hollywood used to put on 1950's starlets.....in anticipation of the scene in which she'd eventually take them off, prompting the leading man to gasp in orgasmic joy, "Why Miss So-and-So! You're beautiful!"........a sure sign of Riverdale's loss of innocence, the closing of the town's drive-in movie theater.......Archie's songwriting aspirations squelched, derided and brutally dismissed Simon Cowell-style......by.Josie and The Pussycats.  Chin up, Archie... I'm almost certain the writers will concoct a new love affair for you....possibly with Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Capser the Friendly Ghost.   BQ can't imagine becoming a regular viewer of this show....but on the first episode, we'll liberally coat it with 2 & 1/2 bottles of Red hair dye....**1/2.

          

'THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE' REVIEW.....A DANDY YANKEE DOODLE PLEASURE......

"THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE" (1959)  For too long, our mad, passionate love affair with this movie endured a cruel forced separation similar to that Broadway play and later film "Same Time Next Year."  Because of its aggravating unavailability, we could only visit this bubbly gem once a year....July 4th on Turner Classic Movies. There it resided briefly along with the few other films in the skimpy collection of Revolutionary War movies (including "The Scarlet Coat" an earnest lumpy thing about Benedict Arnold, "The Howards Of Virginia" with an unlikely Cary Grant and of course, the weirdly endearing musical "1776"  in which William Daniels, playing John Adams,  force feeds America to Congress with the same prissy rectitude he later uses to teach Ben Savage on "Boys Meets World")

           Praise the Movie Gods....the film made its way to Blu-Ray, So we can now indulge and immerse ourselves any time we want in "The Devil's Disciple"s 83 zippy minutes.  Briskly directed by Guy Hamilton, a cinematic Brit Field Marshall who later moved on to the James Bonds, 'Disciple' combines the skewering wit of the George Bernard Shaw play it's based on with action, comedy, romance and a lilting, gorgeous Richard Rodney Bennett music score. Add to that a triumvirate of acting Titans...Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier, and you've entered movie Nirvana.

          Douglas and Lancaster made seven films together and dramatic fireworks ensued every time these dynamic, charismatic Type A scenery chewers bumped up against each other. In this film, they're practically superheroes, with each of their patented surface personas hiding an even deeper, stronger personality.  The plot hinges on Douglas's Dick Dudgeon, a smirking, cynical,wisecracking New England rake whose father has just been hanged as a spy by no less than British General 'Gentlemanly' John Burgoyne (Olivier)  Dudgeon proudly proclaims himself as the Devil's disciple of the title,....his go-to-hell zingers outrage the sturdy, stoic Reverend Anthony Anderson (Lancaster) but magnetically attract Anderson's sexually repressed, conflicted young wife.(Janette Scott) Meanwhile, Olivier's Burgoyne, confounded and bemused by the incompetence of the British War Office, unleashes a barrage of pithy Shaw one liners at his befuddled straight man Major Swinden (the always reliably jug-eared, stiff upper lipped Harry Andrews).

           Then an ironic turn of the plot forces both Dudgeon and Anderson to reveal their true selves....Dudgeon, mistaken for Anderson by British troops who've come to arrest the Reverend for defiantly burying Dudgeon's father, takes Anderson's place in custody, insuring himself a guaranteed appointment with Major Swinden's gallows.....turns out the sarcastic Dudgeon has a heroic moral core after all.  But not to worry.....inside the stolid, sanctimonious Rev. Anderson beats the heart of an implacable, fearless patriot, single minded and strong as an ox.  In his efforts to save Dudgeon from the hangman, Anderson takes on an entire Redcoat regiment in a bravura sequence both swashbuckling and satiric at the same time. While Anderson wreaks comic havoc on the British, Dudgeon, brought before the ever quipping Burgoyne and his sputtering, apoplectic minion Swinden, happily trades barbs with Gentlemanly Johnny as the clock ticks down to Dudgeon's execution.

            None of this bears more than slight,passing resemblance to actual history...you'd probably glean more real facts from the warbling Continental Congress in "1776"....but the "The Devil's Disciple" isn't out to teach history....it wants to poke some effervescent fun at those who made history. (The film does, from time to time, provide historical exposition....by way of, we kid you not, stop-motion puppets. You'll have to see that to believe it.)

           The total package and one of our forever all-time treasures....Beached Quill fires off  its muskets for a full 5 stars ***** and declares this a FIND OF FINDS. Dare not miss it.

           

       

           
         

         

THE GOLD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY.....A FEW MUSINGS ON THE OSCAR NOMS

About a month to go before the Mother Of All Awards Shows.....after you've sat through the umpteenth actor clutching their statuette, blubbering on about...."never give up on your dreams...I know my dead grandmother is watching from heaven right now....we did it, Nana!".....we start to get the dry heaves....(unless they spice it up with some pissed-off personal agenda, a la The Streepinater at the GG's....we can never have enough of those...)

The End Of #OscarsSoWhite- So Bye Bye to the controversy of the last two ceremonies.....and thank God diversity came roaring back just as the as the darkness of the Racist-In-Chief descends over America and the world.......the only African Americans who had no chance in this contest were the "Birth Of A Nation" writer and director, obviously exiled by their sordid rape charge history.

The La La Land Acting Nominations - Emma Stone.....well deserved....breaks your heart while staying illegally cute.  Gosling?  Strictly serviceable,  nothing special....and very lucky the film casts such a spell that you're more than willing to forgive his barely there singing.

Mel And High Water  Welcome back to semi-respectability, Mel Gibson......and BQ, for one, hopes Mel keeps churning out his ultra-violent over heated Mel-odramas for decades to come.....as a director, he's the closest we have to the late Sam Peckinpah, a raging primative who leads with his gut and doesn't much care if you can tolerate what he's showing you....

Her Royal Streepness   We groaned to the heavens when she managed a win for that half-assed, hardly watchable movie about Margaret Thatcher....jeez, enough already......but damn if we're not secretly rooting for her, if only to hear her take another shot at President Pumpkinhead.......

Michelle....my belle.... Michelle Williams is always our personal fave....we still think she was terribly robbed by not grabbing the gold for her Marilyn Monroe performance.....but once again, she's up against heavy competition and once again we fear this just isn't her year.....but she's a gifted gift to movies and we're sure she'll get more shots at it. Keep on keepin' on, Michelle.....

Emma Stone's Big Song In La La Land  ......sounded to us a whole lot like "The Rainbow Connection" from 'The Muppet Movie'........

Thankfully, No Oscar 'Suck Up' Movies  There are no movies we despise more than the pretentious, deeply egomaniacal atrocities that sit up on their hind legs and loudly beg for their Academy Awards....(prime examples, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", "Memoirs Of A Geisha", that odious, mercilessly maudlin thing with Roberto whats-his-name)  Fortunately, all the contenders this year seem honestly noble efforts, designed to tell their stories and engage their audiences, not just made to garner hardware. (The prime example this year, Scorcese's "Silence" (three hours of Catholic priests getting their asses kicked by surly Japanese non believers) was mostly ignored. Marty....we're glad you finally got to make your dream project, even if watching drywall moves faster....but honestly, good riddance to it.

A nomination for "Suicide Squad"? Seriously?  You can bet Ryan Reynold's superhero will have a suitably snarky put-down about this in the "Deadpool" sequel......

That's our thoughts for now.....see you all on the Red Carpet....we haven't decided on our clothes designer yet....Target or Wal-Mart.....maybe something casual from Old Navy....

'THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN' REVIEW......A BLUNT VIEW OF ALTERNATIVE FACTS...OR AS YOU KNOW THEM....LIES.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2016)   After the runaway success of "Gone Girl" (both the book and the film) we knew the Hollywood honchos would storm the New Release rack at their nearest Barnes & Noble, snapping up the movie rights to the latest, hottest entries among the avalanche of thrillers falsely touted as 'the next Gone Girl'.

            The BQ  loves a good suspense movie and/or novel, but we're afraid this race to hit the 'Gone Girl' jackpot will end up going the same way as the studios' once intense but now soured love affair with Young Adult dystopia novels following the success of 'Hunger Games'. (Anyone remember or care about "Beautiful Creatures", "Mortal Instruments" or the abruptly abandoned "Divergent" series?  Thought so...)  After two or three of these 'next Gone Girl' movies tank badly, we expect the film execs will want to consign any similar books to the Lifetime Movie channel.

            Exhibit A in this downward slide is the glum and gloomy adaptation of the Paula Hawkins bestseller "The Girl On The Train". This features a host of URs (Unreliable Narrators, whose mission, similar to Kellyanne Conway's "Bagdad Bob" stints on cable news networks,  is to utterly bamboozle, misdirect and otherwise hoodwink you....mystery authors employ their URs to make your mouth gape wide open when the story unleashes its BIG TWIST reveal...) The leader of the UR pack here, a drunk, depressed divorcee (Emily Blunt) aimlessly rides New York commuter trains in a Vodka fueled haze,  In addition to nursing the booze, she also cultivates a 'Rear Window' obsession on two other URs whose homes sit conveniently trackside. (To our annoyed confusion, the two women URs are look-alike blondes, which doesn't help when sorting out the convoluted plot...) One of the URs(Rebecca Ferguson) has a new baby with Blunt's ex-husband, as well living in the house Blunt and her Ex once shared.....the other UR (Hayley Bennet) seems to have a lovey-dovey life with her hubby while serving as Ferguson's nanny.....until Blunt spies her canoodling with some other guy.....or does she?   A brutal murder ensues and predictably, everyone's casting a withering, suspicious eye on Blunt.

              Here's the problem......as directed by Tate Taylor ("The Help") absolutely none of this has the wicked snap and visual finesse that David Fincher brought to "Gone Girl."   You could sense Fincher's witty, nasty directorial hand as he fashioned a warped fun-house mirror view of marital toxicity....it made you laugh and gasp at the sheer outrageousness of it.  The only laughter in "Girl On The Train" comes unintentionally......Taylor, lacking any visual style and the morbid humor you need to approach this material, duly slogs his way through the film as if he's trying for an Oscar-bait Important Drama. Not gonna happen.   Give us a break, Tate.....you forgot you're making a pulpy airport lounge thriller, not "The Help" with unhappy lying white women. (Not every director can take on this genre....another Gillian Flynn thriller "Dark Places" yielded a dull, unbearable film adaptation, even with the game presence of Charlize Theron.....it landed directly on Wal Mart racks with little or no fanfare....)

             Relentlessly ordinary in execution and not a bit entertaining to sit through,...we'll reliably punch this movie's train ticket only twice...2 stars...**.

       

         



         

HELL TO THE CHIEF.....OUR FAVORITE AWFUL PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES IN THE MOVIES.....

           As we exit this historic weekend, the BQ fondly remembers our most cherished, most blatantly unqualified Presidential hopefuls.....

           JOHNNY EISELIN (as played by James Gregory in "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962)..,..a feckless dunce, groomed as a Joseph McCarthy wanna-be by his Machiavellian Medusa wife (Angela Lansbury), who's actually a Red Chinese agent. She secures him a spot on the ticket as Vice President, but she schemes to have Eiselin's frontrunner capped by her brainwashed son, Raymond Shaw  (Laurence Harvey), allowing her idiot husband to seize the day  and ascend to the top spot and ultimately,  the Oval Office.  Best/Worst Moment:  Lansbury allows Gregory to use a Heinz Ketchup bottle to remind him of the number of communists he's supposed to loudly proclain are infecting the U.S.government.....57.

            RAYMOND SHAW (as played by Liev Shreiber in the remade "Manchurian Candidate" (2004) The remake discards the dopey Eiselin character, preferring to turn poor brainwashed Raymond Shaw himself into the Veep candidate, promoted by his evil mom (Meryl Streep,  channeling in a little bit 'o Hilary). Monstrous Mom now does all this on behalf of Manchurian Global, a Halliburton type conglom run by a bunch of soulless Suits who scarily resemble Trump administration cabinet appointees. Best/Worst Moment: Any scene with Schrieber, who freely applies his soothing voice and thousand yard stare to great effect....you just know this guy's brain has been through the spin cycle more than a few times.....

           GREG STILLSON (as played by Martin Sheen in "The Dead Zone" (1983)   Once in office, this populist man-of-the-people thug shouts "Hallelujah!" as he enthusiastically kicks off a nuclear war......or so he does in the vivid premonitions of tortured psychic Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) Best/Worst Moment: I wouldn't dare spoil it for anyone who hasn't read the Stephen King book or seen the film, but Walken's reckless attempt to prevent a Stillson Armageddon leads to a dark-humored climax that proves nothing eliminates villains better than a public relations meltdown.......

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR TV! A NEW PRESIDENCY....AS FACTUALLY REPORTED BY "THE OUTER LIMITS"

THE HUNDRED DAYS OF THE DRAGON -OUTER LIMITS, SEASON 1, EPISODE 2 (1963) which depicts the murder of a Presidential candidate, hit the airwaves only 60 days before the JFK assassination.  Also making this creepy episode stand out was its singular detour from what "The Outer Limits", a science fiction anthology,  established as its standard template - the weekly introduction of  some new, grotesque alien monster.  There are indeed monsters lurking in 'The Hundred Days Of the Dragon'.....but they're all too human and the episode's cast of skulking, crafty Orientals make it look more James Bond-ish than science fiction.  Odd choice for only the second episode of a debuting sci-fi series....but it's perfect for the BQ to revisit on this  historic Jan.20th, 2017.

            The mad scientists of an unnamed, Asian country under the thumb of a brutal strongman (Red China? North Korea? You pick one, doesn't matter....), have dabbled in 'molecular plasticity'. Huh? Well, a few minutes after some poor sucker gets a jab of their secret serum, his skin turns to silly putty, capable of being squished, pressed and molded into whatever you want. (which leads to the episode's signature special effects wowzer, the  scientist plowing his fingers deep into the test subject's face like a kindergartner making his first clay ashtray....)  While this looks like a whole lot of fun, the Commie fiends have a higher purpose ..... the injected guy clamps a metal face mold over his newly rubbery skin (sort of a salad bowl with somebody's facial features carved into the bottom) After he's done pressing the salad bowl really hard against his wobbly face......voila, he's an instant duplicate for whoever the fiends want to duplicate.

            And the evil country's nefarious dictator (naturally played by Richard Loo, the purring sadist of countless World War II movies) has already picked his target, since the salad bowl mold has turned the test minion into a double of the populist, certain-to-win U.S. Presidential candidate, William Lyons Selby (Sidney Blackmer, who you might remember as Mia Farrow's nosy satanic neighbor in "Rosemary's Baby") This was before presidential candidates received Secret Service protection, so the Asians have no trouble sneaking into Selby's hotel room, killing him and replacing him with their fake Selby.  Faux-Selby sweeps into the Oval Office of course, a literally Manchurian Candidate....designed to undermine the U.S. from within.

            Since Kim Jung Loo's master plan involves replacing lots of U.S. pols and media figures with his Pottery Barn duplicates, the Veep (Phillip Pine) is next up, but escapes death after bumping into his own home-invading doppleganger. Lucky for us, the horrified Veep starts to smell a silly putty rat.....he wonders why Selby suddenly goes all touchy-feely  in negotiations with the Dictator Loo's rogue nation.....(now there's a scary notion for you, a President cozying up to a scumbag, murdering thug....thank God this show's just science fiction, right?....) Furthermore, our ever vigilant  Veep, on a hunting trip with Selby, noticed the Prez take unerring aim at a rattlesnake.....when previously Selby was a Dick Cheyney/Elmer Fudd-type hunter who shot his own finger off........(and yes, the evil Unnamed Nation, clever bastards, remembered to pre-chop the finger off their Selby.)

             The valiant Veep survives another Unnamed Nation assault....and with the help of what appears to be the White House's one and only Secret Service guy, confronts the Faker-In-Chief at a State department reception. Just in case we all forgot who this creep really is,  Sidney Blackmer's phony Selby, once cornered,  malignantly squints his eyes tight like Christopher Lee's Fu Manchu.....(you would think the Unnamed Nation's masterminds would have warned him to avoid doing that, especially at heavily attended diplomatic events....) Then comes our favorite moment.....the vengeful, righteous Veep, now in possession of the Asian wacky-wobbly juice, gives Phony Baloney Prez another injection......and digs his hands right into the faux Selby's malleable face, freely rearranging it so the villainous schlub resembles one of the pig-people from the 'Eye Of The Beholder' 'Twilight Zone' episode. Needless to say, a smooth transition of Presidential power to the Veep occurs on the spot. Ex-President Oriental Selby is led off, his career as a 'Meet The Press' pundit all but ruined.

            Silly beyond words and laughable now,  we know (or is it?).....and the Asian stereotyping is painful to behold and unfortunately at the time,supplied the only work opportunities available for these gifted character actors (including the young James Hong, who's still going strong at age 88, much beloved for his starring turn in John Carpenter's "Big Trouble In Little China".) But in l963, this dark, gloomy little 50 minute drama effectively carved out its own sub-genre, Sci-Fi Noir, amidst the rampaging creatures later to slither and crawl through subsequent  'Outer Limits'  episodes. On that basis, we'll duplicate 4 stars **** for its own offbeat craziness.

         


         

IF YOU WENT GA GA FOR 'LA LA'......DANCE YOUR WAY INTO "THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT"

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (1967) which has long been one of BQ's favorite Guilty Pleasures, is the one to seek out if you're still happily humming to yourself after taking in a "La La Land" viewing.....

            The movie broke into its songs and dances three years after French director Jacques Demy's previous all-singing romance "The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg" broke everybody's hearts. Once again teaming with composer Michel Legrand, Demy set out to make a way more ambitious homage to Hollywood musicals......the movie teems with spinning swirling dancers, coloring book cinematography, non stop singing, and  multiple up and down romances which you know will end well. And Demy's serious about this homage business, including appearances by 'West Side Story' s George Chakiris and the immortal Gene Kelly.

             Knocked out by "La La Land"s opening LA freeway dance-a-thon? Then you'll also smile  broadly at "Rochefort"s opening number, with Chakiris and an ebullient platoon of fresh faced young dancers nimbly prancing through what looks like Jerome Robbins-lite choreography on a combination ferry/bridge as it moves across the water. They're all headed to the sunny seaside town of Rochefort ( brightly repainted by the film's art director), the home of music and dance teacher sisters. (played by real life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac), Befitting a true musical, everyone's lookin' for love and singing their adorable little hearts out about it. (You'll have to read the English lyrics in the subtitles......supposedly an English version of the film exists somewhere, but we've never come across it.)

             Legrand's non-stop score seems( to us, anyway) to have served as the prime inspiration for Justin Hurwitz's "La La Land" music.....a bubbly pop/jazz/broadway mixture that's not particularly memorable, with the exception of the opening number.... but the perpetual tunes carry you away with their lighter than air insistent optimism.

            By the time "Young Girls Of Rochefort" arrived Stateside in 1968, Hollywood studios had practically bankrupted themselves making bloated.outdated 3 hour musicals, most of them featuring big stars who could neither sing or dance. Funny thing is, almost nobody in "Rochefort" does their own singing either, but Demy's cotton candy camera work and his breezy light directorial touch schooled those tar-pit bound Hollywood atrocities on how to do it right.  So Beached Quill easily sings out 4 stars **** for this Gallic gallop through old MGM fantasy-land.  Don't miss it if you're still enveloped  in the euphoric cloud cast by "La La Land".

LIVE FREEBIE OR DIE HARD.....WE RENEW OUR OLD FRIENDSHIP WITH "FREEBIE AND THE BEAN"

FREEBIE AND THE BEAN (1974) we consider the penultimate film in a sub-genre that flourished in the 1970's (and later violently fine-tuned into films like the "Lethal  Weapon" series).....the rogue cop action/comedy.  These movies followed the explosive world wide success of "The French Connection" featuring Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle, a furious, driven cop who, in pursuit of his drug kingpin quarry, leaves a monumental trail of collateral damage, including a Federal agent he accidentally kills.
     
          So just imagine the possibilities of stuff like this played for laughs.....yowza.

           You don't have to imagine with "Freebie and the Bean", which features James Caan and Alan Arkin as its title characters, two bickering, hot-tempered, trigger happy San Francisco detectives. Their single minded quest to take down a racketeer coincides with the added hubbub of the Super Bowl in town....and the boys proceed to inflict more random damage on San Francisco and its innocent, hapless residents than the earthquake of 1906.

           The spectacularly violent chaos orchestrated by director Richard Rush("The Stunt Man") and his stunt coordinator Chuck Bail dares you to laugh at a rollicking symphony of death and destruction.....Freebie and Bean conduct numerous demolition derby car chases on busy streets, engage in blazing shootouts in hotel lobby atriums and other public places, and hurl themselves into  crunching hand to hand punchouts in crowded restaurants. (One of their crazier car chases plows into a marching band, scattering broken bodies like bowling pins......our heroes ignore the outraged bystanders pounding on their windshield - they're too busy comically arguing while their car's stuck in a ditch....) Halfway through the film, Rush and Bail unleash their big yock showstopper....Caan and Arkin sail their car over a freeway ramp and smash into the third floor apartment of an only mildly startled elderly couple. Later on, Rush tries to top this sequence by using no less than Evel Knievel as Caan's stunt double, riding a motorcycle across the tops of cars stuck in a traffic jam.

          All this jolly mayhem, which you're supposed to giggle at,  culminates, naturally, in a ladies room at the Super Bowl, where Caan finally meets his match in the film's last minute unlikely villain....an elegantly murderous transvestite.

         As in a lot of 70's films, there's no pre-calculation or high gloss to "Freebie". Despite the carefully orchestrated action sequences, the movie maintains a raggedy, slapped-together quality, as if everyone's making it up as they went along.....Caan and Arkin's chatter has the edgy, slipshod sound of improvisation....and playing their sputtering, astounded foils is a seasoned roster of well known character actors of the period...(Alex Rocco, Mike Kellin, Valerie Harper, Loretta Swit, Paul Koslo and much beloved Jack Kruschen as the targeted crime boss)

         Similar movies abounded in that era (including "Busting" with Elliot Gould and Robert Blake) but none of them displayed the haywire moral compass and epic disregard for life and property as "Freebie And The Bean".....a near perfect time capsule example of 1970's comedy action movies. For those qualities alone, we freely crash 4 stars **** into 'Freebie'.

         

'I LOVED HER IN THE MOVIES' REVIEW........BOB SLEDS THRU HOLLYWOOD DAMES....

I LOVED HER IN THE MOVIES (2016) by Robert J.Wagner with Scott Eyman - Nobody qualifies better for the position of Hollywood chronicler than actor Robert Wagner, who's now into the seventh decade of his busy film and TV career. After all, this guy has  thrived and survived through every possible milestone of an actor's lifespan......moving from juvenile pretty boy to young leading man to older leading man (a privilege rarely afforded the actresses he discusses in his book)....and finally to senior handsome character actor (which often involves lampooning yourself in comedies...)

          Wagner intimately knows and loves the long gone Golden Age of Hollywood and after the stunningly sad icon deaths of 2016, we're thrilled he's hearty, healthy and still with us to write about it......(and after you've sat through some of today's movies, that era glows more golden with every passing minute),  Okay, we realize he's no brilliantly witty memoirist like Carrie Fisher.....but we always enjoy Wagner's friendly, comfortable tours through Hollywood nostalgia. In this latest excursion, he crafts some skillful, at times painfully candid assessments of the Golden Age goddesses who crossed his path, from the 1930's through today.......sort of a longer version of the Robert Osborne/Ben Mankiewicz bookend segments on TCM movies.

          You'll meet quite a few of them here (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Lauren Bacall, etc), and delve into their backstories......the overall pattern: tough cookies who often came from impoverished, broken homes, their hard outer shells helping them cope with their reptilian studio bosses like Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck and Louis B.Mayer.  With a few rare exceptions, Wagner treats these uniquely gifted women with admiration, even tempered candor, and sympathy, whenever called for......(although BQ admits to grinning widely whenever the book stumbled upon somebody Wagner grudgingly admitted to being a miserable pain in the ass....seriously, Bob, maybe you should devote your next book to all the actors you couldn't stand the sight of....)

            For classic movie FanMen and FanWomen (who become boys and girls again when they watch these movies)....''I Love Her In The Movies" is a 'lights,camera, action'  **** 4 star must read.

         

'TIPPI' REVIEW......THE ONLY ACTRESS GROPED BY HITCHCOCK, BIRDS AND LIONS....

'TIPPI'  by Tippi Hedren (2016) serves as a distinctly one-of-a-kind memoir from a distinctly one-of-a-kind actress. Plucked from fashion modelling by Alfred Hitchcock to star in "The Birds" and "Marnie", Hedren survived her director's creepy obsession, sexual harassment and employment blacklisting. She went on to endure an even more bizarre cinematic adventure.....making the legendarily notorious "Roar" with her late husband Noel Marshall, a film in which Marshall, Hedren and her family(including daughter Melanie Griffith) cavorted with all their adopted felines. Sounds cute, huh? The felines we're talking about were over a hundred untrained wild lions and tigers.

           Being a Hitchcock freak and having plowed through all the books on the director, we found the Hitchcock chapters in 'Tippi' a huge disappointing letdown, skimpy and rushed. (Considering the debate and controversy swirling around the making of the two movies,  Hedren could have easily devoted an entire book to this subject). But the eleven year strife, calamity and insane danger involved in the making of  "Roar" are fully chronicled here......Hedren, Marshall, Griffith, cinematographer Jan De Bont all ended up seriously mauled and wounded by the cats, along with numerous crew members. Their financing for the film evaporated frequently,while floods and fires afflicted their California canyon home, where most of the film was shot,  A completed cut of the film finally emerged in Europe in 1981.....it never had (as far as we know) any exhibition in American theaters.

           Fascinated by Hedren's account(it makes the filming of "Apocalypse Now" look like an episode of 'Happy Days'), BQ sought out the infamous "Roar" for a viewing and had no trouble finding it....anyone can stream it on YouTube.  What we watched almost defies rational description.....shapeless, plotless, embarrassingly acted, it's a 95 minute demented home movie in which Hedren, her daughter, her husband and his sons get chased, wrestled, bitten and pummeled by what looks like an endless herd of lions and tigers...(no bears, oh my). No CGI fakery here, when the actors scream and bleed from their wounds( as does Melanie Griffith), it's the real deal. Incredibly, the film mostly plays this stuff for slapstick laughs, except for a sequence dropped in the middle where the cats rip apart two villains who've been shooting at them. (apparently the only scene where both the cats and humans fake their deaths.)

            We certainly admire the filmmakers for their obvious deep love and care for these animals......but the sheer madness of the people involved in "Roar" blots out whatever environmental message they tried to get across.  Watching this film, you're not worried about the preservation of wildlife.....you're too busy wondering if Hedren and company went completely out of their minds.

            In the book's final chapters, Hedren includes one single stunning insightful paragraph......in which she realizes that the total lack of a compelling script for "Roar" doomed it to its status as nothing more than an unwatchable oddity, a vanity piece set apart only by its makers foolishly putting their lives at risk.  That's a brutal moment of self-awareness that rarely occurs in the rest of the book. But 'Tippi' does fulfill its promise to take you through a remarkable life and we wouldn't have missed reading it......like all survivors, Tippi Hedren got in the last word on her old nemesis Hitchcock......with Hitch most likely spinning in his grave as Hedren enjoyed an acting gig on a network revival of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."   For its vivid account of the "Roar" experience alone, we'll give 'Tippi' 3 stars.***

           

CRYIN' IN THE RAIN,,,.THE SWEET, IMPOSSIBLY SAD "BRIGHT LIGHTS" WITH DEBBIE REYNOLDS AND CARRIE FISHER

BRIGHT LIGHTS; STARRING CARRIE FISHER AND DEBBIE REYNOLDS (2016) reminded us of one of the last sardonic bon mots from Bette Davis...."Aging's not for sissies.."  That witty painfully true observation casts its shadow over this film, which found itself in the position of Most Timely Documentary Ever   ..arriving days after Fisher and Reynolds passed away within a day of each other.

In its candid detailing of Reynolds' and Fisher's singularly unique mother-daughter dynamic(unique in that there's not too many mother-daughter combos who were both show business icons for their generations) the film can't help but depict a sad chronicle of Debbie Reynolds' deteriorating health. Unlike many of her film contemporaries who long ago retired and fled the public eye as aging took its expected toll, Reynolds had show-biz so built into her DNA, she couldn't....and wouldn't leave performing and the adoration of audiences.   Simultaneously amusing, confounding and alarming her daughter, Debbie Reynolds gamely continued her nightclub act, even though she could barely walk.

While Reynolds refuses to go gently into that good night, Fisher,conveniently also her next door neighbor,  muses (and often sings along) with her mother, deploying her piercing laser wit on their lives together.... ....recounting Reynolds' career as a reigning American Sweetheart thrown into notoriety and chaos by her atrocious, worthless husbands and Fisher's equally extraordinary life as a pop culture touchstone, incisive raconteur, and survivor of addictions and mental illness. You can only helplessly watch the now ironic scenes of Carrie Fisher, appearing in relatively good health, bemoaning the fact of her mother's lifeforce, that of a 30 year old, trapped inside a failing body.

Given the tragic circumstances, the indelible, individual moments in this film take on a poignancy that's almost impossible to watch......Fisher at the bedside of the emaciated, dying Eddie Fisher, who famously left her mother for Elizabeth Taylor.....Reynolds once again energizing herself on stage, singing her one pop music hit, the title song from her film "Tammy."....and truly  revelatory footage of a fifteen year old Fisher appearing as part of her mother's nightclub act and  displaying a superb singing voice.

The directors of "Bright Lights", Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens, couldn't have imagined their film, a quirky,amusing and melancholy examination of two remarkable women, would suddenly become a eulogy for its subjects. But Fate's a bitch, as we all know.......the movie, for the most part, nimbly skates through Fisher and Reynolds' life.....it wasn't meant to function as the final word on their lives.....and that's fine with us.....cause like everyone else,  we don't want to believe they're really gone. Beached Quill give a full five stars *****, a FIND OF FINDS.

'LA LA LAND' REVIEW......WHY WE DON'T QUITE LOVE IT TO PIECES......

LA LA LAND (2016) is a movie we longed to embrace like a long lost beloved relative, a deliberately retro singin'  'n dancin' valentine to romantic passion....with modern Los Angeles rendered as a candy coated fantasy world existing only as a place for young lovers to swoon into each other's arms (It's the kind of dreamy LA the sweethearts have all to themselves....the rest of the population seems confined to jazz clubs and pool parties.). Could such a miracle occur? Could writer-director Damian Chazelle ("Whiplash") resurrect a full fledged MGM musical, the likes of which disappeared from the face of the earth decades ago, never to appear again except in "That"s Entertainment!" compilation films?

For most of its lengthy running time, he pulled it off. We succumbed right away to Chazelle's showstopping Freeway traffic jam dance number.....and found his romantic duo enchanting, the star-crossed, chemistry-to-burn team of an uncompromising jazz musician (Ryan Gosling) and a perpetually struggling young actress. (Emma Stone). We forgave Ryan and Emma for their tiny, whispery, barely serviceable singing voices......after all, they held the notes a hell of lot better than Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin in "Paint Your Wagon" and Burt Reynolds and Cybill Sheperd in "At Long Last Love"  (...which I don't think anyone saw except me and Burt and Cybill's immediate families.)

And then.....in the film's closing moments......Chazelle slapped us across both cheeks and more or less yelled, "Sucker! You thought you were watching a real MGM musical? You thought you were going to dance out of the theater with a spring in your step and a song in your heart?  Fat chance, buddy. You forgot you bought a ticket to an up-to-date 2016 Independent movie.....and we ain't here to make you feel good, we're here to deliver quirky dysfunction and unsettled unease. So sit there, suck it up, take it and like it."

We didn't like it. To put it simply, MGM's Lizard of Oz Louis B. Mayer would have tossed Gene Kelly out of a high window if he ever proposed 'La La Land's ending for "Singin' In The Rain" or "An American In Paris"

Coldly examined, the odd finish didn't even make much sense plot-wise...and Chazelle further tortured us with a false depiction of an alternate reality that the film primed us for all along....no doubt congratulating himself for already slipping in an extra ending to the film without having to include it as a special feature on the DVD and Blu-Ray.

So sadly, we  can't offer 'La La Land' the unconditional love we hoped to give it....the best BQ can do is strongly admire the movie for its lilting musical numbers sung and danced by its adorable, fetching pair of lovers. We realize that duplicating a long gone genre is a dicey tightrope walk that few directors have any appetite for...(the last time we recall anyone attempting something close to 'La La Land' -  the Renee Zelwegger/Ewan McGregor "Down With Love", an overly arch,preening recreation of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson "Pillow Talk", which, like 'La La Land' kicked off with the old 20th Century Fox CinemaScope logo....it came off as way too precious and self-absorbed, dying a quick death)

Director Chazelle managed to avoid the numerous pitfalls that might have left the film open to ridicule, bringing off the near impossible feat of delivering a flavor-of-the-awards-season critics' darling. (I could waste ten more paragraphs describing the history of movie musical atrocities produced with  the most talented actors and best intentions, to underline 'La La Land's unique achievement....) But ultimately, he chose his film not to fully re-create its genre.....opting instead to leave its audience on a sour, bitter note......when the credits roll, you'll know it's a 2016 film and not the 40's or 50's. And given the 2016 we've had and the years ahead facing us.....we could have used a genuine MGM ending. We'll only sing out 2 & 1/2 stars.

EUROSPIES FOR YOUR EYES ONLY! YEAH, BABY.....THE BEST BOOK TO HAVE HANDY IF YOU LOVE (AS WE DO) THIS LONG FORGOTTEN GROOVY GENRE!

THE EUROSPY GUIDE by Matt Blake and David Deal is an indispensable encyclopedic tour through the most neglected of cheesy-movie genres.....the hundreds of films ground out by European filmmakers (mostly Italian)in the 1960's to cash in on the fabulous success of the James Bond films.

Let's back up first to 1964....."Goldfinger" with Sean Connery, the 3rd James Bond film, takes the entire movie world by storm and the suave secret agent becomes a world wide fad, a cinematic hula-hoop that everyone haS to have a piece of. American filmmakers quickly started their own faux-Bond franchises, such James Coburn's 'Our Man Flint' and Dean Martin's Matt Helm series. But nobody jumped on the Bond-Wagon with more fervor and sheer quantity than the Italian Grade C producers. They flooded the world market with an avalanche of wanna-be 007s....loading up the movies with the requisite karate chops,car chases, bikini babes and diabolical arch-villains  seeking world domination with secret radio-active whatever weapons. (It was really these movies that Mike Meyers targeted in his "Austin Powers" trilogy.)

The carbon copy secret agents in these films were often played by washed up, down-on-their-luck American actors, wandering over to Italy in search of work. Doing these movies kept them one step away from winding up in dinner theatre productions of "South Pacific." or signing autographs at Auto shows.  But the imitation-Bond roles in these movies mostly fell to obscure European actors whose names would show up as 'Americanized' in the films' credits   .....(Fictitious Example: someone  named Enzio Linguini would tranform into 'Martin Blake'......BQ's own fave was a spaghetti western actor who dubbed himself 'Montgomery Wood' Now there's hero for you!)  The quality of the 'Eurospy' movies varies wildly from  'not bad'  to 'okay' to 'acceptably tolerable' to 'hilariously awful'. Most of them suffered from threadbare budgets, wobbly cinematography, laughable special effects, arthritic stunts and acting that ranged from painful to non-existent......but for fans of way-off-the-beaten-track cinema, that didn't make them any less fun to watch....personally, we couldn't get enough of the blaring 60's jazzy scores that wailed all through these films, some of them even composed by master Maestro Ennio Morricone.

The Eurospy movies had little or no playdates in American theatres.....bunches of them turned up on local TV stations, the rest of them remained strictly unseen Stateside.. And in even with the onset of VHS and DVD, few of the 'Eurospies'  made it to homevideo compared with the onslaught of their brethren, the  Italian westerns and 'Giallo'  horror films that flooded the markets. (Which is why we deeply admire the authors of "The Eurospy Guide" for their superhuman diligence in tracking these films down for a viewing....God only knows where they found them....maybe bobbing along in the Venetian canals....)

As of now, you can indulge yourself in the sheer crappy madness of Eurospy films on YouTube, where mass quantities of them have come to rest......the streaming quality varies on these, but you can mix your Martinis, strap on your shoulder holster and wallow in epics like "Agent 353-Passport To Hell", "Lightning Bolt", "Mission Bloody Mary", and "OSS-117-From Tokyo With Love".....and don't forget to keep your copy of "The Eurospy Guide" handy, since we're targeting it with 5 Stars*****, easily a FIND OF FINDS.  Very cool, baby...

EVERYTHING'S COMING UP 'ROSIE'.....2 BOOKS YOU DARE NOT MISS....

THE ROSIE PROJECT and its sequel, THE ROSIE EFFECT by Graeme Simision are those rare beasts that we hardly ever come across (and believe us, BQ scours libraries and bookstores exhaustively)...rare in that they are charming, witty, laugh-out-loud romantic comedies that can entertain men and women readers equally.

The closest comparison to Simision's strangely endearing Prof. Don Tillman would be Jim Parsons' portrayal of the relentlessly dysfunctional Sheldon Cooper in "The Big Bang Theory."  Tillman, a brilliant academic hard-wired like a super computer is afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism that renders him robotic and stunted when dealing with other people..... and immune to the everyday subtleties of humor, irony and sarcasm. So naturally, Tillman's decision to launch an analytical, scientific search for a potential wife leads to endlessly funny and heartwarming complications.

Tillman's search also inadvertently leads him to Rosie, a no nonsense barmaid on the hunt for her biological father. She, of course, possesses none of Don's qualifications for a mate.....ah, but and you and I know better, don't we? The collision of these two complete opposites, along with Don's hapless encounters and interactions with normal society (which rarely go well) makes these books delightful page turners. Pretending for a moment we're on "The Bachelor", BQ hands out a full 5 ***** roses to the "Rosie" duo. Put both of them on your "to read" agenda.

'NERVE' REVIEW.....WE WORKED UP ENOUGH NERVE TO WATCH 'NERVE'

NERVE (2016),way out of our demographic, is a movie someone as old as BQ has no business looking at....a breathless plunge into the frenzied world of Millennial social media....you know, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook,Texting,  Snapchat, yada yada. But we love watching everything equally,so we dove head first into this thriller directed, appropriately by the "Catfish" guys. ("Catfish" being the documentary and subsequent MTV show in which hapless internet surfers discover that the loves of their lives, who fashioned on-line personas as beautiful, young, excitingly gorgeous people, are in fact, 87 year old bald cross dressers or something similar.....let the internet buyer beware....)

"Nerve" imagines an omnipotent powerful website, a la "Facebook", that generates vast profits by daring high schoolers to post videos of themselves as they attempt death-defying stunts....and reap instant deposits into their bank accounts if they succeed without injuring or killing themselves.  Yes, we asked the same question out loud that you would.....which is, aren't there already hundreds of thousands of foolhardy souls posting videos of themselves engaging in potentially lethal stunts? And doing it free of charge, for the pure joy of an adrenalin rush and more Youtube clicks?

Ah well, you just have swallow the premise if you're going to sit through this....and amazingly, we hit 'delete' on our common sense for 96 minutes and damn if we didn't enjoy the zippy carnival ride this movie takes you on. Our plucky little heroine (Emma Roberts) throws her innate caution to the wind and takes up the increasingly nutty 'Nerve' challenges (to the delirious excitement of the website's audience, watching and texting on every electronic device imaginable, except for microwave ovens and George Foreman grills)  Joining her in her all night, New York City escapades.... a fellow player/mystery guy played by Dave Franco.....yes, the brother who looks like he was cloned from a scraping of James Franco's index finger.

BQ's big question.....which remains unanswered by the film....who is running this borderline diabolical website. We waited in vain for a reveal, for the climax to lift up the curtain, maybe show a motor-mouthed Jesse Eisenberg-ish supervillain behind it all....but, alas, no. (What we really hoped for - the "Nerve" website masterminded by a pimply 13 year old boy camped out in his parents' basement....or better yet, Donald Trump's imaginary bedridden 400 pound hacker, lolling about with an I-Pad in one bulbous hand and economy-size Cheetos in the other... . Film-makers, feel free to use those ideas for any planned sequels....)  After restoring our common sense(we can't remember which combination of FN and F key we used) we'll still click on *** 3 stars for "Nerve"....a fast, fun little time waster.