'THE PARALLAX VIEW'....THEY'RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY, HA HA, HEE HEE, HOO HOO.....

The Parallax View (1974)  In a previous post, we reviewed 1970's "WUSA", one of the first Hollywood mainstream films to fully embrace the country's sense of paranoid dread......the fear that all our cherished democratic institutions were seized and manipulated by sinister forces way beyond our control. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, topped off by the ascension of Richard Nixon left the country in a kind of low volume, fearful despair.  We couldn't quite put our finger on who, how or why......but we sensed an all-powerful evil was pulling the strings and anyone who tried to do anything about it would put themselves in the crosshairs.

              By the mid-1970's, the movies dove into this pool of paranoia deeply, creating a singularly unique thriller sub-genre.....conspiracy-Noir.  With films like "The Conversation", "Chinatown", and "3 Days Of The Condor", our favorite leading men uncovered, raged, and then uselessly fought against diabolic Powers-That-Be who were indestructible and impervious to exposure or damage. No light at the end of the tunnel ever glimmered for our would-be heroes....the finales of these movies left them demoralized, disillusioned......and sometimes as dead as a beloved public figure shot by a commission-declared 'lone' gunman.

            "The Parallax View", directed by Alan Pakula, still holds on to its reputation as the best of these films.  Spare and precise in its atmosphere of suffocating tension, it deliberately moves like a broad-daylight waking nightmare to its foregone conclusion. You know where it's going from the start....with an RFK-type assassination atop the Seattle Space Needle by some crazed loon posing as a waiter. But wait....who's that other creepy looking waiter skulking around? (It can't bode well, since he's played by Bill MckInney, one of the 'Deliverance' backwoods rapists)

            When witnesses to this shooting start dropping dead from accidents or supposed natural causes, one of these terrified survivors (Paula Prentiss) appeals to glib investigative reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) for help. He doubts her until she too ends up on a slab.  Frady goes undercover to dig up whatever's going on,  narrowly escaping contrived 'accidental' deaths arranged for both him and any unfortunate soul he interviews. All these twisted, potentially lethal paths finally lead him to the gleaming glass and concrete HQ of the Parallax Corporation.......the Parallax mission: recruit and train angry, outcast, dumb-as-a-rock patsies to take the fall (sometimes literally) for special-order political assassinations. While cops and secret service agents busy themselves shooting down the hapless Parallax shmuck, the real Parallax shooter (that other suspicious waiter we saw at the beginning) has already done the deed and gotten away with it.

            Beatty poses as a Parallax recruit, and to test his suitability as a violence-prone dupe, they strap him to a chair, visually force feeding him a clever video mash-up of comforting and ominous imagery.......watching it today, it plays like visual representation of a typical Trump rally......

           We'll say no more at this point.....except that considering its genre and the era surrounding it, the film concludes with exactly the ironic kick-in-the-teeth you would expect of it......or as it was bluntly explained to Jack Nicholson..."it's Chinatown, Jake."

           And ironies of ironies, the  suspenseful skill he displayed in assembling 'The Parallax View' earned Pakula the premier directing assignment of his career, 1976's "All The President's Men".  In that film, he had the ultimate, ominous Powers-That-Be thriller.......instead of frightening fictional villains, Pakula could now employ his actors to portray real-life plotters.....the sad, conniving collection of Nixonian minions. Even better, of all the 70's paranoia parade movies......this one featured a truly rare occurrence - for once, a vanquishing of villainy.

            As for "The Parallax View", it stays with us always as a signature, unsettling touchstone of uneasy times. It is the decision of The Honorable BQ Committee On Conspiracy-Noir that this great thriller stands guilty of 4 stars.(****)

         

           

           

'IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE' REVIEW.....IT CAN'T, CAN IT? WILL IT? OR DID IT?

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935)  Small confession:  we dutifully waded through high school and college literature courses without ever encountering this author's alternately scary and satiric cautionary tale of a fictionalized America succumbing to a fascist dictatorship.

              Surprise, surprise......over 80 years since its initial publication, it's a best seller again, along with "1984", George Orwell's nightmarish depiction of a brutal totalitarian society. Both books feature a terrorized populace under the yoke of an all-powerful leader.  Dissenters invariably face firing squads, concentration camps or they tend to disappear altogether. The glorious Leader, rules with absolute authority, controlling all mass media....

               Hmmm........wait a sec......some of this is starting to ring a bell.......a big Orange one....

               So like every other reader who's recently delved into "It Can't Happen Here", the BQ cracked it open to see just how close it comes to current events......

               It does, allright......sometimes enough to scare the crap out of us. Lewis's All-American Hitler, Senator Berzelius 'Buzz' Windrip, spellbinds depression-weary voters, promising them a guaranteed $5000 a year and vowing to put Negroes back in their place and women back in the kitchen where they belong. (Amusing note: Buzz never does quite figure out how he's going to pay for the $5000 a year deal.....unlike today, he doesn't promise his rabid throngs that he'll get another country to pay for it.....)

              With the aid of his sinister, shadowy second-in-command (and most likely, puppeteer) Lee Sarason, Windrip sweeps into the White House...and promptly sweeps democracy out the front door.(Imagine that.....a blowhard with a creepy adviser behind the curtains....)

              Author Lewis recounts all the horrors that follow with a casually offhand, calloused satirical eye.........the end of constitutional freedoms, murders or imprisonment of  political opponents, concentration camps, forced labor camps, terrorizing by homegrown stormtroopers, fancifully dubbed 'Minute Men' by Lee Sarason. Standing nobly against this tidal wave of atrocities is the novel's protagonist Doremus Jessup, an aging Vermont newspaper editor who pays dearly for his resistance.

               Frightening? You betcha. Prescient?  Some of it......with dead accuracy at times. At one point, this government of gangsters hopes to divert rumbling unrest among the masses by declaring war on Mexico.(My, my, isn't that absurd...) And Windrip's swift silencing of any journalism unflattering to him made us queasy in its blatant parallels.

               The downsides? Fair warning......Lewis's prose often becomes dense and near impenetrable. The story springs to life in the dialogue sequences, but much of the stilted speech sounds like the title cards that pop up in silent films. The basic premise - that Windrip and Sarason could accomplish their complete fascist conquest of America in about two years - still comes off as a little Sci-Fi for us, like the flying cars that always sail around in fiction set several years in the future.

                 What amused us greatly was Lewis's ploy to make power-behind-the power Lee Sarason especially loathsome......by sketching him as a homosexual sadist who enjoys both beating and loving the boys of his Minute Men brigade. And we adored the movie-ready sequence in which Jessup's enraged daughter exacts spectacular vengeance against a Windrip minion who ordered the execution of her husband.  Insane, really....but worthy of an Indiana Jones film.

              Optimistically, Lewis has his totalitarian monsters start turning on each other like a bunch of Rotary club Borgias, somewhat similar to Orwell's 'Animal Farm'.At least he remembers to leave you with a glimmer of hope.....and as the Academy Award winners would say.......a reaffirmation of the the human spirit.  As for the BQ, we identified most with the sadder and wiser Doremus Jessup, disgusted with the misery and violence caused by unbending idealogues and their causes.

              Worth a read? If you care at all about what's unfolding in front of you every day....absolutely.  We don't know yet if it can happen here......but it's sure making its initial efforts.  BQ gives out 4 fearful stars (****).

           

         

'MANCHESTER BY THE SEA'.....THE FEEL GOOD MOVIE OF THE YEAR....

Manchester By The Sea (2016)   Yes, we just used a cheap, tawdry trick to make this post's headline stand out, since by now you might have heard about this movie's power to drain your will to live.....

         Untrue. Rather than do the 15,000th exhaustive review of the film, the BQ will supply a basic, and we believe, calming assessment of 'Manchester'. We do this especially for those of you who dread hurling yourself off the nearest high building once you comprehend the unspeakable tragedy that lies at the heart of the movie.....

          Surprise! It's humorous..... You're not going to roll in the aisles like you're watching Seth Rogan suck on a saxaphone-sized bong, but you will hear the real give and take of human conversation......The funny thing about real conversation...it could sound funny ......even when it's about a dazed, drifting-through-life handyman(Casey Affleck) forced to deal with the heart failure death of  his beloved older brother and the thorny impossible task of inheriting the guardianship of the brother's teenage son....... the awkward absurdity of the dialogue exchanges could (gasp!) evoke a smile or a laugh out of you.....

          Yes, there's good reason Casey Affleck behaves like he's in a semi-comatose state....which the movie lays out for you, simply and with grim efficiency, about halfway into the film. But you'll already find yourself riveted by his character long before the source of his overwhelming emotional pain is revealed.  'Manchester', you should know right now,is the farthest thing away from a morose, lethally paced European film that wallows in death and despair, forcing you to check your watch every two minutes.  This movie grips you from the start and doesn't let go....

           You should never miss a movie that spotlights Michelle Williams....her role isn't huge but the few minutes she appears.....including the brief, much talked about encounter with Affleck....she once again proves what a cinematic treasure we have in her. BQ could easily skip the next  fifteen Meryl Streep acting-to-the-rafters movies, but we'd show up for any Michelle Williams film, even if they put her in it for twelve seconds......

           And one more final, pithy metaphor.....based on descriptions of its storyline, don't think of watching this movie as comparable to swallowing a gag-inducing cup of cold medicine. Think of it more as a hefty pint of Boston beer.....biting, bitter and capable of leaving you with a buzz.....the buzz you hold in your head after seeing an exhilarating package of superb acting, writing and direction. BQ raises a glass to "Manchester By The Sea" with 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.


       

OSCAR PREDICTIONS.....FOR THE SHOW, NOT THE NOMINEES....

            We'll avoid prognosticating Academy Award winners since the number of people doing this equals the expected billion viewer audience of the show itself.....

              But after a lifetime of long-night's-journey-into-morning watching Oscar telecasts, we feel safe in making the following predictions about the show itself......

               "We Are Not Amused..."   As Jimmy Kimmel flings barbs at the assembled Hollywood A-Listers, the camera will cut to their reactions. Almost all of them will put on their happy face....but expect at least one of them to stare back at Kimmel, grim and honestly un-tickled.....

               Obscure Winner Gabba-Gabba Filibuster  Early on in the telecast, a winner that neither you or the entire civilized world ever heard of will rush up to claim his prize for Best Short Documentary About Armenian Sheep Herders. Now armed with the world's greatest bully pulpit in front of him, he will blab and blab on incoherently, even with the orchestra insistently playing him off. To everyone's regret, the Academy will stop short of using the only thing that would shut him up.....a 300 ton crate dropped on his head.  Ah well....maybe next year....

              Trump-Bashing   If you've read any of our previous posts, you know that no one loathes and despises the Orange-inator more than the BQ. But political scoldings and diatribes from ridiculously overpaid people in $5000 tuxedos and $10,000 gowns doesn't sit well with millions of people who barely scraped enough together to pay the electric and heating bill. As screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky once chided Vanessa Redgrave.....winning an Oscar isn't a pivotal moment in history.....a simple 'thank you' would suffice. But you can bet your popcorn and raisanets that more than one star will pop off as if they're appearing on a CNN opinion panel......

              The Dark Night Of The Soul we predict will arrive somewhere after three hours into the show. Realizing you have to get up early tomorrow for work, you'll glance at your watch, horrified....the show continues to drag on and they haven't even gotten to the biggies yet, the Best Actor/Actress, Director, Picture. Your bowl of Cheetos and chips sits emptied, your eyelids droop and you'll hurl something at the screen if you hear the 'La La Land' music played one more time......

               Of course, if none of these things come to pass.....we were kidding. If they do, we'll loudly trumpet our soothsaying brilliance in a future post.

'THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN' REVIEW......TOO COOL FOR YUL.....

The Magnificent Seven (2016)  Having just plowed through our analysis of the past and present "Ben Hur"s, the BQ isn't really up for a shot-for-shot comparison of the much loved 1960 "Magnificent Seven" to  director Antoine Fuqua's remake of last year. So we'll stick to the key points....

Star Power  Both films have it to spare, Both are fronted by an established, charismatic movie star (1960's Yul Brynner, 2016's Denzel Washington) With the exception of beefy journeyman Brad Dexter (yes, I can hear you saying, "Who?"),the rest of the l960 Seven went on to flourishing film or TV careers. It's too early for us to make any predictions about some of the relative unknowns who make up the 2016 roster......but the new version benefits from the cheeky star turn by Chris Pratt and those ever dependable scenery gobblers, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D'Onofrio.

Gunshots  This may sound like movie buff nitpicking but it's damn important when discussing movies with sustained gun battles. As much as we love the 1960 film, we always considered its gunshot sound effects a major flaw.......the gunfire had a cheap, low-impact ring to it, like  the sound editors lifted it out of an old Gene Autry/Roy Rogers serial. No problem, of course with the exaggerated Dolby Digital pow-pow-pow of the 2016 Seven. (Personally, we can't get enough of the gunshots in Spaghetti westerns.....every shot reverberates like a Civil War cannon.)

The Villain  Through the distance of 57 years, we can still savor (but guiltily, I guess) Eli Wallach's almost operatic turn as the Mexican bandit Calvera. (You could say he's the original Trumpian "Bad Hombre") Okay, a New York method actor stomping  around as the Frito Bandido would never fly today, but Wallach supplied exactly what the 1960 film required.....a powerhouse villain worthy of its formidable line up of heroes. (And for Wallach, merely a warmup for his ultimate south-of-the-border sleazebag in "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly")   Here's where the 2016 remake blatantly drops the ball.......in place of Wallach's larger-than-life outlaw, the new version gives us the strutting little robber baron Bartholomew Bogue (which sounds like a villain name more appropriate for a Dudley Do-Right cartoon, for a guy who ties fair damsels to  train tracks)  Peter Sarsgaard plays this overdressed, righteously corrupt scum with enthusiasm, but even with a small army outfitted in Sergio Leone dusters, he comes across as featherweight and unimposing.  Which is why the script reiterates his evil by having him routinely commit point-blank executions of unarmed people.

The Final Battle  This is where you observe the great divide between the different eras of filmmaking. 1960's climactic showdown is standard boilerplate for a gun battle....years before the arrival of bursting blood squibs and slow motion death scenes.  2016's battle also plays out as typical for today's Multi-plex, tub 'o popcorn movie.......overlong, earsplitting, chopped into tiny bits and pieces by the film editors and photographed like a shooter arcade game, with pop-up bad guys who drop dead in every direction. The only thing missing is the game score appearing on the bottom of the screen......

The Actors And Their Characters  The 2016 remake cast sweats mightily to equal the vivid charisma of the 1960 bunch, but they don't quite get there. Denzel Washington, however, is more than an equal to Yul Brynner, who depended a lot on his exotic appearance for impact.(And with his flat, robotic voice, Brynner perfectly played a robotic version of his character in the 1973 "Westworld")  James Coburn's silently deadly knife thrower has been remade into an Asian martial arts guy. Robert Vaughan's PTSD gunfighter seems to be re-imagined as a laconic, legendary Civil War vet well played by Ethan Hawke. But there's nobody in the 1960 bunch who quite compares to the remake's burly, barely civilized mountain-man played by man-mountain Vincent D'Onofrio, our very own supercharged Brian Dennehy 2.0.  He's our favorite of the 2016 Seven......he blatantly steals his introduction into the movie by lifting his voice octave up to the level of a talking teddy bear with a pull string in its back.

The Music  The remake could not escape paying homage to arguably the 1960 film's greatest asset, the propulsive, instantly iconic Elmer Bernstein score, which over the years, solidified and enhanced the film's reputation as a classic. Sadly, the 2016 film also serves as a homage to the late James Horner, tragically killed in a plane crash. Overloaded with projects, Horner still managed to compose a strong worthy theme for the new Seven, even before he was able to view any footage. Punctuated with striking trumpet calls, and subtly recalling the Bernstein score, Horner's music painfully reminded us of how much we'll miss his talents.

The Verdict? 1960s "Magnificent Seven"....4 stars(****) for its cast and music....2016's "Magnificent Seven".....2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)....the extra half star for Vincent D'Onofrio's  always welcome over-the-top contribution.

             

'DON'T THINK TWICE' REVIEW.....LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S STRUGGLING COMICS....

Don't Think Twice (2016)  Several lifetimes ago, (so it seems) BQ wrote fairy tale musicals for the busy summertime slate of a professional children's theater company.  Eight weeks....eight hour long musical comedies....each rehearsed in three days then taken on the road to perform at theater-in-the-rounds in a tri-state radius.  An insane ordeal?  You bet.....but like the guy who follows the elephant with the shovel, nobody wants to give up show business. It's just too damn much fun.....

             The highs and lows of a comedy improvisation troupe in writer-director Mike Birbiglia's "Don't Think Twice"  took us back to those crazy, exhausting theatrical days......filled with performers who hit every number on the critical dial......from journeyman mediocrity to dazzling, destined-for-better-things brilliance.  Along the way, friendships and romance came and went, egos rose and fell, careers went nowhere or skyrocketed to fame.

             And so it is with Birbiglia's 'The Commune', a collection of nimble comedic minds, spontaneously creative artists who dare to face an audience with nothing but their own speed-of-light wits. In the gladiatorial world of stand-up comedy, improv is the equivalent of one of those Wallenda guys tightrope walking across the Grand Canyon. Some might consider it harder.....Wallenda simply has to make it to the other end of the wire.....he doesn't also have to make people laugh while he teeters over oblivion......

             The Commune members share a deep bond in their friendship and artistry, but their world is shifting under their feet. Unpaid for their performances, they glumly toil at day jobs......and they can sense they're  fast approaching their expiration dates for achieving show biz success. Their Powerball Ticket out of obscurity is to join the cast of the network comedy TV show "Weekend Live" (Yes, it's the movie's not-so-flattering version of You-Know-What)

            The group's most hungrily ambitious member (Keegan-Michael Key) secures this prize, driving a wedge of jealous envy through the others. And it rips apart his relationship with a fellow Commune castmate (Gillian Jacobs), who's the most brilliant member of the troupe, but also the most insecure.

             This all sounds like heavy, life-altering drama....and it is, but keep in mind, the story chronicles people who make you laugh. Birbiglia, who also plays the teacher and leader of the group, amply shows off the cast's comic chops, both in the improvisation shows and their offstage banter. (Masters of dialect, they take turns imitating the agonized rasps of a castmate's hospitalized father.) Our only quibble:  the film wastes the talents of the too-adorable-for-words Kate Micucci in a fifth-castmember-from-the-left role.

             Our favorite moment.....the Commune members sitting slack-jawed in front of a TV, staring absently at the music group segment of "Weekend Live", internally calculating the seconds until it's over and the funny stuff can begin again. So very true.   BQ glares at the music segments of "Saturday Night Live" exactly the same way.....unless the group's so awful we have to channel surf over to a movie until they stop caterwauling.

              "Don't Think Twice" about watching this movie.....it takes you on a fascinating trip through a cutthroat creative life where a lot more goes on behind the laughter. BQ improvises 4 stars.(****)

             

         

'BEN HUR' .....THEN AND NOW.....SWING LOWER, SWEET CHARIOT.......

Ben Hur (1959) (2016)   Yes, we know......you probably think the BQ is about to pour an entire bottle of nostalgic,  maple syrup praise on the 1959 Charlton Heston "Ben Hur" and then turn around and excoriate the 2016 remake.......not quite.

                Let's start out with some heresy on our part, especially for a classic movie lover. With the exception of the two celebrated sequences in William Wyler's 1959 epic - the chariot race and the sea battle - we always found the rest of 'Ben Hur' an excruciatingly sanctimonious slog, paced like a glacier and about as interesting to watch as a slightly animated oil painting.  Designed to suck up Academy Awards like a vacuum cleaner, it bore all the heavy-handed hallmarks of Hollywood biblical extravaganzas......lots of red-cloaked Roman soldiers sporting helmets with the red mohawks on top, vast crowds of extras, an artfully hidden Jesus seen only in shadow or from behind accompanied by swelling pious choirs.

                 If you stayed awake long enough through all this deadening pageantry, the film first rewarded you with  a rip roaring sea battle (featuring galley slave Heston giving some stuntman a facial with a burning torch) and then the mighty showstopper, the chariot race (which Wyler actually had nothing to do with, turning direction of it over to Andrew Marton and stunt coordination to the legendary Yakima Canutt). After those sequences it's right back to the to the spinach of film's lugubrious Act III, highlighted by much Hestonian jaw clenching....and by spinach, we don't mean the fresh leafy kind in your salad, we refer to the cooked greenish goo that makes you gag just looking at it.

               Particularly hateful to us was MGM's decision to make 'Ben Hur' the primary recipient of its Oscar nominating marketing efforts. So the studio ignored its other big 1959 release (and the BQ's beloved fave) "North By Northwest".  We could easily watch Hitchcock's masterful thriller a dozen times every year......as for 'Ben Hur', the only two scenes we could endure?  Well.....you know.  It amused us no end that novelist and sometime screenwriter Gore Vidal always claimed he sneaked gay sub-text into scenes between Charlton Heston and villain Stephen Boyd. We doubt it, but it's fun to think about.

             And now we come to the 2016 remake, which perfectly epitomizes what passes for epic filmmaking today. Yes, there are credited writers and a director.......and two non-entities portraying Ben Hur and his hated adversary Messala.  (I won't even bother with their names, they look like two temporary stand-ins for real stars who never showed up) But honestly folks......the only serious creative work involved in a movie like this comes from the myriad of CGI digital artists in the employ of dozens of contracted special effects companies. Furiously toiling away at their keyboards and mousepads, they paint the film with not very realistic architecture, crowds, flaming arrows and horses and chariots that bounce higher than the Road Runner after detonating Acme dynamite. No wonder the listing of all their names feels longer than the entire 212 minute running time of the 1959 film.

             Sadly.....and here's the great paradox of the 2016 'Ben Hur' and its ilk.....the meticulous work of all these CGI elves gets promptly chopped, sliced 'n diced up into indecipherable, unwatchable pieces by the director and his so called film editors. Rest assured, they won't let the film out into the world until it looks like it's been pieced together by a team of meth addicts armed with weed whackers.

              Another oddity we noticed in this remake, strange for a movie from Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, producers of many faith-based projects ......the casual, offhand use of Jesus. Unlike the overly reverent hide-and-seek view of 1950's biblicals  He's on full view here, methodically trotted out at key intervals, without much conviction or emotion,  like a required prop at a childrens' Sunday School pageant. Even more bizarre is the film's incredible, touchy-feely windup. At least William Wyler understood his 1959 Ben Hur was all about primal stuff.....hate, revenge, the deep bonds of familial love. In the 2016 remake, the bloodless, antiseptic CGI carnage simply leads to a finale suitable for a greeting card.

                Other than those two action sequences in the 1959 film, (which you could easily skip directly to on a DVD or Blu-Ray), we'd hurry away from both 'Hur's.  For 'Ben Hur' 1959....2 stars (**) .....for the 'Ben Hur' 2016, a chariot with the wheels off....1 star (*)

             

'MORGAN' REVIEW........ADVENTURES IN TEST TUBE BABYSITTING...

Morgan (2016) is 90 minutes of death scenes in search of a movie.....

             Directed by Luke Scott (son of Ridley), the film adheres to that well worn sci-fi template.....the cadre of well meaning scientists who unsuccessfully try to control either an amazing otherwordly discovery or one of their own cooked-up-in-the-lab creations.  Whether the entity in question is alien or homegrown, you can bet your bunsen burner that sooner or later, things will go....as they say in 1950's sci-fi movies.....horribly awry.

            The entity here is Morgan,(Anya Taylor-Joy),  a slapped together artificial DNA cocktail who at first glance, resembles a sullen teen girl in a hoodie.   Incarcerated in a glass-walled cell like Hannibal Lector, she listens to classical music and indifferently spouts faux-polite HAL 9000 banter until you piss her off.....in which case she might tear a chunk out of your neck or stab your eyeball repeatedly with a fork. (qualifying her as either a reality show contestant or a White House spokesperson)

                Morgan's obviously been bred as some kind of unstoppable Jason Bourne killing machine, but her scientific team creators still dote on her as if they've assembled the new adorable American Girl Doll.

              The team's delusional view of Morgan doesn't play well with the two visitors sent out to the secluded lab by the corporation funding all this frivolity.......a cool, emotionless investigator (Kate Mara) and an impatient, glib shrink. (Paul Giamatti).
   
               The shrink launches a hot-tempered interrogation of Morgan (and as you might expect, Giamatti tears through this scene like a hungry tiger gnawing on red meat)  It's a stupid sequence designed mainly to goose up the film's trailer and its inevitable conclusion officially signals the all-hell-breaks-loose part of the story. From that point on, people die horribly, their deaths periodically interrupted by bruising Bourne-worthy smackdowns between Taylor-Joy and Mara,

              And that's all this brief, nasty little movie has to offer, other than the great pride it takes in its one pathetic plot twist. The cast is 'Morgan's only saving grace, with Taylor-Joy superb at conveying pent up ferocity just waiting to explode and a host of other actors this movie doesn't deserve....Toby Jones, Jennifer Jason Leigh (as the hapless forked eyeball lady) and Michelle Yeoh.

              Without this cast, BQ wouldn't have found a single star to hand out to this short pile of gruesome poo.  For them alone, we'll splice together enough DNA to make 1 star (*)  Trust us, there's no Better Living Through Chemistry here.......

'WUSA' .....PAUL, JOANNE & THE DAWN OF ALT-RIGHT AND HATE RADIO....

WUSA (1970)   Given the excruciating slow process of major studio filmmaking, it took over two years after the cataclysmic, blood soaked hell of 1968 until the studios woke up and smelled the tear gas. At long last, in 1970, Hollywood rolled out its various cinematic responses to the upheavals of the era.....the assassinations of beloved leaders, campus riots, the demoralizing Nixon presidency,  the ever raging Vietnam war and the drifting of youth into open rebellion and drug-fueled hippie-dom.

         "WUSA" came with the highest pedigree of all these films......star power in Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Anthony Perkins and a literate script by novelist Robert Stone based on his book "A Hall Of Mirrors". It sank without a trace, killed instantly by Stuart Rosenberg's inert leaden direction and (in the BQ's humble opinion)  Stone's maddening elliptical dialogue, which cleverly danced all around the incendiary subject matter without ever confronting it directly.

           Arriving in New Orleans with only fifty dollars and a suit bag, Newman plays Rheinhardt, a alcoholic world-weary cynic and ex-musician turned 'communicator'...aka radio DJ. He stumbles upon Geraldine (Woodward), another drifting lost soul, a part time waitress and full-time abused, physically scarred floozy. The decent Geraldine makes futile efforts to serve as Rheinhardt's conscience as he becomes, to his own bitter amusement, a rising star DJ/commentator  at the fast growing radio station WUSA.

              The sinister WUSA,  owned and operated by a jovial bigwig bigot (Pat Hingle), drapes itself in All-American patriotic fervor while not-so-secretly pursuing a right wing racist agenda.  One of its schemes involves a phony survey of the city's African Americans, designed to expunge them off the welfare rolls. As their prize patsy to conduct this survey, they employ Rainey (Perkins), a twitching, stuttering do-gooder naif, fresh from a nervous breakdown and only just beginning to realize he's nothing but a clueless pawn in WUSA's covert race war.

              Sounds like irresistibly heady stuff, right?  In the hands of a powerhouse director, (maybe an Elia Kazan or even a down 'n dirty sensationalist like Robert Aldrich) this film might have sprung to the crazy heights it aspires to......after all, it even comes equipped with its own apocalyptic finale, a "Day Of The Locust" bloodbath at a WUSA flag waving pep rally. But Stuart Rosenberg directs it all as if he's both underwater and under sedation.......the actors are game (especially in a telling verbal duel between the dissolute Newman and the quaking, kindly Perkins....."You cornpone Christ!"  Newman snickers at him...) but the scenes lie there and die there.

                 We never do get to hear any of WUSA's poisonous broadcasts.......the film leaves those to your imagination. But as failed as the movie is, it's uniquely prescient in its depiction of a broadcast entity existing only to spew bile and hatred into the national bloodstream. On our first viewing, we thought Rheinhardt's rise to fame made no sense.......why would WUSA pick such a morally bankrupt faker to articulate its propaganda instead of finding an honestly rabid ideologue?

              Looking at the film through the misery of current events, we take back our initial objections. Newman's character looks way more believable to us now. Rheinhardt, that brazen, silver-tongued opportunist who tells people what they long to hear, believes only in himself and his ability to profitably surf the wave of unleashed anger and fear he arouses.

              Didn't we just elect a Rheinhardt?   For its cast and its 1970 crystal ball gaze into a future filled with enough chaos to make 1968 appear quaint....we'll dial up 3 stars (***) for WUSA.

'ARRIVAL' REVIEW.......ALIEN-ATED AMY'S CLOSE ENCOUNTER....WE SQUID YOU NOT...

Arrival (2016)  is that rarest of birds.....a thoughtful, meditative sci-fi epic that's landed on earth to tweak you mind and not just your eyes and ears.

             Not that there isn't plenty to see......director Denis Villenueve knows how to fill up the screen with arresting images that recall both '2001' and 'Close Encounters'.  But in depicting a world gone agog at the sight of twelve ominous alien craft parking themselves into hovering positions around the globe, he uses astonishingly subtle visual restraint.

              Instead of viewing all this through a fully hysterical CNN Breaking News howl, we watch this cataclysmic event through the sad, watchful, wary eyes of a linguistics professor (Amy Adams). She can barely comprehend the spreading public anxiety around her, since she still silently broods and torments herself with haunting remembrances of her late daughter, who succumbed to cancer in her teens. ( A simple bender bender in the University parking lot brilliantly illustrates the panic far better than any scenes of fleeing humanity.)

               Adams is called upon to by the military to use her language skills to communicate with the aliens in one of the crafts floating over a Montana field. In the USA, as elsewhere in the world, anxious scientists and armed forces with increasingly itchy trigger fingers surround each alien ship.........with China rapidly preparing to go all 'Independence Day' on some alien ass.

                In their ships, the visitors, large, tentacle'd, squid-like things, float around in their own aquarium, spitting out globs of inky goo that arrange into circular symbols. The pensive methodical Adams eventually reaches the heart of the alien language.......and in altering her reality forever, the aliens reach her as well.  (We'll go no further than this, since this involves a stunning twist designed to leave you with your mouth wide open.....)

                 We normally despise movies that require a Master's degree in quantum physics to understand the mind-bending science involved, but "Arrival", bless its heart, isn't one of those. It's out to touch your heart, not confound your mind......and the film's moving conclusion might make you stop, think,  ponder, and even start a spirited argument on the moral choices involved. (With most current sci-fi movies, our only immediate pondering involves how soon we can reach the bathroom when the credits roll.....)

                  After a lifetime of fearfully watching the skies in alien-invasion movies, BQ wipes its brow with relief at this new crop of otherworldly visitors.....and give 4 full Tentacles (****) to this close encounter of the better kind......

'TOMORROW, THE WORLD!' COULD SKIPPY THE NAZI FIND SUITABLE WORK TODAY?

Tomorrow The World!  (1944) began life as a Broadway play and its film adaptation hit the movie theaters about five months before the surrender of Nazi Germany.

           This ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama achieved its fame (similar to the l950's "The Bad Seed") mainly due to its spectacular, take-no-prisoners lead performance by its child actor. 'Skippy' Homeier, (later just plain Skip as he moved on to adult roles) portrayed a German war orphan adopted by his American uncle (Frederic March)  and brought to the States to live with his uncle's family.

             For anyone who revels in stories where sociopathic chaos invades an innocent Americana setting, (a la Hitchcock's "Shadow Of A Doubt") here's where the real fun begins. Skippy arrives in his new apple pie suburban home as a full fledged, rabidly antisemitic  Hitler Youth, complete with the rotted, maliciously depraved soul of a Nazi coward and bully.

             Young Homeier, much like Patty McCormack in "The Bad Seed" didn't do much to modulate or tone down his stage performance for the film camera. Skippy goes for broke here, playing this odious little fascist worm loud enough and over-the-top enough to reach the cheapest seats in the upper balcony. Watching this performance today, you could either laugh hysterically as if Skippy's doing a goose-stepping version of Frank N Furter in "Rocky Horror", or like most audiences, you might want to leap into the screen so you can personally bitch-slap him to death.

             Skippy, disgusted and appalled at his new life in the Land Of The Free, naturally goes on a villainous hate-spewing rampage through his horrified community, culminating with his almost murderous attack on his kindly young cousin, March's daughter.  This becomes the last straw for the rest of the cast.....the neighborhood kids administer (to the audience's delight) a deeply satisfying beatdown on Skippy's ass and March prepares to turn the Hitler mini-me over to the cops.

             But hold on.....the script does have a higher purpose than having you cheer on while this kid gets the crap beat out of him. Keep in mind, this was a 1944 play with a deeper message in mind......and when this tormented boy's surprising, poignant backstory is revealed.....you understand you've been watching an attack on the ideology involved rather than this pathetic kid who literally embraced it like a life preserver.

              Skip Homeier went on to a busy career in films, but mostly as a character actor and not a leading man. Unfortunately his unforgettable work in "Tomorrow The World!" forever earmarked him as a villain and he toiled through countless movies as a sneering, untrustworthy henchman.

             And the BQ couldn't help but remember Skip's jaw-dropping role a few weeks ago when we watched some ridiculous White House minion, sent out to fume and rant his way through the Sunday morning network news discussions. Like a taller, balder little Nazi-fied Skippy, he actually declared that his fearless Leader's authority was...uh....'not to be questioned.'   Chills ran through us.....this wasn't an old black-and-white movie on TCM, comfortably watched on a rainy afternoon....it was the real scary thing.  And unlike our Skippy, we doubt there'd be any justifiable backstory to explain this idiot carrying on like a low level Gestapo underling.  After a while, we hoped he'd try to open the Lost Ark Of The Covenant and watch his face melt.......

                As for Skip Homeier and his vividly iconic work in "Tomorrow The World!".....it's another one of those one-of-a-kind moments in wartime cinema not to be missed....4 stars (****)

'THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN' REVIEW.......REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE.

The Edge Of Seventeen (2016), a whip-smart, snappy update of those John Hughes/Molly Ringwald teen angst tours,  boldly threw itself into the multi-plexes during the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday movie logjam.....and promptly disappeared.  Since the BQ fondly remembered our first week managing a video store when '16 Candles' was the hot release of the week, we made an effort to catch up with this new 21st century take on the hellish life of a too-cool-for-school 11th grade girl.

             Given the frenzied pace of our social media era, everything in writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig's film comes at you faster.....the quips, the insults, the pop culture references, and the continuous onslaught of humiliating incidents piled on our put-upon, underestimated oddball Nadine. (Hailee Steinfeld)

                The movie has a live-wire MVP in Steinfeld, who tears into the role with motor-mouthed abandon and meets her match and deadpan foil in her dryly disinterested history teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson, generating laughs by simply waiting for a pause between Steinfeld's rants about her latest miseries.)

                Steinfeld's Nadine, a bullied, lonely outsider, has spent a gloomy lifetime living in the shadow of her ultra-popular handsome jock older brother.(Black Jenner)  The two lifelines she grasped to survive this childhood were her kind, loving father and  her one and only beloved friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson).  The film opens with Nadine's world continuing to go South......her dad's been dead for several years and she currently catches her best friend falling into bed and a relationship with her brother. Feeling utterly betrayed and alone, Nadine contemplates drastic, aggressive action with one boy she's crushing on, while tentatively beginning a friendship with another,  a fledgling filmmaker classmate who's nursing his own crush on Nadine. And we give thanks for the angst.....

              All the expected complications ensue, but Craig's script and direction throw a few new ingredients into the John Hughes formula.....including a surprise look at Harrelson's home life. Though burdened with a few missteps, it's mostly  a swift, breezy ride, energized by Steinfeld's full commitment to the role.

                One thing we hated: an unnecessary scene, begging for deletion,  where Steinfeld's made the butt of a joke that implies she's short and ugly......neither of which Steinfeld is.  We're guessing this gag was in the script before the cute-as-a-button Steinfeld was cast in a role written for a shorter actress, but left in the film anyway as a supposed guaranteed big yock. Doesn't make sense.   And after an hour and half of all this adolescent agita, the movie's quick lurch into feel-good-ism comes off as hurried and not quite genuine.

                But we can't say we didn't have a good time watching this and Hailee Steinfeld's fresh take on Molly Ringwald's hiccuping high school life saved the day......no grading on a curve needed, we hand out 3 stars. (***)

           

'THIS IS US'....ARE THE NETWORKS TOO STUPID TO REALIZE WHY IT BECAME AN INSTANT SMASH HIT?

This Is Us (2016)  It didn't take a media prognostication genius to predict the immediate success of this NBC series.....

            Just take a look at what surrounds it......

             Writer-Producer Dan Fogelman's intricate deft weaving together of a family's past and present stood out by itself, an oasis of heartfelt drama in a churning sea of Network forensic gore.....

            Try to remember the last cascade of network promos you watched on an average night....for us, it plays out like an endless loop of autopsies, serial killers, shootouts, explosions, deadly fires, dire medical emergencies, terrorist plots, ripped apart rape victims and the standard superhero smackdowns consisting of one spandexed stuntman throwing another one up against cars and buildings. In most of these network shows, the greatest challenge for actors is having to crouch at the knees for long periods of time while they poke their surgical gloved fingers into the wounds of various corpses.....

             So no wonder millions of viewers rushed to embrace "This Is us", with its gifted ensemble cast and superbly crafted scripts mixing equal parts of heartbreaking troubles, incisive wit and characters you immediately relate and warm to. And not an autopsy, explosion or serial killer in sight.

            We're not blue-sky dreamers here....we're old enough and semi-wise enough to realize that cops, lawyers and assorted crime-fighters have been TV staples since television sets used to be 98% furniture and 2% picture tube. But good old fashioned drama also was also in the mix.....and these days, in this age of instant gratification, karate kicks, punchouts, car crashes and murder victims serve as far easier attention-grabbers for network shows.

            When NBC execs finally stumbled over the zeitgeist at work here, they quickly renewed "This Is Us" for another two seasons. Inevitably, and for the BQ,  not a bad thing, the networks will probably temper their great romance with dissected bodies and start slapping together some "This Is Us" wanna-be's and copycat series. Some will be okay, some not bad, some excruciating beyond words....let's just say, at this point, we''ll give them credit for trying.....

            For now, we'll continue to stop in every Tuesday night to thoroughly immerse ourselves in "This Is Us"....and special praise for Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore as the parents of the show's diverse clan.....every week these two cut to the bone of their characters and well earn the heart tugs that Fogelman and his fellow writers  create for them. (The casting of Moore is particularly brilliant, an enormously sympathetic actress not afraid to delve deeply into the flaws of the family matriarch. We're guessing multiple Emmy awards are in her future....)

           No one had to guess about this show roaring out of the gate....and BQ gladly bestows a full 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.

           

'GIRLFRIEND'S DAY' REVIEW......NETFLIX INVENTS A NEW GENRE...HALLMARK NOIR.

Girlfriend's Day (2017) clocks in at less than 70 minutes, which was just fine with us......a perfect running time for this strange little dramedy./mystery set in the world of greeting card companies and their writers.

          Director Michael Stephenson and star/co-writer Bob Odenkirk channel a whole lot of Coen brothers quirk into their fractured thriller about a past-his-prime greeting card writer (Odenkirk) freshly fired, newly divorced and flat broke.  While he's avoiding eviction by babysitting his landlord's nephew, opportunities arise.....a covert freelance card-writing job from his former boss and the Governor's announcement of a contest to write the best card for the state's newest declared holiday, Girlfriend's Day.

            At this point, "Girlfriend's Day" turns into a dry sendup of noir private eyewash as Odenkirk stumbles upon the murder of a colleague, starts a random, budding relationship with a young girl (Amber Tamblyn) and regularly gets beaten up by a blackmailing detective and two cornpone thugs who proudly claim they're reformed racists. (With such a short running time, you tend to notice things like the inordinate amount of face punching in this movie....Odenkirk endures more direct hits to his kisser than Mike Tyson's speed bag.)

             The backwoods minions drag Odenkirk to their boss, Grundy (Stacy Keach), the brother of the guy who runs Odenkirk's ex-company and the CEO of  his own rival card firm. Keach functions as the big nasty spider sitting in the middle of the plot's tangled web, similar to John Huston's avuncular evil Noah Cross in "Chinatown."  Like everybody else in the movie, he needs a killer greeting card from our hero....or else. You won't worry so much about the "or else" here, since the undercurrent of absurdity in the dialogue and performances effectively works to keep you from taking this seriously.

            After a few moderately surprising twists and some more face punching, "Girlfriend's Day" resolves in plenty of time for you to peruse Netflix's "If You Like This'  recommendations while the credits roll........so if you're in the right mood to imagine the Hallmark universe littered with an occasional dead body, pop this card open....no jingle starts playing, but the sentiment inside is certainly dark and witty. 3 Stars...(***)

             

         

             

BREAKING NEWS THAT REMINDED US OF "THUNDERBALL"

Right after the opening credits of  the Bond adventure Thunderball (1966), we're treated to a board meeting of that nefarious worldwide crime organization SPECTRE... the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.

            There's no benefits package at Spectre, no 401K and certainly no second chances... one of the Board members, judged an incompetent liar by unseen CEO Ernst Stavro Blofeld is simply fried in his seat like a Hot Pocket left too long in the microwave. The seat, along with its deceased, extra-crispy occupant lowers underground, then pops up again....empty, presumably ready for a new hire.

             We couldn't help thinking of this sequence as we watched the news of Gen. Flynn's resignation from the White House inner circle.....which in its collection of malicious, mean-spirited criminal connivers and incompetents, is every bit the equal of the Spectre boardroom.

            So we're thinking maybe Gen.Flynn should thank his lucky stars that he was allowed to leave with  his butt only symbolically fried.........

'LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN'.....OUR SUNNY, FUNNY VALENTINE.....FROM HELL.

Leave Her To Heaven (1945) we would best describe as the "Fatal Attraction", "Basic Instinct" and "Gone Girl" of its day.  Based on a bestseller by Ben Ames Williams, a popular and prolific novelist of the period, the movie made its mark with its unique contradiction of warring styles......a dark, twisted noir-ish tale like this would normally beg for black-and-white.....instead, it was photographed by master cameraman Leon Shamroy in glorious, gift-shop postcard Technicolor.  Even though drenched in Shamroy's Oscar-winning hues, the movie still earned its well-deserved place in Film Noir reference books. In fact, the overripe Technicolor helped to put an extra lurid melodramatic sheen on a film that only employed functional actors giving ordinary performances. (With one exception, which we'll get to later....)

              The primal plot (still in use decades later) has an amiable novelist (Cornel Wilde) besotted by an upperclass stunner. (Gene Tierney, whose immobile, geometrically perfect beauty made her look like a full size live-action porcelain doll.) Tierney's only momentarily engaged to a humorless lawyer running for District Attorny (a young, toweringly tall Vincent Price)......she quickly dumps Price and homes in on Wilde like a heat-seeking missile. Once married, the audience clearly gets the hint that Tierney's an obsessive sociopath and woe to any poor sucker who thwarts her quality time with Wilde.

             (You might want to skip the next few paragraphs if you haven't seen the movie yet.....)

              And the first poor sucker in her sights......Wilde's gentle-hearted, polio-stricken teenage brother (Darryl Hickman, so sweet and huggable, the only thing missing on him is a huge "I'm Gonna Die Horribly Real Soon" sign hanging around his neck.) Which brings us to the movie's signature sequence, the one it's most remembered for.   At Wilde's sumptuous lakeside Maine cabin (lushly photographed by Shamroy), Tierney sits in a rowboat, supervising Hickman's swimming, waiting for the lovable little fellow to develop a cramp.  She coolly stares at the kid, as he sinks to the bottom faster than Donald Trump's poll numbers,  watching her victim through sunglasses as impenetrable as her heart.

             Tierney's merely warming up in her campaign to totally possess Wilde, now emotionally crushed by the 'accidental'  death of his brother.  She gets pregnant for no other reason than to cheer him up, but then realizes a baby would just be another pesky rival for his attention.  A quick thinker, Tierney opts for a  pre-Roe Vs. Wade abortion by hurling herself down the stairs.  Whoopsie.  All this melodrama drives Wilde into the loving arms of Tierney's girl-next-door cousin (Jeanne Crain)....but Tierney's not puttin' up with any of that. In her Grand Finale looniest move, Tierney poisons herself with arsenic and leaves enough evidence around to frame Crain for murder.

             Now we come to the film's monumentally daft Act III with Crain's murder trial.....under judicial rules from another planet altogether. The prosecutor?  Who else but newly elected DA Vincent Price, all charged up to hysterically badger witnesses until he avenges his murdered ex-fiance. The judge here turns a blind eye to Price's participation in this trial as well as Price's hectoring, howling cross-examinations of Crain and Wilde. (To be fair and honest, we admit it's the most fun part of the movie.....Wilde, Tierney and Crain do nothing above moderate acting, while Price works himself into a frenzy like Torquemada chairing the Inquisition.)

            We'll only say that the suitably outlandish conclusion to both the trial and the movie serves the same function as a huge glob of whipped cream on a Film Noir Sundae....with a cherry on top. And that's why BQ deems "Leave Her To Heaven"  our penultimate Valentine's Day treat.....where you always hurt the one you love....and love never means having to say you're sorry....especially if you've killed a few people.  We give 4 bouquets of stars (****)

           

             

'ANTIBIRTH' & 'YOGA HOSERS'.....SCRAPING BOTTOM ON NETFLIX

Antibirth (2016)  Yoga Hosers (2016)  One night, we decided to ignore any quality offerings on Netflix... .the hell with 'House Of Cards', the hell with 'Finding Dory'.....we fearfully donned our Hazmat suits,  turned on our flashlight and rooted around in the darkest corners of the Netflix basement, just to see what scuzzy,scummy, unidentifiable flotsam we could find.  And with a George Takei wail of  "Oh Myyyyy" we used our tongs to gingerly retrieve these two gems.

         Both these movies crawled out of the primordial ooze of their creators' minds and slouched into the Sundance Film Festival last year. Luckily for the filmmakers,  Robert Redford, swell guy that he is,  passed on setting fire to all the existing prints, leaving these movies free to wander into the Elephant's Graveyard Of Unendurable Independent Films....Netflix.

          Let's start with Antibirth, a "whoa-what-the-hell' horror film that features no less than two Independent Film duchesses, Natasha Lyonne and Chloe Sevigny. And no doubt the result of a search that must have rivaled Indiana Jones' quest for the Grail, this movie also dredges up  that 80's Manic Pixie, Meg Tilly, now gray of hair but forever elfin.

          Lyonne plays a fairly worthless drug 'n booze slut scraping a few bucks together as a motel maid.  She and Sevigny hang out in Lyonne's lakeside hovel left to her by her late father, where Sevigny mildly worries about her friend's massive drug inhalation. What's worse, one of Lyonne's all night semi-comatose evenings has rendered her pregnant with no memory of sex involved (similar to to the genesis of Michael Jackson's children)......not just any pregnancy, but a full David Cronenberg body-fluid bacchanal,  with a 3rd trimester belly bloat, teeth loosening out, skin rubberizing and pus dripping out of blistering wounds. Yum. Tilly shows up as an Army vet who may know the source of Lyonne's condition.....but who the hell cares?

            Some time after 90 painful minutes of Lyonne alternately hitting the bong or peeling off her skin, the film lurches into its spectacularly nutso windup.  Years ago, the last few minutes alone would have guaranteed it a spot on the midnight movie circuit, a worthy substitute to use when the 'Rocky Horror' prints got too chewed up to make it through the projector.  But in this streaming day and age,  you don't even have to leave your house to watch a full-grown whatsit crawl out of Lyonne's abused vagina.

           Yoga Hosers (2016) continues the plummeting part of Kevin Smith's bungee jump career. We still fondly remember the once-upon-a-time in independent films when Smith ruled that world with "Clerks", "Chasing Amy", "Dogma" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back."  But his last few years of flailing around, vomiting up misbegotten films watchable only by his immediate family......it's tortuous to see. Right now,  Smith's wandering around in the same wilderness that M.Night Shyamalan was exiled into, turning into a reviled caricature of himself, cranking out desperately weird movies that look like warped versions of his better work.

            Still, we remain optimistic about Smith, since Shyamalan put a reign on his overpowering ego and came roaring back with trim little nasties like "The Visit" and his current success, "Split".  Smith may yet surprise us by hunkering down and crafting another smashingly funny character piece.  But first he'll have to get stuff like "Yoga Hosers" completely out of his system.....with this movie, he's not so much Kevin Smith anymore......he's more like a half-assed, modern day Ed Wood Jr. and this atrocity is his very own "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

             We cringe at attempting to describe "Yoga Hosers", other than it involves Smith's daughter, Harley Quinn Smith and Johnny Depp's daughter, Lily Rose Depp (a genuine find) as two Canadian slacker convenience store clerks.  They end up battling....oh dear Lord......little Nazi sausage-men (Bratzis) who run around screaming 'Wunderbar' while lethally sodomizing their victims. Enough with that, we can't go on.

              Smith was never much of a film maker, accumulating only enough craft to point the camera in the right direction. So making a stupid, lumpy story like this take flight was way, way beyond his skill set.   It would take a supremely talented visualist with a sharp eye and a satirical mind to ever make a demented piece like "Yoga Hosers" work. Under Smith's lazy, absent-minded direction, the film lies there like a traffic accident victim waiting for the paramedics to show up.

              In watching these two lunatic asylum escapee films back to back, BQ duplicated a 42nd Street Grindhouse experience far better than that "Grindhouse" epic concocted by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. They went to the trouble of deliberately creasing and streaking the images like raggedly 35mm prints. But for a true Grindhouse experience, you can't just imitate bad movies......you need real live, unintentionally awful cinematic abortions. And "Afterbirth" and "Yoga Hosers"  beautifully filled the bill. No stars ( 0!!)  for either of them.

'SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS'.....WHEN ONLY ONE GUY WROTE MEAN TWEETS....AND EVERYONE FOLLOWED HIM.....

Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)  forever holds the #2 spot in BQ's all time favorite greatest-movies-ever-made (the first being "North By Northwest"). Its blistering, black-and-white NYC noir vibe combined with its corrosive dialogue and live-wire superstar acting have never quite been equaled.

           Return with us. boys and girls, to a long gone galaxy far far away.....where a primary source of the American public's news and entertainment came from.....prepare to gasp....NEWSPAPERS!  And if you craved a steady diet of juicy tidbits made up of pithy soundbites describing celebrity and politician ups-and-downs....(the kind of stuff you can get now with one click on your phone or IPad)....then you rustled the pages of your morning paper till you came to a nationwide syndicated columnist like Walter Winchell.  In a column filled with one or two sentences devoted to each of his victims or fawning 'friends', Winchell would either praise or eviscerate Hollywood titans, Presidents, Senators, or anyone else in the public eye.  With a tap of his typewriter, he could build public careers or d
estroy them with the intensity of a nuclear fireball.....he was that powerful.

           So essentially, Winchell (and similar columnists, like the twin movie-biz harpies , Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons) was the original Mean Tweeter.....and unlike today, his column, which read like a collection of tweets jammed together, stood largely unanswered and unopposed. If Winchell printed some nasty swipe at you...implying you.cheat on your spouse or  consort with Commies, etc.....you didn't have a laptop or a phone to swiftly one-up him.  You might write an angry letter to the editor, but by that time, your career in the movies was finished, your road to the White House washed out.
     
               "Sweet Smell Of Success" fictionalizes Winchell into the icy-hearted, physically formidable J.J.Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), a bottomless well of bile whose nationally syndicated gossip column and network TV show commands a coast-to-coast audience of millions. His column, a phony mixture of show-biz savvy with rabid right wing patriotism has made him a power-wielding cultural icon. He's a journalistic nightmare.....the worst kind of bully armed with a bully pulpit.

                This preening reptile does have one soft spot......his unhealthy, overly possessive would-be guardianship over his 20-something kid sister Susie (Susan Harrison), a sweetly naive young woman who's fallen head-over heels in love with Steve Dallas a nice-guy jazz musician.(Martin Milner). Scheming to secretly break up this romance, Hunsecker enlists the aid of a hungrily ambitious press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) whose livelihood thrives or dies on Hunsecker's printing favorable news about Falco's clients. When Falco's initial effort to part the young lovers fails, Hunsecker vengefully cuts off Falco from getting any of his public relations shmooze into the column. ("You're dead, son...get yourself buried...")  Broke and increasingly desperate to please Hunsecker, Sidney placates him by concocting a slimy new plan to destroy Dallas's reputation. ("Cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river...")  Round and round they go, Sidney and J.J., like a cobra and a mongoose who've temporarily joined forces.

               And that brings us to the true glory of this film.....the script written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, based on Lehman's novella. Think of every time you've ever come up with a sharp, witty, devastating comeback line......unfortunately to a conversation you already had days,weeks, or months ago. Now imagine an entire movie in which every character always snaps out the most perfect, truest, nastiest, and darkly sardonic thing to say....at the exact moment it needs to be said.....directed to the person to whom it will do the most damage.  Virtually every line of dialogue in this movie is a stone cold keeper......it would takes us days to list them all, through movie buffs usually remember one of Lancaster's best lines, snarled at Curtis, "I'd hate to take a bite out of you, you're like a cookie full of arsenic..."

              We couldn't help recalling "Sweet Smell Of Success" in that the power its cynical nightcrawlers deploy against each other is primarily verbal.....a battleground of smears, insults and vicious lies calculated to draw blood. Words matter in this film's dark universe, words maim and wound, sometimes carelessly and more often than not, with purposeful malice.

              Walter Winchell, the real J.J.Hunsecker, after a lifetime of trafficking  in libel and grade school-worthy insults, died as a forgotten has been. This movie based on his rampaging gutter journalism doesn't seem too far away and removed anymore......not when 60 years later, the so-called leader of the Free World uses Twitter much like  Lancaster's Hunsecker uses his newspaper column.....to spit out a daily barrage of personal vitriol, delusional untruths easily fact-checked and personal derision to counter every perceived slight.  "Sweet Smell Of Success" remains fresh as yesterday's headlines (and probably tomorrow's)......only the media method has been upgraded.  And lucky for us, since everybody has access to the same media now, a would-be, wanna-be Winchell never goes unanswered (or un-mocked).....which, to our delight, further enrages our so-called Fearful Leader.

             If you remember the first sentence of our post, then it shouldn't be any surprise that we pound our keyboard with 5 stars (*****), for "Sweet Smell Of Success", a breaking news FIND OF FINDS.

'HIDDEN BODIES' REVIEW......GO WEST, YOUNG PSYCHO.....OUR FAVORITE KILLER INVADES LA LA LAND....

Hidden Bodies (2016) by Caroline Kepnes  continues the disturbing but brutally witty mis-adventures of Joe Goldberg, NYC bookstore manager and dedicated murderer in his all consuming pursuit of true love. Once again solely narrated by Joe, so we only experience the story through his sociopath's funhouse-mirror mindset, this sequel to Kepnes's "You" deposits Joe amongst all the sun-baked, drug-mellowed,  self absorbed strivers of Los Angeles.

            Joe heads for the coast in murderous pursuit of Amy, a girl he deemed the latest great-love-of-his-life until she robbed him and fled to LA.  Though he has damnable luck finding her, he quickly accumulates a coterie of La La land oddballs, all of them deftly skewered by Kepnes's up-to-the-minute pop culture driven prose. And once again, Joe finds love.....or literally Love, as in Love Quinn,  daughter of grocery chain millionaires and exactly Joe's type....perpetually sexually aroused. Unfortunately for Joe, Love comes equipped and joined at the angst with her worthless twin brother Forty, a coked-up wastrel who fancies himself a film biz player.

             Even if you haven't read the first book, you'll quickly realize that Joe, who's like Matt Damon's Tom Ripley crossed with a meaner  Woody Allen, won't long tolerate any poor soul he judges an impediment to his happily-ever-after with love....and Love. A fresh body count begins, but author Kepnes, a brilliant plotting sadist, enjoys hurling multiple curveballs at Joe, reveling in every stunning reversal-of-fortune she can throw at him. (Lovers of the first book will roar at another of Joe's frying-pan-to-fire visits to Little Compton, Rhode Island, this time to retrieve that embarrassing DNA sample he foolishly left behind.)

              Loaded with cameos from Hollywood stars, a gaudy and grotesque side trip to Vegas and the expected string of...uh....well, 'Hidden Bodies', this book's another fast funny spin through one of BQ's favorite theme parks,  Psycho-World.....(only the T-shirts and caps are missing.) You might end up begging for a third book louder than Joe Goldberg's victims beg for their lives......4 Stars (****)

THE IMDB MESSAGE BOARDS.....(SPOILER ALERT!)...R.I.P., IN REMEMBRANCE, HASTA LA VISTA, BABY, BYE BYE BYE....

            Allow us to grieve a little over the impending demise of the Internet Movie Data Base message boards, which the site will discontinue as of Feb. 20th, 2017......

             IMDB's rational for this, and we quote, is that the boards no longer supply a 'positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our users'.  For those of you who aren't fluent in Public Relations Spin-Speak, as a public service we'll give you the English translation......"Here's the thing, the boards are infested with so many repulsive, psychotic, mean-spirited trolls, our site's like a 250 million room hotel with unstoppable, un-killable bedbugs. And we don't have the time, the personnel, or the desire to fumigate.  So we're gonna have to take out all the beds......sorry, you can't stay in the rooms anymore, but you're free to roam around the halls......"

             What we'll miss: The IMDB boards provided a fun, and contrary to the site's opinion, useful stopoff if a plot point or story glitch confused or baffled you.....you could, just like the Wizard Of Oz,  commiserate, confer and otherwise hobnob with other posters who were either just as confused as you ("Yes, I didn't understand the hell was going in this movie either...") or would chime in to helpfully straighten you out. ("The guy with the mohawk and briefcase was Brad Pitt's long lost brother!")

              And if you felt passionate enough about a film, TV show or actor to post an opinion.....you could end up  engaging with a host of other people whose opinions might be diametrically opposed to yours, but valid and well written nonetheless.

             Unfortunately.....and we see IMDB's point here, the message boards, like the rest of unfettered social media, gave every dark-hearted, vile soul in the world free reign to publish their every inhuman thought that popped into their addled heads....(BQ covered this same ground in our Jan.30, 2017 post, "The Id From Outer Space".....) Sometimes the sheer viciousness of their comments could provoke you to shocked laughter.....especially when these slugs-from-hell got into extended message-board arguments with each other, like comic book villains hurling laser-powered insults from their fingertips.

            But like public discourse in every media these days, the IMDB trolls dragged the message boards deeply into the gutter, which we guess reached the tipping point with the folks in charge......we remember stopping into the board of a gifted young actress we admired and recoiled at the sheer number of sociopaths taking out their rapist fantasies for a public stroll. A damn shame, since the boards also functioned as a forum for millions of legitimate, articulate and passionately well spoken film and television aficionados.

           So hail and farewell, IMDB Boards......we'll surely miss the entertainment value of posters' reviews, comments, and the invaluable explanations that cleared up the last ten minutes of that Mumblecore Indie film we suffered through.......can't say we'll miss that creepy, detestable bunch whose greatest ambition involved rubbing some actress's feet......

           

'LAW & ORDER SVU'S 400TH EPISODE.....DEPRAVED BY THE BELL....(CUE THE 'GONG-GONG')

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999 -  )  Now in its 18th season, this NBC show, one of the many crown jewels in writer-producer Dick Wolf's empire of lawyer/cop/doctor/fireman dramas, rolled out its 400th episode.  And the BQ couldn't wait to take another Wednesday night horror-filled carnival ride through New York City's bottomless pit of homicidal sexual depravity....and watch our dogged SVU team hunt, capture and arrest the permanently erect, hellish fiend-of-the-week.

            No doubt the show's writers struggled to create an especially loathsome predator for this milestone episode....NBC loudly trumpeted 'viewer discretion advised' at the beginning, which mostly cues 'SVU' fans to smack their lips and rub their hands in delirious glee. (Not that we'd ever stoop to such base behavior....we only screamed out one quick 'whoop!')

             Did they succeed? Hmm....not bad, but in all the years of watching this show, we recall much scummier perps in 'SVU's long, long  line of rapists, pedophiles, human traffickers, and assorted serial killers. No. 400 featured an uptown entitled shrink (Sara Wynter) a deeply conniving serial rapist of teen boys. Her traumatized 15 year old son inadvertently shoots and kills his best bud when he stumbles on Best Bud getting it on with Mom. (Mom, ever quick on the uptake, shouts 'he's raping me! to junior.....egging on the poor quaking kid to blast away)

             But this psycho-babble harpy quack isn't fooling our indomitable SVU Commander (Mariska Hargitay) for one New York minute. Hargitay, now a producer of SVU , has rapidly transformed the show into an almost one-woman vehicle for herself......the camera lingers on endless, loving close-ups of her as she deploys withering, disgusted stares at her quarry.  Unlike her previous Commander, (Dann Florek), she spends little or no time in the office barking orders, much preferring the fun of barging into our prime suspect's apartment, mainly for the purpose of giving out those 'you-make-me-sick, you vile pervert' gazes.

              As in many SVU episodes, we reach the plot's juicy wham-bams at the halfway point, when the weekly Slimeball is dragged into court, there to be prosecuted by lightning-on-his-feet motormouth DA Barba (Raul Esparza). But this episode's gargoyle, Dr. Boy-Rapin' Mom, ain't no fool, hiring that wily defender of all Depraved Douchebags, John Buchanan (Delaney Williams, always superb at painting his monstrous clients as persecuted pillars of the community...)

               If you're watching SVU live, starting at 9:00 Eastern Time, you know by now that at 10:50, just before the last chunk of commercials,  the writers will unleash their final twist or plot reversal, guaranteed to make you and the entire cast drop their jaws in unison. (You can tell the writers are really desperate if they resort to a courtroom shootout, ending their plot by gunfire-ex-machina...) Episode #400 definitely trots out one of the better twists, further cementing  Dr. Mom's utter malevolence.

               At last we reach the signature fadeout of all Dick Wolf-produced shows, but especially potent in SVU.....designed to leave you queasy and unsettled. Yes, there's some amount of closure but usually at a horrible cost, strewn with untimely cruel death,  destroyed lives, broken families, and eternal emotional damage to both victims and the SVU cops who championed them. By the time Dick Wolf's credit pops up at the end, you realize you've been on a mini- Heart Of Darkness cruise and you're ready to start muttering "the horror....the horror..."

              Does that mean we won't come back for next week's episode?  In the immortal words of Will Smith...."Oh Hell no!"  To this episode and the show itself, we hand out 4 indictments....(****) Cue the Dick Wolf celebrated scene-punctuation sound.....'Gong-Gong.'

             

'THE BIG COUNTRY'.....GLORIOUS WESTERN GRAND OPERA OR THINLY VEILED GLOBAL STRIFE?

The Big Country (1958) means business when it puts "big" in its title.....a lengthy (2 hour and 45 minutes) larger than life western directed by the top-of-the-A-List William Wyler ("Ben Hur"), the film leisurely unfolds itself like a frontier Grand Opera. Big emotions, big character rivalries, big scenery, big showdowns.....all of it stunningly scored by composer Jerome Moross, crafting what most movie music lovers (including the BQ) consider one of the greatest film scores ever written.

           Wyler maintained his reputation as a brutal taskmaster with actors.....years after the film was completed, many of the lead actors refused to ever discuss their grueling experience making it. But the film's overblown visuals and overheated performances have always captured our imagination.....and we know we're not the only ones....."The Big Country" always seems to tour the cable movie channels year round.

             We doubt today's multiplex crowds would have the patience for any film so deliberately paced as this one......no Dolby Surround explosions and shootouts to goose you every 8 minutes. But if you sit back and let "The Big Country" envelop you with its almost mythic clash-of-the-land-barons story and soul stirring music you can't help being sucked in.  It makes a great companion piece to producer David O. Selznick's similarly bloated western "Duel In The Sun".......showmen to their core,  the legendary hubris and meticulous attention to detail of Selznick and Wyler permeates every frame of their films.

              Like many legendary epics, "The Big Country"  ended up employing a revolving door of writers to craft its script. But the movie still sounds like it has one clear voice.....and the dialogue is liberally peppered with memorable lines, some deadly serious, some explosively funny. (Burl Ives, playing a grizzled cantankerous leader of a roughshod, dirt-scrabbling clan, delivers a blistering speech that earned him a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. )

              Gregory Peck plays a stoic, Lincoln-esque-to-a-fault New England sea captain who lands way out west in the middle of a raging civil war between two frontier ranching Titans, the upper-crust gentlemanly Major Terrill (Charles Bickford) and the roughshod Mountain Man Rufus Hannassey.(Ives). Terrill lives like an aristocrat, giving fancy balls in his huge mansion while Hannassey and his family live in cabins in the middle of a canyon, like Butch Cassidy's hole-in-the-wall gang.  Peck claimed Wyler's intention here was a thinly disguised version of  the world's global conflicts......but more than ever today, the film more closely mirrors(to us, anyway)   a 'haves versus the have-nots' struggle, the rich and entitled against the angry, resentful, put upon and forgotten.  (We'll leave that to you to decide and discuss.....)

                Peck strides into this boiling tempest as the fiance of Terrill's spoiled daughter (Carrol Baker). He's wrongly mistaken for a coward by everyone in the Terrill camp, including his rival for Baker's love,  the Major's top ranch hand (Charlton Heston, soon to be rewarded by Wyler with the title role in 'Ben Hur')  This all takes a lonnnnngg time to play out (remember the film's running time) until Peck finally reveals his unyielding courage and resolve. (Already known to us from an early sequence in which Greg secretly tames the Terrill ranch's wildest horse...)

                 Aided by the spectacular Moross score, Wyler fills his screen with imposing landscapes and ripe melodrama......the toxic exchanges between Ives' Rufus and his worthless, snivelling son Buck (Chuck Conners) provide the comedy relief.....and in keeping with the Grand Opera vibe, Wyler films the long expected brawl between Peck and Heston from miles away, rendering them tiny figures scrambling around a nightime, arid moonscape. Brilliant stuff.

               So Pardner....if you got yourself about a 3 hour chunk 'o time, BQ recommends you sit down a spell with "The Big Country".....cause they sure as shootin' don't make 'em like this anymore. We fast-draw 5 stars (*****) and declare it a FIND OF FINDS.

'YOU' REVIEW......WHEN LOVE GOES STALK RAVING MAD.....

YOU by Caroline Kepnes (2015) took us back to that wonderfully perverse moment in Hitchcock's "Psycho". (If you haven't seen "Psycho", stop reading this paragraph.....actually, if you haven't seen it, either start watching it on the device you're using right now, or go find a copy....immediately.) Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates, having stuffed Janet Leigh's perforated body in the trunk of her car, pushes the car into a swampy pond and anxiously awaits its total submergence. Down and down it goes....until it suddenly stops, only halfway under water. Uh-oh......Perkins holds his breath in worry......and for a guilty moment, identifying with his plight.....so do we!  For a few seconds, nasty genius Hitchcock has turned us all into Norman's co-conspirators, praying for Janet and her car to go fully glub glub....

               Which is what author Caroline Kepnes accomplishes through the entire length of her brilliantly funny and horrific thriller "You". Her outrageous choice here is to have the book First Person narrated by its sociopath stalker/killer, Joe Goldberg, a young New York City bookstore manager searching for his soulmate. Forgoing college, but self-schooled from his avid reading, Joe takes you on a pop-culture bibliophile's rollercoaster through his deeply sick mind, loaded with hilarious, pithy references to books, films and music.

               Joe's new overwhelming obsession, severely Manic Pixie Dreamgirl Guinevere Beck (of just plain Beck, as she prefers) is a borderline nymphomaniac graduate student pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Minus the propensity for homicide, she's almost as crazy as Joe, so you can see why he falls hard for her. As a dedicated psychotic stalker, Joe fully devotes himself to hacking all her social media devices, cherishing her stolen underwear, you know, the usual stuff.....and it won't take you long to figure out it's lethally dangerous for anyone to stand between Joe, the wise-ass demented Don Quixote, and Beck, his hot-to-trot Dulcinea.

                Joe's irresistible narration, stuffed with jokes and assorted withering witticisms, makes the book resemble "Annie Hall" re-filmed as a horror movie......you won't know whether to laugh or cringe. (His ludicrous mis-adventures in stalking Beck including excursions to a costume party and a dead-of-winter Rhode Island resort would make perfect romantic comedy sequences, if it weren't for the fact that Joe's a monster....)

                That's all we dare tell you about this book, except that Beached Quill considers it a must-read and gruesomely awards it 5 creepy stars (*****) a most definite FIND OF FINDS.