SPECIAL COVFEVE EDITION.....DEPT. OF OUR LEAST FAVORITE COVFEVE'S........

"I have the best words..."      No.....you don't.

Baby Orange Leaves The Paris Climate Accords....  The only scientists the U.S. believes in now....the chemists who mixed that orange stuff that goes on his face and hair......

The Kushner-ator to take a leave of absence??  No...No,....can't happen.Not possible......who would run the country?  Who would create peace and harmony throughout the Middle East, the world and all known planets?

"Baywatch" dies..... and for one brief shining moment.....the world is a better place.

The Portland hate crime stabbing scumbucket....Take a good look at this guy.....he's as much a child of Trump's as Ivanka.........

Sean Hannity........Lego Psycho

Tiger Woods asleep at the wheel from his meds   Says Bill Cosby, "What is he, nuts? Any idiot knows that stuff's for girls......"

CNN fires Kathy Griffin.....officially confirming what the entire civilized world has known for decades.....she's not funny.

Lebanon bans "Wonder Woman" cause Gal Godot's Isreali......Jared Kushner has ordered stern retaliation......only prints of "Baywatch" and "CHIPS" will be exported to Lebanon for the remainder of the year.......

Trump staffers consider vetting his tweets....They'll be the ones that end with...#whack-a-doodle"...

'SWASHBUCKLER'.........THEME PARK PIRATES....LONG BEFORE DEPP...

Swashbuckler (1976)  Every several decades or so, movie studios would yearn to bring back pirate movies.....

            The BQ can't fault their daydreams.....we love pirate movies for the same reasons as the moguls.....pirate capers offer everything that makes people fall in love with movies.....action, spectacle, romance, and joyfully impossible derring-do....(and to quote a Danny Kaye song, ..villains who end up at the angle herring do...)

            Here's the problem:  Pirate movies, by their very nature, are not cheap to make. Costumes. Big ass 18th century boats. Ocean battles. Ocean stuff altogether.....(think that's easy? Ask Steven Speilberg and any other director who filmed movies on the water...) Stunts, dozens of sword-swinging extras, cannon blasts, yada , yada......

            A huge risk.....and the potential for a massive belly flop. Ten years after this film, Roman Polanski, of all people, tried one;;;;"Pirates" with Walter Matthau. Glub glub to the bottom of the sea. Nine years after that one, director Renny Harlin and then wife Geena David set sail with "Cutthroat Island"......sinking so deep that they'd need the submersibles that cruised around the Titanic to find it....not until 2003 did the unlikely combination of the Disney studios and Johnny Depp finally hit the audience sweet spot with 'Pirates Of The Carribbean".

             Back in the mid 70's, yo ho hope sprung eternal for Universal as they launched "Swashbuckler"....a practically encyclopedic compendium of every known pirate movie trope in cinema history.......a dashing pirate (Robert Shaw, fresh from his 'Jaws' triumph), a feisty heroine (Geniveve Bujold, glumly fulfilling her last contractual obligation to Universal) and a sneering, sadistic tyrant  (the strangely miscast comic actor Peter Boyle, hamming it up like he's in a 'Saturday Night Live' skit )

            Also along the ride: Beau Bridges, almost bursting a blood vessel overplaying the bumbling military foil named, we kid you not, Major Folly......James Earl Jones having a fine old time as Shaw's second in command, and the late great Geoffrey Holder, mainly there to break into his trademark, booming laughter, which was all about the bass, no treble.....

            Entertaining?  With this cast, backed up with Universal's big bucks and its army of technicians, how could it not be. Swordfights, chases, romantic sparks.....and one truly eye popping stunt in which three daring stunt performers and a wagon full of bananas go flying off a cliff into the sea....

            Best of all, the film featured a richly conceived, rousing music score by John Addison, brimming with multiple, memorable themes for all of film's  duels and chases. More than any contributor to this film, Addison struggled to lift the movie over and above its generic, corporate atmosphere.

           And there's where the movie fell down...(for us, anyway).....despite all its strenuous attempts to entertain, "Swashbuckler" remains an artless, company product, completely devoid of any creative vision or movie-making finesse. It has the look and feel of a studio guided tour of an ambitious theme park....Pirate-Land. Bloodless, juiceless, lacking any genuine filmmaking passion.

          You finally get a climactic, lengthy fencing duel between Shaw and Boyle.....but it's routinely filmed and staged with all the 'let's-get-over-with' style of an old made-for-TV film. Directed by Universal company journeyman, James Goldstone, the movie hits all its required points.....but with the exception of Addison's score, with  no real enthusiasm.....

          Having gotten all that off our chest, we still like to revisit "Swashbuckler" from time to time....sure, it's a Universal theme park movie.......but who doesn't love a theme park visit every so often?  So we'll yell "Arrrrgggh" and swashbuckle 3 stars (***)......a nice pirate ride we don't have to wait in line for.....and we could listen to that Addison music forever.....
         
         

'WHERE EAGLES DARE' & 'KELLY'S HEROES'........WAR IS HELL.....EXCEPT FOR CLINT......

Where Eagles Dare (1969), Kelly's Heroes (1970)  MGM boldly stepped up to the plate two years in a row with big budget World War 2 adventures......even as the country drifted inexorably toward anti-war, anti-military sentiment........these movies, brimming with explosions, machine gun fire and hundreds of perforated Germans, hit the marketplace just as millions of young people were growing their hair down past their shoulders and sticking flowers in the muzzles of National Guardsmen's rifles...

            "Where Eagles Dare", taken from an original screenplay by prolific warmaster Alistair MacLean ("The Guns Of Navarone") was one of the last staunchly traditional studio war films.......serious as a heart attack, with stoic, super-heroic commandos grimly going about their explosive business of outwitting  Nazi forces while racking up a higher German body count than the bombing of Dresden.....

            Scored to the relentless military snare drums of Ron Goodwin's ominous score, the film maintains its stiff upper lip even though its heroics are far fetched to the point of fantasy......it's like watching all fifteen episodes of a 1940's Saturday matinee serial stitched together. Our two commandos (Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood) stay invincible throughout as they penetrate a German castle fortress to rescue an American general, slaying countless Germans along the way....(Burton even peevishly gripes about sustaining a minor flesh wound on his hand......as for the implacably stone-faced Eastwood, he remembers to give a polite 'hello' to various unlucky sentries before plugging them....)

            Maybe that's why we love "Where Eagles Dare".....as ludicrous as it is, it believes whole-heartedly in itself.  Nobody kids around, even if we silently chuckle at the sight of German firepower forever missing our heroes, while their own guns mow down enemy soldiers like fields of wheat... We know that Burton's grim composure mostly comes from his being hung over and exhausted with filmmaking overall, but it fits his character perfectly.....

           Halfway through the film, MacLean detonates multiple plot twists that would stagger Agatha Christie.....but don't worry, Clint Eastwood handily resolves all these confusing complications by taking most of the supporting cast off the playing board, so to speak.  (One guy we wish had stuck around to the end: the black-uniformed Gestapo slimeball, a strutting, curly blonde-haired Aryan stud, Siegrfried  reborn, wonderfully played by Derren Nesbitt....)

           To MGM's chagrin, the surefire recipe of Burton, Eastwood and Alistair MacLean high adventure stirred up only modest box office results.......especially troubling since the studio had yet another big-budget, high profile Clint Eastwood war movie in the pipeline for the following year....how could such a movie be made palatable to moviegoers who stayed away from the old fashioned heroics and stirring bravery of "Where Eagles Dare"?

           Enter "Kelly's Heroes", pumped up and re-fitted with modern day sarcasm, casual immorality and a wildly anachronistic characterm seemingly dropped into the movie from the Woodstock music festival.....

           Forget the stirring music.....the opening firefights get scored with a bubbly pop tune contributed by MGM's new music director Mike Curb.....(his mission: insert wildly inappropriate songs into as many studio films as he could ruin..)

          Forget any patriotic quest to win the war.....Eastwood and cohorts Telly Savalas and Don Rickles go behind enemy lines in France strictly to loot a bank of its 16 millions dollars in gold bars. They wipe out mass quantities of Germans......but that's only because the Germans have the temerity to stand between our amoral heroes and the golden stash. ....

          And for those who craved a more hip approach to war than "Where Eagles Dare", the movie delivers its oddball wild card........a character named, oddly enough... Oddball, a 1960's laid back hippie jammed into this movie like the ultimate square peg pounded into a round hole. Played with full San Francisco Haight-Ashbury helium by Donald Sutherland, Oddball decries anyone who gives him 'negative waves' while commanding tank assaults on German positions.

            We guess we're supposed to root for these guys to grab their gold because.....well, they're our guys......and we're encouraged to laugh at the blowhard general (Carol O'Conner, playing virtually the same role from "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?") who mistakenly thinks our guys penetrated the German lines to help the war effort. Hah.....fat chance, sucker.

            And so there you had MGM's all new reconditioned overhaul of a World War 2 movie, spiffed up with hippies, pop tunes and a we're-just-in-it-for-the-money lead characters....welcome to the 70's. (We'll say this much for 'Kelly's Heroes'.....for those of us sick of unreal CGI, the film offers the simple pleasures of watching lots of stuff really get blown up.....and blown up real good......

           For the gloriously unbelievable but played ramrod straight "Where Eagles Dare", we'll always award 4 stars (****).......but for "Kelly's Heroes", a ragtag collection of desperate MGM marketing strategies posing as a war movie, we'll barely scrape up 1 &1/2 stars) (* & 1/2)

           ..

'GETTING STRAIGHT'.......THE GOULD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY....

Getting Straight (1970)  As we mentioned in our post on l970's "WUSA", it took years for the slowly grinding development wheels of Hollywood studios to fully respond to the violent upheavals of blood-drenched 1968......riots, horrific assassinations of MLK and RFK, the toxic divide over the Vietnam war...all ending in the coronation of Trickster-In-Chief Richard Nixon, distrusted and despised by an entire young generation. (any of this sound familiar??)

           After two years, studios begin to roll out their counterculture attacks on the Powers-That-Be, starting with twin campus riot movies, "Getting Straight" and "The Strawberry Statement", both hitting the market place in early summer......not long after the Kent State massacre in which National Guardsmen, sent to quell campus unrest, opened fire on students, killing four of them.

           "Strawberry Statement" was instantly disposable, a puffball negligible artsy-fartsy nothing, directed with a 'hey-look-at-me' visual slickness by a non-entity promoted from making TV commercials....

            "Getting Straight", however, proved a different animal altogether......a riotous, take no prisoners, in your face comedy that laid out all the festering, societal open wounds in one massive violent and funny spectacle......racism, sexism, Vietnam, the clash of generations turned into open warfare.....all of it presented in scenes that rarely dipped below fever pitch.....

             This three ring circus of a torn apart country had its perfect ringmaster in Elliot Gould, who ruled the films of the early 70's playing the staunchly defiant humanist railing against the idiocy, bigotry and madness of Authority.....(too many of these 'rage-against-the-Man' movies in too short a time eventually burned out Gould, he began to look shell-shocked, but he was still in top form for "Getting Straight")

            Gould is Harry Bailey, flat broke graduate student pursuing a high school teaching certificate and a Masters degree in Literature. The harried Harry, a world weary Vietnam vet and survivor of the brutal 1960's civil rights protests, views both sides of the raging political/cultural wars with jaundiced disillusionment.........even as they all curry his favor, the the passionate, newly revolutionized students and the clueless, insensitive, obdurate bureaucrats who run the sprawling state university serving as the film's backdrop.

             Harry's futile efforts to remain apart from the chaos swirling around him invariably provoke him into the film's highpoints.....his long, scenery-chewing comic tirades, resembling Lenny Bruce standup routines.  Some of his most cutting, cruelest attacks get leveled on his sweet, adorable girlfriend Jan (Candice Bergen), a former prom-queen airhead whom Harry takes entitled pride in having rescued from a life of middle class suburban mediocrity.......and never lets her forget it.

             Ultimately the deep flaws in Harry's character leave him undone.......as much as we're invited to admire his compassion, liberalism and lethal wit..... we cringe watching Harry's dreams shattered by his unstable moral compass, not much better than that of a Nixon White House aide.    A grievous error of judgement (and one whose results you can see coming from 50 miles away) leaves Harry at the mercy of his nemesis, the head of the school's education department Dr. Willhunt  (Jeff Corey).....who sees the rebellious Harry as nothing more than a preening elitist who envisions mentoring the next Salinger while ignoring most of his other, less gifted students. (We know Harry would never do that, which makes his comeuppance even more wrenching.)

               Besides Gould, we wouldn't dare not mention the movie's other MVP, director Richard Rush who propulsively pushes this film into both melodramatic and comedic hysteria with every scene. The movie's never at rest, and neither is Rush's camera......constantly going in and out of focus from actor to actor.  As for the politics, you couldn't pin Rush down on what side he falls on.....he lays out the generational battles like he's a cold promoter of gladiatorial spectacle....for him, it's all violent grist for the mill, the stuff of exploitation. The students are largely depicted as naive dopes,waiting to get their heads bashed (you can see in them the dawn of the heavy handed political correctness on today's campuses)......the film's  'grown-ups' are cardboard asses, mostly pop-up targets for Harry's withering asides.

              Rush arrived at this film from directing action-packed biker movies and with the help of his able stunt director Chuck Bail, he brilliantly stages "Getting Straight"s centerpiece sequence.....a near apocalyptic campus riot, complete with billowing clouds of tear gas, stunt-students tumbling off concrete balconies, and vicious cops slamming nightsticks across the heads of bleeding college girls. It's a snapshot of l970 America imagined as a movie action sequence, exhilarating and disturbing at the same time. (Rush constantly betrays his exploitation roots throughout the film, never missing a chance to have the camera mimic Harry's girl ogling point of view.....and few years later, he and Chuck Bail will wreak vehicular havoc on San Francisco in "Freebie And The Bean",Rush's equally ragged deconstruction of the cop-buddy genre....covered in a previous post)....

             By the time "Getting Straight" reaches its Armageddon-it-on conclusion, with the campus now occupied by more troops than we have in Afghanistan, Harry Bailey, having self-destructed his own future, smiles at the sight of the rampaging students, "Whoopee," he mutters.   It has taken him till the very end of the movie to embrace the chaos that Richard Rush has been cheering on since the opening credits.....why not enjoy the abyss, Rush seems to be telling us.....and he makes it look like all American violent fun....and sexy as hell.

            A one of a kind moment in time......as seen by a filmmaker who may not hold any discernible point of view......but knows how to pump life into his movie....we'll grade 3 stars (***).....don't forget chapters 4,8,9,and 10 for tomorrow.....

         

'VON RYAN'S EXPRESS'.......FRANK DOES WORLD WAR 2......HIS WAY.......

Von Ryan's Express (1965)   Since we previously covered Hollywood military comedy with "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?", we thought we'd  cover the flipside.....the 1960's robust Hollywood all star World War 2 action-adventure.....and this film's as good an example as any....

          "The Guns Of Navarone" (1961) set the template for all subsequent such films.....throw in a mix of American and British soldiers at odds with each other as they face impossible odds and thousands of German troops. Ambitious in scope and filled with ferocious machine gun battles and bursting grenades, these films flourished until more or less coming to end with 1969's "Where Eagles Dare", appropriately, like 'Narvarone' also based on an Alaistair MacLean story. (By that we mean that 'Where Eagles Dare' was the last of these war adventures to take itself seriously......coming in its wake: a uneven variety of attempts to turn this genre on its head with comedy or anti-war satire....)

            "Von Ryan's Express", sturdy, suspenseful, and bestowed with the star power of Frank Sinatra, ably acquits itself as a standard meat 'n potatoes Studio war movie. It rarely rises above efficient, in its competent direction by Mark Robson and its punch-the-time-clock performance by Sinatra......but that's all anyone ever expected in these l960's war adventures.

              Sinatra plays Ryan,  an Army air corp colonel who, after crash landing in Italy, finds himself the top ranking officer among the Americans and Brits in the Italian POW camp he's thrown into. This doesn't sit well with the Stiff Upper Brit, Major Fincham (Trevor Howard) who commands the UK forces and most definitely resents Ole Blue Eyes taking charge.....

              Frank crisply barks out orders in his spare dialogue......in which you can sense Sinatra's legendary impatience with spending any long amount of time making a movie. After the Italians desert the POW camp, Ryan's  leniency in dealing with the camp's Fascist commander comes back to haunt him.... leading to more POWs killed and the rest of the prisoners recaptured by the German army. Fincham and the men bitterly dub Ryan as 'Von Ryan', blaming his too humane decisions for their predicament.

             That key plot point could have been the basis for no end of blistering, confrontational scenes...... but it's not really on this movie's agenda, so if you're expecting the kind of Gregory Peck/David Niven dramatic fireworks that enlivened "Guns Of Navarone", forget it.  The film briskly moves on to its next set of breathless escapes and besides, Sinatra looks like he's already checking his watch for the next flight back to Vegas.....

              Sinatra, Howard and company next hijack and commandeer the Italian train the Germans are transporting them on.......and so begins the film's main event, a tense hide-and-seek. cat-and-mouse duel as our Allied escapees attempt to sneak an entire train past the pursuing Germans, hoping to divert it into Switzerland and freedom.

              Great rousing stuff happens at the end...(this is one of the few 60's movies where that beautifully rendered artwork illustration in the poster actually mirrors a scene from the film). Frank and the gang, apparently only a few yards from the Swiss border, have to battle it out with German troops and Luftwaffe dive bombers.....(and yes, you'll have to forgive the now primitive blue-screen special effects process they had to use to pull this off......but on the other hand, that's no CGI train. Back then, movies still employed real ones...)

               We couldn't help wishing Sinatra gave a little than casual commitment to the role....but hey. that was Frank, who at his point in his career, coasted through his films like they were airports where he had temporary layovers.  Thankfully his walk-through performance doesn't slow down "Von Ryan's Express"......Frank, Trevor and our Allied boys (including a very young James Brolin) do a bang up job making this train run on time. 3 stars (***) for another 1940's war caper as seen through 1960's color and wide screen....

           

'STAR WARS'.......40 YEARS AGO......A FOND REMEMBRANCE......

Star Wars (1977)   Memorial Day weekend, 1977......no, it wasn't called "Episode IV: A New Hope" when we lined up to buy a ticket.....it was just plain "Star Wars".......neither George Lucas or 20th Century Fox executives could imagine, in their most orgasmic dreams, the reception waiting for this film.......

               The buzz?  Virtually invisible.....but we all had a feeling. No internet, no twitter, no facebook, no instagram, no youtube, , no nationally covered Comic-Cons......The trailer? A glum, ordinary thing that Fox stuck in front of their 1976 Christmas release, "Silver Streak"......

               The theater? A run-of-the-mill, downtown Philly 500 seater.....Philadelphia theaters in those days were privately owned by two families who operated movie houses that weren't much better than watching your Uncle Morty and Aunt Bea's 8 millimeter vacation films in their basement......

               The cast?  Mark who? Harrison who?  Carrie.....oh right, that dull-eyed Lolita who offered to screw Warren Beatty in "Shampoo"......

               The box-office lady wore a "May The Force Be With You" button....whatever the hell that meant....(this was still before the days when downtown box-office windows had to be reinforced with 5 inch thick, bulletproof, lead-lined glass...)

               The lights go down......John Williams' fanfare manages to blast through the theater's mundane, ordinary sound system......the Imperial cruiser endlessly glides across the screen.....and we the audience practically float off our seats....in a giddy, transporting high, the likes of which we've only experienced a handful of times in a movie theater.....

              The group experience here almost defies rational description......we're not simply enjoying the movie together......we're bonding with this movie as if it's a two hour giant wave that we're all surfing simultaneously........spontaneous laughter, cheers, applause.......it's like watching a Phillies ball game where all our guys hit a home run every time at bat......

               We all know we've never seen anything like this......up til now, sci-fi fantasy has remained resolutely grim and dystopian.....we're all doomed, either nuked to hell or stuck in our cubicles eating Soylent Green crackers.  And suddenly.......we're all back at the kiddie matinees, rooting for the good guys to triumph.......but unlike the poverty-budgeted sci-fiers we grew up with....this one looks like the studio made it with the same lavish technical skills as the ....holy crap, as the grown-up movies!

             For two hours, the film and its audience embrace each other like long lost lovers finally united.....and in all our years of movie-going, it's a uniquely rare moment we can only recall happening a few times.....at the first showing of "Goldfinger", hearing the crowd roar with delight at the coolness of Connery's Bond....and at the first showings of "Jaws", with the crowd alternately laughing and screaming.....

            Our Galactic  heroes receive their medallions from Carrie, the credits come up, Williams' stirring symphony launches once again.....and applause bursts across the auditorium......and we all leave the theater, still holding on to those magical hours that will stay with us for a lifetime.....

            Just thought we'd share our most favorite of memories.......of what it was like to see "Star Wars" on that warm, sunny weekend of May, l977.......and why those two brief but wonder-filled hours of our life will forever have 5 stars (*****)

               

             

ONE NIGHT OF TV MADNESS..... ABC'S REVOLTING REMAKE....... 'SVU' NAILS ITS ULTIMATE PERP....BABY ORANGE.....

         Two gaudy spectacles splashed across rival networks last night.......one of them an extended, laughable trainwreck.....and the other, one of the most blood-soaked, hate-drenched indictments of the Trump era we've ever seen on TV so far.....

           First, the trainwreck, ABC's monumentally embarrassing remake of "Dirty Dancing."

           Only greedy, ratings hungry network executives could possibly have thought this was a good idea. The original, a low budget, hastily slapped together raggedy thing, caught lightning in a bottle.....one of those little miracles of filmmaking where everything comes together to make some accidental magic....

           So the network, looking to fill up three hours of air time, foolishly attempted a giant, inflated Macy's Parade balloon version of the film.......dragging out negligible subplots, miscasting the lead roles badly and generally making the film appear like a bloated Alternate Dark Universe version that slipped through a black hole and on to the network schedule.

           We won't waste time recollecting all the ludicrous moments in this disaster.....nor will we even mention the names of the actors who found themselves trapped in the maelstrom......there's no need to smear them any further......they probably feel humiliated enough as it is.....

           Meanwhile, as ABC's travesty unraveled before unbelieving eyes, "Law & Order: SVU" presented its two-part season finale, a non-stop horror show centered around an unspeakable rape-and-murder attack on a Muslim family....

           Earlier in the season, NBC yanked one of 'SVU's episodes,one of their "this is purely fictitious, but you damn well know the true story we ripped off for this" episodes.....one which depicted a distinctly Trumpian politician played by Gary Cole.

           We don't know if the season finale served as a rebuke to the network for pulling that episode,but we do know the show came roaring back with this stunning example of the "Trump effect" on American society.....the unleashing of previously hidden hatred and bigotry into the country's mainstream....the polluting of America with bullying, prejudice and violence, all publicly displayed and endorsed by the so-called President.....

           Neither Baby Orange or anyone playing an imitation of him appears anywhere in the show....but you can feel the pernicious, toxic, Trump-filled atmosphere that infects the storyline from beginning to end.  It's a perfect hellish storm that leaves nobody in the episode untouched, littered with destroyed lives, broken bleeding bodies and terrible,vexing moral quandaries for the SVU team.

            Typical of an SVU episode, there's no comforting closure, even with the capture and conviction of the two odious Trumpanzees responsible for the rapes and murders....(one of them referencing his glorious leader's remark about all Mexicans being rapists) By the time the episode fades to black, you realize that there's only one real hateful perpetrator hovering over all this misery......and he's still at large, on the loose.....and dangerous to the nation....

            For "Dirty Dancing"....Zero stars (0), a project that never should have existed. For the Law & Order:SVU"  season finale....4 stars (****) for its unflinching portrayal of what the country's reaped with the chaotic reign of Baby Orange.....

           

'40 POUNDS OF TROUBLE'........UNIVERSAL INVADES DISNEY.....

40 Pounds Of Trouble (1962).....gave us another mildly pleasant, Technicolor tour of  early 60's studio fare....one more bouncy lollipop of a movie dug out of the Universal Studios vaults, repackaged with its original artwork and plopped on the Wal Mart budget shelves, along with "Psycho" and "Vertigo".......(yep, definitely an eclectic collection....)

            An easy, breezy remake of the Shirley Temple vehicle "Little Miss Marker", the movie was produced by its star Tony Curtis, playing a role tailored for him.....a dashing, slicker-than-oil Lake Tahoe casino manager, a champion schmoozer, fixer and casual playboy....

             Curtis does have his problems, though......he's something of an OCD neat freak and dares to cross over the Nevada borderline into California only at his peril, pursued there by his vengeful ex-wife's army of lawyers and process servers....

             His newest woes include two girls of varied ages.....a beautiful lounge singer (Suzanne Pleshette) forced on him by the casino's gangster owner (Phil Silvers).....and a little girl (Claire Wilcox) abandoned at the casino by her compulsive gambler father.  (Setting up the gag where the sloppy tot horrifies the fussy Curtis by leaving wet towels strewn about his immaculate bathroom...)

             That's about all that's worth describing here until this movie arrives at its whole reason for existence.....Curtis risks an excursion to California to take the tyke to Disneyland, with Pleshette along as a chaperone. The ex-wife and her legal minions get wind of it and soon a mad, scenic, slapstick dash across the famous theme park ensues, taking up what seems like half the film's running time....

             Loads of fun to watch and a colorful, extended commercial for the park, but we thought it odd that Uncle Walt, who virtually invented multi-media cross promotion, would allow a rival movie studio access to the crown jewel of his empire. We can 't imagine why Disney wouldn't have thrown a Disneyland chase into one of his own comedies(such as "The Shaggy Dog"), rather than let it grace a Universal movie. But then again, Norman Jewison, just starting a long, celebrated directing career, does as good a job as any Disney in-house director turning the park into a comic obstacle course.....

            One truly 'whoa' moment to mention....(or a 'WTF', as you wild 'n crazy Internet kids would say....)....Curtis, Pleshette and little Wilcox evade their pursuers by donning full rubber masks of JFK, Fidel Castro and Nikita Krushchev........say what? Did they really sell those at the Disneyland gift shop??. (We'd dreamily imagine a re-make where the three leads race through EPCOT disguised as Trump, Putin and Rodrigo Duterte.....the three Amigos.)

           A more innocent movie for a more innocent time.....which the BQ always loves to return to, especially when the horrors and absurdities of this day and age stagger the imagination. We'll weigh out 3 stars for '40 Pounds Of Trouble' (***)........an amusing little trifle that gets a lot mileage out of its visit to the happiest place on earth.....

           

R.I.P. SIR ROGER MOORE.........THE BOND-VIVANT OF A GENERATION......

              Like everyone else, the news cycle has overwhelmed us.... with yet another ISIS insect blowing itself up to slaughter children and teens...what with President Baby Orange attempting to stop investigations of himself and his equally loathsome underlings...

              There's nothing much we can add to comment on all this horror, misery and rampant criminality......except to pray for it to end one day......

               But since we started this blog to celebrate our love of films and books.....we'll stick to our mission and turn back to movies......though the news here is also sad.....

               As a lifelong Bond fanboy, this hurts badly, reminding us that while James Bond may stand as an ageless cultural icon, the flesh and blood actors who brought him to life are mortal.....

               Sir Roger, we admit,  was never our favorite Bond......for us, Sir Sean was the ultimate embodiment of the character......but for seven films over a period of twelve years, Moore became Bond for an entire generation of moviegoers....though they varied wildly in quality, we wouldn't have dared miss any of these movies. They weren't Connery Bonds, but they were always damned fun to watch....you could tell Roger had a good time in them....and so did we..

           Wisely,  he made no attempt to imitate or duplicate Connery's sardonic brutality.....he simply channeled Bond through the one-cocked-eyebrow, cheeky, oh-so-British persona he'd honed and burnished through years of playing 'The Saint' on television. We know it didn't sit well with the Connery Faithful.....but audiences embraced his good humor, his willingness to let them in on the absurdity of it all and besides, visually he perfectly looked the part, the tuxedo'd movie-poster Bond come to life.......better actors may have played Bond (as Moore readily agreed), but nobody posed as Bond better than Roger.

             What we did love about him.......from the start, he well understood his place in the cinema universe (as an impossibly handsome, somewhat talented Brit smoothie) and he cheerfully surfed the waves of movie and TV stardom, never failing to appreciate his astounding good fortune and enjoying every minute of it. Nobody could effectively ridicule Moore better than Moore.....his own cheerful self-depreciation became legendary......only Bob Hope topped him when it came to making enthusiastic fun of himself..

             And yet, we find him a tad under-appreciated......whenever called upon, he could step up his game and adapt to any seismic shifts in the Bond films......after the wobbly, slapdash cheesiness of "Live And Let Die" and "Man With The Golden Gun", the films returned to spectacle-laden, epic Bond-making with "The Spy Who Loved Me" and Moore subtly toughened up his portrayal to go along with them. (You see the best example of this in "For Your Eyes Only", which briefly returned Bond to more gritty, violent Ian Fleming-type adventuring after the sci-fi lunacy of "Moonraker.")

               We'll always fondly remember one of Sir Roger's early Bond moments......as Yaphet Kotto snarls to his minions "Take this honky out and waste him!", Moore raises one amused, quizzical eyebrow asking in fluent deadpan, "Waste...... is that a good thing?"

               So we bid a sad farewell to Sir Roger Moore.....a true Knight of the realm who entertained the entire world throughout his lifetime.....and then later devoted his life to make the world a better place, representing UNICEF. We'll miss him.

           

WHO TO VOTE FOR IN 2020.........THE BQ'S GUIDE TO THE BEST CELEBS FOR PREZ......

            You probably heard about Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson announcing his Presidential candidacy.....with Tom Hanks as his running mate.....

              It's a telling testament to the era we suffer through, with a President possessed of both the intelligence and coloring of a goldfish, that the thought of a Rock/Hanks 2020 ticket is both hilarious and yet completely realistic at the same time.......

               Our only quibble with this ticket......flip it around. Hanks should be the Prez ("Run, Tom, Run!") with the Rock as Vice......that way, the Rock can not only preside over the Senate, but serve as Hanks' bodyguard in case Gary Oldman or Jeremy Irons attempt a "White House Down"/"Olympus Has Fallen" takeover......

                But really, the field's wide open now..... if Baby Orange can be President, anyone can....so the BQ humbly offers recommendations for the Powerhouse tickets to consider in 2020.....

                 Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling   We have no idea if they're qualified to lead the free world.....we'd just like to see them together again after that downer of an ending in "La La Land".....as long as they don't have to sing......

               Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest  Imagine a daily trivia contest based on the previous day's events....("For a trip to the Bahamas....What country did we threaten to invade yesterday?") Ryan can ask "what are you wearing" to all State dinner attendees.....

                Rocket Raccoon and Baby Groot   Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel don't even have to show up in the Oval Office......just supply the voices. And besides, "I am Groot" is far more perceptive and truthful than any public statement Mike Pence has given so far......

              Billy Ray Cyrus and Miley Cyrus  Infinitely more trustworthy and normal than Baby Orange and Ivanka......and at least this Prez would have no desire to date his own daughter....as far as we know.....

               Aziz Ansari and Priyanka Chopra   If for no other reason....to give Steve Bannon a fatal heart attack.....

               Billy Bush and Nancy O' Dell  Only if the newest Bush Prez is sworn in wearing oven mitts, making it impossible to effectively grab his Vice President's genitals.....

             Rosie O'Donnell and Stephen Colbert....Swept into office after Baby Orange suffers a brain hemorrhage while tweeting attacks on them at 5 in the morning....("Raunchy Rosie & Creepy Colbert  better hope I won't release sex 'tape' of them! Sad!")

              Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino   Because they'll finally get all the *&^%$$
terrorists out of their %&%$(%& hidey-holes and send them to *$&%$ hell.....and Air Force One will be snake-free.....

               Dory and Nemo  Dory still has a longer memory and attention span than our current President..,,,(more buoyant, too)......and Nemo will function as the perfect Vice President by promptly getting lost.....

               For making your 2020 voting decisions easier, you're certainly welcome. Keep in mind what Baby Orange told black voters last year....."What the hell do you have to lose?"  

               Now you know(as will millions of Trumpkins when their medical bills roll in.).....so vote accordingly......

               

'WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY?'........FROM THE 'WAR IS GOOD CLEAN FUN' DEPT.......

What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966)  belonged to a rapidly dying genre.....the military comedy. By that we mean a comedy that fundamentally respected our armed forces and American values.......but could still gently poke fun at all the foibles of men and women in uniform.....

             That kind of film (and TV shows like the un-missed "Hogan's Heroes") would head for the tar pits as the country began to brutally splinter over the war in Vietnam. By the late 60's and early 70's, military comedies became fully weaponized missiles of withering anti-war satire...("M.A.S.H.", "Catch 22")

             And you could kiss goodbye movies like "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?" with their lovable cast of familiar types.....the blustering brass, the gruff master sergeant. the wily conniving junior officer (usually the leading man of these films), the happily wine guzzling Italians who didn't really like Mussolini and of course, the overwhelmingly stupid, buffoonish Germans.

              Director Blake Edwards still managed to pull off a fairly lavish canvas here, with a large cast and huge comedic set pieces with teeming extras.......even though a year earlier, his grand, epic spoof of old movie adventures, "The Great Race" crashed and burned at the box office. With a script by William Peter Blatty (yes, you read it right, the guy who wrote "The Exorcist"), Edwards pressed on with this involved, convoluted World War II farce about an American company of GI's  attempting to seize and subdue an Italian village.

              The Italians agree to surrender to our boys (a straight-arrow martinet played by the wild take-no-prisoner comic Dick Shawn and his sardonic lieutenant played by James Coburn)......but only if they can party in an all night festival that makes New Years Eve in Times Square look skimpy. We won't even attempt to describe the avalanche of complications that result after an U.S. Army Intelligence officer (Harry Morgan) arrives in town the morning after this confetti-strewn bacchanal.

              A word about Blatty:  before he scared the hell out of everyone with "The Exorcist", he enjoyed a brief but busy career as a comedy screenwriter......a truly odd calling for Blatty since he couldn't write a funny line even if the power of Christ compelled him.  His so-called comedies usually concocted absurd situations, leaving the actors adrift, desperately hamming it up to squeeze out any laughs.....(you almost wept in sympathy for the actors stuck in 1965's "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home", Blatty's most catastrophic attempt at writing a farce...)

            His script for this film piles up enough comedic complications on the beleaguered American soldiers and the comic opera Italian villagers to fill up three or four movies.....which is why the film drags on for close to two hours. For his Act III, Blatty throws the Germans into the mix and the movie quickly spirals downward in a dreary hide-and-seek, cat-and-mouse game between our troops, their new found Italian buddies and the dopey Germans....(headed by professional tubby movie villain Leon Askin, also one of the "Hogan's Heroes" cartoon Nazis..)

            There are, in fact, a few pleasures to take in here......mostly coming from Blake Edwards studious devotion to the art of physical comedy. As anyone could see from his Peter Sellers "Pink Panther" films, Edwards adored slapstick and no other director spent so much time and effort designing strenuous gags that sent his actors tumbling off balconies, stairs or into each other.

            The premier set piece comes about halfway through....the elaborate staging of a mock battle between the Americans and Italians for the benefit of Army reconnaissance aircraft observers. Edwards has some real fun at the expense of previous World War II movies....as Coburn tries to orchestrate the battle like a harried movie director and soldiers from both sides fake grandly melodramatic death scenes to the enthusiastic cheers of the village whores.

         . From that point on, Edward and Blatty randomly heap on more subplots, with only a few of them sporadically funny......two hapless bank robbers forever tunneling under the wrong floor, a coterie of village communists hoping to kidnap the German general, Harry Morgan going bonkers while lost in the catacombs beneath the village and  Dick Shawn in drag, looking worse than Robert Preston in "Victor Victoria" and pursued by a horny German officer.  (By that time, we started looking at our watch.....)

            A mixed 1960's bag,,,,,,but so very typical of Blake Edwards, whose comedic instincts could veer from spot-on classic belly laughs to excruciatingly awful,moments (even dedicated movie buffs can barely bring themselves to remember his inclusion of Mickey Rooney's Japanese caricature in "Breakfast At Tiffany's").   For his farewell to old-fashioned Army comedy, "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?", we'll stand at attention for only 2 salutes (**) and that's mainly for the make-believe battle......as for screenwriter William Peter Blatty......he probably generated more laughter with the sight of Linda Blair's head doing a 360 spin........

         

'PRIME CUT'........MEAT 'N GREET IN THE HEARTLAND.....

Prime Cut (1972)  arrived decades too early for anyone to fully appreciate the deeply humorous peculiarity of it......a standard gangster story filmed as though it was a live action version of a comic book for adults. Watching it today, you can think of it as brilliantly sunlit version of the "Sin City" movies.....with everything in it deliberately amped up to larger than life dimensions.

             In 1972, few critics or audience members figured out what screenwriter Robert Dillon was up to......taking all the tropes of well worn gangster shoot 'em ups and and presenting them as simple primal images and characters, with spare, pithy dialogue suitable to encase in round white balloons hovering over their heads.

              While "Prime Cut" maintains a studied, coolness under Michael Ritchie's direction, Dillon took his cartoon-gangster obsession to the next level with his 1974 script to John Frankenheimer's "99 & 44/100% Dead", dialing up the material into a campy spoof. (We absolutely promise to cover this one in a future post).  But camp was a dying style in the mid-70's (see our post on "Doc Savage")....and Frankenheimer disowned the movie while he was still in the midst of shooting it......

             "Prime Cut", unlike that film,  doesn't poke you in the ribs.....it simply invites you to watch it unfold and laugh quietly to yourself, shaking your head. Lalo Schifrin's music bounces cheerfully through the opening credits, in which a dead Chicago hood travels through the length of a meat packing plant's assembly line, finally emerging as a string of hot dogs shipped back to his Windy City big boss. (Eddie Egan, the ex NYC cop who inspired "The French Connection")

               Having a henchman converted into wieners doesn't sit well with Eddie, so he hires cooler-than-cool enforcer Devlin (Lee Marvin, slyly granite-faced) to collect overdue debts owed by renegade gangster-meat-packer Mary Anne, the perpetrator of the Oscar Meyer assassination. (played with a wink and a vile chuckle by Gene Hackman,,,,,and don't even ask us why he's called Mary Anne)

               The garrulous good ole boy Mary Anne and his troglodyte brother Weenie (Gregory Walcott, randomly munching hot dogs to live up to his character's name) operate a vast Kansas City cattle empire where they also auction off drugged, naked teenage girls, raised like prime beef in their very own 'orphanage'.

              So it's off to the heartland with Devlin and his three baby-faced, business-suited Irish hench-lads.....where their long black limousine invades the wide open spaces of  Hackman's sprawling, sun-drenched lair, protected by a small army of Aryan-blonde farmboys armed with pitchforks and shotguns......

              Here's where our comic book clash of the titans goes into high gear, with Marvin and Hackman trading brief, nasty words (Hackman resorts to his infectious giggling while he shovels down a plate of pork intestines...."You eat guts," snaps Marvin. "Yep," giggles Hackman, "I like 'em")  Never one to mince words (as opposed to his meals), Hackman ends their conversation with a penis measuring challenge....so much for subtlety.....)

             The film startlingly offers the first big studio rendition of a human-trafficking sex slave market, with naked girls draped around bales of hay.......but it isn't really there to shock or disgust anyone (except Marvin's character, maybe),,,,,in this movie, it's just another quick visual sick joke, one of many prodding at the hidden depravity beneath the amber waves of grain.....(In fact, director Ritchie would move on make his reputation as something of a social satirist, with "The Candidate" taking on politics and "Smile" eviscerating beauty pageants.)

            To Hackman's outrage, Marvin rescues one of the drugged sex slaves (Sissy Spacek in her film debut), later dressing her up like an inflatable sex doll in see-thru gowns. (Well, we did warn you this was comic book stuff for adults, right?)

               The rest of the film's mercifully swift 86 minute running time is mostly devoted to the deliberately broad-daylight, Hitchcock-homage action set pieces. (Michael Ritchie and his editor knew how long they could sustain this nonsense.....unlike today's comic-book movie directors who think they're making 'Gone With The Wind' with spandex and capes...)

               In true "North By Northwest" fashion, Marvin and Spacek escape the farmboy gestapo in the middle of a county fair turkey shoot, .....and then race through a wheat field, literally pursued by a Grim Reaper.....a massive Harvester machine operated by some tubby guy who looks a refugee from "Hee Haw". (In this movie, the Heartland folk are depicted as either casual observers of carnage, murderous minions,  or dispassionate buyers of Hackman's girl-flesh meat market)

              Marvin efficiently wraps things up with a ferocious firefight in middle of a sunflower field and a final go-round with Hackman, Walcott and what's left of the flaxen farmboys. In the meantime, you can ponder the future relationship between Marvin and Spacek.....imagining the further adventures of this slick, cold hitman and his teenage girl-toy,who still speaks as if in a permanent drug haze...

             "Prime Cut" took a lot of heat for its over-the-top violence, highly exaggerated characters and outlandish action sequences........in other words, everything that garnered Quentin Tarantino massive amounts of praise, hailing him as a groundbreaking visionary for recycling all the crap he watched as a video store clerk.  Sorry, Quentin, but "Prime Cut"  plowed this ground long before you supposedly broke it......and that's why we'll slice off 4 stars (****).......Forget Arby's, this is the movie that ....
.....has the meats!!



           

           

           

DEATHMATCH OF THE WEEK! VIN DIESEL VERSUS ANNE OF GREEN GABLES!

           BQ back with you, having survived the wildest, weirdest night of viewing entertainment ever.....taking in two items that normally we'd only watch if duct-taped to a chair with a terrorist holding a shotgun to our heads......

XXX: The Return Of Xander Cage (2017)  brings back Vin Diesel in the title role (I guess you can call him 'X' for short)as the extreme sportsman and sometime world-saver who wears a big fur-lined coat and thwarts global villainy. (As far we can tell, there's little difference between this character and his "Fast and Furious" guy, other than X-Guy favoring skateboards and skis for hisheavily CGI'd stunts.....

            Incredibly, we ended up watching this because Beloved Daughter, of all people chose it.....it's far, far from her cup of tea, but it featured on of her Big Faves, young actress Nina Dobrev. Dobrev turns up as a chattering, comedy-relief tech support nerd-girl......naturally transformed into a sexless wonk by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses......the two other women in the cast sport elaborate tattoos and trade snarky wisecracks while helping Vin stop evildoers from crashing orbiting satellites into soccer stadiums and such.....

            All the usual stuff in place.....which makes movies like this a lethal plague on cinema.....

            No gravity, no laws of physics.....Characters hurl themselves out of high places with no physical consequences......Diesel himself gets bounced off the hoods of speeding cars with not even a black and blue mark to show for it......vehicles of all sorts propel themselves in much the same way that toddlers play with Fisher-Price toy trucks.....

              "Now You See It, Oh No You Don't' editing......so-called action sequences chopped to shreds so you barely can tell who's punching who, who's shooting who, who crashed into who.....but come to think of it.....who the hell cares?

              Nothing at stake....since everybody in this is a cardboard cut-out, incapable of any real injury, the 489 computer animators work overtime to engage you with increasingly idiotic visual stunts, none of which could exist in the real world. Personally, if we want to watch stuff like this, we'd opt for a good old Road Runner cartoon.....at least those are supposed to make you laugh....

             But this evening of madness wasn't over yet......Beloved Daughter next switched over to Netflix's new 're-imagining' of the classic children's tale, "Anne Of Green Gables", now seething with dark, brooding angst and retitled "Anne With An E"....

Anne With An E (2017)  if nothing else, serves as a spectacular showcase for actress Amybeth McNulty, playing the plucky turn-of-the-century Nova Scotia orphan....McNulty commands this show with a heart-rending vengeance.....she tears into the role as if playing Blanche Dubois on uppers. .

             It's one of the most insanely watchable, over-the-top, hit-the-rafters performances we've ever seen a child actor attempt......a impossible mixture of preening Shirley Temple goodness, Pippi Longstocking self-satisfaction and the hysterical madness of Patty McCormack's "Bad Seed" rolled up into one individual.  McNulty literally never shuts up, carrying on nonstop melodramatic monologues for the bulk of the opening episode's 90 minute stretch, a bravura Shakespearian-like turn that would stagger Dames Judi Dench and Helen Mirren.

             If that isn't enough for you, the show litters McNulty's already boiling-point performance with ghastly flashbacks to her abuse at the hands of families where she was placed by her orphanage.....this kid makes Oliver Twist look like Richie Rich.

             Whether this much darker conception of the material is any good, you'll have to decide. The BQ honestly can't compare it to the old "Anne Of Green Gable" TV series first distributed by Disney on VHS......in all our years toiling in the Video business vineyards,  we never got around to watching it.  We'll say this.....if you sample this Netflix re-do, with its PTSD tormented young heroine, you won't find it cloying or boring......it might well emotionally move you.....but cuddly and comforting it's anything but......

               Quite a double feature.....for the CG-Eyesore "XXX: The Return of Whatshisname", we'll scrape 1 star off the pavement (*).....for the severely re-vamped "Anne With An E", (and for Amybeth McNulty's like-nothing-you've-ever-seen performance....3 stars (***).....no contest, this kid could probably wipe the floor with Vin Diesel......

           

               

'THE BRASS BOTTLE'.......WAL-MART DREAMS OF GENIE....(AND JEANNIE, TOO...)

The Brass Bottle (1964)   Nothing gives the BQ more orgasmic pleasure (pathetic, we know)  than perusing the wildly diverse and democratic selection of new release DVDs at our neighborhood Wal-Mart....

             Living close to the seashore as we do, you can't beat walking through a Wal-Mart parking lot accompanied by the squawking, hysterical laughter of seagulls......we can't tell if they're laughing at us for thinking we're going to find a worthy movie in Wal-Mart, or if they're asking for directions to Tippi Hedren....

            And what a gloriously eclectic mix of direct-to-DVD cinematic gems await us there.......sweeping Asian swordplay epics, cuddly little faith-based stories of kids who find God at horse ranches, slimy-monster-hiding-under-your-bed movies, star-studded action-adventure movies that either the studio lost confidence in or never had any to begin with, primitively animated stuff for the kids, no doubt assembled from do-it-yourself CGI software kits purchased at Office Depot going-out-of-business sales......

            All this goodness laid out for us.....along with the 587th Steven Seagal movie......(with Big Steve lookin' only slightly more mobile than Gort the robot...)

           Surprise, surprise!  In the midst of all these disparate items, we find a colorful collection of old titles exhumed from the Universal Studios vaults, festively re-packaged with outer sleeves featuring the films' original poster artwork.....and at those beloved Wal-Mart prices....(you could buy three of them for less than the cost of an IMAX ticket)

             Of special interest to the BQ were some of the Universal 1960's titles, for which film buffs have been clamoring for a DVD release for decades. We greedily snapped 'em up and here's the first one we couldn't wait to set spinning in our player......

             "The Brass Bottle" pursued a peculiar strategy of Universal Studios in the 60's and into the 70's....in which their feature films and TV shows didn't look all that much different from each other...

            Slickly machine-tooled, photographed in cotton-candy Technicolor, a Universal feature film of that era might offer big movie stars.....but visually would have all the atmosphere and style of a 'Leave It To Beaver' episode.....(not surprising since the movies and TV shows all filmed on the same Universal backlot,  Irony of ironies.....the studio's first attempt at making a feature length film specifically for television, Don Siegel's "The Killers" was deemed too violent for the tube and went into theaters anyway....)

               This breezy comedy, in which an uptight architect (the inventor of uptight, Tony Randall) copes with an corpulent Arabian genie (Burl Ives) who upends his life, plays like a 90 minute pilot for a TV situation comedy.........which is eventually what happened to it, transforming, more or less, into "I Dream Of Jeannie", with Randall's architect turned into Larry Hagman's astronaut and Ives' genie greatly improved and slimmed down into the lovely Barbara Eden (who happens to play Randall's perplexed fiance in "The Brass Bottle".

                Naturally, much innocent fun and magical hijinks beset Randall, after Ives comes swirling out of Randall's recent engagement gift purchase, a huge ornamental bottle that appears left over from a Pier 1 Imports closeout sale. We got some unintentional laughs watching that distinctly Americana hambone Ives plowing through vast amounts of mock-Arabian dialogue, reciting it as if from off-screen cue cards.....he gets to declare "Verily!" a whole lot.  And we're always glad to see Edward Andrews as Randall's future father-in-law and disapproving nemesis......Andrews ruled as the epitome of the stuffy, outraged, upper middle class guy......younger viewers might only recognize him as one of Molly Ringwald's embarrassing grandparents in "Sixteen Candles"....

               Though a mere trifle off the Universal Studios assembly line (which rolled out movies at an even greater speed than the chocolate belt in the "I Love Lucy" episode), "The Brass Bottle" charmed us as only a kinder, gentler mid-1960's comedy can.  Tony Randall's precise comedic timing combined with the wildly miscast Burl Ives, they had us at 'open sesame'......we conjure up 3 stars (***) for Tony, the Genie (and TV's future Jeannie)......and promise to cover more of these delightful Universal rarities in future posts.....

       

'ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN'........TAKEDOWNS COMPARED: TRICKY DICK VS. BABY ORANGE......

All The President's Men (1976)   You don't need a better example of how much faster the world moves than watching Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman) doggedly unravel the Watergate scandal.......

            Because Nixon and his gang considered themselves such a crafty, manipulative, stealthy bunch, the painstaking process of shedding the light of day on them took laborious years....

            And the impending dread and fear for the fate of the country was palpable.....well orchestrated by the film's director Alan Pakula, who'd already displayed his skill at depicting paranoid nailbiting in his 1974 conspiracy thriller, "The Parallax View"...(a huge fave of the BQ, covered in a previous post)

             When Robert Redford nervously walked down dead-of-night D.C. streets, you fully expected Richard Nixon to pop out from behind a mailbox and go "Booga Booga!"

             A silly notion when you think about it......except that now we have such a jack-in-the-box clown for real, shouting "Booga Booga!" to all of us and the entire world.......

              Compare the ever so slowly evolving events dramatized in the film to the dizzying, breakneck speed of today's current events.......similar to watching "All The President's Men" with your finger permanently jammed into the Fast Forward button......

             Pundits, anchors, and politicians have fallen all over themselves comparing this continuous boiling mess to Watergate....and comparing Richard Nixon to the current walking-upright virus infecting the White House......

             Wrong. Two different individuals.....and a different set of dangers hanging over the country. We humbly supply this quick and easy guide.....

             Tricky-Dick  A criminal at heart, but possessed of a wickedly crafty intelligence and a command of statecraft.....useful not just for covering up his crimes, but sanely navigating the choppy political and diplomatic seas facing the leader of the free world....he knew right from wrong, but for him, both options were always on the table.....

             Baby Orange   An infant at heart, spoiled since birth and knowing only tantrums as a form of expression.  Unschooled and ignorant of virtually everything in the world around him....which for him, revolves around him.  Right and wrong hold no meaning as concepts to him.....the only thing real to him....his delusional sense of himself as the Sun in his own personal solar system

             Tricky Dick,,,,surrounded himself with a seemingly intelligent collection of educated, experienced equals......most of whom found themselves indicted as co-conspirators...

             Baby Orange.....has mostly grovelling minions in his employ,,,,,,the equivalent of those faceless dozens in the spiffy jump suits working for Blofeld in the early James Bond movies.....they live only to serve, even if Baby Orange presses his foot on the secret button that drops them into the piranha pool......good news for the ones who survive....unlike the Nixon crowd, they'll likely escape prosecution since their employer never told them anything true anyway.....

             Tricky Dick.....always carefully calculated his every thought and action in terms of how affected his place in history....

             Baby Orange....calculates nothing, thinks of nothing.....other than immediate gratification and self aggrandizement......a egotist who spends his entire life 'living in the moment'.....now with access to the nuclear codes....(think about that for a minute.....)

             And that, BQ visitors, explains why "All The President's Men" unfolds over several years, while the current avalanche of lunacy has engulfed the nation in a little over a hundred days......nobody has to dig very far to uncover evidence of treason and obstruction of justice.....not when it's already put brazenly on display by its very perpetrator,......

             For "All The President's Men", we give all our 5 stars (*****),a FIND OF FINDS.....and we'll eagerly line up for the inevitable film version of the ultimate takedown of Baby Orange....we guarantee it'll have a faster pace than its l976 predecessor......and for the sake of us all and the United States Of American,  it can't come soon enough.....
           

FROM THE "FILL UP THE BAG FOR $5.00" LIBRARY SALE.....'THE BOOKSHOP ON THE CORNER'

The Bookshop On The Corner by Jenny Colgan (2016)   The BQ positively lives for those three day weekend library book sales......most particularly the last day of the sale, when they usually let everyone fill up a brown paper shopping bag with whatever books it can hold......and charge about five bucks for the bulging bag we stagger out the door with.....

             To be honest here.....on bag day, we don't spend a hell of a lot of time examining what we throw in the bag......something on the cover might catch our eye, or a snappy title, or an author we've enjoyed before.....or the plot synopsis might sound so beyond idiotic to make it worth a try, or at least worthy of hurling into the paper bag.

              Genre?  Never a consideration.....as we pointed out in the BQ bio, we're willing to read anything and everything, even it turns out so far out of our demographic, it might as well have dropped in from another planet.....

               Which pretty much describes our reaction to this book when we plucked it out of the bag....romance-laden chick-lit about a recently unemployed British librarian. (The cover, a homey, warm 'n fuzzy illustration of a packed bookshelf, must have been the incentive that prompted us to toss it in our stash)....\

               Our elfin-sized heroine, Nina, unable to secure another library gig,  buys an enormous van, outfits it as a mobile bookstore and heads for the Scottish highlands, home of many lovably eccentric book-starved villagers as well as two potential swoon-worthy boyfriends for Nina...... a poetic, droopy eyed Latvian train engineer and the crusty, grumpy farmer who's leasing his barn as a converted home for our plucky bookseller.

              It didn't take a bookshelf to fall on us to realize this book wasn't meant for the BQ.....which of course led us to give it a read anyway.....or maybe start a few pages just to see how far into it we could progress before groaning to ourselves....'no,no....maybe not....'

              What took us by surprise and kept us reading.......author Jenny Colgan's sharp sense of humor.....some of the comedic byplay in the dialogue had us....dare we say....laughing out loud. We could easily picture this as a Scottish version of a typical romantic comedy directed by the late Gary Marshall. Add to that the author's and her cast of characters great love of books and the whole thing makes for an irresistible package.

               The feisty, frothy humor kept our attention through most of the story.....until Colgan abandons the laughs in the final chapters.....concentrating mostly on what no doubt the book's targeted readers were anxiously longing for.......melodramatic complications and long awaited hot 'n heavy bouts of athletically satisfying sex between Nina and her designated True Love.....

              But we even stayed around for the boilerplate romantic stuff, even though we longed for Colgan to throw in a few more zingers to make us smile.....(apparently, she's written a whole slew of these books that follow this storyline template with Kabuki Theater rigidity.....only the retail venue changes....from bookstores into bakeries and whatnot....)

              Okay, we freely admit to enjoying it as an unexpected, deep-in-the-paper-bag guilty pleasure.....and for this super-cozy tale of a bookseller, we'll ring up 3 unashamed stars (***).....quite a change of pace from the last book we dug out of the paper bag, something about a giant slithering squid gobbling up people in the Bahamas.....no romance at all, not even for the squid.......

           

             

           

'MIRAGE'.....ONCE AGAIN, GREG HELD SPELLBOUND BY A PECK 'O AMNESIA.....

Mirage (1965)  arrived twenty years after Hitchcock's psychiatric romance "Spellbound" but shared a basic similarity in that it plunged an emotionally tortured amnesiac into a tangled murder plot.  And as in the Hitchcock film, that bastion of sturdy normalcy Gregory Peck played the befuddled forgetful guy, his memory temporarily erased by a pivotal trauma.....

         But unlike Hitchcock's dreamy take on this material (with Salvador Dali designed nightmare sequences, lush Miklos Rosza score and Peck's psychosis soothed by a dewy Ingrid Bergman)...."Mirage" has the snap, crackle and pop of an up-to-date, wisecracking thriller you'd expect happening in New York City.......

           Strikingly, director Edward Dmytryk films Peck's flashback attempts to regain his memory as jarring jump cuts in the middle of scenes. It's a brilliant idea and gives the film periodic electric jolts. The score by Quincy Jones, just starting his long distinguished film scoring career, also helps out with sudden, shocking four note blasts of horns to signify Peck's trauma, rage and confusion.

           And screenwriter Peter Stone, working from a Howard Fast novel, pens the second best imitation Hitchcock script ever written.....the first being Stone's script for the Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn "Charade" and the third one his script for "Arabesque" with Gregory Peck filling in when they couldn't get Cary Grant.  With his scripts filled to the max with witty lines and unforgettable supporting roles, Stone was probably the best Hitchcock-type screenwriter who never actually wrote a script for Hitchcock....

            The supporting cast......priceless. Walter Matthau, already an established veteran scene stealer as the always quipping first-time detective hired by Peck to help unravel Peck's clouded identity, Robert H.Harris, delivering the plot's medical exposition as the irascible shrink whose egotism has shriveled his compassion for Pecks plight, and the ubiquitous Kevin McCarthy playing that up-to-the-minute, quintessential 1960's archetype, the sniveling, glad-handing, spineless corporate minion.

           But where the film truly excels in both its characters and their casting is in its lethal, frighteningly entertaining trio of professional killers hired to harass and stalk Peck...(and frequently shooting at him, which doesn't make too much sense, considering he's carrying in his head a piece of information vital to the story's primary villain.) There's Willard and Lester (George Kennedy and Jack Weston).....Willard's a robotically thuggish hitman, who leaves a trail of collateral damage corpses in his wake while Lester affects a cheerful, jocular persona that serves only as a thin veneer, easily wiped off.  Both of them seem to take great, thin-skinned offence at Peck when he dares to defend himself to stay alive.  The wild card of this trio,and the film's highlight, comes with the introduction of the scrawny, 70-ish Bo (House B.Jameson), an especially nasty little senior citizen who accosts Peck in mid-Manhattan broad daylight......sounding like he's been imported directly from moonshine gun battles in the Ozarks......

           Put Peck and all these characters together in a twisty plot that hinges around a horrifying defenestration (as eye-boggling as any in a Hitchcock film)....and you have one of the mid 1960's best thrillers and one of the BQ's perennial, personal favorites.  Gregory Peck might have his memory problems here, but we will fully remember to give 'Mirage' 5 stars, a FIND OF FINDS.  Don't forget to check it out......

         
           

'GORGO'.........THE BIGGEST MOMMY OF THEM ALL.......

Gorgo (1961)  Since we've already discussed "Mommie Dearest" in detail, we turn to our next all time favorite epic of mother love.......a move which brings new meaning to the insult, "Your mama's so big, she stepped on London"........"

               Unlike the overall aura of horror and cruelty of movies featuring rampaging prehistoric beasts ("Godzilla", "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms"), "Gorgo" stunned everyone by ultimately turning out as a glorious tribute to the endurance and strength of mother love.......it's certainly not Mama Gorgo's fault she decimates London in search of her baby imprisoned and exploited as a circus attraction. What's 200 a foot tall reptile to do when her only child's been kidnapped and enslaved by dinosaur traffickers?

              Before anyone thinks of mocking this film, the BQ proudly stands up for it. For 1961, it still looks spectacular, even though produced by the notoriously cheapjack B-movie-quickie producers, the King brothers. (Frank King, the bossman, was hilariously played by John Goodman in "Trumbo", depicting Frank's hiring of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for "The Brave One"....for which Trumbo won an Academy Award under an assumed name)

               The Kings decided to base their monster-stompin' rally in Britain, which gave the film a coating of civility and class, as well as access to a slew of better actors than you'd normally find in a lizard demolition derby. There's Bill Travers, from "Born Free" and William Sylvester, who later earned iconic status playing the public relations-minded scientist in "2001:A Space Odyssey".

              Visually, it's a feast ten times better than you'd expect, photographed by no less than Freddie Young.......yes, the guy who served as director of photography on "Lawrence Of Arabia", "Dr. Zhivago" and "You Only Live Twice".  If you thought Peter 'O Toole cut a dashing desert figure in his white robes, that's nothing compared to how Young beautifully photographs the stuntman in the Mama Gorgo rubber suit, turning London landmarks into rubble and squishing fleeing pedestrians. (In this movie, London bridge really does come falling down.....along with Big Ben and everything else.)

               And we offer extra applause to composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, scoring some the film as if it's a heartfelt tale of love......which rings especially true in the film's final image....mother and child reunited at last, the only giant reptile film with a happy ending. (Well, not so happy for the roughly 80,000 or so Londoners left dead or dying in the monster's wake, but let's not quibble...)

                Happy Mother's Day to one and all......the BQ celebrates with the movie that proves nobody has your back like your Mom.....even if your back is green and scaly and your mouth's filled with five hundred sharp teeth. .  We sentimentally give 4 maternal stars (****).....a loving tribute to Mom equal to a thousand Hallmark cards.

'EXCALIBUR'........KNIGHTY-NITE TO THE ROUND TABLE...(AND STILL BETTER THAN 'KING ARTHUR'

Excalibur (1981)  is yet another film we'll recommend as alternative to cleaning out your wallet to buy tickets to the new CGI-bloated "King Arthur"....(not to mention the additional 7 dollars for a tub of popcorn that costs the Mulitplex about 18 cents to make....)

              This is the kind of movie you'll never see studios roll the dice on ever again......an ambitious sweeping epic that's essentially a fever dream sprung out of its director's over active imagination....

                No corporate franchise-building here......director John Boorman, a pure visualist whom everybody thought already flew off the rails with his crazy sci-fi-er "Zardoz" and the much ridiculed "Exorcist II", couldn't have made "Excalibur" a more personal film.....having shot it around the Irish countryside near his house....and populating it with all his children in small supporting roles...

                 Nor does the film sink under the weight of a hefty budget.....it obviously didn't have one. Boorman, in the great tradition of Roger Corman and every other shlockmeister, uses artful lighting, camera angles and assorted physical trickery to convince you that you're watching a cast of thousands swing swords at each other across vast, far flung, dreamy landscapes.....in reality, the cast mostly traipses around the woods in Boorman's back yard.....

                 Boorman originally planned to make "Lord Of The Rings" into one heaping, giant movie....when that deal fell apart, he turned to filming the entire Athurian legend, King Arthur from magically induced conception to his skewering by bastard son Mordred.....

                 But at two hours and twenty minutes, the movie alternately wanders and then hops and skips through all the the Arthur myths......it has arresting visual style throughout, but no forward momentum or urgency of storytelling. Lengthy as it is, it unravels as if entire huge chunks of it were edited out.......what's left plays like an R-rated Renaissance fair....or a Middle Ages museum tour given by a guide who sounds either high on speed or mildly distracted.

                 The bad stuff first:  the young actors playing the key figures Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere........bland, generic and hardly heard from ever again.  Boorman also badly dropped the ball with the film's music......this film cried out for a big wall-to-wall muscular, romantic score. Never happens.....Boorman randomly drops in poorly mixed dollops of Wagner and 'Carmina Burana' ...(this is where the low budget really did hurt the film....)

                  The good stuff:  Nicol Williamson's singularly odd Merlin, juicing up every scene he's in. Instead of a heavily white-bearded old sage, Williamson's a devilishly nimble-tongued demi-God....he's closer in spirit and comedic chops to Ray Walston's Mr Applegate in "Damn Yankees"...and doesn't get much farther than Ray did in meddling in mortal affairs.  Nicol meets his match in both magic and scene-stealing,  in Helen Mirren, playing Arthur's sorceress half-sisiter Morgana.  (Supposedly Williamson and Mirren despised each other.....whether that 's true or not, the movie comes alive when they clash..)

                And you have to love the "hey! isn't that...." all through the movie.....Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne....

                 Battle scenes?   Plentiful....and we liked that it made knightly combat in full armor what we always imagined.it to be......clumsy, awkward and comically impractical. The knights stagger around, having a hard time even seeing each other as they go Medieval on their asses,  and their shiny armor offers little or no protection to either sharp or blunt instruments, so you wonder why the hell they're wearing it at all. (We guess cause they look damn good...)

                Sure, "Excalibur"s a mixed up goulash of a movie, but we found fascinating and in its sheer creative bravado, never boring. And these days, you won't find too many movie directors throwing caution to the wind and brazenly attempting such an over-the-top epic coming from the top of their heads.....they're all too busy taping two-character films with their cellphones, hoping for a berth at Sundance. So we'll pull three swords out of the stone....(***)......and rescue you from the "King Arthur" lurking about on the multiplex battlefields, put there by the Mordreds who run Warner Brothers......

               

'SWORD OF LANCELOT'......A HARD DAY'S KNIGHT (AND PROBABLY BETTER THAN 'KING ARTHUR'...

Sword of Lancelot (a.k.a.Lancelot And Guinevere) 1963   In this troubled uncertain economy, the BQ wants to step up and save everyone the cost of an exorbitant Multiplex movie ticket to see the new 200 million dollar CGI-engorged version of "King Arthur"........by directing you to older, cheaper and vastly more entertaining versions of the Camelot and Arthurian legends.......

              First one that came to mind.......this long forgotten but surprisingly robust and achingly romantic version of the story co-written and directed by Hollywood studio veteran Cornel Wilde....

              To us, Wilde was an under-appreciated cinema figure who made the transition between Golden Age Hollywood and cutting edge 1960's movies without anyone taking much notice of him. He dutifully toiled as a serviceable leading man in a variety of studio dramas, noirs and swashbucklers throughout the 40's and 50's....and then re emerged as a director of aggressively violent action-adventure films....

               You could think of him as the Mel Gibson of the 1960's.....except that Wilde's  films never achieved enough worldwide recognition. to put him on the A list. But everyone snapped to attention with the release of his "The Naked Prey" in 1965, a primal, brutal survival tale of a Safari guide (Wilde himself) hunted down by African tribesmen. A cult hit was born, but it didn't do much for Wilde's career....he soldiered on, crafting tough little low budget adventures ("Beach Red", "No Blade Of Grass", "Shark's Treasure")

              "Sword Of Lancelot" blended elements from the two filmmaking eras that Wilde traveled through.....combining the lush romanticism of old school Hollywood costume epics with Wilde's groundbreaking in-your-face bloody visuals.  His battle sequences were not only spectacular in their scope, but startling in their level of carnage......with audiences treated to the sight of heads and bodies completely bisected by broadswords.  Wilde threw everything into the mix, with what looks like the entire Yugoslavian army at his command........point-of-view shots from inside a knight's helmet as a lance-wielding opponent bears down on him.....and a jaw dropping moment when he jump cuts from the heat of combat to a corpse strewn battlefield.  This guy definitely knew the power of pure cinema.

               The old school pleasures include a rousing symphonic score by Ron Goodwin (you'll never get the love theme out of your head)....an engaging, vulnerable performance by Brian Aherne as that eternal cuckold  King Arthur.....and backed up by a cream-of-the-crop British supporting cast. All of them skillfully navigate their way through typically overwritten, florid costume epic dialogue.....but it's well crafted stuff and fun to listen to....(Guinevere (Jean Wallace), having been rescued from a public flaming pyre by Lancelot, bitterly cracks wise about Arthur's dealing in "burning women in the marketplace...")

                Which brings us to the film's only major detriment, its Guinevere......Wilde cast his then 40 year old wife Jean Wallace......never much of an actress and at least 20 years too old for the role....(she regularly pops up in Wilde's movies, much like Sondra Locke did in Clint Eastwood films). Wallace gamely throws herself into it, but unlike the British cast, her delivery of the overly ornate dialogue comes out flat and dangerously close to silly.  Film buffs like to ridicule Wilde's Hollywood-ized french accent,as well,  but that never bothered us......we just wish he'd cast a younger, genuinely skilled actress for his leading lady.....but then again, their husband-wife chemistry's sees them through Wallace's miscasting.

                So put away that twenty five dollars or more you planned on spending for a couple of "King Arthur" tickets.....(wait a year and you can nab the blu-ray at Wal-Mart for six bucks)....BQ recommends the simple joys of "Sword Of Lancelot".....broadswords,lances, axes,  castles, flaming arrows, pig-tailed, horn-helmeted Norsemen and blonde princesses burning at the stake like shrimp on the barbie......what more could you ask for? We'll blow 4 royal trumpet blasts...(****)  and we've got another great alternate Arthurian choice for you in the next post.......