'THAT MAN IN ISTANBUL'........HORST CASE SCENARIO.....

That Man In Istanbul (1965)  The BQ, as you dear visitors must know, has carried on a life long love affair with cheesy Eurospy movies, cheapjack James Bond imitations that flourished in the mid 1960's.....and a genre, we might add, that's criminally under-represented on video.....take note, suppliers...)

            Here's one of our favorites, a French-Italian-Spanish concoction with the oddest choice of dashing hero, that diminutive, beady-eyed little fellow, the young punk member of "The Magnificent Seven" himself,  Horst Bucholz.....

            First you have to swallow the idea that Horst, as Turkish gangster-playboy-man-about-town Tony Macenas, is on a first name basis with every voluptuous young girl in Istanbul....("Ciao, Tony" they all purr when encountering him).....

            Fortunately , the movie won't give you time to dwell on such a casting anomaly. Bucholz, saddled with a CIA babe who thinks he's mixed up in the kidnapping-ransom of a nuclear scientist, races around every picturesque sight in Istanbul.......dodging bullets, knives, cars and a metal-hooked thug who's out to toss him off the top of a minaret.

           You simply have to applaud the plucky Bucholz, breaking the fourth wall and snarking directly into the camera, "What, me worry?"  while four or five cars make a concerted effort to simultaneously run him down from different directions.....(you can guess how well that goes...)

          Endless amounts of stuff we'll never get enough of.......the eternally stunning Sylva Koscina as the CIA hottie...(hilariously, the entire American CIA contingent here speaks in worse dubbed-in English than a Godzilla movie)......Bucholz mixing it up with those unmistakable, iconic international oddballs, Mario Adorf and Klaus Kinski.....(leading Kinksi to hiss the movie's best line at Bucholz, who's identified himself with a phony secret agent number..."Whatever your number is....it's up!").

          Even better, all of this non stop nonsense is backed up by Georges Garvarentz's jazzy, brassy typically Eurospy music.....(a few years later, Garvarentz and this film's director Antonio Isasi, will team up for the gloriously Euro-trashy heist caper, "They Came To Rob Las Vegas"....see our previous post on that one, another BQ fave....)

           We could go on and on about the many guilty pleasures of watching this movie......especially the signature lame special effect employed in all these low budget Bond imitators......the hastily sketched in, animated explosions.....(when planes and boats blow up in this movie, it looks exactly like the Acme Dynamite that detonates in Wiley Coyote's face during the Road Runner cartoons....)......It's a wonderful prime example of a long lost genre whose films we used to gobble up like barbecue potato chips at a summer picnic.

           By all means, take a Horst-drawn carriage to "That Man In Istanbul"......the BQ stamps our cheeseball movie passport with 4 stars (****)....and pay no attention to whatever Secret Agent number Horst claims as his.....

DEPT. OF LEAST FAVORITE THINGS: BLEEDING FACE-LIFT EDITION.....

Maybe Sinclair Lewis got the title wrong.......it CAN happen here.....

Baby Orange tweets of Mika Brzezinski's "Bleeding face-lift...." .....but can't seem to find the time to read or understand the Health Care bill......and the waking nightmare continues.......by the way, if our own face glowed like a bloated, mutated Jack 'O Lantern, we'd think twice about commenting on anyone else's visage.......

Melania Trump's Anti-Cyber-bullying crusade.... How's that goin', anyway? When's the first all night telethon?  Who's hosting.....Bill 'O Reilly?

Mitch McConnell  A Dr. Suess character warped through a funhouse mirror.....Yertle The Turtle's evil twin......leaving a trail of disease-stricken, uninsured Americans in his wake.....and like the giant Japanese turtle-monster Gamera, he rotates on his own generated hot air....

Trumpkins......make sure you remember to tip your MAGA caps when the 1 percenters drive by you in their BMWs......they bought 'em with the extra cash they got from your leader's rich-folk tax cuts....

Cosby contemplates Town Hall seminars......on sexual assault?  Wouldn't dare miss it.....we heard every attendee receives a free Jello pudding pop.....and special bonus guests on tap....The former captain of the Exxon "Valdez" will discuss safe boating......Dick Cheney will also lecture on "Successful Modern Warfare",,,,,

Sarah Huckabee Sanders.....All Hail the new Director Of The Ministry Of Truth.....and hands down co-winner, along with Sean Spicer of this year's George Orwell Double-Speak Award....a specially crafted gold-plated turd......

Sean Hannity......doesn't yet realize he's a minor character from "Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom".....he's one of those sorry turban guys stuck on the collapsed bridge ladder next to Mola Ram....sooner or later, Mola Trump will kick him off the ladder, sending him plunging down to the crocs below......

Michael Bay and his 5th Transformer movie.....a living, massive, malignant cancer on civilization at large.......if Baby Orange won re-election, all movies would look like this.......

'PRETTY LITTLE LIARS' FINALE........GOT A SECRET?....PLEASE JUST KEEP IT.....

Pretty Little Liars (2010-2017)  You'd be correct in assuming the BQ wouldn't go anywhere near this TV series, throughout its seven season life span......since we're way, way out of its age group....and gender as well.

            That doesn't mean we successfully escaped it.......Beloved Daughter, among the show's primary demographic target (girls and women, ages 13 to 35, more or less) watched every episode faithfully, sometimes drafting us into an excruciating, unwilling co-viewing of an occasional episode......(or as much of an episode as we could stand before we fled, from both the show and its avalanche of commercials for tampons and acne wash,  desperately seeking a good book...)

             What little we saw of the series remained incomprehensible to us......the story seemed to hinge on a group of girls forever stalked, harassed and terrified (primarily via cellphone) by some mysterious cyber-psycho nursing a deep grudge against them.  Random murder victims would pile up as the girls regularly made lethal bad moves in dealing with this....uh....whoever.

              To be fair.....that's not a bad premise for a 95 minute thriller......but for a series lasting seven seasons?   Throughout the years, we constantly asked Beloved Daughter, "Why didn't these girls go the cops in the first episode? Who would live their entire youth tormented like this....from high school through college, through young adulthood?"  (No real human being, of course, but by keeping its audience riveted by the characters' never ending foolhardy behavior, the show thrived......and kept its network flush in advertising bucks from tampons and acne wash...)

              Once again, the BQ, eyes heavily rolling upward, was drafted to sit down and watch the series' 2 hour positively final episode......in which, the network trumpeted, 'all will be revealed'.....

              Having watched this show only in mercifully brief snippets, we understood what was going on about as well as Donald Trump understands the Health Care bill (or anything, for that matter)....not at all.

               After enduring about an hour or so, including lengthy montages of the principle actors taking time off from all the suspense to enjoy a roll in the sheets with their various partners.....at long last the show unmasked its Big Bad Villain......

                 (I suppose this is where we should warn you to stop reading if you have the slightest interest in finding out this heart-stopping surprise for yourself.....)

                Our mouth did open a bit at the villain reveal......at the sheer nerve of the show's writers in exhuming that most ancient and most lazy of all gimmick villains.......the Evil Twin. Yes, following in the footsteps of a thousand hack soap opera writers before them, the writers went there........with one of our lead girls afflicted with her doppelganger, a cheeky sociopath sporting the same mock-cockney accent we last heard from some kid working the Ye Olde Hot Dog stand at the Renaissance Faire.

                We wonder how many of the show's young fans found this revelation fresh and original....and how many them recognized it as a hoary device that's been employed by centuries of imagination-starved writers as a swift escape out of impossible plot twists they painted themselves into.....(we're guessing the latter group raced to their twitter accounts, furiously punching "WTF" into their phones and IPads....)

               The true kicker in the "Pretty Little Liars" finale was not its pop up English evil-doer, sounding like she's working at the magic wand shop in Universal Orlando's Harry Potter World.....but a teaser scene in which the network threatened to start the series all over again.....only with younger actresses. No better example of naked corporate greed could you find......with the original leads heading into old age (some of them pushing 30).....a perfect time to reboot with fresh babes.....and keep selling those tampons and acne wash.....

               For this post, we only feel qualified to rate the two hours we watched......we can't base a rating on the seven years of the show itself, having glimpsed it only in fleeting chunks.  But that lame surprise villain only warrants 1 star (*).......and we've sworn up and down that we'll never, never lay eyes on any potential re-tread of this show.......unless, God forbid, Beloved Daughter asks us to.....

                 
             

           

'THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU'........DEATH, BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED.....

The Assassination Bureau (1969)   We adore this sparkling, sardonic comedy-adventure for any number of reasons (our favorite Brit goddess Diana Rigg incredibly paired with the young, wolfish, predatory Oliver Reed,,,,,, the stellar supporting cast,,,,,,the combination Jules Verne/James Bond grand finale of a Zeppelin attack on a congress of world leaders at a Germanic castle....)

             But the true star of this movie is Michael Relph, who functioned as both writer of the consistently witty script and its production designer. The BQ could be wrong on this, but we're pretty sure there's very few movies that carry the credit, "....written and designed by..."

             In filmmaking articles and books, the contributions of production designers are rarely examined or celebrated.......exceptions, of course, include Ken Adam, with his spectacular Bond sets and "Dr. Strangelove" war room and the legendary William Cameron Menzies, creator of those "Gone With The Wind" orange sunsets and the "Invaders From Mars" sandpit that still strikes fear in the heart of every baby boomer.....

             The BQ would now respectfully include Michael Relph's gorgeously lush visions of pre-World War 1 Europe to the pantheon of classic production design......as well as his gallows-humored tongue-in-cheek script, detailing the amoral exploits of an international murder-for-fire corporation.

            This classy United Nations of gangsters is at risk on two fronts......the encroachment of World War 1, which will render them bankrupt if everyone starts freely killing each other with no payment involved, and potential exposing of them by a plucky, ahead-of-her-time, investigative reporter (Rigg).

             She cleverly undoes them by hiring the Bureau to assassinate its own young chairmen, (Reed), a devilish, quipping rake with a romantic eye for the news gal.  Reed, a self-assured swashbuckler, readily accepts his company's kill-or-be-killed challenge.....and the film's off and running, as Reed and Rigg hop around the Bureau's branch offices in France, Vienna, Geneva and Venice....all of these sites rendered by designer Relph as sumptuous fairy-tale illustrations come to life.

             We especially savored Relph's premier design accomplishment, the ripely scarlet bordello operated by the Bureau's French representative, (Phillipe Noiret), with its endless three story circular staircase and domed ceiling.  The richly imagined sets in this film (the Bureau's round table headquarters, a boisterous beer hall, Venice palazzos, the Zeppelin interior, festooned with hydrogen gas bags) serve to conjure up a turn-of-the-century Europe as fanciful as The Emerald City, Hogwarts or Neverland.

               If you've read some previous BQ posts, then you know how much we gravitate to what we call snow globe movies, films that create and self-contain their own specialized universe......a fantasy world that could only exist inside the film itself. Well here's one of the ultimate snow globe movies, an exquisite exercise in cinematic world-building by the extraordinarily talented Relph.

               We wouldn't dare end this post without mentioning the film's priceless supporting line-up....Noiret, Curt Jergens, Clive Revill, Warren Mitchell, Vernon Dobtcheff....... and as the Bureau's vice-chairman, Telly Savalas (supplied by Relph with wittier one liners than he got the same year as Blofeld in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"......bemoaning the street jam-up caused by a fallen horse, he declares "How the traffic will flow once it's all motorized!")

              Throw in the lilting, insanely catchy title song ("Life Is A Precious Thing") and you have one of the BQ's all time favorite escapist entertainments.......darkly funny, exhilarating and perfectly designed, like suitable for framing work of art.  We aim and fire 4 stars (****) at these assassins.... "The Assassination Bureau".....it's to die for.

           



         

'MIDNIGHT AT THE BRIGHT IDEAS BOOKSTORE'.......UN-COZY MYSTERIES, FROM PAGES AGO....

Midnight At The Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan (2017)   There's no shortage of entertainingly sweet murder mysteries centered around a town's favorite bookstore......sample one and you quickly see why they fall into the genre of "cozy.' We're certain we have any number of them still sitting unread in our massive '1 Dollar Book Sale' stashes lying around......

              This one stands in a class by itself.......Matthew Sullivan's brilliant new mystery, steeped in book love and lore, will make your jaw drop regularly with its twists, turns, stunning revealed secrets and its heartbreaking, bittersweet climax.

              Be forewarned: cozy it's not.

              As a child, bookseller Lydia Smith somehow survived a horrifying death at the hands of the "Hammerman", an unidentified, elusive assailant who fatally bludgeoned Lydia's friend and her friend's parents during a sleepover. Lydia escaped the Hammerman's sight by hiding  under the kitchen sink......but the question remains, did she really escape his notice?

             Now a young woman working at Bright Ideas, a busy Denver bookstore, Lydia takes special care of the store's 'Book-Frogs', the lost soul eccentrics who've found a sheltering home in Bright Ideas' nooks and crannies.....

              Her world get shaken to its core when Joey, one of the Book-Frogs, a forlorn young ex-convict, commits suicide in the store, bequeathing Lydia a collection of books he's used to create coded messages for her. If that isn't enough of a mystery......the boy dies with a snapshot in his pocket, a long lost childhood photo of Lydia.

              Intrigued? So were we. As Lydia and another childhood friend sleuth their way through Joey's tortured backstory, author Sullivan pulls off one twist after another........and the plot's ever tightening web inexorably draws Lydia back into her horrific past.....and that permanent, shadowy figure of her nightmares, the Hammerman, who was never captured.

              The BQ couldn't give this one anything less than our highest rating. We tore through it in a day......and its final thrilling reveals, filled with violence and unspeakable tragedy, knocked us silly. Superb writing, swift pace, clever plotting......BQ simply recommends you stop into the Bright Ideas bookstore for one of the best reads of the summer.  Easy to rate:  5 stars, (*****), a FIND OF FINDS......

           

           

             

'KINGDOM OF HEAVEN'........ONWARD RIDLEY'S SOLDIERS.....

Kingdom Of Heaven (2006)  We'd never dream of posting anything about this film until we finally caught up with director Ridley Scott's 'Director's Cut', which runs a good 45 minutes longer than the film's original 2 and 1/2 theatrical version........

             With a deep sigh of a bungee jumper about to take the plunge, we wiped the the dust off the Blu-Ray and hunkered down for 3 hours and 15 minutes.......we even selected the daffy 'Roadshow' option, which includes an overture and intermission music......(we'd love to know who in the hell thought this movie would revive the 'Roadshow' format, which the big studios murdered (along with their own financial bottom lines) with their ghastly parade of disastrous three hour 'Sound Of Music' wanna-be's throughout the l960's....)

             First thought that came to mind:  why anyone in their right mind would pay for an overpriced Multiplex ticket to see a Ridley Scott movie is beyond us.......when invariably, a few months later, Scott's voluminous 'Director's Cut' would appear on video, with vast amounts of previously deleted footage re-inserted to at least make the story coherent......

              So here we have Sir Ridley's epic take on the Crusades, which contrary to what many people expected, had neither Christians or Muslims howling for his blood.  Whatever faint praise "Kingdom Of Heaven" collected came from its fairly distanced, dispassionate approach to history's most titanic battle of ideologies.  Hey, Fox News, here's what 'fair and balanced' really looks like......

               The closest thing you have to a villain here, if you insist on having one in your costume epics, are those wacky true believers, the Templar knights.......they're almost as bad in this movie as those skeletal Templars who ride around in the cheapo Spanish horror movies, chasing after screaming hot babes.....

                This balanced approach can't come as any surprise......who thought Ridley Scott could possibly craft a film where content mattered over the visuals?  While other directors might have dug deep into the overwhelming drama of a clash of civilizations, Scott has nothing on his mind other than making it all look pretty......every landscape, every battle, every storm at sea is suitable for framing......no politics, just portraiture.

                If that's all you expect out of a Crusades movie.....gorgeously composed shots of Christians and Muslims turning each other into deli meat with their broadswords, then you can easily lose yourself in Scott's meticulously re-created Holy Land.  Periodically, you can shake your head from time to time and mutter, "wow......things haven't changed much in a thousand years, have they?".....but you won't pick that vibe up from Ridley's direction......that thought doesn't even occur to the movie until a tag line right before the credits roll.....

                What truly relegated Scott's grand vision to quick obscurity was his lethal choice of Orlando Bloom as his lead actor.  With a skilled, charismatic actor as an anchor, the film might have had a fighting chance to engage and grip an audience.  Instead, Scott chose to construct all this massive world-building around Bloom, a generic, uninteresting non-entity of a performer......Bloom aimlessly wanders through this movie like a stand-in for a superstar who never showed up.....

               To the BQ's enormous disappointment, the inside of the Blu-Ray case didn't include a coupon for a free "I Survived the "Kingdom Of Heaven" Director's Cut" T-shirt......or action figures with removable heads and limbs if you want to stage your own Crusade.....so we can only award two broadswords...(**).....if there's ever a threatened 5 hour Ultimate Director's Cut.....we'll pass.


           
             
           

'BAREFOOT IN THE PARK'.........QUIPLASH

Barefoot In The Park (1967)  What a perfect palate cleanser this was.....especially after suffering through 1966's "A Find Madness".....whose bizarre romantic highpoint came with Sean Connery punching out his newly pregnant wife....

                 No such nasty stuff would ever rear its head in this Neil Simon Broadway comedy, which the playwright himself adapted for film. In the Simon-verse, not only is everybody fundamentally nice, but everyone from the leads to the walk-on bit players have an inexhaustible supply of quips and one-liners. No conversational dullards exist in Simon plays or movies.......even the telephone repairman, when he arrives,  comes equipped with both phones and gags....

                   And the BQ wouldn't have it any other way, especially in this movie, our favorite frothy Simon-ized quip-fest.  We hug this one for its simple, basic, primal rom-com mission.....,to insure that our comically mis-matched young lovers finish the movie with a big smoocheroo....to the sustained applause of random bystanders.

                  50 years after its release, we do amuse ourselves by contemplating the backstory here.....as in: what would lead free-spirited, pleasure-loving bohemian Corie (Jane Fonda) to marry straight-laced conservative lawyer Paul (Robert Redford) in the first place?  Their honeymoon, a solid week of marathon, Olympic sex at the Plaza Hotel, certainly implies physical compatibility......but we can't help wondering why a sybaritic sprite like Corie wouldn't just hop on the back of Peter Fonda's motorcycle and head off to find America along with unlimited biker bonking......(of course we know the answer......Paul may be a stick-in-the-mud.....but holy crap, he's Robert Friggin' Redford....)

                  But then, if Corie disappeared in a cloud of weed and Harley exhaust, we wouldn't have a movie to enjoy.....watching these two bat countless Simon gag lines back and forth like a two hour verbal ping pong tournament.....aided and abetted by movie Golden Age veterans Mildred Natwick and Charles Boyer. A warm, fuzzy fantasy world, we know....but who wouldn't want to visit an alternate reality where true love triumphs and every word out of your mouth is funny?

                 As a genre, the romantic comedy has stymied today's filmmakers, who've tried to freshen up the boy-meets-girl blueprint with ever increasing amounts of dysfunction, anger and ridiculous plot twists........as for the BQ, call us old fashioned (or as Beloved Daughter does, just plain old)....we'll take the simple, sweet pleasures of "Barefoot In The Park"  every time...4 romantic stars (****).....now cue the gushing music with a happy chorus singing the theme song......

                 

'A FINE MADNESS'.......POETRY IN COMMOTION........

A Fine Madness (1966)   Some 1960's movies transcend their era in groundbreaking technique and storytelling, others stay firmly rooted in their time period, functioning as a nostalgic snapshot of their time.......

             "A Fine Madness", however, we can offer no rational explanation for.......it was as repulsively noxious in 1966 as it is now. The passage of 51 years has only worsened it......

               The primary reason for its existence:   to serve as a vehicle for the world's then most in-demand movie star, Sean Connery.  Connery, eager to display his non-Bond acting chops, slipped this one in between "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice", shooting the film on New York City streets with a teeming cast of veteran distinguished actors.

                This movie desperately depended on Connery's undeniable charisma and sex appeal to candy-coat his character Samson Shillitoe, a raging, hot tempered, anti-social, anti-establishment poet in the throes of writer's block. In other words, only a Sean Connery could make this jerk palatable to audiences.....

               We can't remember a more astoundingly hateful character in a 1960's studio film than Connery's Shillitoe........a cowardly sucker-punching bully, a guiltless philanderer, and, to the movie's everlasting shame and embarrassment, a physical abuser of his loyal, long suffering waitress wife. (Joanne Woodward plays this role as a non-stop, screeching nag, which apparently justifies Connery's throwing punches at her, terrorizing her until she tumbles down the stairs of their apartment building......unlike Jackie Gleason's "To the moon, Alice!", Connery's not bluffing...)

              But the movie invites us to celebrate Shillitoe's rampage through modern society because.........well, because he's Sean Connery, damn it.....and we ought to forgive him anything.... because he looks so cool doing it  (The key to this movie's attitude is better displayed, not in the film itself, but in "Mondo Connery",  the unintentionally hilarious 6 minute Warner Brothers promotional featurette.....in which a worshiping, subservient narrator fawns over Connery, describing the actor as practically a Demi-God who has briefly graced New York with his divine presence.....)

              Director Irvin Kershner, who 17 years later would direct Connery's rogue Bond "Never Say Never Again", evidently tried for the freewheeling amorality of European films, the ones where you're supposed to chuckle at the sight of lead actors carrying on like assholes.........but the film's shot in ultra-bright primary Technicolor......it looks like a Jerry Lewis comedy that's been hijacked by one of the minor characters, the boorish, obnoxious so-called 'artiste' who's just begging to be punched....

             As Connery cuts a swath through New York's psychiatric community (recruited by Woodward for 200 bucks to cure his writer's block) truly bizarre sequences tumble one after the other
....including the sight of Connery manhandling diminutive, helium-voiced John Fiedler, whose high pitched squeal every kid would recognize from Disney cartoons.......that's right, ladies and gentlemen, this is the only movie where you'll get to see James Bond pushing around Piglet.

             The BQ's Favorite Woeful Moments of this film:  Connery snarling "You tuberculin-tested hags" to a group of outraged matrons he's been paid to read his poems to......a creepy mad shrink (Clive Revill), whose every appearance has a Theramin woo-wooing in the background, performing a double lobotomy on Connery in hopes of turning him into a normal docile citizen...(guess what, even after having steel rods jammed through his eyeballs, Connery wakes up with his temper and libido undiminished......I guess we all cheer at that point...)

             We've always remained the biggest fan of Sir Sean........and the fact that we consider him one of the most watchable actors on the planet accounts for the BQ reluctantly dredging up at least 1 & 1/2 stars for "A Fine Madness" (* 1/2)....a sorry mess for a legendary cinema icon.
           

'THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT'.......GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE GUM......

The World Of Henry Orient (1964).......is always fondly remembered for turning New York City into a sweet, gentle playground for two equally benevolent 14 year old schoolgirls......the New York depicted here seems as mythical as the Main Street midwest towns in Disney films......in 1964, Hollywood was still a few years away from portraying New York as a Dante's Inferno of crime, grime and depravity.

           The film and and its title misrepresented itself as a Peter Sellers vehicle...... while Sellers did have the pivotal supporting role of no-talent concert pianist Henry Orient,  the starring roles belonged to newcomers Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker, playing the adorably innocent, bubble-gum popping teens, not yet overtaken by adolescent angst,  who indulge their crush on Orient by stalking him around the city.

           Sellers' Orient, a self-invented continental sophisticate who fancies himself a Lothario, grows increasingly hysterical and reverts back to his Brooklyn street guy accent (which Sellers modeled off his previous director, Stanley Kubrick)......especially when the girls constantly interrupt his fruitless seduction of a skittish married woman (Paula Prentiss) on the edge of nervous breakdown herself. (At one point Sellers contemplates first plying her with sedatives......yes, you could still get away with staying stuff like that in the more innocent 60's....)

           Director George Roy Hill deliberately fashioned the film like a self-contained, live-action snow globe,(including beautiful postcard-worthy shots of Central Park) and it may stand as one of the last studio movies where you'd still see children still behaving.....well, childishly.  A invaluable gift to the film's lighter-than-air tone came from, of all people, composer Elmer Bernstein, at this point in his career mostly known for robust, muscular dramatic scores. Bernstein layered the film with warm-hearted themes that instantly captured its playful spirit and touches of sadness with remarkable precision....

            Hill also deftly extracted perfectly pitched work from his two young actors......Walker as the lost soul, emotionally bruised child of an about-to-be-broken home and Spaeth as her more grounded, down to earth acolyte........(you can hear in Spaeth's clipped, no nonsense delivery, the enormously successful Republican operative and businesswoman she became as an adult....)

             As a delightful bonus, the film throws in the oddest couple imaginable as Walker's wealthy, unhappy parents......Angela Lansbury as her monstrous mom, a slightly toned down version of Lansbury's 'Manchurian Candidate' harpy, and Tom Bosley, in full avuncular "Happy Days'" mode as the dad. No one could possibly envision how these two ended up as husband and wife.......you almost expect Lansbury to start calling Spaeth a communist tart and invite Walker to play a little solitaire.....

             Befitting the film's benign, compassionate tone, the story ends exactly as you want it to......though we couldn't quite join in the ironic humor of the film's final shot (the girls, having left fantasy adventures of childhood behind them, now converted to full-fledged 'Bye Bye Birdie' teens obsessed with boys, make-up and clothes)......cause let's face it, the film renders them far more interesting and engaging as kids, leaping over fire hydrants and tormenting Peter Sellers, than as the TV sitcom ready teeny-boppers they become......lucky they've got the "Happy Days" Dad to see them through........and the movie still remains one of our favorites, 4 stars (****)

'ALL THE MISSING GIRLS'........2 GONE GIRLS FOR THE PRICE OF 1......

All The Missing Girls by Megan Miranda (2016)   Let's get this out right now: out of the piles and piles of "Gone Girl" clones, this one's the real deal.  A stunner that had the BQ racing through the pages into the middle of the night......... high praise indeed, since at our age,  the only thing we usually race for in the middle of the night is the bathroom......

           This involves a young woman, Nicolette Farrell, and her harrowing return to the small North Carolina town where she grew up,  Rumors and secrets still abound about the mysterious disappearance of her charismatic, wildly destructive best friend Corrinne, ten years earlier.......

            Suspicion, fear and more secrets surface when another young girl disappears.....who happens to be the new girlfriend of Nicolette's high school lost-love-of-her-life, Tyler. Once again police and detectives descend to investigate the same cast of characters they dealt with in the last disappearance....Nicolette, her brother Daniel, Tyler, all their friends and even Nicolette's dementia-afflicted father, who claims to have recently seen Corinne on his front porch....

            Author Miranda wickedly plots enough twists and turns to keep your nose permanently glued to this book until you finish......and pulls off a rather dazzling high-wire act by telling the story backwards, with each successive chapter labeled "The Day Before".

             While the reverse order storytelling may stagger you in its cleverness, what impressed us the most was Miranda's ability to include incisive, wonderfully crafted insights and observations on the characters.......and doing this without ever, for a moment, slowing down the narrative.

             Easily the best thriller we've read this year......BQ recommends you dive into this one with all possible speed. 5 chilling stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS......Gillian Flynn and her Gone Girl  have met their match in Megan Miranda and her gone girls......

'HURRY SUNDOWN'.......WAY DOWN SOUTH IN THE LAND 'O OTTO......

Hurry Sundown (1967)   Now here's a 50th anniversary movie we doubt anyone is celebrating or remembering......except the BQ, as we crown it one of the guiltiest of our guilty pleasures....

           This was the last of director Otto Preminger's bloated, all-star epic dramas, after "Exodus", "Advise and Consent", "The Cardinal" and "In Harm's Way"........the withering scorn and ridicule heaped upon "Hurry Sundown"  effectively ended the Preminger parade of melodramatic, multi-character circuses......forced to go back to more modest films, the famously tyrannical director's downward slide began.......

            Preminger, like many an aging director uncomfortable with the rapid changes in both filmmaking and the culture, went on to make awkward, out-of-touch little movies, most of them unwatchable on any level.......

           Bad as they were, none of Preminger's subsequent films could duplicate the fun of enveloping yourself in the epic toxicity of "Hurry Sundown"......his Southern-Fried grand opera indictment of racism, overacted like rogue Tennessee Williams loud enough for the cheap seats to hear.....

          Before we start in on the movie, we feel honor bound to point out that few film directors so embraced black performers like Preminger, having produced and directed "Carmen Jones" and "Porgy and Bess"......(though he did the latter film no favors, shooting the entirety of it in long shots...the appalled Gershwin estate buried the film, never to see the light of day(or a projector) again.

           By the time he got around to "Hurry Sundown", based on a trashy bestseller fresh off the airport paperback spinner racks, Preminger's worst condescending instincts overtook him.  Subtlety and sub-text had worked their way into films of the 60's, but Preminger directed this movie like a florid, overheated 1940's potboiler, encouraging his actors to dial up the histrionics..........it was a titanic face off between already worn out caricatures....the noble, gentle-hearted poor black folk versus a hateful collection of drawling, Southern cracker gargoyles, freely flinging about the "n" world.

            Even at close to two and a half hours, the film's spectacularly grotesque plot and characters still keep us riveted.......a mint julep trainwreck to savor. Set in post-World War 2 Georgia, the film pits a depraved, greedy wanna-be land developer (Michael Caine) against two army veteran sharecroppers, one black, one white (Robert Hooks, John Philip Law), whose side by side farms stand in the way of Caine's get-rich-quick real estate dreams.

            Before it grinds to a halt, melodrama explodes all over the place, along with huge amounts of construction dynamite.....(after a while, it feels like more stuff's getting blown up than in "Kelly's Heroes" and "Dirty Dozen" combined)

           And like a "Welcome To Deep South Hell" fun house ride, there's a great garish variety of weird displays to pop up in front of you.........Jane Fonda, giving it her all as Caine's near-nympho Southern Belle wife,  mother of their young son, who's been reduced to a non-stop wailing vegetable ever since Caine's mistreatment of the boy as an infant.  (That doesn't quell Fonda's raging hot-to-trotness for Caine, including a now legendary scene where she teasingly fellates his saxaphone.....don't ask us to explain,,,,,you hadda be there....)

             Even more cracker barrel monsters show up to entertain you, including the town's premier showcase racist, Judge Purcell (overplayed for comic relief by Burgess Meredith......sounding like Jeff Sessions on uppers)....and a full coterie of closet Klansmen who hang around the General Store in case they're needed to terrorize and arrest blacks, blow stuff up....or both.

             As for film's oppressed black population, they fight back by gathering 'round to sing a Church spiritual version of the movie's title song while plying the dumb-and-dumbest town Sheriff (George Kennedy) with fried chicken and apple pie........honest, we're not making any of this up....

             If nothing else, Otto Preminger brought the races together with the release of "Hurry Sundown".......everyone, regardless of color, came together in loathing and scoffing at the movie. The Preminger Big Budget/Big Issue/Big Stars gravy train finally flew off the rails, never to roll again.

            50 years later, it appears only the BQ had any desire to break into the time capsule and have another peek.  We don't regret it......the movie's still insanely compelling in all its glorious wrong-headedness........and sadly, we have to wonder if race relations have gotten any better than what's depicted in this film......our current, ridiculously unqualified Attorney General could be just another "Hurry Sundown" character. appointed by the biggest, most raging racist in the world....

              As a movie, it's strictly a one star atrocity (*).....as a deeply guilty pleasure, it's priceless and will live forever.

         

'ROBERT B.PARKER'S LITTLE WHITE LIES'......SPENSER HUNTS A TRUMPIAN LIAR......

Robert B. Parker's Little White Lies by Ace Atkins (2017)   The BQ's more than little conflicted about books in which authors carry on the further adventures of a deceased author's much beloved characters.....

              When Robert B. Parker was alive, we gobbled up his Spenser novels faster than a load of IHOP pancakes.......you could easily devour them in less than two hours, since 90 percent of the books consisted of pithy, dryly witty dialogue from cool, sardonic Boston private eye Spenser. Spenser always had an inexhaustible supply of verbal barbs as he dealt with friends and enemies alike....and we could never get enough of him.

             After Parker's passing, his estate gave mystery writer Ace Atkins the privilege of writing Spenser novels, performing the literary tightrope act of duplicating Parker's unique style while adding something of his own talents to the stories.

            The effect is the same as watching some comedy club impressionist do an uncanny imitation of an instantly familiar celebrity........you admire how close he came to the original, but you're aware you're not experiencing the real thing.....

             Atkins labors mightily to duplicate Spenser's banter but you can sense the sweat and strain he's putting into it, as opposed to the effortless feel of Robert Parker's prose. And to many a fan's displeasure, Atkins' Spenser at times reacts,  behaves and speaks quite differently than Parker's Spenser.  We're willing to roll with that only up to a certain point......if you think Atkins takes too many presumptuous liberties with the character, then Spenser's not Spenser anymore.....and then putting Robert Parker's name on the books in front of the title smells like a con job...

              Speaking of cons, one element we did admire in "Little White Lies"......Atkins creation of Spenser's latest quarry, M. Brooks Welles, a slick pathological liar so cloaked in false identities and fictionalized backgrounds that Welles himself has swallowed his own lies and lost all touch with reality. Like Donald Trump, he's tailor made as a poster boy for the Time magazine cover that recently blared, "Is truth dead?"

              Welles, supposedly a former top secret U.S. military operative, has conned CNN into using him as a commentator and hoodwinked a lonely woman, Spenser's client, out of 300,000 dollars. Spenser goes on the hunt for this self made fantasy figure, but his brief confrontations with Welles prove maddening......Welles resides in his own bubble of falsehoods, he sounds like Trump wailing about Obama's birth, the tapping of his phones, the size of his crowds and New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9-11.....

              It's a lengthier tale than master of brevity Robert Parker would have written......and we couldn't help speculating how Parker's Spenser might have handled such a supremely annoying charlatan, and how it would differ from the even-handed way he's treated by Atkins' Spenser...

             Still, the book's an entertaining enough read, if you can live with the fact that Atkins can skillfully revive Spenser and mimic Parker's style, but never, never recapture that singular, lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the original.  So we'll close the case on "Little White Lies" with 3 stars...(***)....not quite Parker, but always nice to see his creation in action again.....

UNLUCKIEST DADS OF THE MOVIES.......WE SALUTE YOU.....

On this Father's Day, a quick remembrance for these poor Pops....

George Sanders in "Village Of The Damned"   Technically not a biological father, since his blonde-locked, emotionless little troll was whim-whammed into his wife's womb via alien transmissions from across the galaxy........a serious believer in tough love, as he opts for blowing up his kid and the rest of his kid's playmates......wimpier Dads might have just grounded them....

Kirk Douglas in "The Fury"  A truly hard luck Dad......watching his super-telekinetically empowered son used and abused by shady government operatives......the kid and Kirk both end up plunging off a roof......well, at least they got to do things together.....

William Hopper in "The Bad Seed" and "Rebel Without A Cause"  The quintessential 1950's Dad.....completely clueless as to who and what he's raising under his roof......in "The Bad Seed", his Army officer duties leave him oblivious to the fact that the beloved little girl he spawned is a sociopath murderess.  In "Rebel".....this guy's so remote and cold, no wonder Natalie Wood runs into James Dean's arms.......nice goin', Pops......no basket of kisses and hugs for you....

Darth Vader in "Return Of The Jedi"  Nobody wants to see their Dad before he shaves and showers......and after trembling at the very voice of your father, afraid that he might lop off your other hand....you find out he looks like Humpty Dumpty with a bad skin condition......

Christopher Walken in "At Close Range".....cause having your son's girlfriend executed .keeps a rebellious teen in line.....the dopey son should have known this would happen.....your father's Christopher Walken, for God's sake......did you think that would end well?

Robert Mitchum in "Night Of The Hunter"  A loving Evangelical stepdad, threatening to carve up his stepson like a "hog at butcherin'" if the tyke doesn't give up his real dad's hidden stash of cash.....takes good care of the kid's mom too, leaving her sitting in a car at the bottom of a lake with her throat cut.......well, like Trump voters, God must have told him to do it.....

Happy Father's Day from the BQ!

LEAST FAVORITE THINGS CURRENTLY UNDER INVESTIGATION.....

"What legal basis do you have for not answering our questions?"   New government response: "I don't feel like it.....I don't wanna....."     The BQ used to try that on our mom when we were growing up......usually earning us a smack across the behind..... there's something for Congress to consider.....

Baby Orange cracks down on Cuba.....New executive orders:  On  all "Fate Of The Furious" DVDs and Blu-Rays, locale of the the first ten minutes has been changed from Havana to Scottsdale, Arizona......strategic drone strikes over Cuba will target every automobile older than 1960.....

White House lawyers up........Billable hours will exceed the national debt.....

The middle-of-the-night tweetstorms.......maybe all Trumpaholics should ask themselves if this is really what they signed up for....... their idol watching cable news all day, tweeting all night.....maybe they should ask when he ever finds time to do his job.....

Ivanka can't comprehend...."the viciousness"......Very nice of Glinda The Good Witch to lend Ivanka that bubble to float around in......

Megyn Kelly's hard-hitting interviews....Can't wait for her one-on-one with Assad......"So Mr. Assad, you do realize that some kids would rather opt out of inhaling poison gas.....right?"

Another rogue cop exonerated from executing a black man....the real question worth asking....how did this miserable little coward even get on the police force to begin with.....shrieking like a little girl while he pumped bullets into a guy sitting in a car.....

Tom Cruise......how mad would your evil cult Overloards be with you if you went back to real acting?  And went back to real acting in actual movies?

North Korea.....American kids receives a get-out-of-jail card only after they've turn his brains into mush......which still makes the kid smarter than Dennis Rodman.....

Bill Cosby..... enjoy your momentary triumph......meanwhile, the entire world still knows what you're like with the 'America's Dad' mask taken off........

'GREMLINS'.......SPIELBERG HATCHES THE PG-13.....PART ONE

Gremlins (1984)   In a career dotted with landmarks, Steven Spielberg may have achieved his most historical cinematic accomplishment with the two films he released in the summer of '84......this one, which he produced and Joe Dante directed, and his own produced and directed "Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom"........

              Both were rated PG and remain so today.......even though together, they touched off a storm of controversy among parents appalled at the levels of  violence and gore in both films.

              The result? The creation of the PG-13 rating.....in which filmmakers could now work in a few more dead bodies and blood, a little more skin from the starlets.....and even, if screamed out in the heat of anger, the F-Bomb....(as in "Why the f*** did you kill my whole family?!!")

              "Gremlins", which we'll look at first, seems an odd film to blame for the instigation of the PG-13......since the bulk of its violence is inflicted not on flesh and blood people, but on animatronic puppets. The dealbreaker for parents of easily upset kids:  the kitchen showdown between the film's Mom figure (Frances Lee McCain) and the grems, with McCain popping one into the microwave until it bursts into green goo. And that sequence merely kicked off a whole variety of Gremlin exterminations, including creatures stabbed, burned alive and blown to shreds.....

                Director Dante and writer Chris Columbus freely tapped into the gleeful sadism that all kids since the dawn of Toys R Us have exhibited when playing with their action figures.......but for some folks, the shock of seeing this jokey, cavalier carnage played out in a film was a little too much. You can think of Frances Lee McCain hitting High Power on the microwave as the moment of conception for the  PG-13......

                Watching the film again, we found it strangely stand-offish and ambivalent in regard to the human casualties........we're not sure how many people bite the dust in the Gremlin apocalypse.....the editing artfully dodges around, leaving their fates unclear.   Depending on your outlook on life, you can either believe most the town's population has been maimed, mutilated or eaten.....or escaped with minor injuries. (Although we're pretty sure the high school science teacher and the town Wicked Witch took the dirt nap after their Gremlin encounters.....)

                  This puppet massacre, as it turned out, served as only one of the parents of the PG-13 rating........if "Gremlins" was the mother of the PG-13, the father was surely Spielberg's Indiana Jones sequel.....which we'll cover in an upcoming post.  As for "Gremlins", we still love those that those little guys were brought to life by old school mechanical artistry as opposed to today's real but ultimately unreal CGI. We'll microwave 4 gooey stars (****)....and yet it stays a PG!

           

           

'47 METERS DOWN'........FAREWELL AND ADIEU, MY SHARK STRICKEN LADIES.....

47 Meters Down (2017)   If you're startled to see the BQ covering a brand new movie on its theatrical release date......so are we.

           Pure serendipity, to tell the truth.....we got a look at this one way back last year, when it had a one week shelf life as a direct-to-DVD title called "In The Deep".....(Beloved Daughter, who normally runs screaming from scare movies, embraced this film eagerly since it starred her adored fave, Mandy Moore.....

            "In The Deep" was quickly yanked off the Target shelves when the film changed corporate hands......and the new producers, encouraged by the success of last summer's Black Lively Vs. A Shark movie, "The Shallows", gave "In The Deep" back its original title and a prime 2017 summer playdate in theaters.  After all, nothing says summer like the sight of hot babes dangled as appetizers for great white sharks......

             And dangle they do, as two vacationing sisters, (Moore and Claire Holt) unwisely sign up for a shark-cage experience on a rickety tub captained by a haggard, gaunt Matthew Modine. (One glance at Modine's boat tells you things won't bode well......it makes Robert Shaw's 'Orca' look like the Love Boat...)

            Before you can even mutter to yourself, "Girls go in the cage....cage goes in the water....sharks in the water...", the cable snaps and down to the bottom go our lovelies, with only an hour of air left in their tanks, and a lot of You-Know-Whats popping up for a quick bite.....

           No, don't start smirking, loyal readers......cause this little movie, swift, efficient and slickly done, deftly accomplishes what it set out to do..... to.scare you silly and make you cling to whoever you brought with you to see it....(we expect it to become a yuuuuuge date night experience)

           "47 Meters Down" turns out much like one its finely rendered CGI sharks......fast moving and brutally single-minded in purpose, the cinematic equivalent of a theme park ride.

             And no doubt, audiences will cringe at the sight of these toothy predators daring to menace sweet Mandy Moore, America's new reigning maternal sweetheart of 'This Is Us'.  Moore fearlessly risks ridicule by spending the entire film hyperventilating in stark terror......which, let's face it, is exactly what the rest of us would do if put in the same situation . (Personally, we'd inhale more oxygen gasping in fear than all the underwater guys in 'Thunderball' put together.....)

             So what you have here is a perfect, compact, stripped down little 'Gotcha!' joy ride, tailor made for a hot summer night......and the BQ easily prefers a movie like this to any of those bloated, 200 million buck budgeted 'tentpoles' afflicting theaters in the next few months (we mean you, Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp)  '47 Meters Down' with its loads of jump scares and added bonus of a Twilight Zone-ish twist filled the bill for us......a modest reminder of the simple, unfettered pleasures that movies used to be.

            Let other, more sophisticated critics mock and deride this......for 89 minutes, we had a damn good time, so we'll chomp down on 3 & 1/2 stars...(*** 1/2).......you evil sharks....how dare you circle around Mandy.......
             

         

'PROPHECY'.......THE MUTATED BEAR NECESSITIES........

Prophecy (1979)   The BQ shares with Stephen King an overpowering guilty pleasure fondness for this movie. It arrived, with high purpose and high pedigree (a John Frankenheimer film, no less) in the same summer season as Ridley Scott's "Alien"......

           Two monster movies. Two rampaging creatures racking up high body counts, one in the Maine woods, one in a massive outer space corporate freighter......

           Ridley's monster, a stunning, nightmarish creation designed by H.R. Giger, froze audiences in their seats.....they'd never, in their worst dreams, seen anything like it.

           John Frankenheimer's monster, a bear inundated with strawberry sauce, rendered by crude puppetry and mimes in monster suits, invited audience derision and laughter.

           This became doubly sad for "Prophecy" since it clearly had higher aspirations, dealing with a man made ecological catastrophe as well as mistreatment of native Americans. Screenwriter David Seltzer took his inspiration from the mercury poisoned coastal village of Minamata, Japan, where a corporation's industrial waste infected the food chain, leading to the birth of deformed babies.

            Of course his other inspiration was obviously the creature features of the 1950's  where the folly of above ground H-Bomb tests invariably brought out all manner of pissed off giant bugs and dinosaurs.

            As described in Seltzer's screenplay and novelization, the "Prophecy" monster should have been one for the ages......since the mercury, released into the eco-system by a nearby paper mill plant, is described as corrupting and mutating a fetus so badly, it would emerge as everything on the evolutionary scale....amphibian, reptile, feline, etc, etc....In other words, your worst nightmare.....

             That's what in the script, but it's far from what Frankenheimer got from his special effects crew. As opposed to the groundbreaking Giger beastie, "Prophecy"s effects team delivered a true 1950's monster worthy of Ed Wood Jr.......a guy shambling around in a heavy Halloween costume. To add to this embarrassing amateur night creature, its babies were played by barely movable puppets.

             Frankenheimer must have realized how awful his assemblage of miserably constructed mutations looked, .....the monster attack scenes reeked of desperation, with ultra fast cutting to keep anyone from getting a good look at the thing....if you don't blink, you'd glimpse something sort of like Yogi Bear covered in congealed pink frosting.......hardly the evolutionary mash-up described by the writer.....

            The appearance of this ridiculous, roaring Muppet pulls the rug out from the film's actors, who've all been giving intense, committed performances, as if the movie was a top notch serious drama. (Armand Assante, playing the activist leader of the Native Americans, juts his profile for the camera as if he's posing to be engraved on the nickel.....Talia Shire, newly pregnant with a fetus potentially dosed with mercury, spends the entire film in agonized worry, as unhappy as when she watches Mr. T. and Dolph Lundgren pound on  Sylvester Stallone.)

            The actors needn't have bothered.....once Frankenheimer's Jolly Pink Predator rolls through the woods like an angry Rose Bowl Parade float, the movie devolves into simple, Grade Z cheesy fun........to hell with the ecological warnings, we just want to see the big galoot get his monster groove on......swipe people twenty feet in the air, overturn cars, knock down buildings and bite some poor sucker's head off.  He doesn't disappoint.

              We feel sorry for Frankenheimer......we know he meant to bring directorial professionalism and skill to a genre primarily plowed by hacks.....to do for monster movies what  Robert Wise's "The Haunting" did for haunted house movies. And until he's undone by his woeful team of puppeteers, the film comes close to what he had in mind..... as for the rest of it, well let's just say it's a damn good replica of a 1950's big bug/rippling reptile monster mash. And since nobody loves those misbegotten films more than the BQ, we'll claw out 3 stars (***) ......for a Teddy Bears picnic from hell.......


           

'THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!'......IT'S A COLD, COLD, COLD, COLD WAR....

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966)......is a movie we always categorized in our unique 'lukewarm nostalgia' niche.......by that we mean that peculiar group of films that can bring a smile to your face thinking about them, remembering them.......but watching them?   Uh......that's another story.....

           Lauded at the time as an epic laugh riot with an added message of peace and understanding between global rivals, today the movie comes off (to the BQ, anyway) as obvious, shrill, hammy and surprisingly absent of any genuine wit or humor....

             The comedy, such at it is, springs from a large cast of actors screaming in panicked or enraged hysteria. At the top of their lungs, they play a collection of caricatured New England islanders, agog at the landing of a crew of Soviet submariners led by Alan Arkin.  The largely comic opera Reds seek a boat to tow their sub off a sand bar, the result of a foolhardy navigation error by their blowhard, idiot captain (Theodore Bikel)....

             Much huffing, puffing and gun toting ensues from the locals.....even sabre-rattling, courtesy of the island's military home defense loon (Paul Ford).   The effect is like watching a two hour version of the brief comedic scene in "Jaws" involving the chaotic flotilla of would be shark hunters taking to the open sea.....except on land....

              Taken from a Nathaniel Benchley novel and scripted by William Rose, it's really nothing more than a slightly scaled down version of Rose's script for "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"......a large cast of loud American boobs randomly yelling at each other.....only this time it's Russians and not greed that fuels their fury.  Rose can't write a single funny line for any of these people......he can only bounce them off each other like pinballs....

                A few odds and ends still stand out......Arkin's heavily accented working-stiff Russian, gaining his own share of steady laughs, all by himself, with no help from the script.....the late great under-appreciated Brian Keith as the slow burn town sheriff.....the not very funny but decidedly strenuous work put in by the rest of the cast including Carl Reiner and Jonathon Winters........and last and horribly least, the child 'actor' (we use the term actor loosely here) tasked with playing Reiner's repulsive little boy,  Every time this kid opened his toxic mouth, we prayed for the Russians to machine gun him and put Reiner and the audience out of their misery....

               After all the heavy lifting of keeping this cast in perpetual frenzy, director Norman Jewison cemented the film;s iconic reputation with its finale plot twist, which could have come straight out of a Frank Capra movie.......a bold choice for an American movie, given the way-below-zero temperature of the Cold War.  (And the film's feel good climax still stands apart today, since post-communist Russia remains a dangerous, implacable foe, ruled by a KGB reptile still steeped in thuggery..)

                As we said, "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" can make you smile at the thought of it.........just don't expect it to keep you convulsed in belly laughs should you encounter it for real....lots of noise, minimal laughs....2 & 1/2 hammer-and-sickles...(** 1/2)

'HOUSE OF CARDS, SEASON 5'......ARE THE UNDERWOODS UNDONE BY REALITY? (TRUMPED, SO TO SPEAK)

House of Cards, Season 5 (2013-17   When this series began on Netflix, relative sanity and normalcy still survived in the United States, even amid all the partisan bitterness.  And this show was free to pop our eyes  and drop our jaws with its outrageous Machiavellian power couple, Francis and Claire Underwood......

            We couldn't get enough of watching this malignant duo, a modern day D.C. Richard III and Lady Macbeth, lie, scheme, connive and murder their way into the White House.......an outrageous dark fantasy. After all, nobody this soulless, corrupt, this utterly vile could ever ascend to the halls of power in American, could they?

            Yes, they could. With the infection, the raging plague of Baby Orange now upon us.....

             And that's some tough news for "House Of Cards".....the show's not astounding in its plot twists anymore......unheard of reality has swiftly overtaken it.  How can Francis and Claire, even with all their machinations, plots and double/triple crosses, ever hope to compete with the horrifying circus that the real White House has become?

              We'll give the show's producers and writers credit for trying, though. The lunacy of actual news events has forced them to push their fictitious Prez and his wife Vice Prez into more daring villainy....(SPOILERS ahead....)  Francis no longer feels the need to sneak around subway stations to push nosy reporters in front of trains.....he simply shoves his Secretary of State down the stairs in the White House. Claire poisons her lover, but not before she extracts one more orgasm out of him......

               Not that we blame them for having Frank and Claire take more crazy risks to secure their power....how can this show's writers compete with an event like Baby Orange's recent cabinet meeting......where he beamed as his cabinet took turns grovelling and kissing his ass. (They might as well have dressed up for the part, like Kim Jung Un's generals, wearing those hilarious XXL military hats...) It resembled an audition for a new version of "David Copperfield" where everybody's reading for the part of Uriah Heep...

                 The Underwoods and Baby Orange do share one great mystery together........how does anyone embrace and support such blatantly loathsome individuals?  The series never explains why people supposedly in their right minds would come near the Underwoods, given that their experience inevitably leaves them humiliated, professionally ruined, emotionally damaged.....and sometimes dead.

                And we're at an equal loss to explain the same phenomena regarding those who rally around Baby Orange.......(though the longer he stays in office, the greater the chance these folks will end up like the Underwoods' victims.....especially those with health insurance....)

                The show's writers are far from immune to what's going on.....in one of the final episodes of Season 5, Kevin Spacey's Francis delivers one of his most telling, poisonous soliloquies to the audience.....trumpeting the death of the Age Of Reason, that there's  no longer government to serve the people for the greater good....it's just about winning.

                 "House Of Cards" ends its fifth season as a true political house of horrors.  Entertaining as hell to watch, as always......but you can't go to bed feeling secure that such things could never happen in these United States Of America......wake up in the morning, turn on the news, and the horror begins anew.

                For "House Of Cards" four Nixonian stars (****), for Baby Orange....as always, a galaxy of stars, all in the minus numbers.....

'CAPRICE'........THE LIVING DORIS DAYLIGHTS......

Caprice (1967)   The BQ can't help gravitating toward all the movies hitting their 50th anniversaries.....cause, number one....it's kind of fun to re-live the spring and summer of 1967 (before all the horrors of '68 unleashed).....number two, we're delighted to find ourselves breathing and still around to wish these films a Happy 50th......

           And here's a truly oddball bit of flotsam from the era......yet another in the tidal wave of secret agent spoofs that engulfed the world in the wake of the Bond films.....this one starring no less than America's premier Girl-Next-Door Icon, Doris Day......almost at the tail end of her long, beloved film career....

            'Caprice' was yet another of  the many substandard, slapped together studio movies Day found herself forced into by her rapacious husband and manager, Martin Melcher.  While steering her away from roles like Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate", Melcher plundered and exhausted Day's fortune while arranging for her to star in rickety, out-of-date comedies that looked like ancient relics, unearthed from decades gone by......

             A tireless performer, Day soldiered on, to her everlasting credit, in whatever stale concoction Melcher threw her into.......and though probably twenty years too old to cavort in pseudo-Bondian fluff like "Caprice", she's still the permanently adorable starlet, giving it her all, looking stunning in bizarre, trendy pop art clothing.....and  even establishing a romantic chemistry with her most unlikely of leading men,  intense young Richard Harris, courting Doris while quoting 'Hamlet' at her....

              Like the Rock Hudson/Claudia Cardinale vehicle "Blindfold", which we covered in a previous post, "Caprice" whipsaws back and forth between slapstick farce, tongue-in-cheek faux-Bond,antics, and a few occasional, semi-serious action sequences. But unlike the clunky direction of "Blindfold',  the film benefits greatly from the fast, light touch of farce-master Frank Tashlin.  What better movie to give to a guy who started out directing Warner Brothers cartoons that a 60's spy spoof ......which is essentially a live action cartoon.

              Tashlin colorfully zips the plot along.......with Day and Harris as squabbling rival spies in an industrial espionage war between rival cosmetics companies......yes, folks, not quite the fate of the world hangs in the balance here.....but a desperate race to secure a water-repellent hairspray....(or as Doris herself tartly remarks, "I'm the spy who came in from the cold cream...")  It does turn out that there's a little more at stake than meets the eye, but in a movie like this, nobody's ever going to remember the MacGuffins the spies are after....

              Some surprising bonuses along the way:    An opening ski chase that could have easily fit into "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"  and a ski-off-the-mountain stunt that somewhat resembles the classic opening of "The Spy Who Loved Me".......and talk about meta before its time - Doris spying on a fashion model while taking in a showing of...."Caprice" with Doris Day and Richard Harris...(you can even hear her singing the 'title' song, which isn't heard in the movie's actual main titles).....the sequence abruptly ends when Doris gets groped by the model's creepy boyfriend (that "Bonnie And Clyde" babyface, Michael J. Pollard).....lastly, a little twinge of nostalgia as we bid farewell to one of the last films shot in 20th Century Fox Cinemascope, with the accompanying logo and triumphant fanfare.....

             We'll admit it.......strange and uneven as it is, we hold a warm spot in our heart for "Caprice" a movie that could only come to exist from the intersection of so many disparate elements.....the spy spoof craze, Martin Melcher's overwhelming greed, the newly exploding movie career of Richard Harris and constant professional good sportsmanship of Doris Day......that's why we're not likely to see anything like it again......for Agent Doris, we'll secretly pass out 3 stars (***).......realizing it's too late to deny or disavow all knowledge of our actions..........

              

               

'SKITTER'.......THE WORLD WIDE WEB NOBODY WANTS TO ACCESS.....

Skitter by Ezekiel Boone (2017).....is the second book in this author's trilogy about the world overrun with hordes of flesh eating spiders.  We'd jump on a chair and yell "Yikes!" at the very thought......but so far these plodding books, (the first one called "The Hatching"), have barely raised our pulse.

            Boone's first book irritated us with its final third. strictly devoted to teasing and stoking us up for the second book.  The second book exists only to kill time and act as an extended trailer for "Zero Day", the eventual concluding part of the trilogy....

            Nobody embraces rampaging bug stories like the BQ.....remember, we were raised on movies like "Them!" (covered in a previous post).....and we thrilled to the sight of young Clint Eastwood napalming a giant spider in "Tarantula".  But Boone's books repulsed us....and not because of the spiders stripping humans to the bone....we love that stuff.  His trilogy embodies everything that's rotten in a corporate-ruled pop culture......the books are nothing but marketing ploys. Boone's not interested in telling a story or engaging his readers......he's after a movie deal.

            You'd think the depiction of a global spider apocalypse would take hold of your imagination like a vise and you'd tear through the pages quicker than a Daddy Long Legs motoring across your basement floor. Not with this book. Boone ambitiously works with a large diffuse cast of characters spread out among multiple locations around the world.......but without any sense of urgency, excitement or suspense.  Using minimal  character dialogue, he forces you to wade through vast gobs of  his descriptive, uninteresting prose. We sighed with bored resignation every time we started a new chapter......and that's not what a book about zillions of people-gobbling spiders should make you do......

             Throughout this long day's journey into wait-for-the-next-book, the novel teases you with the coming attraction of a new generation of truck-sized spiders preparing to hatch.....but we'll all have to wait for "Zero Day" for these Big MamaJamas to make their appearance. Yawn. Whatever.

             We're weren't much impressed with the first book and this second one's a complete waste of time. "Skitter"s the wrong word for it.....'inch along' would fit better. We'll only step on one itsy bitsy star for this one...(*).....Boone better have the equivalent of a napalm-armed Clint Eastwood for the next book........

COMING SOON IN JUST A FEW SHORT WEEKS! PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRUMPTIONS......

Can you bear the suspense?  Can you contain yourself from overwhelming anticipation?  Prepare yourselves for these mind-blowing projects.......all coming your way.......in just a few short weeks!!!

The White House Tapes.....in which our President says, "I just wanted to be alone with you, Jim....so we could arm wrestle."......also includes the secret tape of Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton totaling up receipts from their human trafficking ring hidden in the storage room of a Papa John's Pizza somewhere in Iowa....
            (to be released in a few short weeks....)

The Top Secret Plan to Destroy Isis......you heard it on the campaign trail......now buckle up and get ready for THE PLAN......
            (to be released in a few short weeks....)

The Secret Files On Four Million Mexicans who snuck into the USA on election day to vote!...it's all here.....names, addresses, Taco Bell drive-thru orders, long lists of women they've rapes.....
             (to be released in a few short weeks.....)

The Tax Returns......yes, the audit is just about, almost, practically a teensy-weensy scootch away from being revealed........and you'll see it all.....
              (to be released in a few short weeks.....)

CONSUMER WARNING :  FDA recommends that you do not take a deep breath and hold it while waiting for any of the above items to manifest themselves......in a few short weeks...._

'THE ISLAND'.........BENCHLEY'S INBRED AND BREAKFAST.....

The Island (1980).....on the surface, sounded like a surefire summer hit from the "Jaws" production team, another sea-going adventure from writer Peter Benchley and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown.....with an irresistible gimmick: the discovery of the descendants of Caribbean pirates, still plundering, pillaging and raping just like the good old days.....

                 The film itself showed up dead on arrival, a sour, grim ugly affair.....it swung wildly from horror(the opening sequences of hapless wealthy pleasure boaters butchered by the pirates) to half baked satire (the pirate chief (David Warner) and his gang resembling Peter Pan and his Lost Boys if they'd all grown up to become sadistic, psychotic inbred ghouls...)

                  Director Michael Ritichie had already made his mark as something of a clever social satirist ("The Candidate", "The Bad News Bears", "Smile"), but Benchley's skimpy, ludicrous screenplay clearly confounded him as how to approach it.  So he tried everything......low comedy. child torture, a dark spoof of swashbuckling......and lastly, when he d completely run out of ideas, lavish Peckinpah bloodbaths.....

                  Sloppily paced, there isn't a minute of it that's remotely believable, so you have plenty of time to ponder every incredulous scene. An investigative reporter (Michael Caine) and his 12 year old son stumble on the pirates.......and before you can say 'yo ho ho', Caine's enslaved to help make fresh pirate babies who won't pop out like the current crew, all inbred idiots (forced into a literal pirate booty call with what appears to be the buccaneers' only exhausted female.)....while his son, after a few days of 24/7 abuse, involving toothpicks to hold his eyes open,  quickly converts to a nasty little mini-pirate, eager to kill...

                  Other directors might have assembled this footage to make you worry terribly for Caine and his boy, to sit up and root for Caine to exact bloody vengeance on this mumbling, monstrous coterie of creeps.  He does indeed, but by the time Caine goes all "Wild Bunch" on their asses you barely care anymore.  You get the feeling all the way through that Michael Ritchie knew how hopelessly ridiculous it all was, directing the carnage with a slight, knowing smirk, distancing himself from turning the film into either an outright comedy or a gripping thriller.  So he settles for nothing.

                   Audiences didn't know what to make of it either..... certainly no comedy-horror crowd pleaser like "Jaws".....it played more like a mean-spirited, R-rated Grindhouse drive-in triple feature movie.  Caine disowned it immediately, never discussing it again.....(though frankly, he's had far worse movies in his filmography than this one......and we'd welcome his thoughts on it, if any....)

                  Any redeeming features for the BQ?  Hmmmm.....not so much. There's an Ennio Morricone score rumbling in the background, but it doesn't do much for the film. And there's some brief scene stealing from that unsettling, strange British character actor Dudley Sutton as the scummiest of the pirates. Blood 'n gore lovers can get their jollies at the finale, when Caine, to his everlasting delight, gets his hands on a Coast Guard 50 caliber machine gun......(speaking of the Coast Guard, their cooperation with this movie defies reason, considering that their young, brave recruits are depicted as clueless jerks, waiting to be slaughtered....)

                   No gold doubloons for this one.....we'll give it two jellyfish stings (**)......300 less stings than Caine and his pirate bride endure......putting them through almost as much pain as it takes to sit through this film......

'YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE'.......WELCOME TO YOUR 50TH ANNIVERSARY, MR. BOND.........

You Only Live Twice (1967)  marked the end of the continuous film-after-film reign of Sean Connery as James Bond. (Though lured back in 1971 for "Diamonds Are Forever", Connery returned looking jowly, overweight and supremely bored.....he got into much better shape for his own rogue Bond film, "Never Say Never Again".....)

              As far as we know, Connery's exit from Bond-age came from....1. His steadily deteriorating relationship with producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli....Connery wanted to be an equal partner in the Bond spoils, they wouldn't hear of it....2. Connery's treatment by the Japanese press, who hounded him relentlessly throughout the location filming.....3. The final coffin nail, United Artists ad campaign, proudly trumpeting "Sean Connery IS James Bond". looking like a malicious attempt to throw cold water on Connery's aspirations for challenging acting roles beyond Bond.

             So "You Only Live Twice" became sort of a farewell to the First Golden Era of the Bond movies and the BQ fondly remembers the following......

             Ken Adam's Volcano....forever a one-of-a-kind milestone from the master production designer....building a giant free-standing set so huge that no mere soundstage could contain it. Even Adam himself realized the sheer craziness of it.......but up it went, with its monorail, helipad, rocket launching gantry and vast spaces for minions to race around in.....

               Roald Dahl....what an off-the-wall choice for a Bond screenwriter....but amazingly, he delivers a script that becomes a blueprint for future Bonds......always ending with Bond leading an army of good guy commandos on an all out assault of the villain's lair....("The Spy Who Loved Me" is a blatant remake of "You Only Live Twice", merely substituting the rocket that swallows space capsules with an oil tanker that swallows submarines...)  And Dahl still manages to sneak in his perverse humor.....(Connery's line about a company executive who fell into a pulverizer..."He gained great face with the company")

                Karin Dor  We don't understand why this ravishingly beautiful German actress didn't become a huge star, especially after her two memorable death sequences......her drop into the piranha pool in this film and her grand demise in Hitchcock's "Topaz", shot dead and sinking to the floor with her red robe billowing out like a pool of blood......(the only memorable moment in the entire film)

                Donald Pleasence's  Blofeld and his scaredy-cat.... another weird choice but forever enshrined as what an international nemesis should look like (and decades later, destined for parody as Mike Meyer's Dr. Evil) In retrospect, the producers might have given Donald the same apple cart to stand on that Alan Ladd and other diminutive actors made use of.  At the first showing we attended in 1967, the sight of Pleasence craning his neck upward to threaten the foot taller Connery provoked some unintended chuckles. And let's give it up for the Blofeld's poor cat, clawing at Pleasence's shoulder in sheer terror when the explosions kick off........no retakes, what a feline trouper.

                Connery Versus The Rock's Pop-Pop.....one of our most favorite Bond fights.....watching Connery flung around Ken Adam's ultra-modern office set by Peter Fanene Maivia, none other than the grandfather of Dwayne Johnson.....we're guessing the Rock would be just as pissed if some British guy started battering him with a leather couch.....

              Mie Hama and Akiko Wakabayashi .....we already knew they were too cute for words, having seen them together in "King Kong Versus Godzilla".... and.of course the film used dubbed voices to cover their limited ability to mouth English dialogue.  Technically, they starred in a Woody Allen comedy, "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" in which he re-dubbed one of their cheesy Japanese imitation Bond films with his own Mad Libs gags.....(with one of the girls admiring herself in a mirror (don't ask us which one), muttering, "Boy....am I a piece...")

               When Sean Connery and Mie Hama scrambled into their rescue life raft, we waved goodbye to the first iconic five films of the Bond filmography.....and the last of the films that brought the entire world of movie audiences together as one globe-spanning fan base, so much so that theaters had to stay open around the clock to cope with the crowds. Bond films would go on, even a few with Connery, but they'd never quite match the anticipatory excitement of the original quintet. For us, a shaken-not-stirred 5 stars (****) a 50th Anniversary FIND OF FINDS....