INDIANA PREZ & THE AIRPLANE OF DOOM....BQ FLIES BY "AIR FORCE ONE"....

Air Force One (1997)     Our fun-filled summer tour of all the "Die Hard" clones wouldn't be complete without a good look at this one........the most spectacular and involved of the bunch.....

             It remains a blast 'n a half to watch......but 21 years later, lots of stuff struck us funny......

             The Fantasy Prez.......Who doesn't daydream about a President like this?  (We bet the Democrats do.....)  A Congressional Medal Of Honor winner and Vietnam war hero......an implacable foe of murderous dictators and autocrats     (Heh, heh....compare him to who we have in reality....heh, heh....).......a loving family man......strong but somehow gently self-effacing......and best of all, he looks and sounds just like Harrison Ford!  (......appearing lean 'n mean, as if he never, ever gnawed on a KFC extra-crispy wing....)

              Hmmm......we're anything but ultra-conservative, but maybe we would be better off electing a combat veteran as President.......putting Vietnam draft-dodgers in the White House never seems to work out well.......

              Da Plane!  Da Plane!   As if it's a Ken Adam designed Air Force One, it comes equipped with an escape pod. (We'd love a peek at any escape pod in the real,  current AFO......our guess, it's probably shaped like a huge Big Mac....)

              And we love that the interior of this fantasy AFO can absorb endless machine-gun firefights......in which nobody spraying the bullets ever unluckily hits a window........

              As if President Indiana didn't have enough problems......We still wonder.....what the hell's the deal with the traitorous Secret Service guy?  Unexplained, he stays a cipher to the very end.....a closet Marxist?  A deep cover KGB-er, like Keri Russell in "The Americans?"  Or like our current President, just a great fan and fervent admirer of bloodthirsty killers?

                Fantasy Politics.......almost as dreamy a concept as having Harrison Ford as a war hero Prez......the movie kicks off with,we kid you not........(and we did a whoa double-take at this)....no less than a joint United States/Russian commando raid to capture a scumbag general who wants to bring back the bad old days of Communist repression and Cold War.    Fun to imagine......but anyone who thinks this would ever happen still thinks Mexico's going to pay for the U.S. Border wall......

                Scary Gary.....Oldman  One of the best, if not the best of all imitation-Die-Hard villains.....raging that the fall of Communism has left Russia overloaded with gangsters and prostitutes.......if Gary's character had only waited a few years for the ascension of Putin, he'd get the best of both worlds.......the return of an evil leader AND all the hookers, too.......

               Jerry Goldsmith makes us stand up and salute.......No wonder Baby Orange used Goldsmith's stirring, blood-pumping main theme for his grand entrance at the Republican convention..........even if everyone knows that if terrorists ever succeeded in really commandeering Air Force One, they'd find Baby Orange cowering in the bathroom, vomiting up his Coca-Cola and super-sized Fries......

                 Having itemized all that......BQ still loves us some "Air Force One".........at the end of the day, it's a jumbo tub 'o butter popcorn........about as real as "Star Wars",  "You Only Live Twice" and "The Wizard Of Oz".......so we give this fellow, non-stop flight-of-fancy 4 stars (****)......can't wait until CNN finds secret photos of the Big Mac Escape Pod.......

SJWs RUN AMUCK!! WE CRINGE OUR WAY THROUGH SEASON 2 OF 'ANNE WITH AN E'.....

Anne With An E (2017-2018- Season 2)    Obviously, only Beloved Daughter could have coerced us to sit through this.........

             To use comparable experiences to describe it........listening to a 2 hour Rudy Guiliani interview on cable news........reliving the prep day required before a colonoscopy........white hot needles driven into our eyes........

               Need we go on?

               The first time we ever saw 'SJW' flung around the internet, we'll admit.......we had to google it.

               Of course , Social Justice Warriors in films and TV now thrive in the ever toxic Kingdom Of Trump........where civility and rational discourse have been replaced by bigotry, racism, misogyny and deepening division.

                So something like the second season of 'Anne With An E' was probably inevitable......a clumsy, embarrassingly awful attempt to cram every hot-button issue of the 21st century into 10 episodes of a show that's supposed to take place at the end of the 19th century.

                There's nothing inherently wrong with using past history to cleverly mirror current events. Arthur Miller did it in "The Crucible",turning the Salem witch trials into a brutal takedown of 1950's McCarthyism......

                But 'Anne With An E' creator-writer Moira Walley-Beckett is no Arthur Miller.......

                In the course of ten 45 minute episodes, Walley-Beckett, seething with righteous anger,  is determined to take viewers on a guided tour of racial hatred, bullying, female empowerment, the tortured, closeted lives of gay men and women.......and even science deniers........(yes, the villagers think a young progressive schoolteacher's use of the old 'electric potato' experiment is a magic trick...)

                 As for jamming in the LBGTQ issues, two of the gay characters, an elderly woman and a teen boy are gentle, kind and  brilliantly artistic.......while the loathsome, Dickensian schoolteacher, consumed with self-hatred by his same-sex yearnings, is a miserable asshole.

                 With so many modern agendas to cover, the show doesn't make the slightest effort to keep all this within the context of the time period it's depicting.......

                 Loaded with anachronistic dialogue and turns of plot that couldn't possibly ever happen at the turn of the century, the show becomes unintentionally funny in its desperate, gasping attempts to turn the original "Anne Of Green Gables" into a ripped-from-the-headlines panorama of all our modern maladies,,,,,,

                     The only thing they might have missed was having one of characters call out the constable after seeing a black guy fixing a fence.......

                   We hate to burst the bubble that Moira Walley-Beckett no doubt lives in concerning her faux-cleverness at updating a beloved children's book........sorry, Moira.......the show's dopey and amateurish and its blatant, insistent editorializing rings false at every turn.

                   Pay no attention to this show's bait-and-switch attempt to present itself as a   children's/young adult drama.....it's just one person typing a long long, long political manifesto.  1 star (*) .......(for the actors only)

THE INCARCERATED AND THE INFATUATED.....WE LOCK DOWN "THE CAPTIVES"

The Captives by Debra Jo Immergut (2018)    If we strained our rapidly aging brain hard enough, we could probably cite numerous film and TV variations of this  book......

           Aw hell.....it's Sunday.....suffice to say it's another version of Jailer Falls Hard For The Jailed.......

            Well written.....spurts of great writing......but by the time it lurches to its inevitable (at least, to us) climax, we wondered why we even bothered.

            Simple enough premise.......two wayward, crushed souls cross paths in a women's prison.....Frank Lundquist, reduced to Prison Psychologist after the demolition of his marriage and career......Miranda Greene, 30-ish inmate whose terrible life choices have earned her a 52 year stretch with no chance of parole.....her Orange is the new black until she's older than Bernie Sanders......

             But, whoa!  Turns out, Miranda was none other than Frank's secret, unrequited high school crush.....the long lost object of his teen yearnings and desires.....

             Frank's brainstorm, so to speak......break Miranda out of prison, disappear with her....in the hopes of a romance and redemption for both of them....

            Yeah.....good luck with that......

             (If you can already sense that this will go about as well as Jay Gatsby's hubba-hubba-hots for Daisy Buchanan.........give yourselves a Gold Star....)

             Not a lengthy tale (to its credit), but takes its own sweet time unfolding Frank and Miranda's tortuous backstories......so the book moves along in spurts, sometimes a low-boiling thriller, sometimes an agonized accounting of lives gone awry......

             Some might consider the ending a 'Gone Girl' type twist........but not if you've been paying even the slightest bit of attention........

              The author certainly did her homework on women's prisons and prisoners........but even with all the tragic angst and suspense along the way, the story holds no real surprises......only an overall grim, moody mixture of redemption and delusion......

                We'd advise to wait until someone adapts it into an 80 minute streaming-service movie......otherwise......eh.....1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2).

WEEKLY MADNESS WRAPUP.....SPECIAL 'NEVER, EVER, EVER' EDITION......

           

Baby Orange threatens Iran...... DON'T YOU EVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES.....OR I'LL HOLD MY BREATH UNTIL I EXPAND EVEN BIGGER THAN THE BALLOON THEY MADE OF ME.....AND I'LL BLOW UP ALL OVER YOU....YOU'LL BE COVERED IN HALF DIGESTED KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN, BIG MACS....AND COKES.

Baby Orange's Press Minion Bans CNN Reporter.....because the CNN reporter did not realize that asking tough questions of Baby Orange has the same effect of throwing Holy Water on a vampire.....lots of burning, hissing and screaming.........

The GOP Clown Car Impeaches Rod Rosenstein.....Immediately rejected by Congress because the proper procedure was not followed.......rules clearly state that the 'Freedom Caucus', (a.k.a. Brain-dead Trumpanzees) must first all pile into a tiny car, drive it around......and then all pile out at once....

"Get Me A Coke"........Baby Orange heard barking this out in the middle of a Michael Cohen meeting to pay off a Playboy Playmate to shut her up......part of the immortal words that will be inscribed in the future Trump Presidential Library (to share space with a Taco Bell in Staten Island)........."Ask not what I can do for my country.....Get me a coke...."

               And finally.......

This week's Honorary "For the Love Of God....Just Shut the F**k Up and Go Away Forever!!" Award......Roseanne Barr.

WINDMILLS OF OUR OUR MIND SPIN 'ROUND 'N ROUND.....AS WE WISH THE COOLEST 50TH TO "THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR"

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)   So.......how cool was Steve McQueen in this movie?

         (Picture BQ widening our hands as far in each direction as they'll go.....)

          That much.

           We know it's dated as hell.......(in 1968, some film directors, including 'Crown's Norman Jewison, fell head over heels for multiple screen sequences.....)

          Hey, it's the 60's , baby. Contrary to Dennis Hopper's funny pronouncement.......we do remember the 60's.....and we most definitely were there to remember it all.....

           First thing to love about "The Thomas Crown Affair"........the streetwise, blue collar McQueen cast against type, as a slick corporate tycoon, complete with three piece suits.  Some folks thought it didn't work.  Not us.

            McQueen, along with a few other 60's leading men (Sean Connery was one), had mastered the art of physical movement for the camera.  You can watch him forever as he carefully calibrated how much stillness and action to bring to a character........his subdued acting becomes almost superfluous......because he's cinematic poetry in motion.

            The Michel Legrand score.......a great gift to director Jewison, who uses it extensively to make the movie look and sound like some sort of American-ized French New Wave thriller......

           Faye Dunaway.........a far more skilled actor than McQueen, you can sense how hard she's working to match his coolness factor. With Dunaway, you can always see the wheels turning behind the performance.........but it in this case, it's an asset, because she struggles to give subtext to a movie that's really nothing but shiny, glossy surfaces.

             The famous chess game foreplay.......impossible to watch now without smirks 'n giggles, but take our word for it.....in 1968, the triple-entrendre coolness of it reigned......

            And that brings us to the ending, a perfect way to cap off a romantic cat-and-mouse game between two characters who aren't much more emotional and animated than the carved pieces in McQueen's chess set.

             "I'm funding an orgy for two sex freaks!"  complains a Police detective at one point........true enough........but the guy didn't realize......it's a cool orgy.  4 stars (****)......now if only we could remember more than three words of the "Windmills Of Your Mind" lyrics........




         

CLIMB HARD WITH A VENGEANCE.....BQ HANGS OUT WITH "CLIFFHANGER"

Cliffhanger (1993)   No question, the 1990's were the Golden Age of giant, gloriously shlocky imitations of 1988's "Die Hard"..........

                While Michael Bay was still directing music videos in the early 90's, Finnish director Renny Harlin reigned supreme as the ringmaster of mega-budget action shlock-busters, having already directed "Die Hard 2" ( you know.....Die Hard In An Airport)

                   And this one, Die Hard On A Mountain, is one of our favorite Die Hardiest humdingers........

                   Everything you'd want is in place......tortured hero (Sylvester Stallone), haunted by the death of a girl mountain climber he failed to save from a horrifying plummet.......stunning setting, supposedly the Colorado Rockies, but mostly the Dolomites in Cortina, Italy.......and most importantly, a raging, sadistic, vile villain (John Lithgow, with a snide British accent) and his equally hateful team of ultra-violent mercenaries.....

                    You gotta love it.......innocents and villains alike find themselves either shot to pieces, hurled off mountaintops or impaled on stalagmites

                     By the last few minutes, Lithgow's practically foaming at the mouth at the number of times Stallone has thwarted his grand scheme to retrieve suitcases of freshly minted Treasury cash.....he's like a hilarious, live-action version of animation's Wile E. Coyote.......

                    Unlike Michael Bay, the big budget Ed Wood Jr., Renny Harlin knows how to effectively stage and edit spectacular action sequences.   We've come to greatly appreciate Harlin letting these sequences clearly and cleanly unfold, as opposed to Bay's mincemeat editing that renders his movies all but unviewable.....

                 Ultimately the 'Die Hard' formula was beaten into the ground by sheer mindless repetition...........but when it cooked, as it does in 'Cliffhanger', you could treat yourself to a hell of a rollercoaster ride without ever setting foot out of your living room.

                   For a tall summer cooler, BQ says this one climbed to the top of the peaks.....4 stars (****).......they should have played "Climb Ev'ry Mountain' during the credit crawl......

               

KLEPTO CUTIE ROBS HUBBY'S BANK.....(HOW COULD WE MAKE UP A MOVIE LIKE 'PENELOPE'??)

Penelope (1966)    Nothing, but nothing delights the BQ more than uncovering the oddest, nuttiest movies that somehow escaped out of studios in the 60's.......

              And this one's a demented gem.......like finding a star-shaped piece of sea glass while beachcombing.......

               MGM was still cranking out movies firmly anchored in the slickness and glamour of its 1940's and 50's output........even as films like this, in the mid 1960's,  were looking as ancient and arthritic as curated museum pieces.

                "Penelope", a vehicle for Natalie Wood, stood out for the sheer madness of its premise.......with Wood in the titular role, an adorable, high-fashion socialite wife of an uptight bank president...(the oddly cast Ian Bannon, making Loch Ness Monster jokes to cover his Scottish burr).

                 Neglected by her husband, Penelope pulls off an outrageously daring robbery of his bank in the hopes of getting some attention........yes, you heard that right.

                  With one lone exception, Wood and her dedicated supporting cast of farceurs (Dick Shawn, Jonathon Winters, Lou Jacobi, Lila Kedrova) work themselves into an addled frenzy. You almost fear that Wood's wonderful huge brown eyes are in danger of popping out of her head.....

                  The one actor who underplays and almost steals the show.......Peter Falk, playing a soft spoken, sardonic police detective......clearly a warm up to his eventual signature role as the beloved TV detective 'Columbo'.....

                   You can take some perverse fun out of watching this film desperately gasping for its few laughs.......it only slows down to admire Natalie Wood's wardrobe changes, some of which involve her stripped down to her underwear........

                 We'll leave our readers to decide what to make of a nutso flashback sequence in which Jonathon Winters chases a scantily clad Wood with who-knows-what in mind......we know MGM probably viewed it as harmless as Harpo pursuing blondes in the Marx Brothers films, but watching it in this current #metoo culture, it comes off as damn creepy....

                "Penelope" proved too hysterical, unreal and not funny enough for audiences weened on Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.  Wood despised the film and stayed off the movie screen for 3 years, until nailing the 60's zeitgeist with her grand comeback in "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice"........

                But we managed to excavate a few scattered laughs from all the weirdness......and renewed our youthful crush on Natalie Wood.  And we'd almost forgotten to mention the sprightly, can't-get-it-out-of-your-head music theme by....who else.....none other than 'Johnny Williams' himself.....

                For Natalie, Johnny and the way-out-there plot, we'll steal 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)......how it rolled off the MGM assembly line we'll never know......and you'll certainly never see the likes of it. again.

DISORIENTED EXPRESS.....BQ WADES THROUGH THE CGI OF 'MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS'....

Murder On The Orient Express (2017)      What a miserable mess........

             You could watch this back to back with director Sidney Lumet's celebrated 1974 version......and go through a point-by-point checklist of everything that's gone wrong in major studio filmmaking in the 43 years between them.

               Lumet, never much of a visual stylist, loved great actors giving great performances.....which is why his films remains landmarks in cinema.....

               You would think actor-director Kenneth Branagh would also be a great appreciator of his assembled actors and serve them well......

                 Think again......

                 After directing CGI-heavy behemoths like Disney's live action "Cinderella" and "Thor", Branagh has fallen down the green-screen rabbit hole, perhaps forever.

                 He must still think he's directing "Thor".........and the only actor he's serving with any effort......is himself.

                   Essentially he's turned himself into a half-assed imitator of director Robert Zemeckis......whose films are usually nothing more than a self-congratulatory trumpeting of how cleverly Zemeckis deploys CGI.

                    As did Lumet, Branagh recruited an up-to-the-minute all star case for his version 'Orient Express'......

                    But unlike Lumet, who glorified in his cast's work, Branagh leaves his actors stranded.....he has very little interest in them, as either characters or actors.

                   What the movie's really about:  endless CGI landscape compositions, elaborate camerawork that screams, "look at me! look at me!".........and Branagh's show-off, hammy star turn as master sleuth Hercule Poirot.

                    The rest of the actors and the plot, for that matter, serve only as minor window dressing.

                    Branagh is so obsessive-compulsive over his CGI, his lengthy tracking shots and his own performance, he completely forgets to edit the film into watchable storytelling.  Lacking any pacing whatsoever, the film tortuously drags through its running time like a barely animated zombie corpse.

                    It makes for a dull, dull, technology-drenched ego-trip.........and we're sick of talking about it already. 1 star (*) and that's only for the valiant work of the neglected ensemble cast.......in this movie, they get snowed in more by Branagh than the weather.

AS IF WE NEEDED ONE MORE REASON TO NEVER GO IN THE WOODS.....BQ CRINGES THROUGH 'THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD'

The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay (2018)    Like everybody else who've tried to describe this book, we dread figuring out where to start.......

             And BQ visitors well know how we loathe writing any kind of detailed plot descriptions of books and movies........

              Okay, here goes. We'll take a wild stab at the set-up........in no way would we go beyond that point.......cause discovering where this craziness will lead is the entire reason for staying with the book.....

               2 gay dads and their adopted, adorable 8 year old Chinese girl.......vacationing in a remote cabin in the New Hampshire woods.......

               Along come 4 home invaders.......who've shared a vision of a worldwide apocalypse.....due to happen at any moment......

                Home invaders visions also tell them that the oncoming end-of-days can only be halted if one of the gay dads or their cute little girl offer themselves up as a human sacrifice........

                Horror, gore and heartbreak follows.........wrapped up in a final few pages you may find either strangely satisfying or a stupid, cheating cop-out.

                There's no denying it.....once the premise hooks you, consider yourself hooked till the bitter end.  One thing we definitely despised......in the heat of things, Tremblay grinds the action to a halt with voluminous, tedious backstory.  (We felt more than tempted to not even bother to skim that stuff, just to skip it altogether.......)

                We understand why Stephen King got a kick out of it........it reads like a sort of real-life dark fairy tale told around a campfire.......to scare the crap out of grownups.  Of course it's ridiculous, unbelievable and couldn't possibly unfold the way it does in this book.

                Or could it?

               3 stars (***) for this terrifying woodsy cabin........you may not like or agree with what you're reading.......but we dare you to try to put it down once you've read a few chapters.....For us, that makes for a super hot summer read.....

               

HOW TO ESCAPE ANOTHER CAPTIVE-LOVE-SLAVE MOVIE.....AS WE ROLL OUR EYES AT 'ROSY'

Rosy (2018)     Oh, for the love of chloroform........another one?

               Yes.......another nerdy, lonely guy Doug (Nat Wolff) thinks the best way to find a soulmate is to drug and imprison her........

                 Doesn't anyone at the corner drugstore get suspicious when guys like this come in, asking where do they keep Chloroform in the Economy Size?

                 The object of Doug's affliction.......would-be actress Rosy (Stacey Martin), currently moping through a desultory affair with an older, married guy (Johnny Knoxville)

                  And then we suffer through the standard connect-the-dots plot points of the 'captive-love-slave' genre.......Rosy moving from initial terror and rage to grudging acceptance......and then moving on the expected sly seduction of Doug, waiting for her chance to slug him and run........

                   Typically, there's all the expected physical wear 'n tear on both captor and captive......(love-slave characters need to make sure they carry medical insurance......

                  We held our impatience and annoyance with this movie to a low roar until it popped its deliberately ambiguous ending.......you can practically hear the writer and director high-fiving each other for their Film Festival cleverness.....

                   Hey, guys......go screw yourselves and your clever ending.

                 As we pointed out in posts on other captive-love-slave movies, you're better off  just sticking with the ancestor of this genre, William Wyler's 1965 film of John Fowles' "The Collector" with Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar.   All the rest are also rans.......

                 As for "Rosy".......1 imprisoned star (*).....we might have like it more if we'd used the jumbo Economy Size Chloroform........on ourselves.

               

WEEKLY MADNESS WRAPUP.........SPECIAL 'DERANGEMENT SYNDROME' EDITION.....

               The hits just keep on comin'.........another typical week in the life of not yet toilet-trained Baby Orange......

               "I meant wouldn't  instead of would.....it's...uh.... a double-negative..."   In reality, we're talking about a triple-negative here........a human triple-negative......

                 Let's turn over American diplomats to Putin's interrogators......"I think it's an incredible offer.....We understand Baby Orange jumped for joy at his new gift......an official, embossed and laminated "Official KGB Useful Idiot"  arrived in a diplomatic pouch......

                  Michael Cohen taped his babe-payoff conversations with Baby Orange......now there's a smart shyster......claims he'll take a bullet for Baby Orange, but creates future bargaining chips to save his own miserable ass.....Well done, douchebag......let's hear all the tapes......

                 "People of high intelligence think I did very well in Helsinki..."    Stable geniuses everywhere, including Hannity and Don Jr. salute you......

                    Trump Derangement Syndrome......what Baby Orange claims that everyone other than MAGA redhat Trumpanzees suffers from..........we'll say this much......as a disease, Trump Derangement Syndrome exists......it's named after the one person who's afflicted with it........

IF HE HAD A HAMMER....HE'D HAMMER IN THE MORNING......BQ NAILS DOWN "YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE"

You Were Never Really Here (2017)     We weren't the biggest of fans of the Jonathan Ames novella this movie's based on.....

                 To us, it came off like a clever stunt........a book that reads like it's gathering up a head of steam to become a full length novel, then bluntly stops short.

                 Ha ha.....very creative.  Where's the rest of it?

                 Director Lynn Ramsay grabbed hold of this literally half-baked story and made it her own.

                  She not only gave the movie an ending (or at least as much of an ending as you could expect), she re-shaped the material into a strikingly visual/aural experience, using Joaquin Phoenix's deeply internalized performance as the film's centerpiece........

                  We don't know exactly how to describe this.......the film plays like "Taxi Driver" if it had been directed by Stanley Kubrick in his "2001" austere, dry emotionless mode........(even when Phoenix is driven to display raw emotion, Ramsay carefully stages and edits everything with a cold, hard, unforgiving eye.)

                   The film freely borrows the setups from "Taxi Driver" and "The Professional".....(abused child rescued from her scummy tormentors by a tortured man whose ultra-violent nature makes him a formidable Knight in shining armor......more than equal to the task of decimating legions of creeps..)

                    Naturally, this guy is a severely damaged soul, a walking open wound, barely containing a lifetime of pent up fury and barely keeping himself from suicide.

                   Combined with Ramsay's calibrated visual poetry, Phoenix embodies the silent agony of a man who's known nothing but unspeakable abuse, horror and violence since his childhood.  He's scary, he's pathetic, he's heartbreaking.........sometimes, all at once.  A flat out brilliant performance.

                    Wielding a hardware store hammer, he's both avenging angel and implacable killer.....specializing in saving children who've fallen into the hands of sex traffickers.....

                 But don't for one minute think this is another take on "Taxi Driver" or "The Equalizer"......Ramsey and Phoenix have no interest in satisfying audience bloodlust with action-movie whoop-whoops.

                  Despite its body count and flowing blood, ultimately it's a quiet, eerily stationary meditative piece.   Yes, you need a degree of patience to watch it........so anyone living on a gluten-heavy diet of Dwayne Johnson movies shouldn't go anywhere near it.

                  We did go near it.....and don't regret it. A strange, challenging little movie, guaranteed to stay with you.  BQ hammers out 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2)  (Oh and as long we mentioned the book, 2 stars for the novella...(**) unlike the movie, it's strictly one third of a meal.....

               

THE DUKE DUKES IT OUT WITH THE CONG.....AN UNHAPPY 50TH TO "THE GREEN BERETS"

The Green Berets (1968)    By the time John Wayne unveiled his vast, hawkish Vietnam War epic, at least half the country had already figured out that Vietnam was a ghastly horrorshow, an endless black hole with nothing even remotely resembling victory in sight........

                Wayne, who never served a single day in the military, saw the war through the warped prism of his old 1940's war movies.......and produced his film accordingly.......in its own way, "The Green Berets" is as much a filmmaker's phantasmagorical fantasy of Vietnam as "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket"..........they differ only in the worldview.....

                 Unfortunately, the politicians, strategists and generals in charge of running the war shared Wayne's straight ahead, World War 2 outlook.....all we had to do was drop enough bombs and kill enough Viet Cong to bash the commies into submission........and didn't that work out well....

                  You can evenly divide the movie into 3 separate acts.......Act I consists of Wayne and his familiar cohorts taking the audience on a grim tour of Cong atrocities......(unlike the lean, wiry youngsters who actually fought the war, Wayne's Green Beret army is comprised of aging, graying, overweight character actors - Wayne, Bruce Cabot, Aldo Ray etc, etc...)

                 The highlight of this section......the script forcing the mush-mouthed Ray. addressing a skeptical press corps, to compare the bloody chaos of the shifting South Vietnam governments to America' s squabbling 13 colonies, earning him applause...........yeah, right.

                  With Act II comes the film's signature set-piece, a lengthy nighttime firefight between Wayne's forces and wave after punishing wave of Cong and North Vietnamese regulars.

                 We doubt Wayne ever stopped to consider the astounding irony of this battle........it's literally the entire Vietnam debacle realized with precision.......with the Green Berets overwhelmed by endless hordes of true believers who care nothing about how many of their own lives they sacrifice.

                 (Incredibly, after all this carnage ensues, Wayne simply calls in an airborne massive machine gun to wipe out the invaders in less than a New York minute.  You have to wonder why nobody thought of this before the big battle broke out.....)

                We'll waste no time on Act III, a ludicrous comic-book adventure in which Wayne and company use a South Vietnam supermodel as a honeytrap to capture a Cong bigwig.  It's too stupid and corny to even discuss........

                 And we wouldn't even know where to begin with the many howlers throughout the movie.....the converted-to-the-cause reporter played by David Janssen, (as opposed to the real journalists who clued everybody in to the nightmare).....the little orphan who would suddenly speak in complete English when it came time for heartstring-pulling.......and of course, the now legendary, infamous final shot of Wayne and orphan-boy on the Asian coast, watching the sun set in the East....

              As we said......a demented fantasy.........that played well with heartland audiences even in the middle of the hellish year of 1968.  And wrong-headed, misguided and crazy though it is, for the BQ, we found it as compelling to watch as the post-war Vietnam films........2 stars (**)....who knows, Marlon Brando's obese Major Kurtz might have fit right in with Wayne's pot-bellied Berets.....
             

THE SUMMER THROWAWAY MOVIE TRIUMPHANT........BQ TAKES A RUN AT "THE CANNONBALL RUN"

The Cannonball Run (1981)   Some may opine that Burt Reynolds frittered away his flourishing screen career by making slapdash, improvised car chase comedies..........which were little more than outtake gags stringed together.......

               Looking back on these films, like "Smokey And The Bandit" and the "Cannonball Run" movies.......we think Burt may have created a whole separate art form here.......an  ephemeral genre, though.

               It lived and died with the ups and downs of Reynold's career.

                But on another one of these sultry summer nights, nothing fit the bill better than another swift little movie that revels in its own silliness.....

                Unlike the similar "The Gumball Rally", which loaded up its cast with character actors whose faces, but not names were familiar, "The Cannonball Run" is heavily populated with people whose names and faces ring a bell right away.....

                  So we have Roger Moore as a delusional nice Jewish boy who thinks he's James Bond, Dom DeLuise as a delusional sidekick who thinks he's a superhero, Jack Elam as a delusional, bug-eyed lunatic who thinks he's a proctologist......and Farrah Fawcett flashing her teeth...…(which in 1981, was more than enough for Farrah Fawcett to do)

                   Oh right......did we forget to mention it's a cross country car race?  Does that even matter?

                   Everybody get regularly pulled over by the State Police, with little or no consequences.....but hey, that's the movies for ya.....

                   And nobody has a better time than Burt Reynolds, whose trademark high-pitched giggling should, at this point, be recorded for posterity and given a proper place in the Smithsonian.

                   We can't help falling for these harmless summer throwaways.......cause they're truly a long lost genre, never to be seen again.  Filled with dumb jokes and game celebrity actors just there to cop a few laughs, "The Cannonball Run" plays like a welcome spirit of long gone summers.......as soon as the first cold snap of Fall hits, we'll probably forget we ever watched it.

                   But for now, in a soupy, balmy July, 3 stars (***)



               

               

SWORDS, FRIGGIN' LASER BEAMS, A BEAUTY AND A BEAST......WE EMBRACE THE KRAZY OF 'KRULL'

Krull (1983)   In a sane world, we should pile on the sarcastic abuse to this movie.......

                        'Krull' is such a clunky, clumsy slapped together thing, so evocative of its era, when studios scrambled to assemble mega-budget 'Star Wars' knockoffs..........

                         It's a true Frankenstein's Monster, assembled from chunks of 'Star Wars' and the sword-and-sorcery films like 'Conan The Barbarian' that were just taking off into theaters......

                         So you've got medieval guys wielding swords against alien invaders who shoot friggin' laser beams out their lances.........

                          In a sane world,as we said,  this movie begs for remorseless ridicule.......

                           But after the Helsinki Summit, it looks like a sane world ain't happenin' any time soon........and damned if it didn't seem like "Krull" achieved a state of innocence while we watched it stumble and lumber through all its blatant homages to the films it imitates......

                          And seriously, how can you hate a movie that introduced us to a young Liam Neeson and a young Robbie Coltrane?

                          And how can you hate a movie so ambitiously scored by a young James Horner, laying on the heavenly choirs and blaring trumpets through the entire two hours........it's the best 'Lord Of The Rings' music ever written for a movie that isn't 'Lord Of The Rings'.....

                           Even more surprising, for a few minutes the story comes alive with a heartbreaking little subplot all its own.......the doomed, past romance between an aging sage (Freddie Jones) and a bitter crone (Francesca Annis) who sits in a vast web guarded by cut-glass stop-motion spider.  (Jones and Annis, bless 'em, throw themselves into this like a geriatric Romeo and Juliet....)

                        But after that, it's back to the borrowed stuff, including our virginal heroine menaced by a giant Halloween shop monster photographed through warped lenses.........more sophisticated than his minions, Big Beast Guy's friggin' laser beams come flying out of his mouth........

                         Yet we can't bring ourselves to dislike "Krull"...... director Peter Yates ("Bullit") gives a classy British reserve to the whole thing..........and even when the movie seems like nothing more than a marketing ploy to sell comic books, video games and board games, it maintains an assured dignity.........(as if it were a real movie and not a collections of tropes ripped off from 'Conan' and 'Star Wars')

                         So for reminding us of more simple, innocent hot summer nights, we'll hearby dub the worthy heroes and rogues of "Krull" with 3 stars (***)........which gave the BQ a pleasant escape from a world gone mad......