TRANS-YL-MANIA! HOW "DRESSED TO KILL" EXPLAINS TRUMP'S TRANS-BAN.........

Dressed To Kill (1980)      Baby Orange must have well remembered this film when he decided to kick transgenders out of the armed forces........

                   No wonder........they're all psycho, straight-razor wielding killers!  And these sickos are out to slice 'n dice superhot babes like Angie Dickenson and Nancy Allen!  Stop them before they multiply!   Not the babes, of course.....we mean those Jack The Trans-Rippers........

                    Well, that's as good as any explanation for what passes for Trump's thought process.......or lack thereof.

                    The movie?  Just another one of Brian De Palma's strenuous exercises in "Look at me! Look at me!  Look at me out-Hitch Hitchcock!!"

                      Not that isn't a hell of a lot of fun to watch. It is.......as long as you don't expect a real, thought-out movie..........

                      Hitchcock would spend a painstaking year or more with his designated screenwriters, hammering out a storyline that would somehow logically justify the all director's visual flourishes........

                       De Palma completely reverses this process -  his long bravura visuals come first......with his cobbled-together script, such as it is, tailored around them.

                        So nobody should even try to make any sense of what's going on here........which features a split personality trans whack-a-doodle stalking a high-end call girl who spotted him/her in the middle of his/her killing spree.......

                        It's not about the story, which De Palma couldn't care less about.......it's about his beautifully rendered, operatic, dialogue free sequences filled with terror, suspense, humor, anxiety and gorgeous, swooping camerawork..........or as Hitchcock put it, Pure Cinema........

                        Somewhere toward the end, for the benefit of anyone who'd care to figure out the plot, DePalma attempts a tortuous explanation/exposition sequence. If anything, it's even clumsier and lumpier than that notorious 'psychiatrist-lays-it-all-out-for-you' scene at the tail end of "Psycho"

                     Fear not, though. Once that scene's done, DePalma goes right back to his dreamy, creepy wham-bams to finish things up properly.......

                     What yanked me back to current events........while a character explains, in anatomically correct detail, a transsexual's surgical procedures to switch gender, you can see a restaurant patron in the background overcome with revulsion.............probably similar to Trump's if he viewed this film......(thereby discriminating against people who have infinitely more courage and bravery than Capt. Bone Spurs himself.....)

                     "Dressed To Kill" may barely qualify as a coherent movie...........but anyone who relishes the pure fun of 'pure cinema' shouldn't miss it.......3 stars (***) 

                     

                 


                   

ROM-DRAMEDY??............"THE NEW ROMANTIC"

The New Romantic (2018)    Not sure how to categorize this.......since it skews and wobbles from snarky millennial semi-comedy to a moral cautionary tale about young women trading sex for material goodies.......

               A college senior and school paper columnist (Jessica Barden)stumbles on to a story to spice up her sex-less commentaries on romance........meeting .a girl livin' the high life courtesy of a Sugar Daddy.

                In other words........no love, but cash, clothes and other expensive stuff on the barrelhead.

                Smelling a story, our intrepid reporter ends up giving it a try herself........becoming a friend-with-benefits to an older professor.

                 And the benefits flow........in place of her well worn bicycle, Sugar-Prof gifts her with a Vespa.....and so on and so on.......

                  Surprisingly, this movie turns out as moral and upright as a church sermon......teaching us that loveless sex in exchange for cool stuff is BAD.........it almost could have been made in the 50's or early 60's...........

                   Well, not exactly. In "Breakfast At Tiffany's", you couldn't have a closeup of a miserable, humiliated Audrey Hepburn while stuck underneath one of her huffing, puffing Sugar-Pops.......

                    You do get that here, of course.......but a sadder but wiser Barden sees the error of her ways and returns to genuine affection and chaste smooching with an age-appropriate classmate........(at least this is far more believable than committed golddigger Marilyn Monroe ending up with Tommy Noonan at the end of"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"......)

                    And the whole sugar-daddy thing is revealed for what the filmmakers  thought it was all along......a pretzel-logic re-definition of prostitution......end of sermon, peace be with you.

                     Barden's cute 'n plucky, but you can decide for yourselves if she makes this worth sitting through. For BQ  2 stars (**)

CATHOLICS VS. TRUMP'S BFF'S........BQ PREYS UPON "THE CARDINAL"

The Cardinal (1963)    I'll admit the BQ has had fun at the expense of some of Otto Preminger's Big Bloat Bestseller movies........2 & 1/2 to 3 hour heavy-handed epics derived from 700 page doorstop tomes that everybody was reading on airplanes.........("Exodus", "Advise And Consent", etc, etc)

                 I landed on this one because in the course of its indigestible length, it pits the Catholic priesthood against  Dear Leader Trump's two favorite support groups.......foaming-at-the-mouth racists and rampaging Nazis.........

                    Even before the film chooses to wander into those two snake pits, it dips itself into the pro-life firestorm.......... the plot forces our young, self righteous priest Father Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) to decide who's going to live or die - his wayward, unwed pregnant sister (Carol Lynely) or her distressed-in-labor baby......

                    Guess which one of he picks for the  the Great Beyond......heh, heh heh........but don't feel too bad - the rescued infant grows up as the spitting image of her dead mom.....(cause she's also played by Carol Lynley....)

                    But enough of these trivial matters........as Father Fermoyle slowly ascends through the church hierarchy (til he attain's the film's tittle), it's off to the racist horrors of the 1930's Deep South.......where he and a young black priest (Ossie Davis) defy an army of drawling, drooling KKKers.......(or you could say, the ancestors of Make America Great Again Trumpanzees.....)

                     Both priests get roundly whipped by the Klansmen..........but since Fermoyle's white, when he wakes up, he's aided by a kindly Ku Kluxer with a jar of salve and a harmonica to play 'Dixie'.......(If you think I'm kidding about this, treat yourself to Preminger's 1967 full blown loony Southern Fried epic "Hurry Sundown", so ridiculed and reviled, it put a definitive end to his Big Bloat Bestseller epics...)

                     As opposed to the rest of the film's expansive European locations, "The Cardinal"s Deep South foray comes off as low-budget backlot cheapjack, filmed on sets left over by old TV westerns.  But we're soon quickly off to pre-World War 2 Austria......with our plucky ambitious Fermoyle coping with the rise of Hitler and his Make Germany Great Again minions.....)

                    Here's where Preminger indulges in the kind of pageant-like spectacle that juices up the movie's trailers.......hordes of rampaging brownshirts plowing through Catholics and priests like a human buzzsaw.

                    Or in Trump's words.......'very fine people'............

                    Not much left to say about the movie itself........other than random odd stuff that pops up in it.....Carol Lynely declaring her slutty lifestyle by becoming a....Oh My God....tango dancer......Broadway star Robert Morse madly twitching in a vaudeville number.......and Tom Tryon.

                      Tryon, a jouneyman hunk 'o beefcake in the Rock Hudson mold was born too late.....there was no longer the kind of studio system that could have nurtured him into a real actor. Tyrannized and humiliated by Preminger in both this film and "In Harm's Way", he left acting to become a best-selling author of scary novels, ("The Other", "Harvest Home")

                      His stolid, uninteresting performance doesn't do the film any favors.....but then neither does Preminger's languid pedestrian direction. 1 & 1/2 stars......and that's primarily for Jerome Moross's memorable main title theme........

                 

GAYS GET PEPPARD-ED, PART TWO.......BQ MOVES IN TO "HOUSE OF CARDS"

House Of Cards (1968) .........and so BQ moves on to George Peppard's next 1968 thriller......and we're off to Europe.......with George essentially playing the same two-fisted, hard luck tough guy he just played in "P.J." (see the previous day's post).........

               No Private Eyewash this time.......we're now in scenic France, where Frances Lai's lush romantic melody plays over a corpse bobbing along in the Seine.........great opening.

                 Peppard? He's an expatriate washed up boxer and sometime novelist who ends up as a babysitter to wealthy French family's fatherless tyke......

                 But oh, what a viper's nest he stumbled into. The whole family's a bunch of sinister, threatening alt-right, neo-Nazi colonials who got kicked out of Algeria in the uprising. And under the leadership of their Jabba The Hut boss, (who else but Orson Welles), they're planning a comeback......

                  The tyke's poor American mom (the stunning but sad-eyed Inger Stevens) is a virtual prisoner in this House Of Thugs.......but not if our boy George can help it......

                  As you'd expect, Peppard and Stevens go on the run, but not before Jabba The Orson has framed Peppard for the murder of Peppard's best bud........

                   I won't spoil any more of the fun you can have with the plot machinations and twists......except to point out that once again, as in "P.J.", Peppard ends up pitted against an oozingly nasty gay villain.

                  Only one Gay Baddie this time, but he proves a far more effective threat than that entire bar crowd who pummeled Peppard in "P.J."

                  Smoothly played by William Job, he's Orson The Hut's prime blade-wielding minion......fashioned along the lines of Martin Landau's snaky 'Leonard' from 'North By Northwest'. And just like 'Leonard', he engages in a lover's spat with the Big Boss.......(and with Orson,  we mean literally big....)

                  In the film's memorable showdown at Rome's Colosseum, Peppard sneers at Job, calling him 'Sweets', but changes his tune when Job comes at him with a sword. No doubt still smarting from that "P.J." gay bar beatdown, Peppard unleashes some good ole-fashioned  heterosexual American fisticuffs on Job's sophisticated ass.........enough to make Mike Pence stand up and cheer.......

                  Slick fun overall, stuffed with Hitchcock-type tropes and one of BQ's long lost favorites.
3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2).  There's a pristine copy posted on YouTube, so seek it out by all means.

                 

               

GAYS GET PEPPARD-ED, PART ONE.........BQ VS. "P.J."

P.J. (1968)    BQ loves '60's movies........and no leading man had a more prolific 60's  Hollywood career than George Peppard......

                    I watched two his '68 releases, "House Of Cards" and this one back to back......and that's probably how they were made.....back to back......(along with that strange comedy "What's So Bad About Feeling Good", already covered in a previous post.

                     These two are thrillers that couldn't be more different in their production......."P.J." was filmed mostly on the Universal backlot (with a smattering of NYC locations).......with the exception of the high violence level, it looks and sounds like standard made-for-TV product, sausage rolled off the Universal assembly line....

                      "House Of Cards", however, has a rich international flavor, filmed all over Europe with a continental supporting cast and a cross-country Hitchcockian storyline........

                     And yet both of them share the same director, John Guillerman. Go figure.......

                     For this post, I'll do "P.J" first........a down and dirty Private Eye thing with Peppard as a broke, down-on-his-luck gumshoe who finds himself ensnared by a rich, high-powered scumbag (Raymond Burr)........and romanced by the expected,drop-dead gorgeous  femme fatale (Gayle Hunnicut).......

                      Punches get thrown,wisecracks tossed bodies fall.......but here's what both these very different movies share.........the use of gay men as ultra creepy, murderous villains......(in 60's comedies, however, gay characters were used for easy, cheap, limp-wristed laughs)

                    In the film's signature sequence, Peppard is lured to a gay bar by one of Burr's oily minions, a mincing, preening slime played by Severn Darden.  The bar's entire clientele, most of them wearing spiked rings, proceed to beat our hero senseless........gives a whole new flip-the-script meaning to 'gay bashing'......

                       ...........but George survives this onslaught with a cracked rib and a broken finger. What a guy.  The film's worst fate is reserved for one of Burr's heterosexual henchman, whose attempt to push Peppard in front of an oncoming subway train goes gruesomely awry.

                     Not bad, even with the cheapjack backlot Universal sets. Big plus: a bouncy nifty music theme by Neal Hefti, the master of insanely catchy TV show themes........maybe a tad too cheerful for corpse-ridden private eye movie, but damned fun to listen to.

                    2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).   Next up.......Peppard and director Guillerman go to Europe......and our boy George crosses swords (literally) with another lethal gay guy........don't miss the post on that one!

                 

DEPT. OF "HUH? SAY WHAT NOW?".....BQ STAMPS OUT "NO POSTAGE NECESSARY"

No Postage Necessary (2017)    Hoo boy........another fine mess to clean up........

                  There's two or three plotlines going on here that, individually, might have made separate, interesting films........

                   .........as long as none of them were written or directed by the boobs who mashed all these stories into this sorry thing.....

                    First plot:   Unlikable young cyber-hacker ekes out a living while the Feds have him on Double Secret Probation........(this includes employment in a custard shack shaped like an ice cream cone..)  The vaguely creepy sad sack supplements his income by masquerading as a postal worker to swipe mail that might hold cash gifts........nice. Plus, he's being blackmailed by a rogue FBI agent who wants him to retrieve stolen Bitcoins off the internet...

                     Second plot:   The Cyber-Shmuck Mail Thief stumbles upon heartbreaking letters written by a grieving war widow to her dead Marine husband.......addressed to the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier........

                       Third plot:   While Cyber-Putz strikes up a relationship with sweet pretty Pretty War Widow, in the hopes that 'KNOWING YOU MAKES ME A BETTER MAN', he discovers Rogue FBI Guy is himself the Bitcoin thief......

                     It would take a skilled, talented director to blend any of this stuff into one movie.........but the guy behind this can't chew gum and direct and the same time.  Making any of these plot threads even remotely convincing is as far out of his skill set as Earth is the moons of Jupiter.........

                     So as a thriller, a comedy, a romance and whatever else it tried for, the film stays crushingly bad from beginning to end.

                      An utter waste of time. Zero stars (0).

'GIALLO!' TO YOU SLAB-HAPPY FANS........BQ DISSECTS "AUTOPSY".......

Autopsy (1975)    Gather 'round, fellow bloodthirsty geeks.........and let's peel the skin off this pipin' hot dish of Giallo spaghetti, doused liberally with red sauce........

               It's a tossup as to which of the two main attractions of this movie command the most attention.......

               First and foremost..........loads of freshly mutilated corpses........dangling eyeballs, shredded innards, ripped apart flesh...........and all this long, long before American TV shows discovered the joys of gruesome forensic science........

               Secondly, the bad-audition level acting and frequently exposed breasts of American expatriate starlet Mimsy Farmer.........whose attempts at emoting out hysteria and fear look more like she's experiencing severe indigestion.........

                Mimsy's a pathologist here, which gives the movie a grand excuse to lay out a stellar, cast of ghastly corpses..........(and sometimes, in Mimsy's addled mind, they don't remain inert......hoo-ha!)

                 True to Giallo tropes, Mimsy and everyone in her orbit are an annoying bunch of obnoxious, screwed up people.........so nobody minds when they start dying in horrible ways........(a proper Giallo audience should be salivating from one murder to the other......)

               But a bonus:   whenever these dopes get into furious lethal fights with each other, they're given to shouting out "I'll kill you! I'll kill you! I'll kill you!".........hey, that's the spirit, gang!

                Further upping the weirdness factor.......the movie throws in random shots of solar flares to imply that sunspots are driving half the population of Rome into messy suicides........

                .........therefore the movie becomes the first Giallo to finger a burned-up heavenly body as a major suspect.

                 And by heavenly body, I don't mean Mimsy, who loses her clothes, along with her mind while stalked and harassed by another loopy character, a disgraced race car driver turned Catholic priest...........(which gave me a brainstorm about writing a script about hordes of disgraced priests who become race car drivers.......)

                    SPOILER ALERT........you'll be happy to know.......the Sun didn't do it.....so everyone can go back to tanning. The murdering psycho turns out to be just another human douchebag in the supporting cast.....

                     Disappointing, though.......especially for a Giallo: the death handed out to the culprit equals, but doesn't exceed the ones already suffered by the victims.  Bummer.

                   Creepy and strange, but for that rather lame villain comeuppance, only two quarts of blood....(**)  As for poor Mimsy, unlike other vacant-eyed Giallo babes, she does work herself to the very limits of her very limited range.......if nothing else, by far the blondest American girl who ever wandered into Euro-trash movies.......

YOU GOT SOME EGGS-SPLAININ' TO DO.........."EASTER UNDER WRAPS"

Easter Under Wraps (2019)     What better way to celebrate the holiday than have a little bit 'o snarky fun at the Hallmark Channel's Easter romancer..........

                 We all know by now the things that Hallmark's obsessed with as they crank out these movies like....um.....Easter Peeps......

                  ..........heavily sugared confections (chocolate, cakes, donuts, pies)........corporate machinations in spiffy, high-rise office buildings........and most of all, the BIG DECEPTION!!!!!!!

                  The BIG DECEPTION, ripped off from the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies, involves one of the romantic partners spending 75 per cent of the movie masquerading as someone else......much to the ultimate chagrin and humiliation of the deception's target/victim - the other romantic partner.........

                   So this one involves a chocolate company's marketing director (and daughter of the CEO) going undercover on the assembly line of one the firm's factories in Iowa..........where, inevitably, she bonds with the factory's hunky head Chocolateer...........and widowed dad to a precious little girl......

                   A word about the child.........it's clear that Hallmark filmmakers work under strict orders to fantasize children........these kids are not of this earth.......they're more like the cartoon bunnies, birds and rabbits that follow behind Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.....

                   With mathematical precision, Hunky Choco Guy discovers Perky Marketing Gal's deception exactly 1 hour and 43 minutes into the film........(these tropes are as rigidly enforced as Kabuki Theater)......

                     He pouts for another 12 minutes or so before the expected kiss at the 1 hour and 58 minute mark........our Hallmarkers have not only discovered chaste, tongue-less snogging, they've created a chocolate Easter Egg similar in size to the chestburster eggs in the "Alien" franchise......

                   All ends well........the complete opposite of Forrest Gump's box-of-chocolates.......

                   Cause in the Hallmark Universe, you always know what you're gonna get.......

                   3 stars (***) for Hallmark obsessed fans..........everyone else.....be afraid.

                   Happy Easter!

DEPT. OF SILLY CINEMA STRIKES BACK!..........."SPF 18"

SPF 19 (2017)     Funny how things work out.........one day after we open the Pandora's Box of the Department Of Silly Cinema (films mad by people who have no business making films).....BD (Beloved Daughter) randomly picks this steaming pile of excrement for us to watch........

                   Not that either of us had an inkling of how awful this would be.......BD hoped for a cheerful, sun-drenched teen rom-com.......BQ merely hoped for something that wouldn't make his eyes roll upward so much that they'd stay stuck forever in that position.........

                   Main impression:   The "director" here (and I use that term jokingly) must have somehow held Goldie Hawn, Molly Ringwald, Pamela Anderson and Keanu Reeves deeply in his debt..........I can't think of any other reason for their sporadic participation in this non-entity of a movie.........

                   Hawn contributes an off-screen narration, sounding like she's reading a fairy tale for teens with severe arrested development..........unnecessarily describing what we already see.......rich, dumb adolescents with various non-problems hanging out at a beachside Malibu home that looks like a slightly smaller version of the Sydney Opera House........

                    The sheer ineptitude of the acting, writing and directing here staggers the imagination........in a complete stillborn state, amateur actors slowly spout dialogue at each other like they're just learned English.

                      This makes the movie appear  as a perfect duplicate of a church-funded, faith-based Christian effort........with the entire cast and crew recruited from people who'd normally bring the mayo and potato chips to the Sunday  church picnic.......

                     .........except for the fact that Jesus is nowhere in sight here.  The only thing this movie worships is surfing and designer wetsuits..........

                        There's also a desperate effort to heavily layer up the soundtrack with instantly recognizable 80's rock songs........to trick you into believing you're watching a real movie......

                      Uh-uh.......won't work.  Once again, another glorious AFH, an ABOMINATION FROM HELL.......Keanu, Molly, Pamela, Goldie.......I hope your debt is paid in full, for the love of surfboards.....

WEEKEND MUELLER MADNESS WRAP-UP.......SPECIAL "SLIP OF THE TONGUE" EDITION

                 Baby Orange finally gets his very own Mob lawyer.......cleverly disguised as the Attorney General..........sucks for the USA, but then Baby Orange now has the best lawyer American taxpayers can buy for him......

                  Sarah Hard-Luckabee Sanders spins her lying on the Mueller Report.........as a slip of the tongue.......A slip of the tongue?   Sarah easily wins the Brass Balls award this week.......her tongue's so twisted from lying, it hasn't seen its own tip in over 2 years........

                   Baby Orange rages against "bullshit" in Mueller Report........too bad he forgot to mention that it's all Under Oath with Perjury Prosecution penalties bullshit..........

                   Baby Orange almost equals Hilary's record for answering "I don't remember" and "I can't recall"......37 times........this after Baby Orange constantly boasted "I have the greatest memory...."......but then maybe he can't recall he said that.......

                     The Mueller Report reveals.....(hold your breath)......to paraphrase Claude Rains in "Casablanca"........we're shocked, SHOCKED to hear that Baby Orange is a lying, corrupt-to-his-soul scumbag, assisted into the Presidency by KGB assassin Putin..........and dedicated to destroying Democracy and the rule of law.....

                    .......oh.....wait a minute. Everyone with at least two or three working brain cells (this excludes the MAGA redhats) has known this for years.

                         Never mind.

DEPT OF SILLY CINEMA............."LADY STREET FIGHTER"

Lady Street Fighter (1981)     Here's the thing about laughing your way through really crappy movies........

                 It's fun for about 20 minutes or so.........maybe more if you're good at supplying instantly funny put-downs, a la 'MST3K'.........

                   But there comes a point where you realize that precious moments of your life tick away as you waste it on garbage unfit for human consumption.....

                    Keep in mind, I do not speak of wonderfully entertaining tripe like 'Fiend Without A Face', the original 'The Blob'......or even 'The Green Slime'.......

                    Those puppies, bad and embarrassing as they are, never fail to keep me enthralled and amused every time I watch them........

                      No, what I speak of here is incompetent, inept, unwatchable turds, slapped together by people who never, ever should have been allowed near filmmaking equipment.......

                      Exhibit A:  This movie........the brainchild of Renee Harmon, a German woman who, after marrying an American soldier, ended up in the USA to pursue her delusions of  creativity in movies.........

                      Renee's staggering lack of both acting and writing talent made Ed Wood Jr look like Orson Welles, but that bless her ridiculous soul, that never stopped her.

                        "Lady Street Fighter", written by Renee, has her as voluptuous Euro-Babe (you'd have to use your imagination to imagine her as such) tracking down sleazy mobsters who tortured and murdered her sister........

                          At least I guess that's the plot, since Renee's thick accent renders most of her dialogue as gobble-de-gook.......

                          I'll spare you (and myself) any detailed descriptions of the arthritic kung fu fights, shootouts and car chases that unfold.  Or the written-in-crayon dialogue, which is all post-dubbed, making the film resemble random loops from European porn.

                        But you do get to take in the sight of Renee performing exuberant fellatio on various stalks of celery...…….if nothing else, the girl does dote on her veggies.

                        Luckily for Rensee and the gang, the film was so bottom-of-the-barrel and under anyone's radar, that they avoided a massive copyright lawsuit from United Artists.......since their tinny attempt at a music score consisted of ripping off Ennio Morricone's "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly"...........

                        Do NOT make the terrible mistake of thinking this would be fun to watch after a guzzling several six packs......whether you watch drunk, stoned or stone cold sober, "Lady Street Fighter" remains forever an AFH....an ABOMINATION FROM HELL.  Take heed..........

WHITEY'S ON THE MOON.........BQ CRASH LANDS ON "FIRST MAN"

First Man (2018)    This movie seduced a lot of critics with the level of its craft and the studied, remote professionalism of its two lead actors.......

                Not us.

                 It's a pretentious, boring chore to sit through........and after 140 minutes, the film seems to celebrate its own failure to penetrate the Sphinx of Neil Armstrong or find any path at all into the heart of his character.........

                  The only way to describe "First Man"........imagine '2001' with the Monolith Slab played by a human actor........

                  ........and the filmmakers here are the apes gathered round the slab, chattering like mad, but staggered and confused at what they see, unable to process it.....

                   The forever stoic Armstrong remains an impenetrable riddle that the movie never solves......allowing Ryan Gosling to play the role as a blank slate, preferring to humanize him only through flashbacks of his young daughter who succumbed to a cancerous tumor.

                  And I've really no idea what they had in mind with Claire Foy's portrayal of Amrstrong's wife as a brittle, frigid woman barely containing a deep well of resentment and anger at her emotionally shut down husband.

                   No glorifying epic love story here........watching them, you can only wonder why they stayed married for 38 years until divorcing in 1994.....25 years after the moon landing.  Which only leads me to believe that the filmmakers understood as little about Janet Armstrong as they did about Neil......

                   And so the film proceeds as a grand re-telling of NASA's space-race history with most of the emotion squeezed out of it..........(the polar opposite of Ron Howard's respectfully dramatic "Apollo 13" or Philip Kaufman's breezy, cheeky version of "The Right Stuff")

                     A few good things pop out here and there........specifically the film's depiction of space travel as a harrowing, dangerous and altogether crazy enterprise.......thereby underlining the astounding courage of the astronauts who undertook such a quest.

                    A welcome breath of fresh air comes from Corey Stall as Buzz Aldrin......the only supporting actor in the film allowed to display some amount of un-suppressed humanity......

                    And kudos for including an actor playing musician-poet Gil Scott Heron performing his blistering "Whitey On The Moon", the legendary takedown of an America spending zillions on space while grinding poverty abounds..........

                     But the monolith of Neil Armstrong ultimately defeats this ambitious attempt to build a movie around him........Gosling and director never find way into the man......Armstrong remains a black hole that gradually sucks the life out of the film.

                      It's the final scene that's the most telling.......Armstrong and his wife, separated by the glass window of the contamination room the astronauts where forced to inhabit after the mission,  They're as walled off from each other as the movie is from them.......2 stars (**)

BYE BYE TO SUSIE HUNSEKER AND RUBY-DOOBEE......RIP SUSAN HARRISON

                      An RIP for Susan Harrison, an actress who enjoyed a all too brief but memorable career as a fresh young starlet......

                      And what a movie to start a career with........the legendary, iconic "Sweet Smell Of Success"......in which Susan played the impossibly, gentle adorable Susie Hunseker, innocent sister of the powerful, ruthless gossip columnist J.J. Hunseker (Burt Lancaster).  J.J. exerts the same iron-willed, malignant influence over Susie as he does over millions of readers and TV viewers.

                      You ache and fear for Harrison's Susie, as her sweet, budding romance with a jazz guitarist (Martin Milner) is undermined and undone by her brother, with the help of his desperate toady, the ever-hustling, conniving press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis.)

                       Harrison moved on to some striking guest starring roles in television......she's the ballerina in that classic Twilight Zone episode, "Five Characters In Search Of An Exit".....(for anyone who hasn't seen it, we dare not reveal the legendary twist.....)

                        Talk about a change of pace, for her last feature film appearance, 1960's "Key Witness", Harrison fairly ignited the screen as Ruby-Doobee, the vicious, official Babe-In-Residence of Dennis Hopper's rampaging gang of teen thugs.   You gotta love Ruby......to stop Jeffrey Hunter from testifying against Hopper, Harrison beats up on Hunter's wife while she's in the courthouse.....(see our 2//21/19 post on "Key Witness")

                       RIP to a remarkable, charismatic talent we only wish we'd seen more of.......

WEAKQUEL..........THE ONLY WAY TO DESCRIBE "THE EQUALIZER 2".......

The Equalizer 2 (2018)   Before I start any ranting over this bloated, disappointing sequel.......a word of remembrance for Edward Woodward, the original Equalizer on TV........

                How I loved this guy in that show........he raged against villains and injustice as if still doing Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.......

                 Yet I somehow still embraced the movie re-invention of his McCall character.....remade as a cooler-than-cool, Zen Master Of Mayhem played by Denzel Washington.......

                 Who didn't love Washington's methodical, blood-soaked crusade, scything through a hateful army of Russian thugs.........all on behalf of avenging the brutal beating of an achingly vulnerable sex-trafficked whore played by Chloe Grace Moretz? 

                   Ah well.......along comes the inevitable sequel........and.....sigh......it's nothing but a gimme-the-cash, take-the-money-and-run stinker.......

                    It's a wonder Washington and the filmmakers could even stay awake while making this.......it's such a one-two-three-kick collection of all the tropes they thought juiced up audiences in the first film........

                    So they kick it off with Washington randomly decimating two separate groups of guys just begging to have their limbs snapped and faces punched in.........a bunch of Turkish sleazebags and an even more deserving bunch, a entitled nest of privileged yuppies who look left over from playing Christian Bale's buddies in "American Psycho"......

                      Then we move on to the plot's Main MotherEffers.......a group of McCall's former CIA operatives, who've turned into a rogue assassination unit.  For some reason I missed (either from dozing off or the film's not explaining it all that well) these guys are on an international murder spree.....which includes offing McCall's most beloved CIA pal from the first film, played by Melissa Leo.

                    Uh oh.......that means two things.......no "Equalizer 3" for Melissa......and a lengthy hunt-and-stalk tour for McCall until all the douchebags get duly equalized........

                    No fun, no excitement...........nothing but worst kind of connect-the-dots, by-the-numbers corporate moviemaking.

                    The only real assassins working here........the studio accountants.......gunning for box-office cash.

                       Okay, no more wasting time on this.......1 star (*) for a washed-out Xerox copy of the original film. BQ says ignore it.

CLASH OF THE MOGULS!.........LEVINE VS. SUSSKIND IN "SHOWMAN"

Showman (1963)  This raggedly little Maysles Brother documentary on legendary movie producer Joesph E. Levine is barely worth discussing.......

                 Considering the great Prime Subject, it's a draggy, pointless, throwaway wasted opportunity..... its 55 minute running time eaten up with random ogling of bikini girls at the Cannes Film Festival and droning business calls of dark-suited Levine minions........

                 But for a few minutes, the film comes alive when Levine clashes with fellow movie producer David Susskind at New York City radio talk show........

                 Susskind, a prolific film and TV producer turned radio and TV host, fancied himself a cultural uplifter of America and sworn enemy of Philistines filling the theaters with crude junk for the ignorant and unwashed.......

                 He couldn't possibly comprehend a producer like Levine, who was all about the hype and hustle, the hard sell to put paying customers into the seats.........no matter what you were selling, diamonds or dung.......

                  And here's what killed Susskind about Levine.......Joe made no distinction between brazen, exploitation crap and high art........whether it was the hilariously awful Steve Reeves "Hercules", the trashy film versions of equally noxious Harold Robbins' novels, or groundbreaking cinema like "The Graduate", "Carnal Knowledge" and Sophia Loren's Oscar winning "Two Women".......it made no difference to Levine.

                   It was all product to push........and scoop up the cash and bask in the publicity....

                   There was the big difference between the two moguls..........when Susskind, the cultured, well spoken Patron Of The Arts, confronted the simple but savvy businessman Levine.....the Patrol Of The Bucks......

                   Susskind, salivating over a potential "gotcha" moment, confronts Levine about "Hercules"....(we guess Steve Reeves pectorals and the rubber monsters somehow deeply affected Susskind's sensibilities......). He crows over the fact that Levine's been overheard admitting that......gasp.....he, Levine, doesn't like "Hercules"!   

                     My God! You mean........Joe knows he's infesting movie theaters with junk?

                    You might be thinking at this point (and you'd be right)......so what?   Isn't that what all movie moguls do.......produce Academy Award winners right along side worthless trash?

                    For a few minutes, you get to see Susskind, from the high altitude of his artistic pedestal, attempt to mock Levine, the streetwise dealmaker who gave the world "Hercules" and the re-dubbed "Godzilla, King Of The Monsters" while at the same time flying to Rome to hand Sophia Loren her Oscar for "Two Women".........

                    So Joseph E. Levine didn't know art.......but he knew what he liked.......and what would make him some box-office buckolas.......and BQ loves 'im for that........as for David Susskind's simpering condescension from the cultural high ground, I'd have told him to go **** himself.....and given him a free full color poster of "Hercules"......autographed by Steve Reeves.

                    1 star (*) for "Showman"......and you now know exactly which few minutes of it deserve that 1 star........