'CAPTAIN SINBAD'.....ONE OF OUR FAVORITE KIDDIE MATINEES

 Captain Sinbad (1963)    We will NOT tolerate anyone deriding or mocking the plentiful amount of early 1960's special effects in this sweet little jewel box of a movie.

            Yeah, we know.......it's far removed from Ray Harryhausen's dazzling, meticulous stop-motion effects in "The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad".

              Ya know what? We don't care. 'Captain Sinbad' is such a charming, adorable children's matinee experience, we fell in love with it at first sight. 

                 What's not love?!  It comes courtesy of the King brothers (Frank 'n Herman) who toiled away in Hollywood as B-movie producers (including the classic 'Gun Crazy') until they moved to England to make that spectacular (and beloved by us) monster stomper, "Gorgo".

                   After 'Gorgo', the boys moved on to Germany where they concocted, with a combined British-German cast and crew, this beautifully photographed fairy tale.

                  Filmed in the ripest, most eye-popping Technicolor and featuring a gorgeous, haunting score by Michel Michelet, it's one of the most silly, childish and yet entertaining kiddie matinee we've ever seen. 

                A perfect cast parades on by......TV's 'Zorro' Guy Williams, make a dashing heroic Sinbad. Stunning curvy German starlet Heidi Bruhl is the perfect to-die-for Princess, with her permanently arched eyebrows......

                  And what a worthy villain in the character acting veteran Pedro Armendariz, making one of his last film appearances (along with his memorable role in "From Russia With Love"), before the suffering cancer-wracked actor took his own life. 

                  There's invisible monsters, aerial warfare vultures dropping boulders on Sinbad's ship, paper mache crocodiles, a Hydra-headed puppet dragon and the palace magician (an extra hammy Abraham Sofaer ) amusing himself by making his own indoor weather and mini-nuclear blasts. 

                  Our stalwart hero's attempts at sword-skewering the villain won't work since he keeps his beating heart conveniently parked in a remote tower so tall that even Rapunzel would need hair extensions to navigate it. (Not that stops our boy Sinbad, who asks one of his crew to lend him his hook.....)

                 But challenges await ou hero Armendariz's evil heart (literally a pulsing heart shaped like a Valentine's Day chocolate box ) is guarded by......a giant glove about the size of a Humvee.  (Someone involved in the movie had a real sense of humor, since the glove waves a "oh-no-you-don't" wagging finger at Sinbad when he raises a sword against it.....)

                   We also don't want to forget the brief but gloriously wack-a-doodle palace dance number which features a scantily clad babe crawling out of a massive spider web hung for occasion. 

                   Colorful beyond description and the most fun to watch, "Captain Sinbad" turned us right back into a child again......and at our age, that makes for a 4 star (****) experience.

'THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES'......WILLIAM WYLER'S NASTY SOUTHERN FRIED FAREWELL.....

 The Liberation Of L.B. Jones (1970)    What a crude, cheap looking little piece of race-ploitation this was to finish out the directing career of William Wyler, one of Hollywood's top-of-the-line, A-list filmmakers of the 40's and 50's.......

           Did this really come from the guy who directed "Wuthering Heights", "Roman Holiday", "The Best Years Of Our Lives" and "Ben Hur"?

           It's photographed as brightly as a quickie made-for-TV movie, its range of acting goes from overdone ham to barely there and it revels in its horrific depiction of America's racial divide still throbbing like a bleeding wound since the Civil War.

           What's even more depressing......the fact that 51 years after this film's release, we've hardly improved, with the ghastly scenes of Trump's January 6th stormtroopers waving confederate flags and hurling the N word at African American Capitol policemen. 

             Wyler's film plunges into the nightmare landscape of a contemporary Tennessee town where the goon squad police spend all their time tormenting and torturing the black population.  (You know something's up when you hear Elmer Bernstein's jazzy score wailing away......)

              The most repulsive of these cops, Willie Joe Worth (Anthony Zerbe) has amused himsel carrying on a public affair with the hot-to-trot bombshell wife (Lola Falana) of the black community's gentlemanly beloved funeral director Lord Byron Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne).

               Against the strong advice of the town's paterfamilias lawyer Oman Hedgepath (Lee J.Cobb) L.B. makes a courageous, foolhardy stand by suing his wife for divorce.......which would mean publicly exposing Willie Joe to scandal and the end of both his career and marriage.

                L.B., refuses to bend to threats and intimidation from Willie Joe and his equally monstrous partner Bumpas (Arch Johnson) which leads to the virtually inevitable consequences (You could consider this movie the darkest flips side of 1967's  "In The Heat Of The Night".....in this little Southern hell-on-earth,  there's no revelation of mutual respect between the races)

               It gets even worse......Cobb's Hedgepath, who throws the N-word around in his casual conversations, arranges a convenient cover-up to spare the town any more embarrassment. And Wyler finishes this depressing, lurid melodrama with one last showstopper......

               As precursor to the 'blaxsploitation' genre soon to flourish in the first half of the 1970's, "The Liberation Of L.B. Jones" ushers in that wave with a grisly sequence that features a white man's death at the hands of a revenge fueled black man. (Yaphet Kotto, who a few years later would become the Bond films' one and only black villain in "Live and Let Die").

                Anyone looking for traces of William Wyler's distinguished classic filmmaking style won't find it here. The movie looks and sounds like any fast buck journeyman hack could have directed it. As cheapjack and exploitive now as it was in 1970, 'L.B.Jones'  remains a grotesque horror movie masquerading as a drama.

                 And an odd closeout to the filmography of a once revered director. 1 star (*)

'OLD'....SHYAMALAN SEES DEAD PEOPLE....OR AT LEAST WITH ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE...

 Old (2021)    How tempting it is to mock our reigning maestro of far-fetched twisty thrillers, M. Night Shyamalan......but we'll try our best to resist.

           We didn't join the rejoicing chorus when his formidable ego got the best of him and sent his promising directing career into a nosedive.....(aided by the triple whammy of the overhyped "The Village", the pretentious "Lady In The Water" and the silly, unintentionally funny "The Happening")

             Because even in his mis-fires, we could see his love of what Hitchcock referred to as 'pure cinema', using the all the tools of filmmaking, to tell a story visually......and elicit a powerful audience response.

              Which is why his movies don't look like anybody else's but his own. And why we remain a fan.

             His new one offers a rich sampling of the best and worst of Shyamalan -  those elegant panning shots that tell you he's up to something ominous.......those tantalizing clues strewn through the movie like a trail of bread crumbs leading to....yes, THE BIG TWIST WE DARE NOT REVEAL.

              Beyond silly?  You bet.. Requiring a suspension of disbelief?  Big time. Filled with holes in the mythology it's asking you to swallow?  Oh yeah, we lost count.

               But once you start watching this movie, you don't take your eyes off it for a second. You wouldn't dare for fear of missing something. 

                 By now, everyone knows the 'Twilight Zone' set up here......a collection of unlucky disparate vacationers at a plush tropical resort stuck on a private beach with a unique power.......to age them all rapidly in 24 hours. Losing years of their lives with every passing hour, the adults sprout wrinkles and head into middle age while their kids go from toddlers to teens in record time. 

                 And escape attempts always end with them blacking out and finding themselves deposited right back on the beach. 

                  A host of issues get thrown into the mix here......racism, physical illness, the parent-child divisions, the obsession with staying young.....and pure simple craziness. And all of it comes together at the end, when Shyamalan finally lays all his cards on the table. 

                  As for THE BIG TWIST WE DARE NOT REVEAL, you're either going to find it clever in its irony (and its relation to current events) or you'll simply roll your eyes and find it massively ridiculous.

                Like the rest of the film, the twist doesn't bear close scrutiny and you could easily poke a hundred holes in it. 

                It didn't bother us all that much........after all, we don't ever remember people spending a lot of time poking holes in Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" episodes. 

                 Whatever you might think of the twist, for BQ, getting there was most of the fun. And we always can't wait to see what Shyamalan's up to next.

                  And there's not many filmmakers we can say that about. 3 stars (***).

            

'TWISTER'.....HAPPY 25TH TO A MIGHTY WIND AND THE FLYING COW......

 Twister (1996)   Can hardly believe it......we've been doing this blog since 2016 and yet it took us this long to catch up with one of our favorite 90's Multiplex popcorn gobblers. Really?

                    How is that possible? We watch the damn thing every summer, cause we've always considered it one our go-to hot weather movies.

                     Maybe it's just as well that we finally celebrate it this summer on its 25th anniversary.

                     So let us now praise, remember and reminisce about:

                    The late Bill Paxton...........perfectly cast as the Texas-twanged, pure Americana storm chaser trying to shoehorn himself into a more staid, traditional life as a TV weatherman. All it takes to turn him back into "The Extreme" (as he's known by his tornado Scooby-gang) is a cluster of twisters and incendiary chemistry between him and his estranged twister-obsessed wife....played by:

                    Helen Hunt .....the genuine beating heart of the film, with the ability to become realistically endearing and annoying all at the same time.

                      Jamie Gertz......stuck with the most thankless role any actress can be burdened with.....the out-of-her-element fiance who's obviously destined to bow out. Yet this 1980's starlet spins gold from it, both comedic and dramatic.  An unsung gem.

                      The late Seymour Phillip Hoffman......playing a Belushi-like  'Animal House' storm chaser, he finds a way to turn this this stock, manic comic relief stereotype into real human being.

                       Cary Elwes  In true 90's blockbuster style, his fate is pre-ordained from the beginning, but we're always still impressed with spectacular finality of it......

                        The CGI tornadoes.....all of you special effects purists may scoff at us, but they still look well done and effectively scary to us.  And the unearthly choral music that accompanies some of them still makes our hair stand on end.

                       The flying cow  Forever airborne and forever in our hearts.

                       The twister dismantling the drive-in showing of "The Shining"   We can imagine Stephen King, who despises the Kubrick film, watching this and chuckling with glee. 

                       Lois Smith   God bless her, still with us and still acting as we write this post.....a touchstone through decades of cinema ("East Of Eden", "Five Easy Pieces", "Fried Green Tomatoes") and in this movie, literally an island of grandmotherly love and care amidst the howling storms.

                        Mark Mancina's music score......wildly eclectic, racing back and forth between rock guitar riffs and the sweeping expansive main theme that follows the storm crew as they race across the heartland for their recklessly brave encounters with the primal elements.

                         The unseen farm family with all the sharp implements in their barn.....maybe it's for the best we don't see them.....

                        What all of this adds up to.....what else but a perennial 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS.

                        

'SUCH A QUIET PLACE' & 'THE THERAPIST'....SUSPECT THY NEIGHBORS....

            Went on a thriller binge this past weekend......well, what else would we do, since we've not one ounce of interest in the Olympics?

              And what a duo to read back-to-back.  Spankin' new twin thrillers from two established purveyors of the genre, Megan Miranda and B.A. Paris.

                ......with both of their books set in a small cluster of houses beset by murder and a collection of neighbors with secrets, suspicions......and possibly more murderous intent in mind.

                   Sounds like fun, no?  Hmmmm.......yes and no.

                  Let's deal first with Megan Miranda's Such A Quiet Place (2021).

                  Back in 7/7/19 we reviewed Miranda's previous effort "The Last House Guest", and it left us less than thrilled.  The same problems that afflicted that book remain present here......a complete lack of even one sympathetic character to latch on to.

                    The residents of  'Hollow's Edge', a little semi-circle of homes in a picturesque college community, are a fairly unlikeable lot. And that includes the book's narrator Harper Nash, whose former housemate Ruby was convicted of murdering a couple of their fellow neighbors by gassing them with carbon monoxide. 

                    To make matters interesting, as they say, Ruby's been sprung due to legal technicalities and promptly parks herself back in Harper's house with payback revenge on her agenda, since she believes the neighbors conspired to frame her for a crime she claims she didn't commit.  

                     Which would mean, if Ruby's on the level, there's still a killer loose among them......

                      Here's where we'll stop on the plot stuff, since the book delivers a whammy of  new development halfway through, which then leads to the BIG TWIST waiting in the final pages. 

                      In thrillers like this that promises all sorts of surprises, we're willing to tolerate the pile-up of obnoxious characters if the pacing zips along and the BIG TWIST  is clever enough to make it worth our while.

                     As in her last book, Megan Miranda's pacing is so-so. But we kind of liked the twist on this one, a worthy stunner dripping with irony, with that extra sting you'd find in an old episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show. 

                      If the author had cared enough to make a reader care about these characters, the book's finish might have delivered a modicum of sadness and tragedy, but the book never rises above the mechanics of its mystery.   2 and 1/2 stars (** 1/2) at best.

                      Speaking of shifty neighbors, one of whom was murdered , let's move on to B.A. Paris's The Therapist (2021.

                       For this one, we hop across the pond to Merrie Olde London, where Alice and Leo, a co-habiting but unmarried couple move into  a gated little cluster of houses dubbed  "The Circle". 

                       To Alice's everlasting dismay, she learns that Nina, a therapist and previous occupant of the house, was brutally murdered, supposedly by her husband who later committed suicide while in prison.

                      ........begging the question, of course,....did the hubby do it? Or is the real killer still lurking among one of the neighbors? 

                      Alice, who's carrying some heavy past emotional baggage of her own, unwisely launches her own haphazard amateur investigation into the murder......which, as we thriller readers well know, will eventually lead to the BIG TWIST..

                      Once again, we're presented with a cast of uninteresting usual suspects, most of whom should wear a 'HELLO, I'M AN OFFICIAL RED HERRING' badge on their clothing....(but you'll notice we used the phrase 'most of  whom'....)  And Alice herself serves as a whiny, neurotic, pain-in-the-ass would be sleuth, whose endless ruminations about who did what and why become wearisome in a hurry.

                      And we know your next question. What about the BIG TWIST?

                      It's a corker of a twist, alright, leading to the expected violent showdown.  And it takes author Paris practically an entire follow-up chapter to explain all the details of its disturbing, but rather far-fetched backstory.

                      The problem here........ we're just not sure the twist, clever and outrageous as it is, was worth slogging through the long, long series of Alice's tedious interactions with the neighbors.......so we've no choice but to hand this one the same 2 and 1/2 star (** 1/2) rating. 

                      But if you're like us and gravitate toward thrillers that offer a less than beautiful day in the neighborhood,  chances are you'll want to check these out.......

'CLOSING COSTS'......EXTREME HOME UN-IMPROVEMENT.....

 Closing Costs by Bracken MacLeod  (2021)     This just published thriller, of which BQ got an advanced copy of a few months back,  seems like a combo of a lost chunk of 'Pulp Fiction' (minus the snappy dialogue) and a house-flipping episode on one of those home improvement cable channels.

              So what we have here is an attractive young couple, newly upscale, who move out to a spacious suburban home in the middle of freakin' nowhere. Their upscale-ness comes from a vast stash of ill-gotten funds they've stumbled into......and illegally helped themselves to.   (At this point, the reader would start silently muttering..."this will not bode well...")

              And sure enough it doesn't.  The new house, exhaustively refurbished by the previous owners, proves to be ground zero for a whole variety of brutal home invaders.. They may have varying motives and agendas, but they've got this much in common - they're all lethal, violent, well armed, short-tempered. and stage their home invasions more or less at the same time.

 
             Wow, talk about bad timing.....and the nearest neighbor is away on vacation.

             What a bummer for our young couple.......whom, as you might expect, endure chapter after chapter of terrifying, extreme physical punishment at the hands of  their variety of tormentors.

               While the first half of the book engages in some backstory time-shifting, by the time you're halfway into it , the story becomes a drawn out survive-against-impossible-odds ordeal.  And the last third settles into a very, very long hunt-chase-fight-escape duel that might leave you as exhausted as the participants. 

              We'll have to admit though, author MacLeod had us racing through these chapters to see how things go for this hapless couple, even if these characters aren't particularly sympathetic or well-developed.  His suspense and action sequences  do the job of making your heart race faster. 

               As long as you don't expect all sorts of twists and surprises (it's not that kind of thriller)) "Closing Costs" is moderately entertaining.  And for anyone who loves a prolonged, extended and gory showdown with an especially loathsome, villain, then this book does deliver that, with a vengeance..3 stars (***)

FRIDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP........SPECIAL 'INTENSIVE CARE UNIT OLYMPICS' EDITION!

             What would the start of the weekend be without the usual cascade of crazy?  Might as well get it over with today so we can put it out of our minds for the weekend......

                And speaking of out-of-their-minds......

The Toyko Olympics commence......with no spectators in the stands and sponsors muttering, "Wait, we didn't realize we signed on for his.....we thought we were sponsoring "Ellen's Game Of Games"......The Olympics committee have already planned for special medals.....including 'Longest Final Gasp before the ICU ventilator's turned off'......

Baby Orange plays his MAGA morons for suckers once again......scarfing up 75 million in donations  supposedly meant to battle his 'election fraud' lie......heh, heh, heh......the MAGA-Zombies probably also wrote checks to that company selling car warranties over the phone......

FBI reveals it received 4,500 tips about Bret Kavanaugh........ to which Bill Barr replied, "I must have hit the delete button by mistake.....we did get a few, though.....at least three that Kavanaugh once parked in a handicapped space for over two minutes....."

Anti-Vaxxers continue to drop like flies from COVID......and also plan to hold a new mass rally in Florida, billed as "Make America Dead Again"....

Tom Barrack, yet another Baby Orange associate indicted....... and immediately received an honorary designer T-shirt from the Mar-A-Lago gift shop (reading "I worked for Donald Trump only as a coffee boy and all I got was this T shirt and indicted!")

Nancy Pelosi vetoes GOP election deniers Jim Jordan and Jim Banks from serving on the Jan  6th insurrection investigation.....in Jordan's case, Pelosi insisted on  maintaining her standard that committee members must have an IQ higher than an eggplant......

Jeff Bezos blasts himself into outer space....and explains he's lucky he remembered  to click on his Amazon shopping cart, "Return yourself to Earth on same day as order"

                  Now forget everything you just read and enjoy the weekend!

'A DANDY IN ASPIC'.....A SPY FORCED TO HUNT DOWN.....HIMSELF

 A Dandy In Aspic (1968)     Anyone who's dropped in on BQ more than a few times well knows what a rabid James Bond fanboy we are.....why, we even hold a special place in our heart for all those blatant Bondian imitations of variable quality, especially those super-cheesy Italian-International Co-Production knockoffs.......

               But we realized we've hardly touched upon the less well known group of films that ran parallel to the Bonds, existing as their own separate alternate universe of spies and espionage.

                We speak, of course, of the grim, serious and mostly depressing spy films.......modeled on the novels of John LeCarre and depicting espionage as a dirty, grimy, depressing business and secret agents as morally bankrupt, desolate civil servants at the very end of their ropes. 

                In other words, more like real life, so you know you're not going to see the superhero wham-bams of a James Bond, Derek Flint or Matt Helm.......

                Don't look for tuxedos, baccarat tables and vodka martinis here........in the 'Serious Spy' genre, everyone's on their way to hell in a hurry. And by the end of these films, they usually get there, no matter whose side they're spying for...(or against.)

                So here we have the 'Dandy' of the title,  Alexander Eberlin (Laurence Harvey), an imperious, uppercrust, snottty MI6 agent who's been given quite the thankless mission by his handlers.

                  He's been tasked with hunting down and killing an elusive Russian agent who's expertly bumping off one British agent after another.....including, while poolside no doubt, nailing one poor sucker in mid-dive off a high board.

                  Big problem for Eberlin:  He in fact is a long time Russian double agent/assassin who's been doing all the hits.......so essentially, he's just been told to fly to Berlin and.....uh.....well, kill himself.

                   One tough job for a guy who lately yearns to ditch spycraft and return home to Russia, huh? But off to Berlin he goes, accompanied by an aggressive, intense British colleague (Tom Courtenay) who already personally despises Eberlin

                   This is the point where you know that things to not bode well for anybody.

                   Unlike the spectacle and fun of the Bondian universe, in the world of  the 'Serious Spy' genre, it's the intricacies and twists of the plot that hold your interest.  This film duly trots them out and the top notch cast holds your attention, even if you know there's nothing but doom ahead for these characters.

                     Hard to tell if we're supposed to sympathize with Laurence Harvey's Eberlin......Harvey, who took over the film's direction when Anthony Mann passed away, mostly excelled as cold, remote and snobbish characters......here, there's hardly any difference between Eberlin and the brainwashed Raymond Shaw of "The Manchurian Candidate"

                     A few other pleasures do pop up here and there........that great old veteran character actor Lionel Stander has a jolly old time as a grinning, duplicitous Russian agent, the always cadaverous Vernon Dobtcheff as a sinister East German border officer and that rising young starlet Mia Farrow flits about the entire film for reasons we don't entirely understand since she and Harvey look like they arrived from two different planets. 

                     Throw in the arresting main titles, which feature dangling, faceless marionettes (yeh, we get it, a metaphor for spies) and you've got an odd, vaguely unsettling but very watchable entry in the Serious Spy canon. 

                      Anyone who's at all interested in this off-the-beaten-track genre or wants to sample one of these films should give this one a try 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)

'BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY'....FAKE COEN BROS., DOWN ON THE PHARM......

 Better Living Through Chemistry (2014)   By the time this indie comedy lurched to its end, we realized that all of its creativity, humor and energy were entirely expanded on its main titles.....a meticulous miniature scale model of the film's bucolic, suburban neighborhood, complete with residents in various states of stupor and sex.

            The film that follows those titles is a mostly tired, witless stab at duplicating the kind of trademark quirk that put the Coen brothers on the map.

              And that's a shame, cause the cast assembled for this was certainly game.......except the film gives them nothing to work with.  Everybody's talents end up wasted here. (Particularly in the brief appearance of the potentially incendiary Ray Liotta, whose presence amounts to nothing)

              That unpredictable live wire Sam Rockwell plays a small town pharmacist who seems created as a kinder, gentler version of William H. Macy's hapless car salesman in 'Fargo'.

              He's belittled by his powerhouse of a wife (Michele Monaghan),befuddled by his unhappy rebellious 12 year old son(Harrison Holzer) and intimidated and bullied by his gruff father-in-law (Ken Howard), whose pharmacy he now runs and owns, though he lacks the balls to defy the old man and give the place his own last name..

                All this changes when Rockwell meets up with the neighborhood's resident Hot-To-Trot-Femme-Fatale-Trophy-Wife  (Olivia Wilde). Gasping, Olympic-worthy sex quickly follows, along with Rockwell and Wilde also freely sampling all  the pharmaceutical goodies available in Rockwell's inventory. 

                None of this, we should point out, comes out anywhere near as dryly comedic and ironic as the filmmakers intended, even with the additional meta joke of having the film narrated by Jane Fonda, playing.....wait for it.....movie star Jane Fonda, who happens to live in the town part time.......

                In true the,"is that all there is?" style of indies, the film serves up two reversal-of-fortune twists for Rockwell and then settles for a comfortably conventional moral lesson. 

                 And left us pondering why we wasted 92 minutes of our life watching this. Oh....now we remember.......we did it so no BQ visitor will ever suffer through it like we did. Zero stars (0). 

             

'THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER'....BILL CLINTON DAYDREAMS HIMSELF AS HARRISON FORD

 The President's Daughter by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (2021)    We're thinking a book like this might stick in the minds of future presidents as an alternative to writing those 5 pound doorstop memoir volumes that pile up in the bargain bins a year after they're published.

           And we're all for it. It's no end of hilarious, guilty pleasure fun  to have Bill Clinton and that tireless one-man bestselling machine James Patterson imagine a POTUS not unlike Harrison Ford in "Air Force One".

              "The President's Daughter" reads like an imaginary novelization of an imaginary sequel to that 1997 'POTUS-goes-Die-Hard-On-Terrorists'  thriller.......

                Come on, who doesn't want read about ex-Prez (and ex Navy SEAL)  Matthew Keating putting together his own team of Scooby Commandos to hunt down an infinitely evil Middle East terrorist who kidnapped his plucky, resourceful teen daughter Melanie?

                Oh yes please!

                But wait......there's villainy and duplicity afoot coming from so-called friends and foes alike, including Machiavellian maneuvering from the current POTUS Pamela Barnes, Keating's former Veep who schemed with her equally power mad husband to derail Keating's chances of getting re-elected.

                Also muddying the waters - a shifty Chinese diplomat/spy with ties to the terrorist lunatic .Only this time he's been tasked by his masterminds with arranging Melanie's rescue as a public relations coup for the Chinese.....except, secretly he's hiding a murderous anti-Keating agenda of his own. 

                 As with all James Patterson collaborative thrillers (no matter who shares authorship with him), the 3 page chapters fly by. the action never relents, and the various climactic showdowns are expertly calibrated to make you shout "Yessssssss!"

                Shameless cheesy junk?  Hell yeah.

                Did we gobble up every page of it like a tub 'o hot buttered popcorn?  Hell yeah.

                We have no rational defense for gorging on this book, any more than we have any rational defense for re-watching "Air Force One", "Patriot Games" and all the  otherDie Hard clones every so often. 

                 If you only sample literary fiction, then of course you shouldn't go anywhere near this book. But if you love a fun wallow in well crafted, slick and totally nonsensical entertainment, this one's a 4 star (****) bell ringer.

                

                

'BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY' & 'ROCKETMAN'.....ICONS BETWEEN ROCK AND A HARD PLACE.....

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) . Rocketman (2019)

            Back in the long ago prehistoric days before VCRs, these two films would've sooner or later ended up together as a re-release double feature in theaters. (With an all new poster blaring something like "THE GREATEST ROCKERS! THE GREATEST SONGS! TOGETHER AT LAST IN ONE GIANT SHOW!")

           Since BQ once again stands as the last being on planet Earth who's finally gotten around to watching these movies, it's inevitable we'd view them and post on them back to back. 

            Since nobody needs to hear the particular plot details of these films hashed over for the 20 millionth time, we'll just kick in a bunch of random observations on absorbing them one after the other. 

             True, there's tons of similarities between them in content and structure, but they're two very different animals.......

               So let's start in chronological release order with "Bohemian Rhapsody" about the meteoric rise and tragic end of Queen's lead singer/songwriter Freddy Mercury.....embodied here by Rami Malek's Academy Award winning Best Actor performance. 

                 And as fate would have it, due to the....uh....unstable behavior of director Bryan Singer, the last few weeks of this film's production were turned over to Dexter Fletcher, the director of "Rocketman". 

                But unlike 'Rocketman', which functions as an all out semi-fantasy jukebox musical, 'Rhapsody' adheres to the same time-honored traditions and tropes that film biographies have followed since the 1930's.

                First comes the Early Years, followed by The Struggle To Achieve, followed by The Success Montage, followed by The Fall From Grace, followed by Redemption and Renewed Triumph.

                 We should point out that 'Rocketman' more or less follows this same carved-in-stone blueprint, but tickles those tropes (and gets through them faster by illustrating them with songs and dance numbers.

                  There's none of those flourishes to distract you in 'Rhapsody', which leaves the film to completely hone in on Malek's all out, go-for-broke performance.  He knows full well he's landed the role of a lifetime and behaves accordingly. 

                  We could pay the exact same compliment to Taron Egerton's equally brilliant work as Elton John in 'Rocketman', but unlike Malek, he's competing for attention with the movie itself, a brazenly cinematic version of a typical Broadway 'jukebox' musical. 

                  Director Dexter Fletcher clearly wants to you  remember his name as well as Elton John's and his ultra high energy back of tricks reminded us, more than once. of those wild 'n crazy Ken Russell rock musicals like "Tommy", and "Lisztomania".

                  (Which would probably account for why Academy voters well remembered Malek's work, while Egerton became just another component bobbing along in a sea of elaborate dance numbers)

                   In true musical tradition, both movies finish up with showstoppers - 'Rhapsody's being a spectacular re-creation of Queen's performance at the mammoth 1985 'Live Aid' concert and 'Rocketman'a staging an infectious, impossible-not-to-love re-do of the "I'm Still Standing' music. video 

                  As those film biography rules dictate, both movies deal heavily with their subject's succumbing to drugs, booze and sex additions as well as their own ballooning egos.....not to mention their ongoing battles with rapacious music industry sharks and their heartwrenching struggle to exist in a still homophobic society.

                   Watching the 'Rhapsody' scenes where Freddy Mercury copes with his death-sentence AIDS diagnosis, you can only wonder how Elton John came through that horrific epidemic unscathed.

                   And each film offers its own bonus in the form of a well known actor rendered completely unrecognizable in their roles. In 'Rhapsody', it's the funny ironic appearance of Mike Myers as a grumbling music executive who's confounded and annoyed when he hears the tape of the title song.....yes, the same Mike Myers who in 1992 made the song a whole new hit again in "Wayne's World". 

                  But we're at a total loss to explain Bryce Dallas Howard turning up in 'Rocketman' playing, of all things, Elton John's mum. Huh? Say what?

                  Something else we found fascinating - each film's divergent depiction of music promotor-manager John Reid, who arranged and managed the concert tours of both Queen and Elton John.  In 'Rhapsody' , as played by Aiden Gillen, he seems like a genial, non-threatening, non-sexual presence......as opposed to Richard Madden's take on him in 'Rocketman' where Reid's shown as sharply dressed, blade thin, cold hearted predator, in whom Elton John mistakenly thinks he's found true love. 

                The two movies bunched together made one hell of a double feature, so in that regard, we're kind of glad we waited this long to catch up with them at the same time.....(almost equivalent to when moviegoers lines up for the double feature of "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice"  (THE BIGGEST BONDS OF ALL TOGETHER!" .screamed the poster)

                 That's why we'll give this dynamic duo the same rating we gave to those two Bonds when we watched 'em back to back......4 stars each (****).   (If there's anyone else left in the world who hasn't seen them, we highly recommend a rock-all-night Double Feature......)

              

FRIDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP......JUST AS EVERYONE THOUGHT.....BABY ORANGE IS COUP-COUP.....

                   And the madness never ends......

                    Sanity, decency, and intelligent thought may have returned to the White House, but Baby Orange remains at large and dangerous to the U.S. and world......still enabled by his zombie-fied Trumpanzees in the GOP and brain-dead MAGA-morons.

Baby Orange contemplated a military overthrow of democracy....... and also insisted the troops perform goose-stepping as they storm the Capitol building and throw out the Electoral College vote.

"Hitler did some good things" said Baby Orange.......and also further explained, "Okay, so maybe he wasn't too crazy about the Jews, but you gotta admit, the guy knew how get things done, right?"

States with the highest number of Trumpanzees now rack up the highest numbers of new COVID infections.........Baby Orange's closest advisors draw straws as to who's going to tell him that these non-vaccinated MAGA-minions dropping dead in the ICUs were potential 2024 Trump voters.

Baby Orange says of his staff members, "Many say I am the greatest star maker of  all time .But some of the stars I produced are actually made of garbage." ......at long last, the only true statement he's made in his lifetime......with examples shown below:

Ticketmaster says plenty of seats still available for the Baby Orange-Bill O'Reilly stadium tour.....which currently goes under the name Loser-Palooza.......

'RUNNING ON EMPTY' & 'LITTLE NIKITA'.....A RIVER RAN THROUGH THEM......

 Running On Empty (1988), Little Nikita (1988)

             And we thought James Dean had parental trouble in "Rebel Without A Cause"?  Hah!

              We could have easily applied Dean's iconic, primal wail( "The two of you are tearing me apart!") to the staggering family dysfunction faced by teenage River Phoenix in two of his films released almost back to back in 1988. 

              Dean only had to cope with a mother and father who didn't understand him. Big whoop.

              Phoenix, on the other hand, dealt with two sets of parents who, for one reason or another, were hunted fugitives, forced to live, along with their unlucky offspring, a clandestine, secretive life. 

              "Running On Empty", directed by Sidney Lumet is obviously the more high profile, carefully crafted of these two films, a deadly serious drama that combines ripped-from-the-headlines American politics with the ripped-asunder bonds between parents and children.  

                Arthur and Annie Pope (Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti) are most-wanted 1960's Vietnam protestors who've been on the run from the FBI for decades. (Their bombing of a napalm lab resulted in the blinding of an innocent watchman they didn't count on being there.)

                 Staying on step ahead of the feds by constantly switching locations and identities also involves a life on the lam for their two sons.......including their older 17 year old Danny (Phoenix), schooled in music by his mother and who's become a gifted pianist with a shot at admittance to Julliard.

                As an actor, Phoenix possessed the same natural, instinctive abilities as the other classic movie rebels before him like Brando and Dean.   And you ache for him as he warily navigates a tender first love with his music teacher's daughter (Martha Plimpton) while facing the inevitable breaking away from the undeserved criminalized life given him by his parents.

                 Since it's a Sidney Lumet film, all the acting on view here is nuanced and superb and one can only imagine what heights River Phoenix could have attained if his life hadn't been tragically cut short.  In his filmography, this one stands as a 4 star (****) must-see.

                Maybe it's just an odd coincidence 1988 also saw the release of  director Richard Benjamin's  purely popcorn thriller "Little Nikita", which once again featured Phoenix as high school senior afflicted with parents (Richard Jenkins Caroline Kava)  leading a dangerous double life.

               Only this time, since the film functions as a high concept suspense story, Phoenix's character has no idea his mom and dad are actually deep cover Russian "sleeper" agents who've been living an all-American apple pie life without ever being activated by their Moscow handlers.

               The poor kid's world turns upside down when a veteran FBI agent (Sidney Poitier) reveals the startling truth to Phoenix about mom and dad while on the hunt for a rogue KGB assassin nicknamed 'Scuba' (Richard Lynch, one of our favorite direct-to-video madmen).

               Lynch's  Scuba a wild-haired psycho in flip-flops, has been running around killing off the embedded Russian 'sleeper' spies  which doesn't sit well with either Poitier and a KGB bigwig (Richard Bradford, another top-of-the-line character actor) And the deeply conflicted Phoenix finds himself a pawn in all the chasing that ensues.

                Normally in a thriller like this, the actors stay at the mercy of the plot mechanics, but director Benjamin, as actor himself, and armed with terrific cast,  never lets the story's various twists and turns become the entire reason for the film existence. It's always about the people.

                And once again, River Phoenix, in the role of a young adult whose family life is a sham, brings a sense of reality and genuine sensitivity to the situation, no matter how far fetched it is.

                 While not considered one his best films in his all too brief career, he still makes it a watchable 3 star (***) entertainment.  Unlike James Dean, Phoenix didn't have to actually scream out how his parents were tearing him apart.  You could see it in him without him saying a word.......  

'FEAR STREET: PART ONE - 1994........SLAPDASH SLASHERS

 Fear Street: Part One - 1994 (Netflix-2021)     Pardon us if we feel like we should use a stopwatch to clock the amount of time we're spending on this post.......

                We  wanted to make sure we don't waste any more time than necessary to review this steaming little Netflix turd. 

                 OMG, what a stunning, groundbreaking idea.....to make another re-do of a 1980's  slasher movie, complete with bleeding (and bleating) teens, knife-and-ax loons running rampant  and generous portions of spurting gore. 

                  Wow, what an explosive brainstorm.  Or more accurately.....brain-fart.

                   So the bottom feeders who concocted this sludge didn't realize that once Wes Craven's "Scream" trilogy mocked and deconstructed the genre, nobody needed to pollute the culture any further with any additional homages or exhuastive re-inventions of  slice 'n dice teenage horror movies.

                   Unless, of course, they had something all new and startlingly creative  to add.......

                   This crew did not. What they did have was a Netflix deal.

                    Garbage from beginning to end, the film follows the blood soaked fortunes of a bunch of decidedly unlikable high schoolers as they fend off a collection serial slashers resurrected by their town's  unfriendly neighborhood 17th century witch.  

                    Okay, time's up.....we're losing the will to live even writing about this. It's strictly for gorehounds who'll be living in the basement of their parents' house until they're ready for Medicare themselves. 

                    Zero stars. (0). A floating barrel of toxic waste.

                 

'SHAFT'S BIG SCORE!'....AND MORE'S A LITTLE LESS

 Shaft's Big Score (1972)    Having wished a happy 50th anniversary to the original 1970 film last week, how could we not complete the full Richard Roundtree trilogy? (The third being  1973's "Shaft In Africa", which we'll cover in a future post.

                 Given the huge success of the first film, director Gordon Parks took full advantage of the much larger budget MGM granted him for this sequel. 

                 Parks not only went to wide screen, but staged a spectacular, air-water-and-land action packed finale, equivalent to a Bond film. 

                  Come to think of it, the helicopter, boat and car chase that wrap this caper up look far better staged, scored and edited than that pathetic copter firefight in "Diamonds Are Forever"  or even Roger Moore's endless, extended bayou boat race in "Live and Let Die".

                   The downside to all this stuntwork hoo-hah is that Richard Roundtree's coolest-cat-in-the-room Shaft takes a back seat to the gunfire spectacle, and he gets less of chance to display those in-your-face attitude scenes that made the first film such a hit. 

                   Too put it bluntly, the movie suffers from a paucity of Shaft-iness.

                    Moments of fun do erupt, especially between Roundtree and the returning Drew Bundini (once a trainer to Muhammed Ali), reprising his role as gangster minion Willy......(who cheerfully suggests he and Shaft defenestrate a Mafia kingpin and his bodyguard that they've just beaten up and knocked out)

                     Snarls Shaft at this idea, "There's too much shit on the street already.....", making him the first blaxsploitation hero to condemn littering.

                   Director Parks even took on true renaissance-man duty here and composed the film's score as well, which deftly imitates Isaac Hayes memorable music for the first film, adding an even more aggressive, funky brass section.

                   All in all, a fun, 3 star (***) diversion, an not to be missed by anyone taking sentimental journeys into 70's action cinema.   Who wouldn't love watching Richard Roundtree expertly dodge over 500,000 rounds of machine gun fire......right on, baby.

                     

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