'THUNDERBALL'.....THE WORLD ORGASMS ON BOND.....(BQ'S 'AUTUMN BOND-FIRE' # 4)

 Thunderball (1965) ....... And here it was, after a year of putting the entire planet into a state of frenzied anticipation after the runaway success of "Goldfinger"......

              ......a year that didn't go by fast enough to give us the movie that promised to be the biggest, most spectacular Bond film ever. 

                    A film that was forced to be made while accompanied by literally armies of reporters and photographers, salivating for any nugget of advance news.

                     A film that opened in theaters that would schedule shows around the clock, 24/7.......so you could gorge on Bond's latest adventure at 4 in the morning to satisfy your craving. 

                     And what of the film itself as it finally appeared?

                    It many ways, it fulfilled all our expectations. And in some ways, let us down.  Even with its lavish budget and special effects, the film showed signs of having been created hastily in order to present it to us as a 1965 Christmas gift.

                      The pacing dragged somewhat (something a Bond film had never been guilty of) and the camera under-cranking to speed up those long, long underwater scenes looked a bit silly. Continuity errors abounded, as if the script girl checking such things had taken a vacation during production.

                     And after the larger than life, grotesque villains of Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, "Thunderball"s baddie, Emilio Largo was just a chunky guy with an eye patch......looking like he'd make a more suitable, run-of-the-mill villain for an episode of Roger Moore's "The Saint" TV show. 

                     But to hell with the flaws......Sean Connery was there in all his Bondian glory.....impossibly cool, seductive, lethal and at all the exact moments, damn funny.  One glance at him striding through the film with the confidence of a tiger in the wild and we could forgive the movie all its many imperfections.....

                     If "Goldfinger" was the foreplay, then "Thunderball" is where we, the world wide audience of Bond fans, climaxed.   And yes......the earth moved, it was good for us and all the requisite phrases.

                     Bond films would continue, of course. So would everyone's ongoing affection for them, of course.....

                     But never quite with the blazing passion that "Thunderball" generated.  James Bond had settled into becoming a permanent part of our pop culture landscape.......and that comfortable familiarity served to change us all......from Bond's obsessed rabid stalkers to his best friends.......4 stars (****).

                  

'GOLDFINGER'....THE WORLD GOES CRAZY FOR BOND......(BQ'S 'AUTUMN BOND-FIRE' # 4)

Goldfinger (1964)     Bond:  "Who are you?"  Pussy: "I'm Pussy Galore"  Bond: "I must be dreaming."

              In our entire life as an ardent movie-goer, we'll never forget the roar of laughter that went up throughout the packed-to-the-rafters crowd at one of the first showings of 'Goldfinger'.

             We all got it......collectively, we loved it when the movie winked at us....as if we'd all been invited in to an exclusively cool party.

              This was the movie that left the entire globe head over heels in love with Bond and the Bondian Universe as we knew it.......a fantasy world filled with fast cars, drop-dead gorgeous women, maniacal supervillains bent on world destruction and fabulous, exotic locations around the world.

                And right in the middle of this dreamscape lived Sean Connery, the perfect embodiment of  James Bond.....suave, cruel, violent when called upon, and never at a loss for a sardonic quip after dispatching one of his many enemies. 

                The whole planet began to engage in an obsessive love affair with Bond and his world.....(which ultimately unnerved and stressed out Connery so much, he had to escape the crushing burdens of the world-wide fame he accrued.)  

                After the more intimate espionage of "From Russia With Love", now came the Bond movie that would forever lay out the fundamental blueprint for all the subsequent films in the series........including the charismatic mastermind endangering the world, the sacrificial lamb girl, the primary girl, the formidable henchmen, the darkly funny quips and the rousing fights and chases staged at regular intervals.

                 The only equivalent we could  think of that would equal the audience response to "Goldfinger" wouldn't come until 13 years later in 1977......with our first viewing of "Star Wars".

                 The world's adoration of Bond glowed red hot in 1964.....and finally reached  a white hot peak one year later, with the release of "Thunderball"

                 And that's why, as a pivotal film in both the Bond filmography and cinema history, "Goldfinger" still stands at 5 stars (*****)

"FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE".....BOND BADDIES 'N BEAUTIES....BQ'S AUTUMN BOND-FIRE #3

 From Russia With Love (1963)    In so many special ways, this Bond movie stands apart from the six Eon Productions films made with Sean Connery......

           It arrived as the most densely plotted Bond, with a more gritty down-to-earth, real world feel to it.....very similar to standard 1950's cloak-and-dagger espionage movies, complete with secret code greetings and suspicious spies lurking behind corners. 

           But even amid all its spy-vs-spy stuff, it was the first Bond to regularly stop to include spectacularly orchestrated action set pieces.....the fierce gun battle at the gypsy camp, the ferocious hand-to-hand struggle on the train, the 'North By Northwest'-like duel with a helicopter and the fiery boat chase.

            And most tellingly, it was the last Bond film for decades that was reviewed with admiration and respect by the community of film critics.  Once "Goldfinger" firmly established the tongue-in-cheek template of larger than life villains with over-the-top plans for world domination, critics treated each new Bond with cheeky, sarcastic commentary, some reviews filled with more quips than the movies themselves. 

            (It wouldn't be until 2006's "Casino Royale" and the Daniel Craig era that Bond movies were given consideration as a cinematic events to be taken seriously......)

             So we now fondly remember the best things about "From Russia With Love" we dearly love.....starting with....

            The immortal trio of villains.....Vladek Sheybal's smoothly creepy Kronsteen, the chessmaster who devises Spectre's master plan, Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb, the repulsive, rogue KGB operative and worst of all, Robert Shaw's Donald 'Red' Grant, the hulking, blonde psychopathic assassin. 007 never had a more daunting line-up of opponents than this bunch.......

             John Barry's score.......truly taking charge of the distinctive musical stylings that define the Bond films for generations......

              The sad farewell of Pedro Armindariz.....playing one of the most beloved and sympathetic of Bond's allies, managing to perform the role while suffering the agonizing cancer he contracted from the radioactive dust swirling around the infamous John Wayne-as-Genghis Khan epic, "The Conqueror"  (later shooting himself dead while in the hospital)

               Bond and 'Red' Grant's train smackdown......still one of the best staged and shot fight scenes ever......

               The Bond Beauties......the second and last appearance of Eunice Gayson, as the London babe always stood up by news of Bond's next impending mission.....and as the main attraction, Daniela Bianchi was, in our opinion, a huge improvement over the dead-eyed, inexpressive Ursula Andress.

                For all these reasons and more, "From Russia With Love" remains a 5 star (*****) gold standard of a series soon to take the entire world by storm.......

"DR. NO"....BADDIES 'N BEAUTIES....(BQ'S AUTUMN BOND-FIRE #2!)

Dr. No (1962    As we all psych ourselves up for the upcoming "No Time To Die", where else would our retro tour of the JBU (James Bond Universe) begin except at the beginning......

             Since there's obviously no reason to go through a plot synopsis for any of these films, we're just gonna roll out every random that hit us......

              The Gun Barrel logo......destined to become a part of cinema iconography. But we've always wondered.......what's up with all that weird electronic stuff that precedes the iris opening of the barrel? 

              Bond's first villain smackdown......with a wussy......we still wish the producers had lined up a far more formidable opponent for Bond's first fight than that skinny, wimpy little chauffer.  Come on, the poor sucker offs himself after Bond bitch slaps him a few times. Seriously?

               Professor Dent gets dented........you can't keep actor Anthony Dawson down, even after Grace Kelly plunged a scissors in him during "Dial M For Murder". No wonder Bond pumps another slug in him after he's down.....  Dawson discovered two irrefutable truths......you can't strangle Princess Grace and you can't get the drop on 007........

               Ursula Andress rising from the sea......we realize we're in the minority here but we always found her the least attractive and least talented Bond girl. But no one can argue about how she looks in a bikini.....

               Quarrel   We always felt sorry for John Kitzmiller.....stuck with this character's jarring transformation....... from a savvy tough guy in the first half of the film to an awful Stepin Fetchit "feet don't fail me now" stereotype in the second half. Shame, shame.

               Jack Lord as Felix Leiter  A fine, cool choice since Leiter's supposed to be Bond's American counterpoint......but Lord, a preening egomaniacal diva, longed for his own stardom (later accomplished in "Hawaii Five-O").....so bye, bye, bye...hit the road, Jack..

               Joseph Wiseman as Dr. No  We always thought it was a remarkably out-of-the-box choice, picking a distinguished stage and film actor for Bond's first villain......(Wiseman himself thought of the gig as some second rate Charlie Chan movie and was later astonished by its success.....)  His chilly gravitas set the template for many of Bond's later meglomaniac superbaddies.

                Overall impression.....yes, it's antiquated and crudely made compared to today's films, but it's always a pleasure to re-visit the start of the saga.......And nothing beats that electric moment when Sean Connery announces himself as "Bond.....James Bond."   4 stars (***).

               

AUTUMN BOND-FIRE # 1! BQ PREPARES FOR "NO TIME TO DIE"

               

                 We couldn't wait to kick off our special series of posts to prepare you (and ourselves) for the long awaited (and frequently postponed ) "No Time To Die" the 25th James Bond movie from Eon Productions......and the 5th and final film of Daniel Craig's portrayal of 007.

                  As Bond fans well know, in that count of films, we're leaving out the silly trainwreck of the rogue 1967 all star "Casino Royale" and Sir Sean Connery's equally rogue 1983 "Never Say Never Again", the stilted remake of "Thunderball"

                  Welcome, BQ visitors, to what we call our Autumn Bond-Fire!

                 We'll kick it off with  Being James Bond (2021), a 45 minute documentary available as a free rental on I-Tunes.

                 All Bond fanatics will want check this one out, a behind-the-scenes retrospective of Daniel Craig's career as Bond, accompanied by some fascinating offscreen conversation between Craig and Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. 

                  There's a film-by-film breakdown in chronological order, starting with the vicious social media attacks on Craig for having been chosen as Bond (mocking him as the "blonde Bond")......followed by, as we all know, Craig stunning the world in "Casino Royale" with his re-invention of Bond as an almost feral killing machine who begins to take on the tuxedo and martini trappings of the suave Bond we'd all been familiar with.

                   Some terrific behind the scenes footage accompanies the film as it moves on to the somewhat star-crossed and overly maligned "Quantum Of Solace" which suffered from a half-completed script (due to a writer's strike) and the terrible decision to make its action sequences look like "Bourne Identity" retreads. 

                    From there we go to "Skyfall", in which all the filmmaking elements seemed to perfectly align....character, action and the continuation of the story arc begun in "Casino Royale".......and then on to "Spectre" which shows Craig filming the spectacular Mexico City-Day Of The Dead opening sequence with a severely injured leg. 

                     Great stuff to watch for all of us Bond-o-maniacs, with some very cool "making of" footage and some honest, candid observations from Craig and his two producers. 

                      For us, we found it telling that the brief film's conclusion, a montage of Craig's tenure as Bond, is underscored with John Barry's beautifully sweet and sad orchestral version of "We Have All The Time In The World".....from his score for BQ's all time favorite Bond film, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"   (more on that film, we promise, as our Autumn Bond-Fire continues through the week.)

                    To start your Bond countdown, try sampling "Being James Bond" as tasty appetizer. 4 stars (****)

                    

                   

JAMES BOND A RAPIST? MEMO TO CARY FUKUNGAGA: OH SHUT THE **** UP ALREADY.......

         

  We planned to take Saturday off, after planning out a whole week of special posts we dubbed our 'Autumn Bond-Fire'.....(in anticipation of the upcoming release of "No Time To Die"......

              We simply could NOT avoid chiming in on "No Time"s director Cary Fukungaga's descent into wokester delirium......claiming that Sean Connery's instant seduction of Molly Peters in "Thunderball" is an act of rape.......

               To recap this sequence:  Bond playfully threatens to blame his health farm therapist Patricia for his almost fatal encounter with a back-stretching machine (a murder attempt made by a fellow patron, Spectre agent Count Lippe).  Being Bond of the 1960's naturally, the price for his silence is a bout of steamy boffing in the shower room.......

                 or translated by Fukungaga into 2021 woke-ism.....rape.

                Memo to Cary:    Are you ****in' kidding?   Did you check the release year of "Thunderball"?

                In case it slipped your mind, or you never heard of checking IMDB, the year was 1965. It was also the year, as we'll cover in an upcoming post, that 'Thunderball' arrived when Bond mania had reached a blistering, white-hot frenzy around the entire planet.

                 .......when non-English speaking audiences referred to Bond as Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang Bang.....

              And yes, the Bond of the 60's was a sexual freewheeler, taking full advantage of the new revolutionary boldness sweeping the world. Prepare to clutch your pearls, Cary......audiences (both men and women) couldn't get enough of watching Bond swashbuckle his way through all the girls in each film.

               That was the era, Cary......if you're not capable of seeing it in the context of its time, then you should probably shut up.......cause sounding like a pearl-clutching snowflake is not a good look for someone who directed a James Bond film.

                 Yours in Bond-of-mania, BQ.

                 

FRIDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP......SPECIAL "ELECTION FRAUDIT" EDITION......

             As always, Baby Orange never disappoints when it comes to piling up the madness each week....

The phony-baloney Arizona election "Audit" arrives.......and says Trump lost and Biden won.....by a large margin......        but Baby Orange, still living in his own reality, claims it shows the opposite....and also proves beyond any doubt that windmills spread COVID and gargling Drano will replace the need for ventilators in ICUs........

Virologist in Trump administration reveals overturning the election took priority over the Pandemic response......is that possible? You mean to say......that Baby Orange thought making himself President For Life was more important than saving thousands of lives?   For anyone who's surprised by that, here's another shocker.......the sky is blue and 1 + 1 is 2.....(except on Fox News....)

Fox News bans Rudy Giuliani.......just imagine for a moment, how clownish, stupid and insane you've have to be to get yourself banned from Fox News.....putting  Rudy beneath the lowest bar imaginable...

Anti-Vaxxers encourage their followers to pull their COVID-afflicted relatives out of ICUs to try home remedies.....their new recommendations for cures include Kool-Aid laced with bleach, Listerine mouthwash taken intravenously and praying and bowing to large photographs of Donald Trump........

'DEAD HEAT'....."SORRY, 'DIE HARD' IS ALL RENTED OUT......HOW 'BOUT THIS ONE?"

Dead Heat (1988)....... and we borrowed the title of this post from a line probably spoken by thousands upon thousands of video store clerks to customers everywhere in 1988......

            A better title for this rambunctious cheeseball of a buddy-cop comedy might have been "Everyone Dies Hard!"

            And by that, we do mean everyone.  

            Directed at a zippy clip by film editor Mark Goldblatt, "Dead Heat" served as a vivid of example of the obsession with 'high concept' screenplays that attempted to do a Frankenstein stitch job on two different genres...

            In this case, it's "Lethal Weapon" meets "Night Of The Living Dead".

           Treat Williams and former 'Saturday Night Live' player Joe Piscopo play the wisecracking buddy cops, rogue jokesters whose one liners sound copied from the "Buddy Cop Dialogue For Idiots" paperback. 

             The boys come across a gang of undead jewel robbers who can't be killed despite constant peppering with automatic weapons fire. This leads them to the sinister Dante corporation, where Treat, playing detective 'Roger Mortis' (yuk, yuk, yuk) ends up dead.......and then resurrected, Frankenstein-style, in the company's big sci-fi, snap-crackle-and-pop machine. 

              Bad luck for Treat, since his return to the prone position will only last 24 hours before he starts decomposing and collapses back into a pile of bony goo.  So he and Joe have limited time to hunt down the masterminds behind all this raising of the dead.......

              And wouldn't you know it.......who else would be behind all this but an aging Vincent Price, looking like he himself has one foot in the grave....... 

              Sounds like sick, dumb fun.......and it would be, except that it's not even a fraction as funny as it thinks it is. Screenwriter Terry Black piles up what seems like hundreds of terrible death gags, rapid-fired by Williams and Piscopo as if they think they're the cleverest quipsters who ever drew breath.....or didn't draw breath, heh, heh, heh.....sorry, we couldn't resist joining in.

               To its credit, the movie does move as lightning fast as a movie like this should.......since you don't want to stop and think about what's going on it for more than half a second. And we did love the sequence where the Dante resurrection ray zaps a butcher shop full of duck and pig carcasses, reanimating them all into instant creepy monsters. 

                 We'll follow the video-store clerks wise advice......and recommend this one only when you can't find "Die Hard" or "Lethal Weapon" on any of your streaming services......2 stars (**)

'THE LITTLE THINGS'.....MURDER VICTIMS AND STORYLINE.....ALL DEAD ON ARRIVAL

 

The Little Things (2021)    Here's one of our prime candidates to nominate for Most Ruinous Waste Of Time And Talent Of The Year.......

             Major talent involved here......Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jaret Leto. Grim, grim story which promises (but not once delivers) a chilling, dark suspense tale, along the lines of "Seven" or even a little bit of "Silence Of The Lambs"........

              Forget it. 

              It's stillborn from the first minute on and stays permanently locked in low gear for its entire dreary 128 minute running time. 

               And it gets worse as it lurches to its conclusion. The plot forces Washington and Malek to behave completely out of character in its ridiculous finale, which makes a feeble grasp at irony with one final twist. (By the time the film got to that point we were long past caring......)

             This film wears the disguise of a thriller, but it has no real intention of directly connecting with an audience. In its dogged, excruciating commitment to tedium, it seems to aspire to the nihilism and remoteness of some films made in the 1970's.....movies filled with characters whose moral compasses had come loose, guaranteeing a miserable fate for everyone involved. 

                You'll have noticed by now that we're not eating up any more useless verbiage describing this film's storyline.....(but if you must know in a nutshell, it's about a disgraced cop (Washington) and a hotshot young detective (Malek) joining forces to hunt a creepy suspect in serial killings (Leto).

                  We can't make ourselves any more clearer than this.....avoid this dud like it was COVID

                 Zero stars (0)  High profile, worthless junk. Flush it.

'THE HYPNOTIC EYE'......YOU ARE GETTING VERRRRYYY SLEEEEEPY......

 The Hypnotic Eye (1960)   Pardon us for this un-woke recollection.....but we couldn't help remembering that when this movie came out, most guys in the audience thought the most vital function of hypnosis was to trick pretty girls into removing their clothes.......

            The filmmakers here came up with ingenious horror-movie variation on that idea.....using hypnosis as a tool to trick pretty girls into disfiguring themselves in all sorts of ghastly ways.

            We don't how many times we watched this late at night when "Chiller Theaters" would take over the local TV station schedules......to this day we'd never forget the startling opening scene (a wowzer for 1960) - a young girl washing her hair in what she thinks is the sink, but is actually one of the open flame burners on her stove.  Big ooooops.

             Then we cut to a not quite convincing but eye popping special effect close up of  the poor girl's head ablaze. (We'll resist the urge to say she looked like a real hottie.....literally. Oh, we just said it, didn't we?)

            As it turns out, she's not the only one.......lovely girls all over town are mysteriously mutilating themselves for no apparent reason.....(sticking their heads in fans, drinking lye, yada, yada....)

            Could it be some evil fiend planted subliminal suggestions in them while he rendered them hypnotized?  

             Hmmm.....wonder that if creepy stage hypnotist Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) and his sinister, gorgeous assistant Justine (Allison Hayes) have anything to do with the pile up of ruined babes?

             We're probably making this movie sound more entertaining than it is, since the bulk of its short running time is devoted to long stretches of Desmond's tedious hypnosis act, as he convinces people to float in mid-air and bark like a dog. 

             A stalwart police detective and his plucky girlfriend try to unravel what's going on, especially after a cute friend of theirs (Merry Anders) having been Desmond-ized on stage, washes her face in sulfuric  acid.  Even worse for Merry, her doctor is played the real life 'Great Imposter' Fred Demara, who notoriously went around the country masquerading as doctors and other professionals whose jobs he knew nothing about.  What a new challenge this was for Fred......pretending to act like a doctor....

              You may well ask at this point, other than sounding like a suspicious foreigner, what other possible motive could Hyno-Creep and the hubba-hubba Justine have for forcing innocent girls to do grievous bodily harm to themselves?

             That particular stupid, senseless reason reveals itself in a last minute twist that this film's screenwriter no doubt patted himself on the back for.

             Cheesy, guilty pleasure fun for the most part......if you like to look in on crappy old horror flicks for at least for one viewing.  But beware the film's attempts to lull you to sleep....unintentionally.

               2 stars (**)

'ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE'.....A FANBOY'S ORGIASTIC DELIGHT, SAFELY WATCHED FROM A DISTANCE

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)    As someone with dwindling patience for comic book movies, we approached this gargantuan epic like a casual, unassuming pedestrian who came upon a 4 hour parade when all we wanted to do was cross the street.......

              That means we'll not dive into the tortuous backstory behind this film, which first existed in a completely different version directed by Joss Whedon......(roundly dismissed and despised by hardcore fans of the DC comics universe.)

               After being sidelined by a terrible family tragedy, writer-director Zack Snyder accomplished the unheard-of task of reclaiming the film, tossing out Whedon's footage and fashioning his own uncut 4 hour and 2 minute fully realized vision of it. 

                Which, thanks to the wondrous ability of a DVD to be paused for pee breaks, we watched in its endless entirety.......

               Since just writing these opening paragraphs has already exhausted us, we'll stick to breaking it all down to random observations......like Al Roker and Savannah Guthrie do when they describe the floats and giant balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.......

                Overall impression.....kind of like watching all three of Marvel "Avengers" movies back to back, only with all the snarky byplay and jokes sucked out of them.......along with anything resembling a primary color in the cinematography.....Grim, dark depressing, but it does trot out all the usual interminable fights involving superheroes and supervillains flinging each other through the air........

                 Ben Affleck's Batman......we started to feel for him.....since ole Ben is the only one in this crew who's technically mortal (no sooper-dooper powers) and therefore completely dependent on his elaborate array of hardware.....(the batmobile, batjet, bat-tank, bat-whatever....)

                  Wonder Woman battling terrorists who want to bring back the middle ages......which led us to ponder, if these guys want to go back to the Dark Ages, why do they feel the need to wear business suits?

                  Superman back from the dead.......we'd no idea a stay in the afterlife leaves you seriously pissed off, Soopy looked so angry, you'd think he spent all his dead-time forced to watch perpetual reruns of the Emmy awards......

                   Aquaman's boozing...... we'll say this much for him.....for a  superguy who takes a fair crack at the sauce at every opportunity. he stays in remarkably good shape. Must be the swimming.......

                   'The Flash'......the DC version of Tom Holland's dorky teen, quip spouting Spiderman, the closest this movie ever gets to comedy relief. But no comedy occurs here.....and it's only a relief when he shuts up.....

                  The old movie screen ratio of 1:33.......you'd have to ask Zack Snyder why he decided to render this expansive spectacle in a screen format that's about the same size and shape of your grandfather's 1954 Motorola TV......

                    The neverending endings.......here's where the length of "Justice League" finally began to work on our last nerve.......similar to the multiple wrap-ups of  "The Return Of The King", the third 'Lord Of The Rings' movie, it drags on and on after the superheroes' climactic battle has finished.....(and that battle alone felt like it ate up an hour all by itself). By the time the end credits appeared, we clasped our hands in grateful thanks for deliverance........

                  Gravel-voiced CGI villains........Steppenwolf, that guy with horns.......didn't Tum Curry play him in "Legend" that Ridley Scott movie with Tom Cruise as a macho elf?

                  So how do we go about rating a behemoth like this?    Simple......for fans of superheroes and their angst, the movie's  a 4 star (****) all-you-can eat buffet.....a buffet piled high with junky fried food that's not good for you but you're helpless to resist.

                  For the rest of us?  We're not sure attempting a civilian rating would do any good here, since the film was designed as the ultimate experience for the DC universe fan base.......and nobody else. 

                   If you fall outside that demographic, proceed with extreme caution.......  

FRIDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP.....SPECIAL "I DON'T WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU ANYMORE" EDITION......

                  BQ sincerely thanks authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa and their upcoming book "Peril" for this week's  mountainous amount of mega-madness........

                    What's beyond disturbing- even in our worst nightmares, we couldn't make this stuff up.....let the madness commence.......(and everyone have a nice weekend!)

Trump tasked Rudy Giuliani with leading the phony election fraud lawsuits because "none of the sane lawyers" would represent him".......but only after Trump tried a seance to contact deceased O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnny Cochran......from beyond the grave, Cochran spoke a line similar to his infamous, "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit....to Trump, he intoned, "I must admit...you're full of shit...."

Trump mocked his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, claiming "He's more loyal to Israel than the United States......in related news, the ex-President also checked with the Surgeon General to see if he could donate transfusions of his own pure Trump blood to Jared and Ivanka's children, thereby completely wiping out any Jewish blood cells that might be circulating in their bodies.....("We could make sure they grow up as very fine people.....like those Neo-Nazi guys in Charlottesville")

Ex-CIA director said Trump's post-election behavior was "insanity" and "acting out like a 6 year old with a tantrum......our only question:  in what way exactly was this behavior any different from the way he conducted his entire 4 year Presidency?

Trump threatened to unfriend Mike Pence if he didn't help overthrow Biden's election...("I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this....".......furthermore, he warned Pence that he wouldn't get any more of Trump's left over McDonald's fries and would also lose his Mar-A-Lago pool pass.....("Ya know, Mike, I'd hate to see you dangle from a rope in front of Congress.....I heard it's murder on your neck and spine, if you get my drift....."

General Milley assured China he wouldn't let Trump nuke them...... and greatly calmed the Chinese government when he told them he'd changed Trump's  nuclear strike code to the phone number of a Taco Bell drive-thru in Newark New Jersey. 

Paul Ryan researched "narcissistic personality disorder" after Trump's 2016 election victory.....and turned queasy when he noticed all the medical journals used Trump's photo as an illustration.....

Trump's lawyers had to perform  "law school 101" to explain to him why he couldn't go directly to the Supreme Court to plead for his reinstatement as President......and also explaining why he couldn't ask Brett Kavanaugh to issue a public execution order on Mike Pence or at the very least, a "Dunk Mike Pence" water tank at the Indiana State Fair........

'KATE'....MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD GOES TOTALLY UMA THURMAN ON THEIR ASSES......

 Kate (2021-Netflix)     As a devoted fanboy of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, we couldn't wait to see her in "Kill Bill" butt-kicking mode, which, let's face it, is the one and only reason we'd sit through this re-heated,  Tarantino-Lite Netflix movie.......

          It does deliver what it promises, mainly our gal MEW playing Kate, a lethal assassin who shoots, stabs, chops, kicks and otherwise eviscerates a small army of Tokyo Yakuza thugs. 

          To her dismay, Kate discovers she's been slipped a radioactive mickey ( a la "Edmond O'Brian in the classic "D.O.A." and Dennis Quaid in the 1988 remake)..  So essentially, she's dead on her feet with hours left to live, courtesy of a  top crime lord  avenging one of her botched assignments. 

            So Kate's off to take names and rack up a formidable body count as she hits the gaudy crowded Tokyo streets, tearing through the underworld like a one woman buzzsaw. Not an easy task, since the radioactive cocktail  systematically eats her up alive while she's kept busy Uma Thurma-ing well dressed hit-guys into oblivion. 

            To make matters worse for her, (if that's at all possible)  her unlikely tag-along companion though all this non-stop carnage is the teen daughter of the guy she killed in the hit gone wrong. Oopsie....That's almost as bad as her other punishing problem, her inability to find a bottle of her favorite soft drink, Boom Boom Lemon.  Damn, life's a bitch.

             And you can bet your sweet Kill Bill that Kate's mentor/trainer/boss/father-figure (Woody Harrelson) will factor into this storyline before the last bleeding body hits the floor.

             We pretty much had the same reaction to this film as we did to "Shang Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings", which we posted on yesterday......

             Dumb, dumb guilty pleasure fun.......and of course way more gore-soaked than 'Shang Chi' since 'Kate' functions without any Marvel Comics PG-13 constraints.  So the blood flows and flies freely through the air, like a paint splattering competition........

              And our beloved Mary Elizabeth fully throws herself into the ferociously choreographed smackdowns......making us hope all the more that one day she gets herself a well deserved major role in a some future blockbuster project,     

              We certainly couldn't give "Kate" any less of a rating than the 3 stars we gave "Shang Chi",....but for the presence of our longtime fave, MEW, we're upping it a  4 star (****) Ultimate Guilty Pleasure.  

              If only we'd had a sixpack of Boom Boom Lemon to go with the popcorn, we'd be in junk movie heaven.......

'SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS'.....MARVEL-IZED KUNG FOOLERY

 Shang Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (2021)    We approach this movie as someone who's at the end of their patience with the amount of time and attention our pop culture devotes to the ever complicated 'MCU"....the Marvel Comics Universe with their overlapping pile-up of superheroes. 

            And we've a gut feeling we're the not the only ones who've sighed heavily and muttered, "Who the **** cares about this crap anymore?"

             So don't look for this post to delve into any deep contemplations of where this movie fits into the various timelines of the MCU.  We truly and profoundly don't give a ****.

              All we wanted out "Shang-Chi" was two-plus hours of non-stop kung-fu ass kicking combined with the usual menagerie of CGI monsters, floods, explosions and people being flung 100 feet in the air.  

               With the whole circus presented in ear-numbing Dolby Surround.....on a big-ass wide multi-plex screen.

               Good news. The movie delivered all that stuff. 

               Here's the breakdown of the good and the bad:

               Good:  The opening Kung Fu-CGI clash between the villain and his magical future bride......a beautifully staged and photographed  duel that's a dance of both aggression and seduction......You know, like a better choreographed version  of "The Bachelor"......

               Good:  Some of the other action set pieces, like the already well known battle on a San Francisco bus and the equally jaw dropping dust-up on a skyscraper scaffolding.

               Good:  Chinese dragons. Can never have too many of those.

              Good:  The martial arts goddess, Michelle Yeoh, always a welcome sight in any movie.  And a brief appearance by Tsai Chin, who long, long ago, purred "I give you very best duck" to Sean Connery's James Bond, before having him machine gunned while trapped in a sprung murphy bed

              Bad:  The unrelenting, annoying Awkwafina as the comedy relief sidekick. She's like the Asian Kevin Hart......she never shuts up and nothing that comes out of her mouth is even remotely funny......

               Bad:  The Marvel teasers inserted into the end credits. To hell with them. (But the CGI artists must love them to pieces, since audiences sit through the entirety of the interminable credits, lest they miss some new MCU nugget.  

               We craved an afternoon of mindless, dumb multi-plex fun......and that's exactly what  "Shang-Chi" gave us.  And that's about the extent of attention we'll devote to a Marvel movie. 3 stars (***)

'GUMSHOE IN THE DARK'.....A P.I. WHO ATTRACTS HEAVENLY BODIES.....AND DEAD ONES....

 Gumshoe In The Dark by Rob Leininger (2021)_   Every so often, a book's description on its inside flap has us at hello......and we grab it on impulse.....

              We're not sorry we did that with this one. There was more than enough in this Private Eye thriller to keep us intrigued and entertained.......

               But ultimately, its incredible amount of sheer repetition and overlength began to wear us out.

                We even stuck with it when we realized it was the 5th book in a series.......and spends way, way too much verbiage describing the hero's previous adventures, so it barely qualifies as a stand-alone reading experience. 

                Our other big problem with it was the numbing overkill devoted to the back-and-forth witty repartee between our P.I. and the women in his life........an ultra-sexy young schoolteacher who's ensnared in a murder-blackmail-conspiracy plot and the P.I.'s ultra-sexy young wife......(yes, they seem to come across as virtually identical characters....)

               We bow to nobody in our enormous love of snappy repartee....(we'll take it over long, descriptive passages every time.)

                But author Rob Leininger drags out the playful verbal ping pong to almost unendurable lengths, way past the point where any of it's amusing or purposeful.  To be blunt, he's not as funny as he thinks he is, and neither are his characters.  (It started to remind us those Ace Atkins continuations of Robert B. Parker's "Spenser" series where he sometimes tiresomely overwrites imitations of Spenser's famous, zippy one-liners)

                Having gotten all that off our chest, we will say that if you love quirky Private Eyes who stumble into even odder, memorable adventures, than Nevada P.I. Mortimer Angel is the guy for you. 

                After befriending that aforementioned hot babe schoolteacher (even after she tried to steal his car at gunpoint), Mortimer finds the body of her mom, Nevada's Attorney General, in the trunk of a car. This all leads our P.I., the perpetually short-skirted teacher and the P.I.'s  equally babe-ish wife to some violent, frightening encounters with a trio of psychotic thug-torturers. 

               Oh yes.....we may have forgotten to mention that Mortimer Angel, in previous capers, has become notorious for discovering  assorted body parts of murder victims. (But don't worry, the author will constantly remind you of this throughout the book, which might be a good reason to start this series at the beginning.....unlike us.)

                  A mixed bag for sure.  Even if the endless yada-yada-yada between the characters tried our patience, we can't say we were ever bored.  You'll find some genuine fun here, along with down-and-dirty, brutal private eye action and a more than satisfying wrap-up. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)

'THE TURNOUT'....NUTCRACKED BALLET...OR: DANCE OF THE SUGAR PLUM SCARY.....

The Turnout by Megan Abbott (2021)    In retrospect, we don't know how we allowed let BD (Beloved Daughter) to pursue ballet dancing when she was a tiny tot......

             We must have blotted out the memory of every movie we ever sat through that depicted the ballet world as a hotbed of dysfunctional passion ("The Red Shoes")  toxic rivalries ("The Turning Point")  or even out-and-out blood drenched horror ("Suspira" and its remake, "Black Swan")....

                Anybody taking this book seriously would no sooner stick their daughter in a tutu than have her hunt down Asian murder hornets with a butterfly net........

                 The Durant Ballet School depicted in this novel is run by a twisted trio with a backstory full of dark, dark secrets. Sisters Marie and Dara rule the school, with the Marie the lighter-than-air ethereal spirit who teaches to little 'uns and Dara the stern task-mistress who oversees the older girls. Dara's husband Charlie, a one time brilliant dancer himself but now afflicted with a lifetime of injuries looks after the business end,

                   A snake slithers into this already warped Garden of Bleedin' in the form of Derek, a garrulous, vaguely sinister contractor who talks the sisters and Charlie into an extensive renovation of their the school's third floor studio.

                     Derek, a smooth talker whose oily patter clearly masks ulterior motives engages in hot 'n heavy sex with the unstable Marie while slyly implying to Dara he has designs on the rambling old house the Durant sisters and Charlie grew up in  (Charlie having been unofficially adopted into the family in his teen years).

                     Even worse, the contractor's ever more expensive and noisy renovations wreak all sorts of havoc on the school as the Durant sisters prepare their premiere holiday presentation of ...what else, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet.  And in this school, there's more than a few cracked nuts running around......

                     (This involves detailed descriptions of the tortured, abused and mutated feet of ballerinas and their jealous rages that lead them to plant razor blades in the toe shoes of the girl who has the lead role in "The Nutcracker".  We count ourselves lucky that the only horrific moment we witnessed at our daughter's ballet recital was the school's insistence on finishing every show with their signature showstopping number, "Disco Yankee Doodle" Please.....don't ask....)

                   Sooner or later, all these characters' secrets see the light of day, which can only lead to.....what else....twisted reveals and dead bodies. (Which, per our usual policy for suspense thrillers, we'll never discuss here.....)

                    While we realize some readers may find it annoying, we kind of liked Megan Abbott's technique of slicing and dicing up the novel into quick, brief digestible little excerpts, as if the entire book's been served up in hors d'oeuvre sized chunks you can snag off a tray as they go by.......

                   You'll have to decide for yourselves which sight sticks in your mind as more upsetting here....., the blackened, gnarled toes of the young dancers or the fates of people who don't make it out of the book alive......

                  For us it's a tossup....and it makes for a  jolly dark 3 & 1/2 star (***1/2) read. (Though nothing in "The Turnout"  could equal  the madness of "Disco Yankee Doodle")

                     

FRIDAY MADNESS UPDATE......SPECIAL "IF IT WASN'T FOR GETTYSBURG" EDITION.....

           Here's the price we pay for the weekends......the weekly pile-up of madness......

Texas governor says his state will eradicate all rapists to he won't have to force 12 year old girls to have babies under the new Texas abortion ban.......and also happily reports he's compiled a comprehensive list of all Texas rapists and they'll shortly be deported from Texas and flown directly to locations in Oklahoma, Alabama and apartments within walking distance of girls' dormitories on campuses throughout the U.S.  Said Gov. Abbott, "One or two of 'em may slip through the cracks.....but  the law still holds for those little girls.... In this state, if a kid gets raped, she won't be scraped. Catchy, no?"

Donald Trump claims Robert E. Lee could've won the Civil War if it wasn't for Gettysburg......the ex-President's lesson in revised history was followed by thrilling rendition of the classic song from "The Wizard Of Oz"....'If I Only Had a Brain'. 

Court ruling allows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to continue to punish schools who want mask mandates.....DeSantis happily exclaims....."This is a great victory for freedom and my God given American right to insure the community that as many kids as possible will contract COVID and die horribly trying to take their last breath on ventilators  With any luck, I can fill up those ICU's with more deathly ill little bastards than this country's ever seen.. It's what I do......and damn, I'm good at it!"

'THE COMIC'....SILENTS OF THE HAMS

 The Comic (1969)     The late great comedy writer-director Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke thought of this obscure film they made together as a "lost" movie.......ignored by audiences and short changed by its studio, Columbia, which couldn't wait to stick it on a drive-in double feature and forget about it.......

              We hate to be the one to disagree with those two mighty talents, but when we finally caught up with "The Comic" we fully understood why it arrived in theaters stillborn and instantly forgotten.....

               Ambitious in conception, but crude, cheap and artless in execution, it did nothing but leave a sour taste in our mouth while checking our watch to see how much time we'd wasted on it......

               What Reiner and Van Dyke attempted to create here was a sprawling Old Hollywood tale of the rise and fall of a silent film comedian.......(whose rocky, ragged backstory they took mostly from the real life of Buster Keaton)

                They'd hoped to evoke the long ago era when Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle and others convulsed America in guffaws with their one reel silent slapstick comedies, filled with intricate balletic physical humor that's still stunning to look at today.

                But Reiner, primarily a straight ahead, go-for-the-joke sitcom director, possessed no real cinematic skills to bring any sense of style, artistry or subtle subtest to this story.

               "The Comic", with the exception of its clever re-creations of silent one-reelers, looks like a backlot, slapped together made-for-TV movie, like a low-budget variety show with delusions of  profundity. 

                'Billy Bright', the silent movie star played by Van Dyke, is a egotistical jerk from the moment we set eyes on him, so powerfully consumed by his own self-regard that his grim path through life is pre-ordained. For the rest of the film, we follow the ups and downs of his career as he's undone by booze and infidelity to his long suffering wife. (Michelle Lee)

                 All the dramatic scenes play like hastily staged TV skits minus the laughs, but as we previously mentioned, there's one genuine highlight -  an extended collection of Billy Bright's greatest slapstick hits. Reiner and Van Dyke's adoration of these classic comedians and their riotous work is lovingly rendered in this sequence.....(we especially admired the one where Billy Bright causes no end of chaos by strolling down the street without realizing there's an entire coat rack stuck on his back....)

                Without any ability to make itself look like a real movie, the film turns downright bizarre in its final scenes depicting Billy's slide into old age and obscurity.......including a distasteful moment in which Billy can barely mask his contempt and disgust when he briefly meets his long estranged son (also played by Van Dyke) who's presented as a mincing, gay fashion designer.

  

              While here at BQ, we always pride ourselves on seeking out long lost films that might  deserve your attention.......in this case we found one you can easily skip. But if you should come across it, we'd recommend at least watching those black-and-white one-reeler imitations, for which we'll hand out this film's one and only star (*)

                  Fast forward through the rest of it.

'CURSE OF THE FLY'.....HORROR MINUS THE BUZZ

 Curse Of The Fly (1965)......exists as the little thought of, unwanted stepchild of "The Fly" movies....much like 1982's "Halloween III: Season Of The Witch", the long forgotten bastard stepchild of the 'Halloween franchise.

             Just as there's no Michael Myers slashing his way through "Halloween III", in "Curse Of The Fly", there's no member of  the star-crossed, French-Canadian Delambre family who ends up with a housefly's head parked on his shoulders........(for our musings on the 2nd film in the canon, 1959's "Return Of The Fly", refer to our post on 2/1/19)

               Which doesn't mean the Delambres aren't up to their old tricks -  trying to dis-assemble people's atoms in a glass box and transmit them, like a wireless signal to another glass box where they'll pop up re-assembled....thereby negating the need for airline, train or bus tickets.....

                And that, boys and girls, is technology that we all know wasn't fully perfected until Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek" TV show featured people "beaming" themselves from place to place.  (When people beam themselves up and down  in those shows and movies, evidently nobody worries about their atoms getting mixed up with a stray fly.....)

                 In this third episode of the "Fly" saga, the Delambres still have big dreams of teleporting people from coast to coast and across the seas. Too bad that their various failed attempts have reduced two of their lab assistants and one of their wives to gibbering monstrous mutants, kept locked up in convenient cells on the family's sprawling estate.

                   Hey, nobody said science was easy........

                  True love returns to Martin Delambre (George Baker), husband of the currently locked-up mutant wife. He falls hard for Pat (Carole Grey), a nervous concert pianist freshly escaped from an asylum where she was recovering from a stage fright breakdown.  Poor kid.....talk about jumpin' out of the frying pan and into the fire....(though 12 year old boys in the throes of puberty no doubt enjoyed her fleeing the booby hatch dressed only in a bra and undies.....)

                   The secret that Martin's teleporting is gradually turning him into a mutant never comes up as the lovebirds do a quickie marriage before settling in at the Delambre mansion.

                    At the big homestead, a typical-for-the-time sinister oriental couple (Burt Kwouk of "The Pink Panther" films and Yvette Rees) tend to the mutants while Martin's forced to teleport the family's Big Daddy (Brian Donelevy) out of London and back to the Canada lab, even though his skin's gone  mutant-ized as well.   The younger London-based younger brother of the family (Michael Graham)  the only non-mutant of the bunch doesn't much like any of these goings-on.......

                      Sure enough, it doesn't take long before all three mutants run rampant, allowing Pat to rip out some serious horror movie screams.  Martin succumbs to full mutant-ism and two of the other mutants get fused in the teleporter as they're tandem-zapped back to London.  As for Big Daddy Donelevy, his gruesome fate is simply too priceless to describe and one of the film's best moments.     

     Silly to the max but damn if it doesn't have its moments......and director Don Sharp (a veteran of Hammer pulp like 'Kiss Of The Vampire'  and 'Rasuputin The Mad Monk') knows how to keep it all moving and fun to watch.....even without a single fly in sight.

                      Classic horror film completists  should check this one out at least once. 2 & 1/2 stars. (**1/2).

'UNSANE'.....ONE FLEW OVER THE STALKER'S NEST......

 Unsane (2018)    We tried as hard as we could to resist using a flagrant, sarcastic opening line for this review, something like "Director Steven Soderbergh phones it in..."......since he famously shot most of this film on an IPhone 7.......

            Uh oh.....we just printed that, didn't we?  Ooops, we did it again......

             We'll not harp on the IPhone stuff......if it hadn't been well publicized in every friggin' review of "Unsane", with our barely-there eyesight, we never would have known anyway.

              Visually, it didn't look any different to us than the last 1000 or so independent films we've viewed......for all we know, Soderbergh could have been using a 1958 Kodak Brownie or a Viewmaster....

              (You young 'uns can feel free to google those last two references in order to savor BQ's sparkling wit......)

              Let's speak of the movie itself, shall we?  It's kind of a suspense, semi-horror thriller that takes a nice big healthy swat at everyone's most despised villains....the health care and insurance industries.....

               Claire Foy (of "The Crown") plays a nervous, high strung woman named Sawyer Valentini......not only is the poor girl saddled with a name that sounds left over from one of the 'Star Wars' prequels, she's deathly afraid of a psychotic stalker from whom she's fled to another town to escape.

               As if that wasn't enough woe for her, Sawyer's visit to a counseling therapist ends with her inadvertently committing herself to a day of mental health examination.  Her short fuse temper and outraged, Type A personality quickly earn her an enforced ,involuntary 7 days in the cuckoo's nest, complete with all the perks...... like being tied down in her bed and heavily sedated.  

              (It's later revealed, in case you hadn't already guessed that this particular funny farm is running a massive scam designed to plunder their freshly incarcerated patients for their insurance company benefits.  Oh my.....is such a horrible idea even possible in this day and age.....heh, heh, heh...)

              Can things get any worse for her?  Oh, you bet your Nurse Ratched they can......since her quietly lunatic stalker (Joshua Leonard) has infiltrated the place as an orderly-attendant, beloved by all the staff for his friendly demeanor and dedicated work ethic.

              Claire Foy tears into this role with full force and Leonard (one of hapless hikers in "The Blair Witch Project") gives the deeply loony-toons psycho an implacable sense of chilling calm.......(the solitary confinement scene where the always enraged Foy manages to finally pierce his delusions  is the film's major high point....)

              As inventive and skillful as Steven Soderbergh is with actors, you start to realize this film's really just another terror filled hunt-and-chase, back-and-forth duel between a harried heroine and her relentless tormentor,  Structurally, it's not much different from a typical 1970's slasher movie  (And the film's final freeze frame is straight out of that decade.....)

             Foy's histrionics kept us glued to it, though and Soderbergh, no matter what kind of equipment he's using to shoot his movies, knows how to smartly put together a film and tell a compelling story.. Not bad at all (3 stars - ***)......with even a surprise cameo from a Major Movie Star.......