'OPERATION KID BROTHER' ('O.K. CONNERY').....SEAN'S YOUNGER BROTHER HITCHES A RIDE ON THE BONDWAGON......

Operation Kid Brother (a.k.a. O.K. Connery) (1967)

      Given that one of this blog's sacred missions is to  seek out and unearth the strangest, craziest, most ridiculous obscure films ever made we can only ask ourselves.....

       How in the holy hell did it take us this long to get around to this one?????? 

         Really, this should've been one of the first movies, if not the first to start off BQ our long and winding pulp cinema yellow brick road.....

     In the universe of cheap, knock-off EuroSpy James Bond imitations, this film shines as the Holy Grail of loony toon faux-007 madness. 

      Italian produced (as were the bulk of the EuroSpy canon), the film doesn't merely offer Sean Connery's younger non-acting brother Neil as the....what else, younger brother of Britain's top secret agent....

      There's more!  This movie offers nothing less than a plethora of Bond movie actors in supporting roles.....Bernard Lee ('M'), Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), Adolfo Celi (Largo from 'Thunderball') Anthony Dawson (Professor Dent from 'Dr. No' and Blofeld from 'Thunderball'), and Daniela Bianchi (Tatiana from 'From Russia With Love').

        (Also wandering around the film is a character named 'Lotte' and obviously made up to look like Lotte Lenya's 'Rosa Klebb' villain.)

         And even more icing on the cake..... an Ennio Morricone score!......which starts off the main titles with the title tune 'O.K. Connery' warbled and shrieked by a singer billed as 'Khristy'......(she sounds like she'd auditioned to become one of the screaming howlers from Morricone's 'Navajo Joe' soundtrack.....)

        But now let's get down to business. How good, bad, or awful is 'Operation Kid Brother'? 

         Well, in the pantheon of euro-trashy Euro-Spies, the film's much better than most of them, not quite as good as a few others and more than fulfills its goal to provide check-your-brains-at-the-door, guilty pleasure joy. 

         Unintentionally, it's at least as funny as the  Austin Powers trilogy....but then again, those films were designed to make you laugh on purpose. 'Operation Kid Brother' doesn't have to work that hard for its giggles......it just is what what it is.....

         Connery the Younger, an Edinburgh plasterer fired for losing his tools, wasn't much of an actor,  but with a striking resemblance  to his Big Bro, he cut an imposing enough figure....lookin' good as he beat up minions and smooched the girls.  And that backup cast of beloved Bond vets turned the film into an instant one-of-a-kind.

         We won't bother explaining the usual ludicrous EuroSpy plot, involving an 'atomic nucleus' and a magnetic ray that renders all the world's metal weaponry useless.....if you're a fan of these films, you know the drill....

          Every so often though, you will see some unique screwball stuff......a remote control driverless car, a yacht crewed by beautiful Bond-ian babes, and a factory producing (don't ask) radioactive rugs, manned by blind beggars sustaining radiation burns as they work the looms. 

        (We bet Dr. NO never thought of that....._

       For all EuroSpy devotees, great, great 3 Star jollies await you. (***). 

        For MSTK-3000 fans, there's an episode devoted to the film, but chances are, given enough beer and popcorn, you could throw in your own comments just as withering.......  

'TAYLOR SWIFT - THE ERAS TOUR (TAYLOR'S VERSION)......NO WONDER SHE TERRIFIES REPUBLICANS.....

 Taylor Swift - The Eras Tour (Taylor's Version) (2023)

    Sat down along side BD (Beloved Daughter) to watch this 3 & 1/2 hour extended version of Swift's concert movie, now streaming on Disney +......

              BD never stopped singing along with Swift througout the entire running time....

             So did a giant stadium crowd packed with hundreds of thousands of devoted Swifties.......they're visiible in a few brief clips, but mostly exist as thousands of cell phone lights surrounding the musical love of their lives.......

              As a lover and collector of symphonic film scores, we're not qualified to discuss Swift's music......other than it's catchy, tuneful and presented with the kind of spectacular showmanship that Cecil B. DeMille, Steven Spielberg and Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus can only drool at with envy. 

             We can't help but bow down to Swift's reign as the Empress of Pop Music.......her tireless, prolific creativity and her staggeringly proficient self-promotion and mass marketing of herself leaves us in awe......

             And she sure as hell knows how to put on one hell of a live performance, filled with dazzling effects, choreography and the Swift-inator herself, literally reveling in her own persona.......

           Listening to her fans scream in rapturous delight, we realize she's the real Lion King........everything the light touches is hers. 

           No wonder she generates such fear and loathing from Donald Trump, the Trumpanzees, the QAnon Krazies and Republicans scraping off the last shreds of their sanity and morals........

           She's everything they despise and tremble at the sight of.....a powerful woman with progressive views who commands a vast fan base that Trump could only dream about as he spews his verbal diarreah to the dwindling crowds of MAGA zombies......

           We can only giggle hysterically at the thought of the ex Toddler-In-Chief sweating through his ten layers of orange varnish as he suffers through a nightmare of Swift publicly endorsing Biden.....

            Though we're not sure a Swift endorsement of Biden would finally drive the last nail through Count Fatula's coffin......

              ......it couldn't hurt.

            Oh and the movie. Fun stuff and an eyepopping spectacle too.

             5 stars (*****)

             

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO MOVIE MUSIC? A EULOGY.........

              Hey there, visitors.......if you read any of that "About Me" stuff, then you know about the BQ's overwhelming  passion for orchestral movie soundtrack music.......'

               While most of our Baby Boomer peers grew up with the pop music of the 50's and 60's, we became enraptured by the can't-get-out-your-head movie themes of Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman......and as we moved into adolescence and adulthood, Ennio Morricone, Maurice Jarre, John Williams and other gifted composers......

                The music of these composers indelibly weaved its way into a film's DNA to the point where you couldn't ever imagine the movie without its score...........and listening to these scores brought the movie back into your head like a welcome daydream......

              Nowadays?  Whole different story.

              It's hard to pinpoint what specifically led to the downfall and current miserable state of film music......and there's a depressing irony to what's going on.......in that there's more huge symphonic scores being written than ever before (for all those mega-budget CGI atrocities), but the music stinks of mediocrity, lacking any creative thought or memorable themes....

               What we have now are scores that sound like elevator music written for 150 piece orchestras.......heaving around with no identity of their own and for the most part drowned out by the sound effects mix.......somewhere underneath the explosions, gunshots and rocketship blasts, you can barely hear the score rumbling around........not that there's anything worth hearing in it.

               Tragically, this seems like intentional policy from studios.......reducing film scores to shapeless walls of background noise instead of bolstering the movie with a unique musical signature. For those of us who've spent a lifetime listening to classic film scores......it's a sad, sad state of affairs.....just compare the music of "The Magnificent Seven", "Vertigo", "Ben Hur", "The Wind And The Lion" to the generic muck that's applied to films today......

                We hold out this glimmer of optimism........perhaps a director-composer collaboration will come along in which they return to the idea of using a boldly thematic score that irrevocably welds itself to the film and stands out as much any of the characters in the film.  Since studios love imitating success......maybe it could start a trend.....and composers could regain their place as key creative partners in the filmmaking process.....right now, movie composers are like the saloon piano players in old Westerns.....aimlessly pounding away until the gunfights start.....

              Anything can happen out there in La La land.....so here's hoping.