'MINDHUNTER'.......THERE'S MORE HERE THAN MEETS THE F.B.I.......

Mindhunter (Netflix-2017)    A confession:  We freely borrowed the snarky headline for this post from one of our biggest 1940's faves, the Humphrey Bogart crime-comedy "All Through The Night"...(which we solemnly promise to cover in a future post)......it's a prime Warner Brothers corker about patriotic NYC gangsters who tangle with a German spy ring. It's "Guys & Dolls Meet The Nazis" and it's priceless......

            As for "Mindhunter", think of it as an FBI-conducted guided tour through hell on earth......the minds of sociopathic serial killers.

            Based on true history, but embellished with a ton of stylish fear and loathing, it recounts the early efforts of the Bureau to establish a method of profiling and capturing a new kind of 20th century monster........the psychotic, remorseless creature who tortures and kills not for money, not for love....but for other reason than.....he can. And he likes it.

           While the FBI bureaucracy can't comprehend the "why" of these fiends, a supremely self-confident young agent, Holden Ford (Jonathon Groff) thinks he can map out a way to track them down.......by plunging into the minds of convicted, imprisoned serial killers through clever interrogations.

           And there you have the series premise:  Partnered with world-weary skeptical veteran agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany). Ford and Tench conduct a deeply bone-chilling, unnerving bunch of Q & A's with some of the most frightening, real life demons imaginable.

            These interrogations, each a separate creepy voyage into the nightmare landscape of the killers' minds, take up the bulk of the series' 11 episodes, some of which film director David Fincher helmed with his customary, trademark gloomy dread.....

            And we had no trouble designating our nominee for MVP (Most Valuable Psycho)......actor Cameron Britton for his infinitely scary portrayal of well-spoken, behemoth-sized slaughterer Ed Kemper.  It's a remarkable, calculated piece of precision acting.......a performance to live in your bad dreams forever.

             The show gets another big plus when the agents are joined by a brilliant psychology professor Wendy Carr (Anna Torv of "Fringe"), who intends to organize the agents' increasingly freewheeling encounters with the killers into a standardized methodology to identify the savages hidden among us.

              To put it mildly.....nothing goes as expected.....

               Fair warning: this show is no feature-film funhouse ride designed to goose you every five minutes with a shock or a jump scare. Fincher and his fellow episode directors maintain a steady, deliberate pace throughout the entire story's length.....

               But we were never bored for a minute. There's an aura of pure anticipatory fear that hangs over and around this show like a permanent dark cloud.  And the character arc of Agent Ford, gradually undone professionally and personally by his uncompromising arrogance, guarantees a second season......

              Which can't happen soon for the BQ......4 &1/2 disturbing stars (****1/2)......and remember to never hug it out with Ed Kemper......

             

           

'THE SNOWMAN' (THE BOOK).....WHY READ THE BOOK FIRST" IS THE 11TH COMMANDMENT.....

The Snowman by Jo Nesbo (2011)   Like everyone else, we've read all the toxic press about how badly botched the film version of this international bestseller turned out........

            We'll admit our only previous encounters with Scandinavian noir had been the Dragon Tattoo books and films........ (and way back in the 70's, the Americanized film version of "The Laughing Policeman" with Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern...)......so we sledded into a copy of "The Snowman" and finished it a few weeks before the much reviled film came and went......

              As for the movie, we can say nothing more until we reserve ourselves a no-cost DVD rental from our local library........(nothing gives you a more satisfying feeling than laying out zero dollars to watch some overblown, over-budgeted A-List film that the studio wanted you to pay 12 bucks to view in a theater......)

                On to the book........further proof that there's great wisdom in those "Read The Book, Then See The Movie" silver stickers they slap on the paperback movie-tie-in editions.....

                We definitely wouldn't want a screenwriter's job of somehow condensing and simplifying the dense plotting and serpentine twists and turns in "The Snowman".....

               That's the pure pleasure you derive from any well written murder mystery, along with the author's ability to delve deeply into the innermost thoughts, quirks and flaws of the characters. Essentially, it's sitting back and watching the author assemble a jigsaw puzzle in front of you.....carefully positioning the pieces until they lock together into a complete picture.

               Some screenwriters and filmmakers, tasked with adapting murder mysteries, can maneuver the material into an acceptable visual equivalent........and others get lost in the tangled forest of the book's plotting. It's not easy......they don't all come out as smoothly done as "Gone Girl"....

               Nesbo's a champ at all of those skills.......and we surprisingly didn't mind that he takes his own sweet time unraveling his story, diverting our attention with the expected false leads and red herrings while he piles up the bodies.

                Also done nicely......the spooky 'creep' factor to raise up those goosebumps......and when violence inevitably erupts, it's as gaudy and gory as anything in 'Silence Of The Lambs', with a hero vs. psycho showdown worthy of a Hitchcock finale.....

                Speaking of our hero, Norwegian police Inspector Harry Hole, his blatant alcoholism is the only thing that bored the hell out of us.......sorry, but we came to this book after a long, long lifetime of reading countless adventures of detectives and private eyes with every known dysfunction under the sun.......booze, drugs, mental illness, blindness, partial or complete paralysis.....feel free to fill in your own favorite afflictions here.   So pardon us if we yawned every time Harry succumbed to a couple of beers.....

                Even if you never get around to the movie, the BQ says by all means chill out with "The Snowman" book. We intentionally didn't discuss any of the plot details here because that's the whole fun of picking up a book like this in the first place.  And like any superb thriller maestro,
Nesbo will have you racing through the final pages. 4 blood-freezing stars (****)....let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.....

'POWER RANGERS'......WE MORPH, THEREFORE....WE ARE.

Power Rangers (2017)   Choosing to watch this movie is like choosing the 76 cent generic supermarket brand of paper towels that's sitting in between the $12.99 multi-paks of Bounty.......the price and quality may differ.....but at the end of the day......they're still all paper towels.....

            We couldn't resist having a peek at this one,  bringing up wistful memories of taking our then 9 year old Beloved Daughter to the first official Power Rangers movie back in 1995.....

             Not quite a kinder, gentler age......but back then the theaters weren't glutted with 200 million dollar budgeted Marvel and DC superheroes. And the Power Rangers, based on a Japanese TV series, hit the zeitgeist sweet spot for its target demographic......toddlers to 10 year olds.

             Exactly who the demographic would now be for this bloated update, arriving in the middle of a competitive onslaught of neverending, spandexed CGI circuses.....who knows? 

              More to the point.......who cares?

              We're not here to waste time dumping on the movie......it's a harmless, paint-by-numbers thing, not embarrassingly awful.........but getting back to the paper towel analogy, it suffers from its very generic-ness......Everyone's sat through all this crap before....bigger, better and sometimes funnier.

                There's nothing here that toddlers, kids and fanboys living in their parents' basements haven't seen in dozens and dozens of other comic book movies........and that includes the usual A-List cast member (Elizabeth Banks) enjoying her own Children's Theater hamming as villainess Rita Repulsa......(which, by the way, sounds like a super alternate name for Kellyanne Conway...)

                And this one drags on for an interminable 2 hours, waiting for its five troubled teens to overcome their various angst issues so they can 'morph' into their festively color-coded costumes......

                 If you're still awake for the end, the vast platoons of CGI animators dutifully produce a whole bunch of giant whatevers smashing and crashing into each other.  We're starting to wonder if all those digital artists nod off themselves while they're moving the pixels around to create the same climax we've all seen in every other superhero smackdown.  I swear we can hear them snoring offscreen.......

                 No doubt Haim Saban, the Power Rangers mastermind, dreamed of selling more toys, candy, comic books and action figures.......but found himself and his little plastic heroes all but lost in a modern day marketplace  already stuffed to the rafters with Comic-Con movies.

                Which is why we can morph up only 1 &1/2 stars (* 1/2)  Sorry, Haim.......it's too late to party like it's 1995......

'INSIDE DAISY CLOVER'.......A 30'S STARLET, AS SEEN FROM THE COOLER 60'S.....

Inside Daisy Clover (1965)   An admission before we start in on this movie........we've been on Team Natalie  Wood forever.

             Talk about an extraordinary life......an actress who successfully navigated the choppy, poisonous waters of Hollywood through virtually her entire lifespan......from child star to teen star to young ingenue starlet to A-List leading lady.....

               This film looked tailor-made for her......the rise and fall of a tough, streetwise delinquent plucked out of a beachside trailer shared with her addled mother and turned into an official Hollywood American Sweetheart by a Swan, a smoothly satanic studio boss. (Christopher Plummer).

                Sounds like juicy, garish fun, huh?   Uh.....no.

                Directed with way too much fastidious good taste by Robert Mulligan ("To Kill A Mockingbird"), the movie respectfully plods along like a PBS 'Masterpiece Theater' depiction of  rough 'n tumble 1930's tinseltown.  This film comes as close to the Hollywood of that era as Earth is to Saturn.....

                The actors all appear subdued and restrained, the bulk of their dialogue comes out sounding like obscure subtext. After a while, during our umpteenth yawn, we started to imagine what a director with an enthusiastic taste for lurid, trashy Hollywood storylines could have done with this material.......someone like Robert Aldrich, for example.....

                (Truth is, we can imagine what Aldrich would do.....just watch "The Big Knife", "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" or "The Legend of Lylah Clare"......)

                Mulligan is simply too much of a gentlemen artist to give this movie the propulsive melodramatic push it desperately needs.

                 And Plummer's 'Swan' character is the film's most ridiculous, unbelievable concoction....a studio mogul who's some kind of cultured patrician, a purring Devil who seems to have stepped out of a 'Twilight Zone' episode.  Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck and Louis B.Mayer would no doubt laugh at the sight of this uppercrust high society swell supposedly running a movie studio.

                 Swan turns Natalie Wood's Daisy into a daft cross between  Debbie Reynolds and one of the Our Gang kids, complete with attendant musical numbers......(by far the most entertaining moments in the film....)

                It doesn't take Daisy long to figure out she's fallen into a nest of vipers.......and the script forces Wood to spend most of her screen time in reactive mode, widening her big brown eyes at the casual cruelties, foibles and immorality swirling around her.

                 Defying Swan by eloping with the studio's resident matinee idol Wade Lewis (Robert Redford) only hastens her downfall.......Wade isn't quite the....uh....man's man and Daisy soon finds herself having a meltdown while trapped in a dubbing booth. 

                 None of this melodrama unfolds with much commitment.......you're left to imagine all the sinister machinations that Swan and his minions might be up to. Roddy McDowell, as Swan's assistant drips with barely contained malice.....but to what purpose, who knows?  The movie's just too measured to delve into any of its characters.

                  The shining light here (and the single only reason this movie is worth watching for more than a minute, let alone its snail-like 2 hours)......Natalie Wood, feisty, in-your-face adorable and holding your attention through this indifferently directed movie through sheer charisma.

                  And that's what made her, until her untimely death by drowning, one of the last of the true movie stars.   2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2)   and consider all 2 & 1/2 stars strictly for her alone.

'INVADERS FROM MARS'........EVERY BOOMER'S NIGHTMARE......

Invaders From Mars (1953)    Take it from the BQ, no film struck deeper into the worst nightmares of the post-World War 2 generation of kids than this one.......

              The real star of this movie is William Cameron Menzies......not only its director but its Production Designer.......

               And we're not talking about any ordinary art department journeyman here.......this is the gentleman rightly given Hollywood's first official credit as a Production Designer on "Gone With The Wind."

                Yes, those iconic blood orange sunsets that Vivian Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara posed against came from Menzies.

                 Given the directing reigns of a typically low-budget sci-fi exploitationer, Menzies applied his pure genius as a designer to the project. In deliberately warping the size and shape of the film's sets, he scarily reproduced, in lurid color, the very essence of a pre-adolescent bad dream, the kind of nightmare that would send kids screaming from their rooms to dive under the covers with their parents.

                 The terror for young David (Jimmy Hunt) begins with a Martian saucer crashing into a sand pit at the top a hill behind his house. (This setting is as eye-catching a design as anything Menzies created for 'Gone With The Wind')

                 Before long, the Martians have sucked David's parents down into the shifting sand (to the sound of an unearthly, wailing chorus, a master stroke by composer Raoul Kraushaar). When they're spat out into the world again, to David's horror they've been converted into cruel, heartless Martian minions.......(this plot device of humanity sucked out of humans became an all-time favorite of science fiction screenwriters, reaching its penultimate version in "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers")

                 David desperately seeks help from unbelieving authority figures who loom over him in Menzies' brilliant conceptions of what the adult world looks like to a kid........long, long unfurnished corridors existing only to intimidate any child who'd wander into them.

                 For these dream-like paranoid sequences alone, we're more than willing to forgive the flaws that come with the film's rock-bottom budget.......the hulking Martian mutants outfitted in furry green footie pajamas and the dreary use of grainy 16 millimeter Army stock footage of tanks, presumably rolling along toward the final battle with the sand pit embedded invaders.

                 Our hapless young hero finds himself as a fleeing non-combatant in the middle of the Martian Vs. Army showdown........but not before he encounters one of the film's most unforgettable creations, the Martian Master Brain......literally a greenish head in a fishbowl, carted around from place to place by the hulks in the zippered jammies.   Instantly creepy and unnervingly serene, this creature forever implanted itself into immortal sci-fi imagery.......and millions of baby boomers' bad dreams.

                But for the film's first young audiences and David, the worst was yet to come.......with the film springing a nasty, queasy twist that rivals anything in the "Twilight Zone" and or an M. Night Shyamalan thriller. Unlike most science fiction of the era, no kid ever left a showing of "Invaders From Mars" breathing a sigh of relief.........immediately putting the film way ahead of its time.

                This one's an easy call for us.....5 stars (*****)a FIND OF FINDS......accept only the original.....the atrocious Tobe Hooper 1986 remake should be avoided at all costs.....(although we're sure we'll eventually get to it in a future post...)

                 

             

                 

             

'SPLIT'........FOR GOD'S SAKE, MAN, PULL YOURSELVES TOGETHER......

Split (2016)    Further proof that M. Night Shyamalan got his mojo back after years of failure and ridicule.......

             We plumbed the vast BQ research archives for any other filmmaker who had as calamitous a career trajectory as Shyamalan........going from Boy Wonder/Next Big Thing to National Laughingstock........

               The closest we came was director Peter Bogdonovich, a film critic whose directing career soared in the early l970's with his trio of movies that cleverly duplicated the look and feel of the best of 1940's films, "The Last Picture ", "What's Up Doc" and "Paper Moon"......

                Shyamalan enjoyed a similar meteoric rise, establishing himself as a young Speilberg/Hitchcock knockoff with his made-in-Philadelphia thrillers that mixed the fantastic and supernatural with jaw-dropping, 'Twilight Zone' twists.....("The Sixth Sense", "Unbreakable", "Signs")

               Afflicted with rapidly ballooning egos and a tendency toward preening, obnoxious self-promotion, both of their careers flew off the rails with disastrous films, some of which were unmercifully mocked by critics and audiences alike.....

                 Bogdonovich continued with his pastiches of old movies he adored (he recycled Old Hollywood much in the same way Tarantino absorbed and strip-mined all the grindhouse junk he watched as a video store clerk).......but he burdened the films with his girlfriend, the blank-faced, dead-eyed Cybil Shepherd and together they met Armageddon with their abysmal Cole Porter musical "At Long Last Love"......

                 Shyamalan went into equally steep freefall with ever dopier thrillers with ludicrous, unintentionally funny twists.........when he scraped rock bottom with "After Earth", another ghastly attempt by Will Smith to make a star our of his son Jaden, M. Night had nowhere to go but up.....

                 And happily for all of us, up he went.......unlike Bogdonovich, who stayed in low gear and never returned to the heights he previously hit.

                Working with lower budgets and lesser known actors has revitalized Shyamalan, who kicked off this new phase of his career with "The Visit", his enjoyably nasty little 'grandparents from hell' thriller.....

                 In "Split", he dares to make use of that well worn plot constantly overworked by other horror directors and suspense novelists.......the collection of innocent teen girls abducted and enslaved in a makeshift dungeon by a psychopathic monster.

                 Our monster here is Kevin (the frighteningly astounding James McAvoy), whose fractured mind has split into so many different, separate personalities........if he married Sally Field's Sybil, they'd need to hold the wedding in a football stadium just to accommodate all their various selves....

                This means especially bad news for the three young girls that Kevin has captured and imprisoned, including the sad-eyed Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), who's reliving, in flashbacks, her own horrific, tortuous childhood.

                 For the versatile McAvoy, it's every actor's dream come true.......and he attacks the role (or roles, we should say) as a true Spencer Tracy Actor's Actor......switching from personality to personality with little or no reliance on costuming or makeup. accomplishing his now-you-see-me-now-you-don't transformations with sheer physicality, and subtle facial and voice contortions. He's a sight to see......straight from your nightmares.

                Taylor-Joy, we should not forget to add, is every bit as riveting as his haunted prey......she more than holds her own (and your undivided attention) with her mostly silent reactions to McAvoy's constant theatrical fireworks.....

                Now pardon us while we zip our lips before we're tempted to discuss the expected twists that await an audience at at the end of "Split".......other than to say it will put a smile of anticipation on your face.  Watching the entire film put a smile on ours.......cause it's always nice to see a cinematic talent rise from the ashes and.....(insert your own cliche here.....find his groove, get into the zone....etc, etc....)   3 & 1/2 stars(*** 1/2)  for M. Night, McAvoy and their huge cast of characters, all inside McAvoy...


                 

'BIG JAKE'..........ROLLICKING LAUGHS 'N LOADS OF SLAUGHTER.....

Big Jake (1971)   We've always found John Wayne fascinating........the towering, monumental All American Icon who somehow avoided serving in World War II.......(a wounding fact that director John Ford never let Wayne forget, not above using Wayne's non-participation in the military to humiliate and humble his star while working on films together....)

            In '71, even as the counterculture swelled and the Vietnam war raged on, Wayne still packed 'em into theaters.........and this film, one of our favorite Waynes, is a wildly uneven Jekyll And Hyde concoction that mixes quintessential good-hearted Wayne adventures with the brutal, cruel nihilistic violence that had now fully infected both American society and its films......

              46 years after first seeing "Big Jake", we still don't know what to make of it. Initially written by Harry Juilen Fink and his wife Rita, the creators of 'Dirty Harry', it veers crazily between the jokey male bonding of a Ford or Hawks western and the vicious bloodbaths you'd usually only encounter in  Leone and Peckinpah films.....

              After a semi-sarcastic turn-of-the-century-newsreel prologue that leads you to believe the film might be one of those hip, revisionist westerns, a la "Butch Cassidy", it gets down to gory business......the merciless attack on a ranch by a heartless soldier-of-fortune (Richard Boone) and his band of equally depraved, scary gunmen.  (This group includes a hefty bearded Bluto who hacks up women with his machete while Elmer Bernstein's normally jaunty score wails in dire alarm.)

              Boone has picked the wrong ranch to stage his slaughter and kidnap a young child......the ranch belongs to Wayne's estranged wife (Maureen O'Hara making her farewell appearance with Wayne)....and boy is Wayne's youngest grandson....(actually played by Wayne's own young son, Ethan).

              Neither Wayne nor O'Hara will tolerate any of this million dollar ransom nonsense demanded by the malevolent Boone and his cutthroats.....

               So off Wayne goes, with his two equally estranged grown sons(Patrick Wayne and Chris Mitchum, son of Robert) and his, dare we say it.....faithful Indian companion, warmly played by Bruce Cabot.....

               By now, you get the idea that this all this family estrangement comes primarily from Wayne's character being one singularly tough, unpleasant son-of-a-bitch.  And he rambunctiously revels in it, frequently punching out his upstart boys when they unwisely give him attitude....

                And lethal attitude is what this movie's all about, as Wayne and his merry band confront Boone, one of the foulest most flat out dangerous villains you'll ever see in a Wayne film.  In between all the friendly joshin' and jokin', the film piles up a record body count worthy of any \Clint Eastwood "Dollars" movie.  And take our word for it, some of these bad hombres die hard, taking point blank shotgun blasts....

                The Fink writing also team provides Wayne, who famously turned down 'Dirty Harry'  with a 'Dirty Harry'-worthy dialogue mantra....which ends with "whatever happens....I'm gonna blow your head off....")   But we sincerely doubt the Finks had anything to do with the comedic rough-housing scenes inserted into the film like using sugar cookies to garnish a steak cooked blood red rare....

                  Schizophrenic in the extreme......yet there isn't a minute of it that isn't robustly entertaining......especially the all too few memorable confrontations between the taciturn Wayne and his slimy, loquacious nemesis Boone.  We'll saddle up 3 & 1/2 stars...(***1/2).  To quote Wayne as he tantalizes the greedy Boone with the ransom money...."it's the stuff dreams are made of..."