FRIDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP........SPECIAL 'JELLYFISH STRIKE BACK!' EDITION........

                Jeff Sessions grovels to Baby Orange as he plans to run again for the Senate.......in related news, specialists at the Mayo Clinic announce that Sessions' spine transplant procedure failed......which means the former Attorney General will continue to live life as an oversized jellyfish.........

                  Baby Orange and his attack minions continue raging against the Whistleblower.......even after a host of officials already gave first-hand accounts of his Ukraine call in sworn testimony......Baby Orange also threatend the Whistleblower with a new tweet: "....And I'll get your little dog, too....".

                     Don Jr. compares his family sacrifices to make daddy president to sacrifices made by soldiers and military families......thereby proving the old adage....'the larva doesn't fall far from the the rotted apple it dropped out of..'

                    Lindsay Graham's new defense of Baby Orange: The Baby Orange administration is too chaotic to ever come up with quid pro quo........in breaking news, the Iowa State fair offers  Graham, Jeff Sessions, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz $1000 each to star as next summer's biggest carnival attraction "The Amazing Human Jellyfish! All together!"

                     Baby Orange considers accepting Putin's invitation to attend Russia's May Day military parade....Putin promises Baby Orange that even with bone spurs, he'll still be made an honorary general in the Russian army........for services to Russia above and beyond the call of duty....

WAR OF THE CHRISTMAS MOVIES! LET THE ONSLAUGHT COMMENCE!

Christmas Reservations (2019)    To hell with peace on earth and good will toward men........it's a UFC-worthy holiday smackdown between the Hallmark and Lifetime channels.........

                Now that ultra cozy TV Christmas movies have been officially anointed as a Pop Culture Thing, this season brings together literally hundreds of Christmas movies competing with each other on completing networks.......

                 And to our everlasting horror, BD (Beloved Daughter) may very well force us to watch all of them.......well, maybe most ot them.......okay, maybe a lot of them......

                   Here's a few handy BQ tips if any of you plan to indulge.......

                   Settle in, calm down.......they're all slow.....minus the 30 minutes worth of commercials, all TV Christmas movies run about 90 minutes. And we're talkin' 90 very, very, very slow minutes.
So don't get antsy waiting for the pace to pick up. It won't.  Doze if you must, but try to wake up for the last ten minutes......when the plot's resolved, the lovers kiss, and the fake snow starts lightly falling.......

                    Everybody's super nice.......get over it.......Unlike real life, where mean-spirited people run rampant and everybody's stressed and pissed off from spending too much for gifts on Amazon, Christmas movie characters appear unfailingly upbeat, happy and brimming with holiday cheer. No, of course they don't  resemble real human beings......not even close.  That's why you only come across these relentlessly angelic men, women and children in Christmas movies.  You want real human beings?  Go watch 'Silence Of The Lambs'.......

                   But they do run into.......uh.....complications.....Christmas movie people usually face some sort of travail ......a mortgage due, a fractured romance, a nefarious corporation scheming to tear down  their Currier  & Ives little town and replace it with condos and office buildings......(in Hallmark movies, this bump-in-the-road plot detail almost always leads to a misunderstanding  that temporarily splits apart our boy-girl cutie couple.)..........Take heart, have no fear.  Always remember you're watching a friggin' Christmas movie......so all will be well......

                  Oops, we almost forget this post is about a Christmas movie.....to kick off our coverage, we defected from Hallmark and wandered over to the Lifetime Channel for "Christmas Reservations".......starring Lifetime's own Holiday star, Melissa Joan Hart......

                  We kind of liked that Lifetime allowed this movie to more freely play around with the traditional tropes of the genre......which over at Hallmark, are carved in stone. ...(as in: NO kissy-kissy between the leads until 2 minutes before the movies ends......)

                   This one's a little more ambitious, with multiple romantic storylines unfolding  at a ski-resort lodge........somewhere toward the end, they even throw in a Bollywood dance number......

                   Does everyone end up with a Happy Holiday at the end? What do you think?

                   We don't know if it makes sense to rate these films......it's like rating a Big Mac every time you eat one.......unlike Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, in a TV Christmas movie you always know what you're gonna to get......

                   Still, we'll get into the spirit, with 3 stars (***) for this one.......(that Bollywood dance definitely tipped the scales.....)

                    If you should try one of these movies and find it impossibly slow, cliched and unreal, then bail out altogether.......cause they're pretty much all the same, like a tray of freshly baked gingerbread men.......

                    Should you find yourself sucked in and warmly comforted........then grab your warmest blanket and 37 boxes of microwave popcorn........consider yourself hooked.

                   





                   

'THE LITTLE MERMAID LIVE!'........DISNEY CREATIVITY....DEAD

The Little Mermaid - Live! (2019)    We're going to spend about as much time on this televised monstrosity as Disney Corporate did when they thought it up...…

                  Only about a couple of minutes...……

                  It's a joke to review something like this...…..its one and only purpose was to serve as a marketing tool to beat the drums for the new Disney streaming service......and the theatrical release of  "Frozen II"...…

                   We might as well review the latest Disney Report to the Stockholders...….

                   But it's truly fitting that this what-the-hell-is-it mish-mash of the original "Little Mermaid" film and labored exhausting attempts at live action musical simulation arrived on the same day of the video release of its CGI'd  "Lion King"......another dead-on-arrival exhumation of one of the studio's  animated classics...…

                   Don't even ask us to describe this noisy, garbled, chaotic mess...…...other then to say we felt deeply sorry for fledgling Disney Princess Auli'i Cravalho ("Moana"), forced to sit stationary in a Halloween Shop red wig and fishtail...…..which gave a nationwide audience plenty of time to notice she ought to cut down on the cheeseburgers and milkshakes...….

                    Nothing more than the usual strip-mining by the Disney suits...…..an utter waste of time, talent and effort. Zero stars (0).  Send it to the bottom of sea......how 'bout the Mariana Trench......

'LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR'........DICK GERE AND HIS MAGIC SWITCHBLADE.......

Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1977)   Leave it to writer-director Richard Brooks, the straight-arrow, uncompromising books-into-movies guy to to excoriate the 70's .....with 3 years of the Me Decade still to go.......

             Take that, you self-absorbed, sex-drenched yuppies!  See what happens when you use your new found freedom to boff any stranger you bump into in a bar.......ha!

              There's no mistaking the purpose of Brooks' adaptation of Judth Rossner's best selling novel.......it's a fire-and-brimstone sermon, delivered straight from the director's bully pulpit (a major studio release, that is).......populated with a horrorshow parade of neurotic sluts, borderline psychopaths, crippled, love-starved children and ego-fueled dickheads who think with their dicks.......

             With such a crew in place, you know this can't end well......

             ......especially for Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) who leads a daringly reckless double life .....by day, a caring, committed teacher of deaf children and by night, a drunk and drugged bar hopoer looking for love.....or maybe the next one night stand of fireworks sex......

                No Mr. Goodbars turn up here for Theresa (whom author Rossner based on a real person).......but plenty of assorted nuts.......including an eogtistical pseudo-intellectual adulterer (Alan Feinstein), a coked-to-the-gills, live wire street stud (Richard Gere, in his breakout role), a too-good-to-be-true boyfriend-in-waiting (William Atherton)..........and finally the joker in the deck, a bi-sexual hustler (Tom Berenger) with a wounded psyche and a violent short fuse.

              The film bluntly traces back Theresa's fragmented, adult life to her literally tortured childhood.......in which she suffered both a polio-twisted spine and a monstrous, unloving father (a bravura role for Richard Kiley), whom she still lives with. Her dad an unfunny Archie Bunker,   continues to rule  her with dictatorial coldness, while he remains oblivious to the blatant dysfunction of Theresa's sister (the awesome Tuesday Weld giving it the full Tuesday), who's forever on the prowl for a new boytoy and a  reliable abortionist.

                  And so it goes on and on, this disco-fueled inferno, dominated in its middle section by Gere's look-at-me-look-at-me one man circus, highlighted by his frenzied kung-fu dance with his favorite  toy......a glow-in-the-dark switchblade.........(makes him look like a grungy 1977 New York City Jedi warrior....)

                   In an unusual move for Richard Brooks, never known as a flashy visual stylist,, he clumsily inserts himself into the film with abrupt, awkward and poorly staged depictions of Theresa'a worst fantasies, some sexual, some paranoid.  These supposedly clever touches just come off as dopey, crude and way beyond this director's skill set..........

                    The cast is game, though and Keaton, in case we forgot to mention, goes all in with this character's unhinged, uninhibited, anything-goes lifestyle.......a heroic piece of acting for sure.

                   Of all the "life sucks and then you die" dramas that ruled the 1970's, this one ends with the most blunt force of them all.......in an appropriate strobe-light bloodbath.  As the last strobe blinks out, you can also thinks of it as the switch-off for grim, studio-financed dramas like this one........'Star Wars' had opened a few months earlier, ushering in the era of the feel-good blockbuster......

                    The only 'goodbars' moviegoers wanted from now on were at the snack bar......

                  But the film's still buoyed, after all these years, by Keaton and the rest of the equally powerful cast. For them alone, we're looking for 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2) for "Looking For Mr. Goodbar"

'YOU CAN SUCCEED TOO'......JAPAN-A-MUSICAL!

You Can Succeed Too (1964)    This one comes under the heading of.....holy crap, now we've seen everything.......\

 

                    Singing! Dancing! Romance!  Comedy!

                     All coming your way from.....(wait for it)......Japan.

                     Yes, it's an all-out attempt by Japanese filmmakers to duplicate a typical 1950 MGM musical, filled with masses of choreographed dancers and two sets of squabbling couples destined to end the movie realizing their love.......while they waltz across the screen. 

                      We could barely follow the storyline......something about competing tourism companies who squire around Americans to sites like Mount Fuji. 

                       We did recognize Frankie Sakai, the chunky ball of energy who supplied the comedy relief in "Mothra" and the gorgeous Mie Hama, who cavorted with Sean Connery in "You Only Live Twice"........always nice to see them again.

                       As for the songs and dances.........well, let's just say there was more than enough enthusiasm on display to make it all fun to watch.

                        We don't regret spending time with it........and for anyone who loves uncovering bizarre, long lost cinema curios (like us)......it's a wacky little treasure chest. 2 stars (**)

            

            

'BATTLE OF BRITAIN'........HAPPY 50TH.....SORT OF.......

Battle Of Britain (1969)   We honestly can't get all that nostalgic and sentimental over this movie, hitting its 50th year anniversary........

                No doubt Harry Saltzman, the co-mogul of the Bond films,envisioned a grand, stirring all-star patriotic spectacle.......

                All star, sure. But hardly stirring. Under the command of a Field Marshall director like Guy Hamilton, it's corporate, impersonal filmmaking.......it looks like it was directed by a committee who had minimal interest in effective dramatization......

                    Which is why all the film's few, half-hearted, paltry attempts at high drama ring false and cold.

                 Of course, the physical logistics remain staggering.......and we're duly impressed that in the pre-CGI era, this involved actual stunt pilots in vintage planes staging wildly dangerous re-creations of the dogfights between the young men of the RAF and the Luftwaffe......

                 Unfortunately, the film also resorts to some less than state-of-the-art special effects, including one of the worst.....animating cartoonish fiery explosions on to shots of the planes........the sight of this literally screams out "Cheesy! Fake!" to an audience.

                 A few pluses though......it's always a pleasure to see almost the entire British acting community together in one film, even if they all pop up for less than a few minutes each.

                  Too bad, they get nothing to work with from either Hamilton or the script.......for all its epic scale and ambition, the movie remains remote and disconnected from its actors and whatever their individual stories are supposed to be......

                    Coming back to this movie 50 years later, the only thing we ever remembered originally was the sight of the German pilot taking a strafing hit right across his eyes. Years from now, it may still be one of two things we remember......

                    The other thing......the controversy over the film's two music scores. Sir William Walton, in ill health, managed to write a spectacular symphonic piece to accompany the air battles. Deeming it insufficient, Harry Saltzman engaged reliable war-movie composer Ron Goodwin to finish the rest of the score.

                    Goodwin's score dominates, propelled by his robust, catchy march for the Luftwaffe and a soaring,typically Goodwin-ian theme for the RAF.  At Laurence Olivier's insistence, the powerful Walton suite was not only restored for the film's climactic aerial combat, but played unaccompanied by any battle sound effects.

                   For a few minutes, Walton's score has the soundtrack all to itself........and it's the movie's one and only creatively artistic moment........the only sign that somebody gave some thought to something beyond the explosions and crashes......

                  As we said in this post's sub-title, a sort of happy 50th to "Battle Of Britain"........the film never did find a receptive audience.......both moviegoers and critics didn't  care for the corporate remoteness of it any more than BQ did.

                  See it once, if you're a cinema completist.......minutes later, except for the music and the eyeball strafing, you'll probably forget you ever saw it.......2 stars (**)


           

'NINTH HOUSE'........ONE HELL OF A FRESHMAN YEAR.....

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (2019)    At first, we were inclined to cut this one some slack as we plunged into it.......

                   Other than Harry Potter, contemporary fantasy/occult stuff was never our cuppa......

                   And this book didn't make us believers.......it's a freakin' mess overall........sometimes sharp, funny and thrilling, but more often than not, dense, tedious and clogged with endless, nap-inducing mythology and world-building.......

                    At times, we laughed at its clever dialogue exchanges......and at times we literally snored through all the magic potions, ghosts, demons and whatnot.......those parts read like the worst college textbooks you ever had to suffer through.......

                      Speaking of college, that's where this tale unfolds.........asking you to beleive that the Yale campus hosts a hotbed of secret magical societies.......who do things like dissect still living hospital patients, using their innards to predict the future......

                       Policing these occultists and doing a fairly lousy job of it, is the Lethe, another super secret outfit.  When the main Lethe Cop  mysteriously disappears, his tasks  fall to his incoming freshman apprentice, Galaxy 'Alex' Stern.

                         And Alex is some piece of work......she's a feisty, tattooed, take-no-shit badass with a horrific, violent backstory of her very own. When she starts an investigation to see if the magic crowd had anything to do with a townie girl's murder, she suffers through brutal assaults from entities both supernatural and mortal.....

                           This poor kid has to endure all this, solving the murder and the disappearance of her mentor while trying to keep her grade point average up.........(not to mention being stalked by an old ghost who want her to solve his murder.....)

                         Sounds like fun, huh?   Only sporadically.

                        The pace remains ponderous throughout, until author Bardugo decides to pile on all the twists and showdowns in the last few chapters.  It reads like the publisher grew tired of her dithering around and ordered her to wrap it up in the last 50 pages...……(we''ll give her this much, though.....a great kick-ass final line to set up the inevitable sequel)

                         If you're really into this epic, modern day unfocused hocus pocus, then we guess this book will make you happy enough and hit all your buttons.

                          But if you're new to this genre, just getting your feet wet, be advised this book makes no real effort to appeal to anyone who normally wouldn't go near this kind of book with a ten foot magic wand.  Also, don't let kids get near it.....Harry Potter this ain't...….it's top heavy with rape and gore.

                         Okay for the fantasy fans...…..for everyone else, we'd only conjure up 2 stars (**)