ANDREW LLOYD NEVER......."LOVE NEVER DIES' & "BY JEEVIES".....

           We don't want to sound ungrateful and unappreciative........about all the free entertainment unleashed to make our social-distanced, home-sheltered, forced-house-arrest lives more tolerable in the age of Coronavirus........

             Thin includes the mighty Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber letting us watch full length videos of his musicals on 'The Show Must Go On' Youtube channel......like "Phantom Of The Opera" and "Jesus Christ Superstar"........

              But please, Sir Webby........you don't have to clean out your attic and also display your most disastrous efforts........the shows that bombed on impact and that you spent decades revising, re-writing and re-staging.......to no avail.

                 "Love Never Dies", which we never heard of until we suffered through it, was the sequel to "The Phantom Of The Opera" that absolutely no one wanted or needed.......

                  This bizarre followup has the Phantom exiled to New York's Cony Island, where's he's running some kind of grotesque sideshow populated by what looks like the entire cast of 'Fellini Satyricon'.......

                    We'll go no further with the plot.......there isn't a single memorable melody in the entire pseudo-operatic score and the whole thing's a punishment to watch......

                      We only punished ourselves for about a half an hour into "By Jeeves",  Webber's musicalization of P.G. Wodehouse's 'Jeeves' stories about hapless Brit Bertie Wooster and his ever-efficient butler Jeeves.......(cue audible groan)

                   It's performed as a show with a show....taking place (we think) in a a church basement with over-caffienated  actors racing around the stage spewing vast amounts on incomprehensible dialogue........some of which, we guess, is supposed to be funny.

                    Every so often, just to break the monotony, something resembling a song breaks out......with the accent on 'resembling'.........

                    After 30 minutes, we surrendered with hands up.......and left quietly. The show did go on for at least another 2 hours.

                   But mercifully, not with us watching. 1/2 a star for "Love Never Dies"........as for "By Jeeves", who knows?    We've heard of 'attic treasures', but these two shows belonged back up there, safely collecting dust......

'THREE ON A COUCH'.......FOR HE'S A JERRY BAD FELLOW.......

Three On A Couch (1966)     Jerry Lewis will forever remain a problematic figure in cinema history.......

               In his long, successful career as a film comedian, you can find sporadic bursts of brilliance and at least one masterpiece, "The Nutty Professor",

               That's the movie in which Lewis perfectly displayed the war of his two personas......the spindly, squeaking lovable idiot-clown (Prof. Kelp) and the slick, cold-hearted Hollywood hipster (Buddy Love)........

               In real life, Buddy Love finally won the battle for Lewis's heart and soul.......he aged into Buddy and it wasn't a pretty sight.......in interviews and public appearances, Lewis always revealed himself as an embittered, angry, mean spirited individual, his humanity drained away by a lifetime of show business hard knocks

                 The mid-1960's Lewis found himself at a peculiar crossroad. Cut loose from his long stay at Paramount, he'd already worn out his juvenile "kid" character.......he looked too old for it and audiences were tired of the character anyway......

                 For "Three On A Couch", Lewis boldly tried out his late-night talk show persona.....a uneven mixture of a rational adult leading man, an awkward goofball and and the oily-haired, arrogant, booze 'n cigarette addicted Buddy Love........

                  Watching Lewis slip in and out of these three separate entities is a dizzying sight to behold, sometimes performed in mid-dialogue......

                   In "Three On A Couch", he plays a struggling artist who's won a commission to paint a mural in Paris.  But his dreams of honeymooning in France with his psychiatrist fiance (Janet Leigh) are dashed. Leigh won't leave the states while tending to the neuroses of three women patients (Mary Ann Mobley, Gila Golan, Leslie Parrish).......all young girls nursing deep issues about connecting with men.

                  Now comes the plot engine: Lewis and his best friend (James Best) concoct an ambitiously lunatic plan - where Lewis impersonates three separate potential boyfriends for each of the three girls. (An athlete for fitness fiend Mobley, a drawling cowboy for Western-obsessed Golan and a nerdy Entomologist for nature-loving Parrish)

                    Lewis spins no comic gold from this exhausting ruse.  He makes half-hearted, lazy stabs at portraying the boyfriends.....as well as the 'bonus' drag character, the entomologist's sister. The slapstick sight gags that accompany these episodes play like bad outtakes from 'The Nutty Professor'

                    The film does come alive and engage Lewis's filmmaking skill during its climactic, signature set-piece - at a ridiculously mobbed farewell office party for Leigh.  An ever frenzied Lewis realizes Mobley, Golan and Parrish are all in attendance,.......and his desperate, stymied attempts to  escape via the elevators are staged with precise comic timing.

                    All ends well for the story's characters, but no so much for Lewis himself......the film had little appeal for either adults or the family crowd that used to serve as the actor's prime demographic.  Nobody could really get a handle on this new, more mature version of Lewis......who comes off as needy, thoughtless, selfish......and not very funny.....

                   ..........much like the real Lewis.

                   A tireless, unstoppable performer, Lewis soldiered on through decades more of films and TV appearances......(and those video playback monitors that today's film directors  spend their time hunched over to check their shots were Lewis's idea)......and "The Nutty Professor" still stands as his very own 'Citizen Kane'........

                      But sorry to say, no one's going to remember "Three On A Couch" all that much. We've already begun to forget about it......1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2)

               

'THE IMPOSSIBLE YEARS'......MGM'S REVOLTING YOUTH......

The Impossible Years (1968)   Oh those wacky, hippie teens with their free love and contempt for authority.......aren't they kooky and adorable?

             That'll give you an idea of how Hollywood studio warhorses viewed anyone 22 and under........as gag fodder.....

               For this museum piece, the rapidly crumbling MGM exhumed one of those creaky Broadway-produced sex comedies.......the kind designed to tickle the theater-party matrons who sat in the upper balcony.....

                  Broadway clung to these crappy plays like life preservers all through the turbulent 1960's......(read William Goldman's "The Season" for the most devastating takedowns of them)......

                  Peppered with exhausted, hoary gags fished out of Neil Simon's wastebasket, these ancient artifacts arrived instantly out of date and out of touch.........but in true Hollywood knee-jerk reflexive action, studio execs still  turned some of  them into films........

                   You can only imagine how current "The Impossible Years" seemed when it slouched into theaters at the tail end of 1968, a year turned upside down with assassinations, riots and the ongoing divisive, toxic Vietnam war.......

                  That's why we subtitled this post with a line worthy of the film itself.......since the movie considers youth in revolt........as pretty revolting.

                  Super uptight and stuffy college psychiatry professor (David Niven) rails and sputters at the antics of his nubile 17 year old sexpot daughter (Cristina Ferrare)......who's just been hauled into a police station with a load of college kid protesters.....

                     Unbeknownst to Ferrare, her protest sign had an unspeakable word scrawled on the back of it.....(uh.....we' guessing 'F***' from the way this movie desperately milks it for laughs)

                      The exasperated Niven, who slurps booze when driven to nervous frenzy, also contends with Ferrare's coterie of potential boyfriends......

                        These include a boy next door who attempts no less that two gasping sexual assaults on an unwilling Ferrare (but hey, it's the swingin' 60's remember?),another dopey kid whose main talent is crashing to Niven's parked dar.......and a bearded, bohemian, artist named. prepare for hilarity,......Bartholomew Smuts     (which tells you right away that he's both pretentious and horny)

                      If that isn't enough for Niven, the family doctor (TV's Dad Next Door Ozzie Nelson) informs him Ferrare's physical shows her officially deflowered......which in this movie's skewed, smirky  morality is worse than Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter........

                        For extra yuk-yuks, Ozzie routinely catches his patients' viruses and he's also the dad of Ferrare's boy-next-door wanne-be rapist......who plays 'Taps' on his trumpet when Ferrare dumps him......are you convulsed yet"

                        Determined as Hercule Poirot on the Orient Express, Niven calls together the three suspected boyfriends to identify which one de-virgined Ferrare.......and ends up in a fairly pathetic Three Stooges brawl with all of them.....

                          We'll go no further with this......other than to mention there's one last twist the movie pulls as to whom Ferrare had sex with.......but by that time, after the flood of sex jokes, teen jokes, booze jokes, psychiatry jokes......you'll hardly care......

                       It took Hollywood several more years to finally produce and release films that dealt, for better or worse, with the political, social and sexual upheavals of 1968.....they at last hit the market in 1970....

                       But in '68 itself, sex was still for snickering......and those young 'uns in revolt?   You already know the end of this punchline.......1 star (*)....and that's only for the sight of Ferrare in a fringed bikini......



               

'OUTER BANKS'......CRASS WARFARE

Outer Banks (2020-Netflix)    To misquote Karl Marx.....Neflix has replaced religion as the opiate of the people.......

               Why the hell not........a Netflix binge, unlike fries, pizza and booze or a Sunday morning church service, won't leave you hungover, fat or thinking  Trump's your savior.......

                  True, 'Netflix 'n Chill' could lead to a loss of brain cells...... but in this day and age, if you're staying home, who's gonna know, except your family.

                   We've no intention of attempting any artistic defense of this series.......other than to say we savored, laughed through and enjoyed every guilty pleasurable, mad moment of it.......

                    Imagine if Michael Bay or some other ADD-afflicted idiot had directed every season of "Dawson'e Creek".......then dropped in huge indigestible chunks of "The Goonies".......

                    .......then imagine what "The Goonies" would look like if all the motor-mouthed kids in it were 17, hot tempered and horny.......and transferred from the Pacific Northwest to the sultry marshes and hurricane-tossed surf of South Carolina.

                     Oh wait, we forgot to throw in the close to nuclear class warfare between the substistence-level, low income teens and their mortal enemies, the uppercrust McMansion-dwelling bully-brats....leading to an ever escalating series of vicious brawls and ruinous pranks.....

                       Yep, there's treasure afoot, boys and girls......400 million in shipwreck gold. Our four plucky, wrong-side-of-the-bay teens are after it, but they face an overwhelming array of foes.....

                      ......this includes just about everybody else in their community......a collection of dumb, brutal cops, abusive, clueless parents, lethal drug dealers, random treasure-hunting thugs, the repulsive rich kids.......and a primary villain who favors shredding people with a grappling hook.....

                        Mayhem ensues......washed-ashore corpses, false accusations, perpetual nick-of-time escapes, regularly scheduled punch-outs with the rich brats., a Romeo and Juliet romance......and enough cliffhanging melodramatics to fill a dozen 'Flash Gordon' serials.......

                          Absurd?  Oh yeah. Ridiculous? To the max. Far-fetched?   Understatement of the year.......

                           But fun?   Like a ten hour gorge on pizza, fries and booze.........without any of the harmful side effects.......

                            And that, folks explains that while  the whole world suffers through its worst year ever..... Netflix is having their best.

                            There's no more rational, sane behavior in this series than you'll find in the White House these days......

                             The only difference between them....."Outer Banks" will entertain you.
Not kill you.   4 stars (****)

'SH! THE OCTOPUS'.........THE SQUID STAYS IN THE PICTURE

Sh! The Octopus (1937)     Since we're all living in a world turned upside down and backwards, we thought it best to find a movie to match life as we know it today.......

                    Or to put it simply.......the most insane, batshit loony-toon movie we could think of.......

                     At a mere 54 minutes, old school Hollywood features don't come any shorter or crazier than this one.......

                      Imagine the board game "Clue" crossed with an Agatha Christie mystery crossed with a Marx Brothers movie crossed with "The Wizard Of Oz".........

                        Chaos rules gloriously through its brief running time......the script, such as it is, cobbled together from two plays. strands an assorted cast of characters in a deserted island lighthouse in the middle of a raging storm.......

                      (Even though the miniature shots show this lighthouse parked all by itself on a tiny patch of rock, the dozen or so actors pop in  as if there's a ferry running there every ten minutes....)

                      The plot, you ask?   So did we, all through the 54 minutes.......but by the time you get to the  outrageous surprise ending, it doesn't matter a damn anyway......

                      Two exasperated detectives (Allen Jenkins, Hugh Herbert), think everyone in the lighthouse is a suspicious character and we don't blame them........since they all regularly pull guns on each other......

                       And yes, one of them's a guy with a hook.....named....wait for it.....Captain Hook.

                       To make matters worse, they're being stalked by 'The Octopus', a master criminal......and just to confuse you further, a real octopus skulks around the lighthouse, always ready to put a tentacle squeeze on anyone who's not paying attention......

                        Woo-woo!

                        In case you're wondering, we didn't just go "Woo Woo!" randomly. That's the trademark sound made by comedian Hugh Herbert, usually accompanied by Herbert cupping his nervous fingers together.  In the film, he's anxious to return to his wife who's about to give birth...........and the mere idea of woo-woo Hugh procreating with a woman requires a lot of imagination from the audience........

                         The gag lines come at you with machine-gun pacing ("I've been working on this case for nine years"  "Any clues?"........the primitive 1937 special effects range from hilarious (those wobbly tentacles)  to astonishing (the criminal Octopus, not to be confused with the other one, pulls a wow transformation at the climax.....)

                         But wait! There's more!  Don't miss the bonkers 'Twilight Zone' twist, which another way, way, way more famous movie adopted several years later......

                         What more can we say?  How can anyone resist a movie where one actor yells, "Stick 'em up or I'll blow your brains out!" while pointing his gun at the other actor's stomach?   For a little less than hour, forget the madness going on outside your door.......and concentrate on the sheer madness of "Sh! The Octopus".......5 stars (*****) a FIND OF FINDS/

'BECOMING BOND' ......THIS REALLY HAPPENED TO THE OTHER FELLA......

Becoming Bond (2017)    It's one of the enduring ironies in movie history........

             .......that a glib, randy, non-actor Australian male model/car salesman talked his way in and out of playing the 20th century's most immortal cultural touchstone........Secret Agent James Bond....

                  .......and that his one and only Bond film, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"  now forever stands tall as one of the best of the long-lived franchise.......a film that's still watched, treasured and often paid homage to by top directors within their own films....... 

                       And here George is, still with us, God bless 'im, telling us the amazing, odd, often hilarious, sometimes touching story of a rambunctious up-and-down life that he led on his own terms......for better or worse......

                         The 'worse' part, of course, the pivotal decision of Lazenby's life that most people judge insane, was his walking away from a long term contract to play Bond, along with the fabulous wealth and fame that would have surely accompanied it.

                        Lazenby then bounced about through a skimpy, undistinguished movie career but ended up wealthy anyway as a real estate mogul and given the opportunity, a first class raconteur about his single collision with the world of Bond.....

                        This docu-drama gives him that opportunity.......and as the then 76 year old narrates, the film dramatizes his anecdotal road to "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", sometimes clumsily, sometimes right on the money with humor, wit and poignancy.

                         Some major flaws stick out in these mockumentary reconstructions of Lazenby's ramblings......Josh Lawson, who plays the young Lazenby, completely lacks the ultra-confident physical swagger required to make his scenes look believable,  painfully apparent when the film intercuts his footage with actual clips of the real Lazenby.

                        Sorry, but we couldn't possibly believe that Lawson's Lazenby manged to bullshit and buffalo his way past those two savvy Bond impresarios, Harry Saltzman and Albert 'Cubby Broccoli.

                         Speaking of the mighty Bond Barons, Broccoli is MIA from these dramatizations  (we're guessing from a 'cease and desist' lawsuit threat).......Saltzman, however, turns up portrayed by Jeff Garlin as a crude, growling, cartoonish Harry Cohn vulgarian.

                        A few nice surprises pop up though.......Bond girl Jane Seymour ("Live And Let Die") appears as Lazenby's agent and SNL alumnus Dana Carvey recreates Johnny Carson's stunned reaction to Lazenby's appearance on the 'Tonight Show'......when the rookie Bond renounced the role.....(today, the Internet would have dubbed it 'Bexit')

                         We don't what to make of the film's heart-tugging episodes about the One That Got Away - depicting Lazenby's star-crossed romance with a beautiful, wealthy Australian girl.(Kassandra Clementi). If you believe Lazenby's account, you may find yourself genuinely moved.......as the memories of that road not taken leave our garrulous narrator speechless and brought to tears..

                       Even casual Bond fans should find "Becoming Bond" an entertaining watch.......and for all you Bond-O-Maniacs (that includes yours truly) it's must see. 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2)

CORA THE CORONAVIRUS AWARDS THE 1ST ANNUAL "CORIES".......

BQ:    Cora, it grieves us to say this, but we guess congratulations are in order for you. You've managed to kill more Americans than the Vietnam war.......

CORA:   You betcha, flesh-turd!  And I couldn't have gotten to where I am today without the help of so many wonderful people......

BQ:   Did we hear you right?  'People' you said?

CORA: Hey, it takes a village to rack up a body count like mine. That's why I've started my own awards show......to hand out these solid gold replicas of me to humans who've helped me on my climb to the top......of the corpse piles, that is.  It's the first annual 'Cory' awards!

BQ:  That sounds horrifying and soul-destroying.......

CORA:   Oh, lighten up, will ya......it won't be any more ugly or weird than "Tiger King" or any Kardashians episode.......or a Trump press conference....

BQ:   Swell. So who are the lucky winner's of the the 'Cory'?

CORA:    Our first 'Cory' goes to my favorite White House Larva........drum roll, please!  For declaring what a great success the fight against me has gone........Jared Kushner!  He couldn't be with us today, so I'll accept this on his behalf.......

BQ:   Sorry, Cora, he's probably too busy arranging peace in the Middle East....

CORA:    Moving right along......our next 'Cory' goes to this year's most outstanding ass-kissing  Trump minion who's the most help to me.......

BQ:   Wow, so many worthy candidates to choose from.....

CORA:  I know!  But this year, it was no contest. The 'Cory' goes to the world's most supremely spineless worm, Vice President Mike Pence.......for visiting the Mayo clinic without a face mask.

BQ:   Let us guess......he's not here, but you'll accept the award on his behalf.

CORA:   Right you are, flesh-oid. Now for the very special  Ensemble Cast Award......for the group of people who've paved the way for me to kill more of them!

BQ:   You're no doubt giving it to those trogs who showed up armed to the teeth to protest the
lockdowns.

CORA:   No peeking at the results, damn it!   Of course they won!  I love those guys and their guns.......wait'll they try firing 'em while they're on ventilators!  I accept this award on their behalf.

BQ:       Can we wrap this up? We've lost the will to live.......

CORA:   Here comes the most sought after award.......the 'Cory' for Best Ever Virus Enabler and All Around Worthless Human Being!

BQ:    We promise we didn't swipe the results, but we think we know who won this one.....

CORA:  Who else but the but the most stupid, most heartless, most soulless Virus Enabler I've ever had the privilege to know.......President Donald 'Baby Orange' Trump!  Let's hear it for him, folks!

BQ:  Yes, we know.......you accept on his behalf.  We think we've had enough of this. As always, Cora, no thanks for stopping by......

CORA:   Stay tuned for the after-party!  I hired Chef Wolfgang Puck to make some cute little potato puffs shaped just like me........and I breathed on every one of them.......

BQ:   Promise us you'll give Baby Orange a doggy-bag full of them........
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