'THE SPACE BETWEEN US' REVIEW.....THE IMPENDING GRAVITY OF TRUE LOVE.....

The Space Between Us (2017), an overproduced, shoddily written teen romance, crossed the BQ's path only because our beloved Millennial daughter, who never met a starcrossed-lovers weeper she didn't adore, dragged us along to a viewing. 'Viewing' is the right word, since this movie showed up dead on arrival after multiple Multi-Plex postponements. They might as well have shipped it directly into the Wal-Mart bargain bin.

          Business-wise, it's a prime example of how too many movies end up dumbed down and degraded for their primary sources of revenue......overseas audiences way more forgiving of crummy movies as long as there's lots of CGI, explosions and sound-bite oneliners in place of real dialogue. Financed by a Chinese outfit, "The Space Between Us"  starts by lavishing on the outer space special effects to set up its laborious premise......that of a sweetly innocent teenage boy born and raised on Mars (oh please, please, we beg of you....don't ask us to explain why...). The boy, who's like an adorably hormonal E.T.,has been kept hidden and secret from the prying  Earth media by the space program's Sugar Daddy, a combo Steve Jobs/Richard Branson Motivational Squeaker played to the balcony seats by Gary Oldman. But aha.... our plucky Mars-Boy (Asa Butterfield, now seven feet taller than when he starred in 'Hugo') conducts friendly inter-galactic texting with an equally adorable Earth-Cutie (Brit Robertson, at least ten years too old for the role), a brittle but fundamentally warm hearted foster child.  Yes, we and the entire universe know the e-mail thing to Mars is not scientifically possible, but trust me.....this film's faulty science is the least of its problems.

          Goldman returns Butterfield home and the boy, in the grand tradition of all nerdy teen movie heroes, quickly escapes the ultra high security NASA compound, picks up his Earth-Sweetie,  and off they go in search of his mysterious biological father.  And finally, after more than half the movie's running time, the story gets down its main agenda, the blossoming love between boy and girl,  Rather than cancer, it's the Earth itself that's menacing our young lovers......raised lighter than air on Mars, Butterfield's bones and heart suffer under the heavy pull of Earth's gravity. (Pretty much how we feel when we wake up in the morning....)  What's even more gut-wrenching (from our standpoint).....his calamitous health slide happens before he and Robertson can visit all the theme-park hotels during their Las Vegas stopover. (What, no romantic Gondola ride at The Venetian?)

             Indifferently directed by Peter Chelsom, the movie dawdles around picturesque road trip montages before it decides to strenuously yank on the audience's heartstrings, begging for unearned tears.  Somewhere near the end, the script throws in a plot twist character who might've given the film some poignant, emotional heft, but tosses him aside, never to be seen again.  What's worse, the writers are so tone-deaf to the type of story they've created that they foolishly deny their target audience anything close to a satisfying ending.  Instead, the movie's final scene, a paltry stab at uplift, plays as if were lifted from an alternate-universe version of the script. Maybe if these guys previewed the movie to a Mall focus group of teens, they would have realized how far off the track they careened.
   
              Houston....we have a problem.....and "The Space Between Us" scrubs its own mission with only 1 lonely star. (*)  The movie's designated teen viewers would be much better off with another umpteenth watching of "A Walk To Remember."

'MISSION TO MOSCOW' ...BACK IN THE U.S.S.R-U-OUT-OF-YOUR-MIND?? WE UNCOVER A LOONY MOVIE FOR OUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF!

"Mission To Moscow" (1943) Produced by Warner Brothers at the height of World War II, the story goes that FDR personally asked Jack Warner to make this movie to optimistically illustrate our alliance with Joseph Stalin's Russia.  Everyone probably knew deep down that Uncle Joe was a bloodthirsty butcher, wiping out millions of his own countrymen, but we needed him in the world wide struggle against Germany and Japan.....the survival of civilization itself was at stake.

            And so Warner, not wanting to appear unpatriotic, dutifully had his movie factory assemble this lugubrious, painfully clumsy verbose propaganda piece, based the memoirs of Roosevelt's Ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies. Davies himself, speaking with all the excitement of someone who's just chug-a-lugged a whole bottle of Ambien, introduces the film,  ponderously justifying his make nicey-nice mission to the Kremlin. And son-of-a-gun, he discovers those purge-lovin', five year plan totalitarians aren't such bad guys after all. If you're still awake after that....the movie proper starts.

           What follows next, you need to watch with a sense of distancing, historical perspective......only in this once-in-a-lifetime moment in history, when America was fighting for its life, could such an insanely bizarre film exist, slapping heavy coats of whitewash on a brutal dictatorship and its oppressed people. Ambassador Davies (played by Walter Huston) and his family head for his posting in Russia, first stopping off in Germany, where the movie unleashes a barrage of frightening vignettes (Hitler youth marching, scary stock footage of Nazi rallies and loads of Warner Brothers character actors as sinister Germans...)

             Once in Russia, Davies gets treated to a Warners backlot Never-NeverLand view of Russia that's closer to Disneyland than the USSR......including happy hard-working laborers of both sexes..(our favorite exchange: Woman Miner: "You don't let women work in the mines?"  Davies: "There's no law against it....but we don't put women underground unless we have to."  Yikes...)  Stalin, Molotov and all the Russian bigwigs, played by an entire army of l940's character actors, come off as soft-spoken, polite grandfatherly types. When they launch the infamous purge trials, which takes up a hefty chunk of the middle of the film, the cross-exams between the prosecutors and the sure-to-be-executed accused sound like a junior high debate with all the participants heavily sedated. 

            By the time "Mission To Moscow" staggers to its conclusion ( with Davies' return to the U.S., whipping up rah-rah fervor for Russia) it gives up being a movie altogether, devolving into an endless montage of Davies speechifyin', followed by a heavenly chorus underscoring a crowd of people approaching.......we guess it's the Warners art department rendition of a  glorious futuristic vision..... but to us, it looked like the Emerald City Of Oz.  Demented from beginning to end, this movie was meant for a permanently sealed time capsule, to be opened...uh....never.

            As you might imagine, consequences and vengeful payback hit this movie hard after the war's end and the start of the Cold War. With Russia now a reviled and feared enemy, HUAC,  the  Congressional Red-hunters, held this misbegotten movie up as Exhibit A in their rooting out of Hollywood commie sympathizers. Jack Warner managed to successfully beg their forgiveness, playing the 'FDR-Made-Me-Do-It' card, but Howard Koch,  the film's screenwriter. was promptly blacklisted and forced to exile himself to Europe, writing scripts under pen names. 

            BQ could only recommend this oddest of oddities to hardcore classic movie buffs and students of history.....the bulk of it remains borderline unwatchable for casual entertainment viewing. But as lunatic as "Mission To Moscow" is, it might very well appeal to our current Commander-In-Chief, who equates Russia and the United States as equal nations of killers.  For sane, reasonable people, we'd give the film 1 star (*)  For anyone else who buddies up with a KGB thug and see no difference between us and Russia...it's a 3 star delight.(***)

GAMEDAY MADNESS! OUR FAVORITE CINEMA SPORTING EVENTS.....

            One thing you won't find in the BQ's "About Me" blurbs - any mention of sports.  That's easy to explain.....our only contact with sports comes with the ones depicted in movies. We find sports in movies way easier to watch than the real thing.....movies usually try to juice up sporting events with melodramatic, comedic or downright catastrophic happenings. No droning play-by-play, no 500 breaks for commercials, no post-game wrap-ups by ex-athletes stuffed into network blazers.  Here's a few of our favorites.....feel free to chime in with some of your own....

The Absent Minded Professor (1961) and Son Of Flubber (1963)  In which Fred MacMurray's anti-gravity goo Flubber turns college basketball and football games into something closer to Harry Potter's Quidditch, with players hurling themselves as skyward as the gameballs involved. If Flubber was ever really invented, by now Tom Brady and the Patriots would have already steam-pressed it on to their cleats.....

Black Sunday (1977)  You can keep Beyonce, Lady GaGa and Bruce Springsteen.....when it comes to showstopping Super Bowl entertainment, nothing beats Bruce Dern in a blimp floating into the stadium with a bomb primed to spray everyone with steel spikes. Thank our lucky goalposts we have Robert Shaw, who's managed to crawl out of the Jaws' shark's mouth and put an end to Bruce before he babbles out any more angry Dern-isms....

Ronin (1998) We can't quite explain how two hours of adrenalin-pumping, tire screeching car chases somehow ends up at an ice skating show......where champion skater Katarina Witt takes a sniper bullet in the gut, thereby putting a crimp in her figure 8's. Maybe she pissed off Tonya Harding.....

Experiment In Terror (1962)  We normally find baseball as interesting to watch as the Traffic Cam channel's multiple views of I-95.....but this superb thriller enlivens a night game at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, by having its wheezing, asthmatic, psycho villain (Ross Martin) shoot it out with the FBI on the pitcher's mound......giving new meaning to ...'Yerrrrrr Out!"

Death Race 2000 (1975)  We can't live with the guilt of watching an actual NASCAR race....it's only a matter of time before you realize you're watching the cars go 'round n' 'round' 'n 'round, cause you're waiting for them for twirl in the air as they smash into each other. We much prefer this fictional, ultra-low budget trash where the drivers intentionally run over pedestrians to score the highest points......and major kudos to Sylvester Stallone, the first to rack up big points of the board by simply putting his car in reverse and squishing his entire pit crew. Sports at its finest.

             Have to stop now to pick up the chips 'n dip for the Super Bowl Sunday night.....we can only hope that pesky annoying game, doesn't often interrupt the flow of those funny commercials.....
           

'ON MOONLIGHT BAY' & 'BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON'.....GOD BLESS AMERICANA......WE HAPPILY ESCAPE THE REAL WORLD WITH DORIS DAY....

On Moonlight Bay (1951) and By The Light Of The Silvery Moon (1953)  cheerfully evoke an early 20th Century America that exists only in Norman Rockwell paintings, Hallmark cards and the "Main Street U.S.A."  make-believe downtown where Disneyland holds its daily parades.  Well, the BQ loves Disneyland as much as anybody else, and these two movies, bless 'em,  provide a desperately needed escape from the onslaught of chaotic current events. And you don't have to book a hotel room and wait for hours to go on the rides......

             The back-to-back Warner Brothers musicals, gleaned from Booth Tarkington stories about a mischief-prone Tom Sawyer-ish kid named Penrod, serve up a lighter, fluffier, ice dream Sundae version of MGM's "Meet Me In St.Louis", ditching that movie's angst about the uprooting of the family. Nobody has to sadly sing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" in these films....they're already having one.  (the Warners films also feature "St Louis"s father-figure Leon Ames as their stalwart, upstanding paterfamilias)

              Even with World War I hovering over the storylines, no upsetting drama or strife rears its ugly head to threaten the All-American Winfield family (Ames, wife Rosemary De Camp, kids Doris Day and "Father Knows Best"s Billy Gray and wisecracking housekeeper Mary Wickes)  They go about their untroubled business with teen tomboy Day romanced by the Boy-Across-The-Street (Gordon Macrae) Little brother Gray (inspired by Tarkington's 'Penrod' kid) regularly tumbles into trouble that embarrasses the entire family until they laugh it off and forgive him.  Amidst all this soothing turn-of-the-century charm, Day and Macrae have plenty of opportunity to hug, smooch, and croon vintage songs to each other. In 'Moonlight', Day has to cope with Macrae's frequent proclamations of his high-minded moral ideals and fend off the unwanted attentions of the lovesick town Nerd....(weirdly, in the sequel 'Silvery Moon', this poor nerdy shmuck returns to further obsess over Doris,  but with a new name and played a different actor,)

               We love both films but we especially favor "By The Light Of The Silvery Moon" where the comforting coziness factor gives the film a Never Never Land glow that rivals any musical Disney fantasy film. There are more songs for Day and Macrae, more evenly integrated into the story.....including a glorious, nutso production number "King Chanticleer" in which Day, fetchingly outfitted as a barefoot farmgirl, prances around with chorus boys dressed in chicken suits. Unlike the precision choreography you'd see in MGM musicals, this endearing number looks like Doris and the Warners Chicken-Boys made the whole dance up as they went along.  The film also deliberately and cleverly stages its own live versions of beloved Norman Rockwell illustrations in its depictions of a Thanksgiving dinner and small town gossips burning up the phone wires.

                By the time the movie came to happily resolve all its plot threads  (during a Technicolor moonlit evening at the studio ice pond, with the whole town on skates....) we were beyond smitten and singing along. (And by the way, let's hear it for the legendary Mary Wickes, who also played Meryl Streep's acerbic grandmother in "Postcard From The Edge" and kept up her wisecracking schtick right up to 1995's "Hunchback Of Notre Dame" where she voiced one of stone gargoyles)
Beached Quill sings out  5 stars (*****) for both "On Moonlight Bay" and "By The Light Of The Silvery Moon", each of them a FIND OF FINDS. If the world at large upsets you, we suggest an immediate visit to these two gems.

'JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK' REVIEW......TOM, YOU DON'T KNOW JACK.......

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)  Unlike everybody else, we're not going to pile on this inconsequential  Cruise-Control vehicle for how cheap it looks compared to Tom's  top-of-the-line 'Mission Impossible' romps......

           What we don't understand.......why did Cruise even go to the trouble of launching a secondary action franchise, forcing himself into a lead role that he's clearly ill-suited for? (And by that , we don't just mean the foot-and-a-half height difference between Cruise and the Jack Reacher of Lee Child's books......Cruise also can't come close to achieving  Reacher's world weary gravitas and thoughful silences.....when he tries, he still looks like Tom Cruise, only blandly staring off into space....)   How  many more millions does Cruise need anyway......unless he's funding a spaceship to ferry himself and fellow Scientologists back their original planet.

            With the Mission Impossible and Reacher films, Cruise has created his own movie supermarket shelf with brand name and generic products side by side.......it's like picking between General Mills Cheerios and the big white box that simply reads "Round Oat O's"

             For his "M.I." adventures, Cruise sculpts his body to perfection and gamely dangles from Dubai skyscrapers and airplanes.....for the Reachers, he's content to look like a reasonably fit middle aged guy and sprint through the streets like he's trying to catch the last bus out. No far flung, exotic locales for the Reacher films.......Tom makes do with holding punchouts and firefights in the ever popular TV show staple......The Abandoned Warehouse.....which though abandoned, always contains a plentiful supply of huge barrels, boxes and machinery to duck behind, when the automatic weapons commence firing.

            We don't begrudge a lower budgeted Reacher series (we can easily live without the 500 CGI planes, trains and automobiles crashing into CGI buildings..), but we humbly offer Tom Cruise these vital steps to keep his secondary franchise alive and well.....

            Tom,...Fire yourself and find a new Reacher  You're no Jack Reacher, Tom....time to hold auditions and seek out a suitable 6 foot-and-change guy with serious acting chops to bring Jack to genuine life.   You playing Reacher reminds us of sitting through a Broadway show where the star's been replaced by a only a moderately talented understudy.....

             Start picking better Reacher books to film.... We've read a bunch of the Reacher novels and the best of them by far are the ones modeled after 'High Noon' or the Spencer Tracy classic, "Bad Day At Black Rock."  In these, Reacher hitch-hikes himself into some Middle-Of-Frickin'-Nowhere heartland location.....and finds the whole community is a hotbed of evil conspirators arrayed against him....with nothing to fight them off with but his steely demeanor and a toothbrush. Now, that's a Reacher movie!

             Hold on to the one brilliant casting idea from the first Reacher film....Film director Werner Herzog as the arch-villain?  Inspired choice! Keep it up. Let's have the new Reacher slug it out with diabolical fiends played by Paul Verhoven, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, Danny Boyle, Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi.....and if you scrape up the bucks to film in France, Roman Polanski.

             At all costs, avoid The Abandoned Warehouse... Look, we don't expect you to throw 'Mission Impossible' money at a Reacher film, and we don't expect to see Reacher conducting a blazing shootout on stage in the middle of a Taylor Swift/Beyonce Super Bowl Halftime show....but come on, Tom, it's a big wide world out there with lots of more picturesque places to film than a Tool & Dye factory that closed in 1936.....

               As always,the BQ hands out these invaluable suggestions free of charge and we'll not send Tom Cruise our enormously expensive consulting fee. You're welcome, Tom. But sorry, your 2nd Reacher effort earns you only 2 stars.(**)  Read this post, learn well, my boy..... and fix your franchise.......

           

            

"SHADOW ON THE LAND"......CHEESEBALL DREK OR SCARY CRYSTAL BALL?

Shadow On The Land (1968) a two hour pilot for an unsold ABC series, hit the airwaves as a Made-For-TV movie in December of '68....and what a fitting film to conclude that horrifying, tortuous year, filled with assassinations, riots, the raging Vietnam war and the election of the Crook-In-Chief, Richard Nixon.

           The movie depicts a crisis-wracked America that has succumbed to a fascist dictatorship. The unseen strongman who now rules the country, known only as "The Leader", deploys his own personal Gestapo, the ISF (Internal Security Force) to wipe out dissenters and control the populace. The ISF flies its own spiffy flag very similar to the symbology of World War II's  You-Know-Who from You-Know-Where....just look up the German word for 'the leader' in case you don't catch the subtlety. But wait! All is not lost......armed resistance fighters, dubbing themselves The Society Of Men, have risen up to do furious battle with The Leader and his ISF minions.

           From that premise, we're off and running, with the movie bookended by two spectacularly violent firefights between The Society of Men and the ISF.......keep in mind by 1968, American feature films had begun to fully embrace gory nihilistic violence, so "Shadow On The Land" eagerly became one of the first TV films to jump on the Blood Wagon,

           Sadly, "The Leader" himself remains off screen during all this hysterical hoo-hah. The principal villain, an oily ISF business suit who walks like a man (John Forsythe) barks orders to his chief enforcer (Marc Strange) while consumed with standard fascist paranoia about enemies lurking within the very bowels of the ISF.  Forsythe has no idea how right he is.....Strange is in fact a double agent mole for the resistance and periodically gets to spew out freedom-loving patriotic homilies. Strange has to grimace and bear it when his closest pal, an Army Lt.Colonel (Jackie Cooper) is beaten and tortured to death by the ISF....but not before spilling their latest evil scheme, blowing up the West Coast power grid and blaming it on the rebels. To help thwart the plot, Strange appeals to the Colonel's surviving brother, a holier-than-thou priest who looks upon all this political strife with sanctimonious disdain....and who's played by none other than.....drum roll, please....a young Gene Hackman, fresh off his breakthrough 'Bonnie And Clyde' appearance.

           Bullets fly freely, bodies tumble off of high places and cute starlet Carol Lynley, briefly playing Strange's g.f., strips to her underwear.....presumably for those viewers who didn't mind a little cheesecake thrown with the struggle against totalitarianism.

            Our favorite scenes....(and we swear we're not making this up...)The Leader makes life miserable for innocent travelers at airports, confounding and detaining them with ridiculous, sinister rulings (Oh Thank God, that could never ever happen in real life!!)  Since the film takes place on Christmas week, the ISF goons wrestle Santa Claus to the ground during their brutal round up of dissidents.....presumably to check his bag for explosive-laden candy canes.

            Our favorite insane factoid about "Shadow On The Land"......all this craziness was created by Sidney Sheldon, who also gave you those hard-hitting projects  "I Dream Of Jeannie", "The Patty Duke Show" and the scripts for numerous frothy MGM musicals. ('Shadow' owes more of a kinship to Sheldon's other fabulously lucrative career as the author of pulpy melodramatic bestsellers, mostly consumed by women readers under beauty parlor hair dryers.)

              The question is.....is "Shadow On The Land" a silly alarmist daydream.....or a preview of Coming Attractions?  (We know what the bookstores think....they're loading up on copies of "1984" and Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here")  While you ponder, BQ fires off 4 glorious freedom loving stars (****) for "Shadow On The Land" a feverishly entertaining piece that didn't realize how Nostradamus-like it could become. Long Live the Society Of Men...and Women.

THE ID FROM OUTER SPACE......WHY, 61 YEARS LATER, "FORBIDDEN PLANET" STILL RESONATES TODAY....

Forbidden Planet (1956)  still towers like a colossus over the multitudes of cheesy, tiny-budgeted science fiction movies that ran rampant through the 1950's. Lavishly produced and polished to a high gloss by MGM, the film's script cleverly reworked Shakespeare's "The Tempest " for its out-of-this-world adventure......that of a red-blooded all male space crew investigating a far flung colony of Earth scientists who've gone incommunicado. They find only three individuals left on the planet, the brilliant, cantankerous Dr.Morbius(Walter Pidgeon), his adorable daughter (Anne Francis)....and the amazing, instantly iconic Robby The Robot, somehow assembled by Morbius even though he has no scientific background in engineering or robotics.

            And how did Robby come about? That's our main topic here....we're not out to trumpet our deep love of this movie....it's already been exhaustively declared by millions of writers, bloggers and fans. What intrigues BQ more than ever about "Forbidden Planet"..... is.how it sticks in our mind every time we turn on the news....

            Back to Robby......Dr. Morbius, with a lot of time on his hands since his fellow explorer/colonists ended up ripped to shreds by an invisible, murderous  'planetary force', has increased his intellect to the point where constructing a wonder like Robby The Robot proved no more difficult than snapping together some Legos. He's accomplished this by discovering and absorbing the centuries-advanced technology left behind by the Krell, the long extinct mighty race who once ruled the now deserted planet. The Krell, as far as Morbius can surmise, wiped themselves out in one horrible night, undone by the massive machines they devised to boost their brain power to....uh....well, let's say Infinity and Beyond.

            The movie hinges on what decimated the Krell........the Id. In jacking up their IQs to the Nth power, the Krell unleashed the hidden, worst parts of their minds.....every base instinct, every vicious impulse, every psychotic animalistic thought not only escaped and ran free, but were given form and shape by the unlimited energy they generated.......in essence, the Krell combined suicide and genocide all in one final gory Armageddon.....

             Lately we've come think.....So that's how the Krell really died....they created the Internet, Reality TV, and Twitter.....Watching current events, we're starting to fear that we're living out the Krell's story......except in excruciating slow motion instead of one night. The gradual but inexorable loss of civility, the impulse to instantly lash out with whatever opinion pops into one's head,, the end of intelligent debate and discourse, the warping of truth into internal personal fantasy.....we've not only unleashed all our Ids, we've surrendered ourselves to a leader who's nothing but pure, unadulterated Id, with no thought for anything but itself.

            In "Forbidden Planet" the invisible  Monster From The Id, unwittingly born out of Morbius's own mind by his tinkering with Krell technology, finally manifests itself.  Brought to life by an animator lent to MGM by Walt Disney, the Id's a raging, roaring thing, stomping around,  consumed with hatred, looking to settle scores........sound familiar?

           To "Forbidden Planet" and its vividly memorable Id, we always award 5 stars (*****)....for the actual real life Id whose shadow we live under now.....no stars whatsoever.....only minus numbers.