'NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE'........NEVER TOO BAD TO RELEASE.......

Never Too Young To Die (1986)......remains so ragingly, flagrantly awful, we'd swear it was made by the infamous Golan-Globus "go go" boys for their towering House of Shlock, Cannon Films.....

           It was inevitable that filmmakers would sooner or later try out a "James Bond Jr." idea.....(and it still pops up through the years, in "Agent Cody Banks", "Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker" and our own personal favorite that we posted about, "If Looks Could Kill" with '21 Jump Street's Richard Grieco....)

            The slap-happy hacks who cobbled this one together must have aspired (or perspired) to duplicate that special campy lunacy that assured the ridiculous Golan-Globus movies prime space on every 1980's Mom-'N-Pop video store.....

             The Bond Jr. here is Lance Stargrove (young John Stamos, with his architecturally sculpted hair), a preening prep school gymnast.  And who better to play his absentee, secret agent dad than the one-and-done Bond himself, George Lazenby?  (Interestingly, George wields a bullet proof umbrella, later to become standard equipment for the Kingsmen Secret Service crew....)

              A delicious idea, but the filmmakers toss Lazenby aside, having him promptly killed by the story's villain and Main Attraction.........Velvet Von Ragnar, a howlingly mad, Halloween party  hermaphrodite played in full Rocky Horror mode by Gene Simmons of Kiss. Velvet hopes to poison a city water supply with stuff that can turn a goldfish into something resembling a large floating dust bunny.....

             No, we're not making this up as we go along........though the movie does.

              Watching Simmons cavort like a drunken drag queen offers about 45 seconds of amusement........beyond that, it's like being trapped in a room with a Comic Con cosplay attendee who spiked his Red Bull with a Jolt Cola.  Simmons cackles a lot while he stabs people to death his fingernail and even worse, unleashes and wiggles his world famous, garter snake tongue.

              It falls to Stamos and a secret agent sexpot (onetime Prince protege Vanity) to shoot 'n slug it out with Simmons and his inexhaustible army of biker minions....(all of them looking like desperate actors who didn't make the cut at the 'Mad Max' crowd scene auditions.....)

               Many half-hearted explosions detonate, many half-hearted stuntmen fall down steps.....the Stamos hair maintains its poof under dire circumstances......and Simmons carries on as if he's the new villain on 'H.R.Puf-n-stuf'......

               What we do like........since it's still decades away from the meta-mockery of today's intentional junk, the movie presents itself as honest-to-God straightforward garbage.......no wink-wink at their own foolishness here; producer Steven Paul held sugar-plum fairy delusions of starting a film series.  Surely, he couldn't be serious.....

                 He was. And don't call him Shirley......

                Only 1 star (*) if you watch it sober. View it with several sixpacks, 3 bottles of wine, or a pitcher of Bahama Mamas.....a 3 star hoot......but you'll hate yourself in the morning for wasting 92 minutes.....

             

         

'GOODBYE MR. CHIPS'.........GOODBYE, 60'S MUSICALS.....

Goodbye Mr.Chips (1969)   By the time this film lumbered into theaters, audiences and critics alike had reached the breaking point with bloated, reserved seat musicals......

             Studios were still chasing the elusive, financial dream-come-true of "The Sound Of Music", a big-budget tuner that could capture the hearts (and box-office ticket cash) of moviegoing families worldwide....
   
               And so countless millions of dollars got poured down the drain to produce a slew of these swollen, 3 hour long musical atrocities......some of them populated with stars who could neither sing or dance.

              The especially sad thing about "Goodbye Mr. Chips".......inside the body of this cinematic Brontosaurus, a brilliant creative light shines, a world-class heart melting performance by Peter O' Toole in the title role of James Hilton's beloved teacher.

               A smaller scale drama constructed around O'Toole's beautifully affecting work might have won the acclaim and attention the studio was after here.

              But the overall pomposity and inflated self-importance of turning the story into a lengthy, epic musical finally overpowers the gifted actor at the center of it. The topic of conversation veered away from O'Toole and became all about the film's sky-high budget and its worthless, instantly forgettable song score by Leslie Bricusse.

             Director Herbert Ross decided to make the bulk of these barely composed,  sing-song noodlings function as off screen, internal monologues......a technique which only served to further slow down the already funeral-like pace of the film.  While not as horrendous an idea as Joshua Logan's color-tinting the musical numbers in "South Pacific", Ross turned the film into a bigger disaster than it had to be.....critics had a field day ridiculing a musical that didn't even have the nerve to lets its actors open their mouths to sing.

              The only creative musical talent in the film was none other than John Williams, working as the orchestrator/arranger.  During the overture, he manages to turn Bricusses's mass of nothingness into a rich symphonic imitation of Rodgers & Hammerstein.........makes us wonder why they simply didn't ask Williams to have a go at writing the music to the nursery rhyme Bricusse lyrics.

                But  getting back to Peter 'O' Toole, he's the whole show here, the one saving grace that keeps you watching this elephantine relic of 1960's movie studio hubris. For him and him alone, we'll grade this schoolmaster on a steep, steep curve....with 2 stars (**).  For the rest of it.....an F-minus.

           

'SWEETBITTER'............YOU GOT SERVED......

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler (2016)    This vital BQ Commandment goes without saying......but oh Lordy, does it bear repeating.......

          Never never swallow novelist blurbs on the back cover of a book you're considering borrowing or buying......

           Especially the ones where they say they read it one sitting.........yeh, right. 352 pages clogged with the life threatening cholesterol of Graduate Student Creative Writing Class metaphors?  Maybe a Gitmo terrorist prisoner could pull it off as an alternative to waterboarding, but for the rest of us mere mortal readers.....an impossibility.

            Screw the hype. This book was a pain in the ass to plow through.

            The story?  Alice In Restaurant-Land.......fueled with rivers of booze, plentiful uppers, and blizzard-drifts of cocaine.

             The 'Alice' here is called Tess, a Midwestern innocent who, in true movie-TV style, arrives in NYC and immediately snags a waitress job at a posh trendy restaurant-bar....

             Tess, now immersed in all the inner workings of the place (one of the book's prime selling points....) learns exhaustive knowledge of wines and all the expected hurtful life lessons from her co-workers........(including the inevitable toxic love triangle she gets sucked into...)

             What's good:  the restaurant stuff,  an all-access pass to every nook and cranny of an eatery, right down the vast piles of bugs who thrive behind the Fridge.

              What's not:  everything else. Reams and reams of pretentious, show-offy prose, drowning in its own navel-gazing self importance. Only once and a while do the characters speak in anything resembling human speech.......entire conversations are held in double-meaning, infinitely crafted sub-text, as if everyone's spouting obtuse lines of poetry at each other.  8 or 9 pages of this at a time drained the life out of us......

            We were gobsmacked to hear they've turned this into a mini-series.......well, good luck with that. As for the book......strictly a 1 star (*) dining experience.

           

         

THE GLOBES KICK OFF AWARDS SEASON......BLACK TO THE FUTURE.....

The Golden Globes Awards (2018)   It's a toss-up as to what's more depressing in the dead of winter........staring out the window at the snow drifts or the thought of roughly 2 more months of Hollywood-ites showering themselves with praise, dripping in all the inherent self-righteousness that comes from wealth and fame..........

             On the whole, we think a vast amount of people find this spectacle increasingly obnoxious, maybe due to the ever widening divide between the wealthy and the rest of the populace who work their asses into the ground to pay the mortgage, buy the groceries and attempt to fund their kids' college educations......(nobody hands them little statuettes for their ceaseless, tireless efforts...)

             So like more and more folks, we too tend to watch the awards shows with a jaundiced, distanced eye.  Nothing, but nothing makes us yawn wider than media pundits and umpteen movie bloggers blah-blah-blahing about who's going to take home how many awards at each successive ceremony.......

             Memo to Hollywood:   Who gives a shit?  Breaking news......we're all gonna wait till these movies show up on Netflix, Hulu, basic cable or the $5.00 bin at Wal-Mart.......you can blather all you want about how you celebrate resilience of the human spirit and champion the downtrodden.....we only tuned in to see one or more of you do or say something stupid and embarrassing......on national television......

            Our first random observations........the envelopes please....

             Black......is the new black   No question, an enormously entertaining sight....(in the long shots, it looked like a fancy-dress funeral for deceased royalty.).......the visual mass revolt against Jabba The Weinstein and similar now unemployed film industry scumbags was a sight to behold Forced into one color, the dress designers still exerted their imaginations.....making sure photographers continued to enjoy the usual peeks at actresses' chests and backs.  We applaud the guys who came in all-black tuxes....including the jacket, shirt and tie......cause they reminded us of dancers in the opening number of "Guys And Dolls"......

              Your fifteen minutes are up, Tommy........What's funny here: Tommy Wiseau, the new Ed Wood Jr., must now think he wrote and directed "The Disaster Artist".......until James Franco body-checked him before he could reach the microphone.  But we wish him well.......if Michael Bay can have a career, why not Tommy?

              Seth Meyers' jab at Jabba..........the assembled crowd needn't have groaned. Cause Jabba The Weinstein's eventual demise will most likely never end up on any awards show Memorial  montage. By the time this guy's cholesterol finally puts a merciful end to him, we guess anyone who still remembers him will shrug and go...."oh yeh....him."

             Kirk at 101.....What can we say? He's Spartacus!

              President Oprah?  The mere thought of the glorious spectacle of a 2020 election battle between Oprah and Baby Orange leaves us with more scrambled brain cells than your average retired NFL player. We don't want to think about what it would mean for the country.......other than huge sales of popcorn for home viewing........(we can't wait for the first debate, when Oprah shrieks , "You get a car! You get a car!....")

'KINGS OF THE SUN'........YOURS, MAYAN, & OURS.........

Kings Of The Sun (1963)  Rip-roarin' costume battle epics from the 50's and 60's serve today as unique cinematic museum pieces........take a good look, folks, you'll never again set eyes on a movie that amasses hundreds of actual human beings in one place......(not when digital artists can simply animate them all with a few clicks of a mouse....)

            We have to credit the Executive Nabobs at United Artists for their imagination in greenlighting the most far flung ideas for battle spectacles. After their huge Cossack jamboree "Taras Bulba". they next turned their attention to that little chunk of North American history that we all dozed through in Junior High school.......the Mayans.

             Off screen narrator James Coburn solemnly informs us that the Mayans, way ahead of the curve in math and calendars, still clung to the idea of ritual stabbings to encourage the Gods to grow their crops. To add insult to injury, the poor Mayan sucker selected for sacrifice had to take that punishing climb straight up the pyramid to meet his appointment with a dagger.......one hell of a workout with little reward at the end.

             Soon after that, the whole gang and their glum young king (George Chakiris, still surfing the wave of his "West Side Story" fame), get chased out of Mexico by a rival tribe who've figured out how to make metal swords.

              Sailing across the still oil-free Gulf, George and his not-so-merry Mayans set up shop on the coastline, where they immediately end up in a serious real estate "we were here first"  dispute with the continent's current residents....Chief Black Eagle (Yul Brynner) and his hordes of Native Americans.

               Adding the tension:  Yul and George both have the hots for a babe-o-licious Mayan princess (Shirley Anne Field). But before either of them get a chance to take cold showers, along comes the metal-sword bullies......... and it's high time for Mayans and Indians to join forces and punch multiple holes in those marauding jerks with assorted arrows and spears.

               All the usual tropes are on display........normally very good actors saddled with stilted mock-gravitas dialogue and even sillier costumes and wigs. Elmer Bernstein's muscular score almost never takes a rest during the entire running time.....(he must have been exhausted after the scoring sessions).

               But oh my, that glorious, massive battle......unsullied and untouched by CGI. Real crowds of stuntmen carving the crap out of each other with fearless abandon. Woo hooo.....

              As for the actors, only the powerfully exotic Brynner feels truly at home here.....the rest of them stand around and talk like Disney animatronic figures. Brynner, like John Wayne, Sean Connery and Steve McQueen,  mastered physical movement for the camera.......he glides through this movie like a restless panther and he's the only one you look at when he's center stage.

               For Yul and the battles, we'll spear 3 stars (***).....and as someone battling winter weight we bet a few trips up and down that pyramid would knock some pounds off.....as long as there was no High Priest up there waiting to knock us off.......

             

             

'THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST'.......LIKE, REALLY SMART...A VERY STABLE GENIUS.....

The President's Analyst (1967)   No, of course our post's sub-title is not a quote from this sprightly satire's fictional President......in fact, the film's POTUS is never seen or heard......

         We borrowed the goofy phrases from our other fictional President......the current loon who rampages through the White House like a three year old on a sugar high.......the POTUS we can only dream is never seen or heard.....

           Hollywood studios embraced tongue-in-cheek humor throughout the 60's, but few of them invested in all out satire........you don't see too many films standing along side "Dr.Strangelove" in terms of taking a flamethrower to government chicanery or political madness.

            And we're certainly not putting "The President's Analyst" in that league.......overall, it's a slickly produced puffball piece, much closer in spirit to the James Bond spoofs of that era than to any angry attack on societal foibles.

            But we always thought of it as a fine, funny time capsule of 1960's

            Even with the high gloss studio sheen, writer-director Theodore J. Flicker's movie still maintains the raggedy, slapdash feel of a night at the Improv.  Or a quick thumb-through of a Mad Magazine parody of global espionage.

            The perfectly cast James Coburn, with his spindly, limber frame and wolfish grin, plays a New York shrink drafted into providing 24/7 couch therapy for the unseen POTUS.  This strains his relationship with his pixie-dreamgirl Nan (Joan Delaney, looking like a live prototype of an Anime girl.)..........and also makes him a pawn in the tug-of-war between the country's two Intelligence agencies, the....um....heh,heh.... FBR and CEA. (We did warn you about this being a puffball piece)

                His unlimited access to the Prez's innermost thoughts makes Coburn a prime surveillance subject (and kidnap target) for every spy in the world (even his beloved Pixie secretly records him.)

                 Consumed with legitimate paranoia, Coburn goes on the run......and encounters a variety of standard cardboard pop-up satirical stereotypes......(the right-wing gun nut family, the drug addled hippie musicians, Beatle-ish, mop-topped Brits, and an army of short-stature, dark-suited, conservatively priggish FBR agents. )

                 The film saves its King Sized Joke for the third act......where Coburn discovers that all the domestic and international agents arrayed against him pale in comparison to U.S.'s most supreme, all powerful entity, TPC.....The Phone Company.

                 TPC, as imagined here, is a vast, high tech, SPECTRE-like would-be world dominator, led by a cheerful robot (Pat Harrington) who plans to insert miniature phones in everyone's brain....(insuring TPC's ability to secretly monitor the populace and to save wear and tear on phone booths......come to think of it, isn't that what cellular phones have already accomplished?)

                 A perfect movie to return to this weekend.......and we got an extra laugh comparing it to today's situation........an analyst for the current President? So unnecessary ........since he publicly transmits his every unhinged thought, bright and early at 6 in the morning. We've all been forced to analyze him, whether we like it or not.......and now 70 per cent of us realize he's nuttier than a tub of Skippy's....

                 So we'll give 3 stars (***) for the gentle, innocent spoofery of this movie........little could its makers ever imagine the real White House horrors that lay ahead for us..........



     

'INTO THE UNKNOWN: THE FANTASTIC LIFE OF NIGEL KNEALE'.............. THE ONE AND ONLY QUATER-MASTER.....

Into The Unknown: The Fantastic Life Of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray (2017-Revised & Updated)

             If you've read our previous post on scriptwriter Nigel Kneale's 'Quatermass' films, you know the mere thought of Kneale's groundbreaking work for television and films reduces us to the level of slobbering, subservient fanboy.........

             Throughout his lifetime (1922-2006), the prolific Kneale never considered himself  or cared to be labeled as a science fiction writer. But his BBC teleplays and Hammer films chronicling the adventures of British Rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass captured the imaginations of multiple generations of audiences and filmmakers, their influence and impact still felt today.

              In Quatermass's battles to thwart and defeat insidious, gruesome alien invasions, you can preview all the ideas, templates and tropes that eventually influenced science fiction/fantasy films and TV for years to come.....the "Alien" series, "Dr. Who", the "X Files" and countless others. (Irony of ironies: Kneale famously despised "Dr. Who", deriding it as a children's show designed to terrify children. Years later, the "Who" writers would freely help themselves to storyline ideas first dramatized in the "Quatermass" films....)

              Fair warning here about Andy Murray's book......it's no easy-breezy Fanboy skimming of Kneale's remarkable career in teleplay and screenwriting.  Densely written and exhaustively researched, it's rather slow and plodding in style.....an almost hour-by-hour detailed description of Kneale's many writing projects and his sometimes laborious struggles to bring them to fruition.

              If you're willing to take the time to dive into it, Murray provides you with a full panoramic picture of Kneale's writing life......his triumphs (all of England glued to their TVs to watch the Quatermass TV mini-series),his disappointments  (the all too typical Hollywood trashing of his screenplay for "Halloween III") and sadly, the maddening amount of fascinating projects that never saw light of day....(including "The Big, Big Giggle", his savagely acerbic view of the youth revolution culture....some of which survived in his farewell to Quatermass, "The Quatermass Conclusion.")

              And personally, as someone who's held writing jobs to eke out a living, we're still seething over the descriptions of how the upperclass twits who ran the BBC royally screwed Kneale out his 'Quatermass' profits, paying him little or nothing out of the film deals they made with Hammer.

               A Must Read if you've grown up with Kneale's work or are just now discovering it.  As we said, not a quick book to get through, but for anyone who treasures those gifted folks who put pen to paper and spin out timeless, imaginative tales that stay with us forever......this true story's for you.
3 & 1/2 stars. (***1/2)