'THE FUGITIVE'.....HAPPY 25TH TO THE GUY WHO DIDN'T KILL HIS WIFE AND THE GUY WHO DOESN'T CARE.....

The Fugitive (1993)   Fondly recalling not just the days when Harrison Ford ruled the movies as the Everyman Action Hero.......but our busy, hectic fun days in the homevideo biz......

             Video stores were still a hell of a lot fun to be around back then, both as a customer and a movie-buyer for the stores (a trade plied by BQ)........even though the rapidly growing soul-sucking virus of Blockbuster Video had begun its infection across America, driving independent video stores out of business.......(but that's another story, including the BQ's hellish time of actually working in the infernal belly of BB...)

              For now, we'll happily remember the bustling times when everyone jammed into the video store to grab a copy of a surefire crowd pleaser like "The Fugitive".......an irresistible action-suspense thriller that pitted Ford, framed and wrongfully convicted for the murder of his wife, against an implacable, force-of-nature U.S. Marshall...(Tommy Lee Jones, having loads of scene-stealing fun as he collects his supporting actor Oscar).

              The film, taken from a hugely popular TV series whose final episode gripped the nation, kicks off with that breathtaking, wham-bam bus-and-train crash.......which allows Ford to run loose and hunt down the real villain and the creep's elusive one-armed henchman.

              The rest of movie, in the capable hands of director Andrew Davis, becomes a dazzling cat-and-mouse game between the desperate Ford and the wily, dogged Jones, who begins to incorporate a search for the truth into his relentless trackdown.

              25 years hasn't dimmed "The Fugitive"s pure entertainment value in the slightest........unlike dust-in-the-wind video stores, it's still here for new generations to enjoy.......and who might find miles and miles above the usual CGI, machine-tooled Dwayne Johnson vehicles that pass for 'crowdpleasers' today. .....(as well as having some fun spotting Julianne Moore and Jane Lynch in small supporting roles)

             A 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS for Harrison and Tommy's very own Clash Of The Titans.........we're always thrilled that Blockbuster Video stays dead and buried....but this movie lives on forever.

WE GO BEYOND INFINITY TO FIGURE OUT "AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR"......

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)    Pardon this moment of snarky irony......

                As a lifelong lover of sci-fi/fantasy, we grew up in era where such movies existed as deprived slum-dwellers.....eking out survival in the poverty-stricken ghetto that Hollywood studios placed them in.......

                 The budget for any of these movies now wouldn't equal what they spend on Evian Water for Robert Downey Jr.'s trailer.......

                  And now we've lived long enough to see Hollywood cinema go completely topsy-turvy........with studios lavishing budgets that would fund Third World countries on comic book superheroes battling monsters.......

                  Some months ago, gripping Extra-Strength Tylenol in hand, we laboriously plowed through an issue of Entertainment Weekly that detailed the Marvel movie universe........

                    Our mind reeled.....our eyes rolled........the magazine's writers used elaborate charts that looked like those NCAA March Madness playoff brackets.........in order to keep all the heroes and their interlocking powers, quests,timelines,  allies and villains straight in our head. Or their heads.

                   Enough. We give up. We surrender.

                   We don't have the strength, time, patience or any inclination to sort out this overwhelming avalanche of super-heroes and their various rising and falling fortunes.......

                   Seriously, trust us......life is too short to make sense of all this rapidly ego-bloating plague of costumed characters and their mock-Greek Tragedy woes......

                  Having sat through the 2 & 1/2 hours of this film.......(including its expected, enigmatic post-credits teaser), here's whatever thoughts  remain........

                   Throw-Toys......You can can extract the equivalent entertainment value of any 'Avengers' movie from watching a toddler throw his/her toys from one side of the room to the other......super heroes regularly get bounced or tossed long distances......bashing into walls, cars, or each other.....in other words, everybody behaves like they're in the throes of the Terrible Twos.........

                    Hey, it makes perfect sense to him.....We did enjoy Thanos, the Hulk-sized villain with a massive chin that's like a mock-up design of Trump's fantasy Border Wall.......he's completely committed and sincere in his belief that wiping out half the population of every planet will improve the quality of life for everyone still around after his genocidal enemas........(we guess this makes him Marvel's official Environmental Activist.....)  More importantly, he literally beats the living green crap out of the Hulk, forcing poor Hulky-Poo to spend the rest of the movie as quivering Mark Ruffalo....no fun at all.

                    Glow-y-Thingies....a.k.a. the Infinity Stones, but for us simple folk, Glow-y Thingies.....much coveted by Thanos, who desires them with a fervor similar to the obsession we use to have for those summer movie tie-in McDonald's plastic glasses ("Collect all six!!")    Which brings us, finally to the reason he drools for the Glow-y Thingies......

                    OMG! OMG!  That ending! What did I just watch!!!!   Everyone calm down. Only a rabid Fanboy, with the IQ of a MAGA Trumpanzee would find the climax of this film surprising or upsetting. And even though we're fairly sure that we're the last human being on earth who's gotten around to seeing this movie, we'll dutifully post this warning.....

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!  IF YOU DON'T WANT KNOW, CLICK IMMEDIATELY TO 'NEXT BLOG', WHICH WILL TAKE YOU TO 'ASTRID'S FAVORITE FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS'....OR POSSIBLY,  'CISSY LOVES ROM-COMS'......

                   Thanos completes his Glow-y Thingie collection (which should qualify him for free Large Fries and a Coke).....and half the world, including half of our comic book brigade, crumble into dust, similar to Sarah Huckabee Sanders whenever she's confronted with the truth.  Breaking News to Absolutely No one:  Nobody really freakin' dies in freakin' comic books or freakin' comic book movies.....(Not with the amount of box-office moola on the line that Disney pumps out of the Marvel Cash Cow....)

                   Everyone feel better now?  Then onward to 'Avengers 4'........we've already laid in a supply of Industrial Strength Tylenol.......and a blank March Madness brackets chart.  1 & 1/2 stars
(* 1/2) that's mainly for Thanos and his dedication to amassing Glow-y Thingies...…(we still own our McDonald's 'Batman Returns' cups, so we salute his noble quest.....)

HAVING MORE THAN ONE SENIOR MOMENT WITH "NEBRASKA"

Nebraska (2013)   We fell for this movie........even when we suspected it was dryly mocking some of its characters.......

            Firstly, we're a shameless sucker for any movie shot in widescreen black & white.......(back in the day, major directors and big studios weren't afraid to embrace this strange clash of expansive screen size combined with monochrome visuals.....)

             Aha.... that remembrance qualifies as our first senior moment in this post.....

             Like many of those films swirling around in our addled memory, the widescreen b & w in "Nebraska" works to combine to the remoteness of wide open landscapes with the remote, emotional aridity of the people who populate them.

               And nobody's more remote than Woody (Bruce Dern), an aged, dementia-afflicted alcoholic who's convinced himself that a typical "You Won A Million Dollar" piece of junk mail is the real thing......

               What a relief........so far, that's a senior moment that hasn't hit us. Yet.

               But watching Bruce Dern incredibly inhabit this role-of-a-lifetime brought back a flood of memories of watching all of Dern's unforgettable supporting roles throughout the 60's and 70's......

                With this role, Dern has taken a busy lifetime of playing oddballs, loons, and assorted crazed losers and rolled them into one single lonely damaged man at the end of his days....... (unlike the showy, showstopping work of his younger days,, Dern brings quiet, reflective, heartbreaking nuance to Woody......it's film acting at the very peak of excellence.)

                 Oops there goes another senior moment.......remembering far back to the days when only Bruce Dern could convincingly play a villain who murders the living monument John Wayne.....smack in the middle of a John Wayne movie........

                  And we audibly winced watching Dern's walking gait in "Nebraska"......in which his body lists and tilts from side to side, like an old rowboat tossed around in choppy waters..........we imagined that's how we must look as we stagger though the final minutes of a long early morning walk.

                  But enough of our senior moments......better to remember the best ones in "Nebraska", including the forever scene-stealing June Squibb as Woody's unrelenting, sharp-tongued wife.....(more or less the same role she played as Jack Nicholson's wife in "About Schmidt", but this time surviving the entire length of the film........with ample scenes to deliver a barrage of withering observations and put-downs....)

                   Sometimes comic, sometimes brutally hurtful, (and yes, every so often, too close for comfort, bringing us back to our own sad days caring for a parent with dementia)......4 stars. (****)

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'JUST BE THE BALL.....' WE TEE OFF WITH 'CADDYSHACK' - THE MOVIE & THE 'MAKING OF' BOOK.....

Caddyshack (1980)  and Caddyshack: The Making Of Hollywood Cinderella Story (2018) by Chris Nashawaty        Now here's something we've never attempted before........re-visit a 38 year old beloved movie while simultaneously reading a new book about it origins and production history......

                 No big surprises coming back to the movie........we always knew it fell into our peculiar category.......of movies where you find yourself laughing more at the fond memories of them then you do when sitting through the movies themselves.....

                 38 years later, 'Caddyshack' remains what it is.......stop-and-start, sporadically funny, a shapeless mess that seems to randomly lurch in multiple directions as it desperately searches for laughs.......sometimes it strikes comedy gold(the candy bar in the pool, the moments with Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield machine gunning his one liners) .......and .sometimes it only lies there, inert.

                 Chris Nashawaty's 'making of.' chronicle goes a long way in explaining how the movie turned out the way it did........and surprised us by being far more ambitious than we expected in its detailing of the film's 'origin' story........which began in the chaotic genesis of the "National Lampoon" magazine.

                The book comprehensively begins with the rise of the baby boomer generation of hungry, ambitious, and brilliant comedy writers and performers........who conducted their very own revolution against 1950's and 60's conformity, culture and politics.  Between the National Lampoon Magazine, Saturday Night Live and Second City TV, they tossed out comforting, safe old-school comedy,  replacing it with cutting edge, aggressively irreverent satire.

                 Inevitably, this wild bunch stormed the movie business........and their movies almost always boiled down to watching staid, stupid, bigoted Authority Figures endure withering mockery at the hands of this this new generation of anarchic, anything-goes-for-a-yock jokers.......(not unlike the Marx Brothers outraging polite society in films like "A Night At The Opera")

                 As detailed by Nashawaty, vast easily obtained stashes of pot and cocaine fueled this new generation of comedy and comedians........and the book unsparingly describes the making of 'Caddyshack' as awash in a sea of weed and blow.........(with the sheer amount of drugs ingested, you have to wonder how any of the actors stayed lucid enough to step in front of a camera......)

                Apart from the drugs, a good old-fashioned, eternal clash of egos also propelled the youth comedies like 'Caddyshack'........at the end of the day, the bitter, hateful clashes between Bill Murray and Chevy Chase weren't much different from the titanic battles between 1930's actors on the Warner Brothers backlot.

                 But ultimately, that sea of drugs took its toll.......not long after the film's 1980 premier, Doug Kenney, the mercurial, high-strung screenwriter of both "Caddyshack" and "Animal House" was found dead after plunging off a cliff in Hawaii.......two years later, John Belushi succumbed to his addictions.

                For moviegoers unfamiliar with all these rancorous and tragic backstories......only smile--inducing memories remain about 'Caddyshack' and that's probably the film's lasting achievement.....not a bad place in pop culture history to end up after close to 40 years.  For the movie,  an overly generous 2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2), for the book, 3 & 1/2 stars (*** 1/2)......(the truth behind the legend hurts, but still fascinating to read about)

BEST SATURDAY NIGHT TOOTHACHE MOVIE......ARGENTO'S 'INFERNO'

Inferno (1980)   No......'Best Saturday Night Toothache Movie' is not one of the new Academy Award categories.....

                   But the Academy can help themselves and use it......on us.

                   With one side of our mouth feeling like we'd taken an all-night sock to the jaw......we needed a completely mindless, plotless, minimal-dialogue movie as a distraction.....

                    Enter, "Inferno", the second film in what eventually became director Dario Argento's 'Three Mothers' trilogy......about a trio of evil witches ruling the world from their home bases in Germany, Rome and New York.

                    With the German contingent beautifully and scarily rendered in 1977's 'Suspiria', Argento moved on to New York's 'Mother of Darkness', put together in the same freeform, hallucinatory style of the first film.

                    And we love the fact that 'Inferno' make even less of an attempt to establish anything resembling a storyline, character development and even a moment of coherence.......(hey, who the hell can pay attention to that stuff with a sour tooth anyway?)

                   From the get-go, it's nothing but an amusement park funhouse ride......you know, the rides where the cars jerk around in different directions as they whip you past visions of pop-up skeletons and fresh, blood-soaked corpses.

                  What's it about?  What are ya, kidding? 

                  It's about a couple of babes and a guy who wander around a huge art-deco apartment building until a pair of creepy hands leap out of nowhere and slice 'em up like deli meat.

                  Now you know what it's about.

                  Oops, let's not forget the hungry hordes of rats 'n cats.......with each species getting their turn to feast on the few other folks who live and work in the building.........(no wonder this huge dump has such a low occupancy rate....)

                  Thankfully for the BQ and our throbbing tooth, no plot complications ever arise to make us stop and think about what's going on........(not that we would have ever figured them out, sitting there in a codeine tablet haze.....)

                  We vaguely remember the Mom of Darkness herself finally showing up, turning into a big-ass skeleton and setting her whole place on fire........the perfect senseless ending to this crazy blue-and-red dreamscape of hapless people running around circles before they meet their gory doom.....

                  Sadly, by the time Argento got around to completing this trilogy, with 2007's "Mother Of Tears", he'd completely lost his nutball-horror mojo..........but we'll forever relish and revel in the delirious insanity of 'Suspiria' and 'Inferno'........with or without an aching tooth, you can dive into them with abandon....if you dare.

                 Our tooth's feeling much better now, thank you......and we're feeling 3 stars (***) for 'Inferno', which throbs and aches in its own special way.....

ENDLESS WEEKLY MADNESS: SPECIAL INTERGALACTIC EDITION.....

           Space Force! Episode 1: The Fat Liar Strikes Back......."That's no moon.......it's Mueller!"....
......normally costing Trillions of dollars.......but relax..... Mexico and Uranus are splitting the costs....

            Omorosa says Baby Orange used the "N" word......To quote Claude Rains character from "Casablanca"......we're shocked, SHOCKED to hear such a thing. Why, that would mean the President of The United States.....is a racist?  Is that......possible???

             Kanye West stunned into silence for 4 seconds,  when Jimmy Kimmel asks him if Baby Orange cares for black people..........Even if it was getting Kanye to shut up for only 4 seconds, Kimmel deserves an Emmy for Meritorious Service To All Of Humanity.......

             Baby Orange lets his immigrant in-laws become 'Chain Migration' citizens.....but all the rest of you rapist/gang member/Muslim/shithole country refugees better not even dream about it.........only special  white,  officially Baby Orange-sanctioned people are allowed.......and maybe, one or two Norwiegens........

             Fox Goblin Laura Ingraham bemoans the influx of multi-colored people to America.......thank you, Laura........for clearing it up for anyone who still wonders what the English translation of "Make America Great Again" means.......

         



           

         

LAW AND ORDER; SV-BOO!....... BQ'S GOOSEBUMPS RAISE FOR UNCLE STEVIE'S "THE OUTSIDER"

The Outsider by Stephen King (2018)    Now this is more like the Stephen King we know and love....

              We didn't much care for 'Sleeping Beauties' (co-written by King with his son Owen)......that endless book became hopelessly wrapped up (literally cocooned) by its elaborate, complicated mythology.......

               'The Outsider' arrives as the fourth book in the author's 'Finders Keepers' series, in which an unlikely assortment of professional and amateur detectives face down villains both natural and supernatural.

                Holly Gibney, one of the most strangely endearing members of the oddball 'Finders Keepers' Scooby Doo gang shows up in this one........and not a moment too soon.  Because the equally eclectic collection of law enforcement types in "The Outsider" have no clue about the depth of the evil they're dealing with....... until Holly figures it out for them....and prepares to do battle.

               King sets up a grisly murder mystery that would stagger Agatha Christie.......in the case of a brutally raped and murdered little boy, piles of damning evidence all point to a beloved high school football coach.....DNA, fingerprints, eyewitnesses who saw him with the boy......

                Except that there's also unimpeachable video camera evidence and witnesses that prove the coach was nowhere near the scene of the crime when it occurred........unless he had the ability to split himself in two and show up at both places simultaneously........

               Ahhh......that's as far we go without risking spoilers.......but everything's in place for a King-lover's feast.......overwhelming dread, nightmarish scares......and an especially vile evil that takes a heavy, tragic toll among the innocent......

                In other words, prime, king-sized King.......A Halloween treat arriving almost 3 months early......4 chilled stars (****).....nothing keeps us up later than an Uncle Stevie bedtime story....