"THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS"........WTF......(WHAT THE FLUFF?)

The Happytime Murders (2018)    If you subtract the endless array of pretentious production company logos at the beginning and the equally interminable 15 minute credit crawl at the end.....the actual film here runs about 70 minutes.........

                Unfortunate.......cause the movie  becomes tiresome and redundant at about the 30 minute mark......

                 We're sure somebody thought this was a cool idea......R-rate Muppets swearing, screwing and blowing each other's heads off with shotguns, leaving a cloud of......fluff.

                   Sure we can imagine the pitch.......throw in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit", the Leslie Nielson 'Police Squad' movies and Melissa McCarthy doing a worn out, tiresome version of the abrasive cop she played in "The Heat"........

                   Oddly, the film shows minimum interest in dealing with the 'oppressed minority' issue that's part of any movie that sets up a universe of humans co-existing with fantasy creatures.....

                   What this film's really about is presenting the spectacle of a Muppet cow and a Muppet octopus having orgiastic sex   (now there's somethin' you don't see every day.....)

                   And let's not forget the sight of our noir-ish, Private Eye Muppet ejaculating miles of Silly String........no doubt the filmmakers thought moviegoers would consider that alone worth the price of ticket.....

                    Uh.......no. (Not that we didn't snort out a few chuckles........but that was only due to Maya Rudolph's exquisite timing as the Muppet hero's faithful secretary, getting a bottle of Windex ready as her boss splooges all over his office....)

                    True enough, we found ourselves laughing a few times........but we could also hear the sound of the late Muppet genius Jim Henson spinning in his grave at the thought of this movie, concocted by his son Brian.......

                     And not because of all the raunch, foul language and sex.......no, we think Jim would be far more appalled at the lazy writing and complete lack of imagination........sticking the Muppet characters in what looks like a overlong, terrible 'Saturday Night Live' skit.......

                    Brian Henson dubbed his production company 'HE' (Henson Alternative).......here's an alternative for you, Brian.......instead of making a movie that's basically one dumb, dirty joke stretched way past its breaking point.......how about making a real fluffin' movie?  With Muppets, too.

                    1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2).....for Maya Rudolph alone.
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WORST TALK SHOW IN AMERICA......WINTER SEASON PREVIEW........

               We had a movie post all ready to go.........on a lame, grotesque, idiotic comedy......

                But this astounding TV spectacle easily trumped (pun intended) any lame, grotesque, idiotic film out there......

                Since this is the season for awards nominations.......

                Worst Performance By A Bad Actor Playing An Even Worse President.......once again, bravura work from Donald J. Trump.......sitting in front of a nationwide audience saying, ".....there's parts of the wall already built..." with a straight face. We don't know how he does it.

                 Best Performance By A Vice President Playing A Crash Test Dummy Without A Seat Belt.......Mike Pence, who totally seizes the day and makes this role his very own. We doubt that even Daniel Day Lewis could equal the nuance and semi-comatose skill that Pence brings to this performance........plumbing the depths of his talent to create an indelible portrait of a non-entity daydreaming of oblivion......

                 Best Supporting Roles........Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, playing canny politicians who easily goad a clueless imbecile into taking full responsibility for a government shutdown.

                 All in all, an exciting preview of an upcoming season that promises to be catastrophic for the host......and a desperately needed breath of fresh air for viewers.........

"SUPPORT THE GIRLS"...........BIG BOOBS AND FLAT SCREENS......

Support The Girls  (2018)    We don't claim to be movie marketing geniuses, but whoever decided to push this film as a comedy needs their head examined.........

                   A comedy?  Jeez, the film opens with its lead character Lisa (Regina Hall) crying in her car before she starts her long day's work.....

                   Who can blame her?  She's managing 'Double Whammies' a pub-food 'n beer sports bar, a blatantly fictionalized version of Hooters......complete with a slew of nubile waitresses decked out in short-shorts and cutoff shirts barely containing their breasts.

                   Like 'Hooters', and 'Twin Peaks', 'Double Whammies' wants it every which way.......to attract a family crowd and still pull in all the guys who come in to ogle the girls and guzzle, as this movie calls them, 'Big Ass Beers'.........

                    But not a nationwide franchise......this dump is privately owned by a creepy jerk (James Le Gros) who generally makes Lisa's life even more miserable than it already is.......

                    We don't kid about the misery......Lisa wrangles her dsyfunctional, unreliable girls while dealing with an attempted robbery that dismantled the cable feed in the restaurant's many flat screen TVs........on the eve of a big televised boxing match.

                    So pardon us if we didn't find any of this even remotely funny.......but we watched genuinely delighted because the entire film functions as a virtual one-woman show for Regina Hall.

                    Hall and her wild workaday ups and downs take center stage here.......it's a guaranteed role-of-a-lifetime and Hall goes to town with it and delivers in spectacular fashion. In our humble opinion, her name ought to turn up nominated actresses in all the award shows......

                    After Hall, Haley Lu Richardson easily grabs the supporting MVP role as one of the 'Double Whammies' servers. She gets her moment in the sun as she stands atop the bar, rallying impatient customers waiting for Le Gros to re-connect the cable TV in time for the boxing event.

                    As someone who toiled in the service industry many hundreds of years ago, we winced, groaned and sympathized with Regina Hall and all the personal and business woes the story heaps upon her in the course of one day.

                    Not a comedy by any stretch.......but one hell of a fast, breezy dramady......with one of the best performances you'll see all year.  3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2)

"THE STALKING MOON"........HAPPY 50TH......IF ANYONE STILL REMEMBERS IT......

The Stalking Moon (1968)    Watching this again, we still stand perplexed on multiple issues.......

              A western suspense thriller?  Who'd be the target audience 1968?  How would you market such a film?

              Directed by......Robert Mulligan?  A guy who specialized exclusively in character driven, deeply felt dramas? ("To Kill A Mockingbird", "Love With The Proper Stranger", Inside Daisy Clover", "Up The Down Staircase")

              What in the world would have attracted Mulligan to this material.........a spare, primal tale about a taciturn ex-Cavalry scout (Gregory Peck) protecting an emotionally damaged woman (Eva Marie Saint) from the rampaging, Angel-Of-Death-like Apache who abducted her and fathered her young son.

               You'd think a director like Mulligan would really dig into these characters and provide the kind of probing dramatic subtext that you wouldn't normally expect to enjoy in a western......

                Nope. Never happens. The movie looks mediocre and generic from beginning to end.......like it was directed on the fly by some TV hack, who pumped out "Rifelman" episodes.....

                Peck and Saint get nothing to work with in the script......... unusual for him, Peck never nails down his character, who swings back and forth from irascible loner to benevolent protector, depending on which scene he's in. Saint is left to stand around and project silent suffering.

               The film also has no idea how to handle its mostly unseen villain........the murderous Apache who pops up in the film's last section as a horror film boogeyman. Throughout the movie, he's an invisible booga-booga presence.....casually slaughtering people on his inexorable trail to track down Peck and Saint in order to presumably reclaim his son......

                That sounds like a decent horror movie trope.....(and the film's initial trailers tried selling the movie that way.....)......but suspense and impending terror were way, way out of Robert Mulligan's skill set.  Lacking any attempts at dramatic heft, Mulligan couldn't even work up a good scare or two......the movie ends up as a stillborn, weak mess, a failure at all the genres (drama, western, thriller) it hoped to blend together......

               Sorry, but the passage of 50 years hasn't improved "The Stalking Moon" one bit.......it's still a curious failure from a director who strayed too far out of his comfort zone, with no idea what kind of movie he was making. 1 star (*).

WEEKEND MADNESS WRAPUP......SPECIAL 'INDIVIDUAL 1' EDITION........

                Baby Orange thinks Mueller's court filing 'totally' clear him........let's put a stop to the rumors that Baby Orange doesn't realize who 'Individual 1' is.......of course he knows who it is......Hilary Clinton.....or possibly Barak Obama.....or Santa Claus....

                 Baby Orange goes on a Twitter rampage before Mueller's court filings.......this is what  a guy falling from a 100 foot building sounds like before he hits the ground.......

                 Rex Tillerson claims he had to stop Baby Orange from breaking the law....Baby Orange calls Tillerson 'dumb as a rock'...... actually, Rex, you are dumb as a rock if you thought working for a psychotic moron was going to have any other outcome.....

                  Baby Orange promises his own counter-report to Mueller's findings.......we've seen a leaked copy of the counter-report already.....one page that reads, "I know you are but what am I?"

                  Baby Orange sits bored, with arms crossed at George H.W.Bush's funeral.......no kid likes being dragged to grownup events.......especially when they all say glowing things about the deceased that the kid knows he never was and never will be......

           

BABY, IT'S WOKE OUTSIDE........A CHRISTMAS SONG BURIED BY HUMAN SNOWFLAKES.......

                 Let's be clear before before we get into this........

                 We've cheered on the destruction of the scumbag sexual predators who finally met justice at the hands of the #metoo movement.......

                  We loathed Harvey Weinstein for years.......and never, in his endless career, did we ever laugh or find ourselves entertained by anything Bill Cosby did or said......(from the get-go, we sensed his public persona was a strictly a mask........but our jaw did drop when it was finally revealed the extent of that mask's phoniness......)

                   Matt Lauer? Charlie Rose?  Louis CK?  Kevin Spacey?  As far as we're concerned.......hit the road, assholes and don't let the back door bump your ass on the way out.....

                    But the Brave New World of #MeToo has also brought out the all-out lunacy of the......well, pick your own phrase.....the SJWs (Social Justice Warriors).....or Snowflakes.....who sniff out something to offend themselves in the most innocuous pop-culture trivia they can find......

                   Their latest target......the 1949 Frank Loesser song, "Baby It's Cold Outside".....written for Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban to sing to each other in "Neptune's Daughter"......which turned into a much beloved Christmastime song, performed countless times by countless singers for close to 70 years......

                   Not anymore.  Snowflakes have declared that the song's playful, romantic banter evokes visions of Bill Cosby plying his victims with drugged booze........so the song's gotta go. And radio stations pulled it from their holiday playlists.

                   Our simple response.........are you whack-a-doodles f*****g serious?   Maybe you creampuffs should watch more award shows, where rap artists perform songs that have to be bleeped out 18 times in the 4 minutes it takes to sing them.  Where's the outrage there?

                    Enough. The whole topic's too ridiculous to even keep talking about........except to say we're going to make it our mission to find and listen to every single version of "Baby It's Cold Outside" right up to Christmas day.........and happily, loudly sing along.........just like Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga did last year.....

                 

"BULLITT".......50 YEARS LATER, STILL THE KING OF COOL.......

Bullitt (1968)   Call it charisma, call it star power, call it Special Sauce.......whatever it was, Steve McQueen had it.......placing him in that select pantheon of actors who could lure moviegoers into theaters on their force of personality alone......

                Or, to put it in blunt studio chief terms, they put asses in seats.

                 None of his roles as the terse, cool-under-fire hero solidified McQueen's  'King Of Cool' image better than 'Bullitt'......

                 As San Francisco police detective Frank Bullitt, McQueen moved with a quiet relentless grace as he methodically dealt with gangsters, hit men and a reptilian politico (Robert Vaughn using Bullitt to further his own career.......

                   Does the film still hold up as it hits its 50th Anniversary?

                    Oh yeh........

                    And we still enjoyed everything that made it a hit a half-century ago......Lalo Schifrin's pulsating jazz score........the rationally explainable plotline.......Robert Vaughn's unctuous, slimy political manipulator, who stood in stark contrast to the straightforward modest decency of McQueen's cop........and naturally, the now iconic car chase,  McQueen's hair-rasing, nausea-inducing auto duel with the two hit men who foolishly attempt to stalk him......

                 Pardon us if we chuckle at the memory of a packed theater's collective gasp and laughter  as McQueen barked out "Bullshit!" to one of Vaughn's oily, corrupt entreaties.  Nobody had ever heard a major star in a major film say that word out loud......... (how times change....)

                  And unlike other fans of the film, we even liked Jacqueline Bisset in the thankless, throwaway role of McQueen's girlfriend........for no other reason than we got to watch the beyond beautiful Jacqueline Bisset in a movie  that was already a favorite of ours.....even without her. So....talk about icing on the cake.

                    British director Peter Yates, imported to direct 'Bullitt' because of the equally brilliant car chase he filmed in his previous movie "Robbery", gave the movie a stylistic unobtrusive mood to match McQueen's character perfectly.......the film hums along at a measured pace, stunning audiences with sudden eruptions of violence and action.

                     50 years later, "Bullitt" remains a 5 star (****) FIND OF FINDS.