'BOOKED FOR MURDER'.....A NOT-SO-FAMOUS ACTRESS INHERITS A HOUSE, A BOOKSTORE PLUS ARSON AND MURDER......

 Booked For Murder by P.J. Nelson (2024)

     I gravitate to a cozy mystery for the same reasons I think other readers do.......something about the setting, the characters or the peculiar situations of the crimes catches my attention, something that makes this particular cozy stand out from hundreds of others.

     "Booked For Murder' does have all the familiar tropes firmly in place...... small town where everybody knows everybody else, a bookstore to die for (and somebody does)., and a plus-sized cat lounging around at the most pivotal moments.

     The lead character (and amateur sleuth) Madeline Brimley is what initially drew me in. I'm a theater nerd/buff and Madeline's a failed actress of indeterminate age who's inherited a combo Victorian house-bookstore from her late Aunt Rose. Madeline's spotty, up-and-down theatrical career can't possibly equal the drama besetting her in her first few days of taking over the house and its store.

     Somebody torches the gazebo behind the house and Madeline receives threatening phone calls from what sounds like a backwoods hood. And worst of all, someone ends up stabbed to death in the store, maybe an unlucky innocent victim whom the killer mistook for Madeline. Even the worst play she ever acted in can't compete with this this level of life-threatening melodrama.......

     In true cozy fashion, our heroine ends up as part of trio of would-be sleuths, along her Aunt Rose's lifelong friend Philomena and local minister Gloria. Suspects abound and Madeline, alternately bold and foolish, attempts interrogating them with results ranging from confounding to downright perilous. And along the way, there's lots of witty asides referring back to her checkered career in the theater.

     A quick and mildly entertaining read, but with a few major problems in characterization and plotting. The author has some of ,well let's say the less educated characters talking like they escaped from a community theater production of 'Deliverance' and after the climactic reveal, the book rambles on as if we're simply content to hang out with Madeline and pals. I think it'll take a few more books in the series to earn that privilege from readers.

       3 stars (***

'WHAT THE WOODS TOOK'......TROUBLED TEENS TAKE ON WILDERNESS HORRORS......

 What The Woods Took by Courtney Gould (2024)

     Scary. Heartbreaking. Breathless. Gasp-inducing. And an incisive examination of five troubled, broken young souls, thrown into unimaginable horror.

     "What the Woods Took' manages to pack all of this into one page-turning package. After a relatively slow start, author Courtney Gould pits her five distressed teen characters against a terrifying mixture of every horror movie trope you've ever shivered through.

     Devin, Sheridan, Ollie, Aiden and Hannah, all given up on by exasperated parents and guardians, find themselves forcibly dragged into a wilderness survival program in the backwoods of Idaho. The guide-counselors in charge, barely older than their unhappy campers, are tasked with taking the group through a 50 day hike,.......presumably to instill self-reliance, self-worth and lose their bad attitudes.

     But things go, as we all knew they would.....horribly awry.

     Something's slightly 'off' about this neck of the woods and when their two guides disappear, the group's left to fend for themselves. Even as they squabble and wrestle with their long held inner demons, they become more aware that they're not alone in these woods. And whatever might lurk behind the trees doesn't have their best interests at heart.

     Author Courtney Gould creates perceptive, emotional portraits of her five characters, particularly, the two leads - angry free-with-her-fists Devin and sarcastic, bullying (but terribly vulnerable) Sheridan. The girls at first despise each other on sight and your heart aches for them as their own troubled pasts and current dangers serve to slowly but surely lower their guards with each other.

     One of those rare books that takes you on a frightening thrill ride but never forgets that its best special effects don't come from what creeps out from the dark, but from the humans you come to care about and fear for. I'd recommend buckling up and take the ride.

           5 stars (*****)

'GLADIATOR II'....SIR RIDLEY'S CGI TOGA PARTY.....

 Gladiator II (2024)   No, we come not to put the sword to Ridley Scott's mega-budgeted sequel to his 2000 epic with Russel Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix.......

         Were we not entertained?   Yes.

         But was this not another thrilling, heartrending epic like the first film?   Uh....nope. Not even close. 

         Director Scott threw hundreds of millions at this film, stuffing it with state-of-the-art CGI that wasn't available to him 24 years ago. 

         Final result?  A pale imitation of the first one, like a re-heated leftover meal.....yet another enslaved gladiator rising up against the Roman Empire. 

         We did have ourselves a fine old time watching it, but part of that's because large chunks of the film are unintentionally ridiculous and funny. 

         (This time around, the Empire's ruled by a set of psycho Bevis 'n Butthead teenage twins, one of them with mind of an 8 year old. You pray for their deaths as soon as you lay eyes on them......)

         For all of its sound, fury and heft, the film's lead player is an empty vessel, a charisma-free non-entity......tough to root for and that's a knife in this movie's gut.  Most of Paul Mescal's energy must have drained out during his gym sessions to give himself that formidable Barrel chest. 

         But speaking of charisma, Mescal's blah warrior-hero is easily outshined by the film's MVP, Denzel Washington. Playing a smiling, chatty, Machiavellian schemer, he's having the best evil time ever and we loved every minute of him.

         The only thing upstaging Denzel is the vast amount of CGI effects thrown at the film like one big Hail Mary pass.....

         Gladiator events reach delirious heights of hilarity. One of the Glads rides in on a CGI Rhino, putting more than one opponent on the horn of a dilemma....

           The second big event involves a horde of spindly CGI baboons, showing off their prodigious teeth at every opportunity. So we're not sure whether they're asking for dental work or somebody to end up as lunch for them. Whatever they're after, they look like the film retrieved them from the 'Delete' files of the 'Planet Of The Apes' CGI animators......

            But the wham-bammer's saved for the third event......in a flooded Colosseum, arena, the Glads stage a full naval battle, complete with flaming arrows and live sharks in the water. Yikes. 

            What a venue, this Colosseum. We can't even imagine the next event they'd book......Disney On Ice?  The Taylor Swift Eras tour? A Chariot Demolition Derby?  (Oh, wait a sec, they did that one in "Ben Hur"....)

            Okay, we'll give 'Gladiator II' this much.....it didn't bore us. It may harbor delusions that it's improving and deepening the original, but c'mon, give us a friggin' break. This is nothing but shameless corporate product designed to squeeze some ticket money out of anyone with fond memories of the first film. 

              If you're going, sit back, calm down and enjoy it for what it is, a CGI circus for some mild amusement. 

               Just don't show up expecting some kind of great movie.

              2 stars (**).

          

'DR. MABUSE VS. SCOTLAND YARD'......THE GERMANIC SUPERVILLIAN STRIKES AGAIN.....

 Dr. Mabuse vs. Scotland Yard (1963)    For those who didn't go all tingly as the mere mention of Dr. Mabuse, let us fill you in.....

       He's a mad, mad mixture of Professor Moriarity, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Fu Manchu....a German spawned criminal mastermind who's been haunting international cinema since the Silent Era. 

       And like all iconic supervillians, you can't keep a bad man down.......his evil spirit just floats around between movies until it possesses somebody else, birthing a new improved re-conditioned Mabuse. 

           Here, once again, Mabuse is loose.....and his victims end up dead as a cooked goose. And there's no calling a truce with Mabuse....(okay, we'll stop now....)

         We harbored high hopes of enjoying a rollicking guilty pleasure with this movie, which is very much in the style those 'Krimi' creepy murder mysteries based on Edgar Wallace novels. (You know the ones......Lots of fake London fog, homicidal hunchbacks, screaming young heiresses, etc, etc.....)

         So many familiar faces too.....the cool tall blonder than blonder Peter Von Eyck, a young Klaus Kinski (!), the portly Werner Peters and imperious Wolfgang Preiss, both well knows to audiences for playing Nazis in big budget Hollywood war movies. 

          And what an enticing plot.....the evil Mabuse, who favors hypnotizing people to bend them to his will, comes across a more high tech way to accomplish just that. 

           Oh how we wish we could tell you how much cheesy fun this is to watch. .......

            It's not. Hardly worth a few passing snickers......

            It plods along for a very slow 81 minutes, with Mabuse zapping people's brains to link them up to his own nasty thoughts.....(hence turning ordinary folk into spur-of-the-moment assassins.

          If you don't count the brain zapping, nothing bizarre or extraordinary keeps this film from becoming an obscure, forgettable mess. So don't get too excited at the shrieking jazz horns on the soundtrack,  always promising a thrill ride that never happens. 

              We've forgotten it already, so you don't need wasting time to remember it......1 star (*).

'CHRISTMAS IN THE SPOTLIGHT' & 'HOLIDAY TOUCHDOWN: A CHIEFS LOVE STORY'......HALLMARK AND LIFETIME CASH IN ON TAYLOR SWIFT/TRAVIS KELCE

 Christmas In The Spotlight (2024) & Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story (2024)

       "Deck The Halls with Swift and Kelce,tra-la-la-la-la...la-la-la-la"

        Thus spoke the Lords of the Lifetime and Hallmark channels currently flooding us with their annual onslaught of Christmas romances......

       And what romance captured the Zeitgeist more than that of Pop Princess Taylor Swift and football star Travis Kelce?

        No wonder the streaming-TV magnates salivated over high ratings and advertiser dollars at the thought of cashing in on America's Official Lovebirds. 

         So they presented us with their very own sanitized-for-your-protection versions.......

         But only one of them, the Lifetime 'Christmas In The Spotlight' had the nerve to actually depict characters blatantly modeled after Swift and Kelce. 

         The Hallmark Film, officially sanctioned and endorsed by Kansas City Chiefs with real Chiefs notables in cameos, took a tamer, respectful route. It simply grafted a standard, generic Hallmarkian couple into a background steeped in Chiefs lore.  

        No surprise here, really. The Lifetime movie is way more fun and fascinating to watch......it takes a full plunge into what we've all contemplated: how does a romance work between a worshipped pop star and a popular jock? What the hell would they even have in common, other than public adoration?

        (We haven't figured that out ourselves. But ain't love grand?)

        So the road to love-dovey-kissy-kissy becomes just as bumpy and hazardous as we imagined. And the script, unfettered with Hallmark limitations, freely doses its dialogue with Swift song name drops. No doubt Swifties everywhere squealed and chuckled at every Taylor meta-quip that made its way into the plot. 

        The Hallmark movie holds weightier issues on its mind......the power of fandom faith to carry on through subsequent generations.  Here, the resident cutie-pie represents the third generation of an  extended family of Chiefs fans. 

          We didn't bother to sort out the large cast assembled to play various parents and grandparents......except for  Ed Begley Jr who looks and sounds like he's heading for big goalpost in the sky.

         The leads are bland, the Christmas-y feels are minimal, but as you might expect, there's a ton of Chiefs stuff in the plotting and on display. Outside of Kansas City, you can make out the sounds of millions of yawns.......(or did Hallmark not realize that football team love is fiercely territorial?)

          Best moment:  For a mushy sentimental finale, the all the family's generations address the crowd at a fully packed Chiefs game. Finally, coach Andy Reid yells at them to get off the field. 

           Bravo, Andy. We would've loved it better if you'd just sent Travis Kelce to physically shove 'em all back into the bleachers. 

           As this blog's designated referee between these two movies BQ calls a penalty on 'Holiday Touchdown'....boredom. 2 stars (**).

            We immediately award on additional star to "Christmas In The Spotlight", bringing it up to 3 stars (***).  At least this movie's team did an actual fictional copy of Kelce-Swift and even eked out a bit of fun with it. 

'DUST'.....AMID CLIMATE CHANGE CHAOS, PARTIALLY DEAF TEEN COMES OF AGE.......

 Dust by Alison Stine (2024)

     So much of this book did truly haunt me and pull on the heart strings with its depiction of a teen girl besieged by both a catastrophic climate and parents who've essentially imprisoned her away from the outside world.

     Set in what I'm assuming is the not too distant future, the book offers up a preview of dreaded coming attractions - overwhelming floods in one part of the country and terrible droughts and dust storms in another.

     Thea's father, obsessed with premonitions, has taken her, her little sister and mother away from the floods of Ohio to try farming amid the stark arid plains of Bloodless Valley in Colorado. It's an unforgiving landscape of little or no water for crops and afflicted with whirlwinds of dust that build into cataclysmic storms the rival those that swept across the land in the 1930's depression.

     Even worse for Thea, whose hearing is partially impaired, her father imposes a 'live off the grid' life for his family.. Meaning no friends, no phone, no internet, no social contact with outsiders unless necessary and only the most amateur attempts at home schooling. that don't interfere with farm chores.

     Allowed a part time job in their little town to help family finances, Thea begins to experience everything she's been denied - friendships, the town library, a sense of empathetic community and the sweet stirrings of first love with a deaf boy who can teach her how to converse with ASL. And even as the brutal existence in Bloodless Valley reaches near Biblicial proportions, Thea faces a reckoning for her to break free of her father's severe constraints, and for better or worse rejoin the world at large.

     Author Alison Stine vividly creates a bleak, nightmarish environment surrounding Thea and all the well drawn charcters who fall into her orbit, forever changing her. 'Dust' must have really kept a grip on me when I realized how fast I found myself racing through it. That's the sure sign of highly recommended read.

         5 stars (*****).

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'WICKED'.....THE GREAT AND POWERFUL UNIVERSAL STUDIO COMMANDS YOU TO WATCH THIS MOVIE.....AND DAMN WELL LOVE IT.

 Wicked (2024)   Has there ever been a movie musical more self-congratulatory and self-loving than this one?

        Has there ever been such a deluge of corporate cross-promotions of a movie than this one?

         Has there even been a movie more hammered into the pop culture universe than this one?

         Phew......we're exhausted already and we haven't even started this review yet. 

         In the golden age of movie musicals, the films existed simply to show you a good time.....make you hum the tunes, appreciate all the craft that went into the singing, dancing and staging.  Musicals just wanted to lift your spirits for a few hours and show you a good time. 

          'Wicked' doesn't want to just entertain you.

           The movie adaptation of the hit Broadway show wants to pound you on the head with all its many glories......and keep pounding you until you fall to your knees and pray to it. 

            'Wicked' doesn't beg for applause. It demands worship. 

             And you damn well better get in line for your opportunity to praise it the skies. 

             As for us?  Nah. Pass. 

             Let's leave the rarified air of the Land of Oz and get real for a few moments......

            First off, it's so bloated with ego (the studio's, the show's creators, the filmmakers) that it's overlong by at least a half an hour. It's a punishing sit for any reasonable adult. God only knows how antsy kids get through it. 

           It's stuffed to its rafters with dead, superfluous scenes that cry out for an editor.......like a Blu-Ray special edition where every useless deleted scene was jammed back into the movie. 

            And worst of all, it falls into that unholy practice that we'd hoped we'd seen the last of with the 'Twilight', 'Hunger Games' and 'Harry Potter' series.....the spectacle of studios, their mouths foaming with greed, dragging out their IP tentpoles to excessive lengths. 

           Yes, this whole 'Wicked' nightmare will return, like a horror movie slasher, for a second half next year. 

          (Oh, and by the way....memo to filmmakers:  Nobody gives a flying f*** how Galinda's name became Glinda. Give it a rest, will ya?)

        (Oh and second by the way....do we really need to see the CGI monkeys experience sprouting their wings as if going through the shrieking agonies of childbirth? Was that footage left over from a Blumhouse movie?)

            Now you might ask, is there anything at all in it we liked?

           We did.

           Cynthia Erivo provides a beating heart and resilient soul that this movie needs. She's by far the film's shining MVP. 

             We nurse a sneaking suspicion that Ariana Grande's very funny Good Witch is an only slightly exaggerated version of her public persona.......a self-absorbed, superstar pixie forever floating in her own bubble, far removed from us mere mortals.  Well, whatever. Her comic timing is impeccable and why studios haven't snapped her up for multiple rom-coms is beyond us.

             (Which brings us to the best comedic meta joke we've seen all year (and that includes Ryan Reynolds' endless Disney snarking).......the sight of original Broadway Glinda Kristin Chenowith slamming her hand over Ariana Grande's mouth before she tried to sing.....)

              Jeff Goldblum as the addled, mumbling, vaguely sinister Wizard Of Oz?  Genius casting, especially when it's revealed the Wiz is a Trumpian fascist, keeping himself in power by giving Oz-ians minority groups to hate......which apparently covers Munchkins, talking goats and assorted weird looking people.  So those grumpy apple trees from the 1939 film would be shipped off to internment camps.....and the Horse Of A Different Color would have to stay white all the time.

          And yes, the dance numbers go all out with the kind of aggressive Broadway pizzazz that earned 'Wicked' its original reputation. 

         But Universal Studios decision to grab America by the throat and insist we anoint the movie with our undying love left us weary. Enough already. 

         2 & 1/2 stars (**/12)  A shame, because somewhere deep in that overkilled, overdone mess, there's a 5 star 1 hour and 50 minute movie struggling to get out.  Maybe next year........