Author Archives: bookshelfbattle

Nov 26 2022
4 Comments
Movies

Movie Review – Ticket to Paradise (2022)

Even the oldsters need love, 3.5 readers.

BQB here with a review of the wacky rom com, Ticket to Paradise.

I gotta be honest. I have avoided this one for the following reasons:

#1 – I dislike most rom coms. Not because of the romance or the comedy or the blending of the two. It’s just while I love all kinds of crazy action sci-fi films with monsters and aliens and spaceships and heroes surviving massive explosions, I find these more believable than two people finding long lasting love despite all the odds, which tells you a lot about my jaded love life, or the lack thereof.

#2 – George Clooney is in his 60s. Julia Roberts is in her mid 50s. Both were in movies when I was a little kid yet they are trying to pull off roles as early to mid 40 somethings who met in college in the late 90s, got married quick, had a kid, then got divorced and spent the last 20 years despising one another. As someone who is in the age range they are playing, someone who did go to college in the late 90s, I kinda resent these oldsters playing early 40 somethings.

Seriously, when they put out the commercial where the kids are dancing and George and Julia are wallflowers till they ask the DJ to play something more their speed so he plays House of Pain’s Jump Around – “Bullshit!” I cried. Bullshit, I say. Pardon my French, but Bullshit. I remember the time when House of Pain was popular, G and J. George, you were killing vampires in From Duck till Dawn and Julia, you were the prostitute with a heart of gold in Pretty woman and I was still in freaking braces so stop it. You two are so far from being young enough to have danced to Jump Around at a college party, you AARP carrying geriatric schmucks.

OK but once we get past that, yeah, it’s actually a charming enough movie.

The plot?

As mentioned above, Georgia (Julia) and David (George) Cotton were college sweethearts who got married right after graduation. Theirs was a fun, whirlwind romance at first but at last, as they got buried by work, bills and responsibilities, they grew to despise and resent one another, each believing the other had cost them opportunities, a great life, a great career, oh the greatness I could have had if I hadn’t met you, never realizing that perhaps their love was the greatness they were seeking all along.

For the past 25 years, they have only stayed in contact for the sake of their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever). As an early scene where they attend Lilly’s law school graduation shows, whenever they are in the same room, they cannot help but heap large portions of insults upon one each other, many of which, to the film’s credit, are funny. The mental gymnastics they go through to blame each other for any little thing that goes wrong is a laugh riot, and sadly, not unlike many a dysfunctional relationship we have all likely seen at some point in our lives.

In true rom com fashion, Kaitlyn visits the tropical paradise of Bali as a post law school romp before she snags a big job at a law firm, yet those plans are derailed when she meets hunky Balinese seaweed farmer Gede (Maxime Bouttier), falls instantly in love, and the two decide to get married a mere two months later.

Naturally, Georgia and David are irate at this notion and so when they fly out to attend the wedding, they pledge to put their differences aside in the name of a truce designed to shut down the wedding at all costs and put Lilly back on the path to being a corporate lawyer.

Comedy hijinx ensue as the duo concoct elaborate schemes to tear their daughter’s romance asunder, all which blow up spectacularly in their faces. As is obvious even in the trailer, in the course of working together to deny their offspring love, the old flames of their long lost love are rekindled. Now that they are oldsters who have been knocked around by life quite a bit, do they realize that all the imperfections the refused to accept in each other when they were young are now acceptable because if its one thing old people understand, it is that you’ll wait forever if you wait for life to be perfect?

Naturally, there are a lot of plot holes to ignore. Lilly did all that work in law school only to throw it away, though it is indicated she only did it to make her parents happy and she now truly believes that being a Balinese seaweed farmer’s wife is her true calling. Even so, the hundreds of thousands of dollars of law school debt could only be absorbed by a kid with rich parents, which she is, but this is never mentioned outright. A sad reality of life is that higher education is a dangerous gamble, one which kids often belly up to the table at a time when they understand very little. They take out massive loans under the assumption the degree will lead to big buckaroos, only to suffer when they don’t find that high paying job, or they do but realize it isn’t for them and have to do it forever to pay those loans off or seek out something they do like but remain forever crushed by debt. Only when you have rich parents can you throw it all away and become a seaweed farmer.

STATUS: Fun. Funny. Not something you’d watch again and again but worth the time of one viewing. George and Julia are two of the last big movie stars so it’s nice to see them yukking it up on screen. In an era where talent is getting increasingly cheap, we may never see their likes again. Both are beautiful rich people playing beautiful rich people doing undignified things for laughs, so that’s surreal.

Bonus points:

#1 – the film focuses on the theme that the best marriages require the perfect time, the perfect place and the perfect circumstances. Maybe you meet someone and you could have been great if you hadn’t been focused on building a career or a recent disappointment in life. Maybe you meet them but alas, you have to go home to LA and she to New York. Maybe you two could be happy if you lived together on a mountain goat farm but unfortunately you live busy urban lifestyles. So focus on building those things that make you happy and love will solve itself, noble reader.

#2 – The ever present conundrum of a kid deciding what will please their parents vs what will please them. I think often young people don’t understand that their parents harp on them to do practical things because they are old and have been knocked around by life. They know big bills and debt are coming your way and know in the long run, you’ll be happier if you can pay them than if you are living on the street giving hobo hand jobs for crack because you tried and failed to chase a silly dream.

The only caveat I’d add is that in today’s economy, trying to secure any job that pays a life sustaining salary requires the applicant to engage in a Mortal Kombat style battle royale for victory against any and all opponents. Ergo, when it’s a freaking uphill climb to get a job in the seemingly practical world of, say, auto insurance claims adjusting, then you might as well just make that uphill climb toward being an actor or an artist or some other thing that parents are mentally trained to tell you to avoid because you’ll totally make big bucks in the law or dentistry or HVAC repair. Mom and Dad don’t realize we’re in a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome job market now, and it is a struggle to get almost any job.

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Nov 26 2022
12 Comments
Movies

Movie Review – A Christmas Story Christmas (2022)

A Christmas Story…Story? No way. Come on, Hollywood. You’ll shoot your collective eye out.

BQB here with a review.

Actually, it’s not so bad.

If you own a TV, then surely you have seen 1983’s A Christmas Story. TBS runs it 24 hours a day on Christmas and I can still recall laughing up a storm the first time I saw it. Even years later, having seen it a zillion times, it’s hard not to leave it on in the background while you go about your holiday merriment.

Alas, the sequels didn’t come until much later, presumably because the film didn’t really become the much beloved classic until cable TV started blasting the crap out of it over the airwaves in the 1990s. By then I can only presume all involved had moved on and unable to make a sequel. Either that or is a single ever possible for such a great film?

Ah but once the film grew a big fanbase, the sequels were attempted. 1994’s My Summer Story is largely unknown. 2012’s straight to video A Christmas Story 2 was cute but ultimately forgettable.

Thus I was surprised a new sequel was attempted this year.. It stars original Ralphie Peter Billingsley, though when I first learned that I doubted if that was enough to save it. Turns out, the answer is a resounding, “Not bad.”

The plot? in the 1970s, Middle aged Ralphie lives in Chicago with wife Sandy (Erin Hayes) and kids Mark and Julie. Ralphie has taken a year off to write an epic sci-fi novel, which seems like something Ralphie would do, given his love of pop culture and all things nerdy as a kid in the original film.

Alas, the publishing houses have all told Ralphie to eat the proverbial big one and as the end of the year draws nigh, he knows he needs to either publish or perish, to make money on a writing career or give up and take a boring old job and get a steady paycheck.

At least he has a planned Christmas visit with his parents to look forward to, but sadly, his old man, “The Old Man” passes and a loving tribute to the late Darren McGavin, who passed in 2006, is paid.

Ah, but the older we get, the more adults tend to, well I was going to say they don’t fear death but they still do, it’s just, by the time you’ve hit the elderly stage, you’ve run out of tears to cry, for you have experience so much loss already. This, Ralphie’s mom (played by Airplane comedy legend and owner of the sweetest voice ever Julie Hagerty who takes on the role as Melinda Dillon has retired from acting) urges Ralphie, Sandy and the kids to buck up and have the best Christmas ever, for this is what the Old Man would have wanted.

Comedy hijinx are mixed with somber moments. There are plenty of Easter eggs and references to the original film, while this one tries its best not to so much repeat old gags but play homage to them, or at least repeat running themes. Adult Ralphie still has a wild imagination that gets him into trouble and riddles him with anxiety as he pictures the smallest hangup leading to horrifying consequences. Bullies go to war with Ralphie’s kids who must learn to stand up for themselves. Comical injuries abound. Ralphie still wants to be an old west sheriff because what Baby Boomer didn’t?

A cavalcade of ex-child actors from the original film, now all grown up and in the middle of life, stop by, and it is surreal. Not knocking anyone but as you see adult actors reprise roles like Flick (the kid whose tongue froze to the light pole) or Schwartz (was he the kid who double dog dared him? I forget) and the once evil bully Scott Farkus (can bad kids mend their ways in adulthood?) you can’t help but think time is really a bastard. All these kids were so cute once and Hollywood was happy to capitalize on their cuteness, but sadly none of them really grew up with the looks that Hollywood wants to see in leading men. Even so, as a fan I’m happy to see them, like walking around your home town and bumping into an old friend. Even Ralphie’s little bro, an all grown up Randy drops by.

Does it all add up to something? I don’t want to give it away but if you think about how adult Ralphie yearns to be a famous writer, and author Jean Carroll leant his iconic voice to the original film but did so in the role of adult Ralphie telling the story of one wacky Christmas in his youth…OK I’ll let you figure it ou.

STATUS: Shelfworthy. If you have HBO Max, it’s free and worth your time. It won’t win awards. It won’t be something you’ll want to watch again and again. What it is is a loving tribute, a rare sequel that straddles the line between capitalizing on your love of the old flick but still remaining true to its spirit. There are sad moments, funny moments, emotional moments. If you’ve ever lost a parent, you know the pain adult Ralphie experience, the expectation of an adult to keep moving on even though a person who comprised a large part of their world has shuffled off the mortal coil. Everyone involved did well here.

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Nov 24 2022
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Happy Thanksgiving 3.5 Readers

I am thankful for all 3.5 of you though sometimes I wish you would be fruitful and multiply and give my 7 readers.

Nov 20 2022
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Music

Sam Smith’s Unholy

Sigh. I’m way more into this song than I should be.

First, it has an awesome beat. I have no business dancing, but when I sit down, turn on the laptop and play the song, my foot jiggles in time.

It only came out in October. The past few weeks it entered my brain a little here and there. Hmm. That’s catchy. Where did I hear that before? SNL made fun of it with two wannabe world’s greatest bartenders gyrating to it while acting like they are mixing fabulous drinks but in reality, just dropping the glasses and making huge messes.

Then I started listening to the lyrics. At first I thought like, yeah it’s a fantasy about a husband that sneaks out on his wife and goes to the strip club to get busy with all the strippers. I admit, I was once a young idiot who aspired to one day be a great rich man who could buy the company of many a beautiful woman. Now I am old and have the wisdom to know a) that’s a one way ticket to VD city and b) honestly, no word of a lie, I’d rather just keep the money. Once you grow up, learn the joys of capitalism and how it is possible to invest your money and make more money, thus putting your money to work for you, the appeal of loose women in it for the cash loses its allure. I joke about wanting a trophy wife but just give me a nice woman who can stand being in the same room as me for long periods of time.

But it’s nice to fantasize right? Until I realized the singer is Sam Smith who is super gay and to quote Jerry Seinfeld, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just far from my cup of tea because I don’t know how women can stand men I’m just thankful that they do so I don’t know why men want to volunteer to be with men. So suddenly it dawns on me that Sam’s idea of “getting hot at the body shop” is far different than how I would picture a husband getting hot at the body shop.

The video confirms it. Sam is singing about a dude who cheats on his wife with other dudes. The big reveal at the end is that the wife he is cheating on is also a dude. Am I allowed to say they are dudes if they truly believe in their hearts that they are ladies? Please forgive me for not knowing. I am old.

It gets confusing because Kim Petras comes in the middle with a whole riff about how she’s willing to hump dudes for cash and designer clothes, so…you know what? It has a good beat. I’m just going to pretend it’s about a straight man getting jiggy at a female strip club. I don’t want to go to any strip clubs to get jiggy but it is fun to think about.

Sam can have his view on what this song is about and I can have mine.

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Nov 14 2022
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Movies, Uncategorized

BQB’s Classic Movie Reviews – Airplane! (1980)

Seriously, you can’t be reviewing a movie this old, BQB.

Yes, I am…and don’t call me Shirley.

A review? What is it? It’s a summary and commentary of a feature film, but that’s not important right now.

This is one of those movies that a child of the 1980s knows by heart. Growing up, even well into the 90s and early 2000s, it was on TV all the time. You’d catch bits and pieces of it and have a good laugh. It really is a silly masterpiece, the likes of which had never been seen before, and will undoubtedly ever be seen again. Many have tried, but the team of the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams were a one of a kind trio. They went on to more success with Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun series as well as the Top Gun parody Hot Shots. Others would go on to try parody movies that would only fizzle. A number of parody flicks released in the 2000s by lesser talents were so God awful that the parody genre pretty much died out in that decade.

What is a parody? Take an established film and give it a mocking re-write. Throw in as much mocking as you can about other movies and or subjects as you can. The uninitiated may not be aware that Airplane is itself, a parody of the 1957 film Zero Hour! That film’s legit plot was about ex-WWII pilot Ted Stryker, called upon to make a split second decision that got a lot of his fellow pilots killed. Years later, he is torn apart and wracked by guilt, unable to function, often fired from several jobs. His wife, Ellen, an airline stewardess, dumps him with a note, saying she will start a new life in a new city her airline job will deliver her to. Ted buys a ticket and hops aboard, hoping to beg her for one last chance. The crew and pilots get sick from food poisoning. Ted is the only one who has flown and must land the plane. He does so while being talked down by an ex air force colleague who hates his guts over his war mistake. In the end, Ted lands the plane, is redeemed, loved by his wife and can move on to a happier life.

Airplane! is literally that same movie, except with lots of shenanigans and silliness. In fact, I believe the rights to Zero Hour! were bought just so ZAZ could make a silly re-do for Paramount.

Don’t call me Shirley. I take my coffee black like my men. Jim never orders a second cup of coffee at home. Stewardess, I speak jive. The list of hilarious jokes goes on and on. So memorable. So quotable. And yet, sitting down and watching it from beginning to end, I hadn’t done that in a long time. Even the lesser known jokes and bits are pretty hysterical. It is a laugh riot.

And it brought back memories. Sigh. Oh, as a little kid I really loved comedy and hoped maybe I’d be a comedian one day. I worshipped ZAZ, between Airplane and the Naked Gun, to the point where I tracked down a copy of their first foray, the lesser known Kentucky Fried Movie. Not their best, but they were just getting started. Basically just a series of dumb sketches tied together.

Eh, but I grew up. Went the so-called practical route. I say so-called because the practical route was supposed to be easier yet nothing in life is easy so the older I get, the more I wonder if it all just isn’t a crap shoot and if it’s hard to make a living as a ditch digger or an accountant or a bus driver or a teacher or a cop or a pharmacist or a podiatrist or what have you then you might as well do what you love and try to find a job in the silly movie game.

But that ship has long sailed. At least I have my silly blog.

Cue the obligatory, “Oh, this movie would never be made today in these woke times” rant.

Nope, it wouldn’t. First, there are naked gratuitous titties. In one scene where the passengers flip out and run around the plane going nuts, a woman runs by for a close up of her jiggly bosoms. Harvey Weinstein’s evil doings put an end to that. Harvey was a sex fiend for 30 years so now every director in Tinsel Town is afraid to ask an actress to take her top off. You’ll never see a set of nude sweater puppets on film ever again. Thanks Harvey. Jackass.

Second, there’s the funny scene when the woman flips out. Starts shouting, “I gotta get outta here!” One person slaps her. The next shakes her. Suddenly, there’s a long line of people brandishing weapons waiting for their turn to torture her. I never really saw this as a joke about abusing women. ZAZ pokes fun at movie tropes throughout this flick, and here they are mocking the movie trope where someone freaks out, so another person slaps them or shakes them and yells at them to calm down. I mean, seriously, is that really the best move? Someone is cracking under pressure, I don’t think smacking them would really help. It’s like no one who ever wrote a movie thought that if a person is flipping out, maybe you ought to put your arm around them and say, “There, there. It’ll all be OK.” But no. Every character in movie world is somehow trained to see a person suffering a panic attack and sock them in the jaw like they’re a wannabe Sugar Ray Leonard.

There’s the sick little girl who makes funny faces, near death because the stewardess playing a song to cheer her up on the guitar keeps accidentally slapping out her IV whenever she moves the guitar around. That would be seen as ableist hate speech now.

Don’t even get me started on the scene where Ted joins the peace corps, visits a tribe in Africa, hands them a basketball and the tribesmen start dribbling and dunking with the skill of the best NBA players.

Stewardess, do you have any light reading? How about this one page leaflet? Famous Jewish Sports Legends.

The Jive guys speaking Jive like it is a foreign language with subtitles.

Sigh. Jokes that would never make the cut today. I suppose we can debate whether or not that’s a good thing. As I watch the film, I get the sense that here is an airplane full of people of all different races, colors, creeds, religions, backgrounds, ages. They all came together to survive a doomed flight, and the ZAZ team made fun of everyone, not in an attempt to be mean, but maybe just maybe in the sense that if we can learn to laugh with (and not at) each other, then maybe we can learn to get along.

Gotta be honest though. When I was a kid, I just thought the pilot asking the boy if he’d ever seen gladiator movies was just a strange, silly man. Today as an adult I realize, yeah the joke is that the pilot is a sex pervert attempting to “groom” the boy. Sigh. Parents, keep your kids away from adult men who like gladiator movies.

Bonus points that the film took known Hollywood tough guys like Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves and got them to basically do their same tough guy schtick, but while delivering silly lines in their tough guy style. Leslie Nielsen, long a serious actor, would go on to a longer second act as a comic actor due to this film.

Double bonus points for Julie Haggerty. She really is the perfect combination of beautiful and sweet. Maybe it’s just the character she is playing, yet deep down every man wants a wife who is beautiful yet kind. Often times in our society, the beautiful don’t have any reason to be kind. Eh, then again, there are a lot of mean ugly people too.

At any rate, there’s a scene where Ted (Robert Hayes) is in the hospital after the war and he does a spit take. Julie just sort of takes a gallon of spit to her face, shakes her hands and cringes like she expected it (not that she knew the spit was coming as an actress but that her character knew this was what Ted was like so knew the spit was coming) and just goes right on talking. Hard to explain. You just have to watch it.

BTW, I can’t count the number of times when I or another kid I knew growing up would pretend to have hard time drinking a glass of water and be like, “Ha ha! I have a drinking problem!”

STATUS: Worthy of the highest shelf! I can’t go on long enough about how great this film is and how it inspired me as a kid, even inspires me today. We will never see its like again, not just because the ZAZ team thought they could never top it, and not because of how many wannabes tried and failed, but alas, these jokes are out of style.

Surely, we can debate long and hard over whether that’s a good thing…and don’t call me Shirley.

Catch it on HBOMax.

SIDENOTE: Woke problems aside, there’s also the issue of audiences being less willing to suspend disbelief and less appreciative of good humor. So many of the jokes are just word play. The running joke is someone says something, the other says what is it, the first gives a definition but that’s not important now.

Stewardess – there’s a problem in the cockpit.

Ted – The cockpit? What is it?

Stewardess – its the little room at the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that’s not important now.

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Nov 13 2022
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Movies

BQB’s Classic Movie Reviews – Misery (1990)

Caca doody poopy, 3.5 readers.

Caca doody poopy, indeed.

BQB here with a review of this horror classic.

I was flipping through HBO Max’s selections the other day and this one popped up. James Caan, who passed this year, is the star, so I figured I was overdue for a re-watch. I hadn’t seen it since a kid.

The plot? Famed horror novelist Stephen King brings to life his worst nightmare, likely with a douse of parody of his most bothersome fans. We’re not talking about the typical fan who asks for an autograph. We’re talking about the nutjobs who live, breathe and think about their favorite author’s writings so much that they a) lose their minds and b) believe they have the right to dictate what the other does with their favorite characters.

Case in point. New York City based novelist Paul Sheldon has become rich and famous from a series of romance novels about the character Misery Chastain. In an early scene with his agent, played by Lauren Bacall, yes she of Casablanca fame, Paul laments that he feels the Misery series is schlock, and though he’s grateful it gave him a name and a fortune, he intends to write one last book where Misery is killed off so he can move on to write novels that would be less commercially successful but more critically acclaimed to show off his brilliance.

Off he heads to Colorado, where his longtime practice is to hole himself up in a countryside hotel away from the world and focus his writing. When his new novel is done, he sets out on the long drive back to NYC, only to accidentally run his car off the road during a snowstorm.

Local Nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) happens upon the wreck and carries Paul to safety. He awakes days later, confined to a bed in Annie’s house. His legs are broken, leaving him to either stay in bed or move about in a wheelchair.

At first, Annie seems a godsend. How lucky was Paul that a nurse found him and fixed him up? She comes across as a fan of his books, but merely of the starstruck variety. Yes, of course I’d be happy to answer all your questions about my books, Annie, and sure you can read my new manuscript. You saved my life, after all.

Alas, what starts as a series of little white fibs turns into boldface lies as Paul realizes that Annie has no real intention of ever letting him go and that due to his immobile condition, he is dependent on a wack job if he wishes to keep living. The first day or two, “the roads are still covered with snow and the phone lines are down so the hospital is unreachable and no one can send an ambulance” is believable but when she’s still singing the same old song and dance weeks later, Paul knows something is up.

From there it is a game of cat and mouse. Paul contrives schemes to take Annie out only to be foiled. Annie tortures and punishes Paul until she eventually drops the pretense of snowy roads and downed phone lines and just openly admits he is her prisoner and she will never allow him to leave. Old newspaper clippings indicate she has been suspected of, yet never convicted by, local law enforcement of all sorts of evil doings in the past.

Everything culminates in a final showdown over Paul’s new book. Psycho fan Annie is uber pissed when she learns that Paul has killed Misery off and orders a re-write, pronto. Paul declines at first, but eventually sees a re-write as the distraction he just might need to lull Annie into a false sense of security so he can strike.

All in all, I have to assume that Stephen King has had his share of psycho fans in his day, people who enjoyed his books but got way too personal and creepy about it. This was his way at poking fun at them, as well as the jerk fans who aren’t so crazed that they’d kidnap him or anything but they feel like they have a right to boss him around about his creative decisions, tell him to write this, don’t write that, freak out over his decisions, etc.

This was a boon for both actors. James Caan saw great success with his role as Sonny in the Godfather, but his career waned in the 80s before this film helped him resurface. Somehow, he straddles the line between coming across as an intellectual type capable of literally prowess and the rough and tumble type who has no compunction about bashing his captor over the head if that’s what it takes to escape.

Meanwhile, Kathy Bates, a relative unknown at the time (and I hate to admit it but obviously not the typical Hollywood hottie actress Tinsel Town is known for rallying around) soared to super stardom in the 90s, all thanks to Stephen King’s creation of a psycho nurse who loves reading romance novels but gets depressed that she’ll never have a life as exciting as the characters she reads about, so takes out her frustrations with a double life of murder and mayhem, all the while maintaining the persona of a nice lady who refuses to say naughty words. Murderous fits of rage are fine but naughty words? Never.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. A 32 old film that holds up to modern woke standards. Nothing really stood out to me as violating today’s rules of wokery. If anything, it is exceedingly woke for casting a woman as a psycho murderer and being strong enough to get plenty of licks in during gruesome fight scenes with a man who once played a notorious mobster. So yeah, one might say this film was ahead of its time.

SIDENOTE: Dude, seriously. We often laugh at today’s superhero movies where the tiny five foot tall, 90 pound waif-like starlet taps a 300 pound brute with her pinky finger and he goes flying, but when you watch this, there are scenes where Annie comes at Paul like a football linebacker high on crack, PCP and bath salts. There is a legit sense of fear and danger, a distinct possibility that Paul might be overcome in the fight and end up beaten to a pulp by a female.

Hmm. How can I put this delicately? Hollywood, if you want believable fight scenes where women look like they are actually kicking a man’s ass (instead of just requiring us to believe they are defying the laws of physics), hire larger women to fill these butt kicking roles. Somewhere out there, a large woman was robbed of the Black Widow role by Scarlett Johanson.

DOUBLE SIDENOTE: I watched this as a kid and thought it was scary, you know, because it is about a crazy woman who holds a man hostage and beats him and tortures him. Today, I found it scary because I am now so old that Kathy Bates’s Annie looks young to me. That’s less of a complaint about this film than it is about Father Time, though.

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Nov 05 2022
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shop buddy

GET A FREE BOOK FOR FREE (BECAUSE IT IS FREE)

Paying money for stuff = BOO!

Getting free stuff = hooray!

Get your own FREE copy of my first novel, Shop Buddy, 3.5 readers. It’s totally free, which means you don’t have to pay for it.

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Nov 05 2022
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Movies

Movie Review – Barbarian (2022)

Barbarism and Detroit, but I repeat myself! Zing!

BQB here with a review of what may be the year’s best horror film.

Generally, I’m not a big horror movie fan. I have enough horror going on in my own life to invite more.

However, once in awhile there’s one that gets good buzz and you watch it and discover it is crafted well enough with enough mystery and intrigue that you have to tell the 3.5 readers of your blog about it.

So let me tell you about it, 3.5 readers.

Actually, I can’t tell you much. Like many horror movies, there’s a house with a scary basement. When a visitor makes the dumb decision to venture into said scary basement, even scarier things happen. If I were to tell you what scary things are lurking down there, it would give the whole movie away.

However, most horror movies aren’t just about the monsters, killers, or creatures that kill with reckless abandon. They are allegories for something deeper. Halloween was about an America where it was becoming less safe to leave your doors unlocked. Scream was about 1990s angsty teenagers with no purpose finding evil purpose in murder. Saw in a macabre way was about appreciating life, and if you’d be willing to murder others if trapped in a sadistic puzzle box just to save your precious life, then why don’t you, you know, do the good things every day to preserve your life like eating your veggies and working out and making good decisions for yourself and those you love?

Here, the twin horrors are “toxic masculinity” and the urban decay that allows bad things to go unnoticed by the police and government.

Georgina Campbell stars as Tess Marshall, a documentary researcher who has rented an Air BNB while in town for a job interview. Alas, the property has been double booked, for when she arrives, she finds the house already occupied by Keith (Bill Skarsgard). Amplifying how women have to worry more than men about certain situations, Tess finds herself having to make the difficult choice between going back out into a dangerous neighborhood or staying in the same house as a complete stranger.

Blah, blah, blah, shenanigans ensue and as it turns out, there are stranger, worse doings afoot in the basement. Justin Long rounds out the cast as AJ, a pervy Hollywood director and the rare horror movie victim you might actually cheer for when he gets got.

STATUS: Shelfworthy, but just remember, you might want to go into this one on an empty stomach. Catch it on HBO MAX.

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Oct 30 2022
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Movies

Movie Review – The Good Nurse (2022)

When nursing goes wrong. Terribly wrong.

BQB here with what may be Netflix’s first Oscar contender of the year.

Based on a true story, this movie tells the story of Nurse Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) a nurse with a heart who always calls her patients by first name and goes out of her way to help them.

Alas, she’s in need of help herself. Speaking of hearts, she has a condition with hers that requires a heart transplant. She shouldn’t even be working. She should be at home resting and seeking treatment but she needs to be on the job four more months until her health insurance kicks in.

Thus, when Nurse Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) starts working at her hospital, he’s like a godsend. Charlie helps Amy carry her workload, and even pitches in helping her raise her two daughters as a single mom. He asks for nothing in return, even the relationship itself seems platonic as he doesn’t seek any nookie or anything.

When detectives start poking around the suspicious death of one of Charlie’s patients, they unravel threads that lead to a more sinister tale. Charlie has a habit of being passed around like a bad penny from hospital to hospital. The hospital administrators always suspect foul play, but can never prove it, so they fire him on some pretense (paperwork violation, for example) send him on his way and then Charlie becomes the next hospital’s problem.

In short, Charlie is subtly killing his patients. Putting drugs in their IVs that induce death, but because many of these patients are in a bad state already, their deaths end up looking natural. One of these hospitals could have taken the lawsuit and put Charlie in jail early but instead they just choose to cover up. The problem is the hospitals don’t communicate and Charlie just takes his show down the road.

When the detectives seek Amy’s help in getting the goods on Charlie, she can hardly believe her BFF has a dark side, but she does the right thing at great personal cost, putting her health and job on the line.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Charlie is the first villain, though it is confounding as we are never given a reason as to why he murders other than maybe he is mad about his ex wife so takes it out on his patients. Eddie Redmayne excels in this part as a seemingly, at least on the surface, average Joe. He isn’t playing a historic figure or alien or wizard as he often does. Chastain is typical Chastain. She may be the healthiest looking heart transplant patient around, and sometimes they have her huff and puff and keel over to remind you amidst all the running around she is doing that she is sick.

The second villain is the hospital system. Cover, deflect and deny at all costs rather than take a financial hit but in so doing, take a killer nurse out of the system. Cullen was convicted of 28 counts of murder but there are suspicions he may have killed up to 400. He could have been stopped earlier.

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Oct 23 2022
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TV

TV Review – The Watcher (2022)

Beware the Watcher, 3.5 readers. He or she (or they) might be watching you!

BQB here with a review of this ultra creepy Netflix series.

If you’re looking for the perfect scary TV show this Halloween season, look no further than The Watcher. Your occult side will cringe at a plot ripe with blood drinking cults, ritual murders, and psychopaths galore. However, if you do not fear such silly stories, then surely your adult side will cringe as every homeowner’s worst nightmare comes true – i.e. when what they thought was a sound real estate investment loses its resale value and can only be sold at a substantial loss. In today’s real estate market? We’ll never be able to afford another nice home in a neighborhood with such picturesque views and good schools, access to quaint shopping centers and don’t even get me started about these beautiful countertops! EEEEK!

Such is the fate of the Brannock family, a clan of trendy Manhattanites who yearn to leave the dangers of the crime ridden big city and stretch out in the stately, beautiful home at 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey. At first, Dean and Nora (Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts) believe all their dreams have come true, only to have them dashed when they start receiving a series of anonymous, threatening letters signed only by “The Watcher.”

The highlights of The Watcher’s claims? That he comes from a long line of watchers. His grandfather and father have been watching 657 Boulevard since the early 1900s and now it’s his turn. The creepy threatening letters go on to claim that the Watcher is watching the kids, that he’ll call to him when he learns their names, and that the house needs blood. Yikes. Not exactly the welcome to the neighborhood any family is looking for.

And thus, the Brannocks go down the most unsavory of rabbit holes as they attempt to unravel the mystery of who the heck this mysterious watcher is. They liquidated their 401Ks just to afford the down payment on this stinking mansion, after all, so they aren’t going to lose their equity without a fight! (You younger non-homeowners might balk at this notion but seriously, once you’ve cobbled together enough money to put a down payment on your first home, you’ll stop wondering why so many homeowners in movies and TV refuse to leave a house even after they find out it is infested with ghosts, goblins, werewolves, zombies, barracudas, sharks with laser beams on their heads, chainsaw maniacs or impolite time share salesmen. I’m sorry but we’re not going back to renting or, yeesh, living with our parents, just so murderous monsters can unleash mayhem on our dime, thank you very much.)

The plot thickens as the neighborhood harbors a seemingly endless cornucopia of yahoos, weirdos and malcontents, each with their own grudge against the Brannocks, largely over the fact that they were able to afford such a luxurious home that everyone in the hard to buy into yet highly desired neighborhood can’t afford. Possible watcher suspects include a laundry list of jealous neighbors, jilted bidders who also wanted to buy the property, greedy real estate agents, unhelpful cops, an eccentric private detective, a young alarm system installer crushing on the family’s teenage daughter, an architecture loving teacher, a historic society that believes it can dictate whatever you do in your home right down to your every sneeze, a suspected blood sucking cult believed to be operating in the area, the perpetrator of a gruesome murder long thought to be on the run but who has now returned, a mentally challenged neighbor who really like’s the house’s dumb waiter and…honestly, I forget. There are at least ten or twenty more suspects I’m missing.

Perhaps that’s the scariest element of this story. The Brannocks are the victims of a crime, yet with no smoking gun, no clue that blows the case wide open, they are left hopelessly chasing their tail between their legs, running round and around, yanking one thread after another but never quite getting anywhere. Everyone is a potential suspect, preventing them to ever feel safe making friends in their new community.

Sure, there is some unlikely silliness. The couple embarrasses themselves often when they pull an “aha!” out of their butts and public hurl accusations at random townsfolk who quickly make them feel like crap when they share a glossed over fact that proves their innocence. The Brannocks quickly agree to stop jumping to conclusions and to never again publicly confront a suspect until they have the hardcore, unvetted and undeniable proof so as to not embarrass themselves or others only to do the old, “Aha! It was you!” routine of public embarrassment again and again.

Meanwhile, forget the part above where I said a good homeowner will never leave their equity investment, psychos and monsters be damned. Eh, the silliness abounds when pets are murdered, mysterious videos emerge showing an unidentified party in the house while the family sleeps, a secret tunnel is found and a blurry figure is seen running into it yet strangely never boarded the eff up, all these and more signs of foul play afoot in the house yet the family never abandons the property. They do rent a motel to escape the creepiness, but the dad usually remains because, damn it, we must preserve equity!!!

In truth, once you get beyond all the frights and chills, the real villain might be the American real estate market. A family feels the need to keep up with the Joneses by purchasing a dream home, the down payment on takes up all their reserve funds, meaning if something goes wrong, they’ll never be able to keep up with the payments and expenses and will be ruined if forced to re-sell at a loss. Sure, they could have bought a smaller home, but they really like this one and fear they’ll never find another like it again. Meanwhile, the highly competitive real estate bidding process leaves buyers angry when they are left out in the cold. Even further meanwhile, covetous neighbors who are used to your property looking a certain way get angry when you change it.

If you think this show is creepy, feel free to read about the real-life story the series is inspired by.

Check out the New Yorker article here:

https://www.thecut.com/article/the-haunting-of-657-boulevard-in-westfield-new-jersey.html

I read the article and while the real-life Broadus family didn’t encounter a list of potential suspects who were anywhere near as wacky as the embellished Netflix series, they did undergo the horror of finding their dream home, only to have their dreams dashed when they received scary watcher letters. They attempted to figure out who said watcher was only for an investigation into myriad suspects to go nowhere. Alas, they never moved into their dream home and had to sell it at a substantial $400,000 loss five years later, without even ever living there.

The scariest thing of all? Lost equity. EEEEK!

Bonus points to Bobby Cannavale, he who typically plays tough guy cops and crooks but plays against type as a typical nerdy upper class suburban dad here. Naomi Watts does fine as the upper class suburban mom though one wonders just how many upper class suburban moms/struggling artists there are.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

SPOILER ALERT: (Look away if you want no spoilers.)

The in-show Brannocks never definitively find out who the Watcher is, just as the real-life Broadus family never did either. The mystery was never solved and you might experience angina as the show hurls an endless supply of schmucks and weirdos, each with their own motive, only for the undeniable “gotcha, you totally did it and here’s the undeniable proof!” moment to never happen. Sadly, we’ll never know who the Watcher was, what was their grudge with the family and what was the point of all those creepy letters?

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