Every year, I usually would have talked about the Oscars long before now. In fact, it feels weird they did them in April. But COVID has caused a lot of changes to everything.
Also, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a good, real movie. Studios will occasionally release a semi-decent one here and there but they are mostly holding onto their blockbusters until people are going back to theaters in large numbers again. Good news is I’ve caught up on a lot of old movies I probably never would have seen but bad news is I’m not that minded on new movies lately. Minded? Does that word work there?
Also, I usually complain about how the Oscars are so darn pretty. #OscarsSoPretty Rarely do we ever see the ugly win an award. We visually displeasing Americans demand equal representation on film.
Anyway, my thoughts:
#1 – I have seen none of these though it does seem like the streaming services are taking over. Nomadland = Hulu. Trial of the Chicago 7 = Netflix. Judas and the Black Messiah was made by Warner Brothers but released on HBO Max so more people could see it due to theater attendance being down. At any rate, I know the Oscars love to use the ceremony as a way to build up obscure think pieces that otherwise would go unseen, but I believe this is the first year where I haven’t seen a one before the show.
#2 – See above where I said I haven’t seen any of these movies, ergo it is hard for me to comment on performances. On the surface, I think they should have given Chadwick Boseman a posthumous Oscar for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Often, the Oscars are awarded based on a mix of a) whose turn is it and b) is there still time for them to get another turn? with c) who gave the best performance coming in last. Again, I saw none of them so I don’t know who gave the best performance and arguably, it is hard to say which is “best” because different roles call for actors to do different things so perhaps performances can’t even be compared.
Long story short, I love Anthony Hopkins but he’s been awarded up the wazoo throughout his long career. He plays an elderly father in “The Father” about a man suffering from dementia and memory loss and the toll it takes on his adult children who serve as his caretakers. I do have to say, this is a plight that goes unnoticed by society – how oftentimes, young people will go into life thinking they will do great things and then bam, an elderly parent gets a health problem and then that young person will spend a large chunk of their youth sitting in hospital waiting rooms, helping the parent around the house and so on. It’s what families do but perhaps we need a national conversation on how to make elder care more accessible and affordable, how to have professionals who know how to assist the elderly with patience and dignity, rather than have the adult kids try their best. Of course, another layer is that many old folks would prefer their kids help them as opposed to a stranger. Then there’s another wrinkle in that sometimes adult children will take advantage of the elder parent i.e. swipe their moolah or something and there’s even another wrinkle in that sometimes some elderly will boss the adult kids around, be unkind and miserable to them, treat them like crap, etc.
Note I said “some.” Not all do this. At any rate, I don’t need to bloviate on. I just think a) I’m not looking forward to watching the Father. I might skip it because it sounds sad but also I do think more light needs to be shined on the need for elder care (though I’m not sure how many solutions are realistically available) and b) Chadwick Boseman got robbed. So sad he passed at 43 after making history as the Black Panther and it just feels like since he’ll never get another chance to deliver an Oscar performance, he should have been given the award posthumously.
Oh and sidenote it was nice to see Steve Yeun of Walking Dead fame get a nod. He was one of the main characters that kept that show together in its early years and its nice to see him go on to bigger things.
I guess that’s it. Those are more two big Oscar observations, 3.5 readers.
My latest twisted short, “The Phone Did It” is number one on Amazon’s free technothriller charts. Thanks to a Freebooksy promo, I gave away approximately 1900 free copies of this book this weekend.
I mean, yeah if people had actually PAID for 1900 copies, I’d have a nice little chunk of change coming my way but let’s not get ridiculous, here. Authors making money in exchange for their labors? Absurd! Absurd, I say!
Anyway, this books is FREE until Tuesday, so do grab your FREE copy and if you’re so inclined, maybe you could even leave a review:
3.5 readers, this weekend you can get one of my fine books for FREE, which means you don’t have to pay for it. All you do is go and get it for free. Wanna read it? Great. Don’t want to? Hey, maybe you will later. Point is, get it now, for it is FREE.
Do you know how your phone has been trained to show you stuff you’re interested in? Hell, buy one pair of French loafers today and you’ll be seeing ads for French loafers until the end of time.
What if they had a phone that could DO the things you want done, before you even realize you want them done? What if your phone just knows you like French loafers and automatically calculates when you need a new pair and orders them?
What if your phone, capable of impersonating your voice and making all those grunt work calls you hate making, what if your phone, capable of doing actual tasks and making purchases and transactions in your name, took its mandate to fetch whatever its user wants before they know they want it…way too seriously? (Muah ha ha! Cue sinister foreshadowing.)
Grab your free copy of The Phone Did It this weekend on Amazon. Reminder – it is FREE.
You know, the important things to remember in this brave new world are a) consumers of entertainment should never have to pay anything to be entertained and b) writers and all other entertainers should never make any money whatsoever.
That’s right. Everything should be totes free. FREE, I say! Totes FREE!
I kid. I kid. Writers should make money but alas, we have to put out a lot of FREE stuff first.
Anyway, get this book about a dude who jumps out of a plane only to discover his ripcord has been sabotaged:
BQB here with a review. (Yes, it’s on Pluto TV. I’m really getting my money’s worth out of this app, which is zero.)
I remember thinking this movie was funny as a kid but now as a geezer, I think it is more clever. I was able to guess the jokes as they were coming, partly because they are memorable and partly because 2019’s “The Hustle” starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson in a modernized female version with basically the same plot kept the jokes fresh in my head.
Michael Caine, looking rather dapper at roughly 55 here and man what a life you can live if you eat your Wheaties, plays Lawrence Jamieson, a master con artist who lives a lavish lifestyle in a wealthy town in the south of France. He finances his mansion, servants, travel, wardrobe, extravagances, etc. by bilking rich women out of their money, often by telling them he is a prince living in exile, trying to coordinate a rebellion against the communists who have conquered his non-existent nation. The ladies think they are donating to the cause of freedom, while Jamieson simply pockets the dough and gives the women the heave-ho.
Freddy Benson is also a con man, but on a much less impressive scale. He is an American, conning his way through Europe with stories about his sick grandmother and how he can’t afford lunch because he’s saving up for her operation. Freddy bilks rich women out of free lunches and pocket money.
When they meet on a train, Freddy demands that Lawrence take him on as a student, that he become Darth Vader to Jamieson’s Emperor, which is funny because Palpatine himself is in this flick. Ian McDiarmid plays Jamieson’s trusty butler Arthur, who assists in the cons. I know McDiarmid has a long career but personally, I believe this is the first non-Emperor role I’ve seen him in (at least that I can remember.)
Lawrence and Freddy go out on the con together but soon butt heads, finding it difficult to work together as they rarely see eye to eye. They settle their differences with a bet. First one to con super sweet soap company heiress Janet Colgate out of $50,000 gets to stay in town, while the loser must leave.
From there on, it’s a mad cap romp as Lawrence and Freddy constantly one up each other, telling one lie after the next and apparently they have no fear of burning in hell for there’s nothing, literally nothing that they aren’t willing to do to defraud this poor woman.
To the film’s credit, I remember it being a common trope in many films where a character sets out to defraud another character (sometimes it’s a man defrauding a woman or vice versa) and then after they get to know one another, they fall in love. Here, love does bloom amidst this twisted triangle, but (SPOILER ALERT) the duo is not rewarded for their treachery. The ending is rather ingenious and if you’re watching it for the first time, unexpected. I thought it was better than the old “Oh OK I forgive you for being a fraudulent piece of crap and will reward you with my love and trust now” ending that so many other movies go with.
The late, great Glenn Headley plays Janet and this movie reminded me of how sad I was to hear of her passing. She also played Dick Tracy’s Tess Trueheart and I always thought that movie illustrates the dilemma many a man finds himself in. Dick wants Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) because she’s hot, but knows she’s trouble as she can have any dude she wants. Tess, on the other hand, is true blue and will be there for Dick through thick and thin. Ultimately, you bang Breathless and marry Tess…or maybe just skip breathless and marry Tess because Tess will dump you if you knock up Breathless. Whatever. God, my knowledge of film stretches back to some super old movies. No one even gets these references I wager.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I do remember repeating Steve Martin’s bathroom at the dinner table joke over and over as a kid.
It’s the movie that dared to cast French Stewart as a badass.
BQB here with a review of Stargate.
Long before the Internet took off (this was made in those early days where you didn’t dare to log on for more than 5 minutes lest your mom start harping on you about the phone bill), conspiracy theories still existed, though they weren’t as rampant as they are today.
One was the premise that the Ancient Egyptian gods were, in fact, space aliens who ruled over Egypt, subjugating the masses with their advanced technology. After all, how else could they have made all those pyramids without modern machinery? Spoiler alert – they did it through enslavement of the tribes of Israel which this film conveniently leaves out (enslaved subjects of another planet that resembles Ancient Egyptian are featured but the plight of the Jewish people is not mentioned specifically) but it did cast actors of Arabic and Middle Eastern descent rather than just put white dudes in brown face so honestly by 1994 standards, this flick was hella woke for its time.
James Spader, who made his bones playing the snobby rich kid in every 1980s teen movie, shows a softer side as Dr. Daniel Jackson. Honestly, as Spader got older, he traded in his snobby rich kid demeanor for an arrogant, full of himself and his genius villain persona, so unless I’m forgetting something, this is the one role I can think of where he actually plays a decent person, and in fact, a nerd. And he does it quite well.
Spader is a linguist recruited to decode the symbols on an artifact. The government has been trying to crack it since 1928 and Spadey Spades figures it out within minutes. Thus, the movie’s trend to dump on him for being smart begins as it is a running joke throughout the film that everyone despises a poindexter. (Sigh, as I have discovered in real life as well.)
Turns out, the artifact is a Stargate. Ancient Egypt really was ruled by aliens. Those aliens have since moved on to another planet. The gubmint calls on Colonel Jack O’Neill (Kurt Russell) to lead an expedition through the stargate and into the alien world, begrudgingly bringing Jackson as a tag-a-long as he’s the only one who will know how to decode the symbols on the stargate in the alien world. Oh, and they also bring a team of stereotypically rough commandos, including French Stewart, typically known for being a goofy comedian but he dumps on Dr. Jackson for being smart and again, I feel the doctor’s pain as everyone has been doing this to me my whole life.
Human vs. alien fights ensue. O’Neil and Jackson help the enslaved people of this alien world escape the tyranny of the evil aliens. If only O’Neil and Jackson had been around on earth many years ago. Exodus would have been a much different story.
Overall, it’s a pretty cool sci-fi flick and ahead of its time. I dare say it was original because most space films usually focus on space flight whereas the idea of a gate might, in theory, be more likely as a method for space travel as beings can’t otherwise fly for millions of miles without growing old and dying.
Bonus points for Russell, who also looks young here. He plays the grieving father of a son who accidentally shot himself while fooling around with an unsecured gun, presumably blaming himself for not locking it up. He cares for the young slaves who join his rebellion against the alien Ra but clearly looks after them as if they are his own kids, worrying about their safety.
This inspired a long-running syndicated TV show, which I never watched though I always heard was cool.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. And I watched it on Pluto TV!
Just want to give a free plug to Pluto TV. I discovered it last week and have been glued to it ever since.
Is it another free streaming service? Not quite. It comes across very similar to your cable service. There’s a guide and a grid and you can scroll through channels of stuff that is already streaming in progress. However, it has an on demand section too where you can see what they have available and pick something.
It’s put out there as a solution for cord cutters. Get TV without cable. Eh, to me, it depends on how much you live TV and movies. Me? Personally? I need HBO, Netflix, etc. But otherwise, it’s got NewsMax and CNN updates so you can stay up on the news and it’s got a lot of stuff to keep you entertained so hey, if you wanted to save money, you could try cutting the cable cord and give this a try for awhile.
Ultimately, it’s another source for free stuff. I could have used it at the height of the pandemic as I went on a binge of old movies I’d always wanted to see but never got around to and they had a lot of them.
Cons – I’ve notice some freezeups and not the best rewind/fast forward options (which a lot of non-Netflix sites have a problem with.) For example, there was one movie where I just wanted to watch a part of the end and I gave up because it only had the back 15 and forward 15 buttons and once you move ahead every 5-10 minutes it makes you stop and watch a commercial.
Will you look at that, 3.5 readers? A short story by me, BQB, is #1 on Amazon’s free horror short story list this weekend.
Look out, Stephen King. I’m set to outpace you, in like, a thousand years maybe…but still, isn’t that great? Last month, I had a book that was number one in Amazon’s free writing skill reference so I was a master of the English language and now I’m a master of horror.
Now if I could only get to the top of a paid Amazon list. I suppose that takes more doing.
For a few weeks now, they’ve been playing this trailer for a horror film – “On the holiest weekend of the year, watch The Unholy.”
And each time it played, I was like, “What idiot thought it was a good idea to release a horror film on one of the happiest, most holy and spiritual weekends of the year? I mean seriously, what dummy is going to go out and sit by himself in a movie theater during a pandemic to watch a horror film on this, the anniversary of our Lord and Savior’s glorious resurrection?
Well, turns out, I was an idiot who set up a free promo for a book about werewolves on Easter weekend. I set it up weeks ago, back in February. You know how we are all then. We still haven’t bothered to look up whether Easter is in March or April yet.
So, listen, grab this free book, will you? You can wait to read it next weekend if you want, but just do your old pal BQB a solid and grab your free copy. Jesus would want you to because he was all about helping people. No, I don’t claim to know what Jesus wanted but I’m just saying, I think he’d want you to have free books.
BQB here with a review of Hulu’s big (and perhaps only) hit.
I avoided this show for a long time, largely due to the subject matter. I understand the importance of its message but ultimately, I view movies and TV as a means of escape from the crappiness of my own life, so a TV show about women being forced into a lifetime of sexual servitude at the hands of a cruel, tyrannical dystopian regime doesn’t exactly sound like good time viewing.
But with Hollywood saving their best stuff for post pandemic releases, I dove into it recently and I am hooked, though that probably is not a good thing.
For the uninitiated, the show is based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, about an America that has been replaced by Gilead, a fascist, hyper-religious bible thumping regime. There is a passage in the bible about Jacob’s wife, Sarah, who can’t get pregnant, so her handmaid Bilah does the deed with Jacob so that Sarah can raise the resulting offspring of her own. Gilead circles around this passage, as the novel and the series, and as an aspiring writer, I tip my cap to Atwood, because she got a lot of mileage out of that passage.
SIDENOTE to writers – there is plenty of stuff in the public domain that you can build entire worlds from too if you put your mind to it.
Back to the review. It’s funny, I always thought that other show that Elisabeth Moss was in, “Mad Men” gave the best illustration of why women stood up and demanded their civil rights in the 1960s. On the surface, that show was about Jon Hamm’s boozy, womanizing Don Draper, a man who on the outside was the epitome of success but on the inside, torn about by a seemingly endless hole in his soul, one there wasn’t enough success, money, power and women in the world to fill.
But if you dig deeper into that show, you get to know more about the struggle of Betty (January Jones), Draper’s wife who has to put up with Don’s chicanery. She wants to leave but can’t. She has no money and no skills because the culture of the time prevented her from working in any meaningful capacity. Alas, she languishes under Don’s thumb until she meets a nicer, older man who whisks her away, willing to pay for lawyers and whatever it takes to cut Don off.
I mean, it’s nice that Betty finally gets away from Don but the underlying message was clear – women of that time weren’t able to escape a bad man unless they had the help of a good man. Basically, they couldn’t do anything without a man.
But if Mad Men is a testament to why the civil rights movement was important, The Handmaid’s Tale is a look into the nightmare the world would become without it. This show is basically a woman’s worst nightmare come to life on screen, the stuff that keeps them up worrying at night and should motivate us to keep the world from moving backward.
The set-up? In the not-so-distant future (or perhaps an alternate present), environmental disasters leave the world ravaged and most women end up infertile. Populations are dying out, some countries going years before a healthy baby is born.
Long story short, a bunch of bible thumping dudes see their opportunity to seize control of America and put the last few fertile women into slavery as their handmaids and well, I’d rather not get into the gritty details of what that entails. You can get your own Hulu subscription and find out.
The show starts strong. Moss is a boss at communicating messages via her eyes. Offred, her character (Handmaids are called Of plus the name of their “commander,” in her case, Fred. Her real name is June. Offred can’t communicate much on her own, so her eyes do a lot of the talking. When she is forced to feign allegiance to all of this stupidity in public, her eyes tell the viewer that she truly believes this all to be bullshit. Who can blame her? She once had a nice life as a book editor with husband Luke (OT Fagbenle who you might remember from long ago as Meadow’s boyfriend on the Sopranos), daughter Hannah and BFF Moira (who you might remember as OITNB’s Poussey Washington.)
So many long, long discussions could be (and are) generated by this show, more time than I have to dedicate to on this fine blog. From a TV show analysis standpoint, I’d say it starts off strong, but then I have to admit, as it goes on, it loses its way, starts to meander, can’t figure out quite what to do next, though it then veers back on track.
Ultimately, from the very beginning of the show, we see the cruelty of the Gilead regime in all its way too gory detail. Heretics, non-believers and generally people who have pissed the ruling class off in the most trivial of ways are hanged daily, and bodies swinging from nooses left out in public for days on end serve as reminders for people to not step out of line.
Women are divided into classes and forced to wear uniforms as such. The wives of the ruling commanders wear green, the “Marthas” i.e. housekeepers wear gray, the Aunts i.e. the women who boss the handmaids around and keep them in line (usually through cattleprod shocks) wear brown and the handmaids are in red.
Overall, the ability of a show to keep the viewer in suspense is what keeps viewers coming back for more. This is why Game of Thrones put butts on couches on Sunday nights, because it was all too possible that at any moment, a beloved character could buy the farm.
Thus, this show draws the viewer in because we know the Gileadeans are totes a bunch of merciless d-bags, so we are on the edge of our seats as Offred circumvents the rules to improve her life, or the lives of her children, or to help others or whatever she is doing to help in the current episode.
SPOILER – where the show starts to meander is that there are many times when Offred gets one over on the Gileadeans. She scores big victories, it looks like she might be sentenced to death and then, poof, all is forgotten and she’s back to work as a Handmaid for the Waterfords, truly the worst yuppy couple in history (Joseph Fiennes as Commander Fred and Yvonne Strahowski who I always thought was critically underrated and underutlized by Hollywood since her Dexter days.) Here Strahowski has some chilling moments as the complex character Serena Joy- at first, like a Wicked Witch of the West character, gladly selling all of woman-kind down the river if it will help her get a baby and keep her social standing, but then as the show progresses, an ally to the struggle (because, you know, eventually this Gilead bullshit starts to affect her personally.)
SIDENOTE – this is probably Atwood’s key message, among many, namely that it becomes easier for a regime to subjugate women when they turn on each other. The evil male commander dudes probably couldn’t have pulled this off if their wives hadn’t gone along with it. Alas, everyone has their own selfish self-interests and usually can’t be persuaded to stick up for others until their own interests are on the line.
What was I saying? It’s a good show that provokes a lot of discussion, A LOT. However, a formula emerges and they go to the well one too many times with it. Offred screws with the regime. It looks like she’s going to be sentenced to death or worse. Then someone in charge is like wait she’s fertile, so we can’t kill her. So then her crimes against the evil regime are swept under the rug. Close up on Offred’s sorrowful eyes. Back to the Waterford house she goes. Rinse. Repeat. To the show’s credit, the writers try to work this in. Offred mentions in narration her story is disjointed, perhaps because she is recalling it years later and there is so much to tell she has a hard time keeping up with it all. And perhaps certain Gileadean dignitaries are so willing to sweep her disobedience aside because deep down, even they know their regime is crap and they can’t tell if they are part of it because they believe it or if they just feign allegiance to it to save their own hides. (And to be certain, while they don’t kill Offred, the Gileadeans are adept at inventing new punishments where she might be better off).
The book and the 1990s movie were more succinct. Let us peak into Offred’s shitty world then cheer as she escapes…like one time, for good, and that’s it. Not a hundred and fifty times where Serena and Fred just end up wagging their fingers in an impotent (pun intended) rage as if it becomes a sitcom, That Wacky Offred.
But I get why Hulu is dragging it out. This is the service’s first big original success in a sea of other stuff that is mostly junk (though I did enjoy Hulu’s show about Catherine the Great and that Andy Samberg movie where he keeps reliving the same day.)
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. New season in April. I have only started season 3 so don’t spoil it for me. Under his eye, 3.5 readers.
Bookshelf Battle 