I’ve been writing this blog since 2014. Next March, it will be 5 years. My Christmas wish is that next year this little enterprise will actually start turning a profit. Toilet Gator will hopefully come out in 2019 and if a book about an alligator who eats people while they are pooping can’t make me a millionaire then I don’t know what will.
In the meantime, check out one of my books below and if you have a spare 99 cents, feel free to buy one.
What is your Christmas wish? Discuss in the comments.
Hey 3.5 readers. I’m busy getting to my Christmas stuff but just wanted to throw out some love for this movie. It’s funny and better than your average, run of the mill romantic comedy.
Girl meets boy then finds out he’s rich and she has to struggle to fit in is as old as Cinderella. But this takes it to a new level. Rachel has been dating Nick for a year when he takes her to Singapore for a family meeting only to reveal that he’s the heir apparent of a wealthy hotel/real estate mogul family. They’re rich. Super rich. Crazy rich, even. They spend all their dough on fancy cars and wacky parties, full of vibrant colors and fireworks. But Nick is also Asia’s most eligible bachelor and that makes Rachel unpopular among the babes who want to be in her position.
Awkwafina is the icing on the cake as Rachel’s wacky friend who teaches her how to make it in the crazy rich Asian scene.
Great movie. Worth a rental. Makes me wish I was a crazy rich Asian.
I’m just going to say it. This movie is solid. I think “Wonder Woman” was better. There were some parts of this movie that were silly and it’s a half hour too long (two and a half in total) but it’s a feast for the eyes, very beautiful with a lot of colors and great action.
In other words, DC/Warner Brothers screwed the pooch by getting the super friends together first in “Batman vs. Superman” and “Justice League.” Rather, they should have intro’d all the heroes in their own films with an ongoing subplot that ties them all together i.e. the Marvel model.
Oh well. Perhaps now that the super heroes are doing the solo act, DC/Warner will be able to figure out their piece of the comic book movie pie.
Suffice to say, Aquaman aka Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) is half Atlantian and half human, the product of a lighthouse keeper (Don’t know the actor’s name) getting his fuck on with a runaway Atlantian queen (Nicole Kidman).
Note that this is the second movie in recent years where a human fucks a fish person so Hollywood might be into some pervery behind the scenes but I digress.
The hard task here was to make a likable Aquaman, one who is cool and awesome that you want to root for. The problem is that Aquaman has always been the joke of the superhero universe. You scoff but think about it. Given your choice of superpowers, you’d surely choose flight or indestructibility or invisibility or any host of awesome skills before you’d say, “I want to be able to boss dolphins around.”
But the filmmakers lived up to the challenge here. Arthur lives among humans, an outcast not welcome in Atlantis, using his abilities to save people and is fresh off of helping the JL save the world from Steppenwolf.
Alas, Arthur’s half-brother, King Orm (Patrick Wilson) (the product of a fish person fucking another fish person and call me old fashioned but that’s the way it should be) is solidifying his power with the other fish kingdoms with the help of another fish person king (Dolph Lundgren doing the most acting he’s ever done in his entire career) and seeks to lead a vast army to the surface world to destroy and conquer.
Ergo, it’s up to members of the Atlantian royalty to commit treason and help Arthur overthrow the king. Those traitors include Vulko (Willem Dafoe who looks out of place in this movie and literally at any minute you end up wondering if he’s just going to look at the screen and break the fourth wall and say, “How the fuck did I end up playing a fish man in this schlock? I was in Platoon, for Christ’s sake!”
And of course, there’s love interest, Mera, played by Johnny Depp’s one who got away Amber Heard. Mmm boy, now there’s some sushi I wouldn’t mind in my take-out box.
Hmm. That comment was probably inappropriate. Oh well. Good thing only 3.5 people read this blog.
Did I mention there’s a kickass fight scene in Italy with Black Manta (Yahya Abdul Mateen II?) I enjoyed the visuals but also the entire time as Aquaman and Manta pummeled each other I wanted to call my travel agent and book a trip to this exotic locale.
There are a few moments where it is absurd but the absurdity comes with a bit of self-awareness. For example, SPOILER ALERT, Willem Dafoe makes a more skeptical than usual face when the long lost, thought to have been executed queen (Kidman) returns. Heard shrugs it off and tells him, “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”
I took that as a wink as if the writers were telling me, a member of the audience, “Yeah, we’re sorry we couldn’t think of a reason why she’s back but aren’t you glad she is? By the way, keep plunking down your ticket money and we’ll tell you why she’s back when we figure it out.”
Overall, the flick is a good time and a sign that if DC/Warner take their time and worry more about putting out good movies rather than rushing to put their characters together, it will pay off.
I’ve seen this movie a million times since childhood and happened to watch it again recently. It’s funny how the older your get, the more things you notice.
Thus, without further ado, and I have to do this quick before the Yeti finds out, it’s my Top Ten Observations About A Christmas Story (1983).
#10 – Life is Hard
Yeah, obvious, but still, I notice this more as an adult than I did as a kid. As a kid I just thought Ralphie’s father was an old grumpy bastard. Now I know why he’s old and grumpy. You work all day and then come home to a house where shit breaks every five minutes and you have to spend all your free time fixing it because if you can’t then you have to shell out some of that money you worked so hard for. No wonder the old…
Jingle bells, the Yeti smells, BQB is still in captivity.
But that’s ok because I have my ways of getting around the Yeti.
Did you know you can help rid BQB HQ of Yeti rule by following me on Twitter – @bookshelfbattle ?
In the meantime, from BQB HQ, here are the Top Ten Christmas Movies, in no particular order:
10. Scrooged (1988) – A Christmas Carol has been remade, rebooted, and parodied a ridiculous amount of times. It makes sense because it follows a classic formula for teaching a main character the error of his ways. For me, the best and funniest retelling was this Bill Murray comedy from the late 1980s. Entertainment executive Cross follows in Scrooge’s footsteps by chasing money and working his way to the top of a TV network, only to realize he missed out on the love of…
It’s the future and cities move…into my wallet and take my money…and give me a poopy movie in return.
BQB here with a review of the apparent flop, “Mortal Engines.”
I’m torn, 3.5 readers. If you read the reviews, the critics are calling this flick an epic fail. I must admit, my test of a bad movie is if, at any time, I reach for my cell phone to check the time just to find out how much longer I have to sit through this stinker.
But that’s me and the problem is, this movie wasn’t made for me. It’s a YA tale geared towards teenagers and it checks off all the young adult boxes and then some.
Teenagers who are in, for some reason, highly important positions of authority? Check. Adults are villains? Check. Reluctant romance between the hero and heroine where they dislike one another at first but then as the drama unfolds they fall for one another? Check. Possible developing love triangle? Check. Teenagers save the day despite having little, if any, combat experience? Check.
Ergo, I am reluctant to call this a stinkburger because again, it wasn’t made for a crusty old fuck like me. It was made for the kids and I’d imagine if I had been born around the turn of the century I would have found this to be a good time.
The plot? It’s a thousand years into the future and people now suffer life in a world ruined by the ancient ones (SPOILER ALERT: we, all of us, right now, are the ancient ones). Humorous allusions to our stupid and slothful ways and our pop culture worship provide comic relief.
Cities are now mobile. Some, like London, have become enormous tank-like monstrosities, moving across the planet on giant treads, looking to conquer other mobile cities because, well, all the world’s resources have gone to shit, so now, stealing another mobile city’s shit is the only way to survive.
Other cities move in the air. Sorry. I forgot the name of the city that flies in the air. I’m an adult and I’m too busy worrying about making my next mortgage payment.
Against this dystopian backdrop, young Hester Shaw (played by someone too new for me to remember her name) seeks revenge for her deceased mother and in doing so, attempts to murder the chief muckety muck of Mobile London, Hugo Weaving. Him I know because I saw “The Matrix” in the theater and I have the gray pubes to prove it.
Blah, blah, blah, the plot fails, Hester ends up escaping with some teenage historian who has studied up on the ancient ones’ ways (reading all about how we got fat while writing posts about our lunch on Facebook I assume) and they go on an adventure, they run around the wasteland, they fly around in sky and shit an so on.
The beginning has some good action. I was borderline asleep for the middle. A sub-plot where Hester is pursued by Shrike (Stephen Lang, him I know from “Avatar”), some type of hybrid human-zombie-robot who wants to turn Hester into a human-zombie-robot and she calls bullshit on that and doesn’t want to become one.
This is a Peter Jackson flick and the visuals are hella tight. The special effects are awesome. And honestly, it’s hard to knock the plot because unlike many other movies, there is one.
Where it lags is, in true YA fashion, you have to learn a lot of shit fast. Personally, as an adult, when I read YA, I feel like I’m suddenly being hit with all these definitions, and rules, and new words, and “Those people are the Hoopy Doops and they believe this” but “Those people are the Weeble Worps and they believe that” and so on.
Like I said. I’m old. I have a tube of Preparation H in my medicine cabinet. This movie wasn’t for me. I did enjoy the effects and pretty colors and admit if I were younger, it would have captivated me.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy, though I don’t have any interest in watching it again. However, if you’re a steampunk, this movie will be your Super Bowl.
Go ahead. Make my day. But slowly. Because I’m old.
BQB here with a review of Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule.” (SPOILERS).
I must admit, 3.5 readers, when I first saw the trailer for this movie, I assumed it would be a ripoff of “Breaking Bad.” Similar to Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, Clint’s Earl Stone is presented in the preview as an old man who has lived a shitty life and now, with little to lose in his declining years, decides to say, “Fuck it” and get into the drug game to make some fast, sweet, sticky cash, all the danger be damned.
Despite the similarities, Earl is his own man. He’s super old and though he has no diagnosed terminal illness, he’s in his nineties and therefore likely to croak if a cool breeze hits him the wrong way. He’s no mastermind genius like Walter. He’s just an old man who lost his job and finds another one.
Though I’m one of Clint’s biggest fans, I have to admit the premise is thinner than his present day hair and it saddens me as with some tweaks to the haphazard plot, it could have been as lush as his 1970s “Dirty Harry” mane.
Honestly, the first twenty minutes of the film feel less like an Eastwood movie of old and instead, more like a glorified Lifetime Channel for Women movie, you know, the one that your Grandma watches to feel hip and young without having to be bogged down with anything that makes sense.
Earl is a horticulturalist. For many years, he chose the road over his own family, missing birthdays, graduations, weddings, funerals, anniversaries and so on to drive across America in his old, beaten up pick-up truck just so he could put his latest rare flower on display and socialize with his fellow green thumbs.
I know. WTF, right? Not to give away a spoiler, but in the first few minutes, Earl, already having been divorced from wife, Mary (Dianne West), is finally ostracized from the family for good when he chooses yet another flower show over the wedding of his daughter, Iris (played by Clint’s real life daughter, Alison.)
SPOILER ALERT (in fact, spoilers abound in this review so look away): As I watched Clint at the flower show, buying drinks for his flower growing friends, a sad look on his face like he knew he was doing wrong for picking horticulture over his child, I called bullshit. Just absolute bullshit.
But then I thought about it. The man needs a reason why he was estranged from his family. And I suppose if he’d been a workaholic stockbroker or a lawyer or businessman, that would have been already done before, not to mention, he’d have no need to do illegal deeds for money.
FYI that’s how he becomes a mule. Oddly enough, though his granddaughter, Ginny (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera) throws a pre-wedding party. Clint attends, is kicked out by mom and grandma. Though granddaughter still loves him and shows no signs other than that she is a solid, upstanding young woman, for some reason that can only be describes as bad writing, there’s a shady drug cartel associate in the wedding party who sees Earl is down on his luck after his flower farm is foreclosed on and introduces him into the world of mulery.
At this point, I start to get it. You have to bend over backwards to get it. The movie’s writing style starts out as “tell, don’t show” with characters dumping key plot points in dialogue and eventually moves to “Stand on your head and twist around three times to get it.”
You see, it was never about the flower shows. Earl just sucked as a human. He was selfish. No, he wasn’t out cheating on his wife or anything like that. He was just stuck in his own head. He loved driving in his truck. He loved meeting and talking to people. He loved going to parties and having fun and being the center of attention in his little flower world. He lacked the emotional capacity to handle it when life got real, to not be around a wife and kid with needs and feelings. He regrets not being a good dad and husband, but lacked the fortitude to be one.
Muling is his second chance to renew that cross-country traveling lifestyle. He meets “the boys” i.e. oddly kind and chatty drug cartel chop shop operators who joke around and talk Earl’s ear off as they stuff his new and improved truck (a Lincoln that is the real star of the movie) full of cocaine. He then drives off into adventure, stopping at roadside stops to meet new, interesting folks, often risking blowing the whole operation just for the chance to make a new friend.
Alas, the job starts to suck when the stakes get higher and higher. You ever have a job that started out great and then one day, you get a new boss and you’re told you’re being watched and the slightest fuck-up will be punished with extreme prejudice? Yes, another spoiler but suffice to say, eventually being a mule stops being fun when oddly kind drug cartel boss Andy Garcia is taken out in a coup and replaced by hardasses who have no patience for Earl’s desire to stop along his route to help strangers with flat tires or to find the world’s best pulled pork sandwich.
SJWs and the politically incorrect alike will find reasons to cheer, maybe even come together. Earl openly tells off-color jokes and uses centuries old slurs in routine conversation. You’re torn between being grossed out and wondering if maybe an old man who doesn’t know any better really needs to kicked completely out of society if he truly didn’t mean any harm and didn’t understand how times have changed.
Meanwhile, Earl takes full advantage of his elderly white privilege, moving mass quantities of Columbian nose candy to and fro with reckless abandon, sent merrily on his way by unsuspecting cops who simply assume they’re in the presence of a doddering old fart while the aforementioned cops then immediately turn around and run Earl’s younger Hispanic associates up the river if they so much as make a funny look.
Bradley Cooper and Lawrence Fishburne round out a star studded cast, but honestly, I can’t say it enough. The writing blows goats and really, the only reason to stick through it is to watch an old man down on his luck suddenly fall into a world where he can make mad cash, bang hot hookers, and not give a shit about jail or STDs because fuck it, he’s 90. Not gonna lie. It wouldn’t surprise me if Clint just slapped this flick together just so he could charge off scenes with hot young babes on the studio’s dime.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy, only because it’s Clint. At times, you see a little glint in Clint’s eye, such that you can just tell if it weren’t for his tired old body, the Clintster would be tearing shit up in this strange new world. It makes some valid points. A running joke is that Earl has to constantly fix broken things because all the young people are too busy getting on their smart phones, looking up how to fix the broken things instead of just trying to actually do it. Point taken. People used to get out and live life. Now we’re living life through a screen. The writing is epically lame. Plot holes the size of Earl’s truck that you’d never put up with. If you can suspend disbelief long enough, it’s nice to see Clint have fun.
And the night is just normal because it isn’t holy because we will no longer be subjected to the patriarchy’s puritanically rigid belief system that forces the ignorant into modifying their behavior in accordance with the whims of a fictional man in the sky who simply isn’t there.
Fall on your knees!
But only if you want to take a rest.
But if you don’t, that’s ok.
In fact, don’t because then you’ll get grass stains on your jeans!
A night that is not divine!
No, it’s just another night as usual except is it just me or is this night hotter than usual? Damn it, when will you all learn that global warming is real, people?!
Away in a manger, no crib for a bed (because capitalism is the worst because the wealthiest 1 percent use the unwitting 99 percent as their pawns and socialism will totally work if we just give it one more try)…
The little Lord Jesus, laid down his, her, or possible xer’s head. Whatever. It’s way too early to box this child into a gender and Jesus will let us know what he, she, or xe is in time.
The stars in the sky, look down where he, she, or xe or any combination thereof because gender is fluid, lay.
The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay, again, because when are we going to wake up and realize that capitalism is barbaric and only when government seizes control of all business interests will all children of indeterminate gender be allowed to sleep in the proper cribs they deserve.
Bookshelf Battle 