IMDb meta data is a runtime of 1h and 42m, rated 8.1 by 48,344 cinematizens.
Genre: Dramedy or Comdram.
DNA: Poland via Hollywood.
Verdict: Satire stings.
Tagline: A sea of troubles!
A Warsaw acting company gets caught up in the German invasion of Poland, and the more its members try to wriggle out of the net, the more deeply enmeshed in it they become.
Betrayal, espionage, treachery, mayhem, torture, suicide, murder, all have a lighter side in this offering. The Nazi’s are so preoccupied with being Nazis they fail to notice details.
Whatever is made of that, as theatre it is pitch perfect. When Jack Benny (yes, you read that right) has to imitate a dedicated Nazi he reiterates the nonsense he has heard another Nazi say, and is relieved, though surprised, to find that it works.
Released in January 1942 the makers saw it as a contribution to war effort to mock and belittle the enemy as Charlie Chaplin had in The Great Dictator (1940). Yes Mel Brooks reprised it.
We went to see it on the wide screen at the Ritz in Randwick. What a treat.
Good Reads meta-data is 437 pages rated 4.01 by 242 litizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: SoCal.
Tagline: Cyclopes.
Verdict: Less than meets the eye.
A creative take on the evergreen trope of alien abduction that I had first thought was to be played for laughs. Nope. Indeed that trope was buried in a soap opera family drama: husband loses his job, wife has cancer, truculent teenage children rebel, mortgage payments overdue, and so on, and on. Had they a dog, it would have turned rabid or something.
I didn’t turn the pages for that, but in a page count it is bulk of the book.
Oh, the A2 is there and it is well told and in a novel way. No spoiler on that except to say it confirms a nostrum of SyFyism, the aliens want our women!
There is a lot to like: Some insights into the changing world of journalism, basics of composition, DNA testing technicalities, characterisations, the to’ing and fro’ing in the urban agglomeration of Los Angeles, the way the writer avoided explanatory details, say about the curvature drive. Refreshing to read something by author who knows what a topic sentence is.
Irving Belateche
What I didn’t get is where the cash money came from in $100,000 units, how the drug was marketed, what happened to the boy Mason who so preoccupied Hero’s thoughts and then drops off the page. Did I blink?
Good Reads meta-data is 160 pages, rated 3.10 by 379 litizens.
DNA: Argentine.
Verdict: Meh.
Tagline: Not sure I care.
Winter in Buenos Aires is wet and windy, when a resident of a small apartment block returns home late at night from the pub, well and truly tanked, to find the lift occupied by…a corpse. Befuddled he does some stupid things.
There follows a police procedural confined largely to this building where each apartment occupies a floor. Several of the residents are European flotsam and jetsam from the war. The corpse was not a resident and yet seemed to have had a key to the front door. Does the European past hold the key to this mystery. Doh!
I chose it for the setting but, well, I got little of post war Buenos Aires since the story unfolds mainly in the building. The translation was cryptic, or perhaps that is the original, and this reader found it hard to follow and hard to develop an interest in, or to keep straight, the characters. Ergo, be your own judge.
María Angélica Bosco
It is one of eighteen or so in a series from this writer who is described as the Agatha Christie of Argentina. I couldn’t see why. But then one of the other Good Readers compared her Raymond Chandler and that seemed idiotic for even a Good Reader.
Good Reads meta-data is 233 pages rated 3.99 by 1,204 litizens.
Genre: krimi; Species: period.
DNA: England; Victorian.
Verdict: Cute but slow.
Tagline: He did it! What a surprise.
Mr Obnoxious is stabbed in the back during a party celebrating the opening of his new very posh pub. Since he was universally disliked, despised, and hated as everyone from his wife, brother, sister, and the family dog is quick to say, there is no shortage of suspects. In addition there are all the people whom he has shortchanged, cheated, and stole from in his pursuit of free marketeering.
By a quirk of fate a not very sharp tool at Scotland Yard has inherited, not only a grand house, but a housekeeper and her staff. While Inspector Dull bumbles around, Mrs Jeffries and her associates get to work and uncover clues to place in his path, some of which he notices. Others not. Some he understands, others not.
With this invisible help he meets with success, a surprise to him and to others, and so he muddles through.
However, in this outing the worm turns. Slightly. There is a nice plot twist at the end, but it was a tedious trip to get there. I all but drowned in the blue herrings.
This is number nine (9) in the sequence which has, sit down, more than thirty titles. I bought in Canowindra in 2025.
There a similar spin on Sherlock Holmes with Mrs Hudson, see Martin Davies, Mrs Hudson and the Malabar Rose (2005) and more.
Good Reads meta-data is 560 pages, rated 2.84 by 87 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Period (Medieval).
DNA: Italian.
Verdict: Suffocating detail.
Tagline: Spoiler: she Pope.
October 1301 the Florentine Council sends Dante (Durante) Alighieri to Rome to assess and, if possible, negotiate with Pope Boniface, who was busy redefining papal corruption. An uneasy peace exits in Florence between the Little-enders and the Big-enders, while Rome is seething. While he waits for an audience Dante falls into company of an affable, wealthy Senator with a comely daughter. Dante often has trouble keeping it in his robe.
In this heady atmosphere, strange things emerge. Very strange. That a representative of the Inquisition wants to hush things up, stimulates Dante to find out more with a great deal of to’ing and fro’ing in ruined Rome. Much. Too much.
A fantastic plot is slowly revealed.
Giulio Leoni
This is the third and final instalment of the English translation of this series. There remain several untranslated titles in the original Italian.
IMDb is a runtime of 2h and 8m, rated 5.9 by 1,001 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: More, please! (And less.)
Tagline: Ripped from today’s headlines!
In the near future of 2019 (!) the book burners are masked, armed, and dangerous. Welcome to Florida!
Why?
Villains read books. (Do they?) To eliminate villains, eliminate books, because it is too hard to eliminate villains. Blaming books for what readers do is an old, sad song we are hearing again today. (It is only a matter of time before this logic leads to eliminating authors, as one character observes.)
Over-reach soon follows as the masked thugs enjoy creating mayhem, and in response a political compromise emerges that makes public libraries an asylum for all books. Bookstores on the other hand are not protected and they become the battleground of the thugees. The line between bookstores and libraries is blurred by both sides, and to ensure that exception libraries recruit a defence force. The inevitable happens when boys play with guns: innocent bystanders get killed, and each side blames the other. Check the headlines today for proof.
In this maelstrom we have a candy-coating of a romantic comedy. Believe it or not, Mortimer. The players are charming, the situations far-fetched and yet…well, watch the television news tonight. Maybe not that far fetched.
One of the web sites that guides my viewing, completely missed the point on this film. This blogger devoted most of his comments to the unlikely proposition that municipal libraries would have the funds to create an armed force or that the national government would permit it. ‘Hello! It is fiction.’ But even short of that realm, political compromises are often contradictory. The National Guard may confront local police forces. It has happened before, and now it is again in the offing.
This film has spawned sequels which I may pursue. But this one was attenuated with way too much shoot ‘em up. Way too much. So less of that, please, and more about the books, and why they are important.
Though there were many nice touches salted away. I liked the comment that the Book Burners wanted to censor the history of censorship to conceal it. But there were also loose ends, like who was the murderer influenced by reading and what was in the archive that had to be rescued. Maybe I blinked.
Of course I thought of Fahrenheit 451 and also the more obscure short but powerful Phoenix – A Science Fiction Short Film (2014) from Warnuts Entertainment, 19 August 2016 on You Tube. I commented on the latter elsewhere on this blog. Click on.
IMDb meta-data is a long runtime of 2h 16m, rated 6.5 by 30,001 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: High octane.
Tagline: Slam, bam, wham. Reset. Repeat. Redo.
In 2092 rocket powered bin divers stumble onto a treasure in the debris and try to profit from it, but they encounter a clone Elon Musk – vacuous, soulless, mindless, destructive, and solipsistic. There is the usual corporate corruption, the usual political connivance, and the usual general stupidity. All the lazy scriptwriters’ crutches.
One chase after another follows, each loud and colourful, but the pace is slowed by too many back stories. It seems everyone has one, except the villain-in-chief and his endless robotic minions.
The multi-lingual international characters are cartoon cardboard. About one hour too long for the story.
What did W. C. Fields say about working with children? Don’t!
I opted for peace and quiet and turned it off.
Much similarity to Cosmic Rescue (2003) reviewed earlier.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 30m, rated 6.6 by 553 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; drama.
DNA; Québécois.
Verdict: Odd.
Tagline: Another ‘film without a gun’ from Stéphane Lafleur.*
She is trapped in a loveless marriage while her brother cannot grow up. The inertia in their lives is manifested in a backhoe à vendre sitting on the snow-covered lawn. We never do learn how they came to possess this totem.
An accident at the paper factory where she works jars her from somnambulance, while her drifting brother is likewise disturbed by a brief conversation with a man who claims to come from the future. Both are freed, perhaps only briefly, from the inertia that has governed them. Together sister and brother embark on a road trip into the eternal north of Québec and change the future.
It is that man who claims to be from the future that triggers the label Sy Fy, and that claim is never developed, but it stimulates the brother to action. Though he might as well have had a premonition, and stirred himself to act on it.
All in all it is laconic in a genre of Québec films that focus on the working stiffs, usually absent from Hollywood, and combines that with a soupçon of wintry magic realism. The cinematography of winter tells a good part of the story of these hibernating people.
Oh, and no, I can’t explain the title. Let me know if you got it.
Stéphane Lafleur
*You either get it or you don’t. There is no explanation here.
Good Reads meta-data is 230 pages, rated 3.90 by 2481 litizens.
Genre: Fiction.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: More Jay, please.
Tagline: Murphy explains it all.
The unwilling and unwelcome chair of the English Department of Payne State University, Jay, backs into another unwanted assignment. He is to escort a dozen Payne undergraduates on a three-week study tour of England. It’s only three weeks: what can go wrong, so he consoles himself.
Then the sea of troubles – personal, institutional, and international – strike, one after another. There is no respite. Will Jay never learn?
One of the students did not read the brochure beyond the word ‘British,’ and thought the tour was to the British Cayman Islands. Yeah no one else can understand how that worked, but he showed up at the airport in shorts with diving gear for a January trip to London, the one in England. He now considers suing the University for false advertising.
Another participant does not like to talk about his sealed police record, and so he brings it up repeatedly. When, as a result, others begin to avoid him, he expects Jay to overcome this ostracism or he will give him a bad rating.
The identical twins are, well, identical and inseparable, though separate. Jay can’t tell them apart, and he gradually realizes they, being well aware of that, exploit it to confuse him further, albeit he starts pretty confused.
Then there is DB who apparently missed the flight and yet appeared, briefly, at the London residence, only to disappear again. Oh, and no one knows what ‘DB’ stands for.
Another student has never before been away from home, and her cat, and pines for the latter every minute. She believes in sharing this pining with Jay.
Then there is Boadicea who approaches everything as Armageddon. She categorically refuses to comply with any of Jay’s few and lax requirements mainly because ‘all requirements are gendered.’ Patriarchy must be denied!
But the peculiarities of these students pales into insignificance when the remainder of the party is considered.
Although the dozen students all signed up for the excursion and paid for it, none of them intend to follow the prescribed program, still less write the reports Jay set, and that is fine since he had little interest in reading them. Every step of the way it is a test of wills, and at sixty years of age Jay’s will has been eroded by the tests that have gone before it. Most recently with the Provost to get a budget for his department, which has been on death row for some time. Few of its members will survive the killing fields of the next budget round. But like deer in hunting season, most of his colleagues are unaware of the calendar. He hopes, no doubt vainly, that taking this assignment will earn his department a stay of execution for another budget cycle. Rumour has it that the Provost has negotiated a new contract with a salary greater than the combined salaries of all sixteen members of the English Department. Hmmm.
If you don’t know Jay, start with Dear Committee Member, the first of the three novels chronicling his woes. Then continue with the Shakespeare Requirement, before getting to this one.
Some readers of these books might think them satirical, but I can assure such readers that they have a core of verisimilitude. This conclusion is contrary to some of the more sanctimonious reviews on Good Reads.
Cosmic Rescue: The Moonlight Generations (2003) (コスミック・レスキュー ザ・ムーンライト・ジェネレーションズ)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 24m, rated 5.7 by 25 cinematizens.
DNA: Japan.
Genre: SyFy.
Verdict: Stop the music!
Tagline: Non-stop.
The boring routine and madcap adventures of a 2053 NRMA space road rescue patrol number 89. It is composed of three mop-tops who read comics, chew gum, spend hours on a coiffure while sweeping up debris. They cannot even rescue themselves from boredom, and then…!
Another corporate conspiracy is at work, but all’s well that…, well, ends.
It moves so fast, there is no time to count the plot holes and character contradictions.
It has inspired me to try to find the director’s The Library Wars to get an update on Florida’s war on knowledge where library proscriptions will soon be enforced by masked, armed thugs recruited from jails.
