Snowblind
Mood:  cool
Now Playing: THAT MAN BOLT
What a full day and it's not even 3pm yet. For some reason, I haven't slept all that great the past few days, so I was up shortly after 8am. I have updated Marty's Marquee only twice this year so far, so I wrote a bunch of reviews this morning to post next week. It was snowing pretty good in Champaign this morning, so I would have preferred to stay in, but I had no food, and thus I ventured forth to Sam's Club. I had not shopped at Sam's in several years, but it was nice to know that not much has changed. I still find it amusing that, right next to the frozen Tyson chicken breasts, you can plop a clearance-priced widescreen TV in your cart and wheel them to the checkout counter.

I haven't written much of substance since I began this blog a month ago. I mostly leave the political stuff to Tolemite, but I occasionally pop up in the Comments section on his blog and on Cheeseburger's. The current political situation in the U.S. is so depressing right now. It seems so obvious to anyone with common sense that our nation's leaders are dangerous, arrogant fools, yet we're powerless, as last year's election proved, to do anything to stop them. It would be nigh impossible for any American president to perform his duties with less competence than George W. Bush did during his first term, yet he still got re-elected. Look forward to four more years of war, hatred, class resentment, inflation, and hostile former allies.

Instead I'll tell you about THAT MAN BOLT, which I finally got to see on Universal's new DVD. BOLT contains a lot of chasing, fighting and shooting, jumping from Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Las Vegas back to Hong Kong, but, unfortunately, it feels a bit lifeless except for the grinning charm of its star, the great blaxploitation actor Fred "The Hammer" Williamson (so named because of his trademark as an NFL cornerback of "hammering" his opponents with a hard forearm). The Hammer is Jefferson Bolt, a professional courier who is blackmailed into transporting a million bucks from Hong Kong to Mexico City. He never makes it south of the American border, as he is waylaid at LAX and discovers the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist contains what he believes to be counterfeit cash. Ranald McDougall's screenplay lost me on occasion, but Bolt eventually ends up back where he started, invading the island stronghold of a Japanese gangster named Yamada and blowing stuff up just like he does at the end of THREE THE HARD WAY.

Give credit to Universal for not steeping BOLT in a bunch of blaxploitation clich?s; with just a few dialogue tweaks, BOLT could just as easily have starred Robert Wagner. More energy and perhaps a bit more budget would have improved this film a lot, although it was nice to finally see it.

The effervescent Teresa Graves sings a couple of tunes as Fred's sacrificial lamb. Graves was a sweet and very sexy singer and actress who was quite popular during the early 1970's as a regular on LAUGH-IN, afternoon talk shows, and her single-season cop show, GET CHRISTIE LOVE!, where she popularized her catchphrase, "You're under arrest, sugar!" Graves was reportedly a very nice woman and a religious one who finally left a Hollywood industry that was more interested in her body than her talent. She sadly died in a house fire in 2002. She's missed.

I've been reading Ellery Queen lately. I have always been a very big reader, a habit that was encouraged by my folks when I was a kid. Particularly my mother, who also was a reader and never hesitated to pick up something for my brother and me to read when she could. She also got us involved in the local library, which was located just two blocks from our house. It's a habit that has never died; even when I was in college, I would carry a book to class to get in a few pages before class started. My apartment is too small to accomodate my current collection, much of which is stacked up against walls. I have more than 2000 comics and several hundred paperbacks and hardcovers. I'd say at least 90% of my collection is comprised of four categories: A) non-fiction books about film and television, B) contemporary mass-market paperback mysteries, crime dramas and courtroom thrillers, C) older mysteries and pulp adventures, and D) comic books and trade paperbacks. I also have several boxes filled with magazines that I just can't bear to get rid of. Ellery Queen belongs in category C, along with Perry Mason, Lew Archer, Shell Scott, Nero Wolfe, Matt Helm, 87th Precinct, etc. I enjoy the process of collecting clues, just like the detectives do, and the challenge of fitting them together to solve the mystery. Unlike most of today's TV mysteries like CSI, where the crimes are usually solved through wild coincidence or a deux es machina in the fourth act, authors like Queen made an effort to craft a mystery that would hold water.

Some contemporary writers do this too, but I find more comfort in older literature, for some reason. I still read the latest by Nelson DeMille, Jonathan Kellerman and Ed McBain when I can get my hands on them, but James Patterson, for instance, leaves me cold. Cheeseburger lent me some of his books to sample, but after getting through about 1/3 of two of them, put them down. They weren't hooking me, although they're solid enough, I suppose. I certainly see why they were popular enough for Hollywood to take notice, although an adaptation of a Kellerman Alex Delaware novel, with, say, Alec Baldwin starring, could be a hit if any studio would dare attempt it. Considering the awful original thrillers Hollywood has produced lately (TAKING LIVES, TWISTED, SUSPECT ZERO among them), I don't see how they could lose by adapting a good story that has already been written.