Burl reviews Plane! (2023)

 

Attention passengers, it’s Burl here to review some January schlock! Ha ha, we all know about the grand January tradition the studios have of releasing lower-brow genre movies into the theatres in the turbulent recirculating flow left by the Christmas holidays! January is regularly regarded as a dumping ground for movies that might inadvertently make some money, but which, even if entertaining, aren’t likely to garner much prestige! It’s a long and glorious tradition and I could name plenty of examples from the past: Deep Star Six, The Kindred, Demon Knight, Phantoms – all of these being entertaining genre fare that appeared in the first month of their respective years!

And now, whoosh, here comes Plane! Ha ha, that makes me sound like a caveman who’s just seeing an airplane for the first time; but yes, the movie is actually called Plane! Yes, just Plane, tout court! Less than half of the picture takes place on the titular conveyance, and so the movie might just as well have been called Island, but never mind that for now! The title helps it fit into its paradigm: the ideal January goofnugget! It takes place on New Year’s Eve after all, with many instances of characters wishing a happy same to other characters (almost as frequently as characters exhort one another to “Get down!!!!”), yet it all happens in a tropical locale in which everybody gets hot and sweaty! So on a wintry January day in Canada, you can go off to the theatre with your son and take in a brainless lark and imagine you too are hanging out among the palms!

Unshaven gumdrop Gerard Butler from Olympus Has Fallen plays Torrance, the pilot with a mildly scandalous past thanks to an event in which he used his brawn against a rage-demented passenger! He and a friendly co-pilot played by Yoson An from The Meg are flying from Singapore to Hawaii with a comically small load of passengers when they run up against a storm that knocks their aircraft all a-frizzle! This drawn-out crash scene is maybe the best part of the picture, and once they’re safely down on a Philippines-adjacent island there’s a bit of time to kill before they realize there are violent separatists lurking nearby – the kind who enjoy kidnapping people, holding them for ransom, then shooting them anyway!

The passengers are mostly a bunch of nonentities, but among them is a Canadian criminal called Gaspare being transported by the RCMP back to Toronto for trial! Gaspare is played by Mike Colter from Men In Black 3, and of course once his handcuffs are off he proves to be a resourceful type and handy at pounding separatists with a sledgehammer! It pretty quickly comes down to Torrance and Gaspare trying to make contact with authorities and rescuing the passengers from the clutches of the separatists!

While all this is going on, back in a glossy black chamber somewhere in Manhattan, the head of the airline, Paul Ben-Victor from Metro, calls in a dealing-with-it specialist named Scarsdale, essayed by Tony Goldwyn from Friday the 13^th part VI: Jason Lives, and he in turn calls in a gang of mercenaries to try to find and rescue the castaway passengers! Once these mercenaries have arrived, we get some group shootouts and, eventually, a return to the plane, which proves surprisingly bulletproof while under extended machine gun attack!

Ha ha, like Butler’s _________ Has Fallen movies, this is a sort of throwback to 80s and 90s action! It’s not quite as fun, cheesy, or action-packed as that description might imply, however – aside from the crash, a fair punch-up mid-picture, and the machine gun / plane take-off climax, the movie is largely made up of people sitting around looking glum! The main bad guy glowers but doesn’t make much of an impression, and we never even get a chance to find out what his specific political issues are! Ha ha, aside from his penchant for shooting tourists and missionaries, for all we know maybe he’s not such a bad guy!

Like its 80s and 90s forbears the picture is pretty simple-minded: as simple-minded as its title in fact, but it’s also perfectly amiable – too dumb to offend, too eager-to-please to embrace the mean spiritedness some action pictures have! (Usually a moment in which the likeable co-pilot shows off a photo of his lovely family is a sure harbinger of his death, but not here!) Being a good candidate for dumping-ground release is not a stellar achievement for a movie, but it’s still an achievement, and I didn’t mind paying a few bucks to see this particular achiever! Still, I hope the next movie I take in on the big screen is better! Ha ha, I’ll give Plane two passenger lists and try to book a better flight next time!

Burl reviews Sully! (2016)

 

Heading for runway two-niner, it’s Burl, reporting birdstrike from the sky! Ha ha, it’s a real-life disaster movie – or is it? Those of us who remember watching the news in early 2009 remember that it wasn’t a disaster at all, but a heartening story of competence! Yes, it’s a picture from the man who reinvented himself as a chronicler of ripped-from-recent-headline stories, and this, as far as I can tell, is the best-regarded of them: by garr, it’s the fabulous story of Sully!

Yes, it’s Sully Sullenberger, Airport Pilot, and who better to essay him than Tom Hanks, the fellow we recall from Dragnet and Big and pictures like that! Why, Hanks already had the real-life-pilot-wrings-triumph-from-disaster angle covered in his portrayal of Jim Lovell of Apollo 13! Like Lovell, Sully keeps a calm head and is helped by his even-keeled co-workers, and from the oncoming rush of too-certain tragedy comes the joy of unexpected survival – a water landing from which the aviatrons emerge smiling!

You recall the story: in January of 2009, a flight takes off from La Guardia airport in New York, and instead of its intended destination, Charlotte, a capitol of one of the Carolinas I believe, the airplane is struck by passing birds and, bereft of thrust, is forced into the icy waters of the Hudson River! Injuries are minor and fatalities nil, and pilot Sully Sullenberger is hailed as a hero! But wait – the Red Cross blankets draped across the shoulders of the survivors are not the only wet ones in this story, because various authorities, especially those concerned about insurance costs and so forth with regards to the plane, ask whether Sully and his co-pilot could not have returned to the aerodrome even in their bird-crippled state! By the end of the picture it is revealed that the pilots did all the right things, and their reputations and hero status remain intact!

Aaron Eckhart from Olympus Has Fallen is the co-pilot of Mustache Air flight 1549, and he provides a stolid backup to Sully, a faithful wingman, someone for him to talk to! Laura Linney from Congo is the worried Mrs. Sully, whose scenes are all on the telephone and who doesn’t get to do anything but fret from a distance! Ha ha, it’s a bit of a nothing part, but Linney is a good actor and does what she can! And of course the picture is directed by Clint himself, who as a filmmaker has brought us many pictures: some of them very good, others more like Blood Work! And yes, as mentioned above, of his ripped-from-the-headlines pictures, which include one about the terrorists on the train to Paris and another about the security guard who was thought to have planted a bomb, Sully is the one people thought was pretty good!

Maybe that’s because Sully himself was such a readymade white middle-aged man hero, and therefore perfect to be played by Hanks! Hanks is good in the role, but there’s not all that much to the man aside from being a good and dedicated pilot who’s certain of the rightness of his actions aside from one or two moments of doubt! The picture is assembled in such a way as to break the actual crash and rescue into sections, one of them from the perspective of the La Guardia tower; and occasionally we are privy to the explosive visions with which Sully is occasionally assailed – snapshots of how the disaster might have unfolded if everything hadn’t gone exactly right in the aftermath of the birdstrike!

Like most Eastwood pictures, it’s a competent but unspectacular work! It certainly doesn’t wear out its welcome – at 93 minutes, including credits and explanatory titles, it qualifies as a miniature in the Eastwood oeuvre! It’s a fine piece of reportage, very basic in its themes and emotions, and carries nearly to a fault an abhorrence of nuance or complication! It’s no Unforgiven, ha ha, and it's no Sully Sullenberger: Airport Pilot either, but then what is! Still, I’m going to give Sully two and a half cries of “Heads down, stay down, brace, brace, brace!”

Burl reviews The Lost Squadron! (1932)

 

Hello chums, it’s Burl, here with a nifty picture about flying fliers and the flights they flew! It’s a story about some airborne veterans of WWI - the Great War, ha ha - and what happens to these fellows once the hostilities have ceased; and it’s called The Lost Squadron!

It opens in the final five minutes of the war as our heroes try to down as many German planes as they can, and then, as the 11 AM bell strikes on November 11, we see them exchange a last friendly wave with their former enemies and fly back to their airfield! Ha ha, it really pushes the alleged gentlemanly aspects of the war, in much the manner as it was parodied many years later by Monty Python in The Meaning of Life, except here it’s in earnest!

Our boys are upright Gibby, played by Richard Dix from It Happened in Hollywood and The Ghost Ship; Woody, the most carefree of a pretty relaxed bunch, essayed by a cheerful Robert Armstrong from King Kong and The Mad Ghoul; Red, handsome and charming, in the person of Joel McCrea from Foreign Correspondent, Sullivan’s Travels, and of course the great Ride the High Country; and their potatofaced mechanic Fritz, played by Hugh Herbert from The Black Cat and Hellzapoppin’! At their demobbing they are told nothing has changed since they left for Europe, but on their return Stateside they find everything has! Personal disasters - bankruptcy, cuckoldry, so forth - befall each man, which they accept with astonishing stoicism; and one drinking scene and a quick montage later, all but one of them have become rail-riding hobos!

On the distaff side we have Mary Astor from The Palm Beach Story and of course The Maltese Falcon playing Gibby’s ex, the ambitious, inconstant Follette - a character not dissimilar to how Astor herself was perceived by the public a few years later when she was beset by the sort of scandal that small, Puritanical minds think is important! As well there’s a crucial character called The Pest, who is Woody’s little sister and is played by Dorothy Jordan from The Searchers!

Gibby, Red, and Fritz, the three members of the squadron who have become stewbums, make their way to Hollywood, where they discover Woody living the good life as a stunt flier for the then-booming genre of aerial war pictures, and The Pest worrying about him and trying to stop him from his habit of drunk flying! Woody’s glad to see his old pals and convinces them to join him in the lucrative if still dangerous endeavor, and so it is that the squadron once again find themselves facing off against a fiery German enemy: this time the shouty director Von Furst, played by The Man You Love To Hate, Erich von Stroheim! Not only is he a sociopathic martinet in jodhpurs, but he’s now married to Gibby’s old flame Follette, who’s the female star of the movie! Ha ha!

Well that is a coincidence! And it’s not one the perpetually angry Von Furst is willing to countenance: he decides to get rid of Gibby by dousing his plane’s guywires in acid! But the irrepressible Woody takes the sabotaged plane up instead, and when Gibby, having realized what’s happening, goes up and flies alongside Woody trying to warn him about the acid attack on his wires, Woody just laughs and gives him the finger! Ha ha!

Well, after the wires break and Woody crashes in a spectacular conflagration, it’s clear to the remaining three that revenge is required, though there is disagreement on the type! However, before this can be resolved an accidental gunshot claims the autocratic filmmaker, and down the stairs he tumbles! Ha ha, the boys have to pull a Weekend At Bernie’s with Von Furst’s corpse to fool a slow-witted watchman who heard the shot! From there events proceed as they must, with noble subterfuge and sacrifice abounding, and in a final touching coda, the squadron members who’ve succumbed in the course of the story reappear as ghost fliers piloting ghost planes!

It was a real pleasure to watch this peppy little picture, I must say! The stunt flying is impressive, and the cast a real delight, and the pre-Code shenanigans are terrific! The gentlemanly comradeliness of the squadroneers is almost alien in its profundity and relentlessness! Von Stroheim is good in his role as the heavy, even if he’s more or less playing a more homicidal version of himself, and the layers of postmodern irony with which the narrative is infused seems almost unintentional, which fact merely adds another layer, ha ha! It’s a crackerjack and no mistake, so I give The Lost Squadron three toasts to fallen comrades!

Burl reviews Eraser! (1996)

 

HA-LLO DIS IZ BURL! Ha ha, as you can tell from my note-perfect Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation, I’m reviewing an Arnie picture for you today! It’s late-mid period Arnie, after he graduated to comedies like Junior, but before he got into his Grizzled Old Muscleman phase! Evidently as the second half of the 1990s began, he felt like dipping a toe back into the R-rated action of his earlier years, when he was doing pictures like Commando and Raw Deal and the like; and the big-budget nubscrum that resulted is called Eraser!

Arnold is of course the titular Eraser: an agent with no life, back story, or personality, who works for the Justice Department, giving new identities to witnesses and informants and folk of that nature! In the opening scenes he does just that for a low-level gangster played by the late Robert Pastorelli, and then we meet the main erasee, a lady called Lee, played quite well by Vanessa Williams, who’s ready to give up the goods on the shady armaments company she works for by recording them through a hideous brooch camera! Here we get just a kiss of science fiction, because the company’s newest invention is something called a “rail gun,” which shoots pellets nearly at the speed of light! Ha ha, in reality these pellets would just pass through a body and it would take a second before the victim even noticed, while in the movie if you get shot by one of these things, then of course you fly screaming all the way across the room and crash into the wall in slow motion!

James Caan from Misery is Arnie’s mentor and work chum, but it’s pretty evident he’s the bad guy right from the start! Of course maybe it’s not so evident, because James Coburn from Hard Times, here wearing a silver cocksman’s beard, is lurking around in the office scenes looking just as suspicious! Soon Arnie is on the run from the both of them; there’s a pretty impressively-sustained level of action-suspense once Arnie realizes he’s been betrayed and must jump off a flaming jet plane to escape, and then drives like a maniac to the zoo, where he must gunfight and battle alligators!

The picture slows down a bit after this, but I suppose it had to! It’s got a little sparkle to the script, maybe thanks to the participation of Walon Green, who also wrote Sorcerer and The Wild Bunch! Of course it’s pretty hard to say who wrote this lame-o bon mot or that goofy gay bar scene, so best to spread both the credit and the blame around as far as it’ll go! The sci-fi superguns are a nice addition, because that peps things up a bit! Whenever one of the rail guns starts shooting, it leaves a trail of expanding blue smoke rings from every supersonic projectile! It’s an effect I liked well enough, but not nearly as much as the filmmakers liked it themselves: ha ha, it must happen a million times! I bet the animation artists got tired of drawing blue smoke rings!

The  climax is a pretty bog-standard shipyard shootout, with the addition of a lot of blue smoke rings of course; and then there’s a final revenge scene that’s hard not to read as a fond fantasy from people who might like to see sterner measures taken against real-life perpetrators of similar crimes! Ha ha, this is an Iran-Contra movie just the way The Parallax View is a product of Watergate, though of course Eraser is far and away the weaker film I think it should go without saying!

It sits squarely in the middle of the 90s Hollywood action pack: not nearly up there with Speed or The Fugitive, but cheek by jowl with Passenger 57 and Con Air on the ho-hum-hell-why-not shelf! It’s got a fine action look from cinematographer Adam Greenberg, a nice scene of henchmen getting crunched by alligators (which beasts are brought to life by both animatronics and rough mid-90s digital trick effects), and a reasonably brisk pace! Making a smart political thriller out of this material might have been nice, but these particular filmmakers just weren’t interested in doing that! I’m going to give Eraser two concerned bartenders!

Burl reviews Jet Pilot! (1957)

 

Up up and away, it’s Burl, here to review aeronautical derring-do! Ha ha, we’re all familiar with the Duke, which is to say John Wayne, and his many horse operas, from Randy Rides Alone to Rio Bravo! But in today’s picture he’s bestride a different sort of saddle: the pilot’s seat of the latest in jet fighter technology! The picture in question is titled, with admirable prosy, Jet Pilot!  

The Duke stars as Jim Shannon, one of the Air Force’s top wingsmen! When a pretty pilot called Anna, played by Janet Leigh from Halloween H20 and The Fog, drops into the Alaskan air base run by General Jay C. Flippen (an actor we may recall from Thunder Bay) and requests political sanctuary, Shannon is enlisted to keep her company! They fly around together and of course fall in love! Ha ha, but is she truly sweet Anna, wholeheartedly wanting to defect, or is she the duplicitous Olga, sent in order to lure the lovestruck Duke back to Mother Russia?

The answer, it turns out, is “both!” But there’s a lot of back and forth along the way, and plans within plans, and chumps made on both sides! Ha ha, Anna and Shannon even get married, and you know what that means - blanket hornpipe! Considering the political leanings of both the Duke and of Howard Hughes, who produced, or anyway “presents” the picture, we can be pretty sure from the start which side will prevail! In the meantime, some fun is made of Anna’s socialist values, as when she notes that a hotel suite is far too large for just two people, so invites a number of other, including Paul Fix from Night of the Lepus, to bunk with them!

Ha ha, the picture was released in 1957, but a little research taught me that it was shot in 1950, so that all the cutting-edge technology it wanted to show off had long passed its sell-by date! At this remove of course that doesn’t matter much, and so we’re left with a whole heck of a lot of excellent flying footage, with the pilots doing little rollover tricks, and voiceover radio chat between “A for Anna” and “S for Shannon!” But the aeronauts seem to fly everywhere all the time, and it eventually gets tiresome!

When the Duke follows his bride back to Russia, he finds Hans Conried from Summer Stock, The Monster that Challenged the World and The Twonky running the show, and that Anna has reverted to her more Soviet persona, Olga! She flips back and forth between these identities, even seeming to change her hair colour sometimes, and I found it as confusing as the Duke did! Leigh’s character is as split as that of her later co-star in Psycho, ha ha, and when she starts casually murdering people at the end, by tricking them into pulling ejection seat handles at inopportune moments for example, she seems more a narrative instrument than a character at all!

A funny thing about Jet Pilot is that it was directed, nominally at any rate, by Josef Von Sternberg! Ha ha! It really doesn’t seem like his sort of picture, and the picture itself doesn’t seem much like it was directed by von Sternberg! Still and all, that’s a pretty interesting fact! Hughes was the real auteur here, I suppose! But the overlapping part of a Hughes/von Sternberg Venn diagram is eroticism, and somehow this is a strangely sexy movie! Leigh looks great in her flight suit; she loses her harem pants at one point and is almost spotted trouserless by a marching band; and after their marriage, there are several references to the notion that Leigh and Wayne are doing nothing besides bohankie all the day long! It starts right from the beginning, as the Duke observes Leigh warming her bum at a stove and musing “This might be some new form of Russian propaganda!”

 

 

The flying scenes are impressive, but too long and too numerous; the geopolitics are childish and binary of course; and the characters are little more than blank figures moved around the landscape like quoits! It’s entertaining in its 1950s way, but seems more an interesting relic than a piece of cinema! But if you like watching jets fly around, this is the motion picture for you! I give Jet Pilot one and a half barrel rolls!

Burl reviews Con Air! (1997)

My goodness, it’s 90s action again! Ha ha, I’ve reviewed a lot of these lately, it seems, and this one, Con Air, is a picture I may well have tackled back in my old reviewing days, and if I looked I might be able to find the old notice itself! But I recently watched the picture again, so I can provide opinions that are popping fresh and hot out of the oven! Hee hee!

I’ve said it so often that the words have lost all meaning: here, truly, is quintessential 90s action! But I’ve felt the same about pictures as minor as Passenger 57 or as forgotten as Executive Decision, though if I were applying myself seriously - ha ha! - I might have to give the title to something like Speed, or even to the execrable Bad Boys or The Rock! Con Air, for its part, is more the latter than the former: one of those Bruckheimer crundleburgers that practically bust a nut trying to earn the baffling critical acclamation “Testosterone Fueled Action!”

Well, here is where the movie scores highest: in the simplicity of its plot and in its singular cast! Nicolas Cage pulls out his Sailor Ripley accent, with just a touch of H.I. McDunnough, to play a man just paroled from years in the pokey, hitching a ride on a plane with a load of convicts who are all being taken to a big new jail! But soon the hard cases take over the plane; these include legendarily monstrous criminals played by the likes of John Malkovich, doing the same sort of thing he did in In the Line of Fire, Steve Buscemi from Escape from L.A. playing a calm maniac, Ving Rhames from Mission Impossible III as a Black revolutionary, plus M.C. Gainey from Starman and Django Unchained, Danny Trejo from Machete, and Mykelti Williamson from Streets of Fire as the diabetic buddy! We also get famed instability comedian Dave Chappelle playing a young wiseacre! Ha ha, so you see what I mean about the cast!

The tensions come from Cage trying to keep his identity as a parolee from the other cons, and particularly from Malkovich! Meanwhile, on the ground, John Cusack is trying to figure out how to get what he constantly refers to as his plane back down on the ground without blowing it up, which is what hothead Colm Meaney wishes to do! (To be fair, Meaney has seen this kind of thing before, from when he played a pilot in Die Hard 2!) Up in the plane, where convicts are constantly rooting through Cage’s stuff and discovering his secret, there are violence fights and near-misses, and it all ends with a crash in Las Vegas and then a fire truck fight, and then an over-the-top showcase death for main heavy Malkovich! Ha ha, he catches a real piledriving right upside the head!

Rachel Ticotin from Total Recall plays the only lady on the flight, and as such becomes the focus of Danny Trejo’s horrible rapist character! Of course he gets his just desserts without having a chance to practice his horrible avocation, but, after enjoying a tea party singalong with a little trailer park girl, Buscemi’s maniac is allowed to stroll off for a some action at the roulette table! Ha ha, all of this simply reveals a script that privileges mindless button-pushing over structure or characterization, or other things a motion picture scenario usually aspires to!

All it really has to offer are moments scattered here and there to juice up the audience and make them whoop and say ha ha! We get scenes like the dumping of Chappelle’s battered corpse from the plane down to a city street; the destruction of a classic Corvette by use of a plane, a length of cable, and a hook; and the time Cage rolls under a truck to avoid an explosion, only to find Dabbs Greer already there! Ha ha! And these are all fine, and the movie’s 115 minutes move quickly and entertainingly! It’s clearly aware of its own absurdity, and the cast is just having a ball, but there’s a forced cynicism and faux edginess to the whole thing that really wears thin, and some of the special trick effects are pretty bad too! It’s a movie of its time and doesn’t have the staying power of some of the better 90s actioners, and so I give Con Air one and a half bunnies in the box!

Burl reviews Passenger 57! (1992)

A hearty welcome to all! I’ve got a bit of advice for you movie lovers today: always bet on Burl! Ha ha! Yes, I’m reviewing 90s action today, as I have done so often, and today’s 90s action offering is one of the quintessential early-90s actionstravaganzas! It is not, I hasten to add, one of the best of them, but if on one starry night it happens to be all you’ve got, then it’ll do until one of the best comes along! The picture in question is, naturally, the Snipes-on-a-plane picture Passenger 57!

Of course this is not the only time Wesley has had trouble in the air - you'll recall how, two years after this picture, he hit the silk to fight parachute criminals in Drop Zone! In the case of Passenger 57, he’s John Cutter, some kind of security expert who tutors airlines on how to acquiesce completely to hijackers and their demands! Of course, ha ha, he’s the best there is, and we have his buddy Tom Sizemore, whom we may recall from The Relic, there to remind us of this every few minutes! Ha ha, the Sizemore character’s two defining characteristics are his hounddog admiration of John Cutter and his mild fear of flying in helicopters!

Anyway, at the beginning of the picture the world’s most deadly airplane hijacker, played by Bruce Payne from The Keep in a way that’s meant to recall Alan Rickman in Die Hard, is captured just as he’s trying to change his face, and of course the authorities decide this nefarious character must be taken by commercial air carrier across the country to California! Double of course, John Cutter is on this very same flight, on his way to take a job with the airline run by Bruce Greenwood from The Malibu Bikini Shop; and triple of course the hijack terrorist has a plan for violent escape that includes several Euroslimes like himself, a pretty lady masquerading as a stewardess, and a sadistic glasses nerd, which was a common 80s-90s henchman archetype! On Snipes's side there is a helpful flight attendant who is an exact forbear of the stewardess Halle Berry played later in Executive Decision!

It’s a 90s action movie that seems to have been stamped out on a tintype! Ha ha, the bad guy is what an AI computer would spit out if you fed it details from every other action movie made around the same time! Everything about him, from his name, “Charles Rane,” to his plummy accent, his style-mullet hair, his snide, superior, steely-effete manner, the way he first underestimates and later admits to underestimating the capabilities of the Snipes character, whom he calls “Mis-tah Cut-tah,” and finally to his climactic, hilarious death plummet from the plane, is so familiar as to seem a Simpsons-style parody!

The action scenes are not as peppy as one might want, but at least our characters get out of the plane for a while and chase around through a fun fair adjacent to the airport! Ha ha, there’s a merry-go-round shootout which none of the kids on the ride seem even to notice, even as horseheads are exploding into splinters all around them! And where are the parents? I know that when my child is on a ride, I’m standing there watching him! Not so in the world of Passenger 57!

So it’s goofy and dumb, and one wishes it were more exciting, or exciting at all; but on the other hand at 87 minutes it’s short and sweet and never boring, and it’s as comfortable as an old cotton shirt in its absolute refusal to stray from the action formula of that period! Ha ha, I give Passenger 57 one and a half bottles of steak sauce!

Burl reviews Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb! (1964)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here, living it up on Condition Red! Yes, I’m here to review one of the best movies I can think of, a fine work from Mr. Stanley Kubrick, the maker of pictures like The Shining and Full Metal Jacket! Of course I’m talking about the great Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, a movie I’ve seen many times! It’s one of my father’s two favourite motion pictures, the other one being Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings!

Do we all know the plot of this anti-war satire? Ha ha, of course we do: it’s more or less the same as Fail Safe, the movie in which Henry Fonda was inducted as President In Movies For Life! In Kubrick’s movie, it seems that General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden from such marvelous pictures as The Asphalt Jungle and The Long Goodbye, has gone hot bananas and decided to start World War III by sending impossible-to-countermand orders to his in-flight bomber pilots! Ha ha, he’s worried about precious bodily fluids and whatnot, so naturally global decimation is the only solution!

Peter Sellers, whom we know from Down Among the Z Men and Being There, plays three roles in the movie: a visiting British officer stationed at Ripper’s air base, and morally tasked with trying to talk him out of his mad plan; the American president, Merkin Muffley, desperately trying to convince his Soviet counterpart that the nuclear firestorm shortly to ravage his country was not delivered purposefully, or at least not purposefully by him; and of course the good doctor of the title, the cartoonish ex-Nazi Strangelove!  

George C. Scott from Exorcist III plays another manic general who indulges in a little fighting in the War Room, and makes the odd comment to his pal Jack Creley from Tulips; and, back at the air base near the end of the picture, Keenan Wynn from Piranha and The Dark and Herbie Rides Again appears as the blockheaded Colonel Bat Guano! In the airplane, our third major location, we find Slim Pickens from This House Possessed and White Line Fever and a young James Earl Jones from The Hunt for Red October! It’s really a pretty incredible cast, ha ha!

And there’s not much else I can say that you folks don’t already know! It’s a precision satire machine that scores strategic hits on an array of targets! It’s a beautifully shot, designed, directed and acted picture that might lean a little heavily on shticky gags here and there, but doesn’t ever stray from its noble, hilarious course! I love the picture and so should you, and I have to give a special mention to Sterling Hayden and his marvelous performance! Ha ha, I give Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb four deviated preverts!

Burl reviews Executive Decision! (1996)

Ha ha, Burl here with a simple question for you: what would you get if you combined Die Hard with the 1970 Ross Hunter production Airport? One assumes you’d simply get Die Hard 2, or maybe something like Air Force One! But I’ll tell you what: I think you might get a picture very like Executive Decision!

“Ha ha, Executive what?” you might ask! And your question would not be a foolish one! This picture is a real product of the 1990s, but now it seems largely forgotten, though it was as slick and big-budget an action-drama as they came in those days! It was directed by Stuart Baird, a film editor with plenty of action-movie cutting experience, who managed to infuse all the pictures he directed - well, the ones I’ve seen anyway, which include this one, a semi-sequel to The Fugitive called U.S. Marshals, and the last of the Picard Star Trek features, Star Trek Nemesis - with a strange, subliminal, post-viewing suggestion that the audience immediately forget anything about the movie they’ve just seen! This Peter Reveen of the cinema made his directing debut with Executive Decision - and, ha ha, it’s okay to admit if you’ve forgotten the title since the last time I typed it!

There’s something kind of machine-tooled and generic about the movie, and I’ve always thought the utterly banal title of the picture suited it nicely! There’s a fine, high-concept premise: a gang of terrorists, led by David Suchet in brownface, takes over a 747 with the goal of delivering a deadly payload of nerve toxin, and an elite force of covert operatives slip onto the plane in mid-flight in order to foil the plan! Ha ha, this involves sneak-flying underneath the airliner and crawling through a shaky tube up to the belly and through some kind of service hatch!

Kurt Russell from The Thing plays the unwilling hero, a strategic analyst unused to the action shenanigans of the field! Once aboard he gets in touch with Halle Berry, playing a spunky stewardess in the tradition of Karen Black in Airport 1975! Meanwhile the bomb is ticking down and the U.S. officials are getting antsy, ready to send fighter planes to shoot the plane down the moment it crosses into their airspace! As befits a picture made by an editor, it does a reasonably good job of juggling two or three separate but parallel suspense sequences all happening at once!

It’s got a lot of the 1990s in it, this picture, and that’s largely thanks to the supporting cast! John Leguizamo from the even blander Collateral Damage is one of the commandos; J.T. Walsh from Misery is a grandstanding senator; Oliver Platt is the fellow who came up with the tube idea; B.D. Wong is yet another commando; and Joe Morton, an actor I’ve admired ever since I saw him in The Brother From Another Planet, and who became an unlikely action figure in movies like Terminator 2, Speed, and this, plays the bomb defusing expert who gets badly shaken about during the tube transfer and spends the rest of the picture gaff-taped to a stretcher! Ha ha, even Marla Maples is in it! And, of course, in the most 90s touch of all, we get Steven Segal, who was formerly Hard to Kill, but proves not to be so here! Ha ha!

Yes, you heard that right: they got Steven Seagal, then at the tail end of his mid-budget action stardom, to play the boss commando of the movie, then they tossed him out of a plane at 35,000 feet! Ha ha, you’re pretty grateful to see him go, since his character is pretty much just a jerkier version of any of his other characters! He flies out of the tube in a noble act of self-sacrifice, but I sure wish they’d gone with the original plan and had his head explode in a thrilling rush of depressurization! (Seagal himself put the kibosh on that, claiming that his fans wouldn’t have liked to see him go that way, but I think they would have loved it!)

Anyway, it’s not a good picture, though of course it presaged 9/11 in many respects; but it’s a modestly entertaining one, with a few thrills here and there, all the lavish slickness a studio can offer! (Alex Thomson shot the picture, mostly, but in keeping with the whole, the cinematography is merely competent, without that dark and velvety style he gave movies like The Keep, Alien 3 and even, at points, Cliffhanger!) It is instantly forgettable though, and I had to force myself to recall enough to even write this review! Ha ha! I give Executive Decision one and a half chewed straws!

Burl reviews The Devil's Triangle! (1973)

Kchshsh, Burl transmitting! Can you read me! Ha ha, I think the odds are likely that I’ve flown through the Bermuda Triangle more than once, and yet here I am, having survived these risky journeys through the unknown, to write you a review for a late-70s goof-doc highlighting the final journeys of some who were not so lucky! Ha ha, yes, it’s The Devil’s Triangle!

The Bermuda Triangle was a big deal in the 1970s, and a filmmaker called Richard Winer obviously knew a winning gambit when he saw it: make a mid-length documentary about the phenomenon, use all sorts of stock footage, some po-faced interviews, a few re-creations, a droney theme tune by King Crimson, a briefly psychedelic flashback and an exploding model boat to tell the story - and then hire Vincent “Dead Heat” Price to narrate it all! Ha ha, Price does the job perfectly with that high-born voice, and sounds like he’s been offered a bonus for every time he can work in the words “The Devil’s Triangle!” in a tone of barely-controlled alarm!

It’s a little weird, actually: the words “Bermuda Triangle” are never uttered once in the picture! It’s as though Winer had decided to coin a new term for some reason, or else was prohibited by court order to use the established nomenclature! It feels like poor Price is being forced to talk around something that everybody already knows the name of, and I’m afraid the ruthless determination to speak only of The Devil’s Triangle undercuts one’s willingness to accept all of the movie’s propositions!

Many well-known cases are considered! Of course we get the full story of the Lost Squadron, the routine patrol flight that went out, send back a few cryptic, garbled messages, then vanished for all time, never to be seen again! There’s the more historical account of the Japanese freighter that only had time to radio “Danger like dagger now!” before never being heard from again! Some stories were unfamiliar, at least to laymen like ol’ Burl, and you can see why! For example, there’s the one about the guy and his buddy the priest who lay their cabin cruiser just a mile off Miami to look at the lights of the city, call in a complaint that there was a hole in their hull, and then aren’t there anymore by the time the Coast Guard comes to investigate! Ha ha, it’s not the most thrilling tale, that one!

In what was probably considered a big get for the documentary, Winer interviews the pilot who stayed behind while his Lost Squadron patrolmates went out into oblivion! There’s a real human story here, or the potential for one, about survivor’s guilt, obsession, and the unevenly-toothed gears of fate! But the movie engages with none of these, presenting instead a ghostly roll call in which the survivor’s name is repeated as though he’s the one who’s absent!

This bit is a waste of time (of which this brief picture has only fifty-two minutes’ worth in total), but where we do get a few frissons of creepy mystery is in some of the radio messages sent back from, apparently, the void; or the scary portraits of sailors in panic; or the home movie footage, which Price assures us is genuine, of a sailing yacht under the skipperage of a famous millionaire in the last few days before disappearing forever into uncertain geometries!

The picture gives equal consideration to all theories attempting to explain this terrifying isosceles! Could it be a gateway to another dimension, an electromagnetic anomaly, a curse of long standing, or simply a space alien kidnap zone? One thing it absolutely cannot be, the movie asserts with utter certainty, is coincidence, or anything so banal as rough weather! Ha ha, surely not!

When I was very young, I would be sent down to the neighbourhood movie house, the Park, every Saturday afternoon to see whatever was playing, and sometimes it would be something just like this! So I have a fondness for these 70s-era tabloid docs, even if they’re always clunky, frequently dull, and never very convincing! On balance, and largely because of Price, and this residual affection I have for the form, I’m going to give The Devil’s Triangle two sudden squalls!

Burl reviews High Road to China! (1983)

Yippee-yippee-hey, it’s Burl! I've got a forgotten picture of the 80s again today, ha ha! Yes, High Road to China is surely to biscuits one of those movies that only got made because of Raiders of the Lost Ark! For that reason, it often gets unfairly maligned as a Raiders rip-off, but it’s not! Ha ha, it’s pretty clearly an African Queen rip-off!

Any other maligning the picture receives is just and proper! This was, I believe, Tom Selleck’s first dip into feature film stardom, before Lassiter even, and the fact that old Tom had famously been offered the Indiana Jones role only increases the assumption that his character in this movie, O’Malley by name, is going to be searching for some kind of lost city or treasure! Well I suppose it is a form of treasure he’s after, but something more valuable than any treasure could be! For, ha ha, their treasure is BRIMLEY!

Yes, it’s all about a spoiled heiress about to lose her fortune to Robert Morley (from The African Queen, natch!), and so to find her father, last heard of in Afghanistan, she has to hire dipsomaniacal airman O’Malley and his jovial mechanic Struts, played by Jack Weston of course, because who else could do it? Not Martin Balsam! Anyway, ha ha, relations between O’Malley and the heiress are strained for a good part of the picture, though even when attracti*n strikes, and however drunk he is, O’Malley always remains un vrai gentilhomme!

The heiress is a good pilot herself, and her dad is of course Wilford “The Thing” Brimley! Ha ha, Brimley here is as jovial as I’ve ever seen him in a movie! This must be his most jovial role ever, I don’t care if he’s played Santa! Ha ha! Wilford has somehow strode into a Chinese village and become its leader, which is something they need since a Gengis Khan type is constantly attacking the village! Wilford’s strategy, which provides the picture’s climax, involves detonating incredible amounts of explosive beneath the feet of the siege forces! Everyone gets blown up and Wilford dances a merry hornpipe! Ha ha!

Tom Selleck really had his niche carved out in the 80s: Cary Grant reborn! (Ha ha, at least until Runaway!) His particular shtick, as near as I can pinpoint it, is to be unexpectedly whiny for a big handsome moustache man! But he has a standout scene in this picture, which is, I suppose, his attempt at the Indianapolis speech from Jaws! He segues from regaling a gang of airmen with his tales of WWI glory in the skies to a sorrowful reminiscence about the young, frightened near-children he was shooting down by the war’s end! Pretty somber stuff, and surprisingly well performed by the fur-lipped lug! Ha ha!

But the action is pretty banal, and there’s no more chemistry between Selleck and Bess “11^th Victim” Armstrong than there was between the blockheads of Summer Catch! The direction from Brian G. Hutton, who also made The First Deadly Sin and was an actor in Carnival Rock, is merely functional! Really, there’s nothing much memorable about this picture, though I do admit that the planes are very nice! Some pretty daring stunt work too! However, the picture never rollicks as much as it would like to, seriously lacks in the pep department, and, as much flapper dancing as Bess Armstrong does, it never seems much like we’re actually in the 1920s! On the other hand, Brimley! Ha ha, I guess I’ll give High Road to China one and a half drop-bombs!

Burl reviews Night Moves! (1975)

Workin on a' night moves, dum dum dum, working on a' crazy downtown moves… it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review one of my very favourite 1970s private eye pictures! 70s private eye pictures can be pretty marvelous – witness The Long Goodbye, Chinatown and The Late Show, ha ha – but the one I’m going to review today is Night Moves!

Now this is a real pistol-packer if you ask me! There’s a lot going on in the picture, and not all of it is clear, but the easy-but-effective visual metaphor in the movie’s closing shot assures us that if we don’t quite understand what we’ve just seen, well, neither does the protagonist!

The protagonist in this case—ha ha, “case!”—is Harry Moseby, who once was a championship football player before becoming a private eye, and is played with perfection by Gene Hackman from The Quick and the Dead! He’s one of your small-office dicks, the fellows who do the seedy, sniffing-around kind of work! Like all movie private eyes, he quietly revels in his status as anachronism! But his lady wife, played by Susan Clark from Porky’s, is not faithful to him (her unlikely boyfriend is the judge from Ghostbusters II!), and as a result he immerses himself in his current missing-persons case rather more profoundly than he should!

He’s looking for a peppy teenage girl, the daughter of a Hollywood semi-starlet, and the trail takes him first to a movie set and thence to Florida, where it’s all going down! There he meets Jennifer Warren from Mutant, a glib and sassy blond with a gift for badinage; and a salty fellow who is the missing girl’s stepdad; and then the missing girl herself, played by a sixteen year-old Melanie “Fear City” Griffith!

From there things get complicated and opaque, and people are killed, and the mystery that Hackman thinks he’s uncovering is never quite where his focus should actually be! The plot is in the end not so much impenetrable as open to interpretation!

To me the big clue Harry misses is that everybody he talks to seems to know everyone else he wants to talk to, and that the connections are never hidden, but still remain murky! Harry himself is easily able to ingratiate himself with all these people, due to his charm and his football celebrity, but he should be suspicious of their instant affability! “Knowing people” is really the dominant theme in this picture, as the other thread of plot involves Harry and his wife, who’ve been married for years but still don’t really know one another!

The movie works many wonders, and one of them is that it feels blessedly like one of those quietly marvelous, low-incident character studies the 70s filmmakers were so good at, while at the same time containing fistfights, nudity and plane crashes galore!

The picture looks good, having been nicely photographed by Bruce “Out of Bounds” Surtees; and Arthur Penn does a commendable job directing it! You know, Penn made plenty of great pictures, but this might be my favourite! Ha ha, I certainly prefer it to Target! The script by Alan Sharp (who also, believe it or not, helped with the script of Damnation Alley!) is just that, sharp, and the supporting cast includes many fine performers, from James “Videodrome” Woods to Kenneth “For Keeps?” Mars, to even Rags himself, Max Gail from Curse of the Black Widow!

It’s a movie both shaggy and sharp, and maybe that’s one of its great accomplishments too! (And one it shares with The Long Goodbye!) I think you ought to have a look at this fine movie if you haven’t already seen it! I’m going to give Night Moves four bonks with a conch, ha ha!