Burl reviews Halloween Ends! (2022)

 

Ha ha and pumpkin guts, it’s Burl, here with a seasonally appropriate review for you! In Octobers past I’ve taken a look at the new version of Halloween from 2018, and its sequel, Halloween Kills, which came along a few years later! And now that the air is crisp again and the leaves are swirling through the air, landing crunchy and brown ‘neath the skeletal branches and grey clouds heavy with the coming snows, I’ve caught up with the third in this tributary of Myersania: the maligned Halloween Ends!

 

In part it’s maligned because it fails to provide exactly what a fan of these films expects and wants, which is to say many repetitive scenes of Michael Myers stalking and killing the people of Haddonfield! It shares this fake-out quality with an earlier production, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and, to demonstrate its own self-awareness, and also perhaps a bit of wishfulness concerning its legacy, it also shares the opening title font, if not the computerized pumpkin imagery, with that now-celebrated picture! Ha ha, I must say, I was heartened when I espied that italicized, powder-blue lettering!

 

Though this series takes the position that none of the Halloween stories exist except the one told in the original 1978 Halloween, the second picture of the new cycle shares with Halloween II the aspect of taking up exactly where its predecessor left off, and now with Halloween Ends, although instead of telling a loopy story of warlocks and killer robots in a completely different town we’re still in Haddonfield, but a break from the contiguity of the first two is still indicated, because it’s four years after the events depicted in those photoplays! The effective opening scene, set in 2018 like the first two films, introduces us to Corey Creekmuir, a hapless and nerdy babysitter whose ill-fated charge turns out to be a bit of a jerk! This leads to a plummet-related tragedy for which Corey Creekmuir is blamed!

 

Then it’s four years later and Corey Creekmuir is a skulking pariah who is given the hairy eyeball by Haddonfielders and is outright hassled by the local marching band jerks! Meanwhile our favourite donkey girlscout, Laurie Strode, who in the earlier films was a wild-eyed survivalist hiding out in a trap-filled shanty, is now, unaccountably, an apron-wearing, pie-baking granny living in a normal house and writing what sounds like a preachy and unreadable memoir about her experiences with Michael Myers! Her granddaughter is now a nurse with her own set of problems, which Laurie tries to help assuage by introducing her to Corey Creekmuir! There follows a wildly improbable romance, during which time Corey Creekmuir also discovers Michael Myers hiding in a sewer and begins to fall under his baneful influence!

 

So for a while it’s sort of a romance movie and a buddy picture, and then it morphs into a revenge story with Corey Creekmuir using first Michael and then later just his mask and kitchen knife to exact rote revenge against his various enemies! Concurrently to all this there’s been a steady stream of tributes to John Carpenter, and not just to the Halloween-related works either! Corey Creekmuir watches Carpenter’s The Thing at his babysitting gig early in the film (just as Laurie watched the Howard Hawks version in Halloween); there’s a radio station as we saw in The Fog; and Corey Creekmuir works at a junkyard which strongly recalls the wrecker’s yard in Christine!

 

And that’s when we realize that this picture is not a remake of Halloween or even Halloween III, but of Christine! Corey Creekmuir shares much with Arnie from that 1983 release: a surname; an initial cringing nerdishness; Buddy Holly glasses which are broken by bullies, and whose absence signposts the character’s gradual de-nerdification; a cartoonishly angry and overbearing mother; a facility with automobile repair and a large industrial facility in which to practice it; a doomed romance with someone way out of his league; and a willingness to fall under the spell of an evil force in order to exact his revenge, at the eventual cost of his life! Once that finally occurs the movie can get back to half-heartedly portraying Michael Myers as a vaguely dangerous slasher with an unexplained grudge against Laurie Strode - or is it the other way around, ha ha!

 

The picture retains the impression set in the previous two films of Haddonfield as an infinite series of neighbourhoods, an endless, physics-defying expanse of landscape urbanism easily containing all the people, services, streets, overpasses, sewer systems, hovels, mansions and everything else the story may require! The performances from the veteran actors are good: Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Grandview U.S.A., once again demonstrates her commitment to the character of Laurie, and Will Patton, famed from The Puppet Masters, once again plays Officer Hawkins, and here very touchingly so as he shyly woos Laurie!

 

I was pleased to see the picture try something different, but I was never sold that this was the best route to take, nor that Corey Creekmuir was the best candidate to take it with! Even more than ever, the movie is dramatically powered by human behavior that ranges from unlikely to downright bizarre; and though the conceit is that their years of fearing Michael Myers has driven everyone in town slightly bonkers (though, strangely, it has never diminished their enthusiasm for Halloween parties and costumes), this just results in a movie that offers no one with whom it is possible to latch on to as a surrogate or narrative helpmate! There are some effective scenes, but too many others that feel as though they were not so much directed as merely gotten over with! I’m glad they went in a weird direction, but I wish it was weirder - ha ha, some killer robots would have hit the spot! I give Halloween Ends two tongue-skipping records!

Burl reviews Rumours! (2024)

 

Ha ha and holyoake, it’s Burl, here making a brief return to reviewing, and who knows for how long! I’m here to review a picture I saw recently: the latest project from Guy Maddin, who brought us Careful and several others, working here in concert with two brothers named Johnson! The picture is a bosky little number called Rumours!

 

That bosky quality, along with the limited cast populated with a few well-known ringers, a generally oneiric quality to the goings-on, and a formal approach that, for Maddin, is strikingly mainstream, all reminded me powerfully of one of the filmmaker’s most misbegotten projects, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs! Ha ha, the more I think about it, the more similar the two pictures seem, although Rumours is clearly the more successful!

 

The story has a late-period Buñuelian quality to it: that dreamlike feeling of never being able to eat your dinner! The setting is a G7 meeting somewhere in rural Germany, where world leaders have gathered to hash out an obviously meaningless statement in response to “the present crisis,” which of course remains undefined! The host leader is the German Chancellor, Hilda, played by Cate Blanchett, well known from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; also in attendance are the Canadian prime minister, Maxime, essayed by swarthy Roy Dupuis, who has played such Canadian icons as General Romeo Dallaire and Maurice “Rocket” Richard, but whom I myself know best from movies like Jesus of Montreal and Screamers; the dozy American president played by the world’s most British man, Charles Dance from Alien 3 and For Your Eyes Only; the British prime minister, Cardosa, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, who was in that crazy Jupiter Ascending as well as two of the more recent M. Night Shamalyan pictures; and the leaders of France, Japan, and Italy, played respectively by Denis Ménochet, Takehiro Hira, and Rolando Ravello! Alicia Vikander from Jason Bourne and The Green Knight and Zlatko Buric from 2012 also show up in extended cameo roles late in the picture!

 

The situation is this: they’re supposed to write, or rather “craft,” some kind of crisis-addressing statement, but can’t really get started with it, distracted as they are with romances, reminiscences, and the local jagoff mudmen! Ha ha! Every now and again someone will have a little brainstorm and jot a few things down, but nothing ever makes much sense and there’s no indication that it would be any help even if they could finish it off and present it to the world! Meanwhile the rest of the world seems to disappear and the leaders realize they’re on their own! A giant brain is discovered out in the woods, along with Alicia Vikander, who speaks in what is at first taken to be gibberish, but turns out to merely be Swedish! Unaccountably, the French President’s leg bones dissolve and he must be carried, or pushed in a wheelbarrow; meanwhile the Italian prime minister carries an inexhaustible supply of pocket meats! Their progress through the woods is as maddeningly slow, as pointless and seemingly circular as their efforts to write the statement; but in the end it all comes together in a glorious ejaculation of ineffectual nonsense!

 

Almost all of this takes place in dark woods punctuated with rock video lighting, and there is much gabbing and wry hilarity! One triumphant moment involving a rope ferry is scored to an Enya song, ha ha, and somehow the use of that song makes it one of the most amusing sequences in the whole picture! But of course there’s always a danger in trying to depict entropy and cyclical pointlessness in a movie: that the movie itself will become infected with these qualities; and it must be said that this is the case here, but, thank heavens, only occasionally! In the main it feels a bit like Maddin had the chance to remake Twilight of the Ice Nymphs but this time to make it more entertaining, and he, along with his Johnson brothers, made the most of this rare chance!

 

The analogies on offer are perhaps a bit broad, and the picture occasionally spins its wheels and could stand to dig in more deeply here and there, but it’s altogether a merry jape, well-acted by everybody, and is on balance a good deal of politically relevant fun! It’s not like much else you’ll see at the movies this year, and so I recommend it! I give Rumours three streams of two-century old urine! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Fallen Leaves! (2023)

 

Ha ha and hello again everybody! I sure am sorry I’ve been such a no-show lately – I’m working on a book, and that always eats into my movie reviewing time and energy! I’ve still been watching plenty of movies though, many of them great candidates for review! There’s a bit of a backlog and I’m not sure I’ll ever get to them, so for now I’ll just review a picture I saw with friends and family the other afternoon at the local arthouse! It was a fine outing, the more so because the movie was the latest Aki Kaurismäki picture, Fallen Leaves!

Ha ha, as a person of mostly Nordic blood, I’ve always enjoyed deadpan Scandinavian movies, and I’ll say right off the hop that this one was a real delight! I used to watch Kaurismäki joints with my pal Pellonpäa, who is so nicknamed because of his undying love for the great bohemian and excellent actor Matti Pellonpäa! Unfortunately Pellonpäa (the real one, not my friend) died a long time ago, so he couldn’t be in Fallen Leaves! But we sure enjoyed him way back when in the Leningrad Cowboy movies and Night on Earth, and best of all in La vie de bohème, in which he played the role he was born for: a bohemian! After all, in real life he had no home – he lived in a car and a big booth at his favourite Helsinki bar, and that’s a pretty boho situation right there!

So there’s no Pellonpäa in Fallen Leaves, but there are some pretty acceptable substitutes! Our story revolves around two lonely, quiet, early-middle aged people in Helsinki! Ha ha, they’re taciturn in the great Finnish tradition, and because this is part of a series of Kaurismäki pictures set amongst the proletariat, they work a series of menial service or industrial jobs from which they keep getting fired or otherwise becoming unemployed!

We meet Ansa, who looks uncannily like my friend Mary and is played by Alma Pöysti, as she toils in a bleak supermarket under the close and creepy gaze of a monstrous security guard! She lives in a lonely apartment and whenever she turns on the radio it plays dire news of the war in Ukraine! And across the city is lank-haired, ghost-moustached Raunio, who drinks a lot, lives in a shipping container with four other dudes, works some kind of compressor-based job while wearing a thick boiler suit, and is played by Martti Suosalo!

These two lonely folkünn first spy one another at a charming karaoke night, where the show is stolen by Raunio’s buddy Huotari! There are some further mutual (or not mutual) sightings, and then finally they go on a date to see a movie: none other than the Jim Jarmusch zombie feature The Dead Don’t Die! Ha ha! This occasions a few funny cinéaste gags in which the movie is compared to a Bresson film and also to Godard’s Bande à part!

But (in a plot mechanism that rings a little false, I must say), the two never get around to telling each other their names, so when Raunio immediately loses Ansa’s phone number he’s unable to find her, and true love must wait! Then when they reconnect it must wait again thanks to Raunio’s devotion to the demon alcohol! And at the last, once the bottom has been reached and rebounded from, and it looks like the two will finally get together, fate intervenes yet again in a slightly unlikely cliché that is depicted in perhaps the laziest, most clichéd and most rote way possible!

But ha ha that’s completely forgivable, because Kaurismäki’s hand is so steady on the wheel that we know it must all be by careful design! The same goes for the cute dog which is introduced in the final act of the film – there’s nothing lazier than tossing in a cute dog to win the hearts of the audience, but here we don’t care because the dog underplays his part in just the same stoic manner as the rest of the cast, and is genuinely charming and hilarious as a result!

There are other on-screen charmers too – ha ha, I thought Huotari, the buddy, was a heck of a fellow, and he reminded me of some real-life people I know! Ansa has a nice friend too! The picture was shot on real celluloid film, so it looks very nice, and, typically of Kaurismäki, thanks to the locations, sets, props and costumes, it seems as though it could be taking place any time between the 1950s and now; although of course there are such modern touches as cell phones, karaoke, and the war in Ukraine, so we know it’s set in the now!

It’s a feel-good sort of movie without any of the laboured heart-tugging that phrase usually bespeaks! It’s slight, but it’s simple in the best ways, and as a date picture you could do much, much, much worse! I say that if you get a chance to see it in a little arthouse cinema like I did, take that chance! I give Fallen Leaves three and a half expired sandwiches, and will try to be a bit better with my movie reviewing in the future! But if I’m slow with it, at least you know why! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Oppenheimer! (2023)

 

Bang boom and blast, it’s Burl, with a report on a big summer movie that I’ve only just gotten around to seeing, as opposed to the big summer movies I managed to see but haven’t yet reviewed! (I hope to review them for you soon, but who knows!) This is one of the biggest of the summer pictures, or at least one of the longest, and I’m sure by now you’ve figured out that I mean Oppenheimer!

Ha ha, as a casual WWII buff, I already knew the broad strokes of the story, and was aware that, after spearheading the logistics of the bomb-building and after the war was won and his utility exhausted, Oppenheimer was subsumed by the Red Scare business of the 50s, mostly, it seems, just to get him to shut up, and also for revenge! All of this is told fairly plainly in the film – we jump around a bit in time, as is the norm in a Christopher Nolan picture, but it seemed pretty straightforward biopic material to me!

Oppenheimer is played by the veteran zombiefighter and Irish-man Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later, looking rather gaunt and zombielike himself! Ha ha, with his suit and hat and skeletal physique, he seems a pretty good candidate if they ever want to make the William S. Burroughs story! (Unless Peter Weller wants to do it, ha ha - maybe they could share the role!) We meet the titular atom-juggler as he’s testifying before some kind of panel we don’t yet understand, but we will many times return to this small, unprepossessing room to see more of what we soon understand to be a kangaroo court!

We flash back to Oppenheimer’s time at Cambridge, where he nearly kills first his tutor and then, accidentally, Niels Bohr (played with appeal and a fine Danish accent by Kenneth Branagh from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) by means of a poisoned apple! Then we get into some science madness and relationship wackiness, including a few nude-lady scenes which elicited a gasp from the woman sitting next to me! (Ha ha, is a perfectly tasteful sex scene really so shocking? Have we really sunk so far back into puritanism?) We also get into Oppenheimer’s politics a little bit, which were refreshingly similar to my own! And of course then mustachioed army man Leslie Groves, played sternly by Matt Damon from The Martian, shows up to enlist Oppenheimer into the Manhattan Project, and the race to build the biggest bomb in all the world is on! (Ha ha, but they prefer to call it a "gadget!")

Of course once the Trinity test is successful and the bomb carted off by the army, and Oppenheimer has qualms about the morality of it all, there’s still the third hour left in the picture, which is mainly back to the kangaroo court I mentioned before! We learn that an administrator and would-be Cabinet member called Strauss, played very well by Robert Downey Jr. from Weird Science and Due Date, has orchestrated Oppenheimer’s downfall because one time Oppenheimer was a wisenheimer and Strauss has never forgiven him for it!

We meet many, many characters in the course of all this, most of them played by familiar faces! Oppenheimer’s tart-tongued wife Kitty is played by Emily Blunt from Edge of Tomorrow; his emotionally disturbed girlfriend Jean Tatlock is Florence Pugh from Midsommar; Roger Robb, the bulldog prosecutor in the disciplinary panel scenes is played by gimlet-eyed Jason Clarke from Twilight (the Paul Newman one, not the vampire one); silver fox inventor Vannevar Bush is Matthew Modine from Full Metal Jacket; Strauss’s aide is Alden Ehrenreich from Stoker; a fellow called Borden, whom Strauss uses as ponyboy in his pursuit of Oppenheimer, is David Dastmalchian from the more recent Dune; a miraculous defender of Oppenheimer is played by Rami Malek from No Time to Die; and a presidential aide called Gordon Gray is Tony Goldwyn from Plane!

It’s a long picture, but made up mostly of short, often punchy scenes – ha ha, you can tell there was a very concerted effort to keep things moving to offset the inevitable criticisms that this really is mostly a movie about white guys endlessly talking in rooms! It can be difficult to keep track of who’s who and what their motivations are, but a general understanding is really all that’s required to discern the larger themes and narrative drive at work! And some the major concerns here include power and responsibility, and it seems to me the picture is proposing an inverse to Uncle Ben’s great maxim “With great power comes great responsibility!” Oppenheimer – and Oppenheimer, for that matter – asks whether that responsibility still applies when it turns out one doesn’t have much power after all! The conundrum torments our science bug, and is addressed directly in late-picture scenes featuring a no-nonsense Harry Truman, played by Gary Oldman of Track 29 fame, and, separately, an avuncular Professor Albert Einstein, impersonated here by Tom Conti from Reuben, Reuben!

Nolan provides some poetic visuals that are meant to spring from Oppenheimer’s imagination: here we have raindrops depicting the sort of atomic chain reactions he’s looking for in a bomb, or rather gadget; there, a trick effect dramatizing what might happen if the chain reaction simply didn’t stop! But these sometimes seem shoehorned in as sops to the audience, and, as with the deliberate punchiness of the scenes, the non-stop music attempting to wallpaper over the seams, and the declamatory quality of some of the dialogue, one can here and there see the popular-cinema pulleys, cogs, and wheels hard at work, more so than the director intends!

Still, it’s a real achievement, almost as much as it assumes itself to be, and the sheer volume of craft on display is nearly overwhelming! I’m glad this long, talky, science-minded picture was made and that it’s doing well, and I for one was consistently engaged! (My twelve year-old got pretty antsy after the Trinity test, however, ha ha!) There’s something marvellously old-fashioned about it even beyond its mid-century setting, and I’m going to give Oppenheimer three slatherings of a topical jelly!

Burl reviews Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3! (2023)

Ha ha and pieww-pieww, it’s Burl here with space action-comedy for you! Yes, it’s the summer blockbuster season, and the big shows are being rolled out weekend by weekend; and, seeing as how my son and I recently watched the first two entries in the Guardians of the Galaxy series of pictures, which come from the director of Super, James Gunn, we thought we might go out to catch the third in the series! The official title of this third entry seems to be Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3!

I will here and now confess that I’m no great adherent to the Marvel superhero pictures, which I mostly find cacophonous and bewildering! Well, they’re not that bewildering – I’m not an idiot after all, ha ha – but when watching one I’m always conscious there’s a whole mess of back story and relationship dynamics of which I’m cheerfully unaware, and knowing this tends to dull my enjoyment of their product! But of all the various series, the Guardians of the Galaxy ones have been among the most amusing, both because they seem to sit apart from the Avengers and all those associated heroes, and because there is for the most part a refreshing lack of reverence for the interwoven Marvel universe as a whole!

The Guardians of the Galaxy are of course a motley band of space people who live in a lumpus called Knowhere, are led by a ragamuffin called Quill, played by Chris Pratt from Jurassic World, and occasionally cruise around in their spacecraft doing missions! Ostensibly they’re flying around out there to battle evil, but most of their time seems spent on investigating their own origins and past traumas, as though the whole hero caper is really just some good old fashioned recovered-memory therapy! The first one dramatizes the origins of the group, but takes time to investigate how the battling sisters Gamora (who is green and played by Zoe Saldana from Star Trek Into Darkness) and Nebula (a mostly-blue patchwork essayed by Karen Gillan from Oculus) came to be what they are, which has something to do with their father, a rock monster! Then the second one showed that Quill’s father was secretly a space god played by Kurt Russell!

This time it’s the raccoon man’s turn to look back on his life! The character of Rocket is an irascible procyon with the voice of Bradley Cooper, and at the beginning of the picture a golden boy flies in and tries to kidnap him! After a fearsome battle the golden boy is driven off, but poor Rocket hovers on the edge of death! It turns out the only way to save him is for his pals to bust in to the scientific facility that created the raccoon: a place run by Chukwudi Iwuji from John Wick: Chapter 2 playing “The High Evolutionary,” who’s a maniac with pretensions to godhood! This is our bad guy, and the rest of the movie bounces between the Guardians’ efforts to find the information that can save him, and Rocket’s comatose recollections of his childhood, in which he was caged with three other similarly mutilated weirdo child-animal friends!

It's as melancholy a picture as Marvel will allow, meditating (ha ha, again, as much as Marvel will allow) on loss and survivor’s guilt; and it’s also got a strong anti-vivisectionist message! These things are over and again subsumed by the pieww-pieww, but you can tell Gunn means what he says because there’s significantly less joking around than in the previous installments, and a lot more talking about feelings! There’s a scene that takes place in what I took to be heaven’s antechamber that, for a conversation between two non-human CGI confabulations, is really quite touching! And eventually everyone cries, even the raccoon!

It’s a long, busy picture – ha ha, the Marvel extravaganzas all seem to be in running time and character-number competition with one another – but fairly straightforward when you break it all down! The High Evolutionary is a mean man but gets what’s coming to him, and I could never decide whether Iwuji’s performance was a minor triumph or a silly hamfest – ha ha, or maybe it was both! I liked it, though! Otherwise except for the occasionally dour tone, the movie mostly follows the pattern set by the previous volumes, including the requisite moment of fighting triumph for the tree-man; some literal-mindedness from manmountain Drax, played by Dave Bautista from Dune; a cameo appearance measurable in seconds by Sylvester Stallone from First Blood; and lots of cacophony and endless song cues! Although, ha ha, they seem to have dropped the trope of Quill listening to mix tapes his mother made him – although there are still 1970s AM radio cuts here, the selection is also watered down by what I suppose are simply songs James Gunn likes!

Anyhow, it’s more enjoyable than the usual Marvel nonsense, and it has an alternate earth populated by animal people, so I’ll give Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 two blue jay men!

Burl reviews Cottage Country! (2013)

 

Ha ha and welcome to the cottage, it’s Burl! I had lake cottages I could visit while I was growing up – grandparents had one, uncle had one, some friends of course – but they were either far away or could only be visited occasionally, so I can’t say I really had the childhood cottage experience! But eventually I married into one, and now I do have it, and man is it sweet! It’s a lot of work, though! I’ve built additions, sheds, decks, docks, wooden walkways and garden boxes, and have done more tree-chopping, wood-splitting, outhouse-moving and various sundry other tasks than I ever thought I would! But if that sounds like complaining, think again: ha ha, I’m very grateful to have it!

But my place is a lot more rustic than the cottage seen in the movie I’m reviewing for you today: by name, Cottage Country! It’s a Canadian picture, and at times a very Canadian picture, so as a cottaging Canuck myself, I thought this picture might strike a chord! Well, maybe it did, but a fairly dull one with little resonance and not always the most pleasing of tones! Still, it proved better than I was expecting! Read on, sweet primate, and I’ll give you the particulars!

Tyler Labine from Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and Rise of the Planet of the Apes plays Todd, a milquetoast Toronto salaryman with a family cottage in the Muskokas and a blonde girlfriend who at first seems out of his league, and to whom, this magical weekend at what Ontarians call “camp,” he plans to propose! Malin Ackerman who played Debbie Harry in CBGB is Cammie, the girlfriend, and she does a good job at immediately situating the character as a very specific type, who later in the movie will evolve into a different, but related, specific type!

Anyway, after a brief encounter with a woods-hobo played by Earl Pastko from Heads and Land of the Dead and Roadkill and The Sweet Hereafter, Todd and Cammie arrive at the cottage, which is more like a regular two-story house; and before Todd can make his ill-considered proposal, even before Cammie can enact a prefatory session of whistle-dog, who should burst in but Todd’s obnoxious brother, whose name, improbably, is Salinger, along with his dour Eastern European girlfriend Masha, played by Lucy Punch from Hot Fuzz! This unwanted invasion sets up the big conflict of the picture, which comes to a head when Todd semi-accidentally puts the chop to his brother’s neck!

Things get a little Macbeth from here: Cammie turns out to be the sort of lady who won’t let anything get in the way of her personal happiness and the vision of her life which she has conceived! Ha ha, you know the type! Well, she’s soon browbeaten Todd into helping her murder Masha, and from there things get complicated with the chopping up of the bodies, the sinking of the parts, and the unexpected party which the brother had arranged before his axing! With increasingly suspicious guests – one in particular likes asking the hard questions, ha ha – the murder-happy couple’s desperation grows, and their willingness to kill, or at least Cammie’s willingness to kill, grows apace!

Eventually Todd and Salinger’s parents show up, played by Canadian acting veterans Kenneth Welsh, whom we know from any number of things including the latter-day Romero picture Survival of the Dead, and Nancy Beatty from City on Fire! They’re a pair of bickersons right out of Till Death Do Us Part, and the name “Salinger” becomes even more unlikely once these L7s appear, but the actors are talented enough that their worry for their missing son, and increasing suspicion about what might have happened to him, hits a genuine emotional note!

There are some hoser cops that include Jonathan Crombie from Bullies, and then there’s a car chase and the final dislocation between Todd and Cammie! Ha ha, in the last act the picture begins to recall the British killer-couple movie Sightseers, but it never fully commits to the heartlessness and black-comic violence of that picture! Still, there are casualties and things occasionally get bloody! The acting is pretty sharp all around, the locations pretty, and the rest of the show is perfectly functional! But it never really flies, and it never really lands either – it’s not scary and not all that thrilling, and if the intention is satirical, the targets (WASPy couples? Affluent cottagers? Families?) escape unscathed! But it has moments of sharpness, minor suspense, and gratifying humour, so it was hardly a total loss! I’ll give Cottage Country two pairs of expensive headphones!

Burl reviews Aftersun! (2022)

Merhaba my friends, it’s Burl here to review fun in the sun! Well, sort of fun, anyway, ha ha! It’s one of the newer movies out there, and while it takes place in a sunny Mediterranean resort locale, if a rather downmarket one, and while nothing overly traumatic happens, and while the word “sun” is even in the title, it would be a stretch to call this a fun-in-the-sun picture now that I think about it! But, ha ha, you can decide! The movie in question is a Scottish picture called Aftersun!

It’s all set in a period with which I’m quite familiar: the late 1990s! It’s a reminiscence story, mostly though not entirely from the perspective of 11 year-old Sophie, who has come to a Turkish resort on holiday with her father, Calum! (And yes, his name is Calum, but unlike the fine film A Lawless Street, with its protagonist Calem Ware, they don’t feel the need to repeat the name over and over again!) Calum is a loving father and a reasonably friendly guy; but still, there’s something a little off with him, and this impression is visually represented in the first half of the picture by the unexplained, and completely unsigned, plaster cast he wears on his right arm!

We get more and more clues that something is off with Calum, mostly from little scenes for which Sophie is not present, or events of which she is unaware! Calum expectorates unexpectedly on a mirror, or sobs naked in the room, or walks into the sea, or just sometimes has a funny look in his eye! Occasionally the musical score will play some worrying strings just to underline the problem, whatever it is! And when he peevishly refuses to karaoke an R.E.M. song with Sophie, you really start to wonder!

The problem, it seems, is that Calum is depressive, and that he’s not able or willing to medicate himself! Through clever filmmaking and right proper acting we get the notion that for Sophie this vacation is an opportunity to have fun with her dad and with some of the other guests, and even to kiss a boy; while for Calum it's a last hurrah, a solemn goodbye dressed in jolly holiday clothes! He worries for his daughter; exhorts her, as parents of pre-adolescents will, to talk to him about anything that may trouble her as she goes through puberty and teendom; but we don’t get the sense that he plans to be there for it himself!

All of this is interspersed with quick shots of strobing club action and little flashes of the adult Sophie! Ha ha, in the present day she has become a parent herself, and perhaps this is why she’s looking back over this Greek father-daughter holiday: scanning it for clues not just to her father’s inner life, but her own, and perhaps her child’s! She’s watching all the video she took during that time, possibly wincing at her childishness, maybe lamenting her lost innocence! It’s hard to tell, but, as with Calum, a lot of room is left for the viewer to fill in the blanks!

The movie features one of those moments I cherish in cinema: where you don’t know the end is coming, but then there’s a shot in which you realize this would be the perfect note on which to end the film, and then indeed the film does end in that instant! I remember having that feeling at the end of Irma Vep, and there are other examples too I’m sure! Ha ha, The Conversation comes to mind also, and there’s a movie I should watch again! But Aftersun, well, it was a fine film too, and its subtle emotional ratcheting worked on me in just the way I imagine it’s supposed to, and thus the ending did too! If you think you might relate to anything in here – father-child relationships; the mysteries of adults from a child’s perspective; loss of innocence; the lapping tide of depression; budget Mediterranean resort life – then by all means seek it out! I give Aftersun three motorcycle video games and a sound tubthumping!

Burl reviews Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves! (2023)

 

With a rousing jig and a hoy-te-toy and a merry, merry click of the heels, it’s Burl, here with a review of the latest in theatre hits! At least I assume it’s a hit – ha ha, I don’t keep track of the box office figures, so for all I know it might be a big old flopparoo! But the people in the theatre seemed to like it, so I’m going to guess it’s doing well! Incredibly enough it’s not a sequel, but it is an adaptation of a recognized intellectual property and I guess that’s what counts for daring originality in today’s marketplace! Of course I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves!

Chris Pine from Star Trek Into Darkness plays the role of the roguish, not too bright, charming-scamp hero, Edgin or Ederin or something; but like the other characters do, we’ll just call him Ed! He’s in a jail with his barbarian-lady chum, and they live in a land more fantastical than, say, the world of Ladyhawke, but maybe not quite so much as The Lord of the Rings! Michelle Rodriguez from Machete is the tough gal-pal, who pines not for Pine, but for a three-footer who dwells in a glen in the forest! They escape their prison by means of a birdman even though they were about to get paroled, and immediately begin a series of enfiladed quests with their buddies!

And who are these buddies? Well, there’s a young wizard without, yet, the self-confidence required to master his trade, and a druid lady played by Beverly from It! They also meet a supernaturally benevolent paladin who joins them for a couple of the interior sub-quests and is a big help when it comes time to battle a porky dragon! The antagonist is none other than Hugh Grant from The Lair of the White Worm, a scoundrel of a rapscallion of a nogoodnik, formerly a chum himself, who betrays our heroes and becomes a rich mayor or something, claiming Ed’s daughter as his own, dwelling in a castle, and employing an evil witch to help with his schemes!

I didn’t expect much from this one, I have to say! I was never a D&D player, though I sat in on a game once! My son is playing it every Sunday with some pals though, and I took him and one of the chums to see it at the theatre, where the exhibitors occasionally busted out some old-style showmanship by projecting extra edges to the frame along the side walls! The effect was surprisingly un-annoying and even a little bit immersive! Anyway, I thought I was just being a decent dad by taking some kids to a movie, but darned if I didn’t enjoy myself thoroughly!

It’s no Conan the Barbarian, but it’s got some laffs along with the usual not-quite-Peter-Jackson level fantasy action scenes! Hugh Grant, whose stammery smarm was always ready and able to be put in the service of evil, gives good value here, and Pine, playing a hero halfway between Han Solo and Jack Burton, does exactly what the picture needs him to do with unshaven aplomb! It’s all nonsense of course, and nonsense with an airy, arbitrary feeling to it; and the story and structure sure could have been a lot stronger; and I for one would have liked more of the grotesque creatures - sucking worms and so forth - that I remember from the monster manuals; but it hits some emotional beats with surprising solidity and integrates the comedy with the fantasy in fine fashion!

Even though it’s machine-tooled to be the first of a series (which they’d better hurry up on before Pine ages out of his scalawag years), it’s nevertheless still at this moment a standalone film and not a sequel, remake, reboot, or requindle; and although it’s derived from an age-old and highly recognizable IP, it’s not one with which I was overly familiar; and the effect of all this on me, and of attending with a pair of 11 year-olds, was the feeling of an old-fashioned 80s-era outing to the movies, which feeling probably brought me more pleasure than the movie itself! But the film is amusing too, and so in spite of its cumbersome title, I’m going to give Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves two and a half gelatinous cubes!

Burl reviews John Wick: Chapter 4! (2023)

 

Ha ha and bang bang bang, it’s Burl, here to recount a tale of gunfire and mayhem! Yes, it’s the latest in the increasingly long line of action fables featuring the bearded Keanu Reeves, whom we recall so well from Bill & Ted Face the Music and other associated productions! It’s the John Wick pictures I’m talking about, of which I’ve seen all, but have only reviewed, I believe, John Wick: Chapter 2! This one is called John Wick: Chapter 4, which I figure they chose as a title because, ha ha, it’s the fourth chapter in the series!

Of course these crime pictures are set in a crazy copless world which seems essentially run by a big gangster conglomerate known as the High Table! Ha ha, the movies are so dedicated to this world that they often seem ridiculous, but at the same time the fealty to this criminal fantasyland is so complete as to be kind of admirable at the same time! And my belief – the belief that allows me to fully enjoy these movies, ha ha – is that the filmmakers know about and encourage that ridiculousness, while still endeavouring to make worthwhile action pictures!

I won’t bother relating the plot, as it’s both a continuation and repetition of what’s come before, to wit: John Wick, super-assassin widower and former dog owner, is trying to not be killed by the people who are after him, which is nearly everybody, and endeavouring to get out of this crime-world! (Is there an “out?” Ha ha, if so we never see it!) To accomplish this he must shoot and punchfight all sorts of people in order to satisfy the arcane rules of the people who run things! This time, for John, it ultimately means dueling a fop, but there are plenty of fights to have before that in this nearly three-hour tour!

Characters from previous Wick adventures are here, notably Wick’s pal Winston, played by Ian McShane from Too Scared To Scream, who here loses his beloved concierge and his hotel too! Laurence Fishburne from Fast Break and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 returns as the King of Lower Bumtown, but here his main activity seems to be providing Wick with bulletproof suits, guns, and the occasional boat ride! The new character everyone loves is a blind master called Caine, played by the Ip Man himself, Donnie Yen, known to Western audiences from movies like Rogue One! He’s an appealingly human and ambiguous presence, and his fighting is most impressive!

Other fresh faces include Clancy Brown from Buckaroo Banzai and Extreme Prejudice, who strides through the proceedings wearing a black hat and a big beard, his task evidently to see that the rules of the High Table are strictly followed! There’s a fellow with a dog and a gun but without a name, who will occasionally aim his rifle at John Wick but usually ends up shooting someone else! And then there’s Scott Adkins, who’s been actioning it up in all sorts of movies for some twenty years now, and who here wears balloon makeup and golden teeth in the role of a monstrous card sharp!

There are some fine action scenes, in particular the one up the stairs to Sacré Coeur! The roundelay at the Arc de Triomphe gets a lot of love, and I certainly enjoyed it, but there was a greenscreen weightlessness to it at times – it was all those bodies flying around after being hit by passing Citroëns, I suppose! And I quite enjoyed the long overhead scene in which John Wick blasts people with a shotgun that sets them on fire, ha ha! The last contest with the foppy clothes-horse Marquis, who stands as the picture’s principal villain, is okay, but maybe wasn’t quite the satisfaction I was looking for; but the last-act tribute to The Warriors was a mighty big help, boppers!

In sum, there’s plenty to enjoy here for the action enthusiast, and even the Ridiculous Action enthusiast! There’s a rake-gag aspect to some of this: you’ll lose count of how many times John Wick gets hit by a car, or falls down the stairs, or plummets a distance that would cripple a normal man! There’s a more general repetitiveness of tone as well as event through much of the picture: many times, for example, Wick will meet up with someone with whom he used to be friends, and they’ll refer to this bosom chumship in sober and reverent terms, but every time this happens it leaves you wondering just exactly what sort of friendships these were! Ha ha, did these guys go out for beers or socialize in any recognizable manner, or did they just run across each other in the course of their killing sprees and develop their friendships as a sort of parallel play between gunshots? It’s a conundrum, and it’s perplexities like this which keep you from fully engaging with the movies on a human level – ha ha, that’s is why Donnie Yen is such a breath of fresh air in this hermetic and cloistered environment! But you know, I took my son to see it and we had a fine old time at the picture house, and so I give John Wick: Chapter 4 three doorless cars!

Burl reviews Cold Pursuit! (2019)

 

By krim-kram and by the flurries of winters past, it’s Burl, here to review yet another picture featuring an aging Liam Neeson carrying vengeance in his heart! He’s done this oh so many times before – look at movies like Next of Kin and Darkman and Taken 2, and there you’ll see that old familiar figure of Liam Neeson with vengeance reliably lodged in his heart! And the picture under discussion today is more of the same, and it’s called Cold Pursuit!

This is not just a vengeance picture but also belongs to that subset of movies which are remakes of movies made a year or two earlier by the same European director who made the original, and usually the remake is the filmmaker’s entrée into Hollywood studio picturemaking! Think of The Vanishing, (and, ha ha, then forget it – the remake, anyway), or Funny Games! Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Danish-Norwegian comedeo-vengeance film In Order of Disappearance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen! And like all these remakes, bar, I think, none, the original is the better one!

Old Liam plays Nels, which seems like, but isn’t, an anagram for “Liam!” Nels is a solid citizen in a little Colorado mountain town: he’s the man who keeps the roads clear with his big shed full of plowing equipment, and for this he’s being recognized as Local Man of the Year, for which his wife, Laura Dern from Blue Velvet, is proud! But then we see how their son, played by Neeson’s real-life son I believe, has, through his airport baggage job and the shabby offices of a disreputable pal, become mixed up with a drugs gang, and thanks to a misunderstanding, is kidnapped and given a fatal overdose by the gang!

Neeson and Dern each react to this in their own way: Dern takes off for parts unknown and is never seen again, while Neeson becomes vengeance-crazed, turning to his retired-gangster brother, played by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice, for information and advice! The tone turns blackly comic as Neeson kills his way up the Denver crime hierarchy, and with each new notch on the belt comes an intertitle memorializing the dead party and listing his gangster nickname! Ha ha, this is a bit on the cutesy side – I recall it working better in the original, where the humour was allowed to be as dry as it needed to be and the little titles didn’t stand out as much as they do in this more studio-tooled, focus-grouped remake!

The nicknames are another running gag, with a puzzled Neeson quizzing his brother about them! But, like the obituary intertitles, this aspect seems nothing more than ornamentation added later to purfle the border of an otherwise ordinary crime thriller! Ha ha, but there are a few details which seem a bit more organically integrated, like the rival gang of Indigenous mobsters! And there’s a subplot involving the son of the main bad guy, a boy-faced mob boss called The Viking, who lacks any evident Viking qualities beyond a general ruthlessness; this subplot has a mild wackiness to it, and lends the picture a bit of dualism which, for the movie’s running time at least, serves as an acceptable substitute for complexity!

The revenge part works well enough, familiar as it is, though I was disappointed that Nels didn’t use his snowplow more! It figures into the last act a little bit, but not enough to make this picture anything more than a mildly eccentric and otherwise unmemorable crime picture, more notable for casting a shadow over the original foreign iteration than for any qualities of its own! Neeson does this stuff with an appealing stolidity, but he could pull that off in his sleep, and in several scenes seems to be doing so here! I say stick with the original version, or maybe Fargo, which did snowbound crime eccentricity better than any other picture I can think of; but I’ll give Cold Pursuit two Fruity Pebbles anyway!

Burl reviews 65! (2023)

 

Ha ha, Burl returning to you good people after an absence! Sorry about that – I’d have warned you there would be one, but I simply didn’t know! These things sometimes happen in Burl-land, and although I’ve watched plenty of movies I’d like to review, the old reviewing muscles simply weren’t twitching! But I’ve just returned from the cinema show, and I figured I’d review you the picture I saw while it’s fresh in my memory! It’s the sci-fi dino-fest 65!

And I know you’re saying “But Burl, by garr! What does that title mean!” Well, it refers to the time frame in which the picture is set: 65 million years ago! It seems an alien man named Mills, played by Adam Driver, whom we recall from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Inside Llewyn Davis and The Dead Don’t Die, is driving his spaceship past ancient Earth when he gets knocked askew by a meteorite! But there’s some backstory, economically told thank goodness: Mills, we learn, is only driving this spaceship to earn enough money for lifesaving medical treatment to cure his ailing daughter, which is a plot point only an American could come up with! Ha ha, on a sophisticated, futuristic, Trek-style planet, they’ll have universal health care, believe me!

Anyway, Mills crash lands on a planet, which, tah-dahh, is Earth in the dinosaur times, and all the colonists or whomever Mills is ferrying are killed, but there’s one survivor, a little foreign girl! Together she and Mills must trek across the jungle primeval to the other half of the crashed spaceship, where there might be a blast-off pod! Along the way they must deal with dinosaurs, gross bugs, geysers, quicksand, cave-ins, language difficulties, and more dinosaurs! And of course their visit to Earth is perfectly timed with the impending arrival of the planet-killing meteor that wiped out the thunder lizards! Ha ha!

And that’s about it for plot! The bulk of the picture is the overland trek, punctuated by dinosaur encounters and the other hazards mentioned, and it’s all done passably well, but there remains a feeling that more excitement, more suspense, even more art, could have been wrung out of this premise! Driver does a fine job, though his attempts to communicate with the girl don’t always make sense; and the mere presence of the girl, a stand-in for the daughter he misses so much, is about as un-nuanced and sophomorically convenient as storytelling gets!

Still, the whole thing moves well, looks good, and clocks in at a trim (for these days) 93 minutes, so even with its obviously huge budget, it counts as one of those appealing B-cinema theatrical experiences that I treasure so well! One does occasionally wish for the R-rated version that might have been, in which there are more survivors among the passengers and therefore more potential victims to be bloodily chewed on by lizards and bugs, but there’s an appeal to this trimmer PG-13 iteration too – ha ha, it was a family outing for us, and it never got too gruesome for my 11 year-old! (He’s got a pretty high threshold for that stuff though!)

Altogether it was more straightforward and enjoyable than, say, Jurassic World or any of those recent ones – it was more on the level of Jurassic Park III, another unpretentious 93-minute special! I can’t accuse 65 of excessive originality or style or a very good title, but the premise works and it’s a night out, barely! I give it two mouthfuls of bug goo!

Burl reviews Troll! (2022)

Höch now, it’s Burl, here to review sweet monster madness! Yes, we’re in giant creature territory here, but not in Japan this time, nor even in Korea or North Carolina! No, this monster hails from the northern reaches of our world, up in Norway! Of course we’ve had monster troubles up there before – ha ha, we all remember Trollhunter! Well, here’s a picture in the same vein, and this one is simply called Troll!

It’s not that Empire Picture from 1986 called Troll, the one where Sonny Bono turns into a jungle! No, in fact it's a pretty basic giant monster picture, garnished with a specific mythology and featuring a more human-like monster than usual! The movie reminded me of War of the Gargantuas if it had just the more sympathetic brown gargantua and not the evil green one! Still, the giant troll in this one does, like his grouch-coloured gargantua forbear, munch down on a poor unfortunate guy, eating him up just like a junior mint!

Anyway, the story is pretty simple! After a prelude showing a girl and her father climbing to the top of a Norwegian mountain and talking about the legend of the trolls, we skip to twenty years later, the present day, by which time the girl, Nora Tidemann, now played by Ine Marie Wilmann, has become a professor of paleontology working with The Rocketeer himself, Billy Campbell! When a mountain-drilling project being protested by environmentalists suffers a strange disaster which kills drillers and protesters alike, the Norwegian government puts together a task force which includes the initially baffled Nora!

Turns out the legends her father always talked about are true, and a hundred-meter troll has awakened in a grumpy mood and is wreaking destruction across the countryside! He’s not a destruction-for-the-sake-of-it sort of a monster, but he sure doesn’t shy away from causing carnage either! He’ll kick a house down without thinking twice if the house is in his way, and his melancholy, bulbous-nosed expression stays constant! But he does start to get irritated when they start shooting at him with rockets, ha ha! And who can blame him!

Most of the time is spent with the humans, though, following Nora as she's recruited by the prime minister to help out after an anthropoid form has been spotted in the billowing dust of a panic video! She’s paired up with a nerdy assistant who’s always telling people about his crazy book ideas, then is seconded to a military unit, and it looks like a pace-crippling romantic triangle might develop between Nora, the nerd, and a handsome military man, Kaptein Kristoffer; but thankfully that never happens! The gang visits Nora’s old dad, who’s now a crazed hermit because no one would listen to his troll theories, and there’s some tension between daughter and dad that needs to be worked out!

Meanwhile the troll attacks, or rather strides through, Lillehammer, where pesky helicopters are ringing church bells at him! Though annoyed he takes a moment to save a father and son from certain doom, and this is where everyone, characters and audience alike, realizes the troll’s primary goal actually isn’t to flatten (or occasionally eat) humans! But he doesn’t mind doing it either, and it soon appears that what he really wants is to stomp Oslo! It turns out he’s got his own agenda beyond that, but I’m not saying Oslo also doesn’t get a little stomped on in the process!

In many ways this is a Scandinavianized update of King Kong Lives, ha ha, but luckily they left out most of the stupid stuff! It’s not much more than a standard kaiju, complete with a “let nature be” message, and it has a few monster-less longeurs, but it’s never boring and pretty consistently entertaining! Plus the trick effects are solid, the troll is a sympathetic figure, and the whole thing is played at just the right pitch – not too self-serious, not too self-aware! Sure the characters aren’t much to write home about, some stuff doesn’t make sense, and a few threads are left dangling, but if you like a giant monster movie this ought to scratch the itch! I give Troll two and a half vintage Chevy pick-ups!  

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!