The Family Fang

Year 10, Day 314 - 11/10/18 - Movie #3,091

BEFORE: It's the end of the road for Nicole Kidman today, as she carries over again from "The Stepford Wives", but I'm already set up for the next chain, thanks to the other actor who carries over, and that's going to help me get a film off my list next time, one that's been there way too long, thanks to it's near un-linkabliity.

Thanksgiving's coming up fast, I've got my parents coming to town like they did last year, so I've already got the dinner reservation in place, and then we'll be on a fast sprint to Christmas, so next I've got to start thinking about shopping for presents and getting my holiday mix CD made.

THE PLOT: A brother and sister return to their family home in search of their world-famous parents who have disappeared.

AFTER: This is a weird one, though it touches on some of the themes I've already been exploring this year, with a lot of adult children having interactions with their parents, be they absent or straying fathers, neurotic or overprotective mothers, and then of course their screwed-up children, who are now screwed-up adults.  And true to form, there are a lot of flashbacks here, showing the kids at various ages trying to survive with these mixed-up parents in a mixed-up world, but I think I have to allow it here because all the time-jumping seems to serve a purpose, namely to slowly clue us in about who these parents were and what this family was all about.

The parents turn out to be performance artists, rather than con artists, which in some cases seems to be worse, because at least con artists would have a solid motivation for tricking people, namely to separate them from their money.  But these people are tricking people just to make video art, and I'm not sure that's really even a thing, like I've never heard about performance artists who involved their children in their pieces.  I mean, this would have been before the YouTube generation, at a time when people were making home movies just to preserve memories, not to confound everyone at the bank or in a public park.  I'm not sure I even understand the video prank that the Fangs pulled at the bank, like I don't see what point they were trying to make or what larger purpose it served.  I kept expecting them to rob the bank, only they didn't, they just wanted to make art disguised as a bank robbery.  Huh?

Any comedy has to have at least one foot in reality, like even "The Stepford Wives" had a solid jumping-off point, which was the battle between the sexes and a feminist fear of losing control and becoming subservient.  But there's no foundation here, therefore I don't see how anyone got this story to where it is, like what is the origin of the idea here?  The same goes for the piece with the fake coupons for chicken sandwiches, like what was the goal, what did they set out to prove?  By the way, this little scam would never have played out like this, so I have to call a NITPICK POINT.  Any employee at a fast-food chain would be keenly aware of what promotions would currently be going on, so there's no way a server would mistake a phony coupon for a real one.  Sorry.  This goes double for the manager, he would have known immediately that a coupon was phony.  It's a little interesting that the scammer here got scammed, because he intended to cause a riot or at least ill will among the customers, and instead found that the staff was TOO accommodating, so he himself was caught unaware and had to punt, and cause the disruption himself.  I just don't see things playing out like this in reality.

And then we come to the final "piece", where the Fang parents disappear, and seem to have met a tragic end at the hands of some killer that finds his victims at rest stops.  That much I can believe, but then the question becomes - can a pair of performance artists, known for tricking people, just disappear, or is this also another one of their tricks?  And if it is a trick, then what purpose does that serve, allowing people, including their own children, to believe that they're dead?  We eventually do get an answer, but I'm just not sure that it's enough.  So it's right down the middle today, nothing that really stood out as offensive or grating, but nothing really thrilling or extraordinary, either.

Also starring.Jason Bateman (last seen in "The Gift"), Christopher Walken (also carrying over from "The Stepford Wives"), Maryann Plunkett (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Kathryn Hahn (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Harris Yulin (last seen in "The Emperor's Club"), Taylor Rose, Mackenzie Brooke Smith, Kyle Donnery, Jack McCarthy, Jason Butler Harner (last seen in "Blackhat"), Frank Harts, Josh Pais (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Grainger Hines (last seen in "Lincoln"), Robbie Tann, Michael Chernus (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)", Gabriel Ebert (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Eddie Mitchell, Patrick Mitchell, Linda Emond (last seen in "North Country"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Hostiles"), Charlie Saxton.

RATING: 5 out of 10 spud guns

The Stepford Wives (2004)

Year 10, Day 312 - 11/8/18 - Movie #3,090

BEFORE: So far this alternating plan is working out, watching a movie every other day instead of every day - I'm still making progress, just not as quickly, and I think I can stretch out my chain until the end of November before I have to stop until Christmastime.

Nicole Kidman carries over from "Queen of the Desert", and I'm still not done with her chain - one more film tomorrow.

THE PLOT: The secret of a Stepford wife, how women become different and immobilized robots, lies behind the doors of the Men's Association.

AFTER: Looking back through the last few Nicole Kidman movies is very telling - much like Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, they can be separated into two types of films, ones where the lead female characters are strong, decisive and accomplish great things, and then ones where they are in trouble, threatened by men or by forces outside of their control.  And that seems to be the underlying fear for the modern woman, fear of not being successful, fear of not being in control, fear of being dominated by men.  (I realize that just viewing a small subset of Nicole Kidman movies is not an accurate system for a commentary on an entire gender, but work with me here for just a minute.)

Gertrude Bell is deemed a successful character because she achieves on her own, she goes into the desert and DOES stuff (umm, with the help of male servants...) but without the need for a relationship with a man dragging her down.  In "Dead Calm" Rae is a less successful character, because she's not only grieving due to the loss of her son, but she's tortured and manipulated by a man, and has to work hard to accomplish, and find her husband again.  In "Ghost Story" Kidman played a mother who tries hard to protect her children, but unknown forces seem to be haunting the house, and prevent her from taking care of them the way she wants to.  And then in "Before I Go to Sleep", there's that dreaded loss of control again, as her character is easily manipulated by men who take advantage of her unlikely (and unbelievable) medical condition.

So there's a loose theme here, and it's amped up tenfold in "The Stepford Wives" as she plays a disgraced TV executive who's brought down by a man who appeared on one of her reality shows and lost his wife to the affections of other men on the show.  This man went nuts and shot a bunch of people after appearing on the show, so that's the end of her career, since as we all know, the president of the network is ultimately responsible for everything that happens on every show.  (Umm, no.)  So the only thing for her to do is to move away with her husband (who had a VP role at the same network, I'm not sure how that worked, like who took care of their kids?) to the town of Stepford, CT, to find herself again without the stresses of her former high-profile executive job.

But to really analyze this film, where it's coming from and what it's trying to say, I've got to travel back to a long-past time in history, back when a simple time gender politics were different, back before everything got changed around.  Yes, I'm talking about 2004.  That's pre-Weinstein, pre-Spacey, pre-Louis C.K., and it might even be pre-Cosby.  George W. Bush ran for re-election against the old upstart John Kerry, Jude Law was People's Sexiest Man Alive, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were still together, and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were breaking up.  On TV we said goodbye to "Friends" and hello to "Desperate Housewives".  And in the middle of all of this, someone thought it would be a good idea to re-make a film from the 1970's that depicted a bunch of suburban women as robotic, mindless sexpots who all cooked, cleaned and served their husbands without complaints, only they'd put a modern spin on it, turn the tables just a bit.

And hey, we'll add a gay couple into the mix, because it's 2004 and there aren't enough depictions of gay people in pop culture yet, so by being more inclusive and diverse we're really going to show how liberal and accepting we are.  Only this, more than anything, was really two steps forward and one step back, and I think like many things in this film, it was a huge misstep.  Because to depict a gay couple in the framework of this suburban farce, then one of the men has to be overly flamboyant, obsessed with fashion and way over-the-top, and I don't think this really helped.  Also, that meant they had to fall back on the butch/femme stereotype, where one of the men is essentially the "wife" in the couple, and I've been told that this is a fallacy.  Why can't they just be two husbands together, why does one have to be dominant and the other submissive?  And why does one have to be flamingly gay and the other one could pass for straight?  Fiction's depiction of two gay men is probably a projection of the whole bottom/top thing, and I just don't think the personalities involved are necessarily that clear cut, and what we get as a result is a straight writer's imagining of what a gay couple is, rather than a depiction based on a real dynamic.

But let me put that on hold for a second and get back to the straight couples seen here.  The men are all slobbish, nerdy, losers who are tired of playing second fiddle to their more successful wives, who were all executives, judges, or sports stars who were more successful than them, earned more than them, and so somehow the men moved to this town (after the women were burned out and tired from "having it all") and chose to subject their wives to some treatment that would subvert their personalities in favor of this "happy homemaker/fembot" overlay.  And that sound you hear is the women's movement being rolled back toward the 1950's mentality, that didn't work back than, and shouldn't be expected to work again.  Whereas it would have been easier for all of these men to go to therapy and learn to deal with their inferiority issues, or at least learn how to accept their wives as successful, instead a costly, experimental medical procedure that would implant mind control chips was seen as the preferred course of action.  Forget how illegal this would be, or how immoral to completely remove all consent from a woman for not only a medical procedure, but also the change to her personality, it's just abominable.

Of course, there is the possibility that nothing here is meant to be taken seriously, once a writer creates an implausible or impossible situation, why not go all the way with it, and have the most outrageous things depicted, like a woman being able to spit $20 bills out of her mouth like an ATM, when it would be so much easier for a man to just carry a wallet around?  And thus we see that the movie bent over backwards to "solve" problems that weren't even problems to begin with.  But again, it's a nonsensical farce, though it would have been easier to swallow if it just stuck a little bit closer to reality, then it might have hit home more effectively.  As it is, we're not sure if the women are being transformed, or killed and replaced with controllable clones, or killed and replaced with robots, or what.  We're only told that this "process" happens, and suddenly they're happier, healthier and more controllable, and they only lose all of their free will with regards to the relationship.  And I'm still waiting for some indication that this was a good basis for a comedy.

Maybe it's just that I'm looking at this 2004 comedy post-MeToo and post-TimesUp, but how exactly is this situation any different from a man drugging a woman to have sex with her?  It's the whole town here that took away their women's (and one gay man's) right to say no, and yet someone thought this could be seen as funny?  I'm sorry, but that's a comedy fail.  Even if it was done to make a larger point, and I'm still not clear on what exactly that point was, this is now a taboo thing to make fun of.  The film tried to turn everything on its ear and almost succeeded in doing so, but then it completely tanked it in the end - and the final explanation of who was really behind everything, who set up this town this way and why, well, that made no sense at all.  You can't just change everything in the last few minutes and hope that makes up for the sins of the previous 85 minutes of movie.

I'm too tired to even try to tie this one to the election somehow, because I could very easily point out that America still seems to be supporting Trump and his political allies, despite the fact that we're all aware of his long history of degrading women, treating some them as sexual objects, and then ridiculing the appearances of the others.  Watch any press conference he holds and you'll notice that he hardly ever calls on female reporters, and then when he eventually does (I'm assuming only at the point where he's answered all the men's questions) he can't stop from interrupting them when they ask a question.  This is how bias is allowed to continue, when an obvious sexist is still elected to power and his behavior is not kept in check in any way.  We need more women in power, not just for the reasons of equality but because having too many men in power brought us to where we are now, and things aren't looking so great.

Because seriously, is this really the stuff we should be concerned with, men, that our wives are more successful than us?  We've only got like 20 years left before half of our coastline is under water, and we're fretting over who in the couple makes more money?  Can we prioritize a bit, please, because if we don't start worrying about the right problems, it's game over for everyone.  Look, my wife makes more money than I do, but I don't care. I work in the independent film game, and she doesn't, so in a way it's to be expected.  I'd have to go into another line of work if I wanted to be the breadwinner - our jobs are equally as stressful, but it's possible that I enjoy mine more, I have more fun, so like anything else, it's a trade-off.  Maybe I don't really want to work that hard or struggle more to get ahead.  Maybe I just enjoy her picking up the check more often at restaurants, I don't have such an outdated fragile ego that I let that get to me.  Besides, anyone with a two-income family shouldn't stress over these things, when there are so many other couples with only one or even zero incomes.  Rich people and their problems, am I right?

I think I'm forced now to review my opinion of the film "Get Out", which I watched earlier this year.  Because this film came first, and now "Get Out" just seems like a rip-off of this concept, only with racism instead of sexism.

One last thought, this film cast Mike White as a contestant on a reality show, set on a tropical island - and he's on the season of "Survivor" that's airing right now, so a little bit of art imitating life?

Also starring Matthew Broderick (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Bette Midler (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Christopher Walken (last heard in "The Jungle Book"), Glenn Close (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Roger Bart (last seen in "Trumbo"), Faith Hill, Jon Lovitz (last seen in "Matilda"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Loving"), David Marshall Grant (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Kate Shindle (last seen in "Capote"), Tom Riis Farrell, Lorri Bagley (last seen in "The Crew"), Robert Stanton (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Mike White (last seen in "Orange County"), KaDee Strickland (last seen in "Something's Gotta Give"), Lisa Masters, Christopher Evan Welch (last seen in "The Hoax"), Colleen Dunn, Jason Kravits, Dylan Hartigan, Fallon Brooking, Carrie Preston, with cameos from Larry King (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Meredith Vieira, Billy Bush (last heard in "Big Hero 6")

RATING: 3 out of 10 square dances (that should really be a NITPICK POINT, I don't think anyone has done a square dance anywhere in Connecticut in the last 100 years, at least...)

Queen of the Desert

Year 10, Day 310 - 11/6/18 - Movie #3,089

BEFORE: Nicole Kidman carries over again, and I'm going from a film set on the ocean to a film set in the desert, the irony is not lost on me.  But there used to be that old song from America that had they lyrics "the desert is an ocean with its life underground", or something like that.  "A Horse With No Name", that's the song.  But there's a lot about that song that didn't make any sense, like, why couldn't the narrator just give the horse a name?  That seemed like a very fixable problem, he could have just called it "horse" and that would be fine, right?  Why wasn't that possible?  And why did the lyrics have to use a double negative like "There ain't no one for to give you no pain..."

Another line from that song is "It felt good to be out of the rain" and I find I must agree.  It rained a lot this morning, of course just during the time when I was walking to the polls to go and vote, so even with an umbrella I got pretty soaked.  But the upside was that fewer people chose to go out and vote while it was raining, so I didn't have to wait long to sign the form and cast my vote.  The whole thing took about 5 minutes.  But even if there's a record turnout and a long line, we should all get out and vote, because it's one of the few guaranteed freedoms we have left, and we don't want this one or any of the others to be taken away.  And if you're in a place where your vote is suppressed, please fight for your right.

With everything that's gone on in the last two years, it's come to feel like our democracy is edging toward a dictatorship, given all the party politics, executive orders, lies, fake claims of "fake news", not to mention gerrymandering and voter suppression.  When people now say, "Get out and vote", it feels like there's an implied follow-up of "Get out and vote...if you agree with my politics.  If not, please stay home."  And we can't let that happen, either through malice or our own inactivity.  I didn't vote in the 2016 election and I regretted it, but the good news is that they let me vote twice today to make up for it.

(I'm kidding, don't freak out or accuse me of voter fraud.)

THE PLOT: A chronicle of the life of Gertrude Bell, a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer and political attaché for the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

AFTER: It could have been a nice tie-in that this film is about Middle East politics in the early 20th Century, that had the potential to be somewhat interesting.  But on the whole, I just found the political aspect of this film very confusing, much like Middle East politics today.  From what I was able to understand, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling for some reason (I'll have to look this up...) and the territory it once occupied was set to be divided between the U.K., Greece, France and Italy, with only a small section of the old empire to remain, and I presume that eventually this became the country of Turkey.

For that matter, her influence and advice led to the creation of the countries we now know as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Armenia.  But God, so many bad things have happened in these countries in the last 100 years that I honestly don't know if Gertrude Bell should be considered a hero or a villain. I mean, didn't people learn anything from the U.K.'s colonization of India, which worked for a while, but over time just became a terrible situation for that country's natives?  What gave these white European allies the right to dictate how things should work in another part of the world?  These countries were and are mostly desert, there's nothing there, except maybe oil, but how ego-centric do you have to be to look at another country's stuff and say, "Oh, yeah, we want that, so therefore it should be ours."  NO, you've got your stuff in your country, and they've got their stuff, so if you want their stuff too, you have to trade for it, that's how international business and politics works.

But I'm sorry, I don't really get the point of this film - so Gertrude Bell felt a little bit out of place in British society, because she'd gone to Oxford and got a history degree, but couldn't handle all the dumb suitors she encountered at social functions?  So her answer to that was to go to work in Tehran and then tour the Middle East?  Right, because they're SO much more enlightened about the role of women in society in Middle Eastern countries...  Isn't reality the exact opposite of that?  I mean, if she couldn't find her place as an educated woman in the U.K., why then spend time in countries where, even today, women are automatically treated as second-class citizens?  And this effect must have been even more pronounced in the former Ottoman Empire, predominantly Muslim countries.  So I really don't understand her lifestyle choice at all, at least the way it's presented in this film.

It might have made more sense if she were some kind of political operative and spy, but according to this film, she wasn't.  So by removing those reasons for traveling to Persia, learning Farsi, meeting various sheiks, and replacing them with essentially nothing but her whim to travel and see the world, I'm left with a giant plothole here, there's no WHY to explain what she did.  Why go to a dangerous part of the world, just to take a couple photos and cross the desert on a camel - just to say you did it?  I get the desire to travel, but this all seems a bit extreme, like it was a lot of work for a very small payoff.  And then to make her guides fill up her canvas bathtub with water, which is no doubt the single most important resource in a DESERT, just so she could wash her hair and rinse the sand off of her body every once in a while?  This does not portray her in the best light, because it makes her seem very spoiled and snooty.  God forbid if she didn't look picture-perfect as she was traveling through a sandstorm on a smelly camel.

The only motivation we get for her spending so much time in the desert, traveling from one sheikdom to the next, is the loss of her love, Henry, the man she fell for while they were working in the British Embassy in Tehran.  Her parents disapproved of this marriage (this was back when parents could do that) so he jumped off a cliff.  Or, another interpretation is that he committed suicide so he WOULDN'T have to marry her, I think that's just as valid.  Years later, she finally opens her heart again to a married military man, Richard Wylie, and he chooses to re-enlist and head into battle.  So I think I've spotted the pattern here, men just couldn't stand to be around her, and her lovers all took the coward's way out.  She's also shown sort of flirting with T.E. Lawrence (aka "Lawrence of Arabia") and look what happened to him...

All in all, this character reminds me of the guy who tried to launch himself into space a few months ago, in a homemade rocket, just to try to prove that the Earth is flat.  How do we know that Gertrude Bell's "good intentions" in visiting these sheikdoms didn't result in making the Middle East the messed-up region that it is today?  Like sailing, you can add MidEast politics to the list of things that I know very little about, and this film didn't really do anything to change that, in the end.

Also starring James Franco (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Damian Lewis (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "Maps to the Stars"), Christopher Fulford (last seen in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"), Mark Lewis Jones (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Jenny Agutter (last seen in "Equus"), Holly Earl, Beth Goddard (last seen in "Edge of Tomorrow"), Michael Jenn (last seen in "Cinderella"), Assaad Bouab, Jay Abdo, David Calder (last seen in "Rush"), Nick Waring, Sam Kanater, Sophie Linfield, William Ellis, John Wark, Younes Bouab, Fehd Benchemsi, Anas Chrifi.

RATING: 4 out of 10 overloaded suitcases  (Really? Isn't this a stereotype about women when they travel that should go the way of the dinosaur?)

Dead Calm

Year 10, Day 308 - 11/4/18 - Movie #3,088

BEFORE: When this little chain is over, I estimate that I will have seen 33 films with Nicole Kidman in them.  That may seem like a lot, but I doubt that it's a record for any actor or actress, and anyway, there are still films with her in them that I have not seen, like "Birth" and "Dogville" and "Margot at the Wedding", but those just don't seem to be any sort of priority for me.  Plus, this raises the question about which actor or actress I have seen the most times, at least in the last 10 years.  Honestly, I have no idea.  I could use IMDB's search function to figure this out, but it would require doing one search for every possible actor, and I don't have that kind of time.  Anyway that search function is somewhat unreliable, because it tends to include people who get thanked in the credits without appearing, and also people like Justin Timberlake when a film uses one of his songs, which doesn't count as an acting appearance.  Unfortunately there's no way to exclude these things, so I may never know.

Robert De Niro's name pops up 47 times in the last 10 years of movie-watching, but 5 of those are for producer credits, so I've seen him as an actor 42 times.  Meryl Streep has 40 appearances, Tom Hanks has 27, Tom Cruise has 25 and I have no idea who to search on next. Brad Pitt has 36, Clint Eastwood 32 (once I take away his directing-only credits), Jack Nicholson 29.  Schwarzenegger and Stallone are tied with 22 each, and I'm OK with that.  Woody Allen only makes it to 22 appearances, too, because at some point he stopped appearing in his own films.  Now I don't know if I should be checking older actors with long careers, like Cary Grant (31 films) or character actors like Richard Jenkins (29) who pop up everywhere. I'll have to think about this some more, but I've got to table it for now.

Kidman carries over again from "Before I Go to Sleep".

THE PLOT: After a tragedy, a naval officer and his wife are spending some time isolated at sea when they come across a stranger who has abandoned a sinking ship.

AFTER: I'm flashing back to the late 1980's for this one, to the earlier part of Kidman's career - but with so few actors in this one the only way to make the connections was to hide it between two more recent films.  Here she plays Rae, a young wife whose young child recently died, and that's been something of a recurring theme this year - and very specifically, several films in which Nicole Kidman played a mother whose child has died.  At least twice this year, maybe three times.

So when her husband John gets out of the Royal Navy (I'm not sure if his service ended, or if he was just on leave, that's unclear) naturally they want to get away on a boating trip in the middle of nowhere.  Let's assume it's somewhere in the South Pacific, since this was filmed near the Great Barrier Reef and everyone has something of an accent.

After a few days in this tranquil ocean, a strange ship appears, which seems to be adrift and lifeless, until a man is seen rowing furiously away from it, headed toward their boat.  He claims that the other ship is sinking, the engine is out and everyone else aboard is dead from food poisoning.  But his story seems to have more holes in it than a fishing net, so while he sleeps, the husband rows to the other ship to check it out, and learns that it was apparently some kind of swingers' cruise for 6 people, five of whom were killed violently, leaving only the guy from the rowboat with his false story.

Unfortunately this sort of makes the mystery man into something of a stereotypical character, bordering on a cartoon.  We never learn his motivations, so without this he's a killer because he's insane and he's insane because he's a killer.  Not knowing the why of things is very confounding, but once he wakes up he begins bullying Rae, and then sails away on the working ship with her, leaving husband John on the not-previously-sinking but now currently-genuinely-sinking vessel.  Fortunately this Navy man has a lot of experience in engine and boat repair, but still the ship seems doomed, and things get worse when an accident locks him below deck.  I'm not sure if it qualifies as a NITPICK POINT that the troubled vessel had sails in addition to its engine, but perhaps they were nonfunctional and just for decoration, or perhaps since he chose to focus on the engine he just never got around to unfurling them?

Anyway, it falls on Rae to seduce the mystery man to gain his trust and to re-gain control of their vessel.  But this comes at a cost, and it's a violent struggle once the killer realizes that her affections were not sincere.

This film is based on a novel from 1963, and it's one that Orson Welles tried to make into a film, he spent several years in the late 1960's doing that, and some scenes were filmed before the project was abandoned.  Only two work prints survive, that original negative has been lost.  Many story elements were changed when the 1989 version was filmed, such as the story was narrowed down to just three main characters, and the motivation for the killings was completely dropped.  I just wish the filmmakers here had chosen to replace it with something, anything.

I'd probably have a ton more NITPICK POINTS today if I knew anything about sailing or navigation.  Like the fact that John makes a lot of measurements and calculations before setting a course, and Rae just doesn't.  She prefers to choose a direction by random chance, apparently, and I know that the sea is so very, very big that this doesn't seem like it could possibly be successful.  There are 360 degrees in a circle, after all, so what are the odds of picking the right course without navigational tools?  But again, I'm not an expert.

Also starring Sam Neill (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Billy Zane (last heard in "Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World"), Rod Mullinar, Joshua Tilden, George Shevtsov, Michael Long.

RATING: 4 out of 10 harpoons