Burke and Hare

Year 18, Day 97 - 4/7/26 - Movie #5,296

BEFORE: I was making a master list yesterday of my Star Wars autographs, all signed 8 x 10s, some of them are hanging on the wall and some of them are in boxes because I ran out of wall space. But I noticed how many of those actors have popped up recently, like Rose Byrne (Episode 2) and Domhnall Gleeson (Eps. 7-9) were both in "Peter Rabbit 2" and I didn't realize the "Star Wars" connection there. Keri Russell (Ep. 9) popped up in "The Upside of Anger") and Naomi Ackie (Ep. 9) in "Mickey 17" and "The Thursday Murder Club", Liam Neeson in "The Naked Gun", of course. Oh, and Laura Dern (Ep. 8) was in three movies in February and Celia Imrie (Ep. 1) is second on my leader board right now, and Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One) popped up in "KIller Elite". They're all over the place. 

Today's film has at least THREE, which I think is notable - Simon Pegg (Ep. 7) and Andy Serkis (Ep. 8) and a cameo from Christopher Lee (Ep. 2). Simon Pegg carries over from "Terminal". 

THE PLOT: Two 19th-century grave robbers find a lucrative business providing cadavers for an Edinburgh medical school. 

AFTER: I should point out that I have not MET those three "Star Wars" actors in person, I only purchased their signed photos from reputable sources. (I've met a LOT of Star Wars actors, just not any of those three...). But I did meet John Landis, the director, and SPFX genius Ray Harryhausen, who has a cameo here - both at San Diego Comic-Con, though in different years, Harryhausen did a signing in the booth next to mine in 2007 and Landis walked by and then visited my booth in 2009. I'm just glad I knew what both people looked like and therefore I was able to spot them and chat them up. 

Today's comedy is based on a real string of 16 murders committed in Edinburgh, Scotland around 1828, so almost 200 years ago now. William Burke and William Hare sold the corpses of their victims to Robert Knox, to be used for dissection in his anatomy lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons. It seems that someone passed a law that stated that the only corpses that could be dissected were people who were sentenced to death for crimes, and then the main medical school in Edinburgh was paying the executioners top dollar for exclusive rights to those corpses, leaving the smaller anatomy school without any bodies. So Dr. Knox spread the word among local mobsters that he'd pay a second-tier rate for any bodies they encountered - and come on, what proper mobster doesn't have a few bodies he'd like to get rid of? - and the word filtered down to Burke and Hare, who happened to be in the pub and just happened to be disposing of the body of a lodger who'd died before paying his monthly rent. The next lodger was only sick, but they sort of helped him along, and then after robbing graves was a bust (and didn't provide fresh enough corpses) they just started killing people at random, more or less. 

Hare's wife seemed to approve of his plan, as her husband had finally found something he was good at, rather than selling mold as a medical cure for everything, and she only demanded a pound per killing as a "wife tax" - meanwhile the local mobsters decided they wanted in on the scheme and for half of every corpse sale, they basically provided "protection" to keep the cops from figuring out what was going on. Meanwhile Burke suddenly had money to invest in his intended girlfriend's all-female production of "Macbeth", which sure seems like it was way ahead of its time. This sounds a lot like what the Public Theater might stage in the 21st century, not the 19th. 

But as you might have guessed, with half the money going to the mob, a pound going to Hare's wife, and other money being invested into a theater production, that didn't leave much, so they had to double their murder rate just to break even. Fortunately this was back before CSI or even fingerprints, so the police were pretty inept and it was only by chance that someone in the anatomy class recognized the body of one of the mobsters being used in a demonstration. A captain in the police force takes up the case, investigating where all the missing persons might be going, and the head solicitor and the Lord Provost offer him a promotion if he will help keep the scandal out of the newspapers. However, after Burke, Hare, Hare's wife and Burke's girlfriend are all arrested, he demands that one person admit to the killing in order to allow the others to go free. 

This isn't REALLY the way the trial went down in real life, Hare was granted immunity if he turned king's evidence, and also confessed to all 16 deaths, then formal charges were made against Burke for three of the murders, and he was only found guilty of one, but still sentenced to death. Yeah, it doesn't really make much sense for the police to make ONE person confess and then let everyone else walk, that feels very much like an oversimplification of this case.

The real irony was that Burke's body was turned over to medical research after his hanging, and after dissection his skeleton is still on display at the Museum of the Edinburg Medical School.  Another irony was that the case highlighted the need for bodies used in medical research and led to the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed more people to donate their bodies, or those of family members, for anatomical dissection in exchange for eventual burial at the school's expense. Also surgeons could have legal access to corpses that were unclaimed after death, people who had died in hospitals, prisons or workhouses. 

The way the police got suspicious about the murders in real life was also quite different, but you can just look that up on Wikipedia yourself, if you're so inclined. What's more important is whether this works as a kind of dark comedy, and I suppose it does. I guess it's better to laugh about murder and the ongoing need for medical research than it is to bemoan it all, right?

Directed by John Landis (director of "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project" and "Into the Night")

Also starring Andy Serkis (last heard. in "Venom: The Last Dance"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Tim Curry (last heard in "The Pebble and the Penguin"), Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Paddington in Peru"), Hugh Bonneville (ditto), Simon Farnaby (ditto), Bill Bailey (last heard in "The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales"), Allan Corduner (last seen in "Bigger Than the Sky"), David Hayman (last seen in "Macbeth" (2015)), David Schofield (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Ronnie Corbett (last seen in "A Liar's Autobiography"), Reece Shearsmith (last seen in "Saltburn"), Christian Brassington (last seen in "Easy Virtue"), Michael Smiley (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Christopher Lee (last heard in "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim"), Jenny Agutter (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Georgia King (last seen in "Austenland"), John Woodvine (last seen in "Wuthering Heights" (1992)), Steve Speirs (last seen in "The Musketeer"), Stephen Merchant (last seen in "Locked Down"), Paul Whitehouse (last seen in "King of Thieves"), Michael Winner, Max Landis, Ray Harryhausen (last seen in "20 Million Miles to Earth"), Gabrielle Downey (last seen in "The Double"), Stuart McQuarrie (last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Mike Goodenough, Robert Fyfe (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Robert Willox, Ciaron Kelly, Joyce Henderson (last seen in "About a Boy"), Pollyanna McIntosh (last seen in "Filth"), Shelley Longworth, Amanda Claire-Jones, George Potts (last seen in "Dorian Gray"), Duncan Duff, Alan Munroe, John Gaynor, Michael Wilson, Robert Paynter (last seen in "Into the Night"), Tom Meeten (last seen in "Paddington"), Tom Urie (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Ella Smith (last seen in "The Voices"), Janet Whiteside (last seen in "Pride & Prejudice"), Robert Stone (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Chris Obi (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Patricia Gibson-Howell, Jacob Edwards, Billy Riddoch, Esme Thompson, Costa-Gavras (last seen in "Spies Like Us"), Michele Ray-Gavras, Kieran-Miguel Diego D'La Vega, Ken Matthews, Spencer Noll

RATING: 5 out of 10 "missing person" posters

Terminal

Year 18, Day 96 - 4/6/26 - Movie #5,295

BEFORE: There are just a few games left in the NBA season, so I've been working all of the last  home stand for the Brooklyn Nets. There was like, zero chance of that team making the playoffs.  But what's great about having two jobs is that while one job might be shut down, for say, Easter break, because it's run by a college, there's a chance that things could pick up at the other job to compensate, and that's where I find myself right now. There will be a couple weeks before the WNBA games start up, so essentially I've got several weeks off from THAT job, and it looks like I'm about to get very busy at the other. Now, if BOTH temp jobs were to slow down, I'd be in some trouble, that would mean I'd have to kick the job hunt into high gear again. But the college is about to start thesis presentations in late April and May, plus the Tribeca Film Festival starts in early June, so I hope to be very busy at the theater, and I'll work as many NY Liberty games as I can, plus concerts maybe, but my focus might be shifting back over to the theater job, that's all. 

Margot Robbie carries over from "Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway". I know, why not just have Simon Pegg carry over "Mission: Impossible", but I had to get the rabbit film to land on Easter...

THE PLOT: Follows the twisting tales of two assassins carrying out a mission, a teacher battling a fatal illness, an enigmatic janitor and a curious waitress leading a dangerous double life. 

AFTER: Oh, what do I even DO with this film? It's streaming on Hulu, you can almost bet that means it's not good enough for Netflix, or else it's just not connected enough to Paramount or Amazon to find a streaming home there. I'll admit I don't know how all of that works, none of the films I produced really have a streaming home, but that's a long story, the difficulties of getting independent animation distributed, especially films aimed at adults. But I digress - this Hulu presentation is really kind of average at best, like all of the intensity of an assassin-based action movie, just without all the action. 

Instead it's the BORING parts (mostly) of the killer-for-hire game, the showing up for clandestine meetings in cafes and bars and churches, getting phone calls that tell you where to be and when, and then sequestering in a rundown apartment for weeks while you wait for your target to appear in a window across the alley or something. The hitmen here have to do that, just WAIT and they chat to pass the time and they drink and they try to play cards, but usually they just end up arguing with each other.  Meanwhile, there's an teacher who's got a fatal disease of some kind who goes to the same cafe, near the train station - it's the middle of the night and there are no trains, if there were he would jump in front of one and commit suicide - but I guess if you can't kill yourself, you might as well go have a cup of coffee and something to eat. Great tagline for the cafe, "Eating here is slightly better than killing yourself." 

Yes, I realize the double meaning of "Terminal", any train station at the end of the line is a terminal, plus the nature of the assassination business - it's really the only joke the film has, so of course they play it up every chance they get. Cleverness in the plot, unfortunately, is a lot harder to come by. 

The film also jumps around in time, quite liberally - to the point where after a while it's impossible to tell WHEN anything happened, and are we dealing with a split timeline, like one in the past and one in the present, or is everything just randomly ordered to make us more confused, or to cover up all the gaping plotholes?  Anyway the story shifts three weeks back in time, to that same waitress from the cafe, posing as a prostitute in order to get a man into bed, where she ties him up (kinky) but then kills him. This has something to do with her desire to work for the mysterious Mr. Franklyn, but she wants to be his only employee, and she intends to kill all of his competition, or maybe her competition, to nail down the job. 

We then see Mr. Franklyn hiring two of his regular hit-men to do a job, and this involves picking up a briefcase from the train termimal, and figuring out the job from the clues in the briefcase. Again, since we're jumping back and forth in time, it's impossible to determine if we're looking at the past or NOW, if the word NOW still has any meaning, which it kind of doesn't here. Everything just happens at "story time", and we have to work pretty hard here to put the pieces in order, and I don't usually like that. When they follow the matchbook clue to the strip club, they see Annie, the waitress, doing double duty as a dancer, but what this means is still anybody's guess. You know, maybe she just has two jobs, she works in the cafe and also the club, that wouldn't be the weirdest thing in the world. And then the third job is to relay information to the hitmen from their employer? Sure, could happen, I guess but things are getting more and more unlikely. 

Annie also tries to "help" the teacher, she gives him great advice about how to commit suicide, various methods, what would be quickest or least painful, and he's kind of into the idea. I mean, if you've got an undetermined fatal disease, and you could die at any moment, that could lead your brain down some very weird paths, thanks to intrusive thoughts. Or if you've got a beautiful woman who's willing to assist you, that could be somewhat convincing. For a minute it almost seems like Annie is the mastermind here, and she's hired the hitmen to kill this teacher to make his painful death a little less painful? Nah, that would be much too easy, the real truth of what's going on here is WAY more complicated than that. 

But that's it, I'll say no more about the plot because if all that is intriguing to you, you can watch the damn movie yourself. I had to endure it, so I wish the same on you, and I don't even know you. (Do I? You seem kind of familiar...). But of course there is a reason here for people to be doing what they do, and it all makes sense after the fact, they just take their damn time in getting to a point where something HAPPENS and all is revealed, and then fortunately we can all get back to whatever we were doing before this movie came into our lives. It's only 95 minutes long but it FELT like forever. I don't know, maybe you'll like this sort of thing if you're deranged somehow or have absolutely nothing better to do. 

Directed by Vaughn Stein (assistant director on "Beauty and the Beast" and "Wonder Woman")

Also starring Simon Pegg (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Dexter Fletcher (last seen in "The Long Good Friday"), Mike Myers (last seen in "Biggest Heist Ever"), Max Irons (last seen in "Dorian Gray"), Katarina Cas (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Nick Moran (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Matthew Lewis (ditto), Les Loveday (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Jourdan Dunn (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Thomas Turgoose (last seen in "Mickey 17"), Jay Simpson (last seen in "Enola Holmes"), Ben Griffin, Robert Goodman (last seen in "Napoleon"), Paul Reynolds (last seen in "Eddie the Eagle")

RATING: 4 out of 10 references to "Alice in Wonderland"

Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway

Year 18, Day 95 - 4/5/26 - Movie #5,294 - Happy Easter!

BEFORE: I made it to Easter, and the chain is still unbroken - really, it's was either this film about rabbits or one about the biblical Mary - I'll pick this fictional character every time over THAT one. Just saying. 

It's not just Easter, though, it's also Hayley Atwell's birthday, April 5, so we'll be sending a Birthday SHOUT-out today to her as she carries over again from "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning". I think it's probably very safe to say that I'm the only person who was watched these three films with Hayley Atwell, back to back. Probably not even her agent would do this, because the films are all so vastly different. Or, are they? 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Peter Rabbit" (Movie #3,119)

THE PLOT: Peter and his rabbit family are now living with Bea and Thomas MacGregor, who are now married. Bored of life in the garden, Peter goes to the big city, where he meets shady characters and ends up creating chaos for the whole family. 

AFTER: I think I'm on to something here, even though two of these three Hayley Atwell films have been animated features, and the other a big-budget action movie, I think there's sort of a through-line, not just the fact that Ms. Atwell appears in all three of them. "Paddington in Peru" was kind of a quest movie, not just the search for the missing Aunt, but a search for the lost city, and "Mission: Impossible" was kind of about the search for that missing submarine, of course every "Mission: Impossible" film is also kind of like a heist film, and now we have "Peter Rabbit 2" which greatly resembles a heist film at one point, with Peter and his family helping a city rabbit named Barnabas steal a bunch of dried fruit from a farmers' market. OK, so that's not really the same thing as stealing from a bank or breaking in to a fortified end-of-the-world bunker, but a heist is a heist.  

Another thing today's film shares with "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning" is that things don't exactly go as planned (do they EVER?) and some of the team members are caught, in this case all of Peter's family and friends who helped with the heist get caught by the people who run the pet shop, and they all get sold off very quickly to people who want to keep rabbits, or a hedgehog or a badger as a pet. This leads to the SECOND part of the quest, as newlyweds Bea and Thomas McGregor have to drive around the U.K. or even other parts of Europe, to put the whole gang back together at the end. NITPICK POINT: I get why the fisherman bought Benjamin Bunny, he wanted to make a rabbit stew as he was probably sick of eating fish, but WHY was this guy in Switzerland so into skiing down the alps while carrying a badger? Was this some weird fetish thing? If so, I don't want to know about it. 

The good news is that they do eventually get all the woodland creatures back, but this sends a weird message out to the kids - if somebody takes your pet without any right to, the best response is to go and steal it back from them, even if they paid the pet shop for it. Umm, sure, kids need to know how to break the law to make things right, maybe taking legal action against the pet show would instill a better lesson?   I suppose that would take longer, and Benjamin would have been eaten, but still, if stealing is bad then stealing something back is also bad, right?  And Peter Rabbit learns his lesson (at least until next time) that him wanting to act like a "Bad Bunny" has consequences for the people and animals around him. Also, if you are a pet owner or a woman who writes books about animal characters, you do NOT take your eyes off of your pet, not even for a second. You're a bad pet mom if your rabbit is hanging out with a thieving street gang of animals, and they're planning something.

Barnabas had no intention of sharing the dried fruit with Peter's family, or making sure that they weren't captured during the heist, plus he lied when he implied that he knew Peter's father, it was just a plot to gain his trust. Another lesson for the kiddos: street people and petty criminals will lie to you to get you to do what they want. Also don't leave your parents while on holiday with them to go hang out with street trash. That's maybe a better lesson to send out to the kids at home. 

But we still have to deal with why Mr. McGregor is marrying Bea (the stand-in for Beatrix Pother here, I guess) in the first place. Is that how we solve our problems now, by turning our enemies into family that we don't like all that much, and who never trust us and blame us for doing bad things when we were trying (for a while) to do only good things? Also we learn that people who work for major publishing companies are never to be trusted either, they just want to make too-hip sequels that destroy the validity of the original work. Can this be true, can the film that is an unfaithful adapted unnecessary sequel be taking a stand against unfaithful adapted unnecessary sequels? That's maybe just a bit too meta for the room, I don't think kids will get this joke, but maybe it's there for the adults to appreciate? I guess we should be thankful that they didn't make this film into a space-travel themed adventure film? 

I could have done without most of the slapstick, like when they made Mr. MacGregor prove that he could "frolic" and have fun, and this just ends with him rolling down a hill and getting out of control. The way he landed, he surely should have ended up in hospital - but we get it, kids bounce more easily than adults, so we old people shouldn't do anything physical, this is ageism of the highest order though. Really, this could have been a LOT worse, I'll take this story if this really the best they could do, but it's still a complete bastardization of Beatrix Potter's tales. But yeah, heist films sell, so why not do a Peter Rabbit sequel like it's "Ocean's Twelve"?

Directed by Will Gluck (director of "Peter Rabbit" and "Easy A")

Also starring Rose Byrne (last heard in "I Am Mother"), Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "Calvary"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "See How They Run"), Tim Minchin (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2018)), Tara Morice, Dave Lawson (last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Alex Blias (ditto), Jude Hyland, Neil Hayes, Neveen Hanna, Shona Tough, Tom Golding, Tina Maskell, Andy Gathergood (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Nigel Cooke, Lily Hall, Raelee Hill (last seen in "Superman Returns"), Gordon Waddell (ditto), Owen Beamond, Jonathan Elsom (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Jack Andrew (last seen in "Aquaman"), Harry Peek (also last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Matt Newport, John Batchelor (last seen in "Man-Thing"), Eliza Logan (last seen in "Truth"), Maddison-Cleo Musumeci, Joshua Kim, Ingrid Macaulay, Zoe Cash, Chika Yasumura, Callum Macgown, Simon Edds (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Rowan Chapman (last seen in "Ticket to Paradise"), Andrea Berchtold, Dalip Sondhi, Chantelle Jamieson (last seen in "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire"), Megan Smart, Taylor Ferguson, Nick Chopping, Lance Kerfuffle, Buckminster Kerfuffle, Alexandra Gluck (also last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Taryn Gluck (ditto), Anthony Vercoe, Anton Grimus, Mia Willis, Russell Penton, Isla Hawkins, Dean Gould, Yasca Sinigaglia, Stephen Murdoch, Philip Partridge, Mike Duncan, Connor Van Vuuren, Buffy Anne Littua, Renee Ware

with the voices of James Corden (last seen in "Begin Again"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Z for Zachariah"), Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "The Tale"), Aimee Horne, Colin Moody (also last heard in "Peter Rabbit"),  Lennie James (last seen in "Colombiana"), Damon Herriman (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Rupert Degas (last heard in "Planet 51"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Backtrack"), Sia (also last heard in "Peter Rabbit")), Ewen Leslie (ditto), Will Reichelt (ditto), David Wenham (last seen in "Elvis"), Matt Villa, Stewart Alves,

RATING: 5 out of 10 release delays (due to the COVID pandemic)

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Year 18, Day 94 - 4/4/26 - Movie #5,293

BEFORE: Well, it looks like I'll be bouncing back and forth between action films for adults and animated films for children, at least for a little while. It's fine, I'm still in post-romance recovery so either or both or anything will do right now, as long as people aren't involved in love triangles or going on first dates or trying to plan a wedding. Hell, according to the Burned Toast maxim, this makes "Freedom Writers" OK because it was an integral part of bringing me HERE, and I can get rid of this enormous action movie, as well as some animated things that have been kicking around on the list for way too long. 

Hayley Atwell carries over from "Paddington in Peru".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" (Movie #4,821)

THE PLOT: Ethan Hunt and the IMF pursue a dangerous AI called the Entity that's infiltrated global intelligence. With governments and a figure from his past in pursuit, Hunt races to stop it from forever changing the world. 

AFTER: All right, this is the eighth and LAST time I will be including a "Mission: Impossible" film as part of the countdown - really, only because they aren't going to make any more of them. I suppose they said that about James Bond films, too, so I guess which franchise will be rebooted sooner than the other. Hey, they said no more "Star Wars" films at one point (no, wait, at three different points) and we've got a new one coming out this year which I'll have to save space for. 

This film is pretty much what I figured it would be - a very complicated trip for Ethan Hunt to the bottom of the ocean, to download some computer program that might (emphasis on MIGHT) contain the secret to stopping the evil A.I. program which is taking over Hollywood film production. Sorry, my bad, it's really taking over the world's nuclear arsenal, and seems very willing to cause armageddon, and somehow it doesn't realize that without humans alive, the world isn't really worth taking over. Like WHY does the A.I. want to destroy the world, does it not understand that it only exists because it was invented by humans, and also we feed it electricity? Without society, won't the A.I. perish too, to whatever extent it's alive, which it's not? Something doesn't really add up here, except that A.I. is the hot new big bad right now because it's coming for all the filmmakers' jobs - when we can just push a couple buttons and make a passable movie, all screenwriters and film directors will be out of work, and they sort of all see this as a BAD thing. Go figure. 

But anyway, how do you make a final impossible mission that's somehow more impossibler than the previous seven? I mean, they were all successful, so "impossible" is relative, I guess - Ethan Hunt and his team always find a way, even if they have to sacrifice their personal lives or their actual lives. And at least one team member here makes that ultimate sacrifice, I won't say who, but really, I would have been OK with more of them biting it. We believe that James Bond is no longer living right now, until some screenwriter decides otherwise, and honestly, if Ethan Hunt had to go, this would have been the best time for it. Tom Cruise is OLD, man, I don't care if he still does his own stunts, it's maybe time to retire, even though I know he won't listen to good advice. Go out on top, man. 

Before the final mission, though, we all have to endure a non-brief recap of what has happened to the IMF before this. Just in case you didn't see the last movie, or the six others before that, you all have to catch up. Everything's connected, man, and that's both beautiful and scary, because Ethan's actions in the past may have made this evil A.I. entity called "The Entity" possible. He carries so much guilt around, it's a wonder he can even walk, let alone run. Ethan also recruits a few new members for his team of outlaws, some people who were even on the other side in previous installments, but now their skills could be put toward saving the world instead of trying to destroy it. Makes sense, put your enemies on your team and you have fewer enemies...

But rewriting all of "Mission: Impossible" history over seven films to somehow justify all the events of THIS one and the one before it, it's a tall order. We didn't HAVE to make sure that all eight films added up to one big, impossibly twisty and bloated narrative, but I guess that's an OK thing? Still, as I said last time, maybe think about doing more with less instead of the opposite. We could have just taken each film as its own thing, like we did all along. Still, the Burned Toast maxim comes into play BIG time, even the guy who got discredited and sent to run a station in the Arctic for 30 years just because Ethan Hunt broke into the "impenetrable" data center he designed, way back in the first film is a great example of Burned Toast. Yes, sure, Ethan Hunt's actions got him fired and basically exiled - but he simply wouldn't change a thing, because if not for Ethan, he might still be in the same boring job, day after day, plus he wouldn't have had the adventures he had, he wouldn't have met his wife, he wouldn't have composed that cello concerto during his down time. Yeah, right. More to the point, he wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time (NOW) to help Ethan Hunt save the world. Again. So he's got that going for him, too.

But finding that submarine in the middle of the Bering Sea is a tall order, and then once they somehow find out the coordinates WITHOUT being able to read the old floppy discs, where all the information on everything that happened in the world's oceans is somehow backed up, Ethan still has to get himself down to that sunken Russian sub, and even harder, he has to get BACK to the surface without any help until he gets there, which means he's probably going to both drown AND die, but it's OK, because the cold ocean will make sure he's only MOSTLY dead, as long as somebody cuts through the ice in the exact right spot at the exact right time and puts him in a decompression chamber. OK, that sounds very unlikely, one might even call it impossible. 

That mystery agent Gabriel wants that drive from the sub, though, and The Entity wants access to a bunker in South Africa where it can survive the nuclear armageddon that it's about to create. Umm, there's some weird logic here, because Gabriel tries to blow up that bunker with a nuclear bomb, because he doesn't want the Entity to hide there, he wants to control the Entity himself so he can control the world. The plan is to give Gabriel the drive he wants, but also let him infect that drive with the "poison pill" malware that Luther created and Gabriel stole - barring that, they plan to allow the Entity access to the bunker, but once it enters, they'll trap it inside this infinite mainframe thingy that it will bounce around in forever. The plan might have worked, too, if the stupid director of the rival CIA didn't show up with Jasper Briggs, son of former IMF team leader Jim Phelps. They spoil the whole thing so the mission just got a whole lot impossibler, maybe even the most impossiblest. 

So now they have to defuse a bomb while fixing somebody's collapsed lung while Ethan Hunt chases Gabriel in a biplane, hoping to jump over to HIS plane, grab the poison pill from around his neck, attach it to the drive while parachuting to the earth, which will allow the Entity to enter the secret bunker storage, but really get trapped in a glowstick. Man, I wish to Jesus I was kidding here. This is way overblown and over-the-top and everything that possibly could go wrong does, making everything three times more complicated than it needed to be. Somehow it's just ridiculous how serious all this action is together, if that makes sense. 

But now I really wonder if there is extra insight to be gained by watching ALL eight of this franchise's films in a row - which kind of was the point of this (usually) enormous exercise in futility that is the Movie Year. Unfortunately, I just don't have that kind of time, because the counter on that metaphorical nuclear bomb is always tick, tick, ticking down...

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie (director of "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning", duh)

Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Ving Rhames (last heard in "The Garfield Movie"), Simon Pegg (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning"), Esai Morales (ditto), Shea Whigham (ditto), Greg Tarzan Davis (ditto), Charles Parnell (ditto), Pom Klementieff (last heard in "Superman"), Henry Czerny (last seen in "Ready or Not"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Janet McTeer (last seen in "Allegiant"), Nick Offerman (last seen in "Civil War"), Hannah Waddingham (last seen in "The Fall Guy"), Tramell Tillman, Angela Bassett (last seen in "Damsel"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Rolf Saxon (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Lucy Tulugarjuk, Cary Elwes (last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre"), Katy O'Brian (last seen in "Twisters"), Stephen Oyoung (ditto), Tomas Paredes, Paul Bullion (last seen in "Dune: Part One"), Paska D. Lychnikoff (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Ryn Alleyne, Ned Campbell (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Charlie Carter (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Chantelle Roman, Kwabena Ansah, Ross McCall, Hugo Salter, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Sydney Cole Alexander, Gabriella Piazza (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Elliot Janks, Madeleine Day, Erin Battle, Stephen Samson,

 

with archive footage of Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Emmanuelle Beart, Henry Cavill (last seen in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"), Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Emilio Estevez (last seen in "Brats"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Hard Eight"), Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Jens Hulten (last seen in "Alpha"), Kristoffer Joner (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Vanessa Kirby (also last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Michael Nyqvist (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Paula Patton (last seen in "Warcraft"), Maggie Q (also last seen in "Allegiant"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Letters to Juliet"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Jean Reno (last seen in "Die Hart"), Keri Russell (last seen in "The Upside of Anger"), Dougray Scott (last seen in "Ever After: A Cinderella Story"), Lea Seydoux (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Kristin Scott Thomas (last seen in "Easy Virtue"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Liang Yang

RATING: 6 out of 10 protestors in Trafalgar Square

Paddington in Peru

Year 18, Day 93 - 4/3/26 - Movie #5,292

BEFORE: I went on a linking tear last night, and I found a path to Mother's Day - there may be more than one out there, but I have the one I found. There's a lot of flexibility in it, like there are three or four films that are in the middle of 3-film chains, so they can be dropped if those movies turn out to be suddenly unavailable on streaming or something. And then if there's a bigger gap than expected because I had to drop those films, I can add in the two "Machete" films or maybe even the four "Spy Kids" films - so I don't know exactly how it's all going to shake down but I have the basic structure I need, I can add to that framework when I learn what's new to streaming in April or take some movies out if I need breaks.

So here's the planned linking for the rest of April after today: Hayley Atwell, Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, Reece Shearsmith, Lenny Henry, Eleanor Matsuura, Ed Skrein, Lucy Thackeray, Maisie Williams, Paul Walter Hauser, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Regina Hall, John Hoogenakker, Michael Keaton, Sydney Miles, Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, John Heard, Jurnee Smollett, and Dwayne Johnson. I've got things set until two days after Mother's Day, this list just gets me to May 1. There are some BIG films in there, like "Mission: Impossible" and the latest "Jurassic World" and "One Battle After Another" which has been prioritized, of course. Animated features have also been fast-tracked.

And here I went into a blind panic, with my linking set to run out in just four days - but the path was there, it was just waiting to be discovered...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Paddington 2" (Movie #3,198)

THE PLOT: Paddington returns to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown family in tow, adventure ensues when a mystery sends them on an unexpected journey. 

AFTER: March (after the romance chain ended) was just way to serious, if you ask me. People sent to prison, framed for murder. People held hostage to make mercenaries kill soldiers. People going to therapy because they believe they're bad parents just because their kid has an eating disorder. People holding a kid hostage so his grandparents can't even visit him. Then, in all instances, those things started out as bad and got much, much worse. Does anybody remember when movies used to be FUN?  Then at work they go and move me off the beer stand I've been working for months and tell me I have to work at the dessert stand, which is MUCH more hectic, and putting ice cream into little cups is harder than you think it might be, and I wasn't properly trained on the POS system, sure, just throw me into the fire, why don't you?  

So this is exactly the movie I need right now, a silly and adorable "Paddington" sequel, because two films in this franchise just were NOT enough, we need more ASAP. Especially with everything going on in the world right now, I mean a moon mission is very uplifting, but it can't really counterbalance a war, I think we all should have learned that in the late 1960's, right? Like Nixon pushed hard to get Apollo 11 to distract everyone from Vietnam, and now history's not really repeating itself, but it kind of rhymes, don't it? 

Meanwhile, it's been about 2,100 films since I last watched a "Paddington" movie on 4/10/19, that's just about 7 years (minus one week). I adored "Paddington 2", it had the absolute cutest prison-break EVER, and with a bear doing hard time I'd wished they could have subtitled it the "PAW-shank Redemption" but maybe that would be a little too cutesy AND on the nose. That film also had a treasure hunt in London, with the clues in a pop-up book, and this film kind of picks up on that same idea, with characters looking for a fabled lost city of gold, aka "El Dorado" and we've seen many films like that before, even Indiana Jones did one like that. But this one's different because everything in Peru seems to be bear-based, and also the search for El BEAR-ado dovetails rather neatly with Paddington and the Browns searching for his Aunt Lucy, who has disappeared from the Home for Retired Bears.  

There's a fair bit of "Jungle Cruise" and "The Lost City" in this one, too, both films drawing liberally from "The African Queen" and/or "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" as needed. There's a treasure map, there's a boat captain who offers to take the family up river, and of course the captain turns out to have a family history of people with "oro loco" or gold madness. The whole family sets out for Rumi Rock and Captain Cabot informs them that this is where people usually start their searches for the Lost City, but so few people manage to return alive, I wonder why that is...

But, of course, once on the river things start going horribly wrong. The Captain's daughter, Gina, tries to convince him to NOT search for the gold himself, please, just this once, and his response is to sail away without her after she casts off the line. Then HE gets knocked off the boat by the boom, and it's a long time before Paddington and his family realize that the crew is gone, and nobody is steering the boat. The boat turns the wrong way, encounters rapids, and breaks apart. Or maybe it had something to do with the boat being too heavy, like who brings a player piano on a jungle cruise? There's way too much other furniture, too, leading me to conclude this boat is somehow much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. 

Paddington gets separated from his family but ends up at Rumi Rock with Captain Cabot, and he remembers the time that Aunt Lucy saved him after hearing him roar, and she told him that if he ever was in trouble, that was all he had to do. So Paddington follows the response roars he hears through the jungle, all the way to some Incan ruins - and it's very clever that those roars were NOT what he thought they were, and it's even more clever that they still somehow brought him to the right place. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bird, who had been left back at the Ursine Retirement Home with the very suspicious Reverend Mother, arrives by nun-flown plane and manages to rescue the rest of the family from the jungle, so they can all meet up at the Incan ruins. 

Yes, of course there was a reason behind Aunt Lucy's disappearance, you can say that it's far-fetched, or you can agree that it makes perfect sense in retrospect. Most things do, after all. And of course they find the lost city, but the treasure isn't exactly what you'd expect UNLESS you are a bear, that is. Mrs. Brown naturally assumes that Paddington, after finding his tribe again, would want to remain in Peru with them, but is overjoyed when he requests going back to London with his family. A happy ending is enjoyed by all, the captain gives up his quest for gold at long last, and the woman who had been pretending to be the Reverend Mother is punished for her mischief, as it should be. And in a delightful post-credits scene, a bunch of bears from Peru come to London to visit Paddington, and they all go to visit the villain from the last film, who is still in prison. But he is inspired to put on a musical production of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" upon his release. Despite how cute the whole rest of the film is, this ending scene might just be the best part. 

Directed by Dougal Wilson

Also starring Hugh Bonneville (last seen in "Breathe"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Julie Walters (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Enchanted April"), Madeleine Harris (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Samuel Joslin (ditto), Olivia Colman (last seen in "Wonka"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Babygirl"), Carla Tous, Joel Fry (last seen in "Love Wedding Repeat"), Robbie Gee (also last seen in "Paddington 2"), Sanjeev Bhaskar (last seen in "The Flash"), Ben Miller (last seen in "The Prince and Me"), Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Death of a Unicorn"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"), Aloreia Spencer, Simon Farnaby (also last seen in "Wonka"), Ella Bruccoleri, Nicholas Burns (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Ashleigh Reynolds (last seen in "Empire of Light"), Amit Shah (last seen in "Ordinary Love"), Carlos Carlin, Orlando Estrada, Diana Payan, Sarah Twomey, with a cameo from Hugh Grant (last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre")

and the voices of Ben Whishaw (last seen in "The International"), Oliver Maltman (also last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre"), Peter Marinker (last seen in "Judge Dredd"), Joseph Balderrama (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Emma Sidi, Nic Sampson

RATING: 7 out of 10 llamas who like marmalade sandwiches (who doesn't?)

Freedom Writers

Year 18, Day 92 - 4/2/26 - Movie #5,291

BEFORE: OK, so here's what happened. I tend to pair up my movies, not just because I like to have at least 2 movies on each DVD I make, which means a pack of blanks last twice as long, but also because then making the chains is sometimes half as much work, once I get to a film the next one is RIGHT THERE. Of course, it doesn't always work that way, and sometimes to get where I want to go I can only include one half of a (temporary) pair. So I had this one paired up with "Ordinary Angels", even though one was a Christmas-time film and the other was a "back to school" film, which usually ends up slated for June or September. To get to Easter, though, I need to go through this film, which also neatly gets it off the list, and really there's no telling how long it could hang around the list, waiting for a connection. So let's cross it off, it's going to feel so good...

Hilary Swank carries over from "I Am Mother". 

THE PLOT: Erin Gruwell, a young teacher in a racially divided school, inspires her class of at-risk students deemed incapable of learning, to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue education beyond high school. 

AFTER: I'm just going to treat this one like a little bit of mortar, something to hold the bricks together, because I want to get on to some animated films - mixed in with the action films, of course - so hopefully tomorrow's film is a brick, but I've got to endure this preachy high school film before I can get there. Nothing good ever comes without a little bit of pain, right? I really have to get back to my linking, so I'm going to try and keep this review really short, OK? 

This is based on a true story, there was a real teacher named Erin Gruwell who taught English class to at-risk teens in Long Beach, California, and then a book was written about her and her teaching methods and how she improved students' lives and got them to pay attention in class, and then based this movie on that book. Which means the movie is like review-proof, there's no way I can make fun of it or point out any logical problems without coming off like the bad guy here. It's a trap, and I'm just not going to fall into it. But it's not my thing, either, this is way outside my wheelhouse even though I've watched films like "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me", and it's right in that same pocket. 

If I can complain about anything, it's the use of the Holocaust to try to get inner-city youth to pay attention, by drawing some kind of parallel between the plight of the Jewish people in Europe in the 1940's to the inner-city L.A. gang experience. Nope, those are two different things, and I'm not seeing a lot of parallels there. The at-risk teens were not hiding like Anne Frank was, they weren't being exterminated by Hitler, it's just not the same thing. OK, fine, if Gruwell discovered that her students never learned about the Holocaust it's fine that she should take it upon herself to clue them in, but this was English class, not history class. Also according to this there was something of an immediate effect, akin to "Oh, Hitler killed lots of Jews, I understand my own life so much better now." That's what I find flippin' unbelievable. Like I could get into other issues of cultural appropriation and comparing rap lyrics to actual poetry (again, two separate things) but the Holocaust Oscar-bait is probably the worst offense here, in my opinion. 

The other big thing is that one student sees a gang killing at a convenience store, and at first she's not going to testify in the case because the shooter was Latino and that's "her tribe", and you don't speak out about your tribe, but somehow by taking the English class she picked up the knowledge that the legal system is important and she should tell the truth on the stand, no matter what the consequences are. Again, there's something akin to a huge leap in logic there, it would have been great if the film could have somehow connected the dots and explained how she got from Point A to Point C. I mean I get how the classroom games like "The Line" got the teacher to earn the classmates' trust, but suddenly the kids in that class are not racist and trust the legal system implicitly, like those are some pretty big attitude changes to happen overnight. And it's all because they write in their journals now? Come on, pull the other one. 

I know we have a funding problem in our country's schools, and sure, it's great when teachers take it upon themselves to buy extra school supplies or even books. But did this teacher really take on TWO part-time jobs in addition to being a teacher, just to buy her class more or better books from the bookstore? That all seems rather stupid, like as a NITPICK POINT, how come they had a fund-raising event to bring a Holocaust survivor to Los Angeles (this could have been a zoom call...) but they couldn't do a similar bake sale or something to raise money to buy books? If I can't fault Gruwell's teaching methods I can at least find something wrong with her choices to work more jobs for no reason, and an inability to foresee what effect that would have on her relationship. 

She comes across as the kind of person who just wants to "fix" everybody, and some people, like her husband or her school administrators maybe don't want to be "fixed", because that would involve some kind of admission that they are "broken" in some way. You know what, just let me work on my own problems, and you work on yours. No, wait, I forgot, you're perfect and you just like to point out other people's faults. Well, either way, please stop helping me because maybe I need to do my own thing, even make my own mistakes and you're just making that more difficult. That's just the vibe I get from this character, she seems like a lot. Sure, go ahead, try to fix racism and gang violence in your corner of the world, if you want to waste your time, just please leave me out of it. 

Directed by Richard LaGravenese (director of "A Family Affair" and "The Last Five Years")

Also starring Patrick Dempsey (last seen in "Sweet Home Alabama"), Scott Glenn (last seen in "Greenland"), Imelda Staunton (last seen in "Much Ado About Nothing"), April Hernandez Castillo, Mario, Kristin Herrera, Jaclyn Ngan, Sergio Montalvo, Jason Finn, Deance Wyatt, Vanetta Smith, Gabriel Chavarria (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Hunter Parrish (last seen in "Still Alice"), Antonio Garcia, Giovonnie Samuels, John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Barry"), Robert Wisdom (last seen in "Freelancers"), Pat Carroll (last heard in "The Little Mermaid" (1989)), Will Morales, Armand Jones, Ricardo Molina (last seen in "Spanglish"), Angela Alvarado (last seen in "Replicas"), Katie Soo, Liisa Cohen (last seen in "Rent"), Brian Bennett, Horace Hall, Tim Halligan (last seen in "The Island"), Lisa Banes (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Giselle Bonilla, Earl Williams, Blake Hightower (last seen in "Imagine That"), Angela Sargeant, Robin Skye (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Chil Kong (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Juan Garcia (last seen in "Bounce"), Larry Cahn, Sharaud Moore, Cody Chappel, DJ Motiv8, Renee Firestone (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Eddie Ilam, Elisabeth Mann, Gloria Ungar, Robert Gonzalez, Palma Lawrence Reed (last seen in "The Soloist"), 

RATING: 4 out of 10 glasses of sparkling cider (I know it's non-alcoholic, still, it's not a good look for a high school classroom)

I Am Mother

Year 18, Day 91 - 4/1/26 - Movie #5,290

BEFORE: Well, I could skip right ahead to my Easter film from there, but then I'd miss out on the chance to remove three other films from my list, which can fit in-between here and there. So Rose Byrne carries over again from "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" and here are the links that will get me to Easter and a bit beyond that: 

Hilary Swank, Imelda Staunton, Hayley Atwell, Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, and Reece Shearsmith. As you can probably tell, the final "Mission: Impossible" film is on the schedule somewhere in there. I'm working on the rest of April now, I think I've found a path to "Jurassic World: Rebirth" and then the Springsteen bio-pic and then "One Battle After Another", but I don't want to confirm this until I know I have a path to Mothers Day. 

I can't possibly schedule something appropriate for April Fools Day, there just wasn't enough time between St. Patrick's Day and Easter, I had to just take whatever chain I could find - I just have to put something on the big board and hope it somehow works out - this film sounds a bit like a good Mothers Day film, though, so maybe that's the trick?

THE PLOT: In the wake of humanity's extinction, a teenage girl is raised by a robot designed to repopulate the earth, but their unique bond is threatened when an inexplicable stranger arrives with alarming news. 

AFTER: Well, by now I've seen so many end-of-the-world or post-apocalyptic films that if we get anything like this in real life, at least I'll be prepared for it. Who knows how this "war" or "excursion" or whatever in Iran is going to escalate, plus everyone's all in a panic over A.I. too, I can't really say if those are two separate problems or two parts of the same problem, but we're all just headed for something, probably, right? I mean five years ago I would have said that global warming was due to end us all within the century, but know, who can say? If it's not a nuclear explosion it could just as easily be an asteroid striking the earth ("Don't Look Up") or some kind of SkyNet operation, or come on, how many alien invasions have been predicted by movies? We're prepared for those things though, so yeah, it'll probably be something else. 

This film very cagily does NOT tell us exactly what happened (past tense because we're in the future and it already took place) we only see the plans that humanity made to preserve the species if something were to happen. Namely a bunch of fertilized embryos were place in a well-protected storage facility, and there's a robot in charge of determining if and when it's time to re-populate the planet by birthing some new humans, then raising them to be their best selves. Sure, what could possibly go wrong with THIS process? Something tells me we're about to find out...

The head robot in charge goes by "Mother" of course, and starts simple with one baby girl who she names "Daughter". Most likely Daughter is a test case, because Mother is new at this and still learning how to mother. Finding out what music soothes the baby, reading stories to the baby, teaching the baby not only language skills but also science, medicine and even ethics. There's a rigorous training schedule, even if we and they are not exactly sure for what, what happened to the human race, how did it go extinct and what kind of world is there outside? Is there radiation, disease, or just a charred landscape? Knowing this might give us a clue what happened to humanity, so of course we're just not going to get it. 

Despite what Mother told Daughter, one day a woman does come knocking on the door of the bunker, and despite what Mother has told her, Daughter lets her in. I should point out that before this, a mouse somehow came in through a hole near the airlock, and while Daughter was looking forward to having a pet, Mother incinerated the mouse, just to be on the safe side. So, umm, what will Mother do to this woman when she finds out about her? (That's two films in a row with a dead rodent as a plot point, just saying...)

Surprisingly, Mother just wants to help the woman, who has been shot and needs medical attention - this maybe raises a few more questions about what might be going on outside. Who shot her, and why? So there must be multiple people still out there and alive, or something else entirely is going on. The stranger (or "Woman" in the credits) says there is no contamination in the outside world, but Woman could also be lying. For that matter, Mother could be lying about the entire extinction event, we all saw what happened in "2001" when a computer was asked to lie to a couple astronauts, it caused massive programming conflicts and the computer could not resolve them without killing crew members. 

Mother also says that Woman was shot by her own weapon, so Daughter is forced to investigate this herself, in an attempt to determine which entity might be lying to her. After finding out this information and a few other things, Daughter decides to leave the bunker with Woman, only Mother doesn't want to let them go. Yeah, things get complicated after that. Mother offers to start birthing a brother or sister for Daughter, but you know, the trust just isn't there anymore. But then learning what Mother really is and what the extinction event was is really the big reveal of the film, so no spoilers here. 

Surprisingly, this film played at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, although I don't remember hearing about it at the time, and I don't know exactly why it took me 5 or 6 years for me to even hear about this movie, I guess it flew under the radar for a long while. I guess I added it to my list when it hit Netflix in mid-2019, and it's just been there, not linked to for an even longer while. But I watch so many movies it's impossible for me to remember HOW I learned about them, it's really only important that I do, because learning about a movie is the first step toward putting it on my watchlist, and only then can I try to connect to it. The film is based on a novel called "The Final Version" from 2014, so yeah, it was pretty much a 12-year journey from that book to me watching the film today. 

Still, when it comes to apocalypses, I feel like this is all pretty basic stuff, there's not a lot of wow factor here that we haven't seen in films like "I Am Legend", "2012" or "Greenland", only the exciting bits concerning how the world dies and people panicking and trying to save themselves is absent, leaving behind only the much more boring tasks of trying to fix the world and repopulate it with humans. 

Directed by Grant Supore

Also starring Clara Rugaard, Luke Hawker, Hilary Swank (last seen in "Ordinary Angels"), Tahlia Sturzaker, Hazel Sandery, Summer Lenton, Maddie Lenton, Jacob Nolan, Tracy Britton, with archive footage of Johnny Carson (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Martha"), Steve Martin (last heard in "Love the Coopers"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 ballet classes (taught by a robot who can't dance?)