I’ve mainly been working on being depressed rather than watching films, so it’s just two this week. First up is Plane, a bizarrely named and surprisingly cheap looking 2023 Gerard Butler vehicle (to be clear I mean a vehicle for Butler’s career not an actual plane). It begins in the cheapest looking ‘airport’ I’ve seen on screen in years, Butler is a Pilot (the plane type, not the TV type) and is facetiming with his daughter while going though security, something you notably cannot do. The daughter exists only in these video chats, with her and Butler sharing no time on screen, these disconnected ‘end of a phone’ characters are becoming more common, especially for child actors, Mia Lloyd’s role in The Princess Switch 3 comes to mind. I guess it’s a combination of child working hours and trying to keep things simple in post-covid film production? but every time I see it I’m expecting the kid to turn out to be an AI or dead or something. I guess in part I was desperate for meaning or interest in Plane, my mind spent more time wondering than watching. Butler’s accent is also bizarre, he has misplaced his natural Scottish accent so is doing a kinda transatlantic one? but then sometimes he slips into American or Scottish, its so incredibly out of place. The film has a fairly scattershot but genetic plot and I generally didn’t think much of it, this is what I get for picking films based on the titles meme factor.

The other thing I watched this week and my recommendation is Virus, it is an incredibly fun and cosy 1999 film about alien electricity turning Donald Sutherland into a Borg Queen. Jamie Lee Curtis and William Baldwin are co-leads, (like the Scottish Green Party), with Curtis being the natural protagonist and Baldwin being the one the edit slightly favours and perhaps the one the script probably highly favours. The film is very fun and sometimes a little scary, but the real stand out is the design. The practical effects are gristly and weird, they’re also full of creepy detail, like the human skin stretched over the wings of some of the robots, it is wonderfully unpleasant. I think it’s nearly a cult classic but slightly falls short, it wants to be more serious than is, there are little peaks at something greater and it’s more than worth watching for that.