Plots with a View

I have a soft spot for the quaint English film. A Very Annie-Mary, Waking Ned Devine, Calendar Girls (dare I mention Helen Mirren’s breasts again?), Little Voice, Brassed Off and Billy Elliot have all been films I have thoroughly enjoyed. So while I was browsing Video Ezy, on Saturday night, in the hope of finding something I hadn’t seen at the cinema, I came across Plots with a View. With a very colourful cover, how could I walk past it.

Featuring Alfred Molina (Doc Ock in Spiderman 2) and Brenda Blethyn (Little Voice), with Lee Evans, Naomi Watts, Robert Pugh, Jerry Springer and Christopher Walken I decided to give it a look.

Boris Plots runs a funeral parlour, he's still in love with his school crush Betty Rhys-Jones who was minorly involved in the death of her cheating husbands mother (she choked on a spoon full of bran). Anyway, the story is about love and death.

This is more a black comedy. Some of the insanities these people got up to are gutbustingly funny, but in the back of my mind a little voice was saying 'this is a little horrible'. Christopher Walken's Frank Featherbed is in competition with Plots, and goes to enormous lengths to make his funerals lavish, see the lady who got made up to be a Vulcan and her coffin lifted toward the sky...

It is in no way a perfect film, or even a great film. The plot has some serious issues and for such a stellar cast, they are all underused and appear to be a little confused. The film was financed by Miramax, these are the people who turned down Lord of the Rings. Nuff said.

Flaws aside, I intend on seeing this film again, if only to see the opening sequence where it introduces Wales as 'the small country to the left of England'.