Plots With a View

(Nick Hurran, dir & Alfred Molina (Boris Plots), Christopher Walkin (Frank Featherbed), Naomi Watts (Meredith) and Brenda Blethyn (Betty))

Another movie in which I have had the cinema all to myself, so could fully enagage in commenting on the goings on and talking with the characters to my hearts content. Mind you, the cinema was only a 7 seater.

The movie was a pretty average comedy, with a couple of crossed storylines focussing on Boris Plots. It starts with him as a young boy at the school dance, finally able to pluck up the courage to ask his sweetheart to dance just as some much bolder fellow gets in first. Cut to him 40 or so years later, he is the local undertaker, still single, still pining for his Betty. She has a funeral to arrange, that of her mother-in-law who has choked to death as a result of Betty changing her breakfast cereal. Of course, with the contact between Betty and Boris, sparks ignite and he works out a desperate scheme to get her away from her husband and off to Tahiti - essentially she's going to have a fake death in a gruesome fall from a cliff. Here's where the other story becomes important - Boris is facing competition from an American undertaker, Frank, with his fancy new ways: once Betty has plunged to her death, there's an undignified tussle over who will get to bury her.

Boris wins, but his task is made very difficult now as Frank is watching his every move. One consequence is that Boris has to play out his subterfuge much longer, to the point that Betty is just about buried alive. Then, before she is willing to leave, she decides she needs to get revenge on her husband, as she has learnt he's having an affair with Meredith. So - how does a dead person get revenge? By haunting her husband's house, of course: so effectively that Meredith is next seen on a Jerry Springer show and the husband is pretty much mad.

Nothing spectacular really - it is the first movie in which I've seen Alfred Molina, which was an interesting choice. The role was a classic Stephen Fry one, but he'd be too obvious to play it, it was a nice touch to have it played by a straight man. I see on IMDB, it runs from being "dire" to "terrific" - I'd say "meh".