Paddington 2

  When we last saw our little illegal immigrant bear from Darkest Peru (voiced by Ben Whishaw), he had successfully gained asylum with the London browns without ever going through the proper channels. This is what we're teaching our children these days...

 Little Paddington's having a grand old time, and he's made a number of new friends around the neighborhood. But he's sad because his beloved aunt's birthday is coming and he wants to send her the perfect gift. It's not long until he finds one, with a little help from an antiquarian friend (Jim Broadbent, returning -as almost everyone else- from the first film.) The gift is a pop-up book detailing a number of London landmarks. Paddington immediately realizes it's perfect because his aunt's dearest wish is, wouldn't you know it, to go to London, and we soon get a prime example of the weapons-grade charm these movies deploy as Paddington imagines taking his aunt on a tour of old Blighty tourist attractions made in the medium of, well, pop-up books, and the scenery folds out and back into place in place of scene transitions. It's a lovely, imaginative idea, beautifully realized by (returning) director Paul King.

 Paddington immediately sets out to make money to buy the book (on the one hand, he's not immediately sending it out of the country, but he does intend to ship out a one-of a kind pop-up book. Hmmm.) Unfortunately, he happens to mention the book to a new character Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant). Mr. Buchanan is a fading theatrical star (now reduced to doing dog food commercials in costume) - a ripe old ham, of course, and Grant has a huge amount of fun chewing on any scenery within reach.

 And of course the book is a McGuffin - Or a treasure map, I should say, which leads to a dead circus performer's treasure. Buchanan steals the book and frames Paddington, so the film then splits between Paddington's prison time, and his adoptive family trying to solve the crime and clear the bear's name.

 It's a similar setup to the leadup to the third act of the first movie, except here their separate adventures comprise the entirety of the second act - which is fine, because Paddington's stay in prison is a delight. It gives the series' themes of winning people over and bringing them together a workout, as a ton of inmates and wardens enter the yarn, with pride of place going to the prisoner cook Knuckles (played with gruff charm by the great Brendan Gleeson).

 It will all lead up to some wacky adventures as the main plot is resolved, but the considerable charms of the movie are found elsewhere - In the goofy humor of its many many jokes, the technical attention to detail and imaginative transitions (again, the influence of Wes Anderson is not hard to see), or in the little flourishes and links in the script. It's not without its convolutions and clunky bits, but it's hard to be down on a movie when it sets things up so that you know where the coin the bear takes out of his ear to make a payphone call came from. Or one that hides a (very funny) full blown musical number with a ton of extras as a mid-credits stinger.

 Rewatching these films, I think maybe I've been a bit more down on the first one than I should have, and maybe thought better of the second one than it really is. They're on a pretty even keel, all things considered, even though I still like the second one better. But they're both an absolute joy to watch - funny, clever and lovingly made. What more can you ask for out of a kid's movie?

 Well, maybe a bit more rectitude in their messaging. By the end of 2 (spoilers!) you've got two bears living illegally with the browns. And we all know where this road leads: people brazenly talking bear in the streets, marmalade and salmon bones in the pavement... for shame. Keep Britain Ursine Free!

Project: Wolf Hunting (Neugdaesanyang)

 There's a scene early on in Project: Wolf Hunting where a suicide bomber detonates in a Philippine airport - he's not a terrorist, he's trying to get at one of the many criminals being deported to Korea that day. By setting off a bomb in a crowd. Ahem. Anyhow, in the aftermath the camera lingers lovingly on the carnage - debris, a pair of broken glasses, a severed arm, arrayed tastefully on the sidewalk. And then comes the blood, running like someone's given up on cleaning the mess and decided it would be better to spill a bucket of red paint on everything and call it a day.

 It's pretty much a promise. At this point I'm legally bound (I think) to quote the director (Hongsun Kim) and say that 2.5 tons of fake blood were used in this movie. That's basically a full rhinoceros and a bit put in a blender. 

 But before the film once again indulges its wild side, there's almost half an hour of a surprisingly restrained, pretty compelling non-violent thriller.

Red rain is pouring down, pouring down all over me.

 Because of the airport attack, the same criminals that were being extradited to their native Korea from the Philippines in that first scene have to be taken on a cargo ship (The Frontier Titan) departing from a private dock. The boat takes quite a few passengers - about a dozen criminals, the same number of cops, a doctor and his assistant, random workers... enough to allow for a pretty respectable body count later on.

 We get some time getting to know the criminals and the cops as they settle into their rhythms for the next few days. There's a highly professional police lady (Jung So-Min), a police brutality enthusiast captain (Dong Il-Sung, I think?), a rapist punk asshole (Seo In-guk; They even explain he was a teacher for maximum despicability, though I have no idea how he landed that job with grills and full-body yakuza tats), and a ton more. Only a few of them ever get to be proper characters, but the movie does an admirable job of giving a lot of the others a little personality or a fun little line at least.

 As the police and their wards settle down, a few other pieces are moving into place. Some shady outfit's monitoring the ship from a computer-filled control room, the doctor surreptitiously goes down to the hold of the ship to administer sedatives to a heavily mutilated, badass-looking mutant zombie imprisoned in some sort of high tech bed (!) and, more immediately relevant, the guys working the kitchen grab a crate of guns and get the Under Siege party started by shooting up the bridge, take the ship out of the grid, and kick off the second act.

  (I know I'm prone to run-on sentences, but that was bad even by my standards. Anyhow.)

  The prisoners are freed in a ridiculously bloody warden massacre (ridiculously bloody is the catchphrase from now on - gotta use up those 2.5 tons, after all.) And because the ship is so big, a few of the other cops don't even notice the coup! They're on other parts of the boat, investigating, say, why the wireless signal is gone, or a weird axe-waving dude on the bridge.

 It's really well staged, with some good suspense as the threads are pulled taut, and a payoff of a series of high body-count confrontations. The action is great but old-school- it reminded me more of eighties action movies than the long takes and more show-offy moves of modern material, with huge arterial sprays added everywhere for flavor. Complete with the sound of a high-pressure hose going off with each squirt. It's intense, and gory, but not exactly grim... It lacks the medicine-textbook-like elan of modern horror, or its focus on prolonged suffering, and the action-like tone is another excuse, should you need it, to enjoy the mayhem

 A fun time at the movies, in other words. The over-the-top violence also gives the action a very welcome kick whenever it threatens to get a little monotonous.

 Not that that's ever a serious problem, because soon all the bloodshed awakes the monster in the hold, and he proceeds to get in on the action and starts ripping his way through the survivors - cops and criminals alike. Unkillable, super-strong and able to avoid bullets... he's basically a Resident Evil boss monster. 

 The movie's gone from pure, ultraviolent action to some sort of insane action/slasher hybrid. It's grand!

 I'm not going to pretend all the kills are good: There is a lot of punching people into pulp in this movie, and a lot of boring deaths where the monster just grabs people by the neck until blood jets from their faceholes. But there's also a lot of ripping body parts off with bare hands, a bit where someone tears another's arm off and proceeds to bludgeon the newly-minted amputee to death with the wet end. That old standard. Someone's teeth are put to viciously good use. A crowd-pleasing hammer time moment. And so, so much more. 

 And because this is a Korean film, it goes the extra mile and gets ridiculous -well, even more ridiculous- in the home stretch. As if everything going on isn't enough, you get a sci-fi (ish) twist that reminded me a little of The Witch, another very enjoyable Korean movie, but on steroids. After all, it's not every day you get a WW2 flashback that also serves as a device to pump up the body count by a dozen (and against some Unit 731 motherfuckers, no less!)

 

 That final morph in genre allows for some really over-the-top action of the sort the movie hadn't really dipped into up to that moment, right at the point where a saner movie would be winding things down, and it really makes this an essential action/WTF movie. If it wasn't already.

Xtremo

 Early on in the slick, entertaining 2021 Spanish actioner Xtremo, two blood brothers, Lucero (Óscar Jaenada) and Max (Teo García) get involved in a shootout on a drugs laboratory. Bullets tear chunks off walls and detonate dusty explosions everywhere as the pair forge ahead firing, guns akimbo. It's a scene we've seen many times before - from Robocop to The Raid, which is a problem that will plague this movie to the end, but it's also a statement of intent and a clear reference to the films of John Woo (except that the blood here seems to be all CGI; what are you gonna do...)

 This makes sense as the film is a passion project for Garcia, a martial artist and professed 80's action film fan; He's been trying to make a movie in his homeland of the genre he loves for the best part of the last two decades.

 Set in a Spanish, but multicultural underworld of (mostly) honorable crime families, Lucero plays his part as the agent of chaos / murderous nutjob, complete with Yakuza training. After the raid on the Colombian drug lab, he stages a coup and proceeds to kill the head of his family (and his actual father) in an attempt to disrupt the balance of power between the city's crime families in a poorly-defined long term plan to take over all of them.

 His blood brother Max is part of the old guard and must go, despite the fact that he was about to begin life as a civilian with his son. And so is a third sibling Maria (Andrea Duro). The aftermath leaves Max presumed dead, his son dead, and Maria missing in action.

 Cut to two years later. Max and Maria are underground, plotting to bring down Lucero when he resurfaces to take control of the families in some sort of underworld council meeting. But then Max takes a troubled teen (Óscar Casas) under his wing... with disastrous results for both the teen and their (carefully?) planned vengeance.

 The script is a mixed bag. On one hand it's great at setting up constant and varied setpieces, and full of great lines for both heroes and villains, with the villains getting some ridiculously good flair and loopy bits of dialogue (at least in its original Spanish version.) On the other hand... well, the plot isn't all that great. The teen character is a good example; while he's an integral part of the movie, he doesn't add a whole lot and it's hard to shake the feeling the film would do better without him.

 People's actions don't always make sense, which is normal in this sort of thing -those action scenes won't line themselves up, you know- but there's a little too much plot here, which is a problem when that's definitely not one of its strengths.

 More serious is a lack of payoff to things that seemed to be carefully set up - a particularly vicious villain is dispatched in a pretty unsatisfying way, for example, and Maria, who's established as a badass in her own right (and has a great fighting presence) is criminally underutilized.

 It's ridiculously slick, though. Director Daniel Benmayor uses that Netflix money to stage a lot of very attractive aerial shots of Barcelona and gives the film an attractive, glossy sheen. The action is a bit more variable... literally, as it seems to switch filming and editing styles depending on each scene' s inspirations; The initial drug lab fight is very accomplished and clear, a later bathroom brawl is much more chaotically edited (though legible), but then there's a fight on a darkened garage that seems a lot less polished (Garcia seems to punch someone so hard he completely disappears for a split second, a weird but very funny editing glitch.)

 It also doesn't really reach the heights of either its inspirations or the lesser, Netflix-produced 87 North films. Garcia is obviously an accomplished martial artist and shows off plenty of cool moves, and he certainly looks like he could take a mortar shell to the face and keep moving forward; The movie capitalizes on that by mostly using him as a tank who just takes the damage and occasionally repays it with interest. But as a result the fights don't really flow very well, which is a problem because as mentioned before, the action locations are varied but kind of derivative: A bathroom brawl! A discotheque shootout! An abandoned garage fight!
 You're left with solid scenes that are missing something to latch on to, and seem to drag on after a while. Huge gushes of blood can only take you that far.

 Still, it might not be great but it's certainly good enough - and full of wince-inducing bloody carnage (stand by for a great, extremely bloody throat stab).

 Garcia is not a great actor and his character Max is a bit clichéd, but he's got a nice intensity, and when it breaks down he's always very likeable, as is his sister Maria. But it's the bad guys who hog all the best lines and most memorable moments.

 It's a good movie. I have to admit I wouldn't be hugely disappointed if we never get an Xtremo 2, but these people have proven themselves, dammit, and I'd love to see what they do next. Here's hoping they keep getting to make the sort of thing they obviously love.

Warriors of Future

 Warriors of Future is a Chinese big-budget effects-heavy action extravaganza. If you've watched any of those, you know what to expect: a shitshow, to put it bluntly. Shallow characters, cheap, brazenly manipulative twists, cheesy sentimentality, Broad and extremely unfunny jokes, naked nationalism, crappy CGI...

 ...and that's pretty much my review of Warriors of Future. Except that the CGI is pretty good, and you really need to dig into it if you want to get offended by the nationalism. Other than that, this is an absolute piece of shit somewhat redeemed by pretty explosions, some cool action action beats and mech designs, and a lot of unintentional laughs.

Hey, is that Crysis 4?

 So let's get the good stuff out of the way first: it is actually so bad it's good, at least some of the time; my favorite thing in it Nick Cheung as the general, a guy who's 650% gravitas, always squinting off into the distance while the camera rotates around him reverentially:

MAXIMUM SQUINTAGE

 This guy had me in stitches every single time he appeared. Every. Single. Time. Which is, thankfully, a lot of times, though most of them served zero purpose except to remind you he's still there... squinting.

 But there's so much more. This is a movie unafraid to boldly go where everyone and their fucking grandmother have gone before. Consider the case of the bereaved protagonist, moping after his lost daughter. Will he meet a precious moppet miraculously alive in an alien-infested hospital? And will said moppet heal his broken soul? I shan't spoil it, dear viewer, but if you appreciate shameless cheese, you'll like appreciate this movie.

 And it wraps up after almost exactly an hour and a half, which is downright considerate. Wish more terrible movies did that. That's including an inexplicable post-credits sequence setting up... uh, I have no idea what it's supposed to be setting up.

 The action isn't half-bad. Barring a couple of hiccups, the CGI is actually at the level of a mid-tier Marvel movie, which is high praise for this sort of thing; in fact, there are several Marvel 'homages' here, specifically an overused Iron-Man-Helmet-Cam type deal, which is just as annoying as on the Iron Man movies, and an extended Captain America reference.

 The choreography and the way it's filmed is a bit less impressive... so I guess it's like a Marvel film in that respect as well. It takes its cues from videogames more than anything else, overtly so; There's a little bit too much editing, too many show-off speed ramping effects, and too little style to get me excited, but it's always easy to follow and while what was happening was almost invariably stupid, it did hold my interest.

 Everything is overblown; expect an overtly dramatic orchestral score, a fucking cornucopia of unnecessary, drawn-out flashbacks, slow-motion emotional moments, inspirational speeches... the works. While the movie can be mined for a ton of clearly unintentional comedy, the bits of actual 'humor' here invariably fall flat on delivery. It's not a matter of the comedy being broad - it's... basically the jokes consist of the characters bickering in the most uninspired way imaginable and bullshit screaming matches. It's dismal.

 It's hard to gauge acting with a script this bad and a story so basic, so I'm giving the benefit of doubt to Louis Koo (usually very dependable, a regular in Johnie To's films) and a cast of faces that may be familiar to anyone who's watched HK cinema in the last decade.

 And yes, that includes Squints McDelicious. I'd like to state for the record, though, that according to Wikipedia he was in something called "Raped By An Angel 4: The Rapist's Union". I dearly hope he played this same character, contemplating rapist worker's rights with the same thousand-yard stare.

 You'll notice I haven't gone into the plot yet - hey, you're pretty observant!

 In the end, I can't say I resent this movie for being as bad as it turned out to be; As I wrote of Messr. Emmerich recently, if you ordered a turd sandwich you can't really complain about it tasting like shit. To be clear, there's some fantastic Chinese cinema out there - it's when they get populist and blockbustery like this that you need to lower expectations accordingly. This one's definitely not an exception.

Paddington

 Of course I think it's great. I'm not that dead inside yet; give it a few more Zach Snyder movies.

 Paddington is a ridiculously British, ridiculously cute, and very very funny 2014 adaptation of a popular series of extremely British picture books that go all the way back to the '50s. The titular character (voice courtesy of Ben Whishaw, and image courtesy of a bunch of talented computer artists) is a bear from Darkest Peru who sneaks illegally into the country by boat, and... well, that's as far as I can stretch that joke, because the movie has a pretty un-British-like sympathy for illegal immigrants. At least a couple of characters do put on a stony front for a while, but they can't keep it up for long because Paddington is obviously an exception, one of the good immigrants, not like all those others, you know, some of my best friends are immigrants, etc. etc.

 Ahem.

 How does a bear find his way to old Blighty from Darkest Peru? That's explained in a spiffy prologue that's filmed in the style of an old adventure documentary and contains some of the film's best jokes; that's not a slam on the rest of the film, which is chock full of great gags and very funny lines.
 Turns out a daring British explorer (Tim Downie) met Paddington's uncles during a geographical survey, way back when. He befriended them, taught them to speak when he learnt that they could mimic him ('LON-DOHN,' says the bear; 'Good Lord!' replies the overwhelmed explorer. Then, without missing a beat, conversationally: 'Now try Stratford-Upon-Avon'...), and regaled them with  tales about the wonders of the empire. Finally, when it was time to go, he promised them that they would always be welcome at his home in London.

 Many years later, the bear couple who the adventurer befriended have become proper posh British wannabes, voiced by Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon, no less. When an earthquake strikes and leaves them with nothing, they decide to send their nephew back to London, thinking that he'll receive a warm welcome there (the tales they tell him of refugee children left at train stations don't really match up with the prologue's time frame, but it's a cute detail.)
 So begin the adventures of young Paddington, asylum seeker. So named because his bear name is unpronounceable to most humans, and he was found in Paddington Station. After some misadventure, he's taken home by the Brown family. The mother (the always welcome Sally Hawkins) is quite taken by the soft-spoken, extremely well-mannered young bear, but the father (Hugh Bonneville) is much more of a... well, let's say he's a Daily Mail reader.

 From there on you get bear-out-of-jungle incidents as the amiable ursine explores human contraptions, and cutesy bits as he slowly but surely starts winning his new family over, even as the patriarch tries to get rid of him. And as Paddington searches for information on the explorer who invited his uncles to London so long ago, he comes to the attention of a shady taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) who wants our protagonist stuffed for an exhibit at the London Museum of Natural History.

 Most of it goes as you'd expect. Paddington is a very sweet movie, and it's much funnier and more inventive than it needs to be, but it is still a kid's movie, so it does point its sights down a little as a result. It's at its weakest as the plot finally kicks into gear in the final third, but even before that it's perfectly willing to dip into dreary panto territory. It's never not fun, but it's so good when it's good that it's a bit of a shame when it goes for low-hanging fruit.

 Thank goodness, then, that it's got an ace up its sleeve in director (and co-writer) Paul King. This is an extremely good-looking movie, one that pays a lot of attention to frame composition, inventive shots and interesting set design. That's rare these days even in films for grown-ups. King is a veteran of the very psychedelic, extremely acid tinged show The Mighty Boosh; Here he understandably tones down the show's more out there sensibilities, but keeps all the exuberance, resulting in a film that's often a joy to watch:

Trust me, these look much better in motion...

 There are a lot of side-on shots, both static and with lateral movement (a la Wes Anderson,) and carefully composed visual gags. Add to that some lovely flourishes, some magical realism, and a salsa band providing diegetic music at appropriate moments, and you've got yourself something pretty special.

 Want more good news? OK: the sequel is even better.

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

 Wyrmwood's apocalypse is weird.
 On the one hand you have an airborne...something... that turns people into zombies, brought on by a meteor shower. There's the rare individual who's somehow immune, but for everyone else, it's gasmasks or zombiehood.
 So far. so good. But whatever happened, it also rendered all oil inert; gas won't burn, and, more importantly, gasoline doesn't work as fuel for cars any more. It'd be a weird detail, except that later on people figure out that zombie breath (and farts) are not just flammable, but work as a perfectly acceptable fuel substitute.
 It's a... creative way to kick off a Mad Max / Zombie mashup, to be sure.

 Wyrmwood is a 2014 Australian action/horror/comedy hybrid written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner (his brother Tristan co-writes and produces). It starts on the same night everything goes to shit, following two siblings separately - Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who both happen to be immune to whatever's causing people to turn undead.
 Well, actually it starts in media res, in a scene from the middle of the film they later just repeat, but let's skip that.

 In any case: Brooke is an artist who barely survives an attack in her studio from her now-zombified model and assistant. She calls her brother to warn him something bad is happening, to get out of town, and is then taken by some sort of military group.
 Barry in turn deals with a home invasion (in a particularly brutal fashion; the dude acts like he's in a zombie movie long before he realizes he actually is in one) and takes his family on the road until they discover gasoline is no good any more. Luckily, they all have gas masks; The bad news is that, well, they're not very good at using them. Barry's wife and child don't share his immunity, and it's not long before he has to put them down.

 This leaves him understandably suicidal; lucky for him, another survivor pops by and stops him from finishing himself. Before long, Barry's found himself a group of survivors, and they discover that they can use zombies as fuel; so they do what any bunch of zombie movie protagonists would; they suit up with paintball armor until they look like the baddies in a 1980s SNK game, convert a pick-up truck into a tank and plug in some zombies into the engine to harness their burps as fuel. Y'know, the usual.

 Meanwhile, Brooke is handcuffed to the wall in some sort of laboratory where a mad scientist, working with the military, is running ethically dubious and painful tests on a bunch of people who are immune to the disease. Can't say I agree with his methods, but you have to respect that he was already set up and working on a plan pretty much on the eve of when things went to shit; that's way more foresight and organizational ability that I'd be willing to credit any governmental agency with. In any case, in between being experimented on and trying to escape, Brooke... uh, discovers that she can take control of zombies telepathically.

 And honestly, that's ok. Because if we've accepted zombie farts can magically power internal combustion engines, pretty much anything goes at this point, right?

 What the movie lacks in consistency, budget or sanity, it makes up for with a manic, likeable energy. It's not a good movie, exactly -to be honest, I'm don't think it's even aiming for quality; But it's seriously entertaining.
 By the third act the pieces have fallen into place, the two plot lines intersect, and it turns into the Mad Max B-movie it wanted to be all along; Despite all the rough patches, jittery action, crappy CGI blood splatters, dubious character work and the mad libs script, it's almost impossible not to enjoy the ride.

Skinamarink

  Skinamarink is an experimental Canadian horror movie about a couple of very young siblings (one of them four, the other six, at a guess) who awake one day in their home to find that their father's disappeared... and so have all the windows and the door outside. They weather out the weirdness by camping out in the living room with their favorite toys while a VHS keeps looping through ancient (and public domain) cartoons. Then something starts playing around with them.

 I doubt I'd even have heard about it, except that it captured some people's imagination and became a minor viral hit; made for $15k and with no marketing whatsoever, it took two million in cinemas; hell, that such a nakedly uncommercial movie made it to the big screen in the first place is some kind of achievement.

 It's an unrelentingly oblique movie; The camera always faces away from any action, focusing on, say, an empty stretch of wall while you piece together what's happening from noises, how the scene is lit, and maybe, if you're lucky, some movement at the edge of the frame. That's when things are actually happening; most of the time, nothing is, and you're literally watching dry paint.
 There's a further layer of obfuscation in the heavy grain filter applied to every scene, mimicking the lossy video of yesteryear - but this goes a whole lot further than retro movies like Christmas Bloody Christmas; every frame is saturated with static and darkness (no windows, remember?) to the point where it makes it hard to make things out, making it seem very likely that something is going to coalesce at any moment from the background. Scenes are mostly static (ha!) and drawn out, but others mimic the young protagonists' point of view.

Sometimes it reminded me of how you never get to see the adults' heads in Peanuts.

 A movie that's more about questions than answers, that perversely makes you have to parse out what's happening in even the most mundane scenes, and that stretches tension with no payoff on purpose... I get why it became a sort of viral sensation, why people would want to check it out. Hell, I did, as soon as I saw it on Shudder.

 ...It put me to sleep within thirty minutes.
 There'll be people more in tune with its batty wavelength out there, I'm sure, but I found it a chore to sit through, even with a running time of a hundred minutes, cut into two installments (because I really did fall asleep). There's just not enough of anything here.

 The movie's tactics are pretty blatant - get viewers engaged by making them have to work out what's going on, draw out tension by hiding it, trying to dig its hooks in their imagination, and every huge now and then fire off a jump scare or a snippet of... well, let's call it plot, but really it's more of a situation. 
 It is remarkably creepy, and it does do a good job of capturing pre-teen memories of being up way past your bedtime. But I found the whole thing weirdly artless and almost pedestrian, relying on very basic, universally creepy elements to do its work for it. I appreciated what it was going for, but it, to put it bluntly, bored me out of my skull; There are tons of shorts on the web that go for the sort of thing that movie is going for - I'm not saying they do it better (some do, some don't), but I don't see why this stands out.
 Given its microbudget I might be a lot better disposed to it if it had been half as long, but as stands I just found it tedious.

 Not that it's a complete loss: there's a couple of good (non-jump) scares, including one that's respectably cruel, and one decent joke that uses editing and context for effect. There's some mildly cool imagery towards the end, and the overall vibe is creepy enough. But it's way too meagre a showing for an hour and forty minutes.