Barnstorming is the true story of an unexpected friendship that developed between a farm family and two pilots who literally dropped out of the sky. Their friendship has created a new tradition out of an old one long gone: barnstorming.
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Reviews
Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
This is a family film in more ways than one. The Dirksens are dairy farmers in Indiana. Dairy farming is a family affair, a year-round, never-a-day-off occupation. Dairy farmers get no vacation. Imagine if one day you found a couple small airplanes had landed in your alfalfa field. Alfalfa is a cash crop in the sense that it's feed for your dairy cattle, and alfalfa doesn't abide traffic. Two pilots, Andrew King and Frank Pavliga, who like to perpetuate the barnstorming tradition, and who landed merely to take photographs, might have had reason to be apprehensive when they spied the farmer's pick-up coming toward them. But Farmer Dirksen was not upset. He, and the two young sons with him, were intrigued by the airplanes. The barnstormers relaxed. They gave the boys rides. It turned into an annual affair, and the barnstormers became like family to the Dirksens. As the family grew, so did the annual air show. By the time this documentary was made, nine years later, antique cars were added, with food and entertainment; and the event became a town picnic with a crowd in the hundreds...and still on the Dirksen farm. For the children, the anticipation of airplanes landing in your field once each summer to put on a show and give you rides just might be bigger than anticipating Santa Claus. Americana survives!