Friday, April 7, 2017

A Movie Orgy in the Friendly Skies



Flight attendants, I suspect, love movies. They appreciate the fact that on long trips their passengers are so busy staring at their seatback screens that they forget to gripe and demand attention. Having just made two very long trans-Atlantic flights, I’m grateful for having movies on demand to help me pass the time.

Gone are the days when we had no choice but to watch the sole movie (generally a middle-of-the-road family film) being screened in the cabin. Since I could generally not see or hear all that well, I tended to opt for the pleasures of a good book. Today, however, we often have dozens of choices, and can stop and start a movie whenever the spirit moves us. Another innovation: the movies available are chosen to suit a wide variety of tastes. Last November, one inventive U.S. carrier offered a sampling of election-related flicks, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Election, Napoleon Dynamite, and Citizen Kane. And who doesn’t love an airline that gives you the opportunity to watch Audrey Hepburn at her most enchanting in Roman Holiday?  

On my long flights to and from Denmark, I found myself making up personal rules for the kind of films best suited to inflight viewing. Though I’d seen La La Land before, it was a perfect choice: straightforward, upbeat, basically simple in its concept and execution. (My fellow passengers seemed to agree.) I also enjoyed watching Disney’s Moana, a family film I probably wouldn’t pay to see in a multiplex, though I’m sure its sophisticated animation worked much better on a big screen. Among the movies in the “classics” category, I was glad to reaquaint myself with Big, the 1988 gimmick film made memorable by Tom Hanks’ charming performance as a twelve-year-old boy in an adult’s body. Last year’s Oscar-nominated Lion was simple (perhaps too simple) in its concept, so that I never had to worry about losing the thread of the story, but it struck me as tedious in its excution. (That didn’t stop me, though, from tearing up at the climactic reunion scene I knew was coming.)  Perhaps my absolute favorite was an oldie: Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment (1960). Here’s a piquant comedy that puts its accent on characterization, not quips. It’s simple; it’s sincere; it’s a great film to encounter in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of the night. 

 Here’s what doesn’t work well on a seatback screen: (1) Anything with an extremely complicated plot or a very large cast of characters. (2) Anything highly dependent on verbal wit (those little earphones don’t always do a great job of conveying all the dialogue). (3) Anything in which wide-screen cinematography is a major part of the story, especially if a good deal of the story occurs in semi-darkness. (4) Anything in which characters speak in heavy dialect. I once tried watching Mr. Turner, the Mike Leigh biopic about painter J.M.W. Turner, on an airplane. Since the cast is veddy British and the film works hard to capture Turner’s shimmering artistic style via its visuals, I soon gave up. But I’m sure I’d have an equally hard time with the South Florida patois of Moonlight. 

Here’s my strangest adventure in seeing a movie on a plane. Years ago, late at night, the movie that came on was an old Astaire-Rogers musical, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Light fare, right? Except that at the end of this true story of an early twentieth-century dance team, Irene learns that her beloved Vernon has just been killed in a plane crash. Ooops! 

Update: Given the unfortunate stories coming out of United Airlines in the last day or so, maybe I should refer in my title to the UNFRIENDLY skies.

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