BWare

I see I haven’t posted in this series since May 2025. I could break this up into two posts and get my horrible blogging frequency up, but I’m also lazy [0], and I see an Airplane Movies of 2023 sitting in my drafts. So in order to avoid the fate of that post [1], I’ll whip this out for the past year.

Movies on airplanes come and go quicker it seems. I’ve had a bunch I fav’ed to watch, but then they disappear (Nosferatu, for instance), and don’t show back up. There will be twelve on the outgoing flight, then almost nothing on the return. The former is the one I want to sleep on. I used to rely on having at least a couple of flights to get through the new releases, but that’s more unpredictable now.

Also I’m spending more time reading and making a real effort to sleep on the outbounds, because jet lag doesn’t get any easier when you get older.

Here’s what I got up to on the plane:

Last half of 2025:

• Architecton: Suffers from not being seen on a big screen, but I have never had the opportunity to do that, so…
• Sinners: I liked the music scenes, and replayed those several times over a couple of trips. Interesting take on vamp mythology. I enjoyed the movie overall, but it didn’t really rock my world. I didn’t rewatch the whole movie, only those scenes. Maybe if I had seen in on IMAX…
• The Order: White nationalists running amok in Idaho in the 70s just didn’t get a grip on me given that white nationalism is literally running the country these days. I just felt sad. Jude Law wasted a lot of effort and accomplished nothing.
• A Working Man: Reliably entertaining Jason Statham, fit for purpose as a way to kill two hours on an international flight. I can’t remember a single thing about it.
• The Beekeeper: Same.
• Parthenope: Very pleasant to look at. I’m a bit lost by the ending. I had hoped that her life would become more interesting as an older character. Maybe that was the point?
• Relay: I liked the concept, but I also figured out the twist pretty early. Why aren’t people in these movies more paranoid, or in this case, paranoid enough? They really are out to get you!
• The Amateur: I like the concept of the nerd seeking revenge in the ways possible to his character, and rising above expectations, but he’s no Sean Connery and they kind of invited those comparisons.
• Warfare: Lesser version of BlackHawk Down, 84 Charlie Mopic, the last half of Full Metal Jacket. The Spielberg ending doesn’t work for me. It didn’t work for when Spielberg did it too.
• Dunkirk: Served its purpose. I’m glad I didn’t go see it in a theatre, much less making the hour drive each way to see it in IMAX.

2026 (so far)

• Climber Girl: That’s some questionable belaying…
• Bugonia: Interesting enough to get me to watch a couple of stupid characters all the way through. There were only two possible endings, and we kind of got a bit of both, so it wasn’t really a surprise. Can’t say I’m fond of the Of Mice and Men subplot. Maybe there needs to be a website like Does The Dog Die for the less-abled and children (maybe there is). Cheap tropes designed to push my buttons set my teeth on edge (also see ‘fridging’). I liked the visual reference to the Black Lectroids of Planet 10 at the end, or at least that’s what I’m going to pretend.
• One Battle After Another: PTA is not usually my thing, Sean Penn is not usually my thing, and Leo is not usually my thing. By ‘not usually’, I mean ‘never’. I can’t think of anything any of them have done that I would want to watch again. This falls into the same category. Benicio del Toro makes up for a lot, but that’s a lot to overcome. Fairly problematic in many ways. I’ll just compare this to Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty, and a recent LARB article ‘A Better World Is Not Possible‘ for similar things that hit me harder.
• Predator Badlands: I was already pretty bummed by the teenage-predator-coming-of-age story. I noped out when the cute bug-eyed alien sidekick showed up.
• Deliver Me From Nowhere: I made it about halfway through this. Maybe if I had stuck with, I would have gotten more insight into the recording of one of Bruce’s strongest albums, but I didn’t see any evidence of it up to that point.
• Housemaid: Horror overacting and over-signaling. Foreshadow much?
• The Secret Agent: I quite liked this.
• It Was Just An Accident: I’m still not sure what to make of this. But I still think about it at random times, so there’s that.
• Marty Supreme: I like TC, and he’s good here. I dislike the Safdie brothers in general (though the one was good as Teller in Oppenheimer, but he captured Teller’s essence [2]). I really miss the normal-looking actors in old movies like Charley Varrick and any Sam Fuller movie. Sure, there are stars, but the second-tier actors tend to look pretty normal. They’re not Hollywood actors glammed down to try to look like your neighbor. Safdie goes the other way and tries to find freakish looking people, to the point where it’s try-hard distracting. There’s an undercurrent of meanness in their movies.
• The Mastermind: Another jerk who thinks he’s smarter than he is, and turns out not to be.
• If I had legs I’d kick you: I’m putting this here for my future self. I watched about a half-hour and went on to something else. I don’t feel any particular need to return to it.
• Sentimental Value: A little set of Russian dolls. Excellent cast, except for Elle Fanning. I mean, she is a star, so why don’t I buy her as one?
• The Great Arch: I like Claes Bang. I never heard of this movie. Unprepossessing architect wins a contest, has to deal with reality to get something built, the experience turns him into a monster and kills him (spoiler alert). Based on a true story. However, it’s difficult to believe that anyone, say, an architect, who had dealt with the inevitable compromises in building a house on a budget would not be familiar with adjusting expectations to reality, so becoming decoupled from the realities of building a huge structure on the Champs Elysee?

Is it just me or are a disproportionate number of new films set in the seventies? Is it the seventies turn for nostalgia? I feel like the nineties ought to be up for their turn now. Or is it simply the attraction of setting a film in an era where not every logistical difficulty (except keeping your burner phone charged, apparently) is overcome by having a mobile?

The nostalgia gets to me after a while, which could explain my meh reaction to a lot of these. I don’t remember the seventies as being particularly sepia.

 
 
[0] I’m also super-busy with the fallout (literally and figuratively) of the Eaton fire, and traveling frequently for work
[1] I don’t remember anything about those movies anymore, so it’ll never be finished
[2] I have a Teller story, or at least a Teller-adjacent story…