BWare

As you could tell from Airplane Movies 2023, I spent a lot of time on planes last year. A. Lot. Of. Time. All I’ve got to say about that is that having Black Titanium Card status [1] on United ain’t worth much. Sam Elliott did not come out of the cockpit to give me The Card with my name embossed on it. In my head canon, I’d imagined a combination of Up In The Air with the business card scene in American Psycho. Instead, I got an email. And a couple of titanium luggage tags [2], which are unusable in practice because they would cut your luggage [3] to shreds as they are thrown about.

Even with all the travel [4], and not being a big fan of airplane rawdogging, I honestly haven’t spent so much time spent watching airplane movies [5]. Frankly the airlines have been letting me down here. It’s not for lack of time sitting in a seat, there just hasn’t been that much that I wanted to watch, even with the proviso that airplanes are where you watch movies you wouldn’t pay for, whether that be art-house or grindhouse.

But it still has to be something you kinda wouldn’t mind watching.

Or maybe it’s Hollywood just making a bunch of crappy movies? I can’t watch super-hero movies anymore.

There also haven’t been any series-only-available-on-services-I-don’t-pay-for that I wanted to binge, which was always a fallback in the past. That’s how I got through Westworld [6].

I did watch The Fall Guy (it wasn’t available on a plane at the time, so not included here, but frankly should have waited to watch it on a plane for free [7]), and did not realize until just now that Aaron Taylor-Johnson was one of the kids in KickAss. Smarmy there, and smarmy in every movie I’ve seen him in since. So if that’s what he’s going for… I hope he’s not 007. It’s on the plane now, so I guess I could review it, but I bought it on AppleTV as a brainless jet-lag watch, so not sure it meets the stringent AMR criteria.

The good news is that I have about four long-haul trips planned between now and 2025, and four planned for the first 5 months of 2025, so if UA and the global movie industry work with me, I can have get a lot more airplane movie reviews in and also get super-duper status for next year.

• Anatomy of a Fall: Don’t go to trial in a foreign country. Very weird courtroom tactics. Unlikeable characters, well-acted. Could not bring myself to watch the Nazi movie that also stars the lead in this movie even though it was available. Nope. Just Nope.
• Anyone but You: Guilty watch of a bunch of really attractive people being jerks to each other for no reason. Both the lead characters started out being jerks to each other so who cares. Holy cow, we used to just fuck and get it over with. Millenials. All this drama without even getting laid seems so much more difficult. I’m a sucker for watching movies that take place in places I’ve been, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time around the Sydney Quay (which just isn’t that big) including two day trips last year [8]. This movie had a lot of that, so that was fun [9]. The movies make it look much bigger than it is.
• Oppenheimer: I saw this on IMAX, twice. Still good on an airplane for the third watch. The first 30 minutes captures the excitement of what it’s like to be a physics graduate student/postdoc as well as anything I’ve seen. Most of us don’t figure out black holes and atom splitting, but you pack your brain full, talk to smart people, and figure out something new.
• Land of Bad: Elevator pitch: Ewan McGregor’s character in BlackHawk Down meets Gene Hackman’s in BAT*21. Soldier gains respect of Tier 1 operators while being talked out by old skool voice in the sky. Young soldier catches shit for not being an operator; of course there’s the line where young soldier gains operators’ respect.
• American Fiction: Cringe amusing and utterly predictable down to the The Player ending.
• Beekeeper: Not Guy Ritchie’s best. Perfectly average Jason Statham. About the same as Wrath of Man.
• Devotion: I watched it. Can’t say I remember much. It wasn’t bad, but it was unmemorable.
• Mr Jones: Excellent movie with excellent cast about an event that I had heard about but not placed in my historical mindset. Relevant to today.
• The Hunter: Like The Rover, this broke my heart. Great cast, probably don’t need to watch this again
• 65: I lasted until about five minutes after the crash and checked out of this Adam Driver paycheck.
• American Made: This was written around Tom Cruise in Oprah-couch-jumping mode. He should have gotten an Oscar nom for this. It really plays to his skills and strengths and he makes it work. I’ve known dudes like this, and he nails it. Might watch again on an airplane.
• Challengers: Maybe should have been on the big screen, but I would have never paid $35 + parking to go see it in Imax. Interesting enough, maybe not for me as I don’t care for tennis, but enough to think about a few times after.
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Lesser Guy Ritchie. Unbelievable Alan Ritchson, both accent and steroided-up body, neither of which existed back then. Search for pix of old-timey strong men (and good luck with your search algo after that – I’m not gonna do that for ya), and while they were big, and likely strong as an ox, they didn’t look like that. Lots of ‘old chap’, ‘old boy’, ‘jolly good show’ to the point where it should have been a drinking game – distracting. Maybe that’s period appropriate. This Churchill wasn’t a patch on Brendon Gleeson [10]. A bit of homophobia though I suppose that’s also period appropriate. I would like to see Eiza Gonzalez in more movies. She’s at least as good as Anna de Armas.
• Dunkirk: Lesser Nolan. Probably also not for the small screen, but honestly just not that interesting, and would have had overwhelming music and unintelligible dialog based on other Nolan experiences.
• I lied. I watched (and ff’ed through the big CGI battles) Deadpool 3. Guess I picked the wrong week to give up stupid superhero movies.
• Twisters disappeared between Monday and Friday, so did not get to try out this perfect AMR.

 
Potential candidates for the next trip, if they’re still playing in a month:
 

• Daddio: Sean Penn hitting on younger women, seems creepy – meh. But would never pay to watch so maybe it meets the criterion for AMR. Update: Tried to watch this against my better judgement (but what else are AMRs for?), but UA had fuzzed out all the dirty words in the texting. I guess so shoulder-watchers wouldn’t see? It was reasonably clear from the context, but also annoying, as was Sean Penn, so I noped out, will likely never watch this if not trapped on a flight.
• The Bikeriders: I saw the Danny Lyon exhibition on which this was based a decade or two ago in SF [11]. In my wasteful misguided youth, misled by bad influences, I hung out with a rural branch of a well-known club, later involved in a shoot-out in Waco, if you wanna go look that up. I didn’t know any of those folks, but based on those brief experiences with their compatriots, couldn’t say I was surprised. Anyway, I don’t have a lot of misplaced romance for the beginnings of the bike club. None of those folks looked like Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, or Tom Hardy. Not in my memory, and not in the original Danny Lyon photos. Update: As expected, every single character in this is a shitheel. I guess interesting from docudrama kind of point of view. In real life, these folks are exhausting. Same in movies.

 
Zero Between one and three long-haul trips remaining this year (assuming no emergencies), so here’s hoping for more interesting AMR failures… next year.

[1] if they still gave out physical cards, which they don’t
[2] blank, not personalized
[3] and others
[4] I reached the published top tier by May
[5] Theirs anyway. My touchpad-unlock iPad is full. I still wear masks, so can’t use the new one I bought figuring that the risk of Covid would go away
[6] Except the season finale which was starting when the annoying landing we-pause-this-for-an-important-announcement-about-signing-up-for-our-credit-card messages start, which is always the sign to give up. And I was so done with WW at that point that I didn’t care what happened to Rachel Wood (who I saw in a pizza joint the night before the pandemic shut everything down) and The Man in Black
[7] The Fall Guy: not good
[8] How do you think I got all those miles? Flying to Oz for a one-day review, twice, will do it. I had to take a day in Sydney as my butt would have seceded otherwise
[9] Thus the allure of watching Heat and every other Hollywood movie, and all the meta-vid (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Shotgun Freeway, Haim videos, 1-Adam-12, etc.) just to see all the places you’ve been, or haven’t quite, or 10 20 30 40 years ago. Sheesh. I’ve been here a minute…
[10] Could be biased by that being one of the first movies I saw on my new 1080p HD TV set at the time, and the quality which I had never see outside a theatre (and mostly not in them) absolutely blew me away.
[11] The accompanying Man Ray/Lee Miller exhibition suited me better…