Tag: airplane movies

I love international flights because they give me a reason to sit in one place for long enough to watch multiple movies. On the way over to the UK, I only watched two new ones because I made the attempt to sleep. With as much sleep as I got (about an hour and a half), I should have just watched more movies.

Ocean’s 8

I kept meaning to see Ocean’s 8 in the theater and just never got around to it. I think that was before I had regular access to a car, so that’s my excuse. Am I sorry I only saw it on the tiny screen of an airplane? Ehhhh… it’s a fun movie, that’s for sure. I mean, if you like the other Ocean’s movies, you’ll no doubt enjoy this one. If for no other reason than to watch Cate Blanchett strut around in a variety of beautifully tailored trousers. It’s got a heist, it’s got a ton of talented women in it. It’s light fluff that I enjoyed in the moment but really can’t remember much about now… other than Cate Blanchett. And I did love there was at least a nod to the importance and strength of friendships between women, even if I never quite felt like the group gelled as well as I would have liked. I’ll be happy to watch it again the next time I see it’s around on Netflix.

Searching

Saw the preview for it in front of an Alamo Drafthouse movie, and I was interested. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see Searching before now. John Cho plays a dad whose daughter has gone missing, and he’s frantically searching for her while realizing just how much distance has grown between the two of them since the death of his wife two years ago. The conceit of Searching actually works pretty well… the film is told entirely via interactions on a computer: text messages, chats, facetime calls, streaming videos, etc. There’s a time or two where it feels like the scope of the action is fighting the format a little, but it honestly doesn’t feel as contrived as I expected. John Cho does an amazing job, and the twist was actually not one I expected. It’s great to see a dad searching for his daughter in a way that doesn’t go all Taken and feels quite authentic. I do want to see it again when I can find it on Netflix or Hulu, because the tiny airplane seat screen made it hard to read some of the text-based stuff for the story. (Apparently this caused me to entirely miss a sort of easter eggy subplot.) Definitely recommend.

Also, I watched Crazy Rich Asians again. It’s still fucking adorable.

Another transatlantic flight, another round of movies watched because I can’t sleep and find it utterly impossible to work on my laptop in the extremely limited space available in economy.

The Girl With All the Gifts: This movie shows the British still reign supreme in zombie cinema. And this one with a twist, where the main character isn’t a survivor, but a second generation infected girl who may be the key to the development of a vaccine for the infection—if the involved survivors can be reconciled to treating her as an object rather than a person. Weird, gorgeous, creepy, and utterly heartbreaking. Do yourself a favor and see this movie. It’s already out in the UK, and should be released in the US in February. If there’s any justice in the world, this film will get nominated for a Hugo, but I fear the confusion over release dates (2016 in the UK, 2017 in the US) and the fact that it’s not a major franchise will probably scuttle its chances.

The Secret Life of Pets: I mostly liked this for how all of the cats acted, not going to lie–particularly Max’s friend with that immortal and fundamentally cat like, “As your friend you should know I don’t care about you or your problems.” The plot, such as it was, didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense and just had the characters careening around between random bits. Glad I didn’t bother seeing it in the theater, but I’d still take this one over Frozen any day of the week. Plus, thank you for a dog movie that doesn’t involve a protracted fart joke scene.

Far From the Madding Crowd (2015): I wanted to like this, because I’m honestly a bit trash for romance stories of this sort. The problem was, I didn’t really get an impression of chemistry between any of the characters. (And I really, really didn’t get why everyone was so about Bathsheba, other than Frank wanting her money.) So it was a decent enough movie, but I just felt disappointed because I wanted more.

Edge of Winter: A thriller that could be subtitled “the dangers of toxic masculinity.” A divorced, emotionally volatile dad takes his kids out to teach them how to be men (eg: shooting a gun, making fun of each other for crying) and then escalates to outright kidnapping when he finds out that their mom and stepdad are planning to move. There’s some good acting, it’s got a deliberate and creepy buildup, and the realism of the situation really adds to it. But goddamn the score was aggravating. For example, we hear the dad tell his son, “listen to that, you can hear every little sound” in the woods as the soundtrack goes BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Stop trying to help.