What Makes a Good Airplane Movie? pt. 2

+ theorizing in-flight entertainment

Back in September, I asked for your opinions about what makes a good airplane movie and I got some absolutely top-notch responses. They were all very good but to keep this newsletter from being 3000 words, I’m going to post some general findings which were fascinating.

In response to the question, “What makes a good (or bad) plane movie,” TWO people said, “basically anything with Sandra Bullock.” This is deeply exciting knowledge. Do we think Sandra knows this about her body of work? 

Unfortunately Demolition Man (1993) is the only Sandy movie I really like

Most of you say you are more likely to cry at a movie if you’re watching it mid-air which is unexpected, but the mix of things you have cried over is. . . hm. Some of these include the Spanish dub of the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror, 13 Going on 30, the Katy Perry doc (see below), and Joyful Noise.

Here are some of the things you suggested I watch: 

• The French New Wave: who is this person and did you know Jean-Luc Godard was going to die immediately after you suggested this? What else do you know?

• The Predator franchise: between Prey and the review I wrote of Ander Monson’s lively new Predator memoir, also called Predator, I might be burned out on Yautja for a minute

• Early Coens and especially Fargo: I feel like a Buscemi newsletter is probably incoming one of these days—I’m a very, very big fan

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: the Ben Stiller remake used to always be on TV so I feel like I’ve seen parts of that one about ten thousand times

• Fool’s Gold: lol

• All the Jonathan Demme I haven’t watched yet: this would be a big project but I’m intrigued, Married to the Mob is a Celia Classic Movie

• BJ Novak’s podcast movie, Vengeance: Do you have a gun? You here to kill me?

More common themes: 

• Heightened emotions: “Watching the Katy Perry documentary twice, back-to-back, on a non-stop flight to Beijing. I laughed, I cried... and I'm glad nobody else was sitting in my row.”

• Childlike wonderment: “My brother and I watched the film Bandidas together on a transatlantic flight together when we were in high school. Every time something cool happened—WHICH WAS OFTEN—we would click our remotes together and giggle.”

• People-watching watching: “Recently I watched a guy put on Morbius, and a half hour later I looked back over to see him watching like pilots in WWII-era uniforms and because the colors looked so similar I spent like a really long time thinking that Morbius had an extended flashback to the 1940s until I realized that he’d switched over to that movie Midway, and he watched the entirety of Midway before switching back over to finish Morbius.”

• Public mortification: “Accidentally turning on a horror movie, because Chris Rock was on the movie poster so I thought it was a comedy, and watching a man get strung up by his tongue in the first 45 seconds—but the airplane screen broke and I couldn't turn it off. I had to call the stewardess (while I was panicking that everyone around me was watching this lol) and she had to restart the screens for our entire row. *mortified*”

• Classic airplane jank: “One time on a flight from Toronto to Frankfurt, back when the TVs were boxes suspended from the ceiling, we hit turbulence so bad, it fell out of the ceiling and dropped.”

And my personal favorite, completely unedited, presumably from the desk of Lucille Bluth:

• “I watched a Star Wars but the plane was loud so I thought Adam Driver's character was named Kyle Ben for the whole movie.”

Great stuff, y’all. I love hearing the takes! It is interesting to think about the airplane movie as a modern permutation of the connection between movies and transit, because the first motion pictures documented the movement of horses and trains.

Early filmmaking is inextricably tied to trains and transit—even putting aside the apocryphal story of the audience who panicked over the Lumière brothers’ silent film, the train window was a way for audiences to understand the industrial motion of a film screen. The airplane movie is just an update of that foundational relationship. It offers a window of moving image that connects us to the ground even if it heightens our emotions.

As we all remember from Intro to Film/Nope, Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion cabinet cards

We’ll return to our regular programming soon, I promise. In the meantime, you can leave a comment or reply to tell me what you think I should be watching (I need to wash the taste of Don’t Worry Darling out of my mouth/eyes/brain).