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Friend of the Blog Derek recently concluded an epic traveling adventure across the eastern hemisphere with his family, including a stop in La Serenissima where My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I just spent eight days. Thinking like the crack film blogger he is, Derek utilized so many plane rides to ruminate on an essential topic: in-flight movies. It’s a topic Cinema Romantico briefly addressed a few years ago when filmmaker John Magary expressed outrage on social media upon seeing so many people watching “Jungle Cruise” on a flight. It seemed a strange argument to make, however, given that a plane, as Derek noted, is not an atmosphere conducive to watching a movie at full attention. Derek explored this idea by re-examining his various year-end rankings to see how many movies he watched on planes factored in, and whether watching them on a plane necessitated a rewatch. His post, however, got me thinking about in-flight movies in a broader manner. In the last decade, I have traveled a lot, and I have watched a lot of in-flight movies, and I have developed some ideas about what makes the ultimate plane movie.
The truth is, I am not wholly against watching more serious-minded cinema in the air. Indeed, a transatlantic flight can be the perfect place to catch up on movies I have missed during the year. That’s how I wound up watching “Materialists” on my recent flight to Venice, or “I Saw the TV Glow” on my flight last year to Tokyo. Even on a plane, I can give such a movie my full attention to form an honest and informed critique. Trouble is, I can only maintain that necessary attention for the length of one movie, occasionally two, and once I feel my attention wane, knowing my analysis will be compromised, new movies on my must-see list are re-relegated to the mental queue.
That I am generally only able to concentrate for one serious-minded film a flight, however, goes to show that they cannot really be the paragon of the in-flight viewing experience. More often than not, a flight is not an optimal experience itself, depending upon the size of your seat, the measure of leg room, the amount of turbulence, whether the person in front of you chooses to recline the whole flight, not to mention the headphone jack might be on the fritz, as it was on my return flight from Venice. If on land, I’m generally looking for a movie to challenge me, or surprise me, in the air, I tend to look for something else.
A good movie is always a good movie, and a bad movie is always a bad movie, but at 35,000 feet, well, a bad movie is not necessarily so bad it’s good, as the saying goes, but often plays better, or at least a little bit different, like how the low pressure at cruising altitude brings out a better taste in tomato juice. The Amy Adams rom com “Leap Year” was wretched, but following its mechanical rom com formula on my way back home from the Big Island of Hawaii in 2010 felt as relaxing as a geography nut might find following the in-flight map. The subpar Meg Ryan-directed/starring rom com “What Happens Later” did not work at all and yet worked as well as it ever could wedged into a middle seat on a Dreamliner somewhere over the Pacific on my way to Japan.
That gets us closer to what makes the ultimate in-flight movie. One that fits the mood of an airplane, or maybe more accurately, helps soothe the mood an airplane creates the longer the flight goes. And no movie soothes like a movie you have already seen and liked and/or loved. It’s why toward the end of a long flight I often like to watch the first hour or so of Bradley Cooper’s “A Star is Born,” so long as it’s available, because Lady Gaga is my balm for everything. “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” makes no sense on a teeny-weeny seatback screen, in a manner of speaking, but watching it on my flight home from Berlin in 2019 would have sent me soaring among the clouds were I not already literally above them.
Coming home from Italian COVID jail in 2021, my father-in-law nobly upgraded me to business class and knowing this was my one chance to be free of coach, I took full advantage to my delight and detriment by having pre-flight champagne, a pre-dinner Campari and soda, goose for dinner itself, a post-dinner espresso, a ginger ale in an actual glass, a bottled beer even though by that point I was beginning to feel the effects of my living large because when (no longer) in Rome, all of which made my stomach feel so upset that midway through my rewatch of the original “West Side Story” to prep for the Spielberg remake I decided to switch to “Music and Lyrics.” I didn’t feel better physically, but I felt better mentally. Put that on the poster: at 35,000 feet, “Music and Lyrics” is better than “West Side Story!”
Still, nothing in the annals of cinema has ever soothed me more than a Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall movie; I just never expect them to appear on planes. Yet, for our flight to and from Tokyo last year, all their classics were available. I watched “The Big Sleep” going and “Key Largo” coming and, well, here’s the thing: I don’t really sleep on planes. I might want to, but I can’t, not even that time in business class when I discovered the bewildering wonder of a seat that would literally remake itself into a bed. (As Elaine Benes once said, “Do you realize the people up here are getting cookies?!”) Yet, in watching “Key Largo,” at some point, without even realizing it, I drifted off. And though we might typically issue a ticket to a movie that sedates, well, as established, in the air, the rules are different. And I can pay no higher compliment to an in-flight movie than to say, it put me to sleep. Bogie and Bacall really are magic.
