RadishFlix: Movies on a Plane!

This year I was able to visit my family for Thanksgiving, flying into Chicago on a Dreamliner. What a nice bird! Also a chance to add some movies to the 2021 list.

Miscellaneous fun fact: two doses of ‘RonaVax is considered “fully vaccinated” for entering Germany, but not for entering a Kino. New releases will have to wait for me to catch them in streaming.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

Airplane, Japanese with English subtitles
I know it’s silly and vain, but I want other passengers to see me as a refined, serious viewer of foreign and arthouse films. Fortunately, carefully nestled in the “foreign” category menu, was a semi-recent Japanese Godzilla film that follows the best Godzilla film formula: Uh-oh, there’s a monster! Scientists, military personnel, government officeholders, and knowledgeable weirdos realize it’s Godzilla. They try some stuff that doesn’t work right away, and argue for hours while Godzilla crashes around creating chaos with her signature indifference. Eventually, a method of ending the chaos is discovered and administered.

It was everything I wanted in a Godzilla movie, particularly the ending. And I giggled a lot. Serious and refined!

Man is more frightening than Gojira.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Airplane, original English
As sequel to King of the Monsters, it predictably suffered from the same “everything is supersaturated blue and orange and I’m distracted because it’s so annoying” issue.

So now, having seen a Japanese and an American Godzilla film of comparable eras back-to-back, I can conclude I prefer the Japanese ones. The natural colors–ordinary daylight, harsh office overheads, dim cockpits on night flights–tell me this story is taking place in the Earth that I experience every day. Godzilla can really exist in this universe! But this world where everything is orange–and somehow it’s summer in both Florida and Antarctica on the same day–is just a fantasy.

But fantasy with lots of action is perfect for killing time between the terrible curry lunch and the bready ball of grease served an hour before landing as a “light snack”.

Weekend at Bernie’s (1989)

Airplane, original English
I know I saw this in a theater when it was released, and I know the local library had a VHS copy so I saw it several more times in high school, and we’ve all been joking about the premise for thirty years. Watching it for the first time in about 25 years was still a treat. The COLORS! The clothes!! Also important: The art in the beach house. I read a longform article sometime in the last year about all the important contemporary and modern art (replicas) in the beach house, and I can’t find that article anymore, but I clocked the Rothko in the hallway by the bathroom.

In this era we live in where nobody over the age of six is allowed to be in film or television without veneers, it was interesting to see Catherine Mary Stewart playing the romantic lead with her own natural human teeth (athough you can see from the IMDB she got some industry-standard fakes later).

The Lost Boys (1987)

Airplane, original English
This is another one from the “was forbidden to see it until years later” list; probably last saw it about fifteen years ago. I can’t remember if I liked it then, part of the reason I chose it, but this time around was pretty meh. Maybe you need to be flush with puberty hormones to not think Jason Patric’s character was a moron.

I also couldn’t watch the Coreys without wondering who on the set/in the management was abusing them, so there’s that. They had great clothes, though, especially Haim.

There exist 21st century sequels. I have no plans to seek them out.

Interestingly, this is the first movie I have ever seen on an airplane with a “sex and violence, please choose something else if the people around you find it disturbing” disclaimer instead of a “this film has been edited for adult content” disclaimer.

The Green Knight (2021)

Airplane, original British
The internet has told me I was supposed to hate this because it’s inauthentic. The opening credits called it an interpretation. All I remembered from reading the poem in college was the Christmas dinner (yeah, yeah, fat chick here). The costumes were nice, the scenery was great, the violence wasn’t too graphic, the CGI wasn’t too overwhelming.

I’m not sure I understood the ending, but I’m not sure it wasn’t left open to each viewers’ own interpretation.

Wayne’s World (1992)

Airplane, original American
I thought I could I could doze off overnight with this one, as I have seen it at least dozens of times in high school and beyond (although not since 2019, and that time was in German), but I ended up staying awake and chanting most of the script.

I should do that more often.