Anyway, since other commitments are taking up my resources for acute intellectual debate at the moment, this issue makes good my promise to degenerate into televisual review (or rather, film). And also to assuage the considerable anxieties of those who thought the Doughnuts were over with. So, here's my critical round-up of the various delights in-flight entertainment has to offer those travelling in the very near future:
Wild Hogs: John Travolta, William H. Macy, and two other vaguely recognisable men relieve their mid-life crisis by pretending to be bikers. It's the kind of film best summed up by the word 'amiable', but mostly in a good way (cf. Hot Fuzz, discussed below). The kind of film one watches on a Sunday, late morning, then realising that you watched the whole thing and you need to get into town before the shops close early (thanks Sunday Trading laws - why should Christians get all the inconvenient fun?). Or the kind of film watched at 36,000 thousand feet when there's no other choice and the alternative is reading more of Neil Gaiman's hideously overrated Neverwhere.
Bridge to Terabithia: The fact that I managed to follow this without sound and out of the corner of my eye suggests that it isn't Citizen Kane. Although I suspect that it would also be difficult to make sense of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol under the same conditions, so maybe I'm being harsh.
Blades of Glory: I may regret writing this, but this was my guilty pleasure of the recent transatlantic shenanigans. Like the Hogs, this was a desperation choice, but one that turned out rather well thanks to the visible influences of This is Spinal Tap (including figure skating commentary such as "Famed for his personal hygiene, McElroy is beginning to reek. Of gold.") and the first half of Zoolander (before the plot takes over and it loses its way). The director also seems to have it in for figure skating championship mascots as well, which surely counts for something. The best bit, however, is the last thirty seconds. All films should end that way.
Premonition: I only watched the first twenty minutes, before being reminded why I'd only ever seen one other Sandra Bullock film, ten years ago.
Stranger than Fiction: Another non-starter, lasting only fifteen minutes because of the labouring of the central idea (like a bad comedy sketch), and Emma Thompson's irritating voice-over. Or just voice.
Borat: It's no wonder Kazakhstan complained. The film starts with a tour of Borat's home town, which is vaguely uncomfortable in an "Aren't foreigners funny?" way (similar to those fake guide books to Molvania and the like, which are amusing until about half past two on Boxing Day). Things get more uncomfortable once we get to the US, but for the better as often very funny faux-interview high jinks ensue. Singing the national anthem at the rodeo is one of the high points; the naked fight in the hotel is another, with a caveat of "I shouldn't be finding this that funny, surely". Other encounters are startling, such as Borat stopping street punks for fashion advice, or meeting some depressingly misogynist frat boys. There's a plot about going to meet Pamela Anderson, but it really doesn't matter. The most impressive thing, however, is how Sacha Baron Cohen makes such a potentially unlikeable character quite sympathetic and endearing.
Hot Fuzz: I don't want to inaugurate some kind of Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright backlash, because I like them all, but it has to be said: Hot Fuzz is something of a disappointment. It's let down by two main problems: it's too long, and it's conceptually muddled. The idea is that a spectacularly successful London cop is transferred to a rural town, where law enforcement culture clash hijinks ensue (hijinks always ensue). It's the basically the same idea as Shaun of the Dead: relocate a filmic genre to an inappropriate setting. And indeed, the final half hour or so, which moves an LA gunfight to rural England, is amusing. But this should be the starting point, not the end. Wouldn't it have been funnier to have the central character as a violent maverick from the beginning? I suspect the outlandish nature of the murders throughout is also supposed to be funny, but it doesn't work because the events and the setting aren't incongruous enough, thanks to Midsomer Murders and the like. The comedy is also 'amiable', but this time in a bad way, because one expects much more from the people involved. It feels as if the writer, producer, and director all had slightly different ideas about what they were parodying; as if half of them thought they were making English policing look like CSI for comic effect, while the other half thought the idea was to bring Lethal Weapon to the countryside. So while the final part is funny, it takes too long to get there, like a comedy sketch was bloated into a two hour film (and it really shouldn't be more than ninety minutes). There are good parts - Timothy Dalton has fun as the amusingly obvious bad guy, there are some hints at a Wicker Man style denouement (Edward Woodward stars, after all) and I liked the subtlety of the two Bill Bailey characters reading novels by Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks - but it should be better than it is.
Spiderman 3: This is going to make me sound terribly grumpy, but this had my 'law of diminishing returns' sense tingling. It's still above average for the superhero genre, but since it relies so much on the previous films as a continuation of that narrative (rather nicely summed up in the credits), it also invites comparison with them, and the judgement is that it's more of the same. That is, more dizzying and hectically edited fight sequences around the skyscrapers of New York, more near death misses for Spidey... and a creeping lack of investment from the viewer. By the grand finale, Spiderman has been through so much and recovered that he seems pretty much invicible, which somewhat undermines the inevitable final confrontation (yes, at a large building). There's also too much crammed into the storyline; Peter's relationship with Mary Jane, the ongoing conflict with Harry over his father's death, a rivalry with another photographer, an escaped prisoner who turns into Sandman, some black goo from space which turns Peter bad in a Superman 3 way and turns the rival photographer into a monster... making some sense of all this requires the writers to take some questionable shortcuts. Since the "you killed my dad you bastard" plotline isn't going anywhere, Harry conveniently gets amnesia, only to recover later, only to have the butler reveal some previously concealed evidence that resolves the whole storyline (so what was the butler doing throughout the second film? Shooting hoops?). The Sandman thread is equally careless; the convict escapes from prison and is next seen literally wandering into the middle of some particle accelerator thing, where he gets turned into sand. Of course, he needs some motivation to be evil beyond the basic determinism of being a criminal anyway, so he's upset about his daughter being ill. That's about as far as motivation goes, so in a remarkable act of narrative retrofitting, it turns out that he was the guy who shot Peter's uncle after all, and not the guy in the first film. Beyond that, it's not particularly clear why Sandman should have any kind of grudge against Spiderman, except that he is Bad and Spiderman is Good. Of course. The black goo is also unexplained; this might have been satisfying in a more tightly focused plot, but given the holes on display here, it also looks careless. It's not all bad - the performances are good, and the resolution is nice. Well, at least the Venom plot ends well, resolved by what might be the best example of "I knew that information would prove useful at the end of the film" because the set-up wasn't obvious and the execution isn't tediously over-explained. The Sandman plot ends as poorly as it started, with the bad guy realising out of nowhere that he's been naughty and must change his ways. Peter's forgiveness of him would be powerful if the character had been thought through in any depth... but I'm getting back to grumpy here. It's a very watchable and enjoyable film, but don't think about the plot too much, or you'll end up like me.
