Sometimes, of course, it's not movies at all. The woman whose screen I could see in the crack between the seats to my right was only interested in the Sex in the City sequel series And Just Like That, as any time I looked over, there was something going on with Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and the new characters in their lives. Given the unending sameness, I quickly lose interest in what such people are watching.
The woman through the crack on the left, on the other hand, was doing me better than I do me, only with a a certain opposite quality.
Not opposite because of the quality of what she was watching, but because of the vintage. But also because of the quality.
Me, I always jam pack a fight with releases from the current year. That's especially the case in December, when my current year is starting to wrap up, and it's crunch time in terms of getting a lot of middling movies available on the plane -- where I won't care so much about their quality -- onto my list before I close things out for the year.
That sometimes leaves me a bit jealous of the people who aren't doing that.
Before we even left the ground, this woman had started in on Galaxy Quest. I think I might have watched more of Galaxy Quest than the thing that was on my own screen, Tig Notaro's Am I OK?, which she co-directed with Stephanie Allynne. That's an exaggeration, of course, but Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite comedies of the last -- well, can't say quarter century now because it came out just more than 25 years ago. Though maybe I don't need to qualify that comment at all, as it is just one of my favorite comedies, full stop.
Am I OK? is not destined to become one of my favorite comedies of any time period. It isn't bad per se, but it is just so middling -- so perfectly representative of the sort of film I would/should watch on a plane -- that it was easy to very quickly stop watching every moment to glean its finer details. Being from Notaro, I would expect it to be about the main character's sexual identity, which it is. I would also expect it to be funnier, which it is not.
After Galaxy Quest, she didn't make a perfect second decision, but then again, neither did I. While she spent her next segment of the flight on Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, which got only 2.5 stars from me as a retroactive rating on Letterboxd, I was slogging my way through Annie Baker's Janet Planet, which ultimately got only 1.5 stars from me. In fact, this was the most tedious time I had with any of the five movies I watched on the flight, even when the mere task of watching another movie was starting to feel burdensome. Fortunately, I also chose this time to address a bunch of Christmas cards I was planning to mail after we landed, which made the experience far more tolerable.
Before I finished Janet Planet, she got herself back on track in a major way with her third movie, which really made me jealous: Crazy Rich Asians. I've already seen CRA three times within the relatively short six years of its existence, and it would have been four, except I was geo-blocked from streaming it when we were in Singapore in October. That's right, it was on an Australian streaming service (Stan) which I am unable to watch when I'm not in Australia. It was funny enough to me at the time that I was going write a whole post about it, but never ended up doing so.
Crazy Rich Asians was the movie that primed me to want to visit Singapore in the first place, and to do some of the things we ultimately did on our trip, like go to the Marina Bay Sands hotel (the one with the rooftop pool on the 57th floor) and to the food hawkers place that the movie makes look like a culinary paradise, Newton Food Centre. (Never mind that at the actual Newton Food Centre, my stomach started doing somersaults and I had to use the facilities twice in only 90 minutes -- and not for #1.)
I'd wanted to watch the movie while on our trip both to point out places I'd already been and to remind myself of any new ones we hadn't done yet before we ran out of time, so watching to the left through the seat cracks gave me a chance to do a little bit of that. I was mostly curious to see how Newton Food Centre was depicted, since the real one ended up seeming more grubby to me than the one I remembered from the movie -- but indeed, they used the real one in the movie as well, and I had just romanticized it because that movie is an example of the expertise of romanticizing a city on film. I watched that scene through entirely, and only got little snippets of the rest of the film.
Meanwhile, on my own screen, I was watching what ended up being the first of three consecutive musician biopics, though I didn't realize the middle one qualified as such until I'd started watching it. That first was the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black. Ho hum. The musician biopic is the very definition of the sort of middling mainstream fare that a guy ranking all the movies he sees in a given year should watch, but little more than that.
She was still a bit ahead of me -- I think I paused to sleep a little bit at some point, though not very long -- and she started her fourth before I started my fourth as well. Perhaps primed by seeing Michelle Yeoh in CRA, she then transitioned into Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I loved (it was my #4 of 2022) but which I haven't yet rewatched. Aside from one little detour into mediocre Tim Burton fare, this woman was making all the right moves, and my eye was especially caught by this movie with its constant quirkiness and visual invention. (Though I was also reminded how long it is, which is perhaps one of the reasons I have not yet revisited it.)
Me? At least I was now watching my best movie of the trip so far, Kneecap, which is the story of three Irish-language rappers that feels a little bit like a spiritual successor to Trainspotting. (Yes, I know that Ireland and Scotland are not the same, though I sometimes forget which accent is from which country.) The really interesting thing about Kneecap is that the real-life rappers play themselves, which was an especially strange revelation for me from the credits, since I thought I recognized two of the three of them from other movies and spent a considerable amount of time wracking my brain to remember which ones. They are supported by people obviously not playing themselves, such as Michael Fassbender.
Her fifth -- and as it turns out, final -- movie was another animated misstep. Hey, nobody's perfect. Letterboxd tells me I gave Vivo (2021) three stars, but as I was catching little bits of it, it felt more to me like the 2.5-star equivalent of Corpse Bride, with the latter certainly having more claim to endurance in the culture.
After Vivo, she went to sleep -- for the remainder of the flight, it would appear. Which was another source of major jealousy for me.
Watching five movies and still getting to sleep for a good four hours? She did me far better than I can ever do me.
I also watched five movies -- more on the fifth in a moment -- but it was with less than an hour of sleep. Which, really, is not so surprising, given that our plane lifted off at 11:30 a.m., meaning I wouldn't naturally feel inclined to sleep until just when we were landing in LA. But you need more sleep than that on an international flight, if at all possible.
The time I spent not watching movies was this sort of jagged, in-between period where I distracted myself with things like two episodes of Saturday Night Live, which I never get to watch now that I live in Australia but which my wife and I watched religiously for about the first five years of our relationship. These were consolidated 55-minute episodes that did not include the musical numbers, but did include a fair amount of mediocrity as well as a widespread failure to stifle laughter by both the guests and the regular players.
My fifth movie felt like a grim endeavor indeed, but when else would I make the time to watch Bob Marley: One Love?
Don't get me wrong, I love Marley's music, but even if I were to watch a biopic of my favorite musician of all time (Trent Reznor) I would probably find it at least something of a chore. Then again, I hope Trent Reznor would not allow a biopic of himself to be made without some interesting artistic choices. Then again again, biopic subjects rarely get to decide how their own lives are portrayed on film, since it's more likely for them to be dead (Marley and Winehouse) than alive (Kneecap and Robbie Williams, in the brand new biopic that I really liked, Better Man).
I gave One Love a milquetoast three stars, same as Back to Black, which seems to be reserved for movies where there is nothing really wrong, except that the musician biopic form itself tends to be very limiting. We'll see if I get a chance to see, or ultimately prioritize, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown before 2024 is out.
What I found myself wondering about this other woman was if she has good taste (60% good taste anyway) or whether she just stumbled into some very good movies. Because then the question comes up, if she had not seen these movies already, what does that say about her actual taste? Or if she was revisiting them, what does it say about her wanting to revisit Corpse Bride and Vivo?
Maybe it was a hybrid approach, where she had already seen the three greats and was revisiting them just for her pleasure, while she wanted to hear what all the hype was about (there was no hype) for the other two animated movies.
But then again, if she was watching half new movies and half old ones -- new to her, old to the rest of the world -- then she isn't properly my opposite, now is she?
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