Yet I had 16 hours of international flights over the past ten days, and I watched only three movies. (It was actually closer to 18 hours, but that included two internal flights of less than an hour in Vietnam, when I was obviously not going to watch a movie.)
Part of the explanation for that is our return flight yesterday was a red eye, meaning I would try to sleep as much as I could. And I did end up being able to sleep about three of the eight hours. But that left five other hours, more than enough time for two movies. I watched only A Man Called Otto, with about seven distinct pauses for sleep. (And a brief period of panic when it appeared that my entertainment system had stopped working, leaving me dumbly pushing at the touch screen for about ten minutes on and off, probably annoying my older son in the seat in front of me -- a period when I was not even sure I'd even finish the one.)
The bigger surprise was on the way over, when the whole eight hours of the flight was conducted during daytime hours -- or at least non-sleeping hours, as it was dark when we arrived. (The sun sets right around 6 p.m. every day when you are that close to the equator.) During those eight hours I watched only I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Living.
This is probably not a significant enough drop in airplane movie activity to write a post about, but I just got back and I don't have a lot more movie-related things to report from my trip. (I was going to write about watching Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which I'd already seen, in a swimming pool on the Friday night of our stay, but it turned out you couldn't actually swim during the movie, and then conflicting plans meant that I watched only the first hour of it.)
One reason for the drop in my usual voraciousness is the time of year we flew. When it's April, it's too early in the movie year for any of the movies released in 2023 to already be available on the plane. So instead of getting to bulge my 2023 list with releases I ignored when they were in the theater, I'm cleaning up the 2022 movies I ignored when they were in the theater. Less of a satisfying pursuit.
The other reason was Sudoko.
JetStar had the best version of airplane Sudoko I've ever seen, for this one reason: It was the first time I had ever seen a mechanism for adding a small version of a number in a square, to show you had determined that a certain number must appear in either this box or this box -- an essential component to resolving any Sudoko puzzle of a certain level of difficulty. All the other times I've played Sudoko on a plane, I've had to stick those little numbers you usually mark down in pencil in my brain instead, with mixed and usual negative results. In this version, I could play the second hardest level ("Hard," as opposed to "Genius" or whatever the hardest level was) and still eventually solve the puzzle -- though on both of my eight-hour flights, I won one and made a mistake on/was stumped by the other. Still, it was engrossing enough that I spent a couple hours on it each time.
A long time ago I used to actually read on the plane, but that hasn't been much of a factor since they started shutting off the cabin lights so other passengers could sleep if they wanted -- even during daytime flights. I never want to read enough to turn on my own reading light and bother those around me.
Now that I'm back from Vietnam I will attempt to resume the viewing schedule that my trip interrupted. I feel like I've gone quite far astray from that, which is of course what you are supposed to feel on vacation, so I did that right. I have a couple viewing series to return to in the ten days before the end of the month, plus I feel like I don't even know what's in theaters right now, even though I actually only missed one new release date when I was gone.
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