My top-ranked airplane movies

I watched four movies on the two plane flights to get me back to Australia that were long enough for a movie, the first from Athens to Dubai (not quite four hours) and the second from Dubai to Melbourne (just under 13 hours). One of these I told you about yesterday (Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning). The other three were Eephus (very good), The Salt Path (very good) and Karate Kid: Legends (fine). 

There were two movies on my current watchlist that were also available on my Emirates flights, at least two, that I wanted to see a lot more than any of these: Opus and Friendship. But I decided -- on the first leg of my trip, when Opus was already available but Friendship not yet -- that I wasn't going to watch Opus because I was saving it for a more clear-eyed viewing. 

I don't actually know that much about Opus and whether it's worth saving for a more opportune (Opus-tune?) time. Just a feeling I got that it might be a shame to waste it on the plane. With Friendship, I'm actually saving it for a very specific occasion. We tried to schedule a date with another couple to watch it in the cinema, but when that fell through I proposed the four of us watch it at our house after dinner, sometime this month after we returned from our trip. I'm not sure whether or not that will still happen, but it might. 

I'm really telling you this, though, because it illustrates that I divide movies into two categories: movies I want to give my best and fullest attention, and movies I don't care if I watch while succumbing to a dozen bouts of involuntary sleep. (Don't worry, I always pause. Even sleep cannot overcome that powereful instinct.)

That may go without saying. And it may explain why movies I watch on the plane don't end up ranking very high on my year-end list. I simply reserve that time for movies I don't think I'll care very much about, so I don't worry that I might have a compromised experience.

But one of the joys of watching movies is that you make discoveries. You see movies you didn't have much reason to anticipate, or in some cases had never even heard of, and they end up becoming personal favorites, making it into the upper echelon of the films you watched in that particular year. 

Given the number of trips I've made back and forth between the Australia and the U.S., and between Australia and other parts of the world, surely this should have happened a few times?

But just casually thinking back on movies I watched on planes, a lot more of them have plots I don't really remember than a special place on my mental shelf of all-time favorites. 

It's hard to develop a full causal relationship here. Because I don't know what films I'm going to end up loving until after I've already seen them, there's no way to intentionally hold back a potential favorite just so you can test the theory by watching it on the plane. Or rather, I just had the opportunity with Opus and Friendship but I refused to risk sacrificing them.

For one, most of us don't travel enough for that sort of testing to be practical. But also, you can't really tell, retrospectively, if you've just had and missed such an opportunity, because you can't know if you would have liked a particular movie significantly more outside of the plane viewing context. You'd only be asking this question about movies you didn't like, and you can't see a movie twice for the first time.

I do wonder if, for example, I would have had just as much affection for last year's #1 -- The Substance -- if I'd seen it on the plane. Maybe it's too gross to show on the plane, but let's say it had been available there. Would I still have loved it? Or would it just be another among a bunch of films I can't really remember?

I don't think there's really a way to test this. The best I can do is go back through my ranking years to see which plane movie ranked highest that year, out of what total number of movies I saw on a plane that year. That'll not only tell me how many plane viewings were middling experiences in those years, but also give me a total number of plane movies to help see if there is any possible statistical significance to raising up so few of them into the highest end of my rankings. 

I might be able to extrapolate something from this. I might not. But either way, I think it's an exercise worth doing.

I don't think it makes sense for me to consider every year I've ranked my films, which goes back to 1996. Many of those early years, I might have seen only one or two movies on a plane, some years none at all. Remember, back then, the movies didn't play in seatbacks, and often you even had to pay to opt in to the communal movie by renting headsets. That explains the famous case of 1997, my second ranking year, when I "saw" Speed 2: Cruise Control on a plane, and ranked it last that year. The thing is, I hadn't opted in. I'd only been watching the images. Without even listening to it, I have no idea how I thought it could legitimately be ranked. I've issued my mea culpa about this before. Anyway, obviously I wasn't really doing it right in those years, even if I was actually seeing movies that might otherwise be worth considering here. 

So I'll start with 2007, the first year I traveled to Australia, and then jump ahead to 2009 for my next Australian trip. I'll pick up again with 2013, because that's when I moved to Australia, and from that point on, most years have had enough plane movies to produce statistically significant results. 

Except I can't do 2007, because my plane flights that year were in March. Meaning only movies that belonged to a different ranking year were available to be watched. This exercise may be even more flawed or lacking in useful results than I thought. 

Well, my flights for the 2009 ranking year were in December of 2009 and January of 2010, so I know at least we can start there. So I'll just start there and list only the years where there are movies to list. 

2009
Rankable movies watched on plane: 9 
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: The Proposal (50th out of 113, 56%)
Others: Duplicity (#67), Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (#76), Jennifer's Body (#72), Land of the Lost (#96), Michael Jackson's This Is It (#51), Paper Heart (#102), Post Grad (#98), The Time Traveler's Wife (#56) 
Notes: Yes, this is all from two flights -- and it should have been more, except I didn't totally have my airplane movie game established on the first flight, watching two movies (Last Chance Harvey and A Christmas Tale) that weren't rankable for 2009. So yes, that also means I watched seven movies on my trip back to Los Angeles, a record that will never be broken, and was likely only possible because my wife stayed back and returned separately a few days later. Had she been by my side, watching me get no sleep, I probably would not have been able to justify it. Although none of these films ranked particularly high in the year I saw them, I have actually gone on to watch The Proposal twice more, including once in the past year, meaning it has become a long-term favorite -- or at least a guilty pleasure -- from these meager origins.

2013
Rankable movies watched on plane: 3
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Much Ado About Nothing (27th out of 128, 79%)
Others: The Call (#71), The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (#127)
Notes: With only a single flight in this year -- remember, this was the year I moved to Australia -- it hardly seems worth including it. And obviously I was exhausted after a frantic move out of my house in Los Angeles, meaning I only managed to watch three movies. But one of them fared pretty well at least. Then one of them was my second-to-worst of the year. 

2014
Rankable movies watched on plane: 11
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Begin Again (19th out of 136, 86%)
Others: Belle (#45), Earth to Echo (#103), The Fault in Our Stars (#61), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (#68), Magic in the Moonlight (#36), Maleficent (#83), Tammy (#107), These Final Hours (#72), What We Do in the Shadows (#41), Wish I Was Here (#101) 
Notes: The reason we're not talking about records in 2014 is that this is the first time we also took a trip with long internal domestic flights, from the west coast of the U.S. to the east coast, in which I squeezed in an additional three movies beyond the four each way I watched between Australia and the U.S. This was an extended Thanksgiving trip. Here again we have a movie I've watched about twice more since I originally saw it in What We Do in the Shadows. Obviously seeing it on the plane did not prevent me from finding it hilarious. But more notable is that I ranked one of these movies in my top 20, with many other very respectable rankings sprinkled in. Since Begin Again was John Carney's follow-up to Once, which had been a #2 movie for me, it was reasonable that I would have reserved this for a viewing outside the plane environment, except I think I'd already heard not great things about it. What We Do is the one that has gone on to be a personal favorite, and it's only the third highest of these. So by the third year we've looked at, already my initial premise about the negative effect of watching a movie on a plane is seeming pretty flawed. 

2016
Rankable movies watched on plane: 13
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Other People (7th out of 151, 95%)
Others: The Birth of a Nation (#49), The Boss (#59), Florence Foster Jenkins (#90), Lights Out (#135), Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (#111), Love & Friendship (#78), Nerve (#46), Queen of Katwe (#67), The Secret Life of Pets (#129), Storks (#113), Sunset Song (#72), X-Men: Apocalypse (#105)
Notes: No trip to the U.S in 2015, and in fact, that was the first year of my life in which I never once set foot on American soil. But we were back at the end of 2016, for Christmas this time, fresh off the dispiriting election loss by Hilary Clinton to Donald Trump. I suspect these 13 will be a record that will stand* for the total number of movies watched on a plane and then ranked, as it involves not only an additional fifth movie on one of the two long flights, but two each on the two long coast-to-coast flights. And there's a notable asterisk here, though I don't know if it is a real asterisk or not so we will have to discuss. Other People will clearly be the highest ranked movie I've ever seen on a plane, making it into my top ten. However ... this is a movie I had downloaded to whatever device I was carrying at the time, likely a laptop, not one I picked from the seatback options. I had selected it as a possibility to watch at some point on the trip, not knowing whether it would get watched on the plane or at some other time. Does that make a difference for this exercise? I'm going to say no and include it because it did indeed get watched in the plane environment, which is what we're talking about here -- and I'm pretty sure it's the only time a movie I've watched on a plane has left me bawling like a baby**. This was even among my honorable mentions for the best of the decade, so obviously it was not just a reaction in the moment. However, because it was one of those I watched on one of our domestic flights, it likely did benefit from not being the middle of five movies in a row, nor coming in the middle of the night.

* - 2019, 2024 and 2025 will all beat it 
** - read on

2017
Rankable movies watched on plane: 2
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Going in Style (82nd out of 145, 43%)
Others: Paris Can Wait (#140)
Notes: No international flight this year, but a trip to the Northern Territory in August did allow me to fit in two rankable movies. (I sacrificed one viewing slot on a movie that came out the previous year, Masterminds.) With only two movies, it's hard to draw anything significant from this.

2018
Rankable movies watched on plane: 11
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: The Death of Stalin (18th out of 149, 88%)
Others: American Animals (#78), Damsel (#113), The Death of Stalin (#18), Foxtrot (#23), The Insult (#89), Kings (#121), Life of the Party (#135), Love, Simon (#26), On Chesil Beach (#87), Swinging Safari (#77), Tag (#51) 
Notes: The occasion for this flight was to surprise my mother for her 75th birthday, which makes this also the shortest international flight I've ever taken, only seven days from departure to return. (In fact, I remember it being less than that, but it must not have been.) So ten movies on four flights within seven days ... that's a lot. (Swinging Safari was the only rankable film watched on a shorter trip when my wife and I went to Bali for a week for our tenth anniversary.) Anyway, the premise of this post, and even a premise established within this post just a moment ago, keeps getting dashed. Here we have another top 20 movie from my airplane viewings, one of two movies in this group (along with Tag) that I've now watched twice. And we also have a movie that made me cry, or at least brought me close to tears, in Love, Simon, on the heels of me just saying that I thought Other People was the only movie that had done that. Simon is just one of three airplane movies ranked in the top 30 this year. So yeah, my bias against an airplane as a place to watch movies is getting less and less credible as I go through this exercise. 

2019
Rankable movies watched on plane: 18
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Yesterday (41st out of 146, 72%)
Others: The Art of Self-Defense (#110), Cold Pursuit (#100), The Curse of La Llorona (#132), Dumbo (#141), Five Feet Apart (#76), Hellboy (#131), The Kid Who Would Be King (#47), Kursk (#64), Late Night (#67), Little (#98), Missing Link (#119), Stuber (#145), Sword of Trust (#42), Top End Wedding (#115), The White Crow (#82), Where'd You Go, Bernadette (#106), X-Men: Dark Phoenix (#128), Yesterday (#41)
Notes: And now we can see that I only find X-Men movies suitable to watch on planes, as the most recent one (to date) makes the second consecutive one I watched this way. The first trip was relatively unique in our trips to America as it included no east coast portion (my family met us in California) and it involved an uneven number of long flights, as our trip home was broken up by a trip to Hawaii. Then there was an unplanned trip later in the year to help move my mother into a retirement home, where I scored a bunch more viewings. (I laugh that I once thought the 13 from 2016 would be a record and I have since gone back and added an asterisk, which you have already read.) 

2022
Rankable movies watched on plane: 10
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Kimi (30th out of 175, 83%)
Others: Ambulance (#139), Asking for It (#162), Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (#108), Father Stu (#144), Firestarter (#151), Kimi (#30), Marry Me (#149), Scream (#93), Sundown (#113), Umma (#150)
Notes: We returned to the air after a couple flightless COVID years. So this trip had five legs, each of which included at least one movie, as we went to a family reunion in Indiana, visited other family and friends in New England, and then spent some time in Los Angeles before heading back to Australia. There were actually two other movies watched on these flights, but one was for my Audient Bollywood series and not a 2022 release, and another I thought qualified for 2022, but later decided was actually a 2021 movie. Here we see my bias starting to take over and run, and we have to ask if it's starting to be self-fulfilling prophecies to watch movie I know I might not like. Only one of these ten movies has a decent showing and only two are in my top 100 for the year. 

2023
Rankable movies watched on plane: 3
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Carmen (53rd out of 168, 68%)
Others: Carmen (#53), Linoleum (#134), The Pope's Exorcist (#100)
Notes: Our international trip to Vietnam did not produce any rankable movies, since it was in April and there were no 2023 movies available yet, but a September trip to Broome in the other corner of Australia was happy to fill in the gap. The three movies basically yielded one final ranking from each of the three thirds of my chart, though I only barely got one in the top third. 

2024
Rankable movies watched on plane: 14
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Problemista (24th out of 177, 86%)
Others: Am I OK? (#132), Back to Black (#120), Bob Marley: One Love (#121), The Critic (#47), Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (#123), Janet Planet (#172), Kneecap (#34), Lee (#133), Mean Girls (#157), Mothers' Instinct (#167), Problemista (#24), Summer Camp (#162), Turtles All the Way Down (#87), We Grown Now (#75)
Notes: I guess flying in April of 2024 to the Northern Territory (going to some of the same places we went in 2017) did not provide me the same complication as flying to Vietnam in April of 2023, because I was able to squeak in January release Mean Girls. There were two others from a quick trip to Singapore in October, and then we capped an epic travel year with our second trip to New England for Christmas, first since 2016. And though there are a lot of bad movies in here, there are two in my top 40. 

If I were including 2025 in this -- which I obviously can't because I haven't ranked those films yet -- I'd be tying my record for 18 total rankable movies (from 2019), due to the most plane flying I've ever done in one year, by hours. Our July round trip to the U.S. and our various legs just now through Europe have produced those 18 titles, including one Netflix movie watched on a tablet, not to mention three from other years and one rewatch (a thing I rarely do, though I did also rewatch Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood on a plane in 2019, actually liking it much better on this second viewing -- which itself could be useful information). As I write this, I have not yet even included any of the movies I watched on the most recent trip to my in-progress 2025 rankings -- some of them will undoubtedly fare well.

One thing I should say, though, is that one of the films from other years I watched back in July was I'm Still Here, which I wrote about here. In a way, this was actually the test that I talked about not being able to do earlier in this post, even though I won't have the result in terms of a current year ranking.

I'm Still Here was the only best picture nominee from last year that I had not seen by the time of the Oscar ceremony, and in July I took the opportunity to watch it so I could erase that blind spot as well as write the next entry in my Audient Bridesmaids series, which you noted if you followed the link above. So here we have a movie with a high pedigree, but one that maybe I would not have prioritized watching as soon as I watched it if I had not gotten that easy opportunity on the plane. Sing Sing is another movie available on my recent plane rides that would have fit that description, if I'd chosen to watch it. I think I was willing to test this on I'm Still Here because it wouldn't impact my current year rankings, which somehow seems of paramount importance. 

But you know what? I still gave I'm Still Here 4.5 stars on Letterboxd. It's a great movie, obviously, but I can say pretty confidently that I wouldn't have gone all the way to 5 stars, even if I'd first encountered it on the big screen. 

So what have I learned from all this?

I think the most important takeaway is that a good movie is a good movie. I should not be scared of "ruining" it by watching it on the plane. A plane cannot turn a good movie into bad one, though I suppose it's possible to affect the degree I would like or dislike it. That, I think, is not possible to test.

In the ten years I looked at, a movie I watched on the plane was in my top quarter of ranked movies in six of those years, so more than half. Three years produced a top 20 movie and one of those three produced a top ten movie. 

So I think there is no reasonable excuse to deny myself watching whatever movie I find on the plane that's escaped me for one reason or another. I might want to stack the deck in its favor by watching it first, especially on a flight where I may watch four others, before I'm burned out. But that's just good sense. 

And besides, the reality remains: If I'd really wanted to see the movie, badly, I would have already prioritized seeing it in the theater. And that may be the ultimate explanation for why movies I watch on the plane don't rank higher, when they don't: They weren't from a director I felt I needed to prioritize when his or her movie was available on the big screen. On each flight, I have already passively curated these movies into a subsection of also-rans. The fact that some of them do still rise up and become personal favorites reminds me why I try to go into each movie with an open mind and an open heart, and restores some of my faith in the ability of cinema to surprise me. 

8,000 channels and nuthin' on

Forgive me the paraphrase, Mr. Springsteen.

So I'm finally getting a chance to update the blog just about a week into our trip. I thought I might write a post on the plane, but we didn't have WiFi on any of the three flights we've taken so far. (With another couple weeks now before we take another.) So instead, I'm writing this on a train with free WiFi, between Manchester and London.

But because the only movies I've watched while we've been gone have come on those flights --  yes, we've been busy, and also very tired -- I'm writing about something from the very beginning of the trip.

The thing I always heard about Emirates Airlines was that they somehow had 8,000 entertainment channels. It sounded like a number a child would make up, like "eleventy million," so divorced from reality did it sound. But, I think it may have actually been reality.

The list of possible movies was so deep that I never even made my way anywhere near the end of it. Even the "new releases" section almost defeated me, and it seemed to go back in chronological all the way to movies released in 2023. 

For me, this was mind-blowing, although certainly more than I needed. My wife said that she could still not find anything worth watching, but I think it was more that she was actually defeated by it, not that there were no options. (Though I'm glad to see that she took my recommendation of The Ballad of Wallis Island on our second flight, from Dubai to London, and loved it.)

Me? I watched Inheritance, Love Hurts, In the Lost Lands and The Friend on the first flight, and William Tell and Oh, Canada on the second, with lots of regrets and honorable mentions. 

How do I know it was actually 8,000?

Well I guess I don't. But the movies I watched all had a four-digit channel associated with them, in the 6,000 range. There may have been unused numbers, but the capacity for, well, I guess at least 7,000 seems to exist. 

Anyway, on the flight back in early October there should be plenty of fresh new options, which I am looking forward to. As well as the 7,800 others I didn't already scroll through. 

While I have you, I wanted to whinge (the Australian word for "complain/whine") a bit about the difficulty of blogging from my tablet.

I've just annoyed the rest of my family to no end with a lot of heavy sighs and the like. For some reason I can't seem to figure out how to download an image from the web to my tablet where I can actually access it through the Blogger uploading mechanism. So yes indeed, I've just taken a picture of the Emirates logo and uploaded that to this post. Apologies for the poor quality.

I'll get my routines down as we progress further onward -- or I assume I will, anyway. 

Airline announcements as video pop-ups

When flight attendants or the captain interrupt what you're watching to make an announcement, their abuse of their power can verge on the comical.

As I watched a final six movies across three flights, to complement the five I'd watched on my way over to the U.S., I repeatedly got the chance to imagine doing this as some sort of skit on Saturday Night Live.

As you would know if you've ever flown before -- which likely describes everyone reading this -- when a flight attendant or the captain is speaking, your movie freezes and often gets a printed text across the screen that reads something along the lines of "announcement in progress." 

There are two primary ways they can try your patience when they do this:

1) Speak slowly, redundantly or with long pauses, where they refuse to release the intercom during the indulgent and stylized breaks between chunks of their dialogue, meaning you can't get back to what you're watching until they've finally stopped depressing the intercom button;

2) Release the intercom button, but then come back to say something else two to five second later, which means your movie has only a brief chance to resume before being rudely cut off again.

This is where the SNL skit would come in. In this skit, all this behavior would be exaggerated, and our hero would be some annoyed guy just trying to get through the remaining five minutes of his movie before the plane lands. 

Now, I acknowledge that some of the information they're conveying to us can be useful, and we should listen. Collectively as a society of air passengers, we're now to the point where we so routinely ignore the safety instructions, that I think we probably would just run around, shitting ourselves, in the event of an actual water landing.

But sometimes, it's just a variation on that old school relationship between the pilot and the passenger, a remnant of yesteryear, when there really were a significant number of us who cared what major cities we were expected to pass over during the duration of our flight. 

Well, I'm not here just to whinge, I'm here to tell you about what I thought was a really good workaround to some of this, used by Air New Zealand, which we were using for the first time ever to travel to the U.S. (We may have used it ten years ago when we actually went to New Zealand, though I can't remember, and if so, they were not doing the thing I'm about to tell you about at that time.)

Namely, some of these announcements are handled simply by a text that appears at the bottom of your screen as you're watching, a text you can manually dismiss once you've read it -- or even before you've read it, if you're fast enough. 

Mostly this was used supplementally. Like, in their attempt to make interactions with the flight attendants offering meals more efficient, they'll remind us of what the breakfast options are -- remind us, because indeed, they did also tell us through one of these more traditional intercom interruptions. 

But I more appreciated that the technology existed, rather than whether it was fully being used to excise superfluous communications. 

I found I'm a lot more likely to read and absorb the information presented to me in such a pop-up than I am to hear and absorb it when someone is speaking it to me, with the sorts of long, deliberate pauses that only further annoy me as I am trying to watch a key moment of my movie, when I might tune it out from sheer frustration.

A pop-up, as it turns out, is not equally annoying, as it's something you control, and can leave on your screen for as long as it is useful to you, before dismissing it at a moment of your choosing. And it's at the bottom of the screen, so it is not really blocking the action on screen, nor cutting off any dialogue mid-sentence. What's more, it ensures you have a chance to actually take in what is being conveyed. 

And those meal options, by the way? Well, Air New Zealand was also giving us some of the best airline food we've ever had. So we may use them again in the future, even if it involves one additional leg and more travel time overall. 

(The image with this post, you ask? Well, since I decided it didn't really make sense to include the poster for any of the six movies I saw across three flights -- the first of which was actually a domestic flight on Delta -- I'm instead including a still from the current Air New Zealand safety video, which features Kiwi NBA player Steven Adams.)

When buying is cheaper than renting

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is one of a handful of really long movies I am still trying to watch by January 17th. 

A lot of my regular movie-watching scenarios do not afford a good chance to watch long movies. I either have to start really early in the evening, thereby reducing my role in winding down our children and our house for the night, or I have to block out a window of time on a weekend afternoon, which has some of the same complications. Simply put, I will not have many more opportunities to do this for the 2 hour and 43-minute Radu Jude movie before my deadline for releasing my 2024 rankings from first to worst.

Fortunately, my time before then involves several irregular movie-watching scenarios, including two plane trips that perfectly accommodate that length of movie. 

The trouble is, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is not the sort of movie that is usually available on a commercial flight. 

Of course, nowadays it doesn't need to be. We can watch whatever we want on our own devices, assuming it's not, like, porn or something.

The trouble then is my own device.

I'm typing this post on a laptop that is now more than four years old, and though it's doing okay for being that age, it's not strong in a couple of key areas -- including its battery life. But I vastly prefer this as an option for watching a movie on my own device, in part because I don't even have a tablet with me, in part because my phone is too small, and in part because this is where I have iTunes set up, and iTunes remains one of my primary sources for renting movies. I'm not talking about the streaming version, I'm talking about opening the iTunes software on my computer, going into the Apple store, and renting a movie. And because I need to watch it without internet, downloading it is also part of that process.

But my laptop will run out of battery way before 2 hours and 43 minutes have elapsed.

So the likely scenario for me actually watching DNETMFTEOTW on our flight to San Francisco Saturday morning is if the plane has a way for me to charge my laptop in flight. I'm pretty sure I saw the familiar three prongs of a charger symbol on one of the flights we took last week, I just don't know if it was the international one or the domestic one. 

But if I've got that charge, I'm watching that movie. If I don't, I'll watch it when I get back to Melbourne. After all, I've got 30 days from the date of rental.

Then again, this is not a rental, and that leads to the thing I actually want to talk about today.

So as it turned out, I had just been discussing with my sister how I have a funny attitude toward renting movies vs. buying movies. Because I have a collector's mentality and don't want to buy something unless it is a purposeful addition to my collection -- in other words, a movie I have vetted and know I love -- I would much rather rent something than buy something, even if they are the same price. The logic is a bit fuzzy, especially when you have an unlimited amount of cloud storage for these purchases. (It may not actually be unlimited, but it seems that way, at least when you haven't bought a lot of movies this way.) But I think about having had to buy Black Adam for my kids to have something exciting to watch on New Year's Eve a few years ago, because it was only available for purchase at the time. It still pops up in the collection of movies I own on iTunes, and I still have not watched it.

When I was looking at movies I needed to watch, especially those I might be able to review before I can get back to Australia to watch them, I looked at the critically acclaimed Anora from Sean Baker. I might have been willing to rent it for the premium $19.99 rental price, but when I saw it was only available for purchase at that price, I balked. Silly logic, maybe -- but fortunately, logic that only holds up to that certain somewhat arbitrary point of being the same price.

Because what do I do if the purchase price is less than the rental price?

Well then I buy the movie.

That's what happened with DNETMFTEOTW. When it came to the option of watching the movie one time for $5.99 or unlimited times for $4.99 -- but in all likelihood, still only one time -- I had to buy it. I may have funny rules, but I'm not the kind of guy who will throw away a dollar for no reason.

I do wonder how that particular set of circumstances arises, and the only thing I can think is that the two prices are governed by two sets of considerations and do not check each other for internal consistency. A rental price for a movie is likely established as a result of some certain amount of time since it has played in movie theaters, whereas a sale price is likely looking at how many units are moving -- in terms of actual purchases -- and a desire to get more of them moving to turn more of a profit on that side of the docket. There is probably no one who checks that these two prices are in logical conversation with one another.

And so it is that Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is now the fifth in a very slowly growing gallery of movies I own on iTunes, which also include the following:

Black Adam (as discussed)
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (believe this was only available for purchase the year I needed to rank it; still have only watched that one time)
Duane Hopwood (only available for purchase when I watched it for a movie challenge some five years ago; I liked it a fair amount and could potentially watch it again)
Major League (an all-time favorite, though I still think it only joined my collection because there was no way to watch it for free at the time I wanted to watch it, sometime within the last decade. It has subsequently become available on streaming)

What will be the long-term fate of DNETMFTEOTW in terms of potential rewatches vs. just taking up (cloud) space? I hope to find this out in about 24 hours, and you'll know more when I release my rankings.

For what it's worth, in the same purchase session I was willing to spend $9.99 on a rental of We Live in Time, which will arrive in Australian cinemas only just before my deadline, so getting to it now was important. Or would have been, if I had ended up liking it as much as I usually like movies featuring Florence Pugh.

Keeping tabs on my opposite

As a movie guy, I'm naturally interested in what other people are watching on planes, especially on the long flights between the U.S. and Australia. With the people sitting around me, I always get to know what sorts of movies are calling out to them over the course of the flight. 

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? 

Finally answering the question about collateral nudity

Ever since we first started getting customized movie experiences on planes -- ones you could watch at your own seats, rather than on the dozen communal screens spread throughout the cabin -- I've always wondered what from those movies we'd have to trade off for the luxury.

Like, is it worth watching a movie on the plane if you aren't going to get all the nudity and blood and guts that it would have if you saw it in the theater, or in your own living room?

After all, the children still need to be protected. And though they can't hear all the naughty things the characters might be saying, a random shot of boobs tends to be very easily noticed. It grabs your attention even if you were wholly fixated on something else. In fact, you might not even need to catch it out of the corner of your eye. Among horny enough early teenagers, there might even be a sixth sense that boobs were available to be seen in the near vicinity. (Sadly, another change with the times is that available boobs are probably not even a novelty for early teenagers, who can watch whatever they want, whenever they want, on their phones.)

Most of the movies I've watched over the years that I've been flying to and from Australia, I've assumed would be available in pretty much their original form. But if I was ever unsure, I'd usually opt for something more family friendly instead, if I had any sense that I'd be getting only some fraction of what that movie had to offer.

Finally, after more than 17 years of trips to and from Australia, including what (by my count) is now 17 individual legs, I've seen somebody do something about this.

Before almost all of the six movies across two flights I watched during my 40-hour Wednesday -- which I may discuss separately in a post tomorrow -- the following message appeared:

If you can't read the fine print, it says "Please be mindful of those around you. If you feel that you or others may find this content offensive, please choose another title."

It may be that United has been running this warning for some time, but we usually fly Qantas, and probably would have had on this trip had my wife not gotten annoyed with them about the way they did or did not refund us on some previous trip.

There are a number of noteworthy things about a message like this:

1) It is asking you to be conscientious of others, which is a rare thing these days.

2) It is not designed specifically to protect children, but perhaps also any nuns or very elderly people who might be sitting next to you. 

3) It is also designed to protect you, in case you are a child, a nun or an elderly person, and don't have any idea what you're getting yourself into.

4) It confirms that you are, in fact, getting the pure and unadulterated version of the movie. I mean, if it's going to be The Human Centipede, they just don't make it available in the first place.

The profanity warning is interesting as that part can only ever be aimed at the viewer themselves, since there is no way to make the sound heard by anyone but someone wearing a pair of headphones. If the headphones came out -- which happened a lot of times for me on this flight as I wriggled and shifted -- then the movie continues without any sound. 

Then again, you probably also need to protect the lip readers in the child, nun and elderly communities. 

Airplane movies make a comeback

I guess if you don't have actual live baseball playing during a flight, the temptation of the internet is not a death knell for airplane movies after all.

You may recall that last week I discussed taking my first flight on which free WiFi was available. I followed that up on Sunday with my second such flight, where I doubled my single movie from the first flight, narrowly fitting in two to what was described as a 3 hour and 45 minute flight. (It took a little bit longer than that, as it turned out, because air traffic control had to slow us down to avoid congestion above Melbourne. Or so I am told that's what the pilot said. I could not hear him over the general white noise of the aircraft, in his typically calm and quiet pilot voice.) 

And because it was after all the day's baseball had been completed, I resisted the apparently irresistible pull of in-flight internet and got back to the basics of what I usually do on flights: watch movies.

Here are my thoughts on the two I watched.

How to set up 199 sequels

Will we ever tire of movies about exorcists? I suspect not. There's another Exorcist reboot coming this fall as well.

Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist was a fairly traditional example of such a movie, which is not to say it was bad. Actually, I quite enjoyed Russell Crowe's performance, injected as it is with a bit of humor.

But the movie apparently thinks we are ready for as many as 199 more in the Pope's Exorcist series. 

Spoiler alert -- Crowe's character, Gabriele Amorth, emerges alive from his tanglings with a demon, or the actual devil, or whatever it may be. So does his colleague, Father Esquibel, played by Daniel Zovatto. It is revealed that the place they do their battle is one of 200 such sites on earth where fallen angels turned to demons are waiting to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting people who happen to live nearby.

In discussing that their may be 199 more places where they are needed, the two characters give each other that knowing glance and say things like "We have been put on this earth for a purpose" and "Okay, but I can't do it without a partner" and "Let me check with my agent to see if I am available to shoot the sequel." Okay maybe not that last one.

When you see this familiar setup occurring at the end of a movie that is hopeful of giving birth to multiple subsequent franchise instalments, it doesn't usually expand the potential field of future engagements so infinitely, and with such a precise number. It felt rather comical. 

Also a bit comical: The family whose son gets possessed isn't checked in on before the closing credits, except for one priest telling another "The family returned to America and the boy made a full recovery." Now granted, this is supposed to be Crowe's character's story, not a portrait of the family, but it was almost as brief and hand wavy as "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet," albeit with a happier ending.

One possible limiting factor, at least in terms of the apparent intentions of the filmmakers, is that The Pope's Exorcist ends with a postscript about how Gabriele Amorth (a real person, apparently) continued performing exorcisms in service of the church until his death in 2016. Would you include such a postscript if you wanted to make 199 sequels? Perhaps it was a hedge against the film performing poorly and this being the only one.

However, the internet does confirm that a sequel is already in the works. Plus the story takes place in 1987, 29 years before Amorth's death, so that still indicates the possibility of numerous other demon-exorcising adventures in the years to come -- whether they be real or fanciful. Hey, it's worked for The Conjuring's Ed and Lorraine Warren, hasn't it?

Donnie Darko for the astronomy set

My wife started to watch BlackBerry on my recommendation, as I finally broke down her unfounded objections by telling her it would remind her of Silicon Valley. But she had to stop because she was enjoying it too much yet finding it too hard to hear all the dialogue over the aforementioned ambient white noise. We'll watch it together at home, which is good because I am looking forward to my second viewing. 

She had wanted to watch Cocaine Bear, which had been promised to her when she'd looked up online what might be playing on the flight. But either she checked in the wrong place or it had just hit its expiration date for available content. 

So I steered her blindly toward the second movie I planned to watch, Colin West's Linoleum, thinking she might get a few laughs from it because it stars comedian Jim Gaffigan, in addition to featuring Rhea Seehorn, recently of Better Call Saul.

Unfortunately, it wasn't that sort of movie.

And the sort of movie it was was, like, almost exactly Donnie Darko. 

I won't spoil too much about the plot, but I'll give you the general setup. Gaffigan plays the host of a science TV show like Bill Nye the Science Guy, focused specifically on astronomy, who gets booted from his show in favor of a younger man who looks almost just like him (also played by Gaffigan). So he considers trying to build a rocket to live out his failed astronomer dreams. Seehorn plays his wife and co-star on the show.

The number of allusions to Richard Kelly's 2001 cult film, a personal favorite, were so many that I had to stop counting. I'll do my best to recall them all here, two days later.

1) Both movies feature an object of unknown origin falling from the sky into a suburban neighborhood, displacing the family who lives in the house where it lands. It's part of a plane in Darko, a rocket in Linoleum.

2) Both films climax in a Halloween party at which someone is either run over or almost run over by a car. (Apparently, Linoleum is more hesitant in converting than Darko, as its car accident and rocket are both near misses, while the plane engine and the car are hits in the earlier film.)

4) Both movies present a high school setting in which an oddball boy and an oddball girl connect with one another, one of the two of them being new arrivals at the school. 

3) Both movies feature suburbia and high school as mild satirical targets, including the usage of bullies.

5) Both movies feature a mysterious white-haired woman, who they call Grandma Death in Donnie Darko and whose identity is not immediately revealed in Linoleum. (We find out Grandma Death is Roberta Sparrow, who wrote a book about time travel.)

6) Both movies feature a shot set to music where the camera follows several characters through a setting, the excellent "Head Over Heels" high school montage in Darko and an example at the TV station where the science show is produced in Linoleum. Both sequences even feature a character meeting another character and shaking hands. 

7) Both films want to fry our noodle with metaphysical and existential quandaries, with astronomy substituting for time travel here. But suffice it to say there are elements of the story that are not presented straightforwardly that imitate the notion of time travel.

8) Both movies try to get you in the end with an emotional denouement, with pretty different levels of success. 

I have no doubt Colin West would own up to all these moments as intentional allusions, not just thefts. But their sheer quantity becomes embarrassing, even if you are doing it as a form of flattery to an obvious influence.

Linoleum gets to some semi-interesting places, but falls well short of its predecessor, as well as mildly short of a recommendation from me.

And with one plane flight, order is restored in my movie-centric world. 

Stiff competition for airplane movies

I had a four-hour flight from Melbourne to Broome on Sunday. It was plenty of time for two movies, as long as they were short-ish -- or maybe not even so short, considering that we were on the tarmac for an extra 30 minutes at the start, with access to the entertainment system, as they fixed something wrong with one of the cargo straps.

I was lucky to get in one.

Granted, Benjamin Millepied's Carmen was 116 minutes, but the bigger obstacle -- and the cause for numerous pauses throughout the movie -- was being on my first-ever flight on which free WiFi was offered.

Free WiFi, of course, meant messaging people about my free WiFi -- "I'm sending you a message -- FROM AN AIRPLANE!" -- as well as what seemed like a true luxury for me: watching live baseball during a flight.

One of my fantasy pitchers was pitching during the flight, making it all the more special. (And potentially nerve-wracking on the second-to-last day of the matchup, had I not earned the bye week in my fantasy baseball playoffs.)

Fortunately, the baseball was laggy enough that I only watched it in little pieces here and there. But then I was also checking other scores, reading baseball news ... in short, all the things I usually have to do as soon as the plane lands.

If this is going to be the standard going forward, airplane movies may be in trouble. 

Now, it may not be. These circumstances were somewhat unusual. We flew Qantas, our preferred airline and one of the most consistently generous on in-flight options, but we flew it domestic, which we almost never do. In fact, we only rare fly domestically anyway, as international travel is more common for us. To my knowledge, you still don't get free WiFi on the international flights, though it's been a year since I've taken one of those on Qantas. (Our flight to Vietnam earlier in the year was a different airline.)

But if I do have free WiFi, especially on an international flight, I think the days when I collect four or five new movies on a flight may be gone. It's just too much of a temptation to resist, even if it is only things like playing Lexulous and Wordle, or checking Facebook.

And how much did an internet distraction impact my feelings on Carmen?

Well I can't say I would have liked it a lot more without pausing, but I liked it quite a bit. And since I obviously missed its theatrical run, it was going to be a paused viewing regardless.

Yeah, you should definitely check out Millipede's movie -- I mean, Millepied's movies. Does having a thousand feet make you a better director? Whether that's the case or not, I really liked his modern-day take on the opera, starring Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera, though I did check Wikipedia after the fact and determined the actual story here (a border town romance) only has a very few things in common with Georges Bizet's work. Having a thousand feet does apparently make you a better dancer, as Millepied is a dancer himself and dancing features memorably and romantically in the film.

I suppose I could have checked Wikipedia during the movie, but what can I say -- I have not worked out all the advantages of in-flight WiFi just yet.

Viewing conundrums across the international date line

Whenever we used to fly east across the Pacific Ocean from Australia to the United States, the flight would leave in the morning Melbourne time. Not early morning, but like 11 a.m. This brought you in to Los Angeles at something like 8:30 a.m. on the same day, making for one very loooong day. All the movies I watched on the flight were part of this one day. 

For some reason -- COVID? -- that's changed now. The flight leaves at night. Our flight was at 9 p.m., bringing us in to Los Angeles at 6:30 p.m. Which I thought would be fantastic, since we'd only have to stay up a few more hours before going to sleep -- theoretically getting on the new time zone that much faster.

Well, tell that to the worst jet lag I've ever had. After six nights in the United States, I've still only had full night sleeps with the assistance of a sleep aid, and even those were not always as effective as I expected them to me. There was one night -- the second night -- when I slept nary a wink. In fact, at about 4:30 I gave up trying and watched The Amazing Spider-Man, which I'd never seen, on Netflix. 

But I'm not here today to talk about jet lag.

I did want to tell you about how I saw a movie on July 26th, then a movie on July 27th, then two more movies on July 26th, then two more movies on July 27th.

What, Vance? you say. That's impossible.

Au contraire mon frere. And the later departure time had everything to do with it.

See, when you leave in the late morning, you cross the international dateline in the same day. But not when you leave at night. 

As far as I can tell, though the internet has been anything but helpful on this, you cross the international dateline about six hours after leaving Melbourne. If you leave at 11 a.m., that means you cross at about 5 p.m. Melbourne time, effectively staying in the same date on which you left. 

If you leave at 9 at night, though, that means it's about 3 a.m. the day after you left when you cross, before you jump back into the previous day. Whole different story in terms of assigning dates to my movies on my movie list.

Father Stu, the first film I watched on the flight, quite clearly belonged to Tuesday, July 26th, the day I left terra firma. But the second movie, the new reboot of Scream, was not quite so straightforward. If I didn't watch all of it before those six hours elapsed, I watched enough of it to count it toward whatever day it was for me that day. And since most of the viewing would have come between midnight and 3 a.m. Melbourne time, it was a Wednesday, July 27th viewing for all intents and purposes.

By the time I started Kimi, I had time warped back to Tuesday, which was also the day I watched The Duke. (And this answers my question about whether movies on the streamers would be available. Kimi is part of Steven Soderbergh's ongoing deal with HBO, so without this flight I might not have seen it. It's ended up being my favorite film I've seen since we left.)

Then on our next flight to Indianapolis, which was well and truly on American Wednesday after a night in an LAX hotel, I saw Marry Me and Sundown. 

So this is how it looks in my "movie order" document:

Father Stu (7/26/22)
Scream (2022) (7/27/22)
Kimi (7/26/22)
The Duke (7/26/22)
Marry Me (7/27/22)
Sundown (7/27/22)

So it's in chronological order, even if the dates are not.

Of course, this does not work on Letterboxd, the other place I record the order of my movie viewings. A movie on a later date cannot appear before a movie on an earlier date, for obvious reasons. So Scream comes after The Duke but before Marry Me on there. 

And hey! This "crazy" phenomenon gave me the excuse to write my first post from this trip. There figure to be more.

What will this flight have in store for me?

As you know if you've been catching the hints I've been dropping here and there -- well, more than a hint in yesterday's post -- I'm leaving to fly to America tomorrow night. This will likely be my last post before I leave, and I'm not coming back until August 20th.

How much I post while I'm gone will depend on how busy I am and how much my experiences inspire me to write. It might end up seeming like a relatively normal flow of content -- like one every three days on average -- or I might write nothing at all. I think I'll post at least once because I have one post almost in the can, and I plan to put it up at some point after the calendar flips to August. (No need for secrecy here: It's my monthly post on my old film rankings, this time for the year 2000.)

The last time I made the 14-hour flight to the United States was three years ago. Twice, actually -- once in August and then again in November. 

It was a different world then. Streaming was already a formidable player, but not nearly what it has become since 2019. Perhaps more significantly, the whole release strategy for movies has since been reconsidered in light of the pandemic.

Now I'm wondering: What movies are actually going to be available to watch on this flight?

The Qantas catalogue has always been a good one, always containing more new releases than I can fit in, even when I'm working overtime to squeeze them in. Then there are older movies I've already seen, which I have watched on occasion, though typically only for a specific reason. Like, in 2019 I was rewatching movies to consider them for my best of the 2010s, and my fourth viewing of Creed came in this setting.

It seems like the older movies are likely to play a bigger role this time around. 

Given how much of a person's annual viewing has shifted to movies released exclusively on Netflix or Amazon or AppleTV+, I'm wondering if I will detect a noticeable deficit in the offerings. Fewer movies have snuck by me at the cinemas as a result of this big shift to day-and-date availability on a streaming service, and most of the big streaming movies don't sneak by me either because I subscribe to those services. 

However, I also don't think the total numbers of movies are decreasing. I just don't know if Netflix or Amazon or AppleTV+ would have a deal with the airlines to show their content. I don't remember noticing that Netflix movies were available on the plane, in any case -- and it may just be that my mind skipped over them because I'd already watched them.

Usually when I get on a plane for the next 14 hours, I'm licking my lips at what the options will be, already having some idea of the movies I'd missed that year and surmising that this would be a great opportunity to catch up with them. 

But this time? Few titles are leaping to mind. 

I didn't see the Scream remake, and it will probably be available, but will it be a sanitized version to avoid the collateral damage of children walking down the aisle and seeing what I'm watching? I tend to avoid R-rated movies on the plane because I want to get the "real" version of them.

Alex Garland's Men would be a prime choice, since I did miss that one as well, due to two other reviewers on my site doing a joint review of it. But I've heard the ending is really gross, which also suggests it also is probably NSFP (not suitable for plane).

Weirdly those are the only two that jump to mind.

Obviously there are other movies I missed this year. Clearly there were. I'm not on some sort of heroic or historic movie-watching pace in 2022. In fact, if anything, I may be a little behind where I've been in previous years.

But as we've pointed out, the world is no longer like what it was in previous years. 

I guess I will just wait and see -- and maybe be happily surprised, though who knows. Maybe it will be worth a post after the fact to let you know how things have changed ... in case you are also contemplating your first international trip since the pandemic began.

And if I don't have the time to write that post ... well, I'll be sure to pop in and say hello sometime else before August 20th, in any case.

Bleeping airplane movies

One of only two times I've ever flown first class -- both times by lucky upgrade, I can assure you -- was travelling to my cousin's wedding in Atlanta in 1999. This was probably also the first time I privately watched a movie on my own seatback entertainment system. I still remember today that the movie was Croupier, one of Clive Owen's earliest films, and sort of a breakout for him -- though I personally didn't dig it. I remember it because I wasn't sure whether we'd get to see the full, unedited version of the movie on the plane. Once Alex Kingston, erstwhile of ER, disrobed part of the way through, I had my answer, and was thrilled by the possibilities of private airplane entertainment.

Well, that was then, this is now.

I certainly understand that particular images must be edited out of movies on planes, because there's no way to control which content is randomly witnessed by which small children wandering which aisles. What I don't understand, though, is why the dialogue must be edited on a movie that you have chosen to watch privately, through headphones only.

Yet that was predominantly the case on the five flights I took during my recent trip to the U.S., a trip whose jet lag is still affecting me a full four days after I returned.

I first noticed it during Begin Again, John Carney's better-than-expected follow-up to Once. One "No freaking way" might have been written into the script, but when it was followed up quickly by a "bullcrap," I knew that I was, indeed, involved in a very bullcrap situation. My viewing of the movie was not necessarily tainted, as I still really enjoyed it. But I wondered whether the full, unfiltered version would have satisfied me all the more. I imagined Mark Ruffalo dropping real f-bombs, rather than these little f-bellyflops, and knew that I had missed out on something.

I followed that up with The Fault in Our Stars, figuring that a movie intended for teenage girls would probably have a pre-approved, profanity-free dialogue track. Nope. This one was edited too, even with probably fewer than ten instances of naughty language overall.

Seeking to move toward greater certainty of a clean and unedited product, I selected period pieces as my next two movies on the flight: Belle and Magic in the Moonlight. These two also carried warnings about editing for content, though I did not notice anyone calling anything "bullcrap" in turn of 19th century England.

And though I liked all of these films quite a bit, dolling out three four-star ratings and considering a fourth such rating (Fault just ran on too long after hitting its sublime stride midway through), I did feel a bit cheated by Qantas Airlines for giving me a neutered and sanitized version of these movies. Aren't Australians supposed to be less prudish about language? You'd think so -- people swear on regular TV here.

I suppose the thinking is that a really savvy kid -- okay, even a halfway savvy kid -- could easily watch something verboten when his/her parent or parents are asleep. On a flight as long as the one from Australia to the U.S., there are ample opportunities to sneak in some forbidden viewing. I guess the airline thinks it's its responsibility to minimize that potential.

So, figuring I needed to head toward even more kiddie material the next day on my United flight from Los Angeles to Boston, I watched a Disney movie (Maleficent) and a Dreamworks movie (How to Train Your Dragon 2). Both appear to have been unmolested.

What really got my goat was when I was flying the fourth flight, from Denver to Los Angeles (the third, from Boston to Denver, had no video screens to speak of), and I paid good money for DirecTV in order to watch the inferior comedy Tammy. Even this was bleeped, though I suppose only a hint of Melissa McCarthy's grotesque shtick goes a long way. (Making matters more annoying, I was supposed to get $2 off per DirecTV rental if I bought at least three with the same card -- but my credit card statement did not show the discount.)

Imagine my surprise, then, when the first movie on my return trip to Australia -- Wish I Was Here -- included an f-bomb in the very first scene, as well as Zach Braff's bare ass in a masturbation scene just a few minutes later.

Huh?

So some movies are edited for language/content, but not all of them? Or did Qantas randomly loosen its standards in the two weeks between my first trip across the Pacific and my second one?

The next movie was Earth to Echo, a kids movie anyway, but then I got little bursts or profanity in both What We Do in the Shadows and These Final Hours, to finish out the trip. These Final Hours even included an orgy scene with a bunch of naked boobs, bringing us full circle to Croupier.

My ultimate conclusion is that if there was a dubbed version of the movie, they chose that one, but if there wasn't, they chose the full, unedited, R-rated version -- and didn't give it a second thought.

*shrug*