Flightplan

Directed by Robert Schwentke
Written by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray

After T. told me that he didn't feel like seeing Proof for the second week in a row, I decided all on my own to go see Flightplan instead. Just cos, you know, Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster, you know?

Here, Foster plays Kyle Pratt, an aircraft engine engineer whose husband has just died. Unable to quite deal, she's decided to take her daughter (and her husband's body) and move from Berlin back into her parents' house on Long Island.

They're all flying on the (ginormous) plane whose engines she's designed, so she seems to get a weird, low-level VIP treatment - she has a badge from the company and is allowed to board the plane several minutes before all the other passengers start to file in en masse, yet she has to sit in coach, and none of the attendants or pilots appear to know who she is.

This all becomes very important later. Well, maybe not the badge.

Kyle and daughter (and everyone else) soon fall asleep. A bit later, Kyle wakes up and daughter is gone. She looks around for her. She asks everyone else if they've seen her. No one has seen her. In fact, no one can remember EVER having seen her. In fact, there is no record that the daughter ever boarded the plane. In fact, a call to the morgue back in Berlin says that her daughter died in the same accident (OR WAS IT??) that killed her husband.

As Kyle becomes increasingly unhinged (and passengers get increasingly inconvenienced, therefore antagonistic), we're all asking, has she lost her mind? Does the daughter exist? Has she been kidnapped? Is this all part of some insidious conspiracy? Who can we trust? Where's God, etc.?

I will not here tell you the answers to or reasons for all the misunderstanding in this The-Lady-Vanishes-meets-Panic-Room-...in-space! (now with added post-911 fearmongering - watch for the obligatory let's-blame-the-arabs scene, and then watch how it is "resolved" in the end) pastiche, but only say that, for all the set-up, said answers and reasons turn out to be disappointly, almost depressingly, mundane. Maybe that's the point. I don't know. At least The Forgotten had space aliens in it.

Foster gives a predictable performance, that is to say, it's very good, just nothing new. She's fragile and moody, then shows her undershirt and magically becomes Lara Croft. Ho-hum. But after the failure (on several levels) of a film like The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys and the (relative) success of, oh, say, Panic Room, can you blame her?

Peter Sarsgaard (as the initally nice-ish but increasingly creepy air marshall), though, I'm liking more and more with everything I see him in.

Sean Bean, who I've seen a million times though I can't for the life of me remember what, is also pretty good as the grizzling captain who has to weigh the safety of his 435 passengers against the implications of what has (possibly) happened to this one (possibly) deranged woman.

So, Flightplan doesn't completely suck, it just...kinda sucks. The pieces don't really fit. It's like those MPC Alpha Fighters that they sell at Robotech.com. They don't quite transform all the way, and the cannon doesn't really sit very nice on the hands, and bits keep breaking off of it, but they sure do look nice, and hell, you just spent eighty bucks on the thing. (Well, you did. I surely did not.)

P.S. I am officially never flying again. (Super-spoilery text: copy/paste into your favorite text-editing or word-processing program and increase font to read:) Now you can't even trust the air marshall. The air marshall!

Trailer watch:

Jarhead - why am I the only one who thinks this movie looks like utter crap? Well, Jamie Foxx aside, it looks like Mendes has got a pretty capable cast to work with, so I guess we'll just see. On cable.

North Country - ah, Oscar-bait. Next.

Memoirs of a Geisha - it's not so much the fact that everyone's speaking English that bugs me, it's that they all have accents.

Casanova - that same old faux-foreign-so-it's-"arty"-but-it's-in-English-so-it's-safe swill squirted out of Harvey Weinstein and Lasse Halstrom's collective diarrhetic sphincter this time every year.

Glory Road - an inspiring tale of one man'szzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

August Home Video Roundup

Not a great month for new(ish) video rentals, unfortunately, though I have been catching up on plenty of TV show box sets (Mary Tyler Moore, Angel, Buffy. I think I'm giving up on Clamp's X, though, even though I'm more than halfway through -- it's totally a show where after the first three or four episodes you know exactly where it's going, and exactly how it's going to end, and then have to sit through a maddening 7 more discs before you get there). Also finally saw The Specials (sort of a wittier, lower-budget Mystery Men) starring Rob Lowe and Thomas Haden Church, which I found enjoyable (warning to Melissa Joan Hart fans: she's only it for all of forty seconds. Warning to Melissa Joan Hart haters: Melissa Joan Hart's in it).

On to the new(ish) movies!

Off the Map (dir. Campbell Scott, wr. Joan Ackermann) - Actor Campbell Scott's directorial debut, unfortunately, is notable only for the fact that it is actor Campbell Scott's directorial debut. His story about a tax-dodging Wilderness Family (Joan Allen, Sam Elliot, Valentina de Angelis) (remember The Wilderness Family? That shit used to be on tv ALL the time! Now it's NEVER on. I haven't seen that movie on TV since maybe 1989. Also, Pipi), the IRS guy (Jim True-Frost) who is sent to track them down, gets stung by a bee, decides to live with the family and inexplicably become an artist was all over the map (sorry) thematically. I get the sense that Scott wanted to make a subtle, ensemble, alt-family drama, but never really got a handle on what this movie was actually about. I know I certainly did not.


Diary of a Mad Black Woman (dir. Darren Grant, wr. Tyler Perry) - I saw this movie for the exact same reason I suspect a lot of people wound up seeing this movie: I wanted to see if it really was as bad as I'd heard. My conclusion is: yes, it is. But it's also a little more interesting than most people are giving it credit for.

Yes, the humor (courtesy one multiple-role-playing, cross-dressing Tyler Perry, whose character Madea is the subject of many a highly-popular stage production, all written by Perry himself) is unbelievably corny, vaudevillian at best, and it's made all the more awkward because it is completely tacked onto an extraordinarily self-important and melodramatic story -- Kimberly Elise plays Helen, the titular "mad black woman" (and it's "mad" as in angry, though she does have her moments, and completely contrary to popular wisdom, not to mention common sense, that the titular character is in fact Madea, and it's "mad" as in "insane", which Madea gleefully is, and I love grammar, don't you?) is left by her husband (Steve Harris) for a white woman - will she ever learn to love again? (It's Shemar Moore so, you know, duh) -- which is derivative of any number of Terry MacMillan novels or every Lifetime movie, ever (and don't even get me started on that final scene of the movie, derivativeness-wise). It's like simultaneously watching two completely separate movies, with the "serious" plot infitely funnier than the "comedy".

Much of the criticism/discussion of the film that I read dealt with how unfunny the film was (yes), how derivative it was (yes), and whether or not such-and-such characters are or are not incredibly offensive racist stereotypes (possibly, though no more so than Eddie Murphy in any of his Klump roles, or the very existence of Chris Tucker), but I don't think anything I've read deal with what this movie is actually about: forgiveness. And when the final act of forgiveness comes, it actually comes against the wishes and expectations of the Madea character, and I'd imagine against those of much of the audience as well. In this sense, I find it very interesting the way that Perry portrays Madea as a sort of vox populi, even as Perry the writer subverts even his own expectations. It's a complex dynamic in a film that celebrates actions which are radical in their very Christian-conservativeness.

I don't recommend the movie, because on top of it being very corny and unoriginal, it is also just plain not very good. I'm just saying, don't believe everything you read.