What happens when you lose track of movies as stories, as self-contained constructed objects, and start thinking of them as ghostly records of dead people moving through lost locations in a piece of time that you can never recover? What do you say to that, Mrs. Jean-Paul?
Day: November 29, 2005
enjoyable crap
another catch-all thread–this time for disposable entertainment that goes down easy but doesn’t warrant much analysis. recently in this genre for me: the flight of the phoenix via hbo ondemand. apparently, this is a remake of some b-movie from the 60s. i don’t know if i would have been happy paying $8.50 for this but free it was worth every cent. a bunch of people crash-landed/stranded in the gobi desert (which looks suspiciously like the sahara) rebuild their plane and fly out (what? did the name of the film not already give this away?). dennis quaid as a bit of an arrogant jackass whose arrogance causes the crash (but no one seems too upset when they find out); giovanni ribisi having a very good time as a fop of uncertain origin (in the role originally played by hardy kruger!); and a lot of sandstorms. in many ways this was like a slimmed down version of “lost”: a bunch of people stranded in the middle of nowhere with no one coming for them, danger both from nature and from “others”, one passenger who reveals remarkable hidden abilities; but most importantly: no stupid backstories. unfortunately, also no evangeline lilly. but you can’t have everything.
as homer would say, “i didn’t learn a thing”–except maybe to not go out alone to pee in the dark in the middle of a sandstorm–and thank god for that.