Flight planning

So after missing the industry screening of Flightplan due to a scheduling conflict last week, I attended a regular screening on the studio’s gracious dime this afternoon with a semi-packed, rapt-until-the-end (at which time I heard more than a few angry mumbles) crowd at the local Cineplex. It’s going to do better than I expected this weekend, I think, because of a lack of real competition (Corpse Bride probably attracts exactly the opposite demographic) and because the flick touches on a few of our exposed nerves in such a way as to attract folks looking for answers or, failing that, at least the succor of a popular entertainment that all but guarantees a happy ending. There’s the bogey of airline travel, sure, but losing a kid, being thought insane, suspecting a conspiracy against you, wondering if your leadership is competent, wondering if the Arab guy in row 11 has a bomb in his shoe, and so on. As a film, independent of its time, I’d say that Flightplan is a sub-mediocre Mildred Pierce lioness/cubs melodrama – but just like last year’s The Forgotten (a film that’s almost as interesting and almost as failed), the fear of “losing” a child in a metaphysical and literal sense is just piggybacking on last year’s spate of memory-manipulation films – and now this year’s semi-spate of airplane soapers (including TV’s “Lost” in that) that result in character studies of scary ethnicities and homegrown terrorists.

The audience was the best that I’ve had the good fortune to experience since the last time I saw a “civilian” show (A Sound of Thunder a couple of weeks ago) – giving credence to my idea that some people turn into jackholes when they’re given something for free – this audience all the more remarkable for its comparative size (about 200 people at 2:00pm in the afternoon). Not even a text-mailer, making me wonder if this film doesn’t skew “older” in respect to Foster’s audience and the subject matter. The ending though is going to be a problem for the flick’s longevity: I can’t see it lasting longer than four or five weeks of steadily-diminishing returns.

At home: in addition to the queue (“X-Files,” “Lost,” and a couple of Bruce Campbell flicks from Anchor Bay), watched four Robert Wise films on TCM including a fairly amazing Mitchum western called Blood on the Moon. In other news, Gilpin County’s great public library has hired me to do an October series. The theme? Ghost stories: The Innocents, Wise’s The Haunting, and The Sixth Sense, The Others, and A Tale of Two Sisters. If you’re in the area, they’re on Saturday afternoons: stay tuned.

In the pre-frontals: fascinated by Walter Salles’ Dark Water from this last summer, a film that I saw late and thus probably won’t review until/if we get a DVD to cover. Because I’m essentially an idiot – I mean “optimist” – I’m thinking that the fall season this year will be good enough to knock it off: but as of right this moment, Salles’ film is a dark horse for the end of year Top Ten list. I think it fits in here somewhere in discussions of this new cinema of the maternal that Quentin Tarantino started, maybe defined, with his Kill Bill pictures.

Do you suppose that it has something to do somehow (and how does it?) with our experiencing an attack on a civilian population? After all, the Japanese have been making films like this for almost six decades.