Things to do on a 12-hour flight: Constantine, Melinda, Co

Since I don’t have cable, I’ve been able to avoid that time sucking activity of surfing around movie channels and watching 2/3 of a movie I might otherwise have never seen. However, being stuck on an airplane for a dozen plus hours, and having made the serious mistake of only bringing along heavy reading (Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom), I was afforded the opportunity to see (most of) the following movies:

In Good Company
This was the Wietz brothers combining the upbeatness of About a Boy with the inconsequence of American Pie. Not really a good combo, but a great cast. Dennis Quaid sure is rugged. And that Topher Grace fellow is pretty good, although it was pretty airy material for him. He’s supposed to be a villain in the next Spider-Man movie? And I think it’s really funny when Scarlett Johanssen is cast as a girl who goes to college in New York City and has trouble making friends. Yeah, right. I’m sure boys would avoid her like the plague. Ever since I saw her in Ghost World, I’ve thought she’s far too hot to play real people.

Constantine
Because I missed a good deal of this one, I only got a general idea of what they were going for and I actually didn’t mind it, considering the alternative (reading the in-flight magazine). I’m sure not buying Keanu as the hard-boiled character this Constantine fellow is probably supposed to be. But I enjoyed the premise and really dug the scene with a) Tilda Swinton (Tilda Swinton!) as the angel Gabriel with huge wings and a bunch of medical bracelets on her/his wrists, and b) Peter Stormare (Peter Stormare!) as the devil, who is apparently a total goofball, kind of like the wacky Russian astronaut on the Mir in Armageddon. And good production design. I liked the look of the movie.

Melinda and Melinda
Will Ferrell does lines obviously written by and for Woody Allen. Interesting, but ultimately far too self-indulgent and too full of really annoying characters in search of a better Woody Allen movie.

The Love Boat
Holy cats, was TV really this bad back in the 70s? Holy. Cats. I did a fair amount of drugs and drinking in my younger years, but if the episode of The Love Boat I watched was typical, I must have sustained far more brain damage from television.

-Tom

The only thing worse than bad TV like this on the in-flight entertainment system, is a seat mate who finds this sort of thing uproariously funny. My seat mate was slapping his knees and laughing out loud. Thank god they are only half hour shows!

But I agree that the in-flight entertainment is an awesome idea, especially on a long or delayed flight. There is nothing better to idle away the hours than TV.

And for those of you jonesing for a Love Boat meets crime-drama type experience, check out Las Vegas with James Caan. It’s like a crime-drama with a bunch of cheezy cameos by actors and musicians (so far I’ve seen John Elway, Ashanti, Black Eyed Peas, Bon Jovi, and many others).

I am always looking for something to fill my new regular 5 hour flight. In flight movies have an extra problem for about half my flights, the freaking headphone jack is messed up where i can’t get clean sound.

The best thing I have found, a PSP so I can play mule on one of the emulators. Mule games take about an hour or so. They are easy to pause or get out of, not to straining but fun. Between take-off/landing and drink service, the flight is over before i know it.

For longer flights I take Melatonin and just sleep most of it away.

Chet

I used the earbud from my MP3 player one of the last times I flew. The in-flight system had a double jack gizmo, but my single jack plug fit into one of the jacks well enough and to my surprise I got a stereo channel.

I’m not a huge comic fan but I loved Constantine. Great cast, especially Gabriel (“You’re fucked.”) and Satan (great little touch with pulling the lighter away when C. is trying to light a cigarette!), although the policewoman was rather bland. If you watch the entire film, the Constantine character is really less of a badass and more of a chain-smoking loser who accidentally got the ability to slay demons, so Keanu Reeves with his typical unhealthy, confused, and somewhat bedraggled look was just about perfect for the part.

Bringing Absalom, Absalom is never a “serious mistake.” NEVER.

Hard-boiled British character, specifically. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m sure he didn’t pull that off, either, since the only accent Keanu can do is Keanuish.

Bringing Absalom, Absalom is never a “serious mistake.”

Yeah, right. Let’s see you read Faulkner while you’re shoehorned onto a 12-hour flight full of tourists, Frenchmen, and screaming children.

The comic book Constantine is British? Ouch. Didn’t Keanu attempt an accent in Dracula, maybe? I forget.

At any rate, here they had him just being kind of terse, which worked well enough but made me think how it should have been someone better, someone good enough to go beyond dialogue. Maybe Jude Law or Benecio del Toro. I kind of wish it has been an older, wearier actor. Jeremy Irons fighting demons would rock.

Also, it looks like they made him quit smoking. When he assembles his badass demon gun (which looked quite silly really), he blows away his pack of smokes. And at the end of the movie when he’s doomed back to life, there’s a fake-out shot where it looks like he’s lighting a cigarette. But really it’s just gum. Psyche!

Anyway, I guess I’m going to have to drop it into my Netflix queue so I can see the rest of it.

-Tom

The only thing worse than bad TV like this on the in-flight entertainment system, is a seat mate who finds this sort of thing uproariously funny. My seat mate was slapping his knees and laughing out loud. Thank god they are only half hour shows!

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I’m pretty sure Love Boat is an hour long show. Do they cut it down or something, or do you mean without commercials (where it is probably 40-45 minutes)?

In college we used to play The Love Boat Drinking Game, affectionately called Killer Boat. I don’t remember all the rules but here are some of them:

Any mention of the Aloha Deck, drink.

Isaac makes a drink, drink.

Doc makes a diagnoses, drink.

Implied sex, drink.

If there’s a woman in a bikini lying next to the pool with one leg arched, drink. (Happened much more often than you’d think.)

If Florence Henderson, Burt Convey, or Cloris Leachman are guest stars, chug one (each, if all three were on you were basically fucked.)

If little Vicki ever loses her virginity, chug three. (Never happened, but we were always on the lookout.)

Oh, I’m quite happy he didn’t. I assumed the UK-to-USA conversion was for accessibility reasons for an American audience.

Honestly, Reeves was far down the list of things I didn’t like about the film. He actually did quite well with his lines.

Yeah. He doesn’t kiss the girl or smoke the cig! Leave ‘em wanting for the sequel (that they’ll never make)! Also, it’s comic book fanboy nitpicky I GUESS, but Constantine has, after topping 200 issues and counting, yet to quit smoking. Also, he always shag^H^H^Hkisses the girl. And he never uses guns (well, just once, and it was a plain ol’ revolver, not a GILDED HELLGUN STREETSWEEPER).

You do that, Chick. You do that.

While he wasn’t John Constantine Hellblazer, he did pretty good.
And he does smoke a lot with a reason for that end shot… ok, its a bit heavy handed “dont smoke kids” message, but it beats all the non-smokers on film these days.

All in all, it was much better than I ever thought it would be. A silly story and some great characters. Strangely enough, the minute I saw crazy Russian Mir Satan, I thought of Tom and the love we share for Armageddon.
Why are only Scandinavians really good at playing The Dark Lord?

Because “In the mountains of Norway, where the weather is cold, there’s nothing to do except kill each other and play guitars in the snow.”

Didn’t he attempt something in Dangerous Liaisons?

-Amanpour

Keanu’s ability to do an british accent is incidental. If they were going to be true to the comic character they wouldn’t have set the movie in LA, and they would have found a blonde to play Constantine.

It occurs to me that Stormare’s Dark Lord also has a touch of ‘Give us the MO-ney Lebowski or we fucks you up’. But yeah, all around, he’s my kinda Satan.

-Tom

I didn’t think they had that message. It was just a (somewhat ham-fisted) way to illustrate that Constantine is no longer the fatalistic who-cares-it-all-ends-in-Hell-anyway cynic that he used to be.

Speaking of Dracula, it was on sale at Fry’s for $7 so I picked it up. Worst purchase ever. It was so bad I literally couldn’t finish watching it, even though I hadn’t gotten to the part with Anthony Hopkins yet. I figured he makes almost any movie good (Mission Impossible 2? The first 10 minutes are way better than the remaining 1:50 just because of him). Couldn’t stomach it here, though.

On the up side, after popping that out, I decided to put in the original X-Men movie. It’s even better than I remembered. Easily the best superhero movie I’ve seen (I never understood all the hoopla around Spider-Man). Really good script, actually, is the main thing. And Ian McKellen.

It occurs to me that Stormare’s Dark Lord also has a touch of ‘Give us the MO-ney Lebowski or we fucks you up’. But yeah, all around, he’s my kinda Satan.

-Tom[/quote]

I haven’t seen it yet, but being a big fan of the comic I was hoping that the devil would be more Fargo Stormare than Lebowski Stormare

Hard-boiled British character, specifically. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m sure he didn’t pull that off, either, since the only accent Keanu can do is Keanuish.

It’s ok, the film producers figured it would take less time and be cheaper just to train us all to speak Keanu instead. Hence he now has a perfect british (eh?) accent.