Blog From The Bench

I saw two unplanned movies this weekend because friends hauled me to Serenity and Flightplan. Interestingly enough they eneded up as #1 and #2 at the box office, so my usually indpendent minded arthouse mentality was assualted by commerce and slick pop product. I would have to say it was a good news/bad news situation, and an ironic coupling that showcased why I usually avoid the theatre aisles more traveled.

Flightplan was dreck. Originally the film was to star Sean Penn, but he passed and Jodie Foster came on board and even kept the name "Kyle" (because she's a touch butch). I wish they had kept the wife character too, and played it as a lesbian couple with a child. That would have been real progress though, and also would have endangered the box office in the Midwest. And Flightplan is all about the box office. Foster is a great actress, and she pulls off the first half of the film without a hitch. To her credit the movie is smarter than it should have been at first. Then the damn thing implodes in a series of random stupid plot devices with logical holes large enough to crash the plane through. It becomes Panic Plane, and this time no Fincher to darken things up or make them smarter. I hate movies that start smart and end dumb. You'll figure out who did it long before Jodie's character does, and you'll cringe when you find out how she finally defeats them.

Serenity has the opposite problem. It's Joss Wheedon, so it's too smart for it's own good. It's a wonderful sci fi action adventure with good dialogue, and an interesting plot. But like all things Joss, it requires a cult mentality to really appreciate it. Seems he was just making a big screen season finale to wrap up his cancelled Firefly series. Nobody watched it when it aired on the Fox Network, so this is really just a shout out to the fans who bought the DVDs. Neat idea in theory, not so practical for big box office. I didn't watch the show on DVD, and I only caught half of one episode on Fox when it was running. I felt like I was coming into something late, and that feeling lasted throughout the whole film. It was like watching Return of the Jedi without having seen any other Star Wars film. I liked it better than Flightplan, but I still wasn't as into it as the fans who obviously made up the rest of the theatre.

Two crowd pleasers - one made me cringe because it was so dumb, and the other was shooting right over my head because I hadn't seen a television show that nobody watched. Odd pair! Too smart for one, and not schooled enough for the other.