Two weeks ago I flew on British Airways from the US to Heathrow. My partner and I watched a movie. On the way back, we realized that neither of us could remember what we’d watched, or anything about it. We remember no actors and no plot points. We think it was a comedy. We think it wasn’t animated. I have a vague impression that it may have been rated PG.
I’ve looked at what’s playing in the dollar cinema. I’ve looked at Columbia House’s new releases and Netflix’s Top 100 comedies. BA’s website now shows only the September movies. I could e-mail BA and ask for a list of Eastbound long-haul movies for August, but where’s the fun in that?
So please–what movie do you think we saw? It’s probably not animated, it’s probably a comedy, and it was shown on BA in August.
Just to narrow it down a liitle - remember the part where one of the characters did or said something and then the main guy/gal responded in a possibly amusing manner? Was that nearer the start or end? Or in the middle perhaps.
Because it is amazing to me that two people could sit side by side watching a movie, then remember nothing at all about it two weeks later. Was it an amnesia-inducing film? Did BA put roofies in our Diet Cokes? Was the movie so bad that it destroyed part of our brains?
Obviously, the plane was caught by a tractor beam from a hidden Zoofloobian cruiser, the occupants probed and DNA samples taken, then returned to their seats with the memories of the past three hours erased from their brains.
You’ve been abducted, Shoshana!
Well, either that or you watched “From Justin to Kelly”…I know my brain would be trying to erase that 90 minutes or so.
Newsflash
My partner, who can’t sleep on planes, also watched Die Another Day and Spelling Bee on that flight. I didn’t. We agree that the Missing Movie probably wasn’t science fiction. She says that at one point we turned to each other and said, “This is pretty good.” Hope that helps.
It wasn’t postmodern. It was in color. It was not a heartwarming story about a child and a pet, or about animals against all odds. It wasn’t military. It wasn’t British.
On the way back, we watched The Da Vinci Code and re-watched *Prisoner of Azkaban. * Yet the Missing Movie eludes us.
This is actually the goal of the major Hollywood studios. By achieving this, they’re able to repackage the exact same Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan rom-com half a dozen ways and spank a cool $100M out of it each time. Ditto with Lindsay Lohan, Adam Sandler, and those interchangable Eddie Murphy Disney films. Heck, sometimes they just redub the voices, place different actors names in the credits, and send it out again; for instance, Yours, Mine, and Ours was just a redubbed version of Cheaper By The Dozen with just a few digital touch-ups to make the main characters look vaguely like Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo. (It’s not that hard, actually; Martin and Quaid have the exact shame shit-eating grin, so it’s basically just a hair-map and some rearranging of the scenes.)
Independence Day was actually cut together out of segments of Star Wars, War of the Worlds, the miniseries V, a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Battle Beyond The Stars, with a few conjuctionary scenes with Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith. Then there are John Grisham adaptations, which are unsuprisingly exactly the same, given that the source material is the same novel slightly reorganized and retitled. Even Scorsese–a guy who used to bounce from one genre to another–has gotten into the act. Ever since The Age of Innocence, he just keeps recuttting old films and digitially inserting Leonardo DiCaprio in place of Robert De Niro; if you look closely in the background of Gangs of New York you can see a young Jodie Foster walking down the street. Heck, even before that, he strung together Casino out of editting room wastage from Goodfellas, including the alternate cornfield scene where Tommy DeVito gets wacked. Then there are the Star Wars prequels; so bland and pointless it’s impossible to even keep them in order. You think that’s an accident?
A film that you can’t recall once you’ve left the cinema is exactly the magic formula Hollywood is looking for. The last thing they want is another Being John Malkovich or Cool Hand Luke. I mean, you have to figure out a whole new way of marketing each one. That’s enough to put a studio exec off of his 3 o’clock gin and tonic…and if you’ve seen those guys at happy hour, you know that this isn’t something they take lightly.
So…forget about it. Not only will you never figure it out, it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the same film you’ve been watching on BA for years.
No, though we did have to discuss this, especially since our cruise ship featured upside-down ceiling-mounted models of all the ships of the line, and we saw actual icebergs near Greenland on the way home. Thanks for playing, and enjoy our valuable parting gifts.
Your delightful bitterness only redoubles our resolve. It is true, however, that *The Family Stone, *featured in the bowels of BA’s first class library, is Meet the Fockers.