In-flight movies should entertain, distract from crying babies
Some movies make spectacular cinema. Some make fantastic fodder for the likes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And some movies are simply meant to be in-flight movies.
In-flight movies are the chips and salsa of the film industry: They are always nice to have around to take the edge off boredom but are in no way substantial or significant. I used to look down on such movies and still do prefer the often darker and inevitably more complex films of the independent film industry. But as I sat on a commuter jet over winter break with a baby screaming in my ear, I found myself craving the intellectually empty diversion of a good in-flight movie.
Unfortunately, I had no such film on my flight, so I distracted myself by detailing what exactly qualifies a movie for the dubious honor of being an in-flight film.
First and most obviously, an in-flight movie must appeal to broad audiences. It must capture and lull the nervous tensions of many people from different cultures who are trapped together in a small space much higher off the ground than anyone really wants to be. Consequently, natural disasters are generally not good plot twists to throw into an in-flight movie.
Bearing that in mind, a good in-flight movie must be fairly tame in all aspects. Controversial plots or characters can upset some passengers and add to the tension of the flight, rather than soothing it away. While many of us would love to watch a film about an idealized, homosexual-friendly Bohemian culture planning social revolution in the streets of New York City as we fly from home back to campus, no one can be sure when a score of social conservatives will book a flight with us and request that the flight attendants remove such filth from the screen.
Sports flicks used to be a good bet. As long as passengers could ignore the implications of steroid use, who didn’t get that warm and fuzzy feeling of triumph when the underdog rookie hit the game-winning home run?
But recently, movies such as Friday Night Lights and Cinderella Man have put drama and pain back into sports films. They make better movies, no doubt, but they are growing less appropriate for airplanes.
What does that leave? PG-rated romantic comedies, the bane of intellectual snobs all over the entertainment industry, make great in-flight movies. Not only do they generally avoid violence, terror and other strong passions, but the characters they feature tend to have bland, accessible personalities. They fall into cookie-cutter, predictable romances that have cookie-cutter, predictable, happy endings that pacify most passengers into a short nap before landing.
Additionally, in-flight movies should not be blockbusters or movies that received stellar reviews from the likes of Ebert and Roeper. If an airline makes the mistake of screening such a film, many passengers will have already seen it and some will inevitably complain that they are being forced to watch the movie again.
The standard response — “You don’t have to watch the movie just because it is on the screen” — never suffices to ease these complaints, either. Unless a passenger has another distraction on which to concentrate — and most people underestimate how hard it is to read a book or work on a computer with flight attendants buzzing through the aisles — it is difficult to avoid staring at the rows of screens in the plane.
Stripping all controversial and blockbuster movies from a list of possible in-flight flicks can leave slim pickings for airlines. Luckily for them, entertainers such as Hugh Grant (Love Actually) and screenwriter Nora Ephron (You’ve Got Mail) stay in business by exploiting the genre of the bland movie to its fullest. So while I would have welcomed the distraction of a good in-flight movie, when the captain called for our landing, I couldn’t wait until I was on the ground so I could seek out more interesting, multifaceted cinema.
Julia Bursten is a Lovett College sophomore and arts and entertainment editor
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