To do this, people on long flights often must learn to appreciate movies and TV shows that they would normally not give the time of day back on earth. It’s called "killing 14 hours from Tokyo to Newark," or whatever long-haul flight you happen to be on.
I’ve asked around, and there are numerous films that people are either ashamed to admit they liked, or have gushed about to disbelieving cineastes – films discovered high above the clouds, where bad movies should arguably be jettisoned forever.
For instance, you wouldn’t suspect it, but the Jim Carrey-Tea Leoni bomb Fun With Dick and Jane is actually kinda fun to watch, and manages to generate a few unapologetic laughs. I discovered this on a flight back from Indonesia (after I had originally snubbed the film heading in the opposite direction. This is a cardinal rule of in-flight entertainment: chances are, if you missed a crappy movie the first time around, you’ll get a second chance to scan it on the way home).
So, having done some writing on the Indonesia-Manila flight, a little reading, and yet finding myself still unable to sleep, I watched Carrey and Leoni mug their way through a remake of a bad ’70s George Segal-Jane Fonda comedy… and rather enjoyed it. In particular, the slow-motion shootout with water cannons on the front lawn cracked me up. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was jetlag.
But this is the thing about guilty in-flight pleasures: like an alcoholic blackout dimly recalled after the hangover, you can’t really recall what was so damned amusing at the time. And, more importantly, you wouldn’t want other people to know you enjoyed the experience. In fact, if you saw such a movie walking down the sidewalk toward you, you would probably try to hide your face and cross to the other side of the street. We’re not supposed to be caught dead watching bad Hollywood fodder, much less enjoying it.
Oh, but how, then, would we discover that something like Just Friends is a hoot in the old National Lampoon style, and that it’s nowhere near as generic as its crummy date-movie title? This one features Ryan Reynolds, Amy Smart, Chris Klein and Scary Movie alumnus Anna Faris. Ryan is a fat high school geek who pines after crush Amy Smart before shedding a few stone and becoming a hotshot music executive in LA. Typically, he returns to his hometown for a high school reunion, towing along his crazoid pop star girlfriend, Samantha (Faris), who rechannels the same brazen, brainless character she did in Lost in Translation – only turned up to "11."
On paper, this sounds kinda formulaic. But it’s got an undercurrent of sophomoric viciousness – combined with a sweetness absent from teen comedies since the first American Pie movie – that lifts it above the genre.
Ahem. But can we say the same of Just Like Heaven, a supernatural romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo? It may have generated few waves on release, but high above the Pacific Ocean, it actually grows wings. Actually, I caught this, not mid-air, but on a Greyhound bus from Manhattan to Boston. There was a certain chemistry there, with the always-trying Witherspoon as an in-between spirit attempting to spook Ruffalo out of her old apartment after she lapses into a coma in one of those "I shouldn’t have switched the radio station and taken my eyes off the road" cinematic car accidents. Solid, if stupid, laughs. You just have to check your brain at the door.
Then there’s She’s the Man, which my wife clued me into after watching it on the last leg of a return flight from South Africa. (It may be that exhaustion is a precondition for enjoying such movies.) Anyway, she loved this teen update of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which arguably provides more culture than an in-flight movie viewer deserves. Amanda Bynes (yes, Amanda Bynes) is quite good as a soccer-playing high school teen whose girl squad gets the axe, so she pretends to be her brother and transfers to a rival school to get on their team. No, I don’t recall any soccer matches in Twelfth Night, nor was there a catfight in a girl’s bathroom between three debutantes. But maybe Shakespeare’s play would have been improved by it.
Then there are movies that you would probably never watch again after landing, but seem like AFI Classics while in mid-air. Paul Schrader’s Affliction, for instance, was showing on a flight back from the US a few years back. I’d heard Nick Nolte was in rare form in this tale of paternal oppression, and somehow, on a seemingly endless pan-global flight, this tortured specimen of feel-bad cinema made perfect sense, including the part where Nolte performs visceral dental surgery on himself. Guess you had to be there.
Hey, even CSI Miami can seem eminently watchable at 36,000 feet. Normally, I cringe at the William Shatner tendencies of David Caruso – the one-liners delivered in his terse, singsong growl – but on a long flight, it’s really not all that bad, even with the low-IQ, hair-and-teeth squad of CSI agents assembled for the case.
On the other hand, even my three-year-old daughter failed to find any diversion in Free Willy 3; she declared it "boring" after about 10 minutes, and started playing with my seatbelt latch instead. Perhaps she’s a budding movie critic.
The point is, you can find amusement on a long flight, if you’re willing to lower your standards and your expectations, and give up a few of your prejudices. After all, just because Amanda Bynes is in something, doesn’t necessarily make it bad.
In-flight movies are a particular challenge for the entertainment-starved. Maybe those in first class or business have the luxury of abundant choices; but you, back there in coach, you just have to grit your teeth and bear it. And in-flight movies have one edge over home entertainment choices back on earth: you’re pretty much a captive audience. It’s the one place where you can’t walk out of the movie theater in disgust.