Long flights are for movies

Corey duBrowa
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Maybe you guys are better long-haul fliers than I am. I’ve never mastered the art of sleeping on planes (even with chemical assistance). So for me, long flights are for movies, both those I’ve missed in theaters and those I’ve seen before but am filling the trapped-in-seat time by putting my brain on autorepeat.

This week I was en route from London Heathrow to LAX and put on:

20th Century Women: a Mike Mills coming-of-age joint starring Annette Bening. It’s evidently something of a “loveletter” to the women (his mom and sister) who raised Mills and includes a long segment in which Talking Heads’ The Big Country provides the backing soundtrack. It’s essentially the same music in the exact same key (C, if you’re wondering) as John Lennon’s #9 Dream (how did I never notice this before?), a soporific slide-guitar stroll through recovered memory, with Lennon’s version going straight from dream to paper (melody, nonsense chorus — “Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé” — and all) while David Byrne’s reads like in-flight service over mid-America, an eyewitness account of shorelines, buildings, restaurants, baseball diamonds, “places to park” and the banal lives lived within them. I could kind of relate to the character Jaime’s attachment to his music and independence. I’ll leave it there. Worth a watch.

Allied: a Robert Zemeckis life-during-wartime romance starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard doing their very best Bogie-and-Bacall routine in a film that is entertaining and even emotionally stirring in its way but leans more toward borrowed source material than any kind of original storytelling.

The Godfather III: I am the HUGEST fan of Sofia Coppola’s directorial work (I mean, c’mon: The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Bling Ring all on the same ten year resume? Insane). But her portrayal of Mary Corleone, Don Michael’s daughter, is perhaps one of the worst ever committed to celluloid (it rivals Ishtar for sheer parody value). Now I know why I only saw this movie once and was never as inclined to return to it as I was the first two Godfather epics. It served the very real purpose of killing three trans-Atlantic hours… but that’s where the the story ends.

Oh, and you can skip any/all reruns of How I Met Your Mother too. Although it IS kinda fun to stop by McGee’s Pub in NYC, the place in which the fictional MacLaren’s shots were filmed and loosely based, alongside the late, great Fez, which served as one of our own watering holes of choice back when the Upper West Side was “home.”

Speaking of which, glad to be back in SFO again. A great, if sleepless, week.

)

Corey duBrowa

Written by

VP Global Communications and Public Affairs, Google. Reasonably capable with a French press. #GoDucks

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