Like Seattle Maggie, Cinecultist also headed to the Cali for the holiday but our travels brought us to Southern California rather than Northern. Sadly, there were less movies to be had in Palm Desert than there were golf courses, gated communities and desert jack rabbits. Oh, and don't forget the palm trees. There were loads and loads of palm trees.
However, we did have the fascinating social experiment that is the in flight movie to observe and that always amuses CC. On the way to California were two movies we'd seen before, and on the way back two we hadn't. In flight does everything possible to butcher the film viewing experience -- terrible sound quality through the split headphone jacks, grainy picture either projected with a four color projector or on those miniscule screens in the back of your chair, pan and scan to fit the screen plus editing for content. With quality like this, CC often thinks its better just to read a book or listen to the iPod or stare at the back of someone's head instead.
Westbound was the Manchurian Candidate, something we liked well enough in the theater but didn't think we could bear the creepy Meryl Streep on Liav Schreiber action again. We did however, enjoy rewatching the Bourne Supremacy with Matt's steely jaw. The small screen did well with the purposeful crappy color correction and grainy industrial settings. Eastbound was I, Robot and Anchorman which were both perfectly craptacular and thus fine for the bad picture and even worse sound. Will Smith and Will Ferrell, it's sort of a fittingly incongruous bookend, no? It certainly wasn't CC thought this first but isn't it fun to see things which don't belong together back to back? Plus, with the flood of wonderful things in the theaters right now, literally one top tenner after another, its sort of nice to revel in a little cinematic mediocrity as a respite.
Posted by karen at November 29, 2004 12:14 PM