[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart, and our latest edition of Small Stakes, Big Opinions where we open up the phones, get your take on not so serious topics that somehow seem to yield strong feelings where you are right at the hallmark of travel. While you can't count on flights offering meals, or even assigned seats, most airlines do provide some form of entertainment. Somewhat popular films with respectable box office returns, but maybe you weren't completely sold on going to a theater, but hey, on a plane, why not?

Our next guest David Mack is a writer, and is also an Australian living in New York. He knows a little bit about occupying himself on a long flight, and he's figured out a formula for the right film to watch and wrote a piece recently for Slate. The piece is called, What Makes a Perfect Plane Movie. Welcome to the show.

David Mack: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to get you in on this conversation too. What kind of movies do you like to watch on planes? What movie do you enjoy watching on a plane that you normally wouldn't? What's a movie you've discovered while watching on a plane? 212-433-9692, 212-433 WNYC. You can message us on our socials at allofitwnyc, Small Stakes Big Opinions. All right. How often do you fly?

David Mack: I fly a lot. I fly home to Australia maybe once a year, but you've got to remember from New York, that's about 24 hours door to door for me. That's a lot of time on a plane and it's added up to a lot of time, and so I do consider myself something of an expert in this field.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: How long does a flight need to be for you to commit to the movie?

David Mack: Commit to a movie? Well, I think anything around two hours is perfect flight time. That's a two-hour movie. Anything longer than that maybe that's a bit too much for one's attention, but for a perfect flight movie I think is under two hours. Of course, I'm looking at flights that are 10, 12 hours, [laughs] and so you're having to watch a few of these in a row for sure.

Alison Stewart: Yes. How many do you think is the most that you've ever watched?

David Mack: In one session? Well, lately the last trip I did I really struggled to sleep on the way back, so I think I probably watched five or six movies in a row.

Alison Stewart: How do you keep your eyes from drying out?

[laughter]

David Mack: Well, I would wish my eyes would close. I would love it if I fell asleep, but unfortunately I've become worse at sleep on planes lately.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, get in on the conversation. We want to hear from you your big opinions about a small stake. What kind of movies do you like on planes? What's a movie that you enjoy on a plane that you normally wouldn't have watched? Any movie you've discovered on a plane? Give us a call, 212-433-9692, 212-433 WNYC. You can call in, you can join us on the air, or you can text to us, or you can message us on our socials, allofitwnyc. I see some calls coming in, so let's get to your list. All right. The article was inspired in part by the success of the Sydney Sweeney vehicle, Anyone But You. All right. What is it about and why did this spark you to write this piece? It's an interesting box office history.

David Mack: This movie was made for only $25 million, which is a lot of money, but for Hollywood film isn't actually that much money. It did pretty poorly when it first came out over Christmas, but it's since grown and grown and grown and grown. It's just hit $190 million in international Box Office sales. That's huge-

Alison Stewart: Wow.

David Mack: -for a movie of that size, and so it's obviously struck a nerve, but when I was reading this news about this movie, my first thought was, "I can't wait to go see this at the cinemas." My first thought was, "I can't wait to watch this on a plane." To me, just the poster alone of these two attractive people on a boat in Sydney Harbor where I'm from, I knew automatically what kind of movie this was. I knew I'd seen this movie before without even seeing it, and I knew I was going to watch this on a plane one day. It just instantly hit me as a plane movie, so I got to thinking, "What was it about this movie that just based on the trailer, based on the promotion for this movie that I had subconsciously associated this with a plane movie."

Alison Stewart: All right. You said you've seen it before. Was it about anyone but you?

David Mack: I meant generically I had seen it before, but for the purposes [crosstalk] of this slate story I did have to see the movie which felt a little weird watching a movie like this in the cinemas I'll say. It felt unnatural, because I really just strongly felt that it was a plane movie. This is a remake or inspired by Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Two attractive people at a destination wedding in Australia, sort of former enemies pretending to be lovers to put off their friends and family and of course feelings ensue. You've seen this type of movie before, right? You know how it's going to end without even watching it. I just think to me, that is the hallmark of a plane movie.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Felix calling in from Durham, North Carolina. Hi Felix?

Felix: Hi. How are you doing?

Alison Stewart: Doing great. What do you like to watch on movies or movie planes experiences?

Felix: I'm sorry, say that again.

Alison Stewart: No, go ahead. You go.

Felix: Oh, this isn't about a specific movie per se, but I will say that I actually really enjoy watching movies on the airplane. Airplanes are sort of a liminal space where I can just detach from reality for however long a trip is, and I enjoy that, but I have a propensity to cry during movies on airplanes in ways that I rarely experience when I'm on the ground. Perhaps it has something to do with the cabin pressure or the oxygen level, but I'm moved emotionally on airplanes in ways that movies with anything from even silly romantic comedies to Marvel movies.

Not even to say things like, I saw Beautiful Boy on the airplane and I just couldn't stop crying and saw it on the ground later, and it was intense, but I did not quite have that level of visceral tear-jerking emotion, but I can be watching something really silly like a romantic comedy and there'll be a moment where the two lovers they're having to leave each other for a while and I'll just start crying. I find it really interesting that that's the case.

Alison Stewart: Felix, thank you so much for sharing your feelings. What do you think about that idea that you cry more maybe on the plane?

David Mack: You are not alone there Felix. There's definitely been a lot written about that before and a lot of people sharing similar ideas. I think certainly the air pressure may have something to do with it, but I think more than anything it's the stress of air travel. You have gone through this, the stress of getting to the airport, the stress of security. Are you going to make your flight and you've been stressed and tightly wound all day, and then all of a sudden you find yourself unclenching, so to speak. You find yourself more emotional perhaps than you originally thought you will be.

The key ingredient of these movies is their predictability, as I said. We're drawn to these movies. At least what I think a good plane movie is because it is predictable, it's comforting. I'm so stressed after the day that I've had that TSA or whatever. I want to know that at the end of the movie, the hot people are going to get together and kiss and the bad guys are going to be defeated. That's nice to me.

Alison Stewart: One thing you have in your article you said that is set for a plane movie is that it should have an airport in it. It's funny because somebody texted us up in the air which is very much in airports.

David Mack: Yes. It's set in a bunch of planes. Ironically, these movies tend to have an airport or a plane scene in them. I think that's important for us to establish a connection as viewers, and there should be an element of travel as well. There should be something perhaps exotic about where the characters are going. It may be a hot destination or a cold destination, but it should feel like they're going on a trip and we are going on a trip too. Even if our trip perhaps isn't as fancy as theirs is going to be.

Alison Stewart: Let's [unintelligible 00:08:33] Mark, because he's been holding for a little bit. Mark calling from the Bronx. Hi Mark?

Mark: Hi. I have a simple technique. When I get on a plane and I look at all the films it's usually like more than 100 and you can't go through all of them. I just look at the films that are made by a woman, because I know my daughter's experience finding a podiatrist. She had a person who she thought had to be a genius. A black woman is her podiatrist. My advice is you can't go through all the films, just look at the directors because at least it'll be a movie about something. It's not going to be some crap about space craft and fantasy and blah, blah, blah.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Mark, thanks for calling in. Hey, we want to hear from you listeners, Small Stakes, Big Opinions. What kind of movies do you like to watch on the plane? Maybe is a movie you discovered on a plane. 212-433-9692, 212-433 WNYC. My guest is David Mack. He wrote a piece for Slate called, What Makes a Perfect Plane Movie. Okay. One of the films you highlight is Julia Roberts and George Clooney the film, Ticket to Paradise, which takes place at least partially on the plane according to the trailer. Let's listen.

[music]

[MOVIE TRAILER - Ticket to Paradise]

Alison Stewart: Our engineer, she honored up to it. She watches on a plane.

[laughter]

She did watch. Why did Ticket to Paradise make your list?

David Mack: As you heard from that trailer, the trailer opens with them on a plane. It's telling us right from the get go that this is movie associated with planes. Also, as I said, it hits that exotic element that I talked about, the exotic setting. It's set in Bali for a lot of the movie. Also, I think crucially, it takes place over a short period of time. This is a movie that takes place over a week. The same thing in Anyone But You. It's a destination wedding. It's not a 30-year, 40-year epic story, a grand piece of Russian literature. It feels snappy. You can hear from the music in that trailer, this is a movie that has a certain buzz energy to it. It has charismatic stars. It's got people that we know, that we've seen them before. We like them together. That's why I felt drawn to it.

Alison Stewart: This is interesting. I went to Rotten Tomatoes to look it up. It has a 57 score on critic, but 87 on viewers and listeners. Someone even wrote, "It's easy to pass Ticket to Paradise as a quintessential airplane watch, something to put on to bide your time until you move onto bitter and better things." They're not necessarily bad movies.

David Mack: They're not necessarily bad movies, but they're not necessarily good movies either. To be clear, this movie isn't winning any awards. Anyone But You is not winning any awards. They fulfill a different kind of need for our society. They're there as entertainment. There was a TV executive that I quote in the story who talked about how these films need to be lean back the movies as opposed to what he called lean in movies. They don't require our full attention. They're something that you can have on in front of you while you've perhaps got a glass of bad wine from the flight attendant and you're sitting there passing the time. It's a popcorn piece of entertainment for 35,000 feet.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Kipp calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Kipp.

Kipp: Hi. I have a weird one to add to this. I think that it's because the way that an airplane feels to me is claustrophobic. You hear that white noise, even if you have really great noise canceling headphones. I watched The Lighthouse for the first time on a plane, and that movie is isolation and claustrophobia, just really doubled down on me and I found it effective and almost dizzying.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in. This one's funny. "I tend to enjoy blockbusters and silly movies I haven't seen in theaters." Somebody else wrote, "I'm a big, tall, Black guy. I know it's petty, but my favorite movie on a plane moment, when I was watching 12 Years a Slave and realized that my seatmate was peeking and getting increasingly nervous. I decided to get a little animated in my reactions to the film. It was hilarious."

David Mack: I do talk in the piece about how I think you have to be aware in a plane movie that what you are watching is probably going to be seen by whoever's next to you or sitting behind you. Typically, you would avoid something that has a lot of sex in it, perhaps, or anything too scandalous, because the last thing you want is to be sitting there nervously clicking that fast forward button as perhaps the people next to you are giving you eyes. That's for sure.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Ken from Queens. Hi, Ken.

Ken: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Hi.

Ken: First time Cola.

Alison Stewart: Oh, great. Thank you for calling in.

Ken: I just wanted to say I usually do documentaries and in occasion I do the mindless things just to zone out. One that sticks out in my mind was Pizza, A Love Story. I watched it on the way down to Aruba. My wife watched it on the way back and we ended up making the trek up to New Haven to hit two of the three places.

Alison Stewart: Ken, thanks for calling in. Let's talk to Angelo on line three, calling in from New Jersey. Hi, Angelo.

Angelo: Hello?

Alison Stewart: Hello.

Angelo: Can you hear me well?

Alison Stewart: I hear you great.

Angelo: I just wanted to add that when people travel internationally, they should pay attention to the country where you're going to. I went to the Philippines recently. I haven't been there in a long time. It was a 20-hour trip with a stopover in Japan. I watched so many Asian movies, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese. It was just movies I would never consider watching or never heard of, but they were all so interesting.

Alison Stewart: Angelo, great tip. Thank you so much for calling in. Here's another tip. This is from Joe, who wanted to pass along this fact. "Watched Speed on a plane, but it didn't make much sense. I watched it again on land and realized there was a plane crash scene in the movie that was cut out." Apparently, airplane crash scenes get cut out from airplane movies often.

David Mack: I don't blame them for cutting those scenes out of movies. They do tend to edit some things, the airlines, perhaps gratuitous scenes or things that might scare passengers. I have to say, a lot of your calls are making me feel like a very bad person for gravitating towards trash. When they're watching documentaries or foreign cinema to better themselves, here I am rewatching Crazy Rich Asians for the 10th time, or something like that.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, call in. What do you watch when you are on planes? What movies do you enjoy on a plane? What's a movie that you watch on the plane that you thought, "Hey, this really good. I wouldn't have watched it otherwise?" 212-433-9692, 212-433 WNYC, you may call in and join us on air, or you can always text us at that number as well. Social media's available as well. Someone did say that they really enjoy watching is when they first watched Coco. There you go. Also, on your list, the Last Holiday, featuring Queen Latifah. Why is this one fun?

David Mack: This is another destination movie. One, it's got a little bit of a love story to it. A key element that I think in these movies is it has some form of stunts or action. It doesn't need to be big, James Bond blowing things up, but I want to see a little bit of spectacle. This has some funny scenes with her on skis going down some ski slopes. She's a great comic actress. It's charming. It has an appreciation of food and romance. I think it's a perfect, as I said, a short time span film. It's set over a few days and we feel like we're going on a trip with her as well.

Alison Stewart: Where does she go?

David Mack: She goes to a Czech ski resort.

Alison Stewart: Oh, so it's not like it's any ski resort?

David Mack: No.

Alison Stewart: That's the romance part of it.

David Mack: The premise of the movie is she gets wrongly diagnosed with a terminal disease, so she decides to blow all her money and go on this one last holiday. Of course, she has the time of her life.

Alison Stewart: Someone texted, "I watched French movies on my way home from Paris to prolong my trip a little bit."

David Mack: That's a nice idea.

Alison Stewart: Isn't it?

David Mack: I like that too

Alison Stewart: You mentioned this earlier, but I want to follow up on it, the idea of predictability. Why is predictability something that you want to see on an airplane movie?

David Mack: We hinted at this just before when we were talking about air crashes. I think you're drawn to knowing that everything's going to be okay in the end. I think, as I said, I struggle to sleep the night before I get on an airplane. I'm so stressed. I'm worried about making the flight. I'm worried about the traffic to the airport. I think there's something I'm drawn to these pieces of entertainment that make me feel comforted, that make me feel nurtured and not being too surprised by what's going to happen and big twist that's going to shake me. I can understand, there are certain movies that I look at the poster and I think, "I know exactly how you're going to end. I'm totally okay with going on this journey with you."

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Stephanie from Long Island. Hi, Stephanie. Thanks for calling in.

Stephanie: Hi. You're welcome. It's a great show.

Alison Stewart: What do you like to watch?

Stephanie: I was traveling to Hong Kong and it was an overnight flight. Everybody's sleeping and I can't sleep, and so I go and start watching Flight of the Conchords and I'm trying not to laugh my head off. I would warn listeners, nothing too funny. In particular, it was the scene where he is wearing that spandex thing and he was being David Bowie. [laughs] That's a great New Zealand show there for anyone who's not familiar, a very, very funny.

Alison Stewart: There you go, Stephanie. Thanks so much. Is Charles available online too? Can we get Charles up? Hi, Charles.

Charles: Alison, you always have wonderful guests.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Charles: Can you hear me okay?

Alison Stewart: Yes, I hear you great.

Charles: I wanted to tell you a guest that years ago when I was a young person, a young artist living in Chelsea Oak Hill, I knew the famous bright white lead painter from Australia.

David Mack: Oh, he's a great painter.

Charles: [unintelligible 00:20:25] sent out him and his wife and his daughter, Arkey, and he invited me. He was going to pay for everything to take me to Fiji. He was being set up by the president to paint, and I had to turn him down. If I would have gone, my favorite film would have been The Day the Earth Stood Still and pick up on South Street. I like old films.

Alison Stewart: Love it. Thank you so much for calling in. You mentioned that you wanted to talk about the film Crazy Rich Asians.

David Mack: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That was a bona fide hit.

David Mack: This was a big film and it was a big box office smash and I think for a lot of reasons it was well made. It was a big cultural event at the time because of the first film to feature an all-Asian cast and a blockbuster American film. When I was doing research into this story and hearing people talk about what the favorite things are to watch on a plane, this movie came up again and again and again.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

David Mack: It is a movie that people love to rewatch on a plane. I think a lot of us saw this in the theaters and still rewatch it on planes because as I said, it hits all those elements. We know how it's going to end. We're going to Singapore I think in the movie. It's set over a few days. Everybody's beautiful. They're wearing nice clothes. It's a lot of fun and I just think that is a movie that is maybe the definitive plane movie of the last 10 years.

Plane movie I think, I don't want to use that term derogatively. I'm not putting this movie down at all. I think that these are important movies, but this is the definitive one, and congrats to Crazy Rich Asians because people love rewatching this on planes.

Alison Stewart: Ellen from Westchester is calling in. Hi, Ellen.

Ellen: Good afternoon. This is offbeat. I was on a short flight to Florida, and I had the opportunity to watch the Barbie movie, which I otherwise never would have gone to see.

I'd heard a lot of hoopla about it. I had no kids that wanted to go see it. I have to say, had I not had the opportunity to see it on the plane, I would have missed out on what was actually a pretty good movie.

Alison Stewart: Ellen, thanks so much for calling in. Let's talk to Shane from Trumbull, Connecticut. Hi, Shane.

Shane: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to say I was going on a flight to Hawaii for my anniversary, very happy, exciting, and then I decided to watch the movie The Art of Racing in the Rain, which is a spectacular movie but incredibly sad. I was bawling like a baby in front of everybody on the plane. That's okay, I'm not afraid to cry, but maybe watch the trailer first or have an idea of what you're going to be watching.

One other comment I made to the screener was I have a friend that's a flight attendant for Delta, and she said she can always tell what people are watching as she's walking down the aisle just from their facial expressions or if there's a sad movie in the queue, et cetera.

Alison Stewart: Thanks so much for being vulnerable, love that. I have watched Love actually many times. Oh, wait. Last time I traveled, I watched Roberta, the documentary Roberta Flack, great. By the way, my son sells movies to airlines. He says his bestsellers are "geezer pleasers, mature casts, and safe scripts."

[laughter]

David Mack: Consider me a geezer pleaser today.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: All right, for somebody who doesn't like the romance, we've been talking about romance, what would you suggest?

David Mack: I don't think it needs to be exclusively romance films. I think the Mission Impossible films are great plane movies. I think the Bond movies are great plane movies. These are all, they have some element of travel. There's a short mission timespan. You generally know that the good guys are going to win in the end, and you don't really need to pay full attention to them. They're great movies as well.

Alison Stewart: Let's see. This one says, my wife doesn't appreciate Disney movies, animated films, so I watch them on the plane. I was sitting next to a tattooed, golf-looking, 20-something, was a little self-conscious when I started to watch, but eventually, she started to watch it herself.

David Mack: [laughs] Contagion, it's spreading, there you go.

Alison Stewart: This one, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I watched it on a flight coming back from London when it was first released as a Greek American. I literally lost my mind. I was laughing out so loud. I'm so surprised they didn't divert the aircraft. [laughs]

David Mack: I can't wait to watch the latest one of those movies, which is actually set in Greece on my next flight.

Alison Stewart: Oh my goodness. Not too deep, not too heavy for you.

David Mack: No.

Alison Stewart: What's the difference between a lean back and a lean in film for you?

David Mack: I think that there's too much plot. In a lean in film, you need to be paying a lot of attention. There's too many twists and turns. There might be a detail you might miss that might be the whole film hinges on this one movement. Where a lean-back movement, you could probably doze off after you've had a glass of wine.

Alison Stewart: Because the thing is somebody actually wrote, they went to a movie and then they fell asleep for 20 minutes, but it didn't really matter because they woke up.

David Mack: It doesn't matter. You haven't missed anything, really.

Alison Stewart: Let's get a couple more calls in. Nicole from City Island in the Bronx. Hi, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi. You always have such great topics. My favorite thing to watch on planes actually are documentaries, especially if I'm coming from Europe because there are a lot of documentaries that just never make it to the US. My favorite one was when I was flowing back from a job in London and I watched is a documentary on Stanley Kubrick, the director, and all of his boxes of research. There's a whole storage warehouse with all of this stuff. It's fascinating. It's called the Kubrick's Boxes and it's not released in the US.

I also prefer, for some reason, watching movies over somebody else's shoulder and not listening to it because we all do it. If it's like, I don't know, Mission Impossible, which has no interest in me and you start to look at the rail ahead of you and you're all watching, or if you stand up and you see 60% of you, it's like an Andy Warhol moment, which is nuts [unintelligible 00:26:21]

Alison Stewart: [laughs] You know what? I'm going to have to cut you off. Nicole, thank you for calling, call in again. We have about 20 seconds left. Anything you want to leave our listeners with?

David Mack: I would just say, for a very, very long haul flight, consider watching one trashy series and just watching a bunch of episodes of it. It'll make the flight go in no time at all.

Alison Stewart: David Mack wrote the article, What Makes a Perfect Plane Movie. Thanks for joining us.

David Mack: My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: I'll see you here tomorrow.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.