IFE and some of the movies I have been watching

I love IFE. I still remember the days when the movies were shown on screens hanging from the ceiling and sometimes  depending on your seat you didn’t have a good view. And by flying mostly with Air Canada for the past 3 years I thought that IFE is standard issue so I was so surprised when my wife who flew United from Europe told me there was no IFE; I couldn’t believe IFE was not on an international flight.

Nowadays I hardly go to the movies knowing I would watch them on the plane.

Despite its impressive cast (Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, Jack Black) I was reluctant to watch The Big Year as the reviews were not so good. However, I liked it very much and I learnt a few new things: “A Big Year is an informal competition among birders to see who can see or hear the largest number of species of birds within a single calendar year and within a specific geographical area” (from Wikipedia).

Also, I found out about Attu Island of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska (Attu Island was also the place of the only land battle of WW2 that took place on American soil). There is a funny scene in the movie when the plane has a rough landing on the island, everyone is scared with the exception of Owen Wilson who is unfazed. I couldn’t find that scene on YouTube (the movie is still new and I suppose the copyright is strictly enforced). I thought, why not visit the Attu island, it seemed beautiful in the movie, even if the thought of using an outhouse was not too appealing (no hotels there). However, “it’s not possible to fly there anymore. The only way to go is boat. I’ve chartered a boat and took a group of birdwatchers there in 2010 and trying it again in 2012 — it’s a commercial venture so I had to get permits from USFWS. It’s tough finding a boat that can do it for a reasonable price“.
The movie was from 2011 and they flew there but it is a movie.

I was disappointed by this movie, The Iron Lady didn’t do justice to the life of Margaret Thatcher. However, at least the movie showed one of her most famous speeches “..step by step we are rolling back the frontiers of socialism and returning power to the people. [applause]” Again I cannot find the clip on the internet.

Captain America, The Green Lantern (“The core is only as strong as its weakest link and I will tolerate no weaknessses”, one character says), Iron Man
Very good movies, but made the mistake to go to the movie theater for  ‘The Avengers’ IMAX 3D, what a waste of time and money.

I saw the first part of The Hunger Games during the outbound flight and I couldn’t wait for the inbound flight back to watch the last of it (there are times like this when I wish the flight was longer, not to mention more air miles :)). Good movie, even if there were a few recognizable patterns: positive main characters survive and only kill in self-defense, positive secondary characters die dramatically (we cannot have all of them survive), negative characters have a horrible death, and neither positive nor negative characters have to die as well but it is not shown clearly how. All week I was trying to guess how the plot would unravel, I somehow knew that Katniss and her male counterpart from District 12 would be the only survivors at the end but I thought they would try and manage to escape (can’t have both of them trying to kill each other, the movie would be too dark) but it wasn’t like that.

And I almost forgot one of the best movies I’ve watched on IFE, a movie from India.Of course, Enthiran might be silly in some scenes but it was an extraordinary movie. And the music was so good, no wonder “After the second day of release, the album reached number one on the Top 10 World Albums chart on iTunes in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, making it the first Indian album to reach the spot” (Wikipedia)

You will find the full movie (with English captions) on YouTube.

You can see what’s playing this month on Air Canada IFE here.