Well, I swear…but not that much

Our Saturday night DVD movie was Flight of the Phoenix–the new one with Dennis Quaid, not the 1965 original with Jimmy Stewart.

My wife doesn’t much care for flying. Amazingly, she made it through the first half hour with only the comment that “I’ll never get on an airplane again.” (Not likely to be true, but it will take a really great cruise on the other end of that flight…)

The rest of the movie? Good, compelling, not too many lapses in logic and continuity. (I don’t remember the 1965 version, so can’t compare. I added both the new and old War of the Worlds to our Netflix queue at the same time, so we can make a comparison.)

But this isn’t a movie review. We enjoyed it. You might; you might not.

We had time to watch the 41-minute “making of” featurette. We were looking forward to it: To what extent did they actually try to accomplish the key plot element, and what were filming conditions actually like (in Namibia, substituting for the Gobi desert)?

We were disappointed in the featurette, for two primary reasons:

  • The studio tried too hard to make the featurette a mini-movie, with lots of dramatic music sometimes swamping the dialogue. That’s minor.
  • The director, John Moore, apparently can’t say ten words without one or two of them being f*ck or f**king. This got real old real fast. Either word used appropriately is, well, appropriate. Either word used instead of having a real vocabulary is just annoying. It got to the point where we both cringed a little whenever Moore appeared on screen

Actually, John Moore generally impressed us as being a first-rate a**h*le. We’ve never seen any of his other movies. With any luck, we never will. It’s fair to say there weren’t a bunch of quotes from cast members saying what a pleasure Moore is to work with. Admittedly, the filming was done under tough conditions–but geez, Moore seems to be a real pill.

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