Airplane! (1980)
Until I was an adult I knew this movie as Flying High!, because that’s what it was called in Australia, and that’s where I first saw it, as an impressionable young boy of thirteen.
The humour comes thick and fast in Airplane!, to the point where it often seems like the writers have just indiscriminately thrown as many jokes on screen as they could. It’s impossible to pick up every audio and visual gag in a single viewing. I’ve seen it a number of times and I still find something new to laugh at every now and then. Of course, not every joke hits the runway, but Airplane! has a pretty good hit rate.
For a long time after I first saw Airplane! I thought that the auto pilot in an aircraft was genuinely represented by an inflatable captain. I mean, why would it not be? That makes perfect sense. Except… it really doesn’t. For some reason, in a movie that is as obviously stupid as this (and sometimes as stupidly obvious), it never crossed my mind that the blow-up pilot was simply the set-up for a fellatio joke later on. Then again, I was thirteen, so maybe I should be excused for my innocence!
Rumack: Captain, how soon can you land?
Captain Oveur: I can’t tell.
Rumack: You can tell me. I’m a doctor.
Captain Oveur: No. I mean I’m just not sure.
Rumack: Well, can’t you take a guess?
Captain Oveur: Well, not for another two hours.
Rumack: You can’t take a guess for another two hours?
As an adult I don’t make a habit of going around buying glossy books aimed at five year olds, but when I was twenty-nine I made an exception and bought The Adventures of Hannah. It’s a very brief and sweet story, laid out across 18 pages, and was written by an elderly lady who lived in Aberdeen.
Halloween is one of the first mainstream movies to embrace the slasher subgenre of horror, so that can never be taken away from the production. The infamous Michael Myers is a formidable, if sometimes silly, antagonist whose single-minded nature is the driving force behind the movie, and this is of course where Jamie Lee Curtis began to earn her moniker as the scream queen of horror. However, its assured place in history to one side, on its own merits, in 2017, the movie is… well, not particularly great.
It’s Halloween weekend, so there’s no better novel to shine a spotlight on than Frankenstein – if not the grandaddy of the gothic horror genre, then it was certainly at the first family picnic. Not only is this story’s status as a dark masterpiece solid and well deserved, but it’s always up there in the discussion for one of the best novels I have ever read.
The traditional family sitcom is not as popular nowadays as it once was. A large part of the reason for that is the decline in network television audiences, and the subsequent rise of entertainment through channels such as YouTube and Netflix. Everybody Loves Raymond is not an old show by any means, but it does represent the most recent mainstream sitcom that I really enjoyed, and looking at the current landscape, that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
I was nine years old when The Goonies was released, and if you were around that age, this is likely to have been one of your favourites. It’s a classic eighties adventure that hits all the right buttons. In fact, it may be one of the most eighties movies ever made, which is no bad thing, but it has an authentic feeling and look that would be impossible to replicate now.
-- Purveyor of Imagination -- 