The plot involves an endangered 747 flight from New York to Los Angeles. It’s Christmas Eve, and there are only about a dozen passengers on board, including two prisoners and their federal marshals (anyone who has flown around Christmastime knows how empty the planes always are). One prisoner gets a gun and shoots some of the marshals, after which the other prisoner—the really dangerous one—gets a gun and kills the rest, including both pilots and one flight attendant. He locks the remaining hostages in the “crew quarters,” where they are forgotten for most of the picture.
This prisoner is Ryan Weaver (Ray Liotta), a.k.a. the Lonely Hearts Killer. He claims the evidence against him was faked by an LA cop (Hector Elizondo). In a performance that seems like an anthology of possible acting choices, Liotta goes from charmer to intelligent negotiator to berserk slasher to demented madman. My favorite moment is when he’s covered with blood, the plane is buckling through a Level 6 storm, bodies are littered everywhere, and he’s singing “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”
This is one of those movies where you keep asking questions. Questions like, how much money does an airline lose by flying a 747 from New York to LA with a dozen passengers on board? Like, do passengers board 747s from the rear door? Like, can a 747 fly upsidedown? Like, have you ever seen Christmas decorations inside an airplane (lights and wreaths and bows and mistletoe)? Like, why don’t the oxygen masks drop down automatically when the cabin depressurizes—and why do they drop down later, during a fire? Like, do storms reach as high as the cruising altitude of a transcontinental flight?
The big conflict involves the Lonely Hearts Killer and two flight attendants. One of them (Catherine Hicks) is strangled fairly early. The other (Lauren Holly) wages a heroic fight after both pilots are killed. It’s up to her to fend off the madman and somehow land the big plane. Holly’s performance is key to the movie, and it’s not very good: She screams a lot and keeps shouting “Ooohhh!” but doesn’t generate much charisma, and frankly I wish the killer had strangled her and left the more likable Hicks to land the plane.
The 747 spends much time weathering a big storm. (“It’s a Level 6!” “Is that on a scale of 1 to 10?” “No! It’s on a scale of 1 to 6!”) The storm causes all of the lights inside the plane to flash on and off, including the Christmas lights. That lends to extended sequences in which the attendant and the madman crawl around the aisles in darkness illuminated by lightning bolts—and then there’s the big moment when the plane flies upside down and they get to crawl on the ceiling.
On the ground, events are monitored in the Los Angeles control tower. The pilot of another 747 (Ben Cross) talks the brave attendant through the landing procedure, while a stern FBI agent argues that the plane should be shot down by the air force before it crashes in an inhabited area. Eventually he orders a fighter plane to fire—although by then the plane is already over Los Angeles and looks as if it would crash more or less into Disneyland.
There are more questions. Like, if a 747 sheers off the roof of a high-rise restaurant, wouldn’t that cause it to crash? Like, if a 747 plows through an outdoor billboard, wouldn’t that cause it to crash? Like, if it sweeps all the cars off the roof of a parking garage, wouldn’t that cause it to crash? Like, if it gets a truck caught in its landing gear, what would happen then? (“It’s a Ford!” a sharp-eyed observer says, in a line that—for once—I don’t think represents product placement.)
Oh, yes, there are many moments I will long remember from Turbulence. But one stands out. After Lauren Holly outsmarts and outfights the berserk killer and pilots the plane through a Level 6 storm, the FBI guy still doubts she can land it. “She’s only a stewardess,” he says. To which the female air traffic controller standing next to him snaps, “She’s a—flight attendant!”
20 Dates
(Directed by Myles Berkowitz; starring Myles Berkowitz, Elisabeth Wagner; 1999)
20 Dates tells the story of Myles Berkowitz, a man who wants to make a film and to fall in love. These areas are his “two greatest failures, professional and personal,” so he decides to make a film about going out on twenty dates. By the end of the film he has won the love of the lovely Elisabeth—maybe—but his professional life is obviously still a failure.
The film has the obnoxious tone of a boring home movie narrated by a guy shouting in your ear. We learn how he gets a $60,000 investment from a man named Elie Samaha and uses it to hire a cameraman and a sound man to follow him around on his dates. Elie is never seen on film, but is taped with an (allegedly) hidden recorder while he threatens Berkowitz, complains about the quality of the footage, and insists on sex, stars—and a scene with Tia Carrere.
Elie has a point. Even though $60,000 is a low budget, you can’t exactly see the money up there on the screen. I’ve seen features shot for half as much that were more impressive. What’s worse is that Berkowitz loses our trust early in the film, and never regains it. I don’t know how much of this film is real, if any of it is. Some scenes are admittedly staged, and others feel that way.
Even though Berkowitz presumably displays himself in his best light, I couldn’t find a moment when he said anything of charm or interest to one of his dates. He’s surprised when one woman is offended to learn she’s being photographed with a hidden camera, and when another one delivers an (unseen) hand wound that requires twenty stitches. The movie’s best dialogue is: “I could have sworn that Karen and I had fallen in love. And now, it’s never to be, because I couldn’t ever get close to her—at least not closer than ninety feet, which was specified in the restraining order.”
One of his dates, Stephanie, is a Hollywood wardrobe mistress. He asks her for free costumes for his movie (if it’s a doc, why does it need costumes?). She leaves for the rest room, “and I never saw her again.” Distraught, he consults Robert McKay, a writing teacher, and McKay gives him theories about screen romance that are irrelevant, of course, to an allegedly true-life documentary.
And what about Elie? He sounds unpleasant, vulgar, and tasteless (although no more so than many Hollywood producers). But why are we shown the outside of the county jail during his last conversation? Is he inside? What for? He promises to supply Tia Carrere, who indeed turns up in the film, describing Elie as a “very good friend.” She may want to change her number.
There’s a 1996 film available on video named Me and My Matchmaker, by Mark Wexler, about a filmmaker who consults a matchmaker and goes on dates that he films himself. It is incomparably more entertaining, funny, professional, absorbing, honest, revealing, surprising, and convincing than 20 Dates. It works wonderfully to demonstrate just how incompetent and annoying 20 Dates really is.
200 Cigarettes
(Directed by Risa Bramon Garcia; starring Christina Ricci, Courtney Love; 1999)
All those cigarettes, and nobody knows how to smoke. Everybody in 200 Cigarettes smokes nearly all the time, but none of them show any style or flair with their cigarettes. And the cinematographer doesn’t know how to light smoke so it looks great.
He should have studied Out of the Past (1947), the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time. The trick, as demonstrated by Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca, is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities, and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.