So, my longest long-haul flight since the pandemic offered plenty of time to start on the next novel. I unpacked my notepad dutifully, wrote a paragraph, then switched on the first of six-and-two-thirds in-flight movies.
Top of the bill was in the Heart of the Sea, my second cannibalism film of the week after Society of the Snow and not the best thing to watch perhaps when chewing at Gulf Air’s tepid chicken. It wasn’t a great box office hit but the Moby Dick origin story had its thoughtful moments.Second up was the rather black comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me, riffing off every spy movie cliche in the book. The McGuffin, the betrayal, car chase, shoot out, escape from certain death…etc. Undemanding fun though when miles above the Med.Gangster Squad was the third movie on the outward leg. I vaguely thought I’d seen it before, confirmed once the mayhem starts. But Emma Stone is always watchable, and tough guys with guns don’t strain the brain. At some point I even spent a couple of hours reading a history of the Burma campaign.Inkheart opened the programme on the way back, once Thailand disappeared under cloud. A pleasant Brendan Fraser fantasy comedy in which characters drop from books or are pulled into them, helped along by more interesting catering from the Thai end.Had I seen Kong: Skull Island, I wondered as we were over night-shrouded India? No, as it turned out and the film proved to be an enjoyable slice of mayhem with a decent cast and not as predictable as it might have been.Barb n Star go to Vista Del Mar is a very silly, surreal comedy about a pair of daffy 40-somethings tangled in a master villain’s plot. I’d seen it before but it was the perfect thing for stupid o clock in the morning somewhere over the Persian Gulf. On the ground in Bahrain for four hours, going slightly stir crazy and completing reading Stephen Baxter’s Proxima. Resumed second half of film once airborne again.And finally…unable to sleep and somewhere over Europe I fell for the easy on the eye and untaxing Duma about a boy raising a cheetah cub. Turns out Manchester was not so far away as I thought and the last 40 minutes remain a mystery to be solved another day. It was a nice warm up for planning a safari though.
