Inflight Movies

These days, armchair travel is the only kind of travel, so it makes sense to write about movies. I watch a ton of movies, but ever since my first international flight, (LA to Copenhagen 1989) the movies I watch on an airplane have had a special sort of magic for me. The last time I got to travel, I was headed to Hong Kong. Here are the movies I watched on the plane.

I don’t remember what movie I watched that first time, but I do remember that my first introduction to Jet Li (My Father is a Hero -still one of my favorite martial arts movies) was on a flight to Asia. Back then, there was only one movie, and they played it on a big screen on the bulkhead. Ever since we’ve been able to make our own seat-back movie selections, I’ve had a sense that my choices were not only part of the travel experience, but might influence the rest of my trip. So I usually try to pick movies from the culture I’m visiting, rather than movies I’ve been meaning to see.

The Couple Travel Together

Chinese name: Lu xing gong lue

According to my travel journal, I watched this one on the flight from Vancouver to Beijing. Until I read my notes, I had forgotten it, but it was wacky fun. Also, once I looked it up, I discovered something I didn’t catch when I watched it – the story took place on my daughter’s 12th birthday!

Told in a sort of Four Rooms format, The Couple Travel Together is set in an inn over a holiday weekend. Four couples with unique stories and disparate goals check in to the inn. The laconic inn owner and his clerk deal with college students at the beginning of an undeclared romantic relationship, a film director and his blocked screenwriter, a pair of debt collectors, and more oddball characters I can’t quite remember. By the end of the weekend, much hijinks have ensued and been resolved with several happy endings.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a trailer with subtitles. But if you can find film, it’s lots of fun.

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Color Me True

Japanese Title: Kon’ya, romansu gekijoo de

I cheated a bit for my second movie and watched something from Japan just because it looked like my jam. And it was. Color Me True (aka Tonight, at the Movies) was a sort of Pygmalion story. It has elements of Singing in the Rain and LaLa Land (retro styling and love letter to old movies) together with Roman Holiday (Haruka Ayase really channels Audrey Hepburn) or even The Little Mermaid (impossible love between people from different worlds).

It requires a lot of suspension of disbelief – it’s a romcom and they didn’t spend too much time on the magical rules in their worldbuilding – so don’t think about it too much, and just go with the flow. If you treat it like a fairy tale, it’s a super sweet little love story between a young filmmaker and the main character in his favorite silent movie. I’m always partial to movies with vintage 20th century costumes and the use of color vs. black and white to tell a story.

Since I couldn’t find a trailer with subtitles, here’s the OST.

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White Night in Ulaan Bataar

Depending on how you look at it, it is either an advantage or a disadvantage that some of the movies you find in a plane don’t seem to exist anywhere else. Once I watched a film called Man From the North Country on a flight to Japan. It was a moving story about a Hokkaido boy who moves to Tokyo for school and about not only his hard adjustment, but the challenges the rest of his family faces back home. I spent years looking for it and eventually confirmed that it was based on a TV series and only aired on TV in Japan. You can’t watch it anywhere now.

Apparently the third movie I watched on my flight to Beijing is like that too. White Night in Ulaan Bataar is the only nondocumentary film I’ve ever seen about Mongolia. Although it’s a Chinese film, the characters are all Mongolian, and the main theme is what it takes to be a proper Mongolian man. The basic plot is: a very handsome man tries to convince a very pretty woman to sell him a very beautiful horse against the breathtaking backdrop of the Mongolian countryside; romance ensues.

But now that I’m home, I can’t find any evidence that the movie was ever made. Here’s a video of The Hu instead.

Travel TV

The flight from Beijing to Hong Kong was too short for a movie, but there was TV. That experience was eye-opening in a different way and deserves its own post later.