Movie Jibber-Jabber #10: Break-Ups, "Sully," Another Scary Moment

Welcome to Movie Jibber-Jabber, your semi-weekly digest of movie news, reviews, and local film happenings.

Tom Hiddleston & Taylor Swift Broke Up

So what? I brought it up just to show how hip and contrarian I can be about a relationship between two famous people. I'm not bothered. Not at all.

Anyway, I'm deeply excited for “Thor: Ragnarok,” and I thought Taylor Swift's last album was poppy and listenable. I hope they find as much enjoyment with their next relationships as we did with this one for a beautiful three months to which I paid, uh, zero attention.

Scary Movie Memories #2: The Melting Face

The first time I remember watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was when I was 13 years old. I had seen “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and probably “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” before then. But “Raiders?” Nah. It was too scary.

My family didn't own many VHS tapes in the early '90s, but my dad supplemented the void by taping movies from television. We had a few – "Henry V" was my personal favorite – and “Raiders” was another. I don't know how old I was when I first watched it. Too young to remember most of it, but certainly not too young to become completely terrified of Ted Ross's face melting at the sight of the opened Ark.

It was the kind of terror that bred avoidance of “Raiders.” The kind of terror that brought a feeling of complete discomfort at the mere mention of the movie. Even now, as I stare at the IMDB page for “Major Arnold Toht,” which has a big picture of his melting visage, I feel uncomfortable, odd and slightly alone, the way I felt hiding on the stairs when that scene came on the screen.

Review: Sully

"Sully" made me contemplate how we define heroism in cinema. Do we really look for stories about everybody coming together, or do we really want stories about one man against the machine? The odd duality of “Sully” is that it tries to be about both and in doing so manages to wrap a good story in a lousy narrative, hobbling itself.

The crash of US Airways Flight 1549 in January 2009 is a story most of us know, or at least vaguely remember. I'd guess the older and whiter you are, the more likely you are to know it.

Soon after departure from LaGuardia in New York City, the airbus hit a flock of geese. Pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger managed to maneuver the plane into the frigid Hudson River, where Coast Guard and emergency personnel retrieved every single passenger safely.

It was a miraculous landing. He deserves every bit of adulation he has received; I certainly think he deserved a movie. By all accounts, Sully is a good man and a damn good pilot.

Tom Hanks is the best at playing good men; you never doubt his basic decency, even for a second. So he's great here, a pleasure to get to know. If you were worried.

“Sully” depicts the water landing on the Hudson with amazing craft. Director Clint Eastwood nails the tension, the context. We know how it is going to end but it does not matter. We get to know bits and pieces about passengers as they board, and we follow them through the terrifying experience of evacuating the plane. It's a great sequence, one that establishes the importance of humanity the movie works so hard to convey.

But it's a sequence that comes halfway into the movie as a flashback. The story of Flight 1549 is a great one, but it doesn't fill a 90-minute movie. How Eastwood and writer Todd Komarnicki fill that space breaks the movie and ruins the whole enterprise.

The rest of the movie focuses on the routine National Transportation Safety Board investigation into Flight 1549, and how it makes Sully feel.

Hapless bureaucratic investigators Charles Porter (Mike O'Malley), Ben Edwards (Jamey Sheridan), and Elizabeth Davis (Anna Gunn) question the circumstances of the accident — as they should. Sully faces self-doubt when they suggest one of the engines might have still been functional, and later computer simulations show that 1549 may have gotten back to LaGuardia in time if he had flown differently.

The movie treats the NTSB as a bunch of nags trying to railroad Sully and ruin his career for no reason. When Sully finally achieves "victory" at the end of the film, it isn't because he landed a plane on the Hudson and saved 150 people; rather, the great dramatic moment at the conclusion of “Sully” is when he gives a stern talking-to to the dopey government investigators trying to harsh his victory high.

As I sat there watching a completely lame fictionalization of the investigation into the crash, I started to get bored. So my mind wandered. Why is Flight 1549 such an iconic tale? What makes Sully a hero, and why did they choose to make this movie like this? Flight 1549 is not a particularly difficult story to mine for meaning, and for about 30 glorious minutes “Sully” does a great job of it.

Is it that Sully was a hero just by doing his job really well? Is it that all of New York came together to help those passengers? These are themes to which the film pays lip service, but then again, you can talk about something all you want.

The trailers and synopsis and portions of the movie (the end title card, even) seem to be about Sully's trauma and Sully's experience and the New York spirit. But “Sully” is clearly a movie made for the audience who most fondly remembers the period after the crash of Flight 1549, mostly those who experienced it solely through chain emails and broadcast news.

It was January 2009, the economy had crashed and we had just elected our first black President. Sully was an American Hero, but he was a hero that played especially well for a particular audience. He was white, older, had a spotless record. He got a lot of play on network news shows.

This isn't to say that “Sully” is an inherently “conservative” narrative in contemporary political parlance or that he is not an inspiring figure. But the way the movie is constructed, with a shallow depiction of goofus governmental regulatory boards and a dramatic story mostly concerned with making them look stupid, while paying lip service to feel-good themes of “community” that only goes so far as the second act, it's a narrative for those acclimated to the storytelling of cable news.

And cable news tells crap stories.

Local Reviews by Indiana Critics

Chris Lloyd has an alternative take on "Sully" right here on the Yap.

Richard Propes loves "Complete Unknown" over at The Independent Critic

Sam Watermeier takes the high road on "Sea of Trees" over at NUVO.

That's it for this week, folks! Be sure to check out the Heartland Film Festival information listed on our home page.