The "Airport" films - search/destroy

Thank you, DV, for allowing my to get this long-buried trauma out in the open. I feel slightly better now.

What was that film about the haunted/possessed 747 called?

errr, the ghost of flight 409 or something? that one is meant to be REALLY SCARY because it is BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

"Well, they don't call it a cockpit for nothing."

(Airport '80, classic.)

Counter-Search: unedited Fight Club as in-flight entertainment.

looks like i picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue...

on the series

http://www.avclub.com/article/star-studded-airport-movies-reach-great-heights-un-215647

These were, for some reason, a big hit in our family when I was a kid.

If they're still remaking fuckin' Star Is Born w/ a straight face, it's time to revive this franchise. NO JOKES, either.

We should be right around the 50-year anniversary of the first one getting filmed at MSP.

MD'A on it:

https://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/airport/

Funny to read the contemporaneous reviews of this juggernaut (still one of the 50 highest-grossing films of all time, adjusted for inflation—about $550 million domestic in today's money), which almost uniformly treat it as beneath contempt. Wonder what they'd think if I could zip back there in a time machine and show them what today's equivalent looks like. For a big dumb event movie, it's almost surreally adult by current standards, albeit in a shallow, soapy kind of way; even the ostensible "villain" has an utterly banal, real-world motivation for his behavior, never coming across as anything more than a terrified, desperate loser. Nor would any mass audience today tolerate such a slow, patient, methodical buildup. I've never read Hailey, and assume his novels have no literary merit (though critics tarred Stephen King with that same brush...), but in broad conception they seem to be not unlike, say, Casino, employing narrative primarily as a hook in order to explore the working details of a given milieu; enough of that approach survives here to exert a certain behind-the-scenes fascination even in the film's dopier interludes. And let's be honest: It's often preposterously entertaining. When Helen Hayes sat down next to Van Heflin, I got downright giddy anticipating where that must be headed, and yet the abrupt, weirdly sadistic, ultimately forlorn way it played out still caught me off guard. Everything after that is arguably anticlimactic (and starts becoming recognizable as fodder for Airplane! gags), but even the so-called happy ending boasts elements that would be unthinkable now, e.g. Burt Lancaster's sister—an apparently perfectly nice woman we've been given no reason to dislike, and did I mention she's Burt Lancaster's sister? anyone remember Sweet Smell of Success?—arriving at the gate to greet hubby Dean Martin, only to watch him accompany Jacqueline Bisset to the hospital, ignoring her completely..hold on her deflated expression as she realizes her marriage is over...aaaand roll credits (after one last scene to confirm that Burt Lancaster's marriage is also over). Amazing.

There has been a Poseidon Adventure remake; how has there not been an update of Airport, perhaps riffing on the MH370 disappearance?

And this thread reminds me; apparently the original Airport contains an almost balletic sequence of snowplows clearing a runway. Can anyone speak to this?

Aren't planes in peril movies a tougher sell post 9/11?

Who can chew up scenery today like George Kennedy? Ed Harris would have been the obvious choice a few years ago, but he might be too old now.

Nicholas Cage, duh.

Bingo! You've just been signed on as casting director.

Betty White for Helen Hayes.

The Lancaster role has to go to Pacino. I'm excited; let's get a Kickstarter going.

apparently the original Airport contains an almost balletic sequence of snowplows clearing a runway. Can anyone speak to this?

Not sure it's "balletic," per se, but to this day the MSP airport plows clear in what they call a conga line.

Meryl Streep as Burt Lancaster.

Post Malone as Van Heflin.

Nic Cage in a modern-day Airport remake would be AMAZING, and best viewed on the back of the economy class seat in front of you on a Virgin Atlantic flight.

Which, btw, everyone's playing the actual actors named, not the characters from the original Airport movie.

Who's this generation's Lee Grant?

Would watch Eric's meta-Airport.

The only one of these I've seen is whichever one has the plane getting stuck underwater.

can already see Judi Dench as dear little pixie Helen Hayes.

Margo Martindale would make a keen Maureen Stapleton.

Matthew McConaughey for the Dean Martin role. Not morose, True Detective/Dallas Buyers Club serious-actor McConaughey, but some cross between the rom-com and alright-alright-alright guy. That's Martin.