Flying to Philly for Mother's Day

Last week, Julie and I enjoyed a terrific celebratory family reunion in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, about which I will share more in a future post.

We booked Delta Air using the buy one, get one free coupon I received for renewing my American Express Card...."Don't leave home without it!"  No matter how much I decry the inconveniences of flying, I appreciate that it is a modern miracle our predecessors would have loved.

Seth Rogen's HBO movie, "American Pickle," which I watched on the return flight and would give a better grade for its concept than degree of humor in actual execution, delves into the subject of how times have changed.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This was my third roundtrip flight during the pandemic, and I must say the airline experience has gotten progressively worse, although to a great extent that was due to the itineraries.  I had hoped Covid-19 vaccines would have been liberating, but no such luck so far.

The first time, I flew from Big Sky to Los Angeles to pick up prescriptions and mail after Julie and I decided we couldn't pull ourselves away from the freedom of Montana.  Those were short two-hour non-stop flight, with easy, polite BZN on one end.  The second time was our amazing Thanksgiving trip to historic Philadelphia, which involved longer flights but had entertaining movies.  I think they were also non-stop flights.  In addition, we luxuriated in the glow of using our new Global Entry Cards to bypass the usual take-everything-out-of-your-suitcases-and-prepare-to-be-stripped step of boarding.

Both of those first two itineraries featured reduced passenger capacity, which made the experience feel less hectic as well as obviously less cramped.  This time, almost every seat was filled.

Worse, however, was being forced to wear masks throughout the duration of the trip despite being fully vaccinated.  By the end of what totaled almost 13 hours from the Uber to PHL and Yellow Cab home from LAX (Uber's app was pricing at over twice what we estimated and paid the real taxi), it was just too much being masked.  In airports and on planes, they now require that you mask up between bites of food and announce on airport loudspeakers progressive federal fines in the hundreds of dollars for each incident.

I usually am entertained by movies from the menu on our flights, but the new movies that were available during this age where Bond and Tom Cruise action adventures have had their release dates moved forward, waiting for worldwide theater-goers to be given green-lights.  They did have a few older titles like "The Patriot" that I'd seen long ago and might have been of interest.  The problem more likely comes down to the movies being made, whether due to Covid restrictions on production or changing objectives.

This clip from the 1982 Academy Awards show reminds me of what cinema once was.

I would have given the award to the fifth nominated song, which remains a cultural icon as well as a personal favorite, though I like Vangelis and think "Chariots of Fire" is a moving composition.

On our Delta roundtrip flights to Philadelphia, we couldn't find many enticing recent movies on their menu.

"The Assistant," for example, seemed self-indulgent movie, with only hints of a beginning, middle or end, none of which elevates above the mundane.  As the writer learned in "Sullivan's Travels," the public wants to be entertained.

Julie and I started watching "Let Him Go" with two stars we usually love, and about ten minutes in, we looked at each other, shook our heads and changed channels.  Too depressing.

Most had little in their elevator pitches to make me want to try them, while a couple of others started with what for me at least were unwatchable scenes, including one with a drugged woman passing out in a nightclub and being taken home to be raped by a young businessman, which didn't seem much like a sunny escape that I want to watch during this prolonged shutdown of live entertainment.

One that was pretty good was "Honest Thief," which followed the basic structure of blockbuster movies with an opening crash to pull us in, character development, inciting incident to put the hero up a tree, slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, pet the dog, mirror midpoint reversal, things are terrible, hero uses what he's learned through his travails to recover and finally Aristotelian ending without the gods intervening.

In any case, those in my "intolerant generation" will remember the flamboyant superstar Liberace, who made a fortune being himself.

I must confess that reading over this post, it is self-indulgent tripe, almost a self-parody that mimics what I criticize about current movies.  I probably should delete major chunks and simply point to the photo and videos, but I will leave that to your abilities to speed-read to take in only the elements of interest to you.