Pushing Tin
Aren’t air traffic controllers wacky?
The script is total letdown. After packing heat for most of the film, towards the end it devolves into the contractual “self-help advice leads to return to status-quo and potential improvement over the initial situation”.
It ruins the entire point of the film. After over an hour showing how miserable air traffic controllers are, all is solved with half-arsed apologies over the radio. I’m assuming the producers followed this line of reasoning:
- Workaholics destroy their personal lives by overworking.
- Sane people close to them have enough of it and quit.
- How to make up to the people you have been ignoring for years on end? How about doing a work-related surprise?
Women are treated badly in this. Cate Blanchett is an independent woman except when showing actual independence, whereby she reverts to 50s housewife. Angelina Jolie has to dress like a slut and spread her legs for the main character to get any chance of her husband to look at her as a human being. How fucked up is that?
As for the main feud, John Cusack gets the best lines, but Billy Bob Thornton turns a cypher that speaks in monosyllable into an actual character. The supporting cast are just cheerleaders for the nominally lonely main character.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.