The cinetrix got on the Chinatown bus at the corner of Chrystie and Hester Streets in New York at 2 p.m yesterday. She had been in the city overnight for a holiday party, and there was much wassailing, which had left her hungover and dehydrated. Under the best of circumstances a poor bus traveler, much given to motion-sickness if she tries to read for very long, the cinetrix was just happy to have made it to the bus. Silly cinetrix. Cruel hindsight.
You see, eight hours later, at 10 p.m., I walked through my front door in Boston. Lindsayism's [see December 11] description of this particularly modern ill--the Chinatown bus vs. winter snowstorm grudge match--in hour increments is much funnier than I could ever be. Plus, it only took our bus two hours to get to White Plains. But it was grim.
There was one flickering, Mandarin-subtitled silver lining: we got to watch movies. Now any movie on the bus is an arbitrary and capricious experience in viewing. At least the airlines have guidelines prohibiting films with plane crashes in them. No such constraints rule the road.
There was the time the 'Fesser once called me from the bus in consternation to describe the salient elements of an odd, late-eighties feature until I could identify it using the Videohound. I remember I got stuck watching Sandra Bullock mug around rehab in 28 Days [sadly, no zombies] on one trip to New York, on Peter Pan, I think. And coming and going up to Maine by bus I was subjected to the Farley-less David Spade oeuvre. Not pretty.
Ah, but yesterday we had two flashback-heavy flicks and one Meg Ryan-riddled wreck. The trip started out promisingly enough with the Robert Redford-Brad Pitt espionage thriller Spy Game, a perfectly serviceable entertainment with a solid supporting cast of hey it's that guys. Plus, watching Redford opposite Pitt is like seeing an age-progression in 3D. One day you too can be all craggy-squinty behind your Ray-Bans, young Brad. Tony Scott serves up the requisite swirling rooftop shots, with a soupcon of explosions and daring nighttime raids for flavor.
To say that Spy Game was the high point of my journey doesn't quite capture the straining-at-the-seams effort behind every frame of Bandits, a "lighthearted" caper starring Bruce Willis [and his hairpiece] and Billy Bob Thornton [and his hairpiece], plus assorted wigs, and one wigging-out Cate Blanchette in another of her inexplicable trashy turns [cf Connie in Pushing Tin]. Director Barry Levinson should be ashamed. Its whimsy was exhausting; I napped through much of the latter half of the movie and was not sad to miss how it ended.
Which left me well-rested for the third fabulous selection. That's right, I'm talking Joe Versus the Volcano. The fuck? This movie is how John Patrick Shanley chose to squander his post-Moonstruck cultural capital? Making the worst [and there's plenty of fierce competition, folks] of the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movies? Fortunately, I missed most of the exposition during our stop at a Roy Rogers somewhere off Route 91 in Connecticut [ours was one of four buses to arrive nearly at the same time. I hate Roy Rogers.] If I never had to sit through another Tom Hanks as a smug/downcast Everyman who finally realizes that life is truly worth living it'd be too soon. Bus or no bus.
The miraculous thing was that some intelligence, some fickle godhead, chose to include these three features [copied from DVD complete with stern Mandarin PSAs about copyright infringement and piracy] on a single cassette for people traveling between New York and Boston at ten bucks a pop. Accidental cinema at its finest.
