Flight

    Flight tells a great story about honesty. How there comes a time in your life when you have to be honest with yourself. Honest with yourself as well as with those around you. Or you'll lose them, and you'll find yourself looking for new 'thems'. You'll realize you have new 'thems' every 6 months. You'll feel unstable because you cannot be honest, and honesty is the basic structure. Denzel Washington plays a man who finally finds it in himself to embrace his honesty, after a perspective-changing event alters his life. Flight is the interesting story of a drunken pilot living on auto-pilot, who finds his way back to living after a heroic crash landing.





I always admire the roles Denzel Washington chooses. What I've continuously been amazed by is how they're all similar while also very different. He plays different people that are also the same. That are also Denzel (or who I imagine he might be). Characters that are tough and heroic while flawed. Real people, extraordinary (whether good or bad) men. Whip Whitaker is a flawed man of self discovery, and self discovery stories are satisfying. Realizing wrongful ways and the correction of those ways is comforting for audiences, because often times in reality people never realize and correct, and those ways become a part of who they are. With Flight we can revel in the process of a person changing for the better.

Denzel and Kelly Reilly display beautiful chemistry as two people living life with addiction trying to find the means of something to hold on to. They become what each other were looking for.
John Goodman and James Badge Dale steal their scenes as a rambunctious coke dealer and humorous cancer patient. Goodman giving the side cracking performance of the film and Dale leaving you speechless throughout his zero flawed entrance and exit. His performance was met with applause from fellow actors during a SAG screening on January 9th. A gripping appearance by Oscar winner and favorite Melissa Leo was a pleasure during the film's climax.





For those who haven't caught Flight in theaters yet (swidt?), I would recommend it. Denzel Washington being up as one of this year's Best Actor Oscar nominations suggests it's definitely worth the money to go out and see. A firm lesson in embracing honesty and "getting yourself together" is always good, too.

3.5/5

Q&A with the writer

    Flight screenwriter John Gatins attended a live Q&A following a SAG screening of the movie at The Writer's Guild Theater in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, January 9, 2013. The sit down hosted by 2006's The Devil Wears Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna gave the audience a chance to ask Gatins some insightful questions on the process of making the movie "behind the pen". A few Flight facts:

• Gatins had been working 10 years to get Flight made into a film.
• No characters were written for himself, strangely.
• He put a few of his best friends in the movie, whom are not actors. (Definitely could've fooled us)
• There was a lot of mistaken identity on-set between himself and actor John Goodman. (Two John Gs)