Saturday, 2nd August 2014 - Sydney to Abu Dhabi

Saturday, 2nd August 2014 - Sydney to Abu Dhabi

I basically choose my airlines on the basis of price, so I can hardly complain that the seats feel small. Still, flying Etihad feels more like something to be endured than enjoyed. It would be nice if the arm rest between Adeline and me could be lifted out of the way but it only pretends it can be - even in full raise it’s in the way. I think for a minute or so about a better engineering solution and can’t think of one, so I sit curmudgeon-like in my narrow seat and resent that the A380’s engineers weren’t, in this particular way, smarter than me.

In between pretending to sleep, by which I mean sleeping and pretending I couldn’t sleep, I watch movies. Transcendence is allegedly thoughtful science fiction. My thought, about a quarter of the way through, was that the human-turned-AI had won and everyone else should surrender. Later the scriptwriter, realising the AI angle wasn’t enough, decided to put nanotechnology in the mix. Alas, there was then no room for a decent ending. Wasting Johnny Depp on this was a shame.

I finally got around to seeing Wall-E, which was fine I guess but I missed the usual high-quality Pixar dialogue. Not really deserving the rating it seems to have, which doesn’t make it bad. This is the most positive review you will get today, seems like my glass is half empty today. Or the movies are rubbish, could be that.

I tried Anchorman, which I thought Adeline had recommended, but apparently I was wrong. Gave up after not laughing.

In Under the Skin an alien seduces men and then kills or imprisons them - seems to vary case by case. A friend of mine used to say that if you watched a European movie on SBS sooner or later two ugly people would have sex and this is a European film - well, Glasgow - so the woman is only so-so attractive. OK, that may just be my opinion, I understand Scarlett Johansson is considered by many the epitome of sexiness but that’s as much a mystery to me as her character’s motives in the story, I find her as exciting as an artichoke. The most interesting scenes are purely visual - one of her methods of killing someone, for instance, is to walk slowly backwards away from them in a dark room. She walks as though on a solid surface, they walk over the same floor she does but gradually descend as though walking down a slope into a liquid until they are completely submerged. The pace is glacial; I watched most of it on 8x fast forward.

I’d like to imagine how Transcendence and Under the Skin would have been if they swapped stars. Actually, I don’t think they would have been significantly different at all.

Next to us in the seat was a young woman returning to Europe from the Galapagos. Some day, I promise, I will blog from there.

In front of me was a Greek woman who held my arm in an affectionate way every time she passed. I’m not sure why but her daughter said she had Parkinson’s so maybe she just needed the support and didn’t know how to ask for it.

Glad that’s over.