Life in Flight (2008) Reviews

• Ugh, Good Cast, Nice Pictures, Miserable Script

  eggboy2008-04-29

  Saw this at Tribeca Film Festival and was surprised by the wretched writing. The cast is professional, and the photography, set and production design are all first class. The problem is a script that presents a somewhat dopey male lead, an unredeemable monster (b*tch) of a wife, and a seven-year-itch scenario. The result is good actors reciting bad lines in overwrought scenes. We bought these tickets expecting that a cast including Patrick Wilson, Amy Smart and several other fine actors would deliver a good result. Tied to that script, they couldn't stay afloat. The movie inspires me to create a new rule for young filmmakers: don't write a script with an architect as your main character, unless you are remaking "The Fountainhead." And don't remake "The Fountainhead."

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• Are you happy?

  GOWBTW2011-06-14

  Life is good, if it's really is. Being successful can be a plus or a minus. Here you got a designer who is married, successful, yet something was missing in his life: Happiness. This man has a wife who takes care of their son happens to be a follower rather than a supporter. At his job site he meets a beautiful woman who not only helps him out with his business, she helps him out on life. He takes heed of her words, especially about the birds flying in a certain direction. It turns out that his life isn't all he wanted to be. His wife was more of a go-getter and crowd pleaser, satisfying her needs instead of asking her husband how he feels about it. It was not a good marriage from the get-go, being materialistic and non-communicative, that can destroy a marriage. But the more understanding woman who took a job in the West Coast, automatically got homesick already. Both of those people have suffered similar consequences. Successfullness can be a plus or a minus in you life. Being steadfast is necessary to be living well. The fast-life will send you crashing fast, and being slow can get you fired. This movie teaches a lesson about being happy. Those two were a perfect match. It help me be happy, it'll do the same for you, too. 5 stars!

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• Wretched

  gracenotesstudio2012-02-07

  *****Warning: May contain spoilers****** I agree with what the previous reviewers have said. However, I'm sick of Hollywood's glamorizing and justifying immoral behavior. There IS no justification for this man's behavior, regardless of his circumstances. ALL marriages have difficulties at times, but that doesn't give us all a license to cheat on our spouses. The architect's willingness to leave his wife for someone else because he's tired of her behavior and expectations, merely adds to the stereotype that men are incapable of making wise decisions independent of their sexual appetites. The only reason I gave the movie a 3 rather than a 1, is that Patrick Wilson, who is one of my favorite actors, is one of the stars. I AM a bit disappointed in his choice of acting vehicles, however.

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• It's like a mental and emotional enema after watching one of the Transformer movies

  MBunge2011-10-14

  I once read a comment from Jim Shooter, the former Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, that it was okay to tell a "day in the life" story as long as it was about the day you discovered penicillin or saved the world from an alien invasion. There's some truth to that. Heaven knows a lot of storytellers love to wallow in the mundane, keeping it real or getting all meta or something. Every so often, though, it's nice to experience a film that isn't about people getting killed or boy getting plot-hammered together with girl while a joke goes off every 20 seconds. At less than 80 minutes long, Life in Flight manages to satisfy that craving without overstaying its welcome. Will Sargent (Patrick Wilson) is a New York City architect with a constantly aggravating construction project on one hand and a constantly striving wife (Amy Smart) on the other. Will is on track to merge his company with a larger, ritzier firm. His wife is happy about that. Will…not so much. He has mostly consigned himself to it, until he meets Kate (Lynn Collins). She's a designer herself and the two of them click from almost the first words they speak to each other. While Will and his wife are living in different emotional hemispheres, it's like he and Kate are next door neighbors. Kate thinks there's something going on between them while Will tries not to admit that to himself. Then she finds out he's married and the day comes when he has to sign the merger papers and both of them are forced to stop living their lives the way other people want them to. Patrick Wilson and Lynn Collins are both elegantly normal. Yes, the drama of their characters isn't like they're living in a war zone or trying to escape from a horde of zombies, but they let us see it's as important to Will and Kate as all our dramas are to us. Nobody else except Amy Smart really has more than an extended cameo in the movie, so the whole shebang rests of Wilson and Collins making us care about Will and Kate. They succeed by diving into the somewhat shallow waters of two people who are unhappy without having much cause to be and making the viewer feel the commonplace depth of his or her own life. Now, I wouldn't say everything works here. Kate invests a whole lot of emotion into a guy she barely flirts with. You also can't escape the realization at the end of Life in Flight that you've watched the world's most sympathetic view of a guy going through a midlife crisis where the film ends just as he's about to start cheating on his wife. I'm not sure if it was intentional but it made me stop and reevaluate how I felt about the whole thing. And while Amy Smart plays a bitch whose bitchiness is beautifully calibrated to a inch before something Will would feel entitled to object to, the two of them are so out of sync it's hard to believe they would have ever had a second date, let alone got married and had a child. If you're looking for a distraction, this probably isn't it. It you'd like a mirror to help you see your own life a bit more clearly, take a look at Life in Flight.

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• Great, Insparational, Refreshing

  czardesign2011-04-17

  Great movie despite the mediocre cast. Inspiring, shows that life is more than the chase for a dollar and selling out in order to feel like you can become someone. The movie is about staying true to nature of being human. I thought it was great because it inspires the search for something real not materialistic but soulful in the concrete jungle where the human connection has been displaced by sensual pleasures and the endless chase for the next big thing and happiness thats never found. The movie inspires stepping back and evaluating life's values, slowing down, smelling the roses and hearing the long lost voice of the yearning soul within self as well as someone else. I recommend this movie to everyone.

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