BEFORE: Harrison Ford carries over from "Random Hearts", and he'll be here tomorrow night as well. With the new "Star Wars" film coming in December, I have a number of ways to possibly link to that film, but Harrison is not one of them. For a while I thought my February lead-out would be the film "42", also starring Harrison Ford, but those plans changed as well. The watchlist is a bit like quicksand, in that's it's constantly shifting around.
I'm also watching the first episode of the new season of "Survivor" tonight, so that's a nice tie-in.
AFTER: Hmm, that's pretty odd - the sub-plot here involves the boyfriend and girlfriend of the two leads getting together, after they believed that their significant others died in a plane crash. Which sounds an awful lot like the plot of "Random Hearts", last night's film. I had to realize that coincidence on some level, right? Even if it was subconscious....
I remember when this came out, some reviewers tore it apart, because they felt that the two leads had no chemistry together. I suspect that their opinions were strongly influenced by the fact that Anne Heche was involved in a very high-profile relationship with Ellen Degeneres, and of course once you mentally attached the lesbian label to someone, it's very hard for some people to get around that. But this is ridiculous, because we're talking about actors - they pretend for a living! And if straight people can pretend to be in relationships on-screen with people that they're not really sleeping with in real life, why can't a gay woman be believable while pretending to be with a man on-screen? Trust me, there are plenty of gay men and women in Hollywood who are "straight for pay" when it comes time to make a film, I just know it.
Besides, I think Anne Heche is back to sleeping with men now, right? Does that make this film suddenly more believable, in retrospect? The whole thing is just ridiculous, because people are so rigid and backwards in their thinking when it comes to sexual orientation. For many people, it's a very fluid thing (and, for others, it's not...) so why should anyone be judged or compartmentalized based on who they're currently boinking?
Anyway, it's another combination of romance film and action film, but this time it's more of a comedy, I think? There are certainly comic elements to it, as the female lead gets strung out on tranquilizers, an accident causes a flare gun to go off prematurely, a life-raft inflates in a small space. To the film's credit, it didn't feel very slapstick-y while I was watching it, but in retrospect I guess it kind of was. The two leads sort of played everything straight and kept it grounded, so the comedy didn't feel too over-the-top.
NITPICK POINT: The female lead character kept saying she was "shipwrecked", and the pilot never corrected her. In order to be shipwrecked, you need to have been on a SHIP. Since she was on a plane that crashed, she was using the wrong term - she was "plane-wrecked", even though I know that's not really a word. But regardless of that, "shipwrecked" was incorrect.
Also starring Anne Heche (last seen in "Cedar Rapids"), David Schwimmer (last seen in "Apt Pupil"), Jacqueline Obradors, Temuera Morrison (last seen in "Speed 2: Cruise Control"), Allison Janney (last seen in "The Help"), Danny Trejo (last seen in "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas"), with cameos from Amy Sedaris, Taj Mahal.
RATING: 5 out of 10 palm trees
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