VividSimon Simply Perfect

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

alexanderdavies-99382 It is true that the "Airport" films are mere guilty pleasures where everything can be taken at face value. This second one out of four, is probably the most tolerable. The budget seems to have been put to better use than in the previous "Airport" film from 1970. Charlton Heston is cashing in on his He-Man image and only has to turn up to save the day. The rest of the cast - apart from George Kennedy - hardly get a look in which is what I expected. There is entertainment value in small doses but don't expect any surprises or twists to the tale.

mark.waltz The alcohol is flowing in this second installment of the "Airport!" series, where Myrna Loy knocks boiler makers and the trio of Norman Fell, Conrad Janis and Jerry Stiller keep their livers working overtime as well. A nervous woman begs the stewardess to keep her filled up, while Gloria Swanson's assistant sophisticatedly orders a martini. Miss Swanson sticks to her tea, complaining about the poisonous food that she refuses to touch.Fans of "Airplane!" will go nuts counting all of the references spoofed in that modern comedy classic, especially the presence of Linda Blair as a young girl in need of a kidney transplant. Try not to think of the passenger's reactions to Lorna Patterson singing when nun Helen Reddy borrows Blair's guitar and breaks out into a folk song. Gloria Swanson's "Sunset Boulevard" co-star Nancy Olson plays Blair's overly concerned mother.The basic storyline has private plane pilot Dana Andrews crashing into the huge two storied passenger plane, killing the pilots and leaving only stewardess Karen Black to frantically fly the plane. While the crash is horrific, I couldn't help but chuckle at the sight of a passenger sliding down the circular staircase towards the plane's bar as if he was heading down a pool slide. The only help of landing the plane is Charleton Heston as Black's non-committal boyfriend, and if course, George Kennedy.With this huge cast of veteran and future stars from every medium, including Martha Scott as the older nun who responds to Reddy's inquiry if Swanson is a Hollywood actress with a very judgmental "Or worse!" Sid Caesar adds more subtle comedy than the trio of drunks as the man sitting next to Loy, subtly commenting on her love for bourbon with a beer back chaser. Familiar faces such as Beverly Garland, Terry Lester, Susan Clark, Larry Storch, Ed Nelson and Roy Thinnes pop in and out, with a young Erik Estrada as one of the pilots. When he looks directly at the camera and gives a big goofy grin a la the blonde pilot in "Airplane!", I had my biggest Danny Thomas spit-take in years! Brian Morrison, of TV's " Maude", plays the young son of Susan Clark whose character is ironically married to series perennial George Kennedy! Alice Nunn, memorable in her cameo in "Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure", is funny in a bit as a passenger hiding her dog in her purse.Take away the unintentional comedy of the film, and you will find a magnificently wonderful bail biter. This is a good old fashioned Hollywood crowd pleaser, reminding the audience of all the wonderful talents they had. One thing that is unbelievable is the big hole in the cockpit not consumed with wind pressure, making it unbelievable that anybody entering would not quickly be sucked out as one of the pilots was earlier. Yes, it gets extremely corny at times, even removing the thoughts of everything that was spoofed, but that hardly matters. I will definitely be adding this to my collection at some point because there were so many little details to pick that you would be bound to miss a few.

Jonathan C Airport 1975 is one of those films that today seems to be simply a mistake. A 747, flying to Los Angeles, is having a routine flight when fog diverts it Salt Lake City. Before it makes it to Salt Lake, however, it has an unexpected and deadly rendezvous with a single- engine craft whose pilot has had a heart-attack. The crash puts a big hole in the plane and the co-pilot is sucked out. The pilot is badly injured, so stewardess Nancy (Karen Black) is forced to fly the plane. Charleton Heston and George Kennedy head the efforts first to talk her down and then to tether a pilot into the hole who can effect the landing.This movie is BAD. It is ridiculous both in premise and in execution. It and its sequel siblings (Airport 77 and Concorde) gave birth to one of the most insipid genres in the history of film, and provided so much material to Airplane that this movie became one of the funniest spoofs in movie history. Some scenes from Airplane have direct ancestors in 75--especially the scene where Sister Helen Reddy (that's right, she's a nun) sings a song to cheer up a girl needing a kidney transplant. This scene alone will make you ralf without any need of airsickness.And yet, the joy that this movie brings (and it does do this) is explicable in the movie's artistic context. 75 was a movie from the heart of the Disaster Decade, which saw such great lousy flicks as the original Airport (which actually is not that bad), Earthquake (which is), the Towering Inferno, the other Airport sequels, The Poseidon Adventure, and, my favorite, Roller-coaster. They all happened in the 70s, and when they did, they were all such trashy entertainment that we really enjoyed them. The secret to watching movies like these is to check your brain at the door and enjoy the camp. Eventually Airplane and the Naked Gun would obliterate this genre, but back in the day, it was not a bad way to kill an hour and half for four bucks.

Robert J. Maxwell There are few movies that are so bad that they're vaguely amusing but this is one of them.A mid-air collision leaves flight attendant Karen Black alone in the half-wrecked flight deck of a monstrous Boeing 747. She doesn't know how to fly the thing. Charlton Heston, back on the ground, coaxes her through certain elementary procedures that turn the airplane towards an airport and lift it over the surrounding mountains. Heston is assisted by the ubiquitous George Kennedy, whose wife and child are aboard the stricken aircraft. Heston heroically makes a mid-air transfer and successfully lands the brute. The terrified passengers sob with relief and get to go down a rubber sliding board. "I love you," says Heston to Black, in the same tone of voice he uses to tell her to watch "the little airplane" on the artificial horizon.I don't know where to begin. Well, let me start with the pluses. Nice shots of a Boeing 747 flying around the snow-capped mountains of Utah. And the viewer is spared the complicated back stories of all the passengers. You know, this one lacks self confidence; that one is a skanky con man; this one a coward; that rich one in love with the whore sitting in Tourist class. Larry Storch is the noisome television reporter constantly pushing his way around to get a scoop.The problem is that we don't really NEED any back stories because the back stories are all up front and visible to the naked eye and the rest of the naked apperceptive apparatus. The nun sings a folk song to the sick girl who need a kidney transplant or a rare type of blood transfusion or an intraorbital lobotomy or something. Norma Desmond, I mean Gloria Swanson, learns that jewels aren't everything. Nancy Olsen's front story is merely that she's taking care of the sick girl. Now, boys and girls, this is twenty-five years after she appeared (with Gloria Swanson, by the way) in the superb "Sunset Boulevard" -- and she looks just FINE. We should ALL look so good when we're nearing fifty.Then there is the script, aside from the personnel. Karen Black is up there, sobbing and trying to figure out the controls. There is a huge hole in the side of the flight deck. The decompression sucked out the engineer, Erik Estrada, which is just as well. But, anyway, here is Karen Black standing in a relative wind of 180 knots and her hair is behaving as if it were in a light breeze on the beach at Cancun, strands of it, comely and lustrous, moving about her forehead in a sightly and graceful manner, a living commercial for some shampoo that cures split ends.And you should see her frenzy as she manipulates the knobs of the complicated radio apparatus, trying to find the airport's frequency. She gets WNEW okay. (They play all the hits.) But then she captures WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, and gets swept up in a Lefty Frizell festival and for half an hour the movie stops while she plays air guitar and sings along to "Indian Love Call."What rankled me most, I think, is that when they're on the radio, Heston keeps addressing Black as "Honey." He calls her "honey" every thirty seconds, as in, "Now just take a deep breath and calm down, Honey." Even I, as a man, found this disgustingly condescending. It really sent my Jungian anima into overdrive. Unless -- unless I am a woman trapped in a man's body. I'll have to mull that over.The thing is, this movie was apparently meant by its makers to be taken seriously by its audience. But the question is: what audience did they have in mind? Six year olds? Gibbons? Some form of pond scum?