Air China

So the reason I had a large gap in my posting recently is that I've spent two weeks out of the last month in China having a holiday. I wont bore you with any clever anecdotes because 1: I don't really have any and 2: you're not read this to read about my holidays are you? Thought not. In short, China's very big and there's a lot of pollution, loads of people, some wicked food and terrible driving. Plus the sights are amazing.

Anyway, I watched 4 films on my various plane trips on Air China in the last few weeks. The selection was very poor and so I had to pass the time watching a couple of films I've just watched recently - 'X Men First Class' and 'Hunger Games', good on an 8 inch screen too it turns out. Aside from the healthy selection of terrible-looking Chinese films for some reason the 'entertainment' system had Citizen Kane. First time I've watched that for over a decade, still as powerful as ever exposing of the ultimate fragility of the so-called elites of society.

The only new film I watched was a twee little British / Indian film called "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", starring Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and a series of other well-known British actors. It's all about a group of older people who decide for various reasons to go off to India to seek out a fresh start to life / find somewhere peaceful to die - but they all learn something about life. It's a charming enough film with moments both touching and funny, but more than any of that of all it's pretty boring without any real storyline. I would have liked to like the film more - the cast is awesome after all - but it's a mash up of small story lines, none of which provide enough interest by themselves to make the overall film interesting.

It's a shame that the film experience on Air China was so indifferent, as normally a long haul plane flight is an opportunity to sit back and watch a couple of films I might never normally bother with. Half the films were terrible-looking Chinese cheese festivals that looked like they'd been directly remade from a Hollywood scrap heap, the rest were mainly the original Hollywood versions of said films. They did have Cleopatra as an option - which would have been fun as for years it was the most expensive film of all time adjusting for inflation - but even on a 10:30 hour plane ride I couldn't bring myself to commit to 4 hours of running time. Plus I was annoyed by the control system for the interactive entertainment. There was just one button to move a cursor around a screen and a second button to select options.  Epic fail.

Air China wont be my airline of choice if I fly back there in the future.