upcoming

Airplane (1980)

What:

Airplane! (1980) screens Sunday, February 13, at 6 p.m. at Arcata Theatre Lounge, 1036 G St in Arcata. Box office opens 30 minutes prior to screening and costs $5.

The Plane’s going to Chicago. The Pilot’s going to New York. The Passengers are going to Pieces!

Airplane! (1980) is an American satirical comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. It stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty and features Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lorna Patterson. The film is a spoof of the disaster film genre, and a close parody of the 1957 Paramount film Zero Hour!. The film is well-noted for its use of absurdist and surrealist comedy and pulls out all the clichés as alcoholic pilot Ted Striker (Hays), who’s developed a fear of flying due to wartime trauma, boards a jumbo jet in an attempt to woo back his stewardess girlfriend (Hagerty). Food poisoning decimates the passengers and crew, leaving it up to Striker to land the plane, with the help of a glue-sniffing air traffic controller (Bridges) and Striker’s vengeful former captain (Stack), who must both talk him down. Along the way we meet a clutch of stock disaster movie passengers like the guitar-strumming nun, a sick little girl, a frightened old lady, and two African-American travelers whose “jive” has to be subtitled. Leslie Nielsen portrays the plane’s doctor, launching a new phase of the actor’s career that carried him through the next two decades in several similarly comedic roles.

The film’s creators received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Comedy, and nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and a BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay. In the years since its release, Airplane!’s reputation has grown substantially beyond its modest comic intentions. The film was voted the 10th-funniest American comedy on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Laughs list in 2000, and ranked 6th on Bravo’s 100 Funniest Movies. In a major 2007 survey by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, it was judged the second greatest comedy film of all time. In 2008, Airplane! was selected by Empire magazine as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time and in 2010, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

When/where: