That Was a Quick 25 Years

Airplane! is 25 years old. And still the funniest movie (and, since happiness is the best of all emotions, therefore the greatest movie) I have ever seen.



I wish some of them pompous academic types would explain why Airplane! is so great (sorry, the Greek subtitles angle is sewn up - get your own thesis topic). Some of my pet theories about the movie:

• It's very postmodern - practically everything in it is a parody of something else.
• The reason the plot works so well, creating a scaffolding for the jokes, is that they stole the script lock-stock-and-barrel from Zero Hour.
  
• The casting of well-known washed-up character actors, playing their insane roles straight. As ROGER EBERT points out, "it was able to exploit our associations with its stars, particularly Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack and Peter Graves. They played against their own images as only they could."
• The deconstruction of the scripted roles - the outing of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is my favorite, with Lloyd Bridges' exposure as a glue-sniffing freak running a close second.
  

God I love that movie. It remains the only movie that made me literally roll in the aisles. It pushed the limits when there were still limits to push. It was very topical when it was made, yet ages well, perhaps because it had a deeper existential point - life stinks, without humor we are nothing. I laugh, therefore I am.

And no, I'll never get over Macho Grande.