Pushing Tin
Back from the great beyond. No, not a near-death experience, just a slight detour, but now I'm back in gear and on the job, doing what you pay me to do - watch moovies.
"Pushing Tin" with John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett and Angeline Jolie. Written by Darcy Frey and Glen Charles, directed by Mike Newell. MPAA Rating R for language, brief nudity and some sexuality.
In case you didn't know, the air traffic routes of this great land are, at any given moment, jammed with hundreds of commercial jet aircraft, which are in turn, jammed with hundreds of people that previously rode those damned Greyhound buses, but who now load up their screaming babies and three days without a shower body odor onto tight, cramped, underventilated aluminum tubes hurtling through the skies at 500 miles per hour. Sooner or later, they have to land. It's a rule. Before they can land, however, they have to negotiate the airspace as they head for the airport. If you always thought that airplanes just sort of flew along some invisible electronic string, you'll find "Pushing Tin" a bit unsettling. Of course, if you've deceived yourself about how airplanes get where they're going, chances are that almost everything this side of "Oklahoma" is going to be a bit unsettling for you.
Nick "The Zone" Falzone (John Cusack) is the alpha male air traffic controller working at New York Center. He and his stable mates are responsible for the most highly congested airspace in the world: New York City and environs. His workplace is a world not completely dissimilar from The Swamp in M*A*S*H. - a hardworking, highly caffeinated bunch of guys and gals who hold the lives of thousands of people in their hands and think nothing of it. Every once and awhile, one of them will go a little blinky, but hey, who wouldn't? If I had to do their job, I'd be talking to my court-appointed psychiatrist right now about all the voices in my head.
Nick lines up the incoming traffic all day and goes home to his loving wife Connie, (Cate Blanchett) and two wonderful children every night and everything is as it should be until one day The New Guy comes to town. Russell Bell (Billy Bob Thornton) comes to the center from out West, complete with a Yoda-esque spookily quiet demeanor, his own chair, a trophy wife (Angeline Jolie), and a mythic legend in air traffic control that precedes him.
Nick, being the hormone driven, competitive and territorial type, does what any red-blooded American Guy would do - he begins peeing in the corners. He finds Russell's calm, meditative self assuredness so threatening that he becomes obsessed. He competes with Russell at work, he competes with Russell at a cookout with his buddies, he tries to unnerve Russell in the car, he eventually sleeps with Russell's way-too-young traffic-stopping wife. Nick is just your standard insecure male jackass that just doesn't quite get it; thirty-three going on twelve, and Cusack is good at it, making him seem disgustingly all but unredeemable.
Billy Bob Thornton is once again the keystone that players focus all their energies against. He may need a new casting description - "supporting actor" doesn't really work any more. Maybe "critically important indisposable supporting actor" would be more like it. You might have been able to make this moovie without Thornton, but why would you?
***A quick note about Angelina Jolie. (Hackers, Foxfire, Playing God)
I can imagine that it would be difficult to cast a woman to compete with the likes of Cate Blanchett. I can also imagine that there are any number of American males who would drool and slobber over Jolie the way that the guys in this moovie did - but - she wasn't able to carry it off, at least not for me. What self-respecting American male would jeopardize their life with Blanchett for Jolie and her HUGE surgically augmented lips. I mean, here's an admittedly shapely twenty-something lying half-naked in bed with Cusack after sex, and I can't take my eyes off those titanic lips. Lips are to Jolie what a nose is to Cyrano. I apologize for pointing them out, thus virtually assuring your movie-going mesmerization, but hey, that's life.
Anyway, it becomes more and more obvious that Nick is going to self-destruct over Russell, and eventually does. It becomes a classic voyage of self-realization - Nick hits bottom, loses everything that matters to him, and then comes face to face with his own failings as he fights back to regain his life and self-respect. You'll doubt, at least for a moment, that he can pull it off, but eventually, with Russell's help, he pulls his head out of his backside and makes everything right again. Adam Sandler could learn a thing or two from John Cusack.
I enjoyed "Pushing Tin". Director Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a Funeral) takes his time in completing the characters' personality development, and demands the characters show us the tense, madhouse nature of their jobs and relationships without leaning on quick-cuts or camera tricks. It's all in the eyes, and he lets their eyes tell the story.
Fly out and see "Pushing Tin". I gave it three and a half cows.
"Pushing Tin" with John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett and Angeline Jolie. Written by Darcy Frey and Glen Charles, directed by Mike Newell. MPAA Rating R for language, brief nudity and some sexuality.
In case you didn't know, the air traffic routes of this great land are, at any given moment, jammed with hundreds of commercial jet aircraft, which are in turn, jammed with hundreds of people that previously rode those damned Greyhound buses, but who now load up their screaming babies and three days without a shower body odor onto tight, cramped, underventilated aluminum tubes hurtling through the skies at 500 miles per hour. Sooner or later, they have to land. It's a rule. Before they can land, however, they have to negotiate the airspace as they head for the airport. If you always thought that airplanes just sort of flew along some invisible electronic string, you'll find "Pushing Tin" a bit unsettling. Of course, if you've deceived yourself about how airplanes get where they're going, chances are that almost everything this side of "Oklahoma" is going to be a bit unsettling for you.
Nick "The Zone" Falzone (John Cusack) is the alpha male air traffic controller working at New York Center. He and his stable mates are responsible for the most highly congested airspace in the world: New York City and environs. His workplace is a world not completely dissimilar from The Swamp in M*A*S*H. - a hardworking, highly caffeinated bunch of guys and gals who hold the lives of thousands of people in their hands and think nothing of it. Every once and awhile, one of them will go a little blinky, but hey, who wouldn't? If I had to do their job, I'd be talking to my court-appointed psychiatrist right now about all the voices in my head.
Nick lines up the incoming traffic all day and goes home to his loving wife Connie, (Cate Blanchett) and two wonderful children every night and everything is as it should be until one day The New Guy comes to town. Russell Bell (Billy Bob Thornton) comes to the center from out West, complete with a Yoda-esque spookily quiet demeanor, his own chair, a trophy wife (Angeline Jolie), and a mythic legend in air traffic control that precedes him.
Nick, being the hormone driven, competitive and territorial type, does what any red-blooded American Guy would do - he begins peeing in the corners. He finds Russell's calm, meditative self assuredness so threatening that he becomes obsessed. He competes with Russell at work, he competes with Russell at a cookout with his buddies, he tries to unnerve Russell in the car, he eventually sleeps with Russell's way-too-young traffic-stopping wife. Nick is just your standard insecure male jackass that just doesn't quite get it; thirty-three going on twelve, and Cusack is good at it, making him seem disgustingly all but unredeemable.
Billy Bob Thornton is once again the keystone that players focus all their energies against. He may need a new casting description - "supporting actor" doesn't really work any more. Maybe "critically important indisposable supporting actor" would be more like it. You might have been able to make this moovie without Thornton, but why would you?
***A quick note about Angelina Jolie. (Hackers, Foxfire, Playing God)
I can imagine that it would be difficult to cast a woman to compete with the likes of Cate Blanchett. I can also imagine that there are any number of American males who would drool and slobber over Jolie the way that the guys in this moovie did - but - she wasn't able to carry it off, at least not for me. What self-respecting American male would jeopardize their life with Blanchett for Jolie and her HUGE surgically augmented lips. I mean, here's an admittedly shapely twenty-something lying half-naked in bed with Cusack after sex, and I can't take my eyes off those titanic lips. Lips are to Jolie what a nose is to Cyrano. I apologize for pointing them out, thus virtually assuring your movie-going mesmerization, but hey, that's life.
Anyway, it becomes more and more obvious that Nick is going to self-destruct over Russell, and eventually does. It becomes a classic voyage of self-realization - Nick hits bottom, loses everything that matters to him, and then comes face to face with his own failings as he fights back to regain his life and self-respect. You'll doubt, at least for a moment, that he can pull it off, but eventually, with Russell's help, he pulls his head out of his backside and makes everything right again. Adam Sandler could learn a thing or two from John Cusack.
I enjoyed "Pushing Tin". Director Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a Funeral) takes his time in completing the characters' personality development, and demands the characters show us the tense, madhouse nature of their jobs and relationships without leaning on quick-cuts or camera tricks. It's all in the eyes, and he lets their eyes tell the story.
Fly out and see "Pushing Tin". I gave it three and a half cows.
