View from the Top (2003)

One of my all time favorites.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

It seems that too many people watch this movie with wrong expectations: first of all, it is supposed to be a mindless, silly comedy, and in that sense it does not fail. The very beginning of the film shows it clearly, so adjust your expectations accordingly, you Ms. Paltrow included :) I mean, there is Mike Myers in a role of an absolute idiotic instructor teaching flight attendants how to pronounce "assess" so it does not sound like "asses", and Gwyneth Paltrow in a role that takes full advantage of her good looks and portrays her as an unambitious (dumb?) blonde (in the first third of the film)... so if you are expecting some Kurosawa, or Bergman type depth, you are being delusional.View from the top does have some shortcomings: first of all, it was being made just as 9/11 happened, and from what I gather, that influenced the story, editing and release quite a bit. Then, there is the strange cameo by Rob Lowe, which leaves an impression that it was meant to be more than just a cameo... but it ended up being a loose end. And there is a strangely inconsistent accent by Gwyneth Paltrow who usually gets it right ("Sliding Doors" comes to mind), so that leads me to believe that there was some serious amount of re-shooting which made for those inconsistencies...Even with all that, the film comes loaded with good laughs, my favorite being scenes with Mike Myers who just nailed his role (but I understand that "haters gonna hate"), and even Gwyneth's reactions to his lunacy are priceless.So, if you are expecting a terrific plot that would make Hitchcock jealous, move on, this is not that type of film. But if you are in for some guilty pleasure of silly laughs with some seriously good acting by the main actors (Gwyneth Paltrow, Mike Myers and Christina Applegate were all great), then you have come to the right place.This film is really not as bad as people are making it to be. There is nothing wrong with using actresses good looks to make a funny film especially when the film has no pretenses at being another "Seventh Seal". If anything, we need more joy and fun in this world, and this film provides plenty of that.p.s. Watch this film carefully, there are plenty of jokes that would be easy to miss if you are too busy eating popcorn.p.p.s. BTW, Christina Applegate just proved again what a terrific actress she is! Wow!

I came across this movie on Netflix streaming movies.Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Donna Jensen, small town girl who never was given much encouragement. Then one day she learns about a new book, written by a successful airline stewardess, and she decides that is what she wants to be. Even though she has never flown before. The first funny scene comes in her very first assignment with a small local airline that shuttles gamblers to/from casinos. With apparently no training, as they take off she starts to scream that the plane is going to crash, they are all going to die, as the puzzled passengers look on.But getting over that hurdle, she settles in but isn't satisfied. Then she learns about openings for a large airline. Her training is made funny by Mike Myers as crooked eye John Witney, who was directing training. Eventually Donna is accepted but due to very marginal test scores was relegated to a commuter airline based in Cleveland.Her good friend and fellow stewardess is Christina Applegate as the dumb kleptomaniac Christine Montgomery who gets one of the prime jobs. This puzzles Donna until the actual tests are checked, it is discovered that Christine changed the I.D. codes on the tests, basically stealing Donna's high scores for herself.Mark Ruffalo is good as the love interest Ted Stewart. And Candice Bergen is good as Sally Weston, the stewardess who wrote the book that inspired Donna.SPOILERS: After Donna got everything straightened out and the international job she wanted, it made it hard for her and Ted to make a god of their romance. So, as the movie ends, we see a plane taking off with Donna in the pilot seat, she now was flying out of Cleveland.

There are talented actors and actresses in this movie. Why? Why did they agree to make this embarrassing movie? They don't embarrass themselves, in most cases, but this script is an embarrassment nonetheless, and they couldn't have been paid that much to do it, as it comes off as a low-budget effort.Where to start? The characters are either caricatures, like Mike Meyers' character, or Candice Bergan's character, or Gwyneth Paltow's character's mother, or ... Or they are shallow to the point of being unsympathetic, like Paltrow's character, who dreams of being assigned as a stewardess to a New York-Paris route for the prestige of it, but evidently has no interest in either of those two cities.The gratuitous shots at Cleveland are cheep humor. (Yes, I live in the Cleveland area.) And then the end is like a bad foreshadowing of the end of The Devil Wears Prada: the young woman decides that chasing her dream of a big career (being a stewardess on a trans-Atlantic route) is not worth giving up her boyfriend, so she gives up the route, evidently, and flies back to the boyfriend. Of course, the boyfriend is from a wealthy Shaker Heights family and will be a lawyer, so it's not exactly as if she's agreeing to starve in a garret for love. But still, there is the notion that a woman needs to give up career/ambition for love if she wants to be happy. They never make movies about men doing that, do they? This might have worked as a short sketch on TV. But it's embarrassing as a feature-length film.The director, Bruno Barreto, did Dona Flor and her Two Husbands back in 1976, so he has certainly done better.This film evidently flopped at the box office, so others also found it poor as well.I just can't understand why any of the names involved bothered. They must all have seen that it was a loser.

I don't know how on why this script got produced, but something nefarious or untoward had to be involved. Somebody had to get paid off, sucked off or drugged up because this screenplay is painfully obvious and even more painfully incompetent. While watching it, it felt like the story had started out as a spectacularly lame attempt at drama but after writer Eric Wald got rejected for the 538th time, he went back and tried to retrofit it as a comedy. That's a bad idea to begin with and it's made so much worse by Wald's near total lack of any sense of humor. There are only three overtly comedic characters in this whole thing. One is supposed to be funny because he's gay, one is supposed to be funny because she's a thieving skank and the other is supposed to be funny because he's cross-eyed. Such low-quality laughs can be acceptable, but not when they're in desperately short supply. For every 10 funny seconds here, there's at least 10 completely unfunny minutes.Donna (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a small town girl with sort-of big time dreams. She wants to be a flight attendant, which is only a lofty goal if you grow up in a corrugated aluminum trailer with an ex-showgirl mom and a succession of loser stepdads. She starts out at a bargain basement airline that flies drunks and gamblers around Nevada, eventually making her way to the much more prestigious Royalty Airlines. But even though she's the best student in Royalty's flight attendant training school, when she graduates she's assigned to a commercial express flight out of Cleveland. Along the way Donna meets a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) and her idol, world famous flight attendant and author Sally Westin (Candice Bergen).You can probably guess what happens but just in case some unborn fetuses are reading this, Donna gets an opportunity to work the international flights to Paris and have the adventurous life of which she always dreamed. She can't really have that life and a boyfriend in Cleveland, so she has to choose. Unsurprisingly, she chooses one and then later on changes her mind and chooses the other. I think you know which is which.It's not like View From The Top is badly made. The cast gives it the old college try, the director does what he can and the basic plot unfolds in a blunt yet logical fashion. There are just so many long stretches where there's nothing vaguely resembling a joke or even a humorous situation. If a comedy is genuinely funny, it can be outright terrible in a lot of other ways. This movie isn't actually that terrible, but it's barely funny at all.Only watch this thing if you're going to be breathing laughing gas for the next 90 minutes.