Planes, Trains and Automobiles

I'm up to the P's in my alphabetical wander through my movies shelf.  To get you up to speed:  I watch movies as I get ready for work in the morning.  The back bedroom doesn't have a cable line to it, and I haven't got an antenna.  So, I watch movies on that TV, as I'm getting dressed.  I was spending too much time deciding what to watch before I threw in Ghostbusters for the 490th time.  So, I started an alphabetical wander through my collection.

I was doing capsule reviews for a while, and I may restart as a way to make my lazy self write some more.  I slacked off, because slackers slack.  I'm into the P's.  I've been going for about 17 months now.  I figure I won't finish until March 2016, or so.

I'm up to the P's.  There are some good ones in P.  Paranorman, which is an underrated little animated flick from two or three years back.  Parenthood continues to be a favorite, and out of all Ron Howard has done, I'm thinking this might be my favorite flick of his.

Then there's Planes, Trains and Automobiles.  Always a favorite.  Contains some of the best lines ever put onto screen.  And a couple of the funniest visuals to ever come down the pike.



How can you not like that?

As I was getting ready, though, after finishing that flick for probably the 100th time, something hit me:  Much of the movie is dependent on the audience's lack of knowledge concerning geography.

See?  Neal and Del get diverted from Chicago to Wichita because of bad weather.  Now, I get that you might want to stay the night, to see if air traffic gets going again.  But then you're Neal, and you wake up (with Del's hands between two pillows and with your money stolen), and then Del convinces you to go to the train station, since the hope of catching a flight is slim.  Which, of course, is in Stubbville, since you can't ride the train out of Wichita, unless you're a hog, or a cattle.

Which leads to more misadventures, including a busride across Missouri, getting beaten up by a dispatcher and all manner of hilarity.

Don't get me wrong.  It's a great movie.

But it's written with a pre-interstate highway mentality.

We had interstates in 1987.  Even in snowy Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.

That's the thing.  Do people know that Wichita is roughly 700 miles from Chicago?  That's a good haul, but definitely not insurmountable.  I drove from Des Moines to Athens a few years back in right around 13 hours, by myself.  Granted, that was without snow and holiday traffic, but still.  It's doable.

Neal and Del should have gone back to the airport, and rented a car.  They could have split the cost, since they both needed to get to Chicago.  They could have split the driving, so no need to stay at a motel. Even with holiday traffic, they would have been home Wednesday evening, easily.

Hell, they could have rented a car Tuesday night, and driven for a couple or three hours, making Wednesday's drive even less of a beast.