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(You know and I know that no airplane piloted by Dean Martin ever crashed).

That snarky parenthetical aside—one of my all-time favorites — comes courtesy of Roger Ebert’s review of the 1970 disaster flick Airport, a ten-time Oscar nominee that ushered in a decade’s worth of storylines where all-star casts were assembled for the sole purpose of dying ridiculously violent deaths at the hands of natural disasters, faulty buildings, disasters at sea, killer insects, and any other threat that had some cinematic pulp to squeeze out of it.
It’s been a long time since I have rambled my way through to the meat of my column (I have felt fairly structured these past weeks), and I bring up Airport only because a) I have rented the DVD collection featuring the quartet of Universal’s airplanes-in-peril series from the ‘70s and felt full disclosure was completely necessary and b) I seriously doubt I will ever get around to writing about Airport 1975, even if I somehow find the time to spend watching it. On the subject of time, I recently sent back nearly half of the 30 movies I had checked out from the library, many ones I had been putting off seeing forever, and that will have to remain strangers to my eyes just a while longer. The ranks of the 18 that remain include such diverse offerings as a 1971 Pink Floyd concert, Woody Allen’s most recent effort, Edward Norton’s film debut, the film that inspired a sequel that finally won Paul Newman an Oscar for Best Actor, and a Tom Hanks slapstick comedy from the days just before he started racking up nominations left and right.

If I can get around to even half of them, and stay focused on the ones I haven’t seen before, I will tally it up in the win column. There have been a lot of changes rumbling on about in my life lately, most of them fairly important, one of them merely materialistic, but all worthy of noting. In the past weeks I have switched jobs, had a marriage proposal accepted, watched my son take steps on his own and exhibit definitive traces of his developing personality and individuality, made plans to take my fiancée and son back to my childhood town for a memorial service to honor my recently departed uncle, and purchased my first-ever flat screen television (for all you inquiring minds/anal retentive Patrick Bateman-types, it is the Samsung 40-inch 6300 series LED-backlit LCD model with detachable blender).

Life changes upon life changes tend to make me even more than introspective than usual, which then leaves more vulnerable and open to tallying ridiculous “patterns” in my life. As for example, the last time a Scream film came out I was also engaged and set to be married in the not-too-distant future. Does it mean anything? No, but it certainly feels like there should be a metaphor, or a life lesson, or at least a clue as to the new Ghostface’s identity (or identities, as the case may prove to be).

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