24 March 2015. Over New York, NY
I sat anxiously in my seat. The plane I was on from Geneva was going to be landing at JFK in a short while.
The pilot was making an announcement over the intercom about fastening your seat belts and the like as my anxiety increased. I wasn’t anxious because of flying or the upcoming landing. I didn’t typically get nervous for those things.
I was anxious because I was watching a movie and I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to finish it before the plane landed. The very important movie I was so heavily invested in was the classic, In Time, starring Justin Timberlake.
The premise is, that in the future, there is no currency except for time. You can trade it and it’s what you earn at work; the rich people have tons of it and poor people have very little of it. But when it runs out, you’re out of time aka out of life.
I had selected the movie after already having watched Birdman and doing some work. I had long ago justified to myself that flights were the perfect time to watch movies you wouldn’t normally watch. You were already being “productive” by moving from one spot to another, so you might as well veg out.
The problem with movie selection, however, is if you start a film too late, you may never see the end of it. I was worried that had happened and was waiting for the pilot to stop talking so I could start watching again.
Eventually the pilot wrapped up his English portion of the safety announcement… before launching into the German version of it. Then a moment or two later, the French version of it. The disadvantage of traveling internationally.
After he finished, the movie started to pick up again at the intense point where Will (Justin Timberlake) and Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) are escaping the Minutemen and I can tell the movie is starting to get to the climax and, hopefully, resolution when the pilot comes on yet again, this time talking about the freaking weather.
There’s nothing more frustrating than your movie being interrupted to hear about the weather, save for hearing about said weather in three different languages.
I felt myself getting more anxious, ironically feeling like Justin Timberlake’s character in the movie, wondering if I was running out of time to actually watch “In Time”, the movie, “in time” before the plane landed.
(As a side note, perhaps my favorite part of the movie was that the writers decided to work in as many time-related puns and phrases as possible. If their writing was food, I’d go back for seconds…)
The announcement finished and the movie started to wrap up. And just as the wheels hit the ground, the credits rolled. Just in tim(b)e(rlake).
