By Brooke Edge
I dont fly too often, so Im still pretty easily impressed by entertainment options available on planes. The folks at Jet Blue positively made my Christmas vacation with their individual screens for each seat keeping me connected with cable TV MTV conveniently scheduled a True Life marathon for my flight home to Florida, so I was successfully distracted from my fear of flying for two hours by the trials and tribulations of attention-whore teenagers with body image issues, substance abuse issues, love triangle issues, etc. I thought Id discovered some revolutionary new feature of in-flight entertainment, but when I got off the plane raving about this Jet Blue phenomenon, it turned out everyone else had known about it for years. Oh well. Not the first time Ive been late to the pop culture party.
In the past two weeks, British Air won me over with not only having individual seat screens (which have tickled me on international trips for a few years now), but having practically a kajillion TV shows and movies On Demand, ranging from serious films Ive been meaning to see (like The White Countess) to the option of just watching a bunch of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Flight of the Conchords for fun. Turns out my inner critic and film scholar also goes on vacation while flying, as the movies I ended up picking were Marley & Me (which falls into the cute puppy flick that I dont want to pay to rent category) and Watchmen (which I just never got around to seeing in the cinema, and probably was a bad choice for a 4x4-inch screen). I stayed awake for Marley; succumbed to the Tylenol PM and free wine and conked out for the superheroes.