Eight Below and The Terminal

I like to watch movies on the bus. Sleep, cell-phone chatter, and headphones inevitably interrupt my viewing, leaving the plot denatured and the dialogue incomplete. In 2003, for example, on a bus to and from the anti-war protest in New York, I watched Crocodile Dundee and When Harry Met Sally in this fashion. (I was lucky; on the ISO-chartered bus, the riders were subjected to documentaries about Palestine.)

This weekend, traveling to and from New York again, I watched two more films, about which I'd like to say a few nice things. Eight Below, in which the huskies out-act Paul Walker and the dude from American Pie, is a triumph of extreme anthropomorphism, radically familiarizing the Antarctic landscape fully as much as the dogs. In The Terminal, Tom Hanks, whose character's accent now seems like a bizarre imitation of Borat's, gives us a bumbling, tragic portrayal of statelessness, and bare life appears in the guise of romantic comedy.