Friday Night at the Movies: Come Fly with Me!

I'm combining two things here.  One is the ongoing effort to beg, cajole and solicit support for the Netroots Nation scholarship program.  I'll say more about it below the fold.

But it is still Friday Night at the Movies, so we need movies.  This week's topic is about movies with travel in them.  Bob Hope & Bing Crosby made a bunch of "Road to ****" movies - this from one of them:

With everyone's teamwork, we can provide support for more scholarships to send people to Austin next month.  The goal is to bring in activists who couldn't otherwise afford to go, expand the diversity of the convention (which to me is the core importance of this effort), and thereby enrich the experience of all attendees.  Kid Oakland founded this effort last year, and DFA (Democracy for America) has taken it up this year.  They are funding 9 scholarships, and donations received have now upped that to at least 15.  (I think we'll end up over 20 in the end.  Kid Oakland managed 19 all by himself last year.)

There are several ways to be a part of the effort:

1. Apply for a scholarship or nominate someone for a scholarship.

2. Vote on applicants (this is only one criterion for awarding the scholarships)

3. Donate money to expand the program - no amount too small (or too larger).  The donate button is on the right side of this page.

4. Scholarships will include conference registration and hotel accomodations.  Travel, meals and incidentals must be raised by the recipient elsewhere, or covered by their own funds.

5. Donate registrations that you won't be using.  In some cases, that's people who can't attend.  In others, it's people who have had panels approved, and earlier paid for registrations.  Land of Enchantment (me) is coordinating that part of the effort.  Contact me via my gmail account (username: landenchantment) for this.

6. Donate frequent flyer miles for a scholarship recipient's ticket to Austin.  Contact me (LoE also) about that, too.  Here's the airlines that fly in and out of Austin.

7. Publish a diary to solicit support for this program.  (Again LoE is coordinating that...)

OK, enough on that.  On to MOVIES!!!

First, since we're talking about frequent flyer miles, there's quite a few movies that take place mostly on airplanes:

• Airplane! which is very funny
• Airport, which Airplane! was a spoof of
• Air Force One, with President Harrison Ford up against terrorists who hijack the aircraft of the title
• Another airborne hijacking story, Executive Decision, featured Kurt Russell and one of Halle Barry's earlier roles
• Air America, about some seat-of-the-pants undercover CIA airline pilots played by Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr
• United 93, with no "name" stars, is a surprisingly good docudrama about a story that we all know the ending to
• Pushing Tin, with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton as a couple of air traffic controllers
• John Cusack plays one of many of his roles that remind me of Jimmy Stewart's screen persona (especially with Hitchcock) in Con Air, with one of John Malkovich's more pernicious turns as a villain
• Jodie Foster has a child go missing, on board the flight, in Flightplan
• Rachel McAdams (best known as the young sweetheart opposite Ryan Gosling in The Notebook) is up against psycho Cillian Murphy in Red Eye, another airborne thriller
• Leonardo di Caprio is a con man fake pilot in Catch Me if You Can
• Tom Hanks is a man without a country, trapped outside of U.S. Customs, and unable to return home in The Terminal
• One of my favorite underappreciated movies is Fearless, which opens with a plane crash, and follows the derangement that follows the lives of the survivors - it is quirky and amusing.  And includes one of the earlier film appearances of Benicio del Toro

I'm sure there's more, including some obvious ones where someone says "I can't believe you forgot Whatever It Is.  But I've already listed a lot, so will stop here.  Except to mention a few other modes of transportation:

• Boats:  Night at the Opera, Titanic, Poseidon Adventure, Lifeboat, The River Wild, The Black Robe, Hunt for Red October, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World; To the Ends of the Earth
• Trains:  Julia, Murder on the Orient Express, Shanghai Noon, Runaway Train, The Taking of the Pelham 1-2-3
• Automobiles & Buses on the Road:  The Grapes of Wrath, Road to Bountiful, Ray, Cannonball Run, Harry & Tonto
• Other:  Around the World in 80 Days, Map of the Human Heart (with a rather unconventional episode of lovemaking on top of an airborne hot air balloon)
• Other modes of transportation (wagon train, horseback, you name it), I'll leave to y'all in the comments.  

But don't forget the TEAMWORK we need to build up the scholarship fund for Netroots Nation.  And, also, don't forget the Mojo!