Phoenix Diaries

The first thing that really struck me about this documentary was how much of an, ah, emotional man John Moore is. There are some great looks behind the scenes of the making of the movie, which are almost always overshadowed by the occasional tempter tantrums the John Moore throws. Granted, he's in the middle of making a multi-million dollar movie on the other side of the planet and in the middle of the desert, but it really seemed to me like he was the only person getting upset all the time.

There is a funny scene where Giovanni Ribisi is taken away from the set to give an interview for Entertainment Tonight or something, and he has to introduce himself four or five times for all of the different channels that will be playing the interview. Most of the main actors give interviews, impromptu or not, in this documentary, and I especially like that it spends very little time showing footage from the final film, concentrating more on footage taken of the actual shooting of the movie, not the results of it, and that is how good supplemental documentaries are made.

And like most documentaries included with the DVDs of less than great movies, this one actually made me like the movie more, because it gives insights not only into the intentions of the movie but the experiences of the cast and crew in making it, which always helps me identify. Not bad.

I came away from this respecting the documentarian, but not the players or director very much.

Director Moore came across as a rather nasty sort, prone to tantrums, and filling his speech with more pointless uses of the F-word than I have heard in many years. If you cut out the number of times he uses this word in the documentary, either as a verb, adjective, adverb, noun, or participle (and yes, he makes ample use of all of these grammatical forms of the word in question) he would actually have had very little to say. Hey, buddy, buy a dictionary or get one of those word-a-day calendars and add to your vocabulary! There's a whole language out there to be discovered.

I was reminded of the documentary that Woody Allen's character makes of Alan Alda's comedian character in the film "Crimes and Misdemeanors," in which Allen makes a warts-and-all film exposing the other side of his subject. If you've seen that film, you will know what I mean.

It was strange to me that so little time was spent with Dennis Quaid in the documentary. Was there a reason? I watched this documentary prior to watching the film, and I was convinced that I would not enjoy a film from this director. I was pleasantly surprised that Flight of the Phoenix was well acted and filmed, and a worthy successor to the original version of 1965.