Don't Believe the Hype

Better than most people think

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I came across this movie on Netflix streaming movies.Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Donna Jensen, small town girl who never was given much encouragement. Then one day she learns about a new book, written by a successful airline stewardess, and she decides that is what she wants to be. Even though she has never flown before. The first funny scene comes in her very first assignment with a small local airline that shuttles gamblers to/from casinos. With apparently no training, as they take off she starts to scream that the plane is going to crash, they are all going to die, as the puzzled passengers look on.But getting over that hurdle, she settles in but isn't satisfied. Then she learns about openings for a large airline. Her training is made funny by Mike Myers as crooked eye John Witney, who was directing training. Eventually Donna is accepted but due to very marginal test scores was relegated to a commuter airline based in Cleveland.Her good friend and fellow stewardess is Christina Applegate as the dumb kleptomaniac Christine Montgomery who gets one of the prime jobs. This puzzles Donna until the actual tests are checked, it is discovered that Christine changed the I.D. codes on the tests, basically stealing Donna's high scores for herself.Mark Ruffalo is good as the love interest Ted Stewart. And Candice Bergen is good as Sally Weston, the stewardess who wrote the book that inspired Donna.SPOILERS: After Donna got everything straightened out and the international job she wanted, it made it hard for her and Ted to make a god of their romance. So, as the movie ends, we see a plane taking off with Donna in the pilot seat, she now was flying out of Cleveland.

I recently saw that someone had watched this and gave it 0/10 so I had to see for myself if it was that bad. It's not. But it sucks. I counted three good laughs and a couple dozen small chuckles. That's not good enough. The movie has a hard time deciding -- romantic comedy or goofball comedy? Mike Myers' part made it goofball and it just doesn't work. I felt bored most of the time and just wanted it to be over. But I don't want to turn off Gwyneth Paltrow because she's an exceptional actress. The end credits make this movie worth it because of the bloopers and the on set dance scene. Yes, a dance scene during the credits is worth watching. Gwyn's acting in that is better than anywhere in the movie itself! A two minute delight to watch. Otherwise this movie has next to no value. It's no wonder Gwyneth refers to this as View From My Ass.5.1 / 10 stars--Zoooma, a Kat Pirate Screener

On a very slow night, I watched this flick and was generally surprised at the physical comedy Gwen was willing to put herself through. I really enjoyed this film. For it's ridiculous nature. It's fable quality, and real nice (yet mostly overused) concept of home is where love is. And it reminded me that the journey with someone is better than the journey alone. Everyone needs a co-pilot and it's a sweet message (albeit sometimes outdated). I feel. a movie like this is genuine, and returns back to a time where we may not have been so cynical. If that's their angle, I would say...it's not a bad thing to be sweet.

I don't know how on why this script got produced, but something nefarious or untoward had to be involved. Somebody had to get paid off, sucked off or drugged up because this screenplay is painfully obvious and even more painfully incompetent. While watching it, it felt like the story had started out as a spectacularly lame attempt at drama but after writer Eric Wald got rejected for the 538th time, he went back and tried to retrofit it as a comedy. That's a bad idea to begin with and it's made so much worse by Wald's near total lack of any sense of humor. There are only three overtly comedic characters in this whole thing. One is supposed to be funny because he's gay, one is supposed to be funny because she's a thieving skank and the other is supposed to be funny because he's cross-eyed. Such low-quality laughs can be acceptable, but not when they're in desperately short supply. For every 10 funny seconds here, there's at least 10 completely unfunny minutes.Donna (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a small town girl with sort-of big time dreams. She wants to be a flight attendant, which is only a lofty goal if you grow up in a corrugated aluminum trailer with an ex-showgirl mom and a succession of loser stepdads. She starts out at a bargain basement airline that flies drunks and gamblers around Nevada, eventually making her way to the much more prestigious Royalty Airlines. But even though she's the best student in Royalty's flight attendant training school, when she graduates she's assigned to a commercial express flight out of Cleveland. Along the way Donna meets a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) and her idol, world famous flight attendant and author Sally Westin (Candice Bergen).You can probably guess what happens but just in case some unborn fetuses are reading this, Donna gets an opportunity to work the international flights to Paris and have the adventurous life of which she always dreamed. She can't really have that life and a boyfriend in Cleveland, so she has to choose. Unsurprisingly, she chooses one and then later on changes her mind and chooses the other. I think you know which is which.It's not like View From The Top is badly made. The cast gives it the old college try, the director does what he can and the basic plot unfolds in a blunt yet logical fashion. There are just so many long stretches where there's nothing vaguely resembling a joke or even a humorous situation. If a comedy is genuinely funny, it can be outright terrible in a lot of other ways. This movie isn't actually that terrible, but it's barely funny at all.Only watch this thing if you're going to be breathing laughing gas for the next 90 minutes.