I flew from Heathrow to Newark yesterday in order to do some financial services presentations in Rochester New York. As usual I flew Virgin, since they have great in-flight entertainment (we also have a corporate deal with them, which is a bigger deciding factor).

Flipping through the 44 films, all available as video-on-demand, I realised that I'd been travelling too much lately. I'd already seen 16 of them, and only one wasn't on a seat back video display. I still managed to find two films to watch, both remakes as it turns out. The first was the Manchurian Candidate, originally made in 1962. Not bad, but I haven't seen the original to compare it to. The second was Flight Of The Phoenix, originally made in 1965. This was very enjoyable, and Dennis Quaid did a pretty good job in the role originally played by Jimmy Stewart. The story is all about a plane that crashes in the Gobi Desert in remotest Mongolia and is then rebuilt using one good engine. Aside from probably not watching crashing planes when you're flying, the thing that struck me about this was the scenery. As the plane is flying over the desert I thought to myself, that doesn't really look much like the Gobi Desert (I was there last year on vacation), although it did look familiar. I sat through the end credits to find that it had been filmed in Namibia around Swakopmund (where I'd been a few years ago). The question really is: if you're going to film it in Namibia, why not set the story there, rather than in Mongolia that's something like 10,000 miles away?

I'm back on the plane again tonight to get back to London. This means I'll either be sleeping or I'll have to start watching foreign language films with sub-titles...