The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater is a virtuoso ensemble in its own right. It gives occasional concerts of symphonic music in the theater and elsewhere, and has. Many of the planetary controllers are blood feasting pedophiles, parasitic monsters literally and predatorily feeding off the 8 million children gone missing each.

Footnotes (2017) Theater Movie Release

Thoughts on the Movie “Sully” UPDATE: January 1. THEY MADE ME do it.

Footnotes (2017) Theater Movie Releases

It’s been said by many a conservative, usually in a moment of frustration, that today’s Republicans are really just yesterday’s Democrats. Colossal (2017) Movie Rating.

Everybody from the journalist Peter Greenberg to my sister’s husband implored me to finally go and watch “Sully,” the Clint Eastwood- directed movie starring Tom Hanks as U. S. Airways captain Chesley Sullenberger, guardian angel of flight 1. Airbus that splashed into the Hudson River eight years ago. When the movie was first released, back in September, I refused to see it (see the original post, below). I’d watched too many big- screen butcher jobs — the chokingly awful “Flight,” for example, with Denzel Washington — and didn’t need the aggravation.

But then the testimonials started coming in, boasting of the film’s surprising levels of accuracy and authenticity. This, I was told again and again, is the rare Hollywood movie that gets the pilot stuff right.

Todd, like me, is an airline pilot who flies 7. Todd was a good viewing partner because, like me, he was skeptical from the start, but also because he’s less of a crank and was bound to keep me in check when my complaints got too whiny or pedantic. Except, in the end, neither of us much liked the movie. Cue 9. 6 minutes of commiserative eye- rolling and sporadic laughter. If there’s a saving grace, it’s that the cockpit scenes are brief.

So far as that “pilot stuff” goes, there’s just not enough of it, really, to get wrong. The silliest scene, to me, is the reenactment of the takeoff sequence, where we see Sully and his first officer, Jeff Skiles (played by Aaron Eckhart, whose bushy . The cockpit is eerily silent, as if the engines have somehow already quit, and the two men chat lazily about the beauty of the Gotham skyline in winter.

Realism grade: F- minus. The first few minutes after takeoff are about the busiest portion of any flight. There’s a lot going on, from the flap retraction sequence to various turns and climb segments. And there’s a ton of radio chatter. It’s a very noisy, task- intensive several minutes, especially out of an airport like La. Guardia. And there go the engines.

Skiles, who was at the controls, gives the jet over to Sully, who gets the heroics going. Skiles then consults the QRH and begins an oddly stilted reading of the emergency checklist (a little too emotionless and flat, though apparently true to the CVR, wordage- wise). And, a couple of minutes later, we get the splashdown into the icy river, digitally rendered in a manner that strikes me as probably more violent and forceful than it was in real life. As part of their complaint, they make the point, several times, that one of the plane’s engines hadn’t totally failed, but had remained at idle thrust. The implication here is that an idling engine would’ve helped get them back to the airport.

This made no sense either to me or to Todd, as idle thrust is just that: idle. It produces little or no push, and wouldn’t have been useful. What were they saying here, that the pilots could have pushed up the throttle and found more power? It’s not clear. As Sully contested, the engine had been wrecked, though investigators, and in turn viewers, don’t learn this until the very end.)The whole return- to- La Guardia question has irked me from the start.

Simulator experiments show that flight 1. But this assumed ideal conditions and instantaneous decision- making, including a well- rehearsed crew that knew exactly what was about to happen. The real- world scenario was a lot messier, as these things always are. Sullenberger weighed the options. Sure, they might have made it back. But if he was wrong — even a small wind shift could throw off the glide — the result would be an Airbus A3.

New York City. Landing in the water was hardly ideal, but it was the best and safest choice. I was also introduced a magical new term that in all my years of flying I’d never heard before: “sub- idle.” The engine was at “sub- idle.” Presumably this is something even less useful than idle? So why are we hearing about it?“What the heck is . It was all a little much. Of course, “Sully” isn’t a movie about flying.

The cockpit sequences are almost incidental. It’s about Sullenberger the man, and his weathering of the investigation that followed. On this count, however, the movie fails harder. Eastwood gives us Sully as a kind of everyman American hero, in battle with obstructive bureaucrats trying to railroad him. But according to those who were there, that’s simply not how things played out. Airways during the investigation. Folks at the NTSB, which is about the most highly respected government agency that exists, have been no less critical.

I received an email from Robert Benzon, Investigator- In- Charge of the board’s inquiry into the flight 1. The NTSB needs the cooperation of all investigation participants: aircraft and engine manufactures, airline operators, the FAA, employee unions, and very importantly flight crewmembers. Watching the movie, this resentment is easy to understand.

The investigators are shown as caricatured villains, hostile to a point that simply isn’t believable. And the ridiculous, time- compressed version of the review board’s final hearing, in the film’s closing minutes, during which Sully is vindicated and everybody goes home happy, is nothing if not goofy — a contrived, Disneyfied portrayal that mocks the actual investigators’ hard work and dedication. When Todd flicked off the screen, we turned and smirked at each other. We were, suffice it to say, underwhelmed.

He of “Miracle on the Hudson” fame, whose 2. I can’t review it, because, in the interest of self- preservation, I’m afraid to see it. Which, in all honestly, had me wanting to see more. Once you get past the histrionics at the beginning — “No one warned us. No one said, you are going to lose both engines at a lower altitude than any jet in history.” — it’s a compelling little tease.

But thirty carefully culled seconds can be deceptive. I’ve been burned this way before. Remember, though, I have decades of precedent on my side.

When Hollywood does airplanes, the results are always a mess, ranging from borderline realistic to off- the- wall preposterous. There have been almost no exceptions to this — save, perhaps, for the efforts of the aforementioned Paul Greengrass, whose “United 9. Problem is, Greengrass isn’t directing “Sully,” Clint Eastwood is, and I have a bad feeling about this one.

That’s the one where Denzel Washington pours himself drinks at the galley, then crash- lands his jet into a field after an inexplicable malfunction causes him to fly a series of inexplicable aerobatics. I had no intention of seeing it.

Readers (and a magazine editor or two) kept badgering me, though, and in time I gave in. A mistake, that was. Then, a couple of years later, in one of the most unforgivably misguided moments of my life, I actually gave the film a second try. I watched it again, and it was even more infuriating the second time around.

For that matter, couldn’t they have picked a better story? The very premise of the movie is based on a myth: the idea that only the most skillful and fearless ace was able to save flight 1. What Would Sully Do? And for this allow me to cannibalize a segment from my book: When the ill- fated jet took off from New York’s La Guardia airport, first officer Jeffrey Skiles had been at the controls. When the engines quit, at a little more than 2,0.

Canada geese, captain Sullenberger took over. There’s no reason a copilot can’t continue flying in an emergency, but in this case most of the primary instruments on Skiles’ side of the cockpit would have failed from loss of power.

Sullenberger took the controls because, really, he had to. Determining a place to land was urgent to say the least. A turn- back to La Guardia was deemed either too risky or downright impossible, as was continuing westward toward Teterboro airport in New Jersey. The choice, then, was either a crash landing in the middle of one of the most built- up cities in the world, or a ditching in the ice- cold Hudson River.