Wherein I See Burning Film

Over the weekend I went out with QR and his girlfriend (I get the feeling I'm going to be going out with a lot of couples from now until the kids start popping out) and she decided that we would watch Flight Plan, the latest trapped-in-a-place-with-evil-movie starring Jodie Foster in a plane acting crazy. My guess is that the increased media representation of women hitting men with fire extinguishers and other heavy objects has led the contemporary Singaporean woman to be a lot more assertive, and men to be a lot less vocal about what kind of movies they want to watch - girls are calling the shots these days (or I just hang out with wimpy guys).

Anyway, as the title of the post suggests, in the final moments of the show, as Jodie punches an air stewardess (as far as I'm concerned the high point of the movie), the film burned. At first I thought it was some funky special effect signifying the air stewardess's loss of consciousness, but it became obvious in a second that it was rather too low-budet looking a special effect. I have tried to recreate the effect in Photoshop:

(Those of you who can't see animated gifs won't be able to see anything, sorry I still use such primitive tech) I was at first at a loss to explain the strange scene, but QR assured me it was the film burning and that he'd seen a documentary or something that had old projectors with burning film. It was the most exciting part of Flight Plan, what with the audience getting riled up and shouting to the poor attendant that they'd better get the thing working again (the movie had major themes of poor customer service, after all).

With luck, when I watch King Kong, we will be accosted by escaped gorrillas from the zoo. That would be ironic (yes, Gary, I know what "ironic" means and this time I'm sure I used it correctly) and interesting.

I already know I'm going to be disappointed in the explaination for the fifty foot monkey.