The Pilot's Wife

Product Description

Kathryn Lyons' (Christine Lahti) perfect life takes a jolting nose dive after news of a fatal mid-air explosion aboard Flight 274, piloted by her husband (John Heard). The tension ratchets up a notch when the black box is recovered-revealing shocking rumors that the crash was possibly caused by her husband! Could her husband have secretly been a terrorist? Was her entire life with him a lie?

System Requirements:
Starring: Christine Lahti, John Heard, Kirsty Mitchell, Alison Pill, Campbell Scott
Directed By: Robert Markowitz
Running Time: 89 Min., Color
Copyright Lion's Gate Entertainment 2003.

Format: DVD MOVIE

Customer Reviews:

Quite Full of Twists.......2007-02-12

This movie was very good. The plot is excellent with a twists here and there that keep you glued. Christine Lahti is excellent in the role of the wife.

Disappointed..........2006-04-05

I really like all the cast members in this film. However, I cannot believe I put myself through this movie! I wasn't ironing, but I did finally pick up my laptop and do a search for a better movie. This movie just had too many loose ends.

Definitely watchable but suffers from a couple of flaws............2004-04-16

Christine Lahti plays Kristine Lyons, the wife of pilot Jack Lyons (John Heard) who loses his life in a plane crash. Flying a route from Boston to London, the crash occurs off the coast of Ireland and under mysterious circumstances.

Attempting to gain insight into the crash, the pilot's union sends a representative to interview Kristine Lyons who ends up having many questions of her own. Upon learning that information on the Cockpit Voice Recorder (Black Box) may possibly implicate her husband in the cause of the downed aircraft, Kristine Lyons resorts to finding the truth on her own which eventually leads her to England.

Upon reaching London and uncovering a trail of lies, deceit, a double life, and illegal activities spanning two continents, Kristine Lyons soon finds out much more than she ever expected to and realizes she never really knew her husband at all.

The Pilot's Wife is a movie that wants to be great but seems to settle in at above average. The plot itself contains enough intrigue and mystery to carry two-thirds of it's length but the finale borders on being anti-climactic. As far as the acting is concerned, Christine Lahti and John Heard are the only prominent names in the cast. John Heard doesn't appear in enough scenes to carry any weight which leaves Christine Lahti to make up the difference. She does very well in her role, in my opinion, and her performances are one of the finer points of the movie. My final grade for The Pilot's Wife rates a B-.

A Pilot's Past.......2004-02-14

This CBS TV movie was filmed in Ireland. It is the second Anita Shreve book to come to the screen. Her "The Weight of Water" which starred Sean Penn was well acted, but was laboriously edited. (My review for that one was called "The Weight of Editing." :) "The Pilot's Wife" fares a bit better overall, although Sean Penn is certainly one of our finest actors.

Christine Lahti who had her Oscar nomination for "Swing Shift" with Goldie Hawn does an incredibly excellent performance here. The variety of levels she hits as grieving wife, compassionate mother, angry widow and driven super-sleuth give us a sterling performance. Campbell Scott, real-life son of George C. Scott & Colleen Dewhurst, gives an excellent subtle performance as the pilot association representative who becomes emotionally involved. John Heard played a character named Jack who was about as devious as Jack Lyons in "Pilot's Wife" in his co-starring role with Goldie Hawn in "Deceived." While his performance here is in flashback and not as chilling, it equals the devious nature of his previous Jack from 1991. Particularly excellent is newcomer Kirsty Mitchell as Murie Boland, the Irish counterpart of Lyons' hidden life. Mitchell gives a brief but excellent portrayal of a woman whose life has been impacted by the violent struggles in Ireland. I haven't seen her previous film credit of "Capone's Boys," but certainly intend to seek it out on the basis of the strength of this performance. Alison Pill from "Pieces of April" with Katie Holmes who plays daughter Mattie turns in a good performance as a teen dealing as much with the struggles of her own adolescent social issues as with her father's untimely death.

The depth for this picture comes amid the backdrop of the Irish troubles. How the lives of the characters weave with the political turmoil of Ireland along with Lahti's performance elevates the picture from the mundane to the magical. The DVD doesn't offer a great deal of extras; but it is nice to appreciate the film as an uninterrupted whole. Enjoy!

The quintessential made-for-TV movie.......2004-02-09

THE PILOT'S WIFE was produced for television and scheduled to air soon after 9/11. Because the film begins with the crash of an airliner, the network decided to delay the telecast until April 2002. (Sensitivity, or just fear of losing advertising revenue?) In any case, the general mediocrity of television fare is well represented here.

As the movie opens, Kathryn Lyons (Christene Lahti) is awakened in the wee small hours by a pounding on the front door. Robert Hart (Campbell Scott), a representative of the airline pilots' union, is there to tell her that husband Jack (John Heard) was killed when the commercial 747 he captained blew up with 100+ passengers off the Irish coast on a flight from London to Boston. Within a couple days, a contingent of interrogators from the National Transportation Safety Board shows up with the FBI and lawyers in tow to ask pointed questions. This is just about the time that the news media begins reporting that the flight's pilot may have been responsible. It's only when Kathryn learns that her husband's mother, whom Jack said had died when he was nine, is now residing in a rest home in Minnesota, and that Jack didn't live in the crews' quarters whenever on a London layover, that she suspects he was hiding a few teensy details of his life. A scrap of paper in his trousers and an email address on his computer lead her to London, where she discovers that Hubby, presumably in response to a mid-life crisis, left behind a Big Irish Surprise. Several, actually.

It's not that THE PILOT'S WIFE is a bad film, it's just not a particularly good one. Lahti is a fine actress, who delivers a respectable performance, especially when she admits to herself and Hart that her marriage was, in fact, wretched. But what could have been an above-average suspense thriller falls victim to uninspired screenwriting that yields a storyline that proceeds at a sedate pace without any real surprises or substantive drama. There are the nondescript performances by Scott and Alison Pill, who plays Mattie, the Lyons teenage daughter. Alison, ostensibly the apple of her Dad's eye, seems less disturbed about his death than Mom's less than undivided attention when she (Alison) reveals that she "did it" for the first time three years before when she was fourteen. The scripting renders the Alison persona unnecessary to the plot, and the final heart-to-heart between Kathryn and her daughter seemed particularly lame, i.e. perfectly suited to the small screen on a Sunday evening in American suburbia.

Description

Russ Meyer's Vixen. Will jar your senses . . . jerk your emotions . . . straddle your soul. The mind-boggling Erica Gavin . . . the standard by which all "voluptua" must be measured. Vixen . . . is she woman . . . or animal? Primitive forests and British Columbia out-country provide this lush photogenic background for this psychological drama. The lives and motivations of a Canadian bush pilot, his wife Vixen, and members of his fishing lodge are filmatically examined. The camera reveals Vixen's inner torments, which are demonstrated by her various love-hate sexual relationships with both men and women. Only today's society could make such an animal a woman . . . or such a woman and animal! Vixen . . . embrace her!!

Customer Reviews:

Unforgettable Guilty Pleasure.......2007-07-13

Any college male who saw this flick in the 60's will never forget it. For most of us, it was our first introduction to the wacky world of Russ Meyer, with his buxom babes and square-jawed men. The movie begins with a pilot landing his plane in the great north as a voice says, "This is bush country." From then on, you're hooked. Thank you, Russ.

Just plain lame.......2004-12-12

God, this has to be the most badly edited movie ever! It's like a student film. And as far as soft core goes, it's pretty awful. The only scene worth a damn is the lesbian one, but don't think you'll be seeing anything more than breasts. It's not that kind of movie. If you want to see Erica Gavin in a good movie, watch "Caged Heat"

Mountains of Fun!.......2004-09-25

It's easy to see why "Vixen!" is one of the late Russ Meyer's more popular movies, with two of those reasons (sorry, this kind of humor is mandatory here) being Erika Gavin. Gavin, as the libidinous title character, seems to be having a great time frolicking through this movie, mounting Canadian mounties, sexually teasing her biker brother or seducing the young couple who stay at the mountain lodge she and her pilot husband operate. Vixen's racism is a bit disconcerting--she frequently hurls racial slurs at her brother's African-American draft-dodging pal Niles--though it seems used largely to set up a plot twist involving communism and hijacking (it'll make sense, sort of, when you see it). Meyer never did hardcore, but the sex in this one isn't as explicit as in some of his later '70s films ("Up" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens" for example). Still, it seems a lot more erotic, with all the men and women embodying sexual archetypes of the day (not to mention Meyer's own erotomanias). It's one of the few Russ Meyer movies where both the women AND the men have good chests. Also toned down are the manic jump cuts and breathless exposition, making "Vixen!" a lot less exhausting viewing experience than other Meyer movies, like "Cherry, Harry & Raquel" or "Up."

I'm still partial to Meyer's black and white drive-in films, like "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" and "Mudhoney," but I include "Vixen!" as one of my favorite Russ Meyer movies, second only to "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls."

Average customer rating:

Down in New Orleans
Starring: Down in New Orleans
Manufacturer: Anthem Pictures
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B000FKO3EE
Release Date: 2006-08-08

Product Description

In this tale of redemption, the protagonist must fight to regain the accomplished life he knew before drug addiction and revenge stole his career, woman, and contentment, set in the river life of New Orleans.

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