Plane travel provides a good opportunity to catch up on the movies you’ve missed. Or, to watch Notting Hill on the screen of your seatmate, while Rick Ross’s God Forgives, I Don’t blares through your own headphones. This is what Moonlight director Barry Jenkins did last night on a bumpy transatlantic flight that left JFK just before the “bomb cyclone” unleashed itself on the East Coast. Jenkins did what any nervous flyer would do in that situation — he got drunk and live-tweeted the whole experience to 111K+ fans from 39,000 feet.
“In other news, the woman next to me is watching NOTTING HILL,” Jenkins announced.
“A few choice folks will get the irony of this happening on my last flight of this sojourn. Also… Julia Roberts is STUNNING in this film. And holy shit Lester Freamon is in this?!” With some help from his good friend Woodford Reserve small-batch whiskey, Barry got stuck right in to the plot of Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts’s iconic 1999 romantic drama.
Despite obstacles — Jenkins couldn’t actually hear the movie, and remained unconvinced that Hugh Grant’s “English cat game” was enough to woo Julia Roberts, who reminded him of Jennifer Lopez on In Living Color — the Twitter thread is perhaps more entertaining than the actual movie. As Jenkins’s soundtrack switches from Rick Ross to DJ Shadow’s “Six Days,” Roberts’s character is launched into outer space, which does sound very dramatic without context.
Jenkins is particularly excited for the entrance of Rhys Ifans, who plays Grant’s scruffy roommate Spike. “Yoooooooo is that wild lookin English cat I ain’t seem [sic] him in forever!!!” he tweeted. “The dude with the crazy hair, he got jokes I remember that dude!!!!!” (I have a similar reaction every time I watch Notting Hill.) However, most of Jenkins’s praise is reserved for Roberts, who has great eyebrows and at one point is compared to “a lamp you find in some antique shop in Novia Scotia. A bulb rather. With infinite lumens and a millionwatt range.”
TBH, Jenkins might be the only director we’d trust with a sequel, soundtracked by Rick Ross obviously.