Sincere 'View' has a limited horizon
By Rene Rodriguez
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Miramax Films
The nicest thing you can say about "View from the Top" is that the movie should do for the flight-attendant industry what "Top Gun" did for the Air Force: entice an entire new generation to sign up for service.
Christina Applegate, left, plays the competition to Gwyneth Paltrow, center, in flight-attendant school. "View from the Top" is about one girl's struggle to leave home and fulfil her dream. Mike Myers has a cameo appearance as an instructor.
As an actual movie, though, "View from the Top" never achieves takeoff. This story about a small-town woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) who dreams of becoming a first-class stewardess on the New York-Paris route trades primarily on gags about towering hairdos and the sight of Paltrow squeezed into a procession of Hooters-tight uniforms. While the actress has rarely looked better (and her chest size, which changes suspiciously from film to film, has settled on a just-right voluptuousness here), it is not entirely unfair to expect something more for your time and money.
Like lawyers and politicians, flight attendants are a favored target of jokes in comedies, but only when they are being obsequious and rude. In "View from the Top," the career is depicted as a highly competitive and demanding profession, embraced by people who take great pride in their work. This may all well be true, but funny, it's not.
"A View from the Top" follows Paltrow as she enrolls in flight-attendant school for a major airline. There is the requisite love-interest subplot, in which Paltrow must choose between her career and Mark Ruffalo. There is also the requisite rival, played by Christina Applegate, who stands between Paltrow and her dreams of serving champagne and caviar at 35,000 feet. As a way to disguise the fatal lack of impetus and zip in Eric Wald's pedestrian screenplay, director Bruno Barreto ("Bossa Nova") pipes a different pop song onto the movie's soundtrack every five minutes — many of them, curiously, from the 1980s, and then mostly covers, which sound just different enough from the real thing to be distracting.
PG-13, for language/sexual references 87 minutes
The only bright spot in "View from the Top" is an extended cameo by Mike Myers, playing the training school's cross-eyed instructor.
'View From the Top'
The actor, who apparently was given free rein to improvise, does score a few laughs, although many of his intonations seem lifted from "Austin Powers in Goldmember." Then again, "View from the Top" has been sitting on a shelf for so long (the movie was filmed in early 2001, long before "Goldmember"), maybe Myers assumed the film would never be released at all.
No such luck.
