Airplane Reviews - Vienna to Koh Samui on Finnair

It's really amazing that without fail, every single airline that is part of the One World alliance is nicer than American Airlines. The planes are nicer, the service is better, and the meals are slightly more edible. Finnair was great. Even though we didn't get upgraded, the seats were perfectly comfortable in coach. I don't remember the meals, which I always take to mean that they weren't that good. Let's just assume going forward that unless I mention the airline food, it wasn't anything spectacular. I expected the lounge in Helsinki to be really nice. It was nice enough, but nothing amazing. 

On the way to Thailand, we watched The Help, which was good enough, but I don’t get all the hype for it and why it’s nominated for every award. I think what bothered me about it is that I thought the tone was very light for the material it was covering. I get that no one is going to come and see the movie if it shows a realistic view of how bad the situation was for black people in the South, but I think it’s also irresponsible and disrespectful to depict it the way they did. It all seemed too easy to me. At times, I thought the movie almost played like a comedy. I also don’t buy that one woman was the source of all the racism in the town. That was ridiculous to play her out like the villain when all the other women in the movie also had black maids that they treated very poorly. I also left the movie wondering where were all the men at the time. Were they all working? Maybe they didn't have the budget to cast the male roles.

On the return trip, we watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which I found extremely entertaining. I thought the special effects were good. The monkeys were certainly fun to watch. I thought it was weird that they made it out that James Franco was the good guy in the movie, given that he (spoiler alert) caused the end of the human race. And as much as I like Freida Pinto and could probably watch her read from the back of a cereal box for 2 hours, I didn’t understand why she was in the movie. Her character had nothing about her that remotely tied her to the plot of the movie. I thought maybe the reason of casting her was to get men to come to the movie, but there are giant apes jumping around the screen for 2 hours wreaking havoc. That’s more than enough to keep a man entertained.