Electric Underpants

I recently had the pleasure of watching the documentary Stranded: I Have Come From a Plane That Crashed in the Mountains and it was really extraordinary. It tells the story of an Uruguay rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, through the recollections of the survivors. 16 of the 45 passengers on the plane survived for three months in the freezing cold mountains. They had no food and were eventually forced to eat the bodies of their dead friends to survive. It’s heartbreaking, horrific and uplifting all at the same time. I recommend it highly – but stay away from the awful 1994 movie Alive based on the book of the same name that tells the same story unless you think that Ethan Hawke is a fine actor and perfectly cast as a Uruguayan rugby player. One highlight: Vincent Spano gets eaten.

About a week after seeing the documentary, I flopped down on the couch and watched The Remains of the Day starring the great Anthony Hopkins (and the ravishing Emma Thompson – but that’s for a different post.) Of course, it’s difficult to watch any Hopkins movie without thinking of his fine performance as Hannibal Lecter is The Silence of the Lambs. And that got me to thinking about a plot device that might have made the movie Alive at least tolerable…