John Travolta is 72, famous for more than half a century. But he’s only now making his directorial debut with Propeller One Way Night Coach, something that’s a personal project for him. Propeller tells the story of an eight-year-old boy, in the early-1960s, who loves planes and takes his first flight, from New York to Los Angeles, to move there with his mother (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett), who’s embarking on a late-in-life acting career. Because they’re not wealthy—and because the plot requires it—the journey has multiple segments, with layovers in different cities, and is mostly taken on propeller planes.
Travolta’s the writer, director, and primary narrator, with an on-screen cameo, and the film’s based on a children’s novel he published in 1997. It seems based on pieces of his childhood, as Travolta’s from New Jersey, had a mother who was an actress, and grew up with a love of aviation. However, he didn’t have a single mom, and grew up with several siblings, not an only child.
Just an hour long, Propeller One Way Night Coach premiered at Cannes earlier this month, and landed on Apple TV on May 29. The film looks beautiful and functions as a love letter to the early-jet age, and, more specifically, to the TWA terminal at what used to be called Idlewild Airport (the aesthetic has since inspired a hotel at JFK). The soundtrack’s heavy on the “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The film is quaint in its all-out earnestness, although the story follows Jeff as he slowly realizes his mom is having affairs with a series of married businessmen.
The film makes some head-scratching storytelling decisions. It’s strange for a feature film to have a running time of exactly 60 minutes. The kid playing Jeff is very irritating. It was odd for Travolta to cast his daughter (Ella Bleu Travolta) as the woman his self-insert character has an obsessive crush on. And the ending goes to a weird place. Still, if you’re into the aesthetics of the early-1960s, and of the Mad Men episodes that involve Don Draper getting on a plane or a hotel, Propeller One Way Night Coach could be for you.
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The Travel Companion is a new indie film directed by Travis Wood and Alex Mallis that opened in April. It follows a male friendship that falls into tension for reasons that have never been the subject of a movie before: Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck) is an airline employee who has access to free flights, and his best friend Simon (Tristan Turner) regularly mooches those flights, mostly in furtherance of his career as a struggling documentary filmmaker.
But Bruce gets a girlfriend, whose arrival complicates both the friendship and those free flights. Bruce can designate only one person as his “travel companion,” and his girlfriend will get that status ahead of his buddy.
This winning film is like a version of those Judd Apatow comedies from 10-to-15 years ago, with a lot less raunch but a focus on male friendship and the reluctance of grown men to grow up. I’d never heard of anyone involved in the film before I saw it, but am eager to see what the filmmakers do next.