'Phoenix' rises to the occasion

The DVD release of "Flight of the Phoenix" is a lot like the movie itself: mediocre fluff, but ultimately a little less than good. \nThe movie is good, in a Saturday-afternoon-at-the-movies sort of way. It's a popcorn flick, without any real cinematic value, but I liked it. A team of humanitarians involved with a Red Cross-like agency are flying across Mongolia on their way home. Naturally, the plane crashes in the least accessible part of the desert, and because their agency was already strapped for cash, it doesn't look like anyone is going to be coming for them. Their plight is hairy, but fear not: one of the team members is a former plane designer. The group will just cobble together a new plane out of the remains of the old plane. Simple, right? Sure, until angry desert nomads, water theft and general crankiness come into the mix. I stress: the movie is fun, but the DVD as a whole doesn't really offer a whole lot. \nThe making-of featurette, "Phoenix Diaries," is hysterical, although I'm not sure it meant to be. It features philosophical little tidbits from Dennis Quaid, including my personal favorite: "You don't know what would happen to you until something happens to you. Humans have a will to survive." The rest of the cast and crew, aside from the oh-so-earnest Quaid, come off like jerks. Hugh Laurie describes a press interview as "slightly less enjoyable than a rectal probe." Others complain indiscriminately, but director John Moore gets the brunt of the feature. He comes across as a put-upon jackass. He spends a good portion of the making-of documentary throwing notebooks, kicking over trash cans and skulking off into the desert. He describes the last days of filming as, "Urgency is a polite way to put it. It's like the last days of Saigon, no matter how dignified you try to make it, it's always going to end up with people hanging onto skids from a helicopter on an embassy roof."\nI understand that a film set, especially one in the heat of summer in Namibia, could be a high-stress environment. But I couldn't help but thinking: you're in the film industry. Without pulling out my address book, I could list 10 people who would be overjoyed to have your jobs. \nThe other features on the DVD include two deleted scenes, two extended scenes and an extended ending, all of which did nothing for me. Nothing. Really. They were short, irrelevant and added nothing to my viewing experience. The extended ending was particularly irritating, because it added perhaps three minutes to the end sequence, but cut off maybe two minutes before the true end of the movie. It wasn't an alternate ending, mind you, just a few extra shots of Bedouins on motorcycles and a few extra shots of sand sputtering under their badly-aimed bullets. Even if you're the type of viewer that waits for this sort of thing, it's still a massive disappointment. \nSo if you're going to rent the DVD, or, God forbid, buy it, do it for the movie, not the features.