Even though movies typically get butchered for showing on airplanes (and then the screen is just miserable), there's the occasional movie that grabs me.
On the latest transatlantic flight, I was lucky to watch The Painted Veil, after a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Naomi Watts and Ed Norton play the main characters. The story is set in 1920s Southern China, where a freshly-married English couple moves from London to Shanghai. The two of them don't really love each other, she meets another man, there's adultery; he (cruelly?) threatens divorce unless she joins him on a daunting mission to a cholera-infested area where he'll help as a microbiologist and M.D., and where they may both well die.
And there, the real story begins. I'll leave it at that to not post too much of a spoiler.
It's love story, big drama, tragedy, with great music and marvelous photography to underpin it all.
