At a Hepburn family gathering in Connecticut, Kate's relatives are boorish snobs, the Van Dorens of Quiz Show on speed.
TAVERN TYCOON REVIEW COMMON SENSE MEDIA MOVIE
In Hughes's relationship with Hepburn, which the movie presents as the great failed romance of his life, the film takes the young tycoon's side, too, despite the suggestion that he serially cheated on her. Mayer is presented as a narrow-minded foil for Hughes to prove wrong Pan Am's Trippe and his congressional lackey Owen Brewster are self-interested sleazeballs trying to squelch Hughes's aeronautic idealism. Hughes is the likable underdog who takes on Hollywood, and the airline industry, and the U.S.
In part, it's because the film has so little critical distance from its subject. The whole is so very much less than the sum of its parts. Though the movie faithfully catalogues his welter of activity and accomplishment, it never makes any real sense of his contradictions.
The Aviator bounces along from one conquest to the next amiably enough, but somehow Hughes himself remains elusive. The years in question provide Scorcese with an overabundance of material: Hughes directed Hell's Angels (which required the construction of a private air force) and The Outlaw (which required the construction of a special bra for Jane Russell) he broke the airspeed record and set new marks for flying from New York to Paris and for circling the globe he dated Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, and Ava Gardner, among others he bought TWA and engaged in a years-long battle with Pan Am exec Juan Trippe that ultimately landed him before a congressional committee he crashed twice, the second time almost fatally in the middle of Beverly Hills he built and (briefly) flew the largest plane of all time, known to him as "the Hercules" but to everyone else as the "Spruce Goose." Throughout its 160 minutes, one can practically hear the exclamation points: Planes! Girls! Movies! Throw in a few de rigeur scenes of obsessive hand washing and of Hughes locked away in his screening room, naked and bearded, and you pretty much have Scorcese's film, a loose, episodic narrative chronicling Hughes's many exploits from the 1920s, when the young heir elbowed his way into Hollywood, through the 1940s, before his ultimate decline into hermitic lunacy. In the case of The Aviator, however, they pretty much sum up the film itself, a technically masterful but dramatically empty feat of celebrity mythologization. Such gee-whiz media commentaries are sometimes used in movies as counterpoints to the filmmaker's deeper or darker vision of the history in question. Each and every night the lucky guy has to escort a different beautiful woman to a different dazzling event!" Later, another enthuses about the tycoon's record-setting trans-global flight in 1938: "Smashing all records, Howard Hughes outdoes Jules Verne's wildest dreams-around the world from New York to New York in four days!" Later still, a third enviously describes Hughes's Hollywood playboyhood: "Movie tycoon Howard Hughes must have the greatest job in the land. And do we mean epic!" one announcer gushes during the production of Hughes's film Hell's Angels. "Young Texas industrialist Howard Hughes just won't stop pouring money into his war epic. On several occasions throughout the course of his Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator, Martin Scorcese throws in a contemporaneous snippet of newsreel footage or an archival radio broadcast.
0 kommentar(er)
