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Song of the Day: “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” Neutral Milk Hotel

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• Genre: Biography/Drama
• Year: 2004

Not at all what I was expecting. Perhaps I heard the wrong people talking, or maybe I filtered out the information I heard and settled only in bits and pieces. However, due to high amounts of hype on a film that based on the trailer I really did not  feel like watching, I made the decision to put off watching it until later on in the future. I do that a lot, if there is a movie I am not too sure about and they hype it up, I tend to give it some time to cool before  I watch it to keep myself from hating on it too much. Part of my nature I suppose.

Quite frankly, I ended up forgetting all about the Aviator until I bought a small Scorsese box set which came with The Departed, The Aviator and Goodfellas. The deal I got at Costco was worth buying two good movies and getting the third as a freebie.

If I were forced to compare this film to another, for referential or recommendation purposes, I would probably compare it to A Beautiful Mind and essentially that is what this is, the biography of an eclectic man that ends up falling victim to his mental disorder but achieving a tremendous amount in the process. Both stories share the same concept, which to me is a turn off. Thankfully, the particulars of each movie are unique enough, different enough and interesting enough that you still do not feel like you are watching the same movie on a different setting.

Personally, I did not know much about Howard Hughes prior to watching this film and I have done no research on him after watching it, so off the bat I was not sure what to expect. The portrait that is presented by Scorsese is an interesting one, of a wealthy man obsessed with planes and movies and trying to do and create the best of both, an endeavor that eventually leads to his acquisition of TWA airlines and puts him in heated conpetition with Pan Am. It does not help that from the onset, Hughes is a terribly eccentric man, ambitions, driven and motivated, hindered only by his obsessive compulsive disorder and his depression.

It is an interesting movie, depicting the life of a very interesting man and Scorsese does a great job bringing the audience in to the movie and setting them in the era. Needless to say, the star studded cast delivers across the board with memorable performances starting with Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, and ending with the secondary roles played by John C. Rielly, Alec Baldwin and Ian Holm among others.

I have no complaints about this film, technically, visually and thematically it is interesting enough, though I still felt myself not quite being able to love this film. Perhaps it was the setting itself that I have a hard time getting into, maybe it is the subject of planes (which I like as much as the next guy but am not passionate about) or maybe it was the fact that it seems there are enough biographies out there already that in the end, good as it may be, this film still feels like one of a bunch. Whatever it is that was missing, it was not there to make it stand out as one would have liked and because of that, I think this film will end up living the same fate of A Beautiful Mind in my opinion, a good film to watch, but once is enough.

Rating: 4 out of 5
Notes: Nudity, language, some violence and a potent crash sequence.
Quote: Howard Hughes: I want ten chocolate chip cookies. Medium chips. None too close to the outside.