Thumbs Way Up
For an upcoming article, I was able to arrange a preview of The Aviator, which opens this weekend in LA and New York and everywhere on Christmas Day. The movie portrays 20 years of Howard Hughes's life, from the making of his movie Hell's Angels to his fight to protect TWA's right to fly internationally from PanAm's man in Congress. It's not a documentary, of course, but a psychologically compelling tragedy that should become a classic. Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, and Martin Scorsese all deserve Oscars, but they couldn't have done it without the brilliant script by John Logan. (Interestingly, it was DiCaprio's idea to make a movie about Hughes.)
As further research, I also got the newly released DVD of Hell's Angels. The dogfight and Zeppelin sequences are wonderful, justifying Hughes's insane perfectionism, but the movie is much more interesting as a historical artifact than as entertainment. Watching Hell's Angels is a little like reading pre-Marlovian Elizabethan dramas. They have their moments, and the potential is there, but the writing is too episodic, the characters too flat, the language too stilted. Hell's Angels has some great visuals, but the acting is so broad and melodramatic that it makes the annoying characters more so. I didn't care if they died; in fact, it was something of a relief. (Plus Germany looks remarkably like the Southern California desert.) It's amazing how much the movies improved after 1930.
UPDATE: Jesse Walkers writes to let me know that Hell's Angels is playing tonight on Turner Classic Movies, midnight ET. It's part of TCM's 13-film (and one-documentary) tribute to Howard Hughes.