"Jay Honeck" wrote in message news:wl9Gd.7986

Well, we went to see "The Aviator" last night, and -- amazingly -- I have
to
admit, he pulls it off. By the end I forgot who the actor was, and got
caught up in the story. DiCaprio especially captures Hughes' descent into
madness in a very realistic (and chilling) way.

My wife is a former psychology professional who worked with people with
severe obsessive compulsive disorder, a la Hughes. She said that during his
day nobody really had any idea, but compared DiCaprio's study of OCD to
Dustin Hoffman's mastery of autism in Rainman. Very fascinating, and
DiCaprio appears to have nailed it in way that lets us understand much more
about Hughes.

Particulary accurate was his repetition of words and phrases starting with
"quarantine," which, my wife explains, is a form of ritual people with the
disorder use to cope with and attempt to control what is happening. (In
Hughes' time, he would have had little idea what was happening to him at
all.) As their condition advances, they can no longer control the ritual,
either.

I was raised by a fomer POW who shared a degree of the same symptom with
regard to cleanliness...not being able to touch a restroom door handles,
violently ill reactions to dogs jumping on him (or many years ago, even
seeing Lassie lick the boy's face on TV.) The reasons for the behavior
were different, but seeing it rendered like that onscreen so well chills me.

Personally, though, I'm tired of CGI whiz-bang fake aviation, and the movie
didn't really capture the essence of flight. "Engine 1 on. Engine 2 on.
Engine 3 on...." They could have done a LOT more with the Goose, in terms
of the engineers in the wing and all of that. My only beef.

-c