The Aviator

I went to see it yesterday. I thought it was actually pretty good, and thought
DeCaprio pulled off a believable Hughes.

The flying sequences seemed a little hokey, and the crash scenes were typical
Hollywood crap, but for 3 hours, it goes by quickly.





www.Rosspilot.com

Rosspilot wrote:

I went to see it yesterday.

Thanks for the review.

George Patterson
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

In article ,
ospam (Rosspilot) wrote:

I went to see it yesterday. I thought it was actually pretty good, and
thought
DeCaprio pulled off a believable Hughes.

Only the last half, where he was interacting with Sen. Brewster.


The flying sequences seemed a little hokey, and the crash scenes were typical
Hollywood crap, but for 3 hours, it goes by quickly.


I saw it the day after Christmas and thought that it was miscast -- at
least the first half of the movie. DiCaprio obviously has never flown a
plane, as he showed no trace of a scan and moved the yoke like a kid
"playing airplane." The only thing missing was the "Brrrrr" sound. In
the flying scenes he looked like the typical Hollywood airhead.

There was also one major script error. When hughes was plotting to take
TWA international (about '43-'44) he was stalking about the competition
and included Lufthansa. HELLO! We were fighting Germany at the time and
certainly wouldn't expect Lufthansa to survive the war. (They didn't fly
again until the late 1950s)

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 04:02:26 GMT, Orval Fairbairn
wrote:

Lufthansa to survive the war. (They didn't fly
again until the late 1950s)

In 1958 I was working at The Overseas Weekly, which had its offices on
the second story of the Frankfurt Press Club. (Which no doubt was war
booty of some sort.) A lot of the members of the Press Club were
American pilots flying for Lufthansa.

Someone told me that the deal was that Boeing or Douglas sold the
airplanes to LH complete with air crews.

(Good point about the film and the war. There was little sense that
WWII was actually happening, save as a possible market for Hughes
Aircraft. I doubt that was true even in Hollywood.)

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 04:02:26 GMT, Orval Fairbairn wrote:

There was also one major script error. When hughes was plotting to take
TWA international (about '43-'44) he was stalking about the competition
and included Lufthansa. HELLO! We were fighting Germany at the time and
certainly wouldn't expect Lufthansa to survive the war. (They didn't fly
again until the late 1950s)


check the LH site:
http://konzern.lufthansa.com/en/html/ueber_uns/geschichte/chronik/index.html

---snip
(...)
After substantial expansion of the route network in 1939—including flights
to Bangkok and Santiago de Chile—wartime air services, except for a few
European countries, are suspended. All flights are discontinued in 1945 and
Lufthansa goes into receivership and is finally wound up and struck from
the Berlin commercial register in 1965.

The Federal Transport Minister sets up a working committee in 1951 to
prepare for the resumption of air traffic in postwar Germany and entrusts
the job of implementation to "Büro Bongers", the office headed by Hans M.
Bongers, the traffic chief of the old Lufthansa in Cologne. A new company
to run air services and named "Aktiengesellschaft für Luftverkehrsbedarf"
(Luftag) is founded in Cologne on January 6, 1953. The company changes its
name to the more traditional "Deutsche Lufthansa Aktiengesellschaft" in
1954, and resumes scheduled flights on April 1, 1955.
(...)
---snap

#m
--
Oh. God. What have we done.

I agree. I was happily surprised at how good it was, and how little I
objected to the boy-man star.

On 30 Dec 2004 00:50:16 GMT, ospam (Rosspilot)
wrote:

I went to see it yesterday. I thought it was actually pretty good, and thought
DeCaprio pulled off a believable Hughes.

The flying sequences seemed a little hokey, and the crash scenes were typical
Hollywood crap, but for 3 hours, it goes by quickly.

Did the ending bother anybody else? We have a rough idea of how it
should end, but after sitting there for three hours I thought they may
as well show it.

On 30 Dec 2004 06:01:39 -0800, wrote:

Did the ending bother anybody else? We have a rough idea of how it
should end, but after sitting there for three hours I thought they may
as well show it.

Well, the movie just stopped. I think everybody in the tiny 12-holer
theater (five seats to the left of the center aisle, three seats to
the right!) was willing for it to go on for another half-hour, surely
the sign of a successful movie.

I stood up to go, but watched the credits because I wanted to know who
had played Juan Trippe, a fine performance. The gal behind me loudly
said: "Sir?" So she was also hooked enough to want to read the credits
also. I saw a lot of people doing just that. (Well, as many people as
you can get into that theater, which was smaller than the one where
Howard supposedly lived for a time.)

It was a movie, for crying out loud! A movie-movie. Not art, not
biography. A pleasant, dumb, colorful movie that kept me interested
for 2hr 45min or whatever it was.

If you want biography, you might start with George Marrett, Howard
Hughes, Aviator, from Naval Institute Press. Marrett was a Hughes test
pilot who earlier wrote Cheating Death about flying a Sandy Skyraider
in Vietnam.

Don't get me wrong...I really liked it. I was just surprised after
coming that far that it just stopped. Many people I talked to about
the movie who know less that I about Howard Hughes felt the same way.
Maybe it will encourage them to do some reading (gasp) on the subject.

On 30 Dec 2004 00:50:16 GMT, ospam (Rosspilot) wrote
in ::

I went to see it yesterday. I thought it was actually pretty good, and thought
DeCaprio pulled off a believable Hughes.

Yes.

I thought Cate Blanchett did an admirable job with her Katharine
Hepburn role also. I had feared that Leonardo DiCaprio's Hughes would
be a cartoon characture, but his performance was remarkable
convincing.

The flying sequences seemed a little hokey, and the crash scenes were typical
Hollywood crap, but for 3 hours, it goes by quickly.

The black and white Hell's Angeles footage of a sky swarming with
airplanes revealed Hughes' obsessive struggle to deliver a product, be
it aeronautical or cinematic, that far exceeded anything that
proceeded it.

The historic HK1 footage was interesting. Clearly, 169 minutes was
woefully inadequate to tell the full Hughes story, but Martin Scorsese
did a good job of giving the non-aviation viewing-public the Hollywood
dirt they relish, unfortunately at the expense of failing to include
all the little aviation related antic dotes and stories which aviation
buffs relish.

In all, I was quite pleasantly surprised and entertained by this
movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338751/...c=1;ft=20;fm=1