Can't Sleep, Or The Freemasons Will Eat Me
Last night, kaynorr, heathey, and I saw the Leonardo DiCaprio biopic of Howard Hughes, Aviator. Since I've always had a sneaking fondness for Hughes (how could I not, given our shared interests in experimental aviation, Jane Russell's cleavage, and the Freemason threat?) despite his really contemptible personality, it seemed like a natural. Plus, Scorsese, although clearly working the hired gun route, is almost always watchable (the meretricious Color of Money excepted). Like Hughes, Scorsese was obviously scarred in his last crash; unlike Hughes, his twitches aren't incapacitating.

Short review: "The greatest electric train set a boy ever had!"

Longer review: That quote is attributed to Orson Welles, referring to the movie soundstages on which he filmed Citizen Kane. It's huge fun to watch Scorsese play with the train set, even if he's wound up doing a much inferior ripoff of Citizen Kane. Scorsese directing Leo DiCaprio as Hughes directing Hell's Angels is so good, and so free and wild and wonderful, that it's a tearing shame that it's up at the front of the movie. Nothing else really communicates, so honestly and without head-banging over-share, what's really going on with Howard Hughes, and since that's the point of the movie, that's a big hole to fill. DiCaprio's acting actually almost fills that hole, but every time you get lost in his understated, tense Hughes, there's some obvious screech from John Logan's Diet Caffeine-Free Kane script and back we go to comfortable, simplistic, B-movie cause and effect.

Still, it's a helluva train set -- to pick only one wonderful element, Scorsese uses period color, so the 1920s and 1930s scenes are shot in two-strip and then three-strip Technicolor (a la Adventures of Robin Hood with blue grass and trees). The cameos are delightful, and the acting is good all around. Even when it's bad, it's good; Gwen Stefani is terrible as Jean Harlow, but not a worse actress; Cate Blanchett is a caricature of Kate Hepburn, but so was Kate Hepburn (as the script gracelessly honks to us in almost as many words).

Two final notes -- come early and stay late. We saw the preview for Sin City at this show, and it looks TRANSMAZING; the last song over the credits is of all things a Leadbelly song about Howard Hughes. Somewhere between a noir comic and the blues, that's Howard Hughes all over.