Friday Minute
No. 131 | July 2, 2010

Hollywood High-flier

Our theme this week
Howard Hughes and the movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Howard Hughes, Moviemaker
Tuesday         —   Melvin and Howard (1980)
Wednesday    —   The Rocketeer (1991)
Thursday        —   The Hoax (2007)

The Aviator (2004)

Rumors of a Howard Hughes biopic go back at least to the 1970s, many of them with Warren Beatty’s name attached.  It was the actor’s dream project to direct and star in a film about the famed aviator and moviemaker.   Beatty’s plans never did get off the ground, but according to Star, Peter Biskind’s biography of the actor published this year, Beatty, now 73, still hopes to make a film about the reclusive billionaire’s later years.

An earlier life of Hughes was a television movie made in 1977, one year after his death.  The Amazing Howard Hughes was based on the biography by Noah Dietrich, Hughes’s business partner for three decades.  Though the movie received mixed reviews, the lead performance by future star Tommy Lee Jones won raves.  The film is available on DVD.

Finally, in 2004, The Aviator made it to the big screen, with Martin Scorsese directing.  Most reviews were positive and the film earned eleven Academy Award nominations.  It appeared that Scorsese might win his long-overdue Oscar, but he had to wait again.  The Aviator won five awards, and two years later Scorsese at last won his, for The Departed.

The Aviator spans a couple of decades of Hughes’s life, focusing on the years that he was a public figure, while he was making films and flying planes, and running a studio and airline.  Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t look anything like Hughes, but it hardly matters.  His matinée idol looks capture the appeal of Hughes in his playboy years, which provide a contrast for later scenes when Hughes’s compulsive behavior grows ever more erratic.  DiCaprio gives a brave performance as a man who has everything but control of his own demons.  Hughes’s obsessions were legendary.  Eventually they get the best of him, and he falls victim to mental illness.

Cate Blanchett gives an Oscar-winning (and deserving) performance as Katharine Hepburn, one of the many women that Hughes pursues.  Hepburn is the friend that Hughes desperately needs, and her banter and care are a good check on his worst impulses.  But Hughes is destined to find other women, and they include Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) and fifteen-year-old Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner).  Danger ahead.

The film covers a lot of ground, taking 170 minutes, though with little waste.  There are scenes on movies sets, in the air above Beverly Hills (ending in a near-fatal plane crash), and at U.S. Senate hearings.  You get a fine sense of the man that Hughes was, what his life was like, and what all the fuss was about.  You see what he had, and what he lost. 

Hughes lived a couple of decades after the film leaves off.  Perhaps then he may have been a freer man.  If Warren Beatty ever gets around to it (though he’d better start soon), we may yet see that part of the story.

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The Aviator (2004)
Martin Scorsese, director
Trailer

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The Aviator (2004)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett

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Quote of Note
Jack Frye:  So you want me to bribe senators?
Howard Hughes:  I don’t want them bribed, Jack.  I want it done legally.  I want them bought.
—Jack Frye (Danny Huston), Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), The Aviator (2004)

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 120 | June 17, 2010

Take Five

Our theme this week
Movies that provide (a certain) R&R

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Rio Rita (1942)
Tuesday         —   Rambling Rose (1991)
Wednesday    —   The Rebel Rousers (1970)

Revolutionary Road (2008)

Just a hunch, but I don’t think Richard Yates used to watch Leave It to Beaver, or Ozzie and Harriet, or Father Knows Best, or Make Room for Daddy.  Domestic problems with easy answers were not his strong suit.

Yates was a brilliant chronicler of 1950s suburban anxiety, and Revolutionary Road, his first novel (and National Book Award finalist), was at last adapted for the big screen by director Sam Mendes and an excellent cast in 2008.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are Frank and April Wheeler, a young married couple struggling to escape the emptiness of their perfect lives, with Michael Shannon stealing a few scenes as the troubled son of a friend daring to speak the truth.

If the mythic TV view of 1950s life is too much for you, Revolutionary Road is the bitter antidote.

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Revolutionary Road (2008)
Sam Mendes, director
Trailer

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Revolutionary Road (2008)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Richard Easton, and Michael Shannon

 

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Quote of Note
“If being crazy means living life as if it matters, then I don’t mind being completely insane.”
—April Wheeler (Kate Winslet), Revolutionary Road (2008)

…58…59…60.

Wednesday Minute
No. 29 | February 10, 2010

Talkin’ ‘Bout “D” Generation

Our theme this week
Actors of the “D” Generation

Featured this week
Monday         —   Matt Damon
Tuesday         —   Matt Dillon

Leonardo DiCaprio

The essentials
“He saved me,” Leonardo DiCaprio said about Martin Scorsese.  “I was headed down a path of being one kind of actor, and he helped me become another one.  The one I wanted to be.”

Shutter Island, the mystery thriller based on the Dennis Lehane novel, which opens this month, is the fourth time DiCaprio has teamed with the famed director.  The other collaborations have been increasingly more fruitful.  They are Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), with DiCaprio’s Oscar-nominated performance as Howard Hughes, and The Departed, the 2006 Best Picture for which Scorsese at last won an Oscar for directing.

Scorsese first heard about DiCaprio from Robert De Niro, another frequent collaborator, when the two actors worked on This Boy’s Life (1993).  DiCaprio, still a teen, won critical raves as the young Tobias Wolff, the writer-to-be who suffers from an abusive, domineering stepfather.  The same year, in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, DiCaprio played Arnie, the handicapped kid brother of Johnny Depp’s title character, who causes a commotion when he climbs the town’s water tower.  The performance opened a lot of eyes and earned DiCaprio his first Oscar nomination.

DiCaprio followed up with some offbeat roles, as Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, and as poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, both in 1995.  The next year he gained new fans opposite Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s modern update to Shakespeare, Romeo + Juliet.  The role that broke it open for the actor was Jack Dawson, in Titanic (1997).  “I’m king of the world!” he cried.  Hard to argue with that.  The movie was a big risk, actually, but its huge success opened doors in the careers of many involved.

Perhaps uncertain what to do next, DiCaprio made a mix of movies, large and small, over the next few years.  In Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002), he was pitch-perfect as the young imposter on the run from a troubled childhood and an FBI agent played by Tom Hanks.

DiCaprio’s interest in political causes was on display in a couple of films set in faraway wars.  Blood Diamond (2006) looked at the exploitation of Africa caused by the jewelry trade, and Body of Lies (2008) at the fight against terrorists in the Middle East. 

Revolutionary Road (2008) was an adaptation of Richard Yates’s acclaimed novel about the price paid for living in suburban society in 1950s America.  DiCaprio reunited with Titanic co-star Kate Winslet, and their fine acting is among the many virtues of the film.

At this point in his career, Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t need to be saved.  Just watched.

Beyond the final credits
Partners in crime (frequent collaborators):
4 films — Martin Scorsese (includes Shutter Island)
2 films — Kathy Bates, Robert De Niro, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Kate Winslet

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What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Darlene Cates

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The Aviator (2004)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin 

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Quote of Note
Frank Abagnale Sr.:  “You know why the Yankees always win, Frank?”
Frank Abagnale Jr.:  “‘Cause they have Mickey Mantle?”
Frank Abagnale Sr.:  ”No, it’s ’cause the other teams can’t stop staring at those damn pinstripes.”
—Frank Abagnale Sr. (Christopher Walken), Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), Catch Me If You Can (2002)

…58…59…60.

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