The Aviator

I finished watching Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004). (I started watching before my last neutral pulpit trip — but it’s a long movie.) It’s a good movie. The plot and the characters are engaging enough to pull you along, so you want to find out what happens next. (This is not as common as you might think. If you watch movies in a theater, sipping a coke and munching popcorn, a movie has to be pretty stupid for you to give up on it. But I watch movies mainly when I’m exercising, and a part of me is always thinking, “okay, I’m ready to stop.” Probably no more than half of the movies I see are engaging enough to make me want to continue.)

I really liked pretty boy‘s performance. He was good enough as the generic Howard Hughes, but he was simply outstanding in the sequence where he testified before the senate hearing. I have vague memories of seeing articles about Hughes (probably from the time he died) and I specifically recall the arched eyebrows. DiCaprio was also good in Catch Me If You Can, and not good enough to keep me from giving up on Gangs of New York.

Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda were good as the no-good pair of scheming crooks their characters were portrayed as being. Delicious, too, was the irony of casting those guys as a pair of back-scratching corporate-statists.

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