alexwesterberg Went into it having delayed many years of "saving up". Because dir. Scorsese and actor starring is Leo.Turns out it's quite a boring pic, none of Scorsese's flair is really demonstrated, Leo seemed to pull some very familiar faces that reminded me more of him in other works than a convincing Howard Hughes (ESPECIALLY) lacking the Texas drawl. The 20s vibe was played up but doesn't interest me much at all. The flight CGI scenes were terrible (both looking painfully cgi and the flight paths behaving very uncharacteristically- blame my too many hours in war thunder). The scars post accident didn't look very good.Katharine Hepburn's actress was extremely good.

UnderworldRocks I watched the movie to see Kate Beckinsale, and she was gorgeous as Ava Gardner. Actually, she's prettier than the real Ava!Kate is such an amazing actress. I can never praise her enough. She is truly versatile, starring in a wide range of movies, from Shakespeare, to Jane Austen, to crime thrillers, to modern action Gothic masterpiece Underworld! You name it. She can pull it off perfectly.Even though Kate has only a small role in this, she shines as Ava Gardner, who would only ask Mr. Hughes to buy her dinner.I also find the hearing at the climax very interesting. I like the way Hughes beat the senator. It was quite witty and impressive. Besides, Leonardo was brilliant in acting out the misery of having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.Alan Alda portrayed the cunning and manoevering politician very well. Cate Blanchett's laughter was so crazy that I didn't even recognize her at first.

Red-Barracuda The Aviator is another dynamic film from Martin Scorsese. He has employed his energetic style to the story of the Hollywood mogul / aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, the result is a fast-paced and entertaining biopic. It's a more restrained effort than Scorsese usually delivers and it's pretty obvious that it was going very much for a PG-13 rating given the very blatant method of including one f-bomb to affect this. So the material, while still showing the darker aspects of the title character, nevertheless whitewashes him considerably too – in real life he seemed to be anti-Semitic and racist, while he also killed someone due to dangerous driving (neither of these two aspects made it into this film). What we do see is still a man with many flaws though with his recklessness, excessive perfectionism, womanising and germ phobia. Leonardo DiCaprio really is excellent in the part it has to be said and shows again just what a skilled actor he really is.Unusually for a biopic the story begins with Hughes already a millionaire and in the middle of making the World War I fighter-plane epic Hell's Angels. We see the money he threw at this picture and his perfectionist attitude leading to it being a very elongated shoot. Despite the film's huge success, he was never fully accepted by the Hollywood old boy's network and was considered an outsider. It's this aspect that has been used to make a hero of Hughes in this film, a man against the system if you will; even though I am sure the truth was less clear-cut given his massive wealth and more unsavoury character traits. Whatever the case, we see him push the boundaries of acceptability in movies with his violent crime film Scarface (1932) and his racy feature film The Outlaw (1943), we see him design ever more ambitious planes, we hear of him circumnavigating the world, and testing aircraft himself (this includes an expertly filmed sequence where Hughes crashes one of his planes into the middle of a populated area), we witness him founding his own airline TWA and in the process gain powerful business and political enemies which leads to a congressional investigation and finally we see a man suffering from paranoia who becomes a mentally ill recluse.The story of Hughes life certainly was a dramatic one and Scorsese presents it as such. He even had romances with Katharine Hepburn (played brilliantly by Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), which adds a glamorous social life to his high profile public achievements. The lush period detail adds a great deal to proceedings with a beautiful look maintained throughout. Scorsese even went so far as to use an old two-strip Technicolor process for the cinematography which leads to the strange moments where we see fields and golf courses replete with blue grass. So, all-in-all, this amounts to another typically well executed, handsome-looking and energetic effort from Scorsese and his first genuinely great collaboration with DiCaprio.

grantss The life of Howard Hughes: film director and producer, aircraft designer and airline owner. A pioneer in all these fields he was a man who had a massive influence on aeronautical advancement, the airline industry and the aviation industry in general plus gave the world some movies which helped the progression of that art form (in particular, Hell's Angels, Scarface and The Outlaw). Not content with being a highly successful and wealthy businessman, leading aircraft designer and movie mogul he even test flew his own aircraft! His private life was equally epic, having long-term relationships with Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner and dating almost every female star in Hollywood at some stage. But he wasn't without his faults, eccentricities and demons, and these are explored here too. A fantastic study of an incredible life. Master-director Martin Scorsese turns a linear biopic into an incredibly engaging, enthralling and illuminating journey. Despite being over 160 minutes long the time flies by, such is the pace, energy and interest of the movie. Hughes was a larger-than-life character and incredibly influential person on history and Scorsese shows him the respect he deserves. Not that he paints him as a saint though. He is portrayed as reckless at times and, as mentioned, his personal issues are also covered, and they are covered well. We see how his eccentricities and disorders - germaphobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder plus potentially other mental issues - have a large bearing on his life and work. We also see how he manages to go on despite these. Very sensitively and appropriately covered by Scorsese.Superb performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. The movie got him his second Oscar nomination, and first for a leading role, and he was unlucky to lose out, having to compete with a brilliant performance by Jamie Foxx in Ray. Cate Blanchett is superb as Katharine Hepburn and well deserved her Best Supporting Actress Oscar (her first Oscar and her second nomination). Alan Alda got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for playing Senator Brewster.The remainder of the cast is star-studded too: John C Reilly, Kate Beckinsale (as Ava Gardner), Alec Baldwin, Jude Law (as Errol Flynn), Ian Holm, Danny Huston. Even the minor parts include Gwen Stefani (as Jean Harlow) and Willem Defoe and the musical numbers include Loudon Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright!A masterpiece.