The film "The Aviator"

I rented the movie "The Aviator" this weekend. This is Martin Scorsese's biography of Howard Hughes, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I was really let down. What a disjointed film! It was certainly not "Citizen Kane".

Robin watched it with me. She gave up trying to follow it and went downstairs to read a book. I don't blame her. At least I know something of the history of Hughes, so I understood some of the context of the the scenes.

My fault with the film is that no background is presented in order to put what you are seeing into a context. In particular, no where in the film does it explain (or did I miss it) that Hughes' money came from his father's oil tool business in Houston Texas?

The film opens with some bizzare scene of a little boy being bathed by a woman in a sensual way. They don't try to explain who the woman is. You might guess it is his mother. Then it jumps to a 20 something punk directing a WWI aviation film called "Hell's Angels". What is the connection? Is the director the same little boy we saw earlier?

I also noticed that the film does not attempt to put events into any kind of time frame and current events. One has to assume that the Great Depression is going on. Or that WWII has broken out.

The film totally overlooked the brilliance of Hughes when it came to marketing his film "The Outlaw" starring Jane Russell's breasts. The film does discuss the problems the film had with the MPAA. But in reality the film, when first released, flopped. Hughes decided to withdrawl the film from the market and started the rumour that it had been censored and was "too hot" to show. He gave the rumour enough time to gain momentum until the public couldn't wait to see what was so awesome that the film was banned. It was a stoke of maketing genius that wasn't repeated until Terry Gilliam's masterpeice "Brazil" was produced in 1985.

I can go on with example after example. You need a cheatsheet with the film to understand what it going on.

So, read his bio first. Then watch the film.