THE AVIATOR

Reviewed by: “A Guy Who Didn't Even Watch The Flick On A Long Flight"

“The Aviator” stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is directed by Martin Scorsese, which pretty much portends that somebody’s going to die in this film. Badly. Continuing their “Gangs of New York” relationship, the DiCaprio/Scorsese team returns to depress an entirely new audience with the real life story of eccentric millionaire, Howard Hughes. And if you haven’t figured it out yet,’ eccentric’ means’ crazy’ if you’re not a billionaire.

After dozens of biographies on Howard Hughes’ life, it ‘s going to be pretty hard to tell most people something they didn’t already know. Plus, at $10 a pop, it takes more than an Oscar nomination to get people in the theater. Especially when they can catch “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” at the dollar show. So, to save everybody time and money, how about a film review outlining how the film PROBABLY went?

Residing in the Slums of Five Point, New York, Amsterdam Vallon (Hughes) barely scrapped by after emigrating to the U.S. from Ireland. The film explores Hughes’ early days as a petty pickpocket who ran astray notorious street gang leader Bill The Butcher and was forced to flee the slum he called his home. Securing passage on the Titanic dressed as one of the ship’s crew, he adopts the name Howard Hughes and romances the rich, lonely women on-board, while passing himself off as a wealthy businessman from New York. All was going well until the ‘ship hit the fan’ and Hughes was forced to call upon the intellectual reserves he was known for. Disguising himself as a woman in order to secure passage aboard a lifeboat, Howard gets away with a tidy sum from the jewelry he snatched during the ensuing chaos.

Keeping the name Howard Hughes, he spends several years running more intricate cons. He learns to fly by dressing like an aviator and hanging out in aviator bars, learning the tricks of the trade. Before long, he is piloting and even building planes in an effort to launder his increasing stash of cash, legitimizing himself as a billionaire industrialist and eventually moving into the motion picture industry. Being a billionaire industrialist and Hollywood film mogul, of course he dated the most beautiful women in the world. In fact, his obsession with boobies inspires him to patent the world’s first, “lift and separate” bra, earning him billions more in royalties. But, then things start to go bad.

A tenacious G-Man (played by Tom Hanks) has been on Hughes’ tail for many years now, and is closing in, causing Hughes to become more and more reclusive. His increasing eccentricity and sudden obsession with the bones of the Elephant Man takes its toll; in an effort to hold off his encroaching insanity, Hughes develops an unhealthy attachment to his fingernails before dying in 1976 of a septic infection. Despite persistent rumors of Hughes being afflicted by a severe case of vampirism, these allegations are never fully explored or substantiated in the movie, leaving the story behind the legend of Howard Hughes incomplete in this reviewer’s opinion.

Looking For Something Old to Rent? Don't Get “URBAN LEGEND”

Reviewed By A Guy Who Actually Saw This Flick

What if a serial killer decided to use common urban legends as their mode of killing, and selected a small, quiet college campus as their homicidal playground? This tale takes place at a fictitious New England college where, according to legend, 25 years before (almost to the day) a professor killed an entire dorm (save one) with a hunting knife. As if that wasn’t enough to cut into your study time, a modern day student returning to campus has just been killed by an axe-welding maniac in the backseat of her vehicle. Sound vaguely familiar?

This movie runs erratically through a lot of very familiar territory. Whereas any normal, sane college-aged kid would have transferred to another school five minutes into this trite attempt at suspense, the students at this third-tier school force us to follow them through this 98 minute exercise in untimely death and misdirection. Not only has this been done before, endless times, but it borrows heavily from other movies. This is not always a bad thing…. yes, in THIS case it is….but paying homage to other movie scenarios has been done quite successfully in movies like Scream. But, this isn’t Scream. And it’s not entertaining, humorous, amusing or even scary in any way. What we have with Urban Legend is an attempt to put a fresh spin on the same tired and overdone horror special effects left over from the sequels of Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street a decade ago.

The movie revolves around a group of stereotypical college kids who look a little too old to be sophomores, live in spacious dorms, visit empty campus libraries (the concept of an empty campus library is an urban legend in itself) and die on cue in some fashion that emulates a specific well-known urban legend. The cast of characters includes Paul, a pushy, cynical school newspaper reporter (Jared Leto doing his Rob Lowe at community college imitation), a self-centered party animal named Parker (played by Michael Rosenbaum who does a pretty good job of making the audience wish he were already dead), a campus cop named Reese (played by Loretta Devine doing the best she can with the ubiquitous, yet insubstantial role) and of course, our strange attractor for all this murderous mayhem, Natalie (played by Alicia Witt in a performance that alternates between Dana Scully’s deadpan performance in the X-Files, and a freaked out pinball running from dark location to dark location). The similarity? Inanimate objects.

Honorable mention goes to Robert Englund as Professor Wexler, obviously cast to try and bring some sort of cinematic credibility to this jumbled mess of a script and to Joshua Jackson from Dawson’s Creek who had the good professional sense to get himself killed early, after managing to create more than a 2D character. But even good screen presence by these two actors was futile when faced with the enormous task of actually trying raise this flick above the mundane.

Dialog is weak, pacing is slow, and frankly, we don’t give a damn about any of the characters. In fact, a couple of characters were so thinly fleshed out, they were dead almost as soon as they were introduced. Unlike most successful movies of this genre, the audience never had enough time to observe the character flaws that always mark you for death in these types of films. There was one notable exception.

As far as amusing scenes go, pickings are pretty slim with emphasis being on the grotesque. Parker, the party animal, managed one of the best ‘set-ups’ in the film, trying to guess the killer’s next urban legend. With a few exceptions other than the very first scene, the movie pretty much plays out like the 2000th rerun of any number of other ‘slasher’ flicks: killer kills all girl’s friends, girl suspects everyone, girl runs to and fro in the dark. In an effort to try and generate any semblance of suspense, the story throws misleading clues and false leads like rice at a wedding.

Even the deaths are more grisly than scary. By the time this movie grinds to an halt (mercifully), the audience has lost all sense of concern about the main character’s safety, waiting around only to see ‘who did it’. And of course, by the time that revelation occurs, the audience has already figured out that there is no way in hell that they could have ever guessed the totally contrived motive and twisted ending. Actually, faster than you can say, ‘Enny, Meany, Minny, Moe’, you’ll have the false resolution figured out; but just give up there while you’re ahead. Because just when you think it’s all over…aw, you know!