Pearl Harbor (2001)

Director: Michael Bay*

Cast: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I honestly can’t remember if I saw the film in theaters or later on home video. Considering in the the theater would be May of 2001, and on disc would have been December 2001, the movie would have played distinctly different in the spread of that half a year.

Do I have a memory of seeing it before? Not even in the slightest.

What could possibly go wrong?

Did I Like It: I’m about a minute and a half into this film when I first role my eyes, and I know I’m in for a long three hours. Another three minutes or so and I’m treated to the two main characters as children accidentally launching into flight in a crop duster. Between this and Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), was there a rash of kids accidentally taking flight in the late 1990s/early 2000s? I don’t remember that being a thing? Incidentally, I had enough material fro a review inside of the first half hour. Maybe I’ll add to it as the film proceeds**.

The movie proceeds from there positively groaning to strike a balance between Armageddon (1998)-style bombast and a legitimate docudrama about the world of 1941.

Guess which mode wins out?

Okay, so, at some point in the near future I’m going to have to build the skill of finding nice things to say about bad movies. It’s probably time to start here. Jennifer Garner is a delight as the nerdy, uptight friend of Kate Beckinsale. She should have been the lead, but she’s far more interesting in her few minutes of screen time than any of the other eye-candy women we have here.

That probably says more me than anything else, so I’ll just leave it there.

But let’s get back to a far more pertinent or profound question: Is there a rational reason to watch this film, when From Here to Eternity (1953) is perfectly available? If you’ve got an answer, then I will wait patiently for it.

And, no, “one is in black & white, and the other is in color” is definitely not a valid reason, in case you were wondering.

*I originally typed that as “Michael Nay” and got a deep enough chuckle out of that, it’s a solid bet it’s more entertaining than the rest of the film.

**I did(n’t?). For any of my other thoughts, probably best to go lookat my Letterboxd review. Haven’t we gone on long enough about this one?

The Aviator (2004)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, Alan Alda

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, but it’s becoming abundantly clear that I may only remember about 10% of movies I saw in the mid-aughts. In some cases, that’s great. In other cases, I wished I only remembered about 10% of everything that happened in the mid-aughts.

Did I Like It: Yes. Way better than the 10% I remembered watching.

On first blush it doesn’t feel like DiCaprio is the right casting for Howard Hughes. He’s too boyish, even now in his middle age. Thus, the film wisely only hints at the broken man the tycoon would eventually become. It also doesn’t opt for a happy, if truncated ending, a la Ed Wood (1994) that leaves their doomed protagonist on top. Hughes is a doomed man here, and that would have to be the essential quality in bringing the character to the screen, something that Warren Beatty never quite captured in his long gestating picture about Hughes, Rules Don’t Apply (2016).

Thus, as the brash young man who needed the last two film cameras in all of Hollywood, DiCaprio is perfectly selected. With the possible exception of Cate Blanchett ably impersonating Katharine Hepburn, the other performances tend to blend into the background. This might read as criticism, especially given the high number of stars that round out the cast, but the electric quality of DiCaprio’s Hughes makes his inevitable fall that much more tragic.

Stylistically, it is an odd film for Scorsese. He embraces the computer tools of the era to display Hughes’ daring flights. It puts the camera where it might otherwise not want to go, but it also ages the proceedings in a way I can’t imagine Scorsese wanted when he set out to make the film. All too often DiCaprio looks like an actor sitting on a soundstage, rather than someone flying a plane only he believes will reach the air.