Not Recommended. All right. I have decided to announce the Triumvirate of Mediocrity: Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. These three guys are somehow worshipped as “auteurs” of artistic films. But what they really are is masters of mediocrity; overlong boring mediocrity, I might add. All of them think their movies are worth two and a half or three hours of our lives, and thus become thieves for stealing this precious time from us. While this movie has an interesting depiction of Hughs’ descent into his madness, it is all rather unfocused and boring drama. Scorsese thinks that “mental illness” Hollywood glamour and movie stars makes for interesting movies, but he is wrong. It’s what these external things reveal about our internal spirituality that is interesting. I did not care one whit for Hughs. He is no hero. And is therefore unworthy of such status in a film. He is an unsympathetic selfish self-obessessed idiot. And he was interested in sexy movie stars like Hepburn and Gardner, who were also unsympathetic selfish self-obessessed idiots. And the whole thing about how he sought to make fast planes and fought to share the airs in competition with Pan Am – who cares? I did not care one moment for this story because it was not made interesting. The Right Stuff made manned flight to the moon and the history of flight with Jaeger and everything very interesting. This made the history of flight boring. Well, it wasn’t horrendously boring like Alexander , made by Oliver the Mediocre, it was only mildly boring. But that’s enough to just say No. And you know, it shows Hughs’ descent into neurosis, but it makes no sense of it. It is just arbitrary. Where did it come from? Why did it happen? Maybe in real life it was a mystery. But this is the movies, not real life. Since they show nothing of his inner character, or his true quest for meaning, it reduces to a shallow examination of the external degeneracy of neurosis. Yeah, but how is this a reflection of his INNER SELF? Everything is external in this movie, and thus boooooring because it seeks the external sufferings of life without the true INNER HUMAN DRAMA. Pretty movie stars with pathetic juvenile temperaments are not interesting if we learn nothing about where this lack of character comes from. Hughs’ external malady should have been a metaphor for the internal flaw of everyone in this film but nothing like this is ever attempted. Thus it fails even as a tragedy because this Hero is a victim, not of his own flaws, but of some external arbitrary malady. I guess this is the essence of humanist tragedy. Life is arbitrary suffering in a chance universe. And that is why true humanist epics are unsatisfying and lack the transcendence that makes for a great movie.
