Some films are cursed in their birth. It will be so for you and this. That is, if you know Scorsese's best ("The Aviator"), Orson Welles' last ("F is for Fake"), and anything about the relationship between Hughes and Nixon.
Welles' film if you don't know it was an amazing hoax, conflating Hughes and Citizen Kane, Irving (who wrote the original script) and Welles, the hoax described here with the hoax of Irving's previous book on fake paintings, Welles' mistress and Picasso's lover. Its a wonderful play on the shifts between illusion and life, far more clever if not more powerful than Herzog at his best. Scorsese is celebrated for a lot, but not much that interests me. "The Aviator" did because he changed his storytelling style to be less about personalities than forces and urges, less about love and power and more about primitive urges, less about so-called ordinary life and more about movie life.
Hughes was a giant. Bill Gates is merely a thug in the robber baron mold, but Hughes was an engineer, a real engineer. It was his vision that was the major force in retooling the US military around high tech rather than manufacturing power and nukes. It was his influence that shaped at least two significant presidencies, and created the technology for the intelligence backbone now known as several agencies but in his day was the NSA. He also laid the groundwork for graft in one political party which is just now being uncovered at the scale it worked. He was big, a big man. Crazy too. My own theory of this is that he suffered what Nash did, breaking of his mind by deliberate stretching.
As far as I can tell, the Irving hoax was fabricated without any secret files provided by Hughes. That business about receiving files was inspired by a separate episode that Irving had nothing to do with nor claimed so. It seems, there WERE files stolen implicating to Nixon and so on to Watergate. The insertion of this bit into the record is a sort of double hoax.
Irving has come clean about the hoax and all its history. He was not involved in this film; other hoaxers were.
I watched it because the real story is so big, I figured even the drudge Hallstrom couldn't mess it up. There's a little merging of life and fantasy at the end, but it is the weak kind, the kind fumbled about with in the recent "Hollywoodland." I have no complaints about Gere, its the director's fault that he chose to make it about the supposedly interesting foibles of a huckster than the motions of forces of the times. Oddly, the one thing that does work is the sound track, taken from songs of the era.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
Welles' film if you don't know it was an amazing hoax, conflating Hughes and Citizen Kane, Irving (who wrote the original script) and Welles, the hoax described here with the hoax of Irving's previous book on fake paintings, Welles' mistress and Picasso's lover. Its a wonderful play on the shifts between illusion and life, far more clever if not more powerful than Herzog at his best. Scorsese is celebrated for a lot, but not much that interests me. "The Aviator" did because he changed his storytelling style to be less about personalities than forces and urges, less about love and power and more about primitive urges, less about so-called ordinary life and more about movie life.
Hughes was a giant. Bill Gates is merely a thug in the robber baron mold, but Hughes was an engineer, a real engineer. It was his vision that was the major force in retooling the US military around high tech rather than manufacturing power and nukes. It was his influence that shaped at least two significant presidencies, and created the technology for the intelligence backbone now known as several agencies but in his day was the NSA. He also laid the groundwork for graft in one political party which is just now being uncovered at the scale it worked. He was big, a big man. Crazy too. My own theory of this is that he suffered what Nash did, breaking of his mind by deliberate stretching.
As far as I can tell, the Irving hoax was fabricated without any secret files provided by Hughes. That business about receiving files was inspired by a separate episode that Irving had nothing to do with nor claimed so. It seems, there WERE files stolen implicating to Nixon and so on to Watergate. The insertion of this bit into the record is a sort of double hoax.
Irving has come clean about the hoax and all its history. He was not involved in this film; other hoaxers were.
I watched it because the real story is so big, I figured even the drudge Hallstrom couldn't mess it up. There's a little merging of life and fantasy at the end, but it is the weak kind, the kind fumbled about with in the recent "Hollywoodland." I have no complaints about Gere, its the director's fault that he chose to make it about the supposedly interesting foibles of a huckster than the motions of forces of the times. Oddly, the one thing that does work is the sound track, taken from songs of the era.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.