My heart sank when I realised Marty's film was two and three-quarter hours - in fact it's only two hours 36 if you factor out the credits. Still, it manages to hold the attention, unlike Best Years which is riveting throughout. The problem here is that Howard Hughes isn't a particularly sympathetic figure, in fact not at all. So we don't really care about his design / financial / relationship problems. It was written by John Logan.
It is well acted by Leo Di Caprio and Kate Blanchett (who won the Oscar) playing Katharine Hepburn. Plus John C Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda (good), Ian Holm, Danny Huston, Gwen Stefani (Harlow), Jude Law (Errol Flynn).
Technically, Robert Richardson's Oscar-winning cinematography is partly down to VFX designer Robert Legato who manipulates the images to give the early Technicolor look. And Tom Fleischman does some wonderful stuff in the sound mix, particularly with the many music tracks that appear throughout (notably the Charles Mingus - was it Charles Mingus? It doesn't appear in the credits so maybe it wasn't? Close - it was Artie Shaw - 'Nightmare'.) Thelma's editing is snappy (and won Oscar).
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| Evidence of clever digital split-screenery |
Jack Nicholson is juicily insulating in As Good As It Gets - "No need to stop being a lady," he tells Greg Kinnear - "You'll be back on your knees in no time", but the film is stolen by Jill the dog.
It was his third Oscar - in total he was nominated twelve times, making him the most nominated actor in the Academy history.
We didn't mean to put on an OCD double bill - it just happened that way.
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