" h. hughes "

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january 19 - the aviator, 8:30pm, major ratchayothin, bangkok***

i mean, like, can leonardo dicaprio look bad just for one day ever at all? the man is gorgeous. even in a scene when his character, a mr. howard hughes is in a complete and lacerated painful recovery in a hospital, there are these glittering baby blues sparkling among the silver granulature.

aside from his physical traits, he puts his all into this picture, and i don't mean just the executive producer credit. he lurches, he's confident, he's weak at times, he's mad, he's really quite affecting. it's hard not to see the drive in this character; he lives life like there's nothing around the bend but has the innate compacity to foresee the future of aviation technology as if a seer.

this is the second martin s. flick with leo in it, and it's a great story. it's a bio-epic and very 'period' in a good way. definitely enjoyed this one three-fold more than gangs of new york (although one cannot pretend that daniel day lewis owned the shit out of bill the butcher, which means that he was the only thing that resonated).

the story is magnetic and you cannot help but be amazed at the sheer amount of relevant aviation history within the film. i love a good movie with all of the details of certain things that i may have known snippets of, then in a completely entertaining form, is flushed out right before your eyes. those are just fun movies.

when i was 8 years old or so, my parents took me and my brother to visit the spruce goose and the queen mary. i cannot remember all of the details of being at those two vessels, save the memory of the sheer size of it. it was a version of large, that i hadn't yet experienced, and i clearly remember feeling very small next to the invention of man for a long while.

tonight's homework:

already knowing that this movie has won some accolades doesn't take any of it's strength away, so i recommend it as a great afternoon thing to do. so take a friend and afterwards, go eat some cheesecake, cause it's never a bad time for cheesecake. especially when you have a movie theatre buddy to go with.

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