“The way of the future...” chants Howard Hughes over and over again as he descends into madness in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. Born to an oil drill bit millionaire, Howard Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, seems to have it all: wealth, good looks, women, and intelligence. An innovator, risk-taker, movie director, and aviation pioneer, Howard Hughes is a success by any measure. Despite this, he is also flawed: Hughes’ Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder leads to his demise in director Martin Scorsese’s thrilling biopic The Aviator.
Because of Howard Hughes’ complex personality, Director Martin Scorsese weaves two different, but intersecting stories at the same time in The Aviator: one that shows everything that is going right for Howard Hughes and one that shows everything that is going wrong. This allows viewers to see the good in Hughes - the glory he has in directing Hell’s Angels and the thrill of his aviation career. It gives the audience insight into Hughes’ life and the ability to sympathize with him before he completely disengages from society and becomes a recluse. Scorsese is skillful in portraying Hughes’ desire for perfection and the gradual development of
…show more content…
When asked his reasoning for focusing on a small part of Hughes’ life, Scorsese remarked, “What I liked was the young Howard Hughes who came to Hollywood with money his dad made on drill bits, and bet the store. He had energy and lust.” This “slice of life” approach works in The Aviator because realistically, there is no way to include every aspect of Hughes’ life into a single three-hour movie. The last ten years of Hughes’ life could be an entire movie itself, which would cover the events in his life that Scorsese chooses to omit: Hughes becomes a recluse, suffers from syphilis, is debilitated by OCD, and eventually passes away without heirs or a
During his lifetime he was known as the wealthier self-made man in the world. Howard Hughes’ riches directly and indirectly helped America’s economy flourish for many decades. For one, Hollywood films accounts for a portion of U.S goods and service revenues. Also, he created many job opportunities for men who could not seek job during the depression and beyond. Two, Hughes was known for spending excessively thought-out his life and more so towards he later adulthood. He purchased an entire Nevada hotel, after refusing to leave when asked. He became Navada’s biggest landlord. Hughes went on a one hundred million dollar buying spree; he bought casinos, local airport, and a television station. All of which helped expand America’s economy. Also,
In Richland Center, Wisconsin on June 8, 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright was born to William Carey Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones. Most of his early childhood was spent traveling with his father from one ministry position to another in Rhode Island, Iowa, and Massachusetts but then in 1878, settled in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1885, Wright’s parents divorced, putting even more strain on their already difficult financial situation. In order to help support his family, an eighteen year old Wright worked for the dean of the University of Wisconsin’s department of engineering while also studying there. However, his passion was in architecture so in 1887, at the age of 20, he left Madison and headed to Chicago. In Chicago, he began working with two different firms, before he was hired by the partnership of Adler and Sullivan where he worked directly under Sullivan for six years.
Beauty – it’s all around us. Some people may not realize it, but the beauty of this city is in the history of the buildings and its houses. Any native or visitor can see the charm of the Queen City, but how many people have ever stopped to wonder where the original designs came from? Who built the house of Buffalo? Without a great architect who was ahead of his time, Buffalo would just not be as charming as a city. Frank Lloyd Wright made great contributions to places all over the United States and even overseas. Buffalo is lucky enough to be home to several of Wright’s many designs and creations. Not only did Frank Lloyd Wright design houses, he was the architect of the Larkin Administration Building, which was his first major commercial commission ever to be built (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House Complex). The Darwin Martin House complex, the Graycliff Estate, a boathouse mausoleum on the Erie Basin Marina, and several private homes for Larkin Soap Company executives, were all built in Buffalo. These constructions were all of Wright’s designs that have contributed to the Buffalo landscape. While Wright has made an impact on Buffalo’s history and beautiful architecture, he has also made an impact all over the globe. From California to Tokyo, Frank Lloyd Wright and his designs are world renown. With several awards and different recognitions, he is arguably the greatest American architect of his time.
...n. Amid massive worldwide publicity, Irving was sentenced to 2 ½ years in federal prison only two months after he appeared on the cover of Time. It was money that etched Howard Hughes into the public mind. The sound of his name was associated with untold wealth, wealth supposedly accumulated through his gift for turning all he touched to gold. left the world with a spectacular legacy that will be remembered for years to come. His contributions to the film business, such as attention to detail and high budget spending, are still being used to this day. Howard’s cutting edge technology used to build his many planes has let to development of many aircrafts presently in use. In truth, we are left with two Howard Hugheses- the public and the private: the rational disguise and the world of shadows, of instinct to preserve and protect at any cost the image he had created. That it has taken so many years for the veil to part is tribute both to his genius and to his tragedy.
The Classical Hollywood style, according to David Bordwell remains “bound by rules that set stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern.” Every element of the film works in the service of the narrative, which should be ideally comprehensible and unambiguous to the audience. The typical Hollywood film revolves around a protagonist, whose struggle to achieve a specific goal or resolve a conflict becomes the foundation for the story. André Bazin, in his “On the politique des auteurs,” argues that this particular system of filmmaking, despite all its limitations and constrictions, represented a productive force creating commercial art. From the Hollywood film derived transnational and transcultural works of art that evoked spectatorial identification with its characters and emotional investment into its narrative. The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor in 1940, is one of the many works of mass-produced art evolving out of the studio system. The film revolves around Tracy Lord who, on the eve of her second wedding, must confront the return of her ex-husband, two newspaper reporters entering into her home, and her own hubris. The opening sequence of The Philadelphia Story represents a microcosm of the dynamic between the two protagonists Tracy Lord and C.K. Dexter Haven, played by Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Through the use of costume and music, the opening sequence operates as a means to aesthetically reveal narrative themes and character traits, while simultaneously setting up the disturbance that must be resolved.
1920’s Harlem was a time of contrast and contradiction, on one hand it was a hotbed of crime and vice and on the other it was a time of creativity and rebirth of literature and at this movement’s head was Langston Hughes. Hughes was a torchbearer for the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and musical movement that began in Harlem during the Roaring 20’s that promoted not only African-American culture in the mainstream, but gave African-Americans a sense of identity and pride.
I will begin my essay by looking closely at the narrative of Sunset Boulevard to see where and how the film represents the Hollywood Studio System. At the beginning of the film the audience is introduced to Joe Gillis, a script writer who is struggling to pay his rent as he in unable to sell his scripts to the ‘majors’ of Hollywood. The film follows Joe to ‘Paramount Pictures’ one of the major studios in Hollywood, which the film pays a large self reference to as the producers of Sunset Boulevard as well as representing the studio system.
Ebert, Roger. Rev. of Almost Famous, dir. Cameron Crowe. Rogerebert.com. Chicago Sun-Times, 15 Sept. 2000. Web. 29 March 2011.
Progress is in the eye of the beholder. Throughout the years society has forced nature out of its life and has instead adopted a new mechanical and industrialized lifestyle. Technology may be deemed as progress by some, where it is thought of as a positive advancement for mankind. Yet technology can also be a hindrance for society, by imposing itself on society and emptying the meaning out of life. In “Autobiography at an Air-Station,” Philip Larkin conveys his distaste of how society has denounced nature. By employing an ironic tone in the sonnet, Larkin comments on the significance of the sonnet in relation to industrial life. Life has become ironic because it is no longer a natural life that society leads, but a fabricated life. Through his use of rhyme and meter, the extended metaphor comparing the air-station to life, imagery, and diction, Larkin reflects on what life has come to be: a deviation from the intrinsic.
For many years, African Americans were forced to live without a voice and many accepted the fact that they were seen as inferior to the white race. Although they were excluded from being a part of society, built up emotions constructed beautiful pieces of poetry that have become important aspects of today’s literature. Langston Hughes’, “ I Too, Sing America” and Claude Mckay’s, “The White House” will be looked at closely to determine how each poem portrays emotional discontent and conflicted emotional states.
A set of practices concerning the narrative structure compose the classical Hollywood Paradigm. These conventions create a plot centering around a character who undergoes a journey in an attempt to achieve some type of goal (). By giving the central character more time on screen, the film helps the audience to not only understand the character’s motivation but also empathize with his/her emotional state. Additionally, some antagonistic force creates conflict with the main character, preventing immediate success(). Finally, after confronting the antagonist, the main character achieves his or her goal along with growing emotionally(). This proven structure creates a linear and relatively easily followed series of events encompassing the leading character and a goal.
Since the late 1890’s films have been constantly changing the history of pop culture and the way people view war, politics, and the world as a whole. As the timeline of the history of film progressed, there were many different phases: gothic noir, slapstick comedy, tragedy vs. love, romance, and many more. Towards the more recent times, the central ideas of films started drifting to the greatness of the directors. Directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and many more were noted as outstanding directors of action and cinematography. In this paper I will speak about Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and the ever so infamous Baz Luhrmann. These directors have changed the way filmmaking has been and will be looked at from this point on.
This media project will focus on the character of Howard Hughes in the film The Aviator. Based on the information provided in the film, this character is portrayed as having Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The purpose of this paper is to describe the disorder as it applies to the character, describe how the disorder impacted the character’s life, explain factors that likely impacted the character, comment on the accuracy of the character portrayal, and provide information about the respectfulness of the portrayal to the mental health population.
...movie that I fell in love with. But most of all I love how the story line is a great overlap into the cinematically engaging movie. There is a great use of camera, timing, shots and story line that are portrayed in this movie without being too overwhelming. This allows the audience to relax during the movie and just take in the scenes as a story from reality. To this day, and even still doing this paper I still come to find different aspects of the movie that I missed the previous times I have watched it.
Ebert effectively points out the highs and lows of Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera. Though the film is visually stunning, much is left to be said for the storyline, acting, and length. Few redeeming qualities make Schumacher’s version of The Phantom of the Opera worth watching. By glorifying the Phantom, Schumacher detracts from the demon that he was and the torment that he inflicted on those around him.