films

Wheeler, 1975
aka
Psycho from Texas (USA reissue title)
The Butcher (UK video title)
The Hurting (USA reissue title)
The Mama's Boy (USA recut version)
Evil + Hate = Killer (undefined)

A friend gave me a VHS of this. Random excellent IMDb review from "Jeff Norris":

License plate on the car and the main actor are from Texas. Where is this taken place? Nobody says anything about that, in a town, and in no time in the middle of nowhere with a run down refinery. My Grandfather was the Bank President and Mr. Phillips best friend. His role was short and sweet to the point and I believe he acted as himself with no lines. He was just like, think about this, and added logic reasons, he should have been asked in the meantime why weeler cashed a check with no I.D. from someone else's account. Sound was what can I say, horrible, chase scene was miles long, so still trying to figure out where they were! I could tell though that the courthouse in El Dorado was noticeable in South Arkansas. More porn on this movie than movies of that nature nowadays. It's alright if your bored! I watched it only for the 2 or 3 minute scene my Grandfather played as the best friend to Mr. Phillips.

In yesterday's Salon Martha P. Nochimson takes Kathryn Bigelow to task for not being femme enough: "It's that I'm still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America."

Some good responses on the first (earliest) page of letters. Anna68:

Uh, because she is an artist and artists are keen observers of human nature? Just a shot in the dark.

(With feminists like this, who needs mysogyny!)

MHC adds:

...Bigelow is a visual artist, not simply a "female director" (whatever that may mean.)

And her film centers on a character who is addicted to a nearly wordless, intense, visual pursuit -- as is any visual artist worth their salt, no matter their gender. Bigelow chose the palette of war, and did show something about the addiction our culture has to war making, but what I found compelling was watching the main character work, watching him engaged in a life and death situation that depended for a positive outcome on his visual acuity, totally mesmerizing. The life and death part of his job seemed secondary to him; the time-stopping focus he was capable of achieving when looking at a bomb and figuring out how to defuse it was what seemed to bring him intense pleasure and release. Anyone who thinks images can relate to that. And anyone who makes war knows that James' character was doing, on a micro-scale, what war-makers do, too; they focus exclusively on the necessary. And women are obviously as capable of engaging in that kind of focus. Just ask Bigelow.

In the film, the main character keeps a box of defused bomb parts as souvenirs. A fellow soldier says "it's just junk from Radio Shack." Reading MHC's letter made me think about the artist connection: the box suggests an after-the-fact version of the found object/collage materials artists collect, which have no value until they are assembled.

Continuing to be impressed by Scorsese's The Aviator (2004). It might be his best film (certainly not the one he won the sympathy Oscar for a few years later). Taxi Driver is more Paul Schrader's vehicle and Raging Bull is too damn arty (and grim).
The teevee has a truncated, censored version of The Aviator--even that's pretty good.
And YouTube has many of the strange bits where Hughes' obsessive-compulsive disorder gets the better of him in public situations (e.g., "show me all the blueprints"), well acted by Leonardo di Caprio.
Ted Goranson has a good review of the movie, including this part:

Howard Hughes: The movie gave the impression that Howard simply inherited his money. No so. He was a brilliant engineer who famously codesigned systems and the engineering organizations to support them. While most of us were barfing at frat parties, he designed a drill bit (often credited to his father) that is still the standard in the industry, together with a set of screw connections that has since become the international standard. That's where the money came from. And though he went loopy toward the end, he ensured that 100% of his wealth (yes, all assets were sold) went to endow the world's largest private research institute.

This was a passionate engineer in a world of monopolistic thugs (Gates take notice), truly what we like to think the "free market" is all about. The movie also ignores a key movie connection: He always intended the "Spruce Goose" to be made of wood, and because all US manufacturing assets were committed, he designed a production system that allowed small businesses, even backyard groups, to make pieces that would be floated down rivers and successively be glued into larger parts. This (what he called the "packet production system") was the first serious research into what we today call "virtual enterprises."

When the war ended, he sent his virtual enterprise experts into his film business where they used the system (freely giving away details) to destroy the vertically integrated studio system. Nearly all movies today use his virtual enterprise approach and the Weinsteins (producers of this very film) are the current masters of the system.

I can't find any support for the statement that Hughes Junior designed the drill bit--need to investigate that further. The Aviator airbrushes quite a bit of Hughes' bio, such as his support for the Hollywood blacklist and his rather, er, omnivorous sexuality. It may be I watch the movie through the lens of what I know about Hughes from James Ellroy and Sam Shephard (Shephard's mostly forgotten play Seduced featured Rip Torn as the aged reclusive Hughes in a great off-Broadway performance). In other words, if you already know Hughes as a malevolent arachnid moving from one penthouse nest to another, the movie shows you the young manhood and the aviation chutzpah that were part of the same equation adding up to this Inspiring and Scary American Figure.