The Aviator

I make no secret of the fact that I tend to prefer Martin Scorsese’s 21st century work to his earlier work. As I’ve noted on a number of occasions, this strikes me as being largely due to the fact that I am more drawn to his more recent subjects — and it probably has very little to do with his filmmaking, which has always been of a pretty high caliber. Still, it’s worth noting that four of his five 21st century narrative features have landed on my Ten Best lists — and two of them snagged the No. 1 slot on consecutive years. The one exception to this was The Aviator (2005). As a result, I was interested to see how I would feel about it on a second look. While I liked it a bit more, most of my problems with it were still there. It still seems uneven to me and its history is occasionally pretty dodgy, but the real problem is that Scorsese never manages to make me care very much about his main character. My original review still captures my feelings, although the first sentence now seems funny: “Even though I rarely like Martin Scorsese’s movies (The Gangs of New York being the notable exception).” You can find my original review in full here: http://avl.mx/l4

The Hendersonville Film Society will show The Aviator at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 7 in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community (behind Epic Cinemas), 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville.