Tucker; the man and his car / Part 2

Rating: 2/10 (6 March 2011)

Many moviegoers bemoan Woody Allen's work of the last 15 years as being a shadow of his former self. But late Scorsese work is not a pretty thing either. Gangs of New York was a self-impressed bouquet of flowers to the dimmest of male viewers. Age of Innocence was glacial and uneventful. Shutter Island was Scorsese's limp contribution to the twist-ending genre. Aviator (like GoNY) proves that Scorsese continues to take interesting story ideas (here, the rise and fall of oddball Howard Hughes) and turn them into flat, superficial projects. The movie has a script that might've been written by-a-machine. The author is working in shallow mode. The excessive winks at the audience are tiresome. (Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow, Rufus Wainwright as a big band singer) DiCaprio is again amateurish and wrong for the role. He cannot play a character of any complexity; also miscast are both Blanchet as Hepburn, and someone else (?) as Ava Gardner. Another character mispronounces the name of Theda Bara because she's just some nobody mired the past. Blanchet looks like the only cast member who appears to be older than 19. And the acting is straight out of a high school play. Inexplicably, this won an Oscar for it's exceptionally cheap-looking cinematography. There is nothing to discover in this movie, because nothing is hidden.
Scorsese is at least as shallow as Michael Bay. His early work won kudos for being forthright, but ideas just don't adhere to his films.