Two weeks out on Henry V, and we spent a long, full day in the theater, from 10:30 to 8:00. Costume fittings, a full run of the show, and some tuning of some of the scenes. I was also there for work with Al, the fight choreographer: in the main battle sequence I'm not doing any fighting, but I'm on stage and I have to be keenly aware of the action that's going on around me. There is a short sequence (scene II.i) that involves some sword- and daggerplay that we haven't really worked with Al yet.

We're in pretty good shape for the amount of time we have left. Most of us are still coping with the set, which is largely a center platform that slopes down to the deck on three sides.

posted: 9:10:32 PM  

I'm somewhat at a loss to comment upon Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, the dramatized biography of entrepreneur Howard Hughes up through the late 1940s, because it's not clear what picture Scorsese wanted to make. Packed into the film's 170 minutes are an average-quality CGI action picture about Hughes's fiery crash of an experimental spy plane and the brief flight of the "Spruce Goose;" a "Mr Deeds"-style square-off between a corrupt senator and a plain-speaking businessman; a fraught character study of Hughes and his women, with lots of air in the scenes; and (perhaps the strongest movie), a chronicle of the obsessive-compulsive aviator's flirtations with madness.

At least the passage that treats his self-imposed quarantine in a screening room is not interrupted the picture's dumbing-down voiceovers and subtitles. Some strange color processing in some sections has turned a meticulous plate of peas blue, and a glass of O.J. has turned from orange to murk from one cut to the next.

As a scientist confidant, the always-excellent Ian Holm mines comic gold from nothing but reacting to Hughes's antics. And Edward Herrmann's wattles deserve special recognition for their contribution to his cameo as the film board censor Joseph Breen.

posted: 9:00:55 PM