Word: nair
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mira Nair's pretty but disappointing biopic Amelia, there's a scene in which Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) laments the shallow nature of the two questions repeatedly posed by her adoring public. It's not long after the 1928 transatlantic flight that made her a household name, and she says all anyone wants to know is "Where are you going next?" and "What did you wear...
...gentle lament, because the Earhart brought to the screen by Nair and Swank is a gracious lady, magnanimous and humble. She quotes Carl Sandburg, takes care to enthusiastically greet the little people while making history - "Well, hello, sheep!" she says, descending from the cockpit in an Irish meadow - and, above all, beams beatifically at the world at large. (See the top 10 biopics of all time...
...those long flights, Earhart whined at least once about having to urinate through a funnel. The closest she comes to complaining is when Putnam is renting her out to sell everything from luggage to waffle irons, a zippy little montage that reminds you how much fun Nair (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) can have behind the camera. (Read an essay by Mira Nair...
Sensibly, the screenwriters and Nair aren't coy about Earhart's likely fate. There are no absurd conspiracy theories involving the Japanese or suggestions of her making safe landing on some deserted island - just communication blunders and furrowed brows (a Swank specialty), and then she and the plane are gone, vanished in the typical way of small planes running out of fuel over a vast ocean. It's not even particularly sad until Nair rolls the documentary footage of the real Earhart. There, grainy and distant, is the "ghost of aviation," as Joni Mitchell called her in the 1976 song...
...will you be seeing Amelia 2: Lost and Found. The Earhart movie, originally to have been directed by Phillip Noyce, with Cate Blanchett rumored to play Amelia Earhart, was finally made with Hilary Swank starring and India-born, Harvard-educated Mira Nair behind the camera. It happens that, in every recent year divisible by five, Swank has won the Academy Award for Best Actress: in 2000 for Boys Don,t Cry and 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. Numerology suggested another Swank statuette in 2010. But who, exactly, was supposed to pay to see her as The Aviatrix? Earhart's plane...