Amelia

Saw it yesterday. Pretty good even if you don't like old airplanes... In one scene she announces the formation of the 99's.

Some scenes are fictional or at least there is no historic record of them having happened, nor could there have been. For example when they are sitting in the lounge in New Guinea before departing on the leg of the flight over the eastern Pacific, where they eventually disappear, Fred Noonan, her navigator hits on her ! Who got the idea to put that in ? A woman is the screen writer......it follows the historic record pretty well overall.





Amelia






by Roger Ebert

I
am drawn to every news story about the attempts, which still continue,
to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance on July 2, 1937.
It's pretty clear she ditched at sea, but you just never know. Those
clues found on a Pacific atoll are tantalizing. It is not her
disappearance but her life that fascinates me. She was strong,
brave and true, and she looked fabulous in a flight suit. No ladylike
decorum for her; before she wed publisher George Putnam, she wrote him
their marriage would have "dual controls," and said neither one should
feel bound to "a medieval code of faithfulness." Maybe she was keeping
a loophole for Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor),
the founder of TWA and father of Gore, who told his son he loved her
but didn't marry her "because I didn't want to marry a boy."

Hilary Swank uncannily embodies my ideas about Earhart in Mira Nair's
"Amelia." She looks like her, smiles like here, evokes her. Swank is an
actress who doesn't fit in many roles, but when she's right, she's
right. The tousled hair, the freckles, the slim figure, the fitness,
the physical carriage that says, "I know precisely who I am and I like
it -- and if you don't, bail out." Not only was she the first person
after Lindbergh to fly solo across the Atlantic, she even looked like
him.

"Amelia" tells this story with sound performances and
impeccable period detail. It deals with her final flight so accurately
that many of the radio transmissions between her and the Coast Guard
cutter Itasca, stationed off Howland Island, are repeated verbatim.
(They could hear her but she couldn't hear them.) It ends on exactly
the correct note. As Red River Dave sang in the lyrics of the first
song ever broadcast on U.S. television:

Half an hour later, her SOS was heard,
Her signals weak, but still her voice was brave.
In shark-infested waters, her aeroplane went down that night
In the blue Pacific to a watery grave.


She was an early feminist role model, an American hero not tainted like
Lindbergh by chumminess with the Nazis. A few years after her death,
U.S women would be asked to hang up their aprons, put on overalls and
work on the production lines of the war. She was the real thing. Yes,
she signed contracts to endorse chewing gum, soap and a fashion line,
but she needed the money to finance her flights, and she always chewed
the gum, used the soap, wore the clothes.

I suppose I vaguely knew she married the famous New York publisher G.P. Putnam (Richard Gere).
It never registered. The film reports, correctly, that Putnam was
instrumental -- promoting her, booking her lectures, publishing her
book, raising money for flights. The movie doesn't much deal with how a
rural Kansas tomboy got along with the famous New York socialite who
published Lindbergh's We. It was love at first sight for George, and forever after for both of them.

That's
the trouble with Amelia Earhart's life, seen strictly as movie
material. What we already know is what we get. To repeat: She was
strong, brave and true, she gained recognition for woman flyers, and
she looked fabulous in a flight suit. She flew the Atlantic solo, she
disappeared in the Pacific, she died too young, and there was no
scandal or even an indiscretion. She didn't even smoke, although Luckys
wanted her for an endorsement.

I'm not suggesting that Mira Nair
and her writers, Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, should have
invented anything for "Amelia." It is right that they resisted any
temptation. It's just that there's a certain lack of drama in a
generally happy life. At least by treating her big flights as chapters
in a longer life, they sidestepped the dilemma that defeated Billy Wilder when he starred Jimmy Stewart
in "The Spirit of St. Louis" (1957). Lindbergh's life offered such
promising details as a 1930s decoration by the Nazis and the kidnapping
of his baby, but Wilder focused on the long flight itself, during which
the most exciting event is the appearance of a fly in the cockpit.

"Amelia"
is a perfectly sound biopic, well directed and acted, about an
admirable woman. It confirmed for me Earhart's courage -- not only in
flying, but in insisting on living her life outside the conventions of
her time for well-behaved females. The next generation of American
women grew up in her slipstream.

There's a beautiful, beautiful field
Far away in a land that is fair.
Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, first lady of the air.


Listen here to "Amelia Earhart's Last Flight":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRMu3dEHCaM

I was wondering about going to see it ...

I'm generally interested...but it would have been cool if they could have waited until something definitive about the physical evidence they found on a deserted island could be investigated. It would be nice to have something you didn't know incorporated.

That debris, a panel , etc. that they found several years ago seems to have been ignored or debunked or something...haven't heard anything about it since then.....

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/conspiracy/q0299.shtml

From what I heard, there were undergarments found at the site. At the time, DNA extraction wasn't thought of (or possible) but now it is. So they planned another trip back to perform such testing.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8160365&page=1&page=1



http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/international/2009/july/DNA-Evidence-May-Reveal-Clues-About-Amelia-Earhart-s-Disappearance.html