Amelia

I was very disappointed with this film. It had a good cast (Swank and Gere) and I generally like these biopics (ex. The Aviator with Leonardo DiCapprio). I found most of this movie incredibly boring and very little insight was presented about Amelia the person. Yes, she has a strange relationship with her promoter/husband and an even stranger one with a married flying instructor (Ian McGregor) and we do briefly see her fascination with flying (about 30 seconds) as a girl growing up in Kansas. Other than that the actual insight is virtually non-existant.

Swank does look as heck of a lot better than the actual Amelia (we see actual footage of the real Amelia at the end of the film) but I felt her performance to be incredibly weak and her accent was annoying. She would have been more effective using her own accent (I remember DeNiro successfully playing a Spanish noble in The Mission with his own Brooklyn accent) and at times Gere spoke so low that I needed to rewind the DVD several times to understand what he was saying.

There is one good scene where Amelia is making a flight as a "passenger" from New Foundland to Ireland and the plane drops causing first the navigator then Amelia to almost fall out of the plan. There was also some controversy as Gere did not permit Amelia to actually fly the plane in that first cross-Atlantic crossing as well as Gere telling another female pilot to let Amelia win a flying race. These tidbits were not enough to save this film for me and I grudgingly give it 2 stars.Get more detail about Amelia.