Amelia Earhart

In The Aviator , Martin Scorsese mythologized Howard Hughes as a 20th-century Icarus who, scorched by the sun, plummeted to earth. In Amelia , director Mira Nair presents Amelia Earhart, legendary aviatrix, as a female Odysseus who navigates uncharted territory while a patient spouse knits his brow until she returns. Though this traditional story about a defiantly nontraditional woman doesn't always soar, it fits Hilary Swank, its producer/star, like a jumpsuit. She and Nair thrill to the life of this American who broke records, hearts, and boundaries.

"Amelia" tells the story of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart with a style that is anything but. Glossy, stodgy and unfailingly conventional, "Amelia" sets out to inspire an audience but never feels inspired itself. Signs of trouble surface early, when Amelia (Hilary Swank) meets promoter and future husband George Putnam (Richard Gere), who makes a windy speech that includes the lines "let me be frank" and "let me be perfectly clear. " He doesn't say "let me be redundant," but then he doesn't have to. Characters fight throughout "Amelia" with the grand speeches and exposition that often dog the biopic.

Sixty years ago this spring, Amelia Earhart stuffed herself in the cabin of a noisy, overweight Lockheed Electra 10E and set out on an adventure that has become a part of American myth. Now, Linda Finch, a pilot and aviation historian, hopes to complete that odyssey, which ended tragically with Earhart's disappearance in the vast Pacific, by circling the world in a lovingly restored Electra. Finch says people talk with her almost everywhere she goes about how Amelia Earhart has touched their imagination.

The clues are tantalizing but inconclusive: a piece of airplane fuselage, the remains of a woman's shoe, the cap of an old medicine bottle, reports of human bones. But now Richard Gillespie thinks he has the "smoking gun" in the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, on July 2, 1937: an airplane engine. After devoting 10 years, $1.5 million and four previous expeditions to the pioneering pilot who was attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world, Gillespie believes he is close to solving one of aviation's greatest mysteries.

When Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics to the hit song "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," he probably didn't realize what it would do to this small eastern Kansas town. In a world that hardly even knew where Kansas was, Atchison suddenly became a household word. Mercer's song dealt with the train line that ran between Atchison and Santa Fe, N.M., in the heady days of the late 1800s when Americans were opening the West. A train line with that name no longer exists, but Atchison, which lies 54 miles north of Kansas City, Mo., is thriving - and not just because of the railroad that once ran there.

William Sellers 2d, 95, of Strafford, a former manufacturer and sportsman who once dined with Amelia Earhart, died Saturday at the Dunwoody Village Nursing Unit in Newtown Square. Mr. Sellers owned and piloted a plane in the '20s and '30s. He once had a dinner date with Amelia Earhart, who was in Philadelphia for a speaking engagement. When he showed up at the Barclay Hotel in his old Ford jalopy, the police refused to let him stop. They allowed him to send in a note. Back came a note from Earhart saying, "Of course, I'm dining with Mr. Sellers, a fellow pilot - tell him to park, and wait.

Whatever it is - a chamber musical? operatic vaudeville? - Take Flight at Princeton's McCarter Theatre is enthralling. Taking flight as its subject and legendary aviators as its characters, it tunefully explores obsession through the interwoven stories of the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart. With a complicated book by John Weidman (no wonder the show kept reminding me of his Sondheim collaborations Pacific Overtures and Road Show), edgy music by David Shire, who saves soaring melody for when he really needs it, and Richard Maltby Jr.'s sometimes clever, sometimes thrilling lyrics, Take Flight is an exciting work.

From the edge of the Willow Grove Airfield, as another bulbous Hercules C-130 cargo plane lumbers into the sky like a giant, thundering illusion, it's easy to think about the future. About the horizon these flying mastodons blast into, the fantastic power they have harnessed and the modern times they represent. But even beneath this trembling stretch of sky, it is the past that resonates with Frank Lagan. "Not that many people in this country know how this happened," Lagan said.

Amelia Earhart is still lost. And Richard Gillespie is still looking. Gillespie, who heads a group that has tried for the last decade to solve the mystery of the aviator's disappearance July 2, 1937, had hoped to find an engine from her airplane on Canton Island in the South Pacific. But when he got to the island on Saturday, the dump where the engine was believed to be had been covered with debris. He thinks the engine is buried underneath, but his team had no way to dig it out. "Am I disappointed?

For most of the 25 years he's been investigating the disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart, Ric Gillespie has gotten little traction. Experts and various self-proclaimed skeptics have dismissed, doubted, and debunked his theory that she and her navigator did not plunge into the vastness of the Pacific, but instead lived as castaways on a pinpoint of land called Nikumaroro. A smudge in a 74-year-old photograph turned everything around. A forensic analyst in Washington thought it looked more like an object than a photographic defect.

2 craft to explore moon's mysteries CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A pair of spacecraft rocketed toward the moon Saturday on the first mission dedicated to measuring lunar gravity and determining what's inside Earth's orbiting companion - all the way down to the core. NASA launched the near identical probes - named Grail-A and Grail-B - aboard a relatively small Delta II rocket to save money. It will take close to four months for the spacecraft to reach the moon, a long, roundabout journey.

Whatever it is - a chamber musical? operatic vaudeville? - Take Flight at Princeton's McCarter Theatre is enthralling. Taking flight as its subject and legendary aviators as its characters, it tunefully explores obsession through the interwoven stories of the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart. With a complicated book by John Weidman (no wonder the show kept reminding me of his Sondheim collaborations Pacific Overtures and Road Show), edgy music by David Shire, who saves soaring melody for when he really needs it, and Richard Maltby Jr.'s sometimes clever, sometimes thrilling lyrics, Take Flight is an exciting work.

In September 1932, an airplane set off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, N.Y., attempting a nonstop flight to Rome. Four months before, Amelia Earhart had become the first woman - and only the second pilot after Charles Lindbergh in 1927 - to fly solo across the Atlantic. The September flight carried a pilot, a physician, and a nurse. All were lost at sea. The nurse had replaced Ida Mae Hampton of Northfield, N.J., near Atlantic City, who had declined an invitation to copilot what newspapers at the time called the "American Nurse" flight.

The movie Amelia shows the legendary aviation pioneer at the height of her career. But here's a little-known snippet of Earhart's bio: Before becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, she attended a finishing school in our neck of the woods. Letters, documents and artifacts from the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, which is now the site of Penn State Abington, offer a glimpse of a girl on her way to breaking barriers of speed, distance and gender. In a school dedicated to shaping the daughters of highest society into proper debutantes, "Amelia was the most illustrious of the alumnae," said Lillian Hansberry, archive coordinator, who will discuss Earhart's local connection in a Nov. 8 program on campus, "Amelia Earhart: From the Ogontz School to Worldwide Fame.

On screen, Hilary Swank incarnates the larger-than-life Amelia Earhart, pioneering aviatrix, as a towering figure. Yet in life the two-time Oscar winner, 35, is of medium height, slim as a tulip stem. Despite a chilly hotel suite, she radiates warmth. Clad in a cobalt-blue minidress patterned with polka dots the size of her large brown eyes, Swank improvises a cocoon out of an assistant's flannel shirt. Don't tell her stylist, but the actress is about being comfortable, not glamorous.

In The Aviator, Martin Scorsese mythologized Howard Hughes as a 20th-century Icarus who, scorched by the sun, plummeted to earth. In Amelia, director Mira Nair presents Amelia Earhart, legendary aviatrix, as a female Odysseus who navigates uncharted territory while a patient spouse knits his brow until she returns. Though this traditional story about a defiantly nontraditional woman doesn't always soar, it fits Hilary Swank, its producer/star, like a jumpsuit. She and Nair thrill to the life of this American who broke records, hearts, and boundaries.

"Amelia" tells the story of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart with a style that is anything but. Glossy, stodgy and unfailingly conventional, "Amelia" sets out to inspire an audience but never feels inspired itself. Signs of trouble surface early, when Amelia (Hilary Swank) meets promoter and future husband George Putnam (Richard Gere), who makes a windy speech that includes the lines "let me be frank" and "let me be perfectly clear. " He doesn't say "let me be redundant," but then he doesn't have to. Characters fight throughout "Amelia" with the grand speeches and exposition that often dog the biopic.

Here's a factoid, courtesy of the Internet Movie Database: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian marks the second time that Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln have appeared in the same film. The first? Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure . Which, by the way, is a vastly more meaningful moviegoing experience than this knee-jerk sequel to the surprise 2006 Ben Stiller smash. A super-size rehash of the original - transplanted from New York's Museum of Natural History to the sprawling mall of museums run by the Smithsonian in Washington - this family-friendly vehicle once again stars Stiller as the museum guard who communes with objects and artifacts on display after the doors close for the day. Except this time, as Night at the Museum - Part Duh begins, Stiller's Larry Daley is no longer employed as a guard.