There was a time when, for whatever reason, some filmmakers liked to see how far into a movie they could put the credits. Watching Amelia, you may find yourself wondering if this was the case here: surely any biography of the famed aerialist would spend a reel or so on her early life?

I assure you that you did not walk into the movie 20 minutes late. Aside from a brief shot of a pre-teen Amelia Earhart in Kansas, looking at a passing plane from a cornfield vantage point and vowing that she would someday fly, this handsome but largely uninvolving movie shows us none of the early struggles of the woman who, for most of the 1930s, was one of America’s biggest celebrities. I mean, I hate to second-guess the film’s capable screenwriters (Ronald Bass (Rain Man, The Joy Luck Club) and Anna Hamilton Phelan (Girl Interrupted, Gorillas in the Mist), working from the Earhart biographies East to the Dawn and The Sound of Wings). Maybe they researched it and Earhart’s early life wasn’t very interesting.

But given that women in our era form only a small proportion of licensed pilots, I can’t help but suspect that a woman trying to learn to fly in the 1910s and 20s must have had a hell of a time of it. As it is, when we first see Amelia (played by Hilary Swank, who bears a strong similarity to the real Earhart) she is being disappointed to learn that the flying stunt she has been hired for is a fraud in which she is expected merely to be a passenger on a plane flown by a man.

The bulk of Amelia, which is framed around scenes depicting the attempted round-the-world flight during which she and her navigator vanished in 1937, is concerned more with her romantic life than her professional career. These are to some extent intertwined, given that her husband (Richard Gere) was the publisher who promoted her career and her lover (Ewan McGregor) was an aviation pioneer and director of the federal government’s Bureau of Air Commerce. But despite her open avowal of non-conformity to her husband, none of it is so compelling as to make up for the stuff about Earhart for which she is remembered today—her passion for flying.

Prettily but blandly directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding), Amelia is at its best in its final reel, which goes into the details of her final hours in the air, based on records of radio transmissions with her plane. It may a bit on the technical side (it seems to come down to a dead battery), but it’s genuinely suspenseful. As for the rest of the movie, it is briskly passed and edited, but overall less dramatic than the musical score, which seems to be working overtime to make up for the lack of a strong script.

Watch the trailer for Amelia:

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Raise a glass in memory of Vic Mizzy, the self-taught accordion player who wrote a lot of music in his 93 years but will be remembered by those of us weaned on the glass teat for two of them: this finger-snapping 1964 classic that I wish the Cramps had covered—

—(does John Astin rule or what?), and this one from two years later, from a show that I probably should be ashamed to admit that I always loved:

Wanna hear more? Check out Mizzy’s website. He may not have been another Raymond Scott or Esquivel, but I’ll bet they’re all hanging out at the same tiki bar in the sky.

Mizzy (center) with "Green Acres" stars Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor.

If you’re one of those people who watches Seinfeld on cable while you’re eating dinner, look closely at the episode airing on WTBS tonight at 6pm. (It’s the one where Kramer decides that butter makes a good shaving cream.) The old guy playing “McMaines” is Everett Greenbaum, a native of Buffalo who became a successful comedy writer. He created the hit 1950s series “Mr. Peepers,” starring Wally Cox and Tony Randall, and wrote numerous scripts for “M*A*S*H,” “The Real McCoys,” “”The Andy Griffith Show,” and “Sanford and Son.” He was a creative consultant on “Matlock,” and wrote a number of films for Andy Griffith and Don Knotts. In the decade prior to his death in 1997 he also appeared as an actor on sitcoms like “3rd Rock from the Sun,” “Grace Under Fire,” and “Ellen.” You can check out the rest of his career at imdb.com

Everett Greenbaum will be one of the recipients of the first Al Boasberg Comedy Awards, named after the Buffalo native who was one of the most influential comedy writers of the 20th century, having had a hand in steering the careers of the Marx Brothers, Burns and Allen, the Three Stooges, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and many others. The Awards will be presented as part of the Buffalo International Film Festival this month; you can read more about them in this week’s ArtVoice.

You can also watch this interview with Everett Greenbaum: