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Strange Darling (2023)
Fascinating, surprising, a great new movie.
Well, now that the Oscar Best Actress Award has been given out seven months early to Willa Fitzgerald we can discuss the most imaginative, stylish movie of 2024. Maybe the most imaginative, stylish movie since Atomic Blonde. There are similarities between them
The same for half remembered Linda Fiorentino noirs from the early nineties. But, read this with a grain of salt because 'chapter' movies 'al la Tarantino', told out of order are a favorite genre of mine.
A serial killer is afoot in the Oregon (Washington?) forests. The pursued/pursuer is desperately seeking escape/the kill. The Serial Killer does not want to kill but, hey, scheisse happens. Red plays almost as big a scene/wardrobe role as it did in Don't Look Now. The killer as demented and sane, cool and grotesque as the killer in the Australian movie Crater Lake. There are similarities between them.
Will absolutely see it again to pay attention to how Willa Fitzgerald does that voodoo that she do to the audience.
Ghostlight (2024)
Still Relevant 400+ Years Later
A blue collar construction worker in Chicago with a volatile temper and a dysfunctional family is asked to fill in when a tiny community theater attempts to stage Romeo and Juliet.
A touching, complicated movie about family and art and fathers and children. One of the best movies of 2024.
And, my favorite movie genre. How art is made:
'Topsy-Turvy'
'Day for Night'
'Tropic Thunder'
'Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story'
Ultimately, indeed, The play goes on.
A great local Chicago actor stars in the movie, and slowly, grudgingly, as Romeo: Keith Kupferer.
What a great face. What a great presence. Costarring his daughter.
When the play within the movie begins, the curtain opens, and these familiar words heard by audiences for 497 years are spoken:
'Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.'
A fantastic movie that I recommend you see.
Civil War (2024)
Easy Rider meets The Year of Living Dangerously
Mostly a boring road trip movie with treacle about the trials of being a war photog. The last fifteen minutes a well done attack on the White House. Lots of grotesque war porn of American soldiers shooting wounded men, massacring civilians, and murdering POWs in between.
Who is fighting whom.for what unclear.
The Easy Rider hippie commune a refugee camp in a graffiti festooned football stadium. Kumbaya and all that. Scene in the camp of kids being home schooled. No brown rice and vegetables buffet shown, but it is suggested.
The 'Civil War'? Fans of the scenes of Americans murdering Americans: pitting those of us who find that example of the Director's imagination grotesque, and those who think it's cool.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
Quinton Ritchie Remakes the Guns of Navarone
Guy Ritchie, usually good with London wide boys and gangsters, is terrible with Nazis and channeling Tarantino.
Watchable. Not a complete waste of money if seen at the bargain matinee.
Perhaps the worst movie score in several decades. Jarring. Loud for no reason. Ersatz Tarantino for no reason either.
The Magnificent Five (or was it six?) not magnificent nor 'kinda OK'.
Cruel killers specializing in killing young, fresh faced Nazis with knives. Neck thrusts mainly. But, one, two, three quick thrusts followed by gurgles and graphic death not uncommon. Very 'Inglorious'.,
For no plot related reason.
The actor who plays Reacher so over muscled that his steroid use will be problem as he ages and tries to act rather than just 'be' as scenery.
Best use of a bow and arrow since Fort Apache.
Worst use of a femme fatale since. Kate Capshaw.
Hard to imagine why it was green lit.
Not hard to imagine disastrous box office results.
Napoleon (2023)
I Say He Never Loved the Emperor
I went to see Napoleon with such high hopes.
My brother and I used dialogue from Ridley Scott's first movie, The Duelists, to add color to our shouts while drinking in bars, and conversations with friends at dinners, since we first saw it in 1977.
We saw Blade Runner five years later, and agreed that Scott was in our top five movie Directors of all time.
The Duelists is as vibrant and wonderful today as it was then. As they say, 'it holds up'.
Based on a Joseph Conrad tale and a series of actual duels that took place between two officers in Napoleon's La Grande Armée through victory and defeat between 1801-1815.
A duel that began over a misheard insult to a lady.
The duel continuing over personal honor, however mistaken the initial cause actually was.
The attention to period detail impressive. The uniforms of the La Grande Armée's soldiers and officers change as they did during the time. From duel to duel, battle to battle, soiree to soiree they become more magnificent and glorious and indicate how grand France became while Napoleon defeated the armies arrayed against France again and again.
Then defeat.
First in Russia. Then at Waterloo.
Napoleon is never seen in The Duelists.
But, the unseen Napoleon is a titan. Loved. Feared. The author of the Napoleonic Code which created written guarantees of civil law and equal justice for the first time in history. A Code that was an existential threat to the European monarchies. A code that remains in France today.
A warrior. A military genius.
I had such high hopes.
Do you remember Dick Shawn in The Producer's? Playing a camp, fey Hitler for laughs?
Ridley Scott decided to cast Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon to play a similar version of a historic figure.
A dull, mumbling, stone faced, jealous, randy fop of a Napoleon.
A Napoleon that elicits not laughs, but groans.
And, grim incredulity. Laughs maybe, but laughs of derision.
In a scene reminiscent of Dick Shawn dancing on a map of the Europe he planned to conquer, Scott has Joaquin unfurl a giant map Europe that he stands on, as he off handedly discusses a mumbled, dispassionate strategy for blunting the gathering armies dedicated to defeating France.
Ah, France.
Remember France?
The Revolution that overthrew the monarchy? The Revolutionary army of common citizens that became the first mass army of citizens not conscripts who fought with vigor and courage and élan for fifteen years under their charismatic Emperor, Napoleon?
The 'jour de gloire' and all that stuff?
No, this Napoleon and Napoleonic Era is all about Josephine's private parts.
She purposely displays them early on to Napoleon and tells him of their power. This Napoleon plays Adam to her Eve, Paris to her Helen.
The scenes of Joaquin rogering Josephine, as a stallion to a mare, are embarrassing to the audience, the actors, and probably, to the crew. Joaquin's facial expressions reminding me of the absurd acting poor eye fluttering Richard Burton had to do in The Exorcist Part II.
The uniforms change a bit. The military tactics displayed in the battle scenes are of the Andy Hardy movies trope:
Hey! You go get your dad's trombone, I'll get my cousin's trumpet, we can use a trash can as a drum! We can form a band for the dance tonight!
Battle after battle staged as if Napoleon won through paper thin ruses.
Toulon: Hey, let's heat up shot and use mortars to set fire to the English fleet! Scale the walls at night when the drunken Englishmen are asleep and I, Napoleon, will lead the charge and swordfight on the walls!
Austerlitz: We'll do an ambuscade and then trap the Austrians on a frozen lake and, get this, use our artillery and break up the ice to drown them!
And on and on, and dismally on.
Scott's Napoleon, Joaquin Phoenix's Napoleon, the actual Napoleon in command at Toulon when just twenty-four, First Counsel at thirty, Emperor and the most powerful man in Europe at thirty-five, a Joe Biden version of Napoleon.
Too old. Too clueless. As if our President, out of the blue, to the English Ambassador, dismisses the Royal Navy as a bunch of boats.
Thank goodness Napoleon had Talleyrand, not Karine Jean-Pierre as his spokesperson to clean things up after he waddles from the room.
The one costume choice that rankles throughout the movie, like Kenneth Branagh's inexplicable interpretation of Hercule Poirot's mustache, is Napoleon's famous headgear.
Worn cartoonishly where hats aren't worn. An in joke or worse.
We know how it looked from countless heroic paintings. Scott opts for a ridiculous variation with strange wings jutting this way and that, and as much gold braid as a contemporary American Army general wears.
Another, inexplicable ongoing decision as to how to portray L'Empereur: he covers his ears as the cannons fire.
Again, and again.
Where every scene in The Duelists, made when Ridley Scott was forty, was magnificent, there isn't a single scene in Napoleon, made at age eighty-six that achieves even:
Hey! Cool!
One can only conclude, sitting in a theater at the first showing of Napoleon with five other people, the empty seats stretching away on both sides like the vast empty steppes during Napoleon's disastrous retreat from Moscow, that the Napoleon of The Duelists, circa 1977, is no more.
Movie spoiler alert: La Grande Armée was defeated and decimated by ambushes!
And, as an alert to my brother sitting in some heavenly movie theater watching a Samurai Film Festival with Wayne, about one of our heretofore favorite Directors, based on his latest movie:
Ridley Scott?
Ridley Scott?!?!!?
I SAY HE NEVER LOVED THE EMPEROR!
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Yonda Lies duh Casul of my Fodder
Well, I didn't walk out during the 3.5 hours of Killers of the Flower Moon. Just when the plod (sorry I meant, plot...actually no I didn't, it's a combination of plod and slog) got to be too much, two and half hours in, the Feds show up and things change from plod/slog to an amble.
DiCaprio and DeNiro do their best to overcome the miscasting and blend in by adopting weird jut jaw expressions and obscure accents. Several times I was reminded of another NYC actor, Tony Curtis and his legendary attempt not to sound like he was from Brooklyn in the classic movie 'The Black Shield of Falworth' set in 14C England. Playing a squire he gestures to a castle in the distance and says to Janet Leigh (the movie where they met): Yonda lies da casul of my Fodder'. It's not that bad in Flower, but close.
Unconsciously attempting the same jut jaw expression left me with an aching jaw. The plod left me wondering why Scorsese picked this weird matrilineal Native American complicated legal murder spree as his next opus.
I repeat: I didn't walk out. Which is, kind of a movie review.
Asteroid City (2023)
Some style, little substance.
All style, kitsch and self indulgence. Lurid colors, boring characters (or should I write caricatures), and stars flocking to do cameos based on Anderson's previous brilliance.
Alas, not on display here.
What is on display is a phantasmagoria of South Beach 1950s colors, characters who appear and exit with little fanfare and nor reason than to display a slightly different pink or violent blue or teeth grinding green.
A brief full frontal of Scarlett Johansson, keeping those in the theater in their seats hoping for more.
Lots of Hollywood default standards: idiotic inept military, homoeroticism, purposeless affectations (beards, pipes, odd sun visors), and Moonlight Kingdom-ish odd children.
Oh, for the Wes Anderson of Hotel Budapest, his last few movies were colorful bores.
Akik maradtak (2019)
Life after death.
Just back from seeing this extraordinary movie at the Wilmette Theater: 'Those Who Remained'.
Set in 1948 Budapest. Everyone still stunned by the war and its aftermath.
A kind doctor befriends a 14 year old girl. Both camp survivors. They are those who were left at war's end. They are surrounded by ghosts. The little girl refuses to accept death. They aren't 'were' they 'are'. Lives that go on with holes as large as elephants. Black holes that suck all of life down into nothingness. Except for the human spirit in everyone. That life smashed, mutilated, damaged, despairing goes on. Love can be felt and to be loved regained. So powerful, so honest and true.
Makes you think...how did those who lived...live?
Brilliant cast. Everyone a living individual. The doctor slowly comes into the light. The girl, angry, furious, refusing to accept what happened to her...saved by human touch. Saved by experiencing, well, fun.
Sad beyond belief in parts, but wonderful in most others.
Renfield (2023)
Watch the trailer, skip the movie.
One of those movies where the trailer is much better than the movie. The best of the movie's humor is there, you have to trudge through 90+ minutes to see all the imaginative stuff, the gold amidst the dross of endless John Wickian violence with a double dollop of Grand Guignol. Somehow, for what reason this movie goer could not fathom, where the new thing a few years ago was working water torture into scene and after scene Renfield decides (perhaps because it is soccer season) that kicking people heads off is the top of the tree special effect we have all been waiting for. Graphically, for, I guess, comic effect. Along with tearing arms off living humans, for, well, comic effect. Not all bad. Not all grotesque. As I said all the good parts can be watched in the trailer. Liked the actor playing Renfield. Liked the other actors. Can't wait for the puff pieces on how many hours the actors had to sit to be made up to look suitably ghastly.
Which they do.
For you youngsters out there, find Bram Stoker's Dracula. Directed by Coppola pere and starring Gary Oldham, with a very young Keanu Reeves, and the perfect Renfield: Tom Waites.
Downhill (2020)
Avalanche Agonistes
If you have the opportunity to pick between an unneeded root canal or seeing the new Will Ferrell/Julia Louis-Dreyfus movie...have the root canal. Only Julia Louise-Dreyfus comes through this unmitigated disaster with dignity and reputation intact. Even the two teenage boys playing the children of Will/Julia seem to signal 'we know!/get us out of here' to the audience. Ferrell powers through hoping, I'd guess, for a nude/underpants running through the town scene to rescue the worst movie of his career. The comedy bits aren't funny, the drama unconvincing, the sexy subplot limp, and the family dynamics excruciating.
Les misérables (2019)
No jour de gloire, but much misery.
I walked into the theater to see Les Miserables late this afternoon with no expectations.
Maybe a thought that this was a modern 'woke' version of Hugo's classic. It isn't. It's a gritty, fast paced, police procedural set in the banlieues of Paris. Unflinching about what the police find there, and how the police act and react to a Paris that tourists never see.
Sobering and revolutionary.
A stunning find and a great movie.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
I've tried smart, and I've tried nice...I prefer nice.
The line above is from a similar movie, Harvey.
I had no desire to see it.
I thought 'Mr. Rogers Neighborhood' was kind of creepy from when it started while I was in college, to when my children were little, and, in a general sense, when the movie came out.
Went to see it yesterday afternoon as a last resort movie having seen everything else.
And, slowly started to like it.
Still a bit of creepiness, but i thought maybe, this much niceness and kindness and empathy just seems creepy in our loud, cynical, gotcha age, but it really isn't. That Mr. Rogers was real, and his kindness and gentle nature not a put on.
I took the same journey watching the movie, that the cynical, skeptical investigative reporter, assigned to write a profile of Fred Rogers (which drives the plot of A Beautiful Day) did.
That journey was a very pleasant experience, and I walked out of the theater into a new year, indeed a new decade, with a determination to be nicer, kinder, and more gentle.
Richard Jewell (2019)
The obscene power of the government/FBI crushes the common man
A well made movie about an almost forgotten episode in American history. Eastwood has decided to direct movies about interesting, instructive, overlooked but recent stories lost in the noise of modern times. Remember the Americans stopping the terrorist on the Paris train? You probably do because of his movie about it. Remember Richard Jewell and the Atlanta Olympics bombing? Probably not, or slightly if at all...something about a fat Paul Blart-ish security guard, wasn't it? Now you'll come to know how a young, idealistic man was destroyed cynically by the forces still active in America today: the government, the FBI, major media who care not for the individual but care mightily about clearing crimes no matter how, and clicks and viewership. A riveting movie, well worth seeing.
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
A Good German
A fascinating, moving, funny, multi-layered movie experience. Memorable. Not really a satire or a comedy. Wonderful set decoration and attention to period clothes. Many surprising twists and turns done with style and imagination and, despite the war and Nazis, gentleness. A Wes Anderson-esque examination of the effect of fanaticism and war on a society, a town, on families, on children and on one particular sweet little boy. The end, which could have been saccharine, over the top, or forced...perfect instead. With a perfect soundtrack sending us out of the theater, but making sure that JoJo, and his mom, a good German, will live on in our imaginations.
Dolor y gloria (2019)
A Spanish Amarcord
Well worth seeing, but 'Pain and Glory' isn't Almodovar's best.
Exquisite art direction of course. A gay Amarcord with little of Fellini's overwhelmingly universal humanity.
Doesn't it seem like many aging male stars/celebrities are congealing into the same slightly seedy oldster look? Like old guys at a 4th of July cookout in their Hawaiian shirts. Pierce Brosnan, David Letterman, Mel Gibson, and now Antonio Banderas near doppelgängers with their hip facial hair and studied unkemptness.
The final scene worth waiting for. Almodovar at his best: a whole movie unto itself in a single scene, art direction genius, colors as only he can use them, an ache we all can feel.
Penelope Cruz dazzling and beautiful.
Despite all the Almodovarian style, much of the movie trudges along dragged down by lamentations not love, writers bloc not artistic fire, much pain, little glory.
The plot more about the aches of the body, not the mysteries of the heart.
Joker (2019)
A 'Triumph of the Will' for Nihilists
'Joker' is a sick, disgusting, dark, evil, violent, total piece of scheisse. It will seriously affect emotionally troubled young people already pulled at by suicide, addictive behaviors, and hopelessness. It's like a 'Triumph of the Will' for nihilists. I would defer from voting for Joaquin Phoenix for best actor until i see video of his normal non-acting self...it may be he wasn't acting in 'Joker' at all and is one majorly screwed up dude. And, what a weird alien body. He's naked from the waist up a lot in 'Joker' and, from the waist up, is, let's say, disquieting. All taut skin stretched tightly over an alien bone structure. The bones stick up and out at odd angles, in odd places, like the exoskeleton of a medical experiment gone wrong. Not a single pleasant moment in the movie. Not a moment of joy, nor beauty, nor happiness. No catharsis from all the misery and violence, just a stomach churning emptiness at the thought that the last fifty years have come down to this, and this is a circle of despair. A movie without hope, without humanity, showing a world that no sane person would live in.
Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (2019)
Well, it wasn't edited by the 'suits' or greenlit by a committee
Long, slow, wooden, and dumb, but not unwatchable. Tarantino's creepy fascination with women's naked feet on full display. Makes the viewer wonder if the movie exists to prove the Director's eternal hip-itude as age overtakes, to allow him to play his favorite oldies for the audience, ditto vintage cars, clothes, and hairstyles, rather than any particular story meant to entertain, amuse, or shock. The great reveal is not that revealing, just idiosyncratic and who cares-ish. That said, Brad Pitt continues to be eye candy, is shirtless for ten minutes., DiCaprio starts slow but ends well, and Margot Robbie ethereally beautiful.
High Life (2018)
Patience pays off
A maddening, unpleasant, difficult movie to watch for most of its length. Upsetting subject matter, utter nihilism, echoes of the ongoing life/woman's choice debate, an unfathomable plot that slowly, oh, so, slowly plays out. Who are these people? Where are they? Why are they, wherever they are? Why, after the first hour, was I still there?
It never really makes sense. The characters never become less than repugnant. But, if you stay to the end, and I'd urge you to stay to the end, something important and moving makes its way out of the interesting but unpleasant black hole that 'High Life' is, but then isn't. It is a serious movie that would be hard to recommend. A serious, complex movie. It's intelligent grotesqueness hard on the eye and heart. But, one that supplies a moving resolution to what the audience just experienced. For that, it is a movie you almost have to recommend. But, only to a movie lover. A movie lover with the patience to understand that as you approach the speed of light, things slow down, become confusing, and relativity becomes a black hole to some.
The Beach Bum (2019)
Better Than Ishtar
But, barely.
One of those truly bad movies, bizarrely bad movies, titanically bad movies, that become works of bad art. If only it had been deliberate, rather than just inept, muddled, idiotic, incoherent, nihilistic, and unfunny...sort of an in joke in terms of talent, satire, and humor, you know SNL for the last ten years, but no...it's just bad. But, I stayed to the end. I had too, I had to ride that runaway train all the waaaaay down. And, when it crashed at the end, or more accurately petered out having done nothing, signified nothing, defined nothing in terms of any reason to see the movie...I, the only person in the theater walked out. Satisfied that I had just been part a cultural touchpoint to be referred to when searching for 'bad' synonyms in bars for the rest of my life. Indeed, now that I think about 'Beach Bum' it is so bad it might become a cult classic. The Planet Nine From Outer Space for our times.
Transit (2018)
Life and Death in Marseilles
Highly recommended. Imaginative setting, letters of transit, Occupied France, unrequited love, maybe a bit slow, making it seem a bit long at times, and an enigmatic ending, of course. The German actor a doppelgänger of Joaquin Phoenix. A sometimes intense, always intelligent, certainly worthwhile 'art' film set in Paris, Marseilles and your imagination. We all have waited in a bar, a glass of wine in front of us, waiting for a woman we love.
Captive State (2019)
An exceedingly interesting movie.
'Captive State', is set in Chicago in the near future. After an alien invasion has taken over the world and rules it with an iron, though exceedingly strange, fist. It's a darn good movie. Filled with heroic, believable characters of every race, Americans all, citizens, who sacrifice to strike the match to light the explosion that may lead to liberty. Massive plot holes (don't pay too much attention to the plot!), characters come and go and are hard to keep track of, but John Goodman is great, the 'underground' believable, and the captive state much like Paris or Warsaw under the Nazis.
The Kid (2019)
I Kid you not (apologies to Jack Paar)
What an incoherent, disgusting mess of a movie. The West of the 'Sisters Brothers' not the Coen Brothers 'True Grit' or the hundreds of uniquely American movies that created the Western Genre. Now the west is populated with filthy, unattractive, monsters who do monstrous things, specializing in mindless brutality, rape, beating women with regularity (see Tarantino's 'Hateful Eight' where the female lead is savaged with NBA shot clock regularity, incoherent plot lines, inexplicable dialogue spoken with odd pauses and misplaced emphasis, and in supporting all the trendy social justices causes of the moment. You know, robber barons, the rich exploiting the poor, thuggish police, injustice, corruption...hey...I thought the movie would be about two of the most colorful (real) characters of the Old West, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid?!? Not a chance. No, this is propaganda, misogyny, and self indulgence on a Hollywood scale. But, a shout out to old Hollywood with the Producer's son given a star turn and a bizarre role (invented out of whole cloth given what we know about the "Kid') in the tradition of John Wayne's sons jarring roles in his movies. If you are an aspiring film maker, script writer, set designer, cinematographer, or casting director...see this movie...it will convince you that you can do better.
Mary Queen of Scots (2018)
Mary, Queen of 2018 Scotland
Not a godawful movie, but close.
Badly miscast: Mary with a strong Irish accent; Margot Robbie in appearance, voice, and acting not convincing as a Queen, the daughter of Henry VIII, or the force of history Elizabeth I was. The screenplay not only departs from the historical record for farcical reasons (Mary's dramatic life and death need little massaging) but introduces anachronisms ranging from gender study issues, to the incongruous casting of minorities in some virtue peddling Oscar Ceremony shoutout.
Adding in, for whatever reason, a prominent but historically impossible gay/cross dressing subplot, thriving in 16th Century, John Knox-ian Holyrood Castle. Hard to follow during long stretches of promise/double cross/dastardly plots a go go/to war or not to war, and when followed intermittently interesting.
I left feeling even more admiration for Shakespeare: his distillation of the complexity and violence of Scottish history in Macbeth, with nary a nod to his or our modern sensitivities of the moment, is, in the context of reviewing this movie, as of comparing Duane Allman's solo in Crossroads, to my awkward, and slow version of Pipeline by the Ventures.
Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)
Hateful Eight Lite
What a godawful movie. Stupefyingly slow, garish, idiotic characters and plot, grotesque violence, rampant cruelty, a grotesque man/underage girl sex subplot, and enough beefcake to populate several 1960s sword and sandal movies. Everyone associated with this movie should be embarrassed to have participated, and, hopefully, the wonderful Jeff Bridges will make something else quickly to get the bad taste of El Royale out of his fans and every movie lovers' mouths.
First Man (2018)
American Exceptionalism
First Man is a compelling, emotional, riveting tale of how America, NASA, and a bunch of what would now be derided as 'privileged white men' created the singular event in human history: a human being on the moon.
Neil Armstrong describing to the world, live on television and radio, that his was but one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
I would guess that practically everybody in the world, even now, knows what he said.
Most have read of the controversy surrounding the conscious, politically motivated, decision to not show the American flag being planted on the moon by the Canadian (read citizen of the world) Director. But, as we saw this afternoon, there's now a lingering wide view of the LEM resting on the moon's surface with the newly planted American flag clearly in the picture...causing this viewer to wonder if it was newly planted 'post final cut' addition to stem the potential loss of audience the negative reaction that the omission caused?
Otherwise, the movie is a rather straight forward, linear telling of how NASA's moon landing came to be: the barely mentioned Mercury program, followed by several two-man, Gemini launches to test the theoretical possibilities of using multiple vehicles requiring in-space rendezvous to make the mission viable with available technology. And, then, the audacious Apollo program which had to invent and test the largest rocket ever constructed to get humans to the moon and safely back...the gigantic, strangely beautiful, instantly recognizable, Saturn.
Which had a test launch one night when I was home from college and lit up the Indian Harbour Beach sky like it was a man-made, sun. The rippling, guttural roar of the launch reaching us as the Saturn rose in a new day sky, shaking the windows of my parent's home, and pressing my shirt to my body, twenty miles from the Cape.
In its retelling, First Man recounts the drama and tragedy of those years. Incidents now mostly forgotten: A T-38 crash that killed two of the Gemini astronauts during training; the disastrous fire that killed an entire Apollo crew while the capsule was being tested on the launch pad; the first attempt at a space rendezvous causing the Gemini capsule, piloted by Neil Armstrong, to careen out of control, tumbling wildly and dangerously, as the crew fought to stabilize it before they blacked out and the capsule was destroyed. Then, near the end of the movie, the mounting tension and drama played out live on television, as the LEM sought its landing location and not finding it until Neil Armstrong overrode the computers, taking manual control, and landing the LEM with no fuel remaining.
Some of this, in First Man, is breathtaking. All of it is riveting.
The human story that holds the movie together thankfully doesn't use the normal Hollywood stereotype of a complaining wife and a noble husband attempting to do heroic things. I wish that such unreal, unnatural, uninteresting, and demeaning depictions of women would be forever consigned to the dust heap of Hollywood tripe and a more natural male/female/husband/wife life become common in movies about uncommon people who do great things.
Which happily and realistically occurs in First Man.
A family tragedy becomes the moving subplot of this powerful recounting of one of the world's most historic events. Yet, even as a subplot, it is not a contrivance, and its emotional impact on the Armstrong's had me verklempt and more accepting of Neil Armstrong's almost off-putting stoicism in the face of all things. And, makes Ryan Gosling's laconic, strong, and silent portrayal convincing. Indeed, at some point in the movie, he becomes Neil Armstrong, something, I would guess, all actors act to achieve.
First Man shows the astronauts and their families as human beings. Extraordinary, but recognizable human beings. Men, women and children, all with hopes and fears and frailties. All displaying courage, humanity, skill, and drive. Watching them, I thought of the children and families I grew up around on Army posts around the world. They were like the people in this movie. All of us are. We're Americans.
The movie, though directed by a Canadian, and starring a Canadian, despite the kerfuffle about the flag, is a love story about what the meritocracy that is America can do, what humankind is capable of.
John Kennedy promised that America would put a man on the moon within the decade.
We did it in less than seven years.
Fifty years on, it remains a universally shared example of human accomplishment.
I watched the second moon landing in a bar in Athens...the Greek crowd cheered, pounded us on our backs in joy, wept and bought us glass after glass of retsina.
We drank to America, to Greece, to Mickey Mouse, to John Wayne, to the world.
First Man will remind you of those times, and make you hope for more like them.