Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

The best thing I can say about this one - and The Hand of God months ago - is that it made me want to a write a script about my youth and coming of age times.

Of course, I'm not American and this one is a very American culturally youth - and I would need to be a successful writer before having this script approved - but I felt this was much more about honouring a time and closing a chapter than about space. Linklater is a specialist about these stories and he knows how to keep us interested.

I grew up in Houston from mid '50s to mid '70s and the nostalgic details in Linklater's great new animated feature was almost overwhelming. I'm sure many people will appreciate it, especially the visual style, but for us Space City kids, it is a real treasure trove of memories. Only one goof: the Majestic Theater did not look like that and was quite the opposite of the run-down theater he described. It was a magnificent movie palace in the heart of downtown.

The title and trailer is definitely misleading by insinuating that this is some sort of space adventure. Granted, there are some fragments of space adventuring going on, but 95% of the film is basically a time capsule of the 60s which tells you all about what life was back then, filled to the brim with nostalgia.

As such it reminded me a bit of The Virgin Suicides in the romantic way it glorifies those long lost days, so stuffed with timely music, tv-shows and other pop-cultural tidbits that it successfully weaves a rose tinted memory of childhood, which will probably have most people create nostalgic connections to what all these references mean in their own life.

A new Richard Linklater movie got dropped onto Netflix about a month ago with little promotion or fanfare, which is a shame, because it was an enjoyable watch and there's quite a lot of good stuff in it.

It's a very, very nostalgic look back at being a kid in the late 1960s, and how it felt to grow up at the time of the Apollo space missions. It mixes comedy, animation, some documentary/historical footage (that's been animated over), voiceover, and even a little bit of fantasy to make for a breezy and largely entertaining watch.

It is more of a hangout/mood sort of movie, and whether it would've necessarily been better with a more focused story is hard to say. I didn't really mind, and it was only towards the very end where I felt like they started to stretch the fairly simple premise about as far as it could go.

And shortly after that point, it wraps up, coming in at about 90 minutes. There was a little repetition throughout, but most of it was really charming and enjoyable. It's a good watch- I think it's another overall solid film in Linklater's extensive, very strong filmography.

Not up there the Boyhood, or the Before trilogy, but fun nevertheless.

The recreation of the 1960s Linklater family tropes is heartfelt and truly etched, and the rotoscope animation is brilliant, but there is a little too much ticking-the-box of 1960s topical events and cultural trends.

The winsome fantasy of the kid astronaut is meant to be the rocket propellant that binds it and lifts it, but this does not quite come off.