B+ | Sixteen years of air and space advancement , from the breaking of the sound barrier to orbiting the earth. Directed by Philip Kaufman Starring Sam Shepard, Ed Harris, and Scott Glenn Review by Jon Kissel |
The TV show For All Mankind posits that if the Soviets had gotten to the moon first, the shame of it would’ve kept the US competing in the Space Race long after the end of the Apollo program. Moon bases would’ve been established, rocketry would’ve continued to advance, NASA would’ve widened its reach to women and minorities, and we’d get to Mars. The technological leaps would’ve kept coming because the pure discovery of the thing isn’t enough to keep the money spigot open. National security interests, more than anything else, are what makes the dollars flow. The Right Stuff meticulously documents the way that the first stages of the Cold War are driven by the military and the raw masculine desire to come out on top, watching admiringly at the results produced by the sheer resources of the government and the derring-do of the cast. Phillip Kaufman’s three-hour-plus epic gets back to an exciting time in American life, one that feels like it was metaphorically elevating the citizenry as it was shooting the ‘best’ of us into the outer atmosphere. The Right Stuff also pokes fun at a period of repeated failures and humiliations that is aggressively sold to the public as a mythic adventure. Though it seems unlikely that anyone would call it the most imaginative or cinematic of any American film about space travel or the space program, Kaufman does produce a thorough depiction of the men of the Mercury program, their predecessors at Edwards Air Force Base, and what distinguished the two groups.
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Contact is about nothing more than humanity's place in the universe and how we see ourselves fitting into it. This breadth is fitting for writers like Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, whose earlier work in TV includes the seminal series Cosmos. Sagan, an astronomer and brilliant science communicator, died shortly before Contact's release, but Contact is an often-beautiful distillation of his worldview and his way of thinking. Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster, Contact brings Sagan briefly back to life, asking the kinds of questions he asked through his scientifically-skeptical outlook. It's not a perfect film, but it is one made specifically for me.
Richard Linklater is the foremost filmmaker when it comes to American male childhood. He nailed high school in Dazed and Confused, college in Everybody Wants Some, and boyhood in… Boyhood. Linklater takes another crack at being young and Texan in Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood. If that seems like a retread after Boyhood, it does to Linklater, too, because he mixes fantasy and reality here in way that he couldn’t in Boyhood. Apollo 10 ½’s nostalgic journey into unsupervised exurban bliss gets its greatest oomph from the tiny details of Galveston beach instead of its moon-walking adventure, likely because Linklater’s been stung by a jellyfish but never left footprints on the lunar surface.
One of the most influential movies of the 21st century, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight ushered in a wave of blockbuster filmmaking that’s either copying it or working in opposition to it. If a superhero movie is being made by Warner Bros or Fox in the ensuing years, it’s going to have to attempt to be a gritty/grounded film with a philosophical background on society. If Disney’s at the helm, the demands of the market force their superhero movies to leave the dark stuff to someone else and lean heavily into a jokey tone with little connection to the real world. The success of the latter strategy implies that the wrong lessons have been taken from The Dark Knight, that only this group of actors and filmmakers at this point in time could pull this off, as demonstrated by the insufficiency of The Dark Knight Rises four years later. It’s not like every facet of The Dark Knight is pulled off as successfully as some others. What does work here is some of the best of Nolan’s career and is worth emulating, but by so clearly aiming for profundity and seriousness, the film invites an interrogation it can’t hold up against. One wishes that a reckoning with the War on Terror didn’t have to be wrapped up in a superhero movie, but we live in the cultural world that Nolan helped to create.
On our master spreadsheet, a movie gets a ranking after 3 people have graded it. We’ve currently logged 4,226 movies, but only 1721 have been ranked. Six movies have received only F’s, and of those six, Batman and Robin has been given an F by eight Mediocre Movie Club members. By consensus, this is the worst movie we’ve logged in the nine years we’ve been doing this. The fourth film in a franchise that’s turned over its entire cast three times, with the exception of Michael Gough as Alfred, Batman and Robin is what it looks like when everyone has given up and surrendered whatever artistic or technical aspirations they have to greed and apathy. No one appears to be trying to make something acceptable. Joel Schumacher buries Batman and resets the superhero genre back to square one in the public’s eyes as a clownish and juvenile endeavor. That wouldn’t last longer than a few years with X-Men and a 9/11-goosed Spider-Man, but it’s not like Schumacher and Co don’t shovel as much dirt on the corpse as possible. Critically reviled movies often come in for a reevaluation years after their release, but Batman and Robin doesn’t achieve some kind of camp quality, nor is it a scrappy underdog. It was bad then, and it’s bad now. |
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