Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

Drawn to the Past

or

"Well, You Know How Memory Works..."

 

Some film-makers go back to recapture their youth. Supposedly, Orson Welles made The Magnificent Ambersons because it reminded him so much of his early childhood. Fellini made Amarcord. Francois Truffaut made The 400 Blows. George Lucas made American Graffiti. Francis Coppola drew on his family life on quite a few of his films. One always gets the impression from Wes Anderson's films that he's tapping into his early years. Robert Benton made Places in the Heart. Mel Brooks produced My Favorite Year. Noah Baumbach made The Squid and the Whale. The trend seems to be gathering momentum. Alfonso Cuaron made Roma. Lee Isaac Chung made Minari. Last year, Kenneth Branagh made Belfast. Paul Thomas Anderson made Licorice Pizza. Spielberg's next movie is The Fabelmans, which started as a screenplay by his sister, now adapted by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, and based on...growing up Spielberg.

 

Richard Linklater seems to specialize in it—both Dazed and Confused and Boyhood are coming of age movies drawn from his past. 

And now, he's hitting the nail on the head with Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood(streaming on Netflix), using animation to literally draw his past, growing up as a "space kid" in a Houston suburb during America's race to the Moon. A self-described "fabulist", Stan (Milo Coy, voiced as a narrating adult by Jack Black) is a clear-eyed recounting of everything about his childhood, from schoolyard games, pop culture, the usual fascinations and distractions of a male kid before he notices girls, but when it comes to the space program, his imagination takes him out of this world. In this way, he's a more extreme version of his Dad (Bill Wise), who works in shipping at NASA, but from listening to him, you'd think the whole program depends on him.

Stan is one day recruited by a couple of NASA officials, who, noting, his extraordinary abilities playing in the schoolyard, say that he's just the kid to take care of a little problem the space agency has—they've built the Lunar Excursion Module just a little too small to hold an adult, so they want to send him into space him to test land it on the Moon in secret before Apollo 11 attempts it in front of the whole wide televised world.* They'll explain his absence that he's "at camp" so the parents aren't concerned and nobody asks any questions, and then the kid will get a condensed version of the years of training in a month, so that he'll be best prepared do all the things that three astronauts can do...alone. With such a well thought-out plan, what could go wrong?

Yeah, it's not a documentary. But, you wouldn't know it from the rest of it. The details that Linklater fills his tale with are spot-on and recognizable to anyone growing up in the 1960's. From the eclectic library of "oddity" music to the touchstones of movies, games and TV (the rights issues on this thing must have been enormous). As one of those old coots who remember that time, Apollo 10½ made long-dormant synapses firing off every few moments, whereas younger viewers may be traumatized by the era's ever-present habit of smoking (in the house!!), neighborhood DDT "runs" and the last vestiges of the Eisenhower era of fashion. Heck, this was the era before computers and cell-phones; that's enough to discourage any millennial from time-traveling back to it.

One little error in this—Planet of the Apes would probably have had a second feature as part of a double-bill.

Those expecting a straight-ahead SpaceCamp kiddie space adventure will probably be miffed that Linklater spends so much of the film's screen-time on Earth-nostalgia—it's fully two-thirds of the film—rather than creating some complicated space scenario. Hey, it's his fantasy—believe me, at the time going to the moon was enough, and the revolutionary kid's space movie, Star Wars, was still eight years away. Plus, there's only so much you can do with a "going-to-the-moon" scenario, that is if you're going to stick with science fact in your science fantasy. Going to the Moon meant a lot of switch-flipping, dial monitoring, math, and keeping your lunch down until you had to do something that might kill you, like try to land the most-unlikely flying machine ever engineered on a pillar of flame without landing on a crater lip and toppling over.

For me, the nostalgia is the fun part (although it may feel as strange as steam-punk to anyone born this century). The space stuff is well-tread territory we've seen before and can smirk at here for its presumptions and naivete in its dream-like simplicity. Because it is a dream. It was a dream. It will continue to be a dream until they have a McDonald's on the Moon...and the other common things that made up daily life in Houston of 1969. And it was a dream shared by a planet full of sky-watchers, whose parents did the same, who can trace their lineage to the hominids who wondered what that thing in the sky was and watched its travels anticipating that time it might move closer and crash on us like a rock...as other rocks do.

And if Apollo 10½ doesn't recreate the moon landing as diligently as First Man did, what of it? It does recreate—just as carefully—what it was like being a kid...in thrall with the Moon.

* Yeah. No. I won't go into it but there are a LOT of reasons why this isn't real, but merely a child's fantasy with all the logic of a child's fantasy ("You ever get a 100% on your math tests? No? Well, there ya go..."). It's funny...there WAS an Apollo 10 a few months before with the mission to do everything Apollo 11 was supposed to do EXCEPT land. They went within 9 miles of the lunar surface and had to come back, without going that last 1%. Imagine how THAT felt. Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan and John Young were the astronauts on that frustrating mission. Young and Cernan got to land on the Moon and Cernan is the last man to walk on the Moon...so far. 

 

Tropic Thunder

Written at the time of the film's release...

And, traditionally, Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day...

"Nobody Goes Full-Retard" 

There's a good idea in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, a comic story about a trio of self-indulgent actors making a Viet-Nam era war film. By a Machiavellian director's conceit, they end up abandoned in a jungle pursued by drug traffickers, with nothing but their persona's to protect them.* The film tosses in more inside-Hollywood jokes than a Scary Movie installment, and some of them turn out to be actually funny. 

The trouble is the film itself is top-lined by self-indulgent actors all vying for screen-time to see how broadly they can play their parts. It's meant to be satire, and it's plenty satirical, as long as Stiller, Robert Downey, Jack Black and Tom Cruise are making fun of the Hollywood excesses of...other actors.** But one is reminded of a less-disciplined, unfunny version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in the broadness of the playing, and heavy-handedness with which its presented. Imagine Dr. Strangelove if every performance had the wing-nut intensity of George C. Scott's.

Tropic Thunder brays and screeches constantly, it's soundtrack thudding with an annoying loudness for scenes even taking place in the quiet of night. There might have been some worry on the studio's part about letting the movie breathe, or fear that the pace might slacken. All well and semi-good. But it gives the film the light and airy feeling of a train barreling into a brick wall. And the frenetic style and the frequent unintelligibility of the actors makes it a frustrating movie-going experience. 

Still, there are moments: the movie starts with a commercial and previews for films featuring the characters in the film, and they are inspired little mini-movies that skewer trailer-style marketing, as well as Hollywood hype. None too subtle, but they're mercifully short and focused. Then there's the performance of Matthew McConaughey, as the distracted agent of Stiller's Tugg Speedman, a breezy graceful performance that's funny and relaxed, but just as nuanced as the other, more aggressive performances.

 

At the opposite end of the scale is Cruise's studio-headcase Les Grossman. Made up with a balding pate and fat-suit, it's played with a giddily vulgar intensity that's pure hyper-Cruise; one wonders if Tom can play a real human being anymore, or for that, even recognize one. Still, it's quite the artery-popping performance. 

But ultimately one is left with a bunch of absurdist little off-ramps that go no where, as in the dramatic send-up typical of the testosterone/weeper when Tugg implores Lazarus, "You tell the world what happened here!"

A puzzled look passes over Lazarus' face: "What happened here?" 

"I don't know" is the reply. 

I found myself laughing at the vacuousness of the exchange, but now, in retrospect, I regret it. Maybe I was desperate for a laugh at that point.

At one point Speedman and Lazarus are discussing acting techniques, and the former brings up a disastrous attempt at a feel-good Oscar-bait film playing a disabled person. "Everybody knows you don't go full-retard," says Lazarus. "Autistic, yes. Imbecilic, yes. Full-retard, no."

And yet they made this movie, anyway.

 

* What's really funny about the script is the cribbing of the making of Apocalypse Now. Back in the early stages of Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope film factory, the plan was for screenwriter John Milius and director George Lucas to make the film "guerrilla-style" by actually dropping the actors and a skeleton crew in Viet-Nam to make the movie. Today, Lucas admits the idea was crazy. Milius still imagines it as a lost opportunity for adventure.

** It's pretty obvious who is being made fun of here: Stiller makes a wicked stab at Cruise mannerisms, Downey is tweaking Russell Crowe and heavy-method actors--his Aussie Kirk Lazarus undergoes treatments to turn his skin black and never breaks character from a dialect straight out of Amos n' Andy, and Jack Black is one of the long line of overweight, drug-addicted comedians on a short fuse. And though Cruise has cause to lampoon Summer Redstone, his movie mogul is more in the Weinstein mode (and is supposedly based on Stiller's production partner Stuart Cornfeld). 

 

Wilhelm Alert: @ 2:25 into the film proper (if you can call it that)

Margot at the Wedding

Written at the time of the film's release....

Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, 2008) Margot (Nicole Kidman) is a short-story author living in Manhattan with her estranged husband Jim (John Turturro). For reasons best known to herself, she takes a train upstate to attend the wedding of her estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Malcolm (Jack Black), an "artist" of no specific discipline. With Margot is her son Claude (Zane Pais), who along with a scriptwriting colleague (the great Ciarán Hinds), are probably the only people she's not estranged from.There's no pleasing Margot. If you try, she'll think you're trying to pull something over on her. Everything's a plot. Nothing is satisfactory. She is brutally honest, even when she's not being honest about it. If she can't probe a weakness, she'll create one to provoke one. And she's only too happy to purloin life-incidents for her fiction.Although one wonders if she recognizes what fiction might be.

Noah Baumbach's last film was the critically acclaimed The Squid and the Whale which astutely recreated the eddies and shoals and snags of conversations that are the dripping water torturing a marriage or any relationship. Things either wear down or they break under such a test, there is no middle ground, and there is no respite from the constant flow. In Squid the human beings were just trying to survive. Here, with Margot, survival's a foregone conclusion, it's just a matter of how many people she can take down in the process. There is no tying her down, it'd be like nailing Jell-o to the wall or having a pleasant conversation with Ann Coulter—it's not done.

You can't reason with a sociopath.

This sort of stuff is indie film gold, and Baumbach is a master at the circular conversation that goes nowhere, and the humor that can be found in absurd power struggles. But there's almost too much of a bad thing here, you can probably time the intervals between the incidents of cast-members breaking down, getting slapped, or getting punched. And Baumbach also is alarmingly unsubtle about the glaring Big Symbol of It All—another "Nature" metaphor that threatens to literally knock the audience over the head with its obviousness. But Baumbach gets one thing exactly right—the only one with any sense is the family dog.

The cast is uniformly excellent and unselfish in spreading the unpleasantness around. If there is one weak link it's Jack Black, but only because he will hammer the joke home, rather than let the words speak for themselves. Everyone else excels at leaving things unsaid when their characters can't leave well enough alone.

Disney's The Muppets

One for the kids...written at the time of the film's release.


"Of Muppets and Meat-Puppets"
or
"Old Feelings Being Felt"

Back in the 1980's Lord Lew Grade made a ton of green with the syndicated "The Muppet Show," which took Jim Henson's cast of characters and had them stage a show in an abandoned theater every week, with practically every bi-ped celebrity host imaginable, ranging anywhere from Bob Hope to Johnny Cash, with the only possible exception being that of Steve Jobs.

Now it's the 2010's and (as the joke goes) not only do we have no Jobs, but no Cash and no Hope. But, at least we have legs. Pity the poor Muppets; they can't stand straight without somebody's arm supporting them!  Subsequently falling on hard times, with the prospect of their old theater being acquired and demolished for mineral rights by a greedy oil cowboy named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper, once again channeling his inner Shrub), Kermit the Frog (Steve Whitmire) must get the gang together to try and save the theater and protect the very integrity of the name "Muppet."  He has unlikely allies—Gary (SNL's Jason Segel, who co-wrote the hyper-joked, "fourth" wall-exploding screenplay with Nicholas Stoller) and Mary (Amy Adams, who is as goofily inspired in this as she was in Disney's Enchanted), who get mixed up in the plan because of Gary's devotion to his brother Walter (Peter Linz), who was born...a muppet.

Okay, okay, already the movie is straying into terri-story that has some under-pinnings of life-lessons to them.  Plug "muppet" into the "Mad-Libs" space where "developmental challenge" or "specified minority" would go, and you have a nicely anarchic spin to the usual "inspiring" story that...well, a studio like Disney likes to make every now and again. But, Disney always does best when it thinks "outside of the castle" and by re-tooling the Muppets for 21st Century kids* (and their parents who watched them in the 1980's), using Segel and Stoller's less-than-respectful approach to Muppets, mores and movies, a slightly hipper slew of cameos, and the musical supervision of Bret McKenzie (the part of "Flight of the Conchords" that is not Jemaine, and the songs are instantly identifiable as "Conchord" material), it has managed to breath new life into the franchise, while maintaining the integrity of the characters...and Henson's basic art-concepts of marionette-puppetry without resorting to CGI cheating. It's like watching a favorite performer make the artistic jump from vaudeville to a more challenging medium.**

It's easily the best of the Muppet movies, including (uh...) The Muppet Movie which this film makes loving tribute to. I still remember the fascination that first film had for me, being googly-eyed with puppetry at a young age and following Henson's first experimental work in the 1960's and marveling at how he was always pushing the form.*** With Henson's death in 1990 (it's been that long?), and the burgeoning directing career of fellow Muppeteer Frank Oz, the Muppet entity collapsed in on itself somewhat, as those two personalities (and accompanying arms) were the spines that kept the Muppets upright. 

But, this film gives one hope (even if Bob is gone) that the Muppets are in—and on—good hands. This film would be hilarious even without the Muppets, with the scripters and director James Bobin having a fine time playing with the concepts and the whole movie-musical world, and doing so very economically. All it takes is one shot for them to skewer or explain away a movie-magic cliché (a particular favorite—the end of a rousing musical number when the principals leave the screen and the dancers and extras hear "Okay, they're gone" and collapse in an exhausted heap), then move on to the next joke.

Everything works, and there's enough material seen in images and bits of trailers that didn't make it into the movie to assure that only the best stuff made it into the movie, with no "down"-time. It's solidly entertaining, fresh and funny, with surprises around every corner. It's not easy being green, but it's extraordinarily hard to re-boot a franchise when the principals can't even wear boots..and don't have a leg to stand on. The Muppets is highly recommended...for everybody.

You knew something was up, when this rather surprising trailer first appeared.

And only the most churlish could roll their eyes at the way the stars were "revealed."

* It's rated "PG" (so as not to kill a more generalized audience than toddlers, I presume).  But, the only things I thought might warrant the rating was Fozzie Bear's invention of "fart-shoes" to generate cheap laughs, and the mere suggestion that Miss Piggy's "replacement" might be a transvestite (in itself a great joke and another instance of the movie "taking chances").

** And, really, are "The Muppets" any different from The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello and other vaudevillians?  It's why stage performers worked so seamlessly with them and why they match the "our heroes against the world" formula of such movies.  They also faced the same danger—being pigeon-holed into formula films that ill-suited them.  A Muppet Christmas Carol?  It was only a matter of time before The Muppets Go West!

*** Parents, don't let your kids read this asterisk!  One of the things about The Muppet Movie that I loved was seeing how Henson and crew moved their critters with hidden people attached to them out of the world of medium close-up into full-figured reality without missing a beat, like watching Kermit ride a bicycle (a simple employment of marionette techniques)...or the opening number, which featured Kermit playing a banjo sitting on a log in the middle of a real water-filled lake.  Hey, he's a frog, it's only natural (well, except for playing the banjo).  But, think of it, the puppeteer (actually two of them, one of whom was undoubtedly Henson himself, who "played" Kermit) had to be submerged in a water-tank to pull off that sequence.  It cemented for me the fact that the Muppets and movies were made for each other—both arts depend entirely on what is in the frame and what isn't to pull off the illusion of reality.