Apollo 11

One giant leap for mankind.

(2019) Documentary (Neon) Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Deke Slayton, Clifford E. Charlesworth, Bruce McCandless II, H. David Reed, Charles Duke, Gene Kranz, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, John F. Kennedy, Janet Armstrong, Patricia Mary Finnegan, Andy Aldrin, Walter Cronkite, Richard M. Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, Hugh O’Brian, Joann Morgan, Joan Ann Archer. Directed by Todd Douglas Miller

 

To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the landing of men on the moon, NASA sanctioned this documentary, giving filmmaker Miller unprecedented access to their archives, allowing him to use footage that essentially hasn’t been seen before now.

Expertly cut by Miller, the material here is meant to promote the immensity of the task, the majesty of the machines that accomplished it and the heroism of the men who rode inside. The movie succeeds on the first two of these; of the third, it is less successful, giving us little more than glimpses into the astronauts. I suppose if you want to find out more about these men, there are plenty of other places to look. It’s not as if these guys weren’t famous.

One thing about reviewing films that are no longer playing in theaters is that you lose the dimensions that are available for those on large screen formats. If ever a movie deserved to be seen in IMAX it’s this one, where the roar of the engines and the size of the Saturn V really take hold of the imagination. Miller manages to give a kind of “you are there” flare to much of the film, from the chaos of Mission Control (with the audio synched up with the video for the first time, giving us an ear on the various conversations going on behind the scenes) to the in-capsule recordings done by the astronauts themselves, whose footage got them membership in the American Society of Cinematographers back in the day.

Once the lift-off footage is complete, the movie gets a little bit dull; even the very dangerous moon landing itself doesn’t have the dramatic effect of the same scenes done for First Man, the biopic of Armstrong that delighted critics but failed to win a mass audience in 2018. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed with the footage and to get a sense of the times, of the feeling that we could accomplish anything we set our minds to – it’s a mindset the nation has largely lost since then. Considering there are still tinfoil hat-sorts that think the whole thing was a hoax, well, it’s hard to argue with the footage but I suppose they will anyway. In any case, this is wonderfully informational for those who didn’t get to live through the events and for those that did, a nice feeling of nostalgia.

REASONS TO SEE: Some incredible footage. Makes you feel like you were there in the moment.
REASONS TO AVOID: Somewhat dry in the middle. We don’t really get to know the astronauts.
FAMILY VALUES: There is some peril but suitable for the entire family.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The electronic music score was played entirely on instruments that were available in 1969.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, AMC On Demand, AppleTV, Fandango Now, Google Play, History Vault, Hulu, Microsoft, Movies Anywhere, Redbox, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 8/3/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 99’% positive reviews, Metacritic: 88/100
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Apollo 13
FINAL RATING: 6.5/10
NEXT: The Cuban

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New Releases for the Week of March 1, 2019

TYLER PERRY’S A MADEA FAMILY FUNERAL

(Lionsgate) Tyler Perry, Cassi Davis, Patrice Lovely, Mike Tyson, Ciera Payton, Kj Smith, Quin Walters, Aeriėl Miranda, Vermytta Erahn. Directed by Tyler Perry

When a family reunion in rural Georgia unexpectedly turns into a funeral, matriarch Madea discovers that sordid family secrets are beginning to bubble to the surface in this, the final installment of the blockbuster Madea franchise.

See the trailer and a video featurette here
For more on the movie this is the website
Genre: Comedy
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG=13 (for crude sexual content, language, and drug references throughout)

Apollo 11

(NEON) Neal Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins. The 1969 voyage to the moon that resulted in the first man to walk on the surface of a body other than the Earth is brought to spectacular life in large format with never before seen footage. It is said to be an immersive experience.

See the trailer here
For more on the movie this is the website
Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: AMC Altamonte Mall, Regal Pointe Orlando
Rating: G

Everybody Knows

(Focus) Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Ricardo Darin, Eduard Fernández. It is a joyful occasion when Laura returns to her small home town in Spain from Argentina where she lives with her two daughters whom she has brought along with her for her sister’s wedding. That joy turns to terror when Laura’s eldest daughter is abducted, bringing to the surface deep secrets from Laura’s past.

See the trailer and a clip here
For more on the movie this is the website
Genre: Crime Drama
Now Playing: Enzian Theater
Rating: R (for some language)

Greta

(Focus) Isabelle Huppert, Chloë Grace Moretz, Maika Monroe, Colm Feore. A young woman whose mother recently passed away finds a handbag on the New York subway and returns it to the owner, Greta, a lonely French piano teacher. The two strike up a friendship but things turn dark when the young woman discovers that her older friend is not what she seems.

See the trailer here
For more on the movie this is the website
Genre: Suspense
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for some violence and disturbing images)

The Samuel Project

(In8 Releasing) Hal Linden, Ryan Ochoa, Michael B. Silver, Maleo Arias. A high school boy with dreams of becoming an artist is doing a school project on his grandfather, an irascible man that the boy has never been close to. However as the project progresses, the two form a bond and the young high schooler discovers his grandfather was saved from a concentration camp by a young German woman. This was previously reviewed for the Heartland Film Festival last fall; a link to the review can be found below.

See the trailer here
For more on the movie this is the website
Genre: Dramedy
Now Playing: Regal Pointe Orlando, Regal Port Orange Pavilion, Regal Waterford Lakes
Rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, some suggestive comments, and brief language)

ALSO OPENING IN ORLANDO/DAYTONA:

Beers of Joy
Koddathi Samaksham Balan Vakeel
The Last Resort
Luka Chuppi
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz
Sonchiriya

ALSO OPENING IN MIAMI/FT. LAUDERDALE:

Bell Bottom
He Matado a Mi Marido
Koddathi Samaksham Balan Vakeel
Luka Chuppi
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz
Sonchiriya

ALSO OPENING IN TAMPA/ST. PETERSBURG:

Beers of Joy
The Hole in the Ground
Luka Chuppi
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz
Saint Judy
Sonchiriya

ALSO OPENING IN JACKSONVILLE/ST. AUGUSTINE:

Luka Chuppi

SCHEDULED FOR REVIEW:

Everybody Knows
Greta
The Last Resort
The Samuel Project

FILM FESTIVALS TAKING PLACE IN FLORIDA:

Miami International Film Festival, Miami

Men in Black 3

Will Smith: 21st Century cool even in the 60s.

(2012) Science Fiction (Columbia) Will Smith, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Emma Thompson, Jemaine Clement, Nicole Scherzinger, Alice Eve, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mike Colter, Bill Hader, David Rasche, Michael Chernus, Keone Young, Cayen Martin, Lanny Flaherty. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

 

Men in Black is an iconic film from the 90s, one which helped establish Will Smith as the superstar he is today. It has been 15 years since that film came out and ten since its sequel. Does the world need a third, or care about it?

Judging from the early numbers, it does. Agents J (Smith) and K (Jones) are doing what they do best, taking care of aliens violating the law in and around the Manhattan area, but they are both getting too old for this sh….stuff. The two are like a couple that has been married so long that there’s no longer any passion; and J is frustrated that he doesn’t know the close-mouthed K any better than he did when they first met.

On the moon, one of the most dangerous and nastiest aliens to ever be arrested by the MIB organization – Boris the Animal (Clement) – has been imprisoned for forty years, his arm shot off by Agent K at the time of his arrest. He has his first visitor in 40 years – a pen-pal girlfriend (Scherzinger) who brings him a cake that appears to be mostly organic. Not that a file baked into it would do any good – his cell is solid steel. However, there’s a nasty little surprise in the cake that helps him get out of the lunar hoosegow.

Back on Earth, the MIB are mourning the late Zed who is eulogized by O (Thompson), the new leader of MIB, in an alien language that sounds something like seals mating. J and K are continuing to be catty to one another like that previously mentioned old married couple. The next morning J comes to work – and K has been dead for 40 years. He’s also got an insatiable craving for chocolate milk, which according to O is a sure sign of temporal displacement.

But that’s the least of their worries now. The Earth is under attack by the Boglodites, the race of Boris the Animal which should have been impossible because his race died off 40 years early when K had captured Boris and enacted the ArcNet shield around the Earth, preventing the Boglodites from invading back then and causing them to starve to death as a species.

O and J deduce that Boris the Animal must have gone back in time and killed K, leading to the events that were now transpiring. It’s up to J to go back to 1969, rescue K, allow him to put the ArcNet shield up and restore the space-time continuum to where it belongs.

Once in 1969, J discovers that it’s not that easy. Trying to ambush Boris at Coney Island (where J knows he’ll be, owing to the file on the killer stating that he would murder an alien named Roman the Fabulist), unfortunately, J is too late and winds up being captured by the younger K (Brolin) and the 1969 MIB team. It takes a little bit of convincing but J manages to get K to understand that he’s from the future trying to prevent an invasion of Earth – although J leaves out the part that he is also there to prevent K’s death. They are aided by Griffin (Stuhlbarg), a gentle alien who lives five-dimensionally and is able to see every possible future. Now that’s a big help, although it would be, as Griffin himself puts it, a pain in the ass.

However, that is easier said than done. K has no idea what an ArcNet shield is, or how to erect it. There are two Boris the Animals out to murder K, who to J’s astonishment, has a romantic link with the young O (Eve). Plus in order to save the world, J and K are going to have to get through one of the tightest security nets in the history of the United States.

It’s nice to see Smith back on screen again (it’s been three and a half years since he’s been in a movie) and especially in a role that is so identified with him and let’s be frank – a role he does better than anybody else. His chemistry with Jones is scintillating but what’s surprising is that Brolin steps right into the role as the young K and not only mimics Jones perfectly, but also in terms of the chemistry with Smith – it’s almost indistinguishable between the actors. That’s part of what makes the movie worth seeing.

The movie holds up pretty well with the second (although not as well with the first). Rick Baker returns to make plenty of oddball aliens, including Boris the Animal (who has a little spider-like thing that resides in his remaining arm which is able to shoot out fang like darts that can be lethal). I can’t help think about what’s missing from the other films – notably Frank the Pug (who only shows up as a painting in J’s living room), the worm aliens (who make a brief cameo) and Rip Torn as Zed, whose funeral is near the beginning of the film. These were part of the indelible charm of the first two movies and their absence is noticeable.

Other than the time travel element, this is really business as usual for the franchise. Strangely, the filmmakers opt not to use the 60s as much more than a background for the movie (other than a scene set in the Factory of Andy Warhol (Hader) who turns out to be an MIB agent) which is a wasted opportunity; the setting could have enhanced the film a lot more than it did. In some ways, they could have easily set the past sequences in any decade from that standpoint. I would have liked to have seen a bit more use of the time period as a part of the movie.

Don’t get me wrong; this is fine summer entertainment and anyone who chooses to go see it is not going to leave disappointed unless they’re incredibly anal about time travel continuity and the franchise in general. Of course, if you didn’t like the first two films in the franchise, chances are you aren’t going to like this one either since it pretty much is more of the same. Which, to my mind, is a good thing.

REASONS TO GO: Brolin does a great job of channeling Jones. Will Smith is, well, Will Smith. Touching coda.

REASONS TO STAY: Not quite as memorable as the first MIB.  

FAMILY VALUES: There’s just a little bit of sci-fi violence and a smidgeon of sensuality – mostly implied.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The mother and daughter in K’s apartment (after he disappears from the timeline) that J gets chocolate milk from are an actual mother and daughter.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/27/12: Rotten Tomatoes: 68% positive reviews. Metacritic: 58/100. The film got decent reviews.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: X-Files: Fight the Future

CHRYSLER BUILDING LOVERS: Will Smith makes his leap into the ’60s from one of the gargoyles at the top of the Chrysler Building.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

NEXT: A Town Called Panic

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Think twice before hanging out with Shia LaBeouf; there are a lot of angry film critics out there.

(2011) Science Fiction (Paramount) Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, John Turturro, Alan Tudyk, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, John Malkovich, Ken Jeong, Leonard Nimoy (voice), Tyrese Gibson, Buzz Aldrin, Elya Baskin, Peter Cullen (voice), Hugo Weaving (voice), Robert Foxworth (voice), James Remar (voice). Directed by Michael Bay

Nothing exceeds like excess, and by that criterion Transformers: Dark of the Moon exceeds all expectations.

Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) has saved the world – twice – and all he’s got to show for it is a lousy Ivy League education. He longs to make a difference once again but he can’t get any sort of job and has to settle for living on the largesse of his new girlfriend Carly (Huntington-Whiteley), a former British consulate employee now working as an assistant to billionaire Dylan (Dempsey).

To make matters worse, the unemployed Sam is being visited by his judgmental parents Ron (Dunn) and Judy (White). However, Sam manages to get a job in the mail room of a defense contractor run by the somewhat eccentric Bruce Brazos (Malkovich).

Sam would much rather be working with the Autobots in NEST, but the government wants him far away from Optimus Prime (Cullen) as he can be. Lennox (Duhamel) is nominally in charge of the Autobots who are helping the American government putting out small fires around the world; taking out an illegal Iranian nuclear plant and investigating a strange occurrence at Chernobyl, where Lennox discovers Autobot technology may have been responsible for the disaster there.

Optimus demands an explanation and finally supercilious CIA chief Mearing (McDormand) gives him one. Apparently, near the end of the civil war that drove the Autobots from Cybertron, an Autobot ship escaped from the planet carrying a secret weapon as well as its designer, Sentinel Prime (Nimoy), the leader of the Autobots before Optimus. That ship crash landed on our moon, prompting the space race of the 1960s.

The Autobots rocket up to the moon and retrieve both Sentinel and the remains of the weapon. As they return, Megatron (Weaving), brooding in the desert after two defeats at the hands of Optimus and Sam Witwicky, puts into motion an evil plan that involves murder, betrayal and plenty of nasty robots coming after Sam and his new girlfriend. The stakes are high as the entire human race could end up as slave labor in the New World Order as envisioned by Megatron – and the Earth itself a desiccated, dried-out husk as her resources are used in the insane rebuilding of Cybertron. Once again, Sam and Optimus must lead the allied human-Autobot forces if both races are to survive.

My son has said that the reason you go to a Transformers movie is to watch robots beating each other up, and he has a point. If that’s why you’re plunking down ten bucks plus to see the movie, you won’t be disappointed. Once the battle starts in earnest, which is about halfway through the nearly two and a half hour movie, it doesn’t let up. The robots just about level Chicago and it is done realistically and spectacularly.

In fact, it’s done so well there seems to be no reason for human participation at all. The first half of the movie is somewhat slow and talky, and the humans are no match in the slightest to the giant robots of Cybertron. It is very much like watching a movie about, say, the Battle of the Bulge from the point of view of an ant colony. All the humans really have to do is dodge falling debris and be blown up by robot plasma shots; when one of the lead characters looks like they’re about to buy it, an Autobot comes out of nowhere to save the day (usually Optimus).

In fact, once the battle starts, LaBeouf has very little to do other than look concerned for his girlfriend, and occasionally shout “OPTI-MUUUUUUUUUUS!!!!” and he does both pretty well. His twitchy persona fits right in with the Witwicky character and although he’s the focus for the first half of the movie, it does break down during the first hour or so as we watch Sam mostly feeling inadequate and sorry for himself. It gets old.

Other than that, Bay did upgrade the supporting cast some, adding McDormand and Malkovich, Oscar nominees both, to the cast and both of the veteran actors deliver, as does Turturro in the returning role of Simmons, the paranoid agent (who is now a bestselling author) as comedy relief. Alan Tudyk, who impressed so much on the “Firefly” series, gets a meaty role as a fey German assistant to Simmons with his own set of skills. He makes the best use of his limited screen time.

As far as adolescent chubby-inducement, Megan Fox is out and former Victoria’s Secret model Huntington-Whiteley is in, making her feature acting debut. Fox was never known for her acting skills but she at least has some; Huntington-Whiteley is there mainly to wear tight dresses, have the camera almost see up her skirt and be put in jeopardy so Sam can rescue her. At least Megan Fox’s character wasn’t nearly as useless.

Transformer fans can rejoice; this is easily the most spectacular movie of the series and for non-fans, this is the best of the lot. Check your brain at the door, get the extra-large tub of popcorn and soda, and bliss out in a dark theater for awhile. This is pure popcorn spectacle on a massive scale and the plot is merely window dressing to the special effects. That’s not always a bad thing.

REASONS TO GO: Lots of robots battling for those who like that kind of thing. Easily the most spectacular film of the series.

REASONS TO STAY: The beginning of the movie lags a bit. The human characters are stiffer than the robots. Humans no match for aliens whatsoever.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s a good deal of mayhem and a few bad words, but it’s the scenes of destruction and robot death that might be a bit much for tykes.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Leonard Nimoy, voicing Sentinel Prime, utters the line “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” in homage to a line spoken by Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

HOME OR THEATER: The spectacle demands the big movie theater screen.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies