Koch

Year 11, Day 173 - 6/22/19 - Movie #3,270

BEFORE: This is one of those films that I spotted on Netflix last year, and it stayed on my radar, even though it's scrolled off of that service.  That's happened with a lot of films, and usually that means that I'm less interested in watching it, but in this case, I'm still very invested in crossing it off from my list, even if I have to pay $2.99 to watch it on iTunes now.  Some documentaries have migrated to Hulu after vanishing from Netflix, some might even be on Amazon Prime, but this one I'll have to pay for.

The IMDB says there are only 6 people appearing in this documentary, one of whom is Ed Koch.  That just CAN'T be right - I went through this last year with the rock/pop music docs, it seems that a lot of documentary filmmakers don't bother to make sure their IMDB listings are complete, so when I watch these films, I have to take notes on my phone whenever I see a face I recognize, or the name of someone being interviewed comes up on the screen.  Then there's a process for making suggestions to the IMDB, and I end up doing that a lot.  Sometimes they listen to me, sometimes they don't - we've got a difference of opinion over what constitutes an "appearance", it seems.  Like if I can verify that's the voice of Walter Cronkite in a news report, that makes it an appearance to me, and the IMDB will sometimes reject my suggestions.  Agree to disagree.

But I had to make my linking based on the IMDB listings, so if they're incomplete, that hampers me quite a bit.  In my selections for this year's doc chain, famous names like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton came up a LOT - and so far, that's not counting the uncredited appearances, which I have to track on the fly.  I'm not sure which President is going to end up being this year's "Paul McCartney" (Paul surprised me by appearing in 19 of the rockumentaries, and ended up with the biggest total for the year) - but I think it could very well be a very visible President this time around.  Or it could be Trump, or Hillary Clinton, or even Joan Rivers - I'll just have to play out the games.

Today Ed Koch carries over from "13th", and so does at least 1 other politician.

THE PLOT: A documentary on Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989.

AFTER: I was right, there were a ton of people appearing in this documentary that were uncredited in the IMDB.  I ended up submitting 50 names, 21 of those were the people INTERVIEWED on screen, and 29 were people appearing in archive footage.  I mean, jeez, if you can't keep track of the people you interviewed on camera, what are you DOING?  People do interviews because they want screen credits, I mean, what other reason could they HAVE for appearing on camera.  Telling their story?  Setting the record straight on historical events?  Bah, it's all about who can get the most screen credits, as far as I'm concerned.  These news reporters and political pundits probably weren't getting paid much for their time, so I'm here to get everyone the credit they deserve - I won't stop until the IMDB database editors see my submissions and say, "Oh, god, not THIS guy again.  The documentary credit freak is at it again..."

I'm not even a news junkie, so the names of NY Times reporters don't really matter to me, but I've been reading the NY Daily News at least weekly since I moved here to go to college in the fall of 1986.  I made my newspaper selection on which paper had the best comic strips - what other parameters could there possibly be?  This was before people got daily comics delivered by e-mail, and back when there was still a Village Voice and the Times wasn't "failing" or being called "fake news".  I arrived in town when Ed Koch was mayor, but only until David Dinkins got elected three years later, capping Koch at three terms, not four.  Hell, that was so long ago that back then everybody pronounced "Koch" as if it rhymed with "watch" or "crotch", not as a homonym for "coke", like the current fashion is, apparently.

So I sort of only really know the tail end of Mayor Koch's story, and I stuck around as Dinkins got replaced by Giuliani, who got replaced by Bloomberg, and now we have DiBlasio.  (The world's tallest mayor replaced the shortest one, I think, and there's some kind of carnival/freakshow metaphor in there somewhere.)

But the film starts with a key moment in NYC history - the 1977 summer blackout, which helps me keep my "hot, sticky racism" theme going, even if my material has moved above the Mason-Dixon line.  If you want to talk about hot, try making it through a couple days in a NYC July with no airconditioning, no fans and nothing that relies on freezers, like ice cream and cold beverages.  I might not have been in New York in 1977, but I was here for the one in August, 2003, and it was not fun.  Umm, except for the delis giving away ice cream and beer that they couldn't keep cold, but I think those might be rumors, it might not have really happened.  Anyway, Koch used the 1977 blackout, and the looting that followed (no electricity means no security systems, no alarms) to his advantage to become a serious contender in the 1977 mayoral election.  As a "law & order" candidate, he criticized Mayor Beame for not calling in the national guard to stop the looting and maintain some order.

The other main contender was Mario Cuomo, who was leading in the polls even before those "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo" signs started popping up in the subways.  Yeah, it was a different time, I'm pretty sure signs like that would be frowned upon today, or would at least cause a backlash against the candidate who approved them.  For the record, Cuomo's campaign never copped to posting those signs, but then, who did?  And that's when people started wondering about Koch's sexual orientation, and he not only never answered questions about that, he would argue that nobody even had the right to ask.  Which usually is a de facto answer, right?  But I can see Koch's point - it's a slippery slope to allow reporters to get in the habit of asking about that, and everyone needed to learn to respect people's decisions to come out in their own time.

But Koch took a different tact, he brought in Bess Myerson, a former Miss America, to accompany him to events, acting like a default First Lady, and allowing Ed Koch to appeal to both the gays and the straights.  Koch later admitted they were "just friends", though that phrase has several meanings, and even when interviewed for this documentary, when it was pointed out that as NYC's first gayor he could have had an enormous impact for change, his answer was still "That's none of your eff'in business."

Through the recounting of events in his first and second terms, I started to notice some similarities between Koch and future President Trump - like both had enormous egos, perhaps that's something that's necessary to run for office.  Koch believed he was truly the best NYC mayor ever, that he was somehow uniquely qualified to hold the office, and that sounds a lot like Trump saying, "I alone can fix it."  Hey, they're both native New Yorkers, maybe their shared ego and self-promotion abilites stems from that.  Both men are/were also very image-driven and self-conscious, through Trump's more of the "fake it till you make it" type, and Koch was always, always asking everyone "How'm I doing?"  Same principle, one just seems a little more needy than the other.

Both men were builders, too (allegedly, on Trump's part...).  After saving the city from bankruptcy and laying off a lot of city staff to balance the budget, perhaps Koch's biggest accomplishment was creating more housing, both public and private.  This doc has images of the Bronx that make it look like a wasteland, like Dresden after World War II or something.  Buildings that were literally crumbling after years of neglect or waves of arson, looking like collections of bricks that were barely holding together - with other nearby buildings already having collapsed or in the process of being torn down.  Koch helped secure financing to put up new buildings all over, especially in the Bronx, because investing in more housing means more property taxes, more money for the city to provide services, and better financial status for the city.

Same deal with Times Square - what was once just a collection of porno theaters and lousy diners started to transform during Koch's administration (this process really took off under later mayors, but it started with Koch) into the vast entertainment wonderland it is now, namely a collection of Disney stage theaters and chain restaurants.  That's progress, I suppose - eh, the porn theaters were eventually going to be killed by the internet, anyway.  But I miss some of the diners - hey, is Tad's Steakhouse still around?

The film then follows Koch through the events of each year he was mayor - the transit strike, the police strike, a gay rights bill (in 1986!) - though for each crisis he handled well, it seems there was also another one he didn't handle well.  Gay activists were unhappy that he closed the city's bathhouses, but that was done with their best interests in mind, as a lot of unsafe sex was taking place there.  He closed a municipal hospital in Harlem, which admittedly was underperforming, but that didn't exactly endear him to the community there.  And then the worst disaster of all, the publishing of his memoir, "Mayor" and the opening of the Broadway musical that was based on it.

Then came the PVB scandal in his third term, which revealed that his political allies were basically allowed to stock city agencies, like the Parking Violations Bureau, with their friends.  While Koch was not directly implicated for any wrongdoing, it seems that city contracts for parking violations computers were awarded to companies owned by his friends.  It might be legal, but there's still something fishy about that. And other businessmen admitted to bribing PVB officials who were friends of the Queens borough president, who then tried to kill himself when the news broke.  All I really know about the PVB scandal is that I indirectly benefited from it, apparently some of the people accused of bribery or some financial malfeasance invested in real estate, and one of the properties that got seized by the city after the scandal was a supermarket building in Park Slope.  A few years later, after years of lying dormant, the building was converted into 14 units of condominiums, and I bought one of them with my first wife in 1993.  When we split up I bought out her share of the property and lived there for 11 more years, during that time it increased in value so that when I sold it, I could buy (most of) a bigger house in Queens.  So for me, something good came out of Ed Koch's biggest scandal - I might still be living in an apartment, with no real estate equity to my name, if not for that.

Very little is said in this film about Koch's years after being NYC's mayor, like there's no mention about being on "The People's Court" after Judge Wapner's time, or being an adjunct professor at NYU.  When I was at NYU, everyone sort of knew that Koch had an apartment near Washington Square, I think it was on Waverly Place - he was one of those mayors who chose not to live in Gracie Mansion, I think.  Dinkins did, but Bloomberg didn't - living in a mansion would have been a step DOWN for Bloomberg.  I'm pretty sure DiBlasio moved his family in to Gracie Mansion, as did Giuliani, but in the middle of Rudy's time as mayor he divorced his wife, and the wife and kids got to stay in Gracie Mansion while Rudy moved into a room in the apartment of a gay couple.  Wait, that doesn't sound right, am I remembering that correctly?

Koch stayed pretty active until he died in 2013, he worked at a law firm, did movie reviews, and made the rounds on the political party circuit - the documentary shows him on election night, holding court while Chuck Schumer was claiming victory in the background, then trying to make peace with the Cuomo family by congratulating the new governor, Andrew Cuomo, son of Mario.  Though the microphones reveal that Koch didn't really forgive OR forget.  Well, he didn't recognize a lot of people he knew at the party, so maybe there was a lot of forgetting near the end of his life.  But mostly he comes across here as a man who held very strong opinions on most issues, and if you happened to disagree with him, he'd cut you off to mansplain immediately why you were wrong.

Also starring Michael Bloomberg, Charles Rangel (also carrying over from "13th"), Christine Quinn, Carl McCall, George Artz, Wayne Barrett, Abe Biderman, Calvin O. Butts III, Diane Mulcahy Coffey, Maureen Connelly, Greg David, Fernando Ferrer, Ethan Geto, Michael Goodwin, Bob Herbert, Charles Kaiser, Sarah Kovner, John LoCicero, Johnathan Mahler, Felice Michetti, Michael Powell, Jennifer Preston, Joyce Purnick, Sam Roberts, Henry J. Stern, Carl Weisbrod, with archive footage of Bella Abzug, Herman Badillo, Abe Beame, George W. Bush (also carrying over from "13th"), David Dinkins (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Andrew Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, David Garth, Rudy Giuliani (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), H. John Heinz, Larry Kramer, Sandra Lee, Donald Manes, Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Bess Myerson, Dolly Parton (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), William Proxmire, Al Sharpton (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Sheldon Silver.

RATING: 5 out of 10 ACT-UP protestors

13th

Year 11, Day 172 - 6/21/19 - Movie #3,269

BEFORE: By the time I'm done with Documentary Month, I'll be very close to the next hundred mark, Movie 3,300, and also very close to reviewing "Spider-Man: Far From Home".  I may SEE it before then, but there's definitely a slot waiting for posting in just about a month.  The great thing about a documentary chain is that the movies tend to be a little bit shorter, and so I've got a little extra free time - I may have time to sneak out to see "Dark Phoenix" and "Toy Story 4" soon, but again, I'm going to sit on those reviews until I can properly link to them.  Cheating, I know, but that's what it takes to maybe have a "perfectly linked year".  The way things are going, with "Avengers: Endgame" coming back into theaters, I'm afraid they're going to pull "Dark Phoenix" before I get a chance to see it, then I won't be able to link the way I want in October.  Carpe diem and all that.

Tonight the topic is systemic racism, and before long I'll be on to politics and capitalism and global warming - thankfully I'm saving some documentaries about comedians for the end of the doc chain, which is smart because after all these downer political films, I'll probably need a good laugh.

Walter Cronkite carries over again from "Tower", and I'll follow a new link tomorrow, I promise.

THE PLOT: An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.

AFTER: It's the first day of summer, and looking back on the week it seems I accidentally programmed a bunch of films that took place (more or less) during the summer, and south of the Mason-Dixon line. July 20, 1969 in Houston, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL (where the rocket exhaust made things EXTRA hot, I'll bet...)  August 1, 1966 in Austin, TX, on a day when the pavement was close to burning the legs of the shooting victims...  Even the Watergate scandal broke on June 18 or 19, and Washington DC is surrounded by Maryland and Virginia, so that counts as the South, I think.  So let's wrap things up with another film that starts in the U.S. South - the hot, sticky, sweaty and racist South.  Happy summer, everyone!

Now, how do we statistically explain that the United States has only 5% of the world's population, but we also have 25% of the world's prison inmates?  This film has one answer, again and again: racism.  There certainly might be something there, especially since one of every 3 African-American males in the U.S. will spend time in prison, when for white men it's only about one of every 17 males.  I'll concede that point, but I think statistically there are a couple other factors involved here.  Why do other countries have fewer prison inmates?  I think there are many reasons - in some of the Third World countries, it may because crime is less enforceable or prosecuted less.  The United States is a very litigious society by comparison to others, and as all of our candidates run on these "law and order" platforms, eventually the public demands that there be something akin to law and order, and that means putting people in jail.  Also, there may be fewer prison inmates in other countries because they're more likely to put criminals to death, by methods like stoning and beheadings. (Yep, I'm talking about you, MIDDLE EAST).  Then, on the other side of the spectrum, you've got European countries like the Netherlands that don't consider drug use a crime, for example - so therefore, fewer people arrested for smoking pot and hash means fewer people in prison.  Lately our country has sort of been heading in this direction, with pot legal in some states, so I wonder if the stats are going to start turning around.

That's right, when Nixon came up with the idea of the "war on drugs", and then Reagan actually put those proposals into place, nobody really thought about the long-term consequences (or...did they?).  Like, where are we going to PUT all these new criminals, and are these new laws going to be applied fairly across the board, racially.  Ha ha, of course not.  This documentary takes things a step further, claiming that the War on Drugs, plus other innovations like the "Three Strikes" law, were specifically tailored to put brown people in prison, and keep them there.  Then corporations not-so-coincidentally owned by white people would be the ones hired to build all the new prisons, and also benefit from the free labor that could be obtained by putting inmates to work.  Thus continuing the long-standing practice of light-skinned people profiting from the suffering of darker-skinned people, it's practically an American tradition - however, essentially it's also slavery in a different form.  Did you think we fixed slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation (which only freed slaves in some states, BTW) and the 13th Amendment?  Oh, you're so naive.

And it gets worse - the income disparity between white Americans and black Americans means that it's much easier for arrested white men to make bail, so that means often black people are forced to stay in prison while awaiting trial, because they can't afford to get out.  And then once you create a wave of new arrested people, via a program like "Three Strikes", there's not enough time for every arrested person to have a complete fair trial (a process guaranteed by the Constitution) so the vast majority of accused people are offered plea deals, and only a small percentage of cases go to trial.  For an arrested person, guilty or innocent, especially one who can't afford to be bailed out, it probably seems like a better deal to plead guilty and serve, say, two or three years, instead of waiting in jail for a trial that could result in a sentence of, say, ten or twenty years.

So follow the track of a black man wrongfully arrested, innocent of a crime (let's say, it could happen, it's happened before...) and he can't afford to make bail, so he's forced to stay in jail even though he hasn't been convicted of anything yet.  Anything could happen to him in prison while waiting to stand trial, he could be injured or killed or made somebody's bitch, when he shouldn't even be there in the first place.  So to hurry things along, and start the countdown which will eventually get him out, he admits to a lesser crime he didn't do, avoiding the possibility of a lengthy trial and a much longer prison term.  He serves his two or three years, and he gets out, only now he can't get a job, and to top things off, he can't vote either.  Now multiply this times a few thousand cases, and you can see how the system could produce an entire generation of disenfranchised people, who conveniently also have no political power to change the system.  Even a James Bond villain wouldn't come up with something this cruel, across the board.

Naturally, this system started down South, right after the Civil War - somebody should have reminded the Southerners that they LOST - when nearly everything that black people could do was made illegal by these little local laws, so there were dozens of reasons to arrest a black man for walking down the street, maybe he just looked at a white woman wrong, or maybe he just passed a cop on the wrong day.  Those who couldn't pay their fines then had to work off their "crimes", so that's free labor, voter suppression and being made to feel like a second-class citizen, all in one big ball of racism.

And Democrats can't say they weren't part of the problem - it's Southern Democrats who passed the Jim Crow laws, and then after the civil rights legislation in the 1960's, when Republicans like Reagan succeeded with their "Law & Order" mandates like the War or Drugs and the War on Crime, Democratic candidates like Bill Clinton only succeeded by claiming they would be tough on crime, too.  And some of his legislation proposals also came from ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) which had been supplying Republicans for years with legislation that would feed the U.S. prison-industrial complex.  The crime rates in the United States have been declining since the late 20th Century (and that's not "fake news"), so why is the rate of incarceration UP?

Why have both political parties taken the same tactic, to demonize minorities and claim they'll be "tougher on crime" than the other guy?  Why is the public more likely to fearfully cast their votes for the "law & order" candidates, rather than the ones who say they'll work for prison reform?  Why don't you ever hear about any young white people killed by cops after routine traffic stops?  It's fear as a factor, across the board.  And if we keep voting out of fear, that's just going to keep justifying those tactics, and the next bunch of candidates will try even harder to make us afraid, because that shit's been proven to work.  We've sort of moved on to "crimmigrants" with Trump in charge, but the principles are the same - without a caravan of brown people coming our way to cross over the border, and do God knows what, how are they going to scare people into supporting their racist policies?

I'm not really sold on all of the claims this documentary makes (look, I'm guessing at least SOME of the people in jail should probably be there...) but I'm still pretty disgusted with American politics tonight.

Since it's documentary month, I'm going to start checking Wikipedia for important dates in U.S. history, you never know, I could hit on something relevant.  For example, it's not just the summer solstice today, it's also World Humanist Day.  Humanism (so I've just learned) is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value, individually and collectively, of human beings, and favors critical thinking and evidence over dogma and superstition.  Sounds good to me.  Also, on this day in 1915, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in Guinn v. United States, which struck down Oklahoma's "grandfather clause" legislation that was effectively denying the right to vote to African-Americans.  Also on this date in 1964, three (white) civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan - remember the film "Mississippi Burning"?  Yep, more hot summer Southern racist activity.

Also starring Michelle Alexander, Cory Booker, Malkia Cyril, Angela Davis, David Dinkins, Henry Louis Gates, Kevin Gannon, Newt Gingrich, Cory Greene, John Hagan, Van Jones, David Keene, Grover Norquist, Rick Perry, Charles Rangel, Bryan Stevenson, with archive footage of George H.W. Bush (last seen in "The Polka King"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Jimmy Carter (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Gerald Ford (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Quincy"), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Vice"), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Bob Dole, Ed Koch, Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Apollo 11"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Barack Obama (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story"), Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "The Doors: When You're Strange"), Malcolm X (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Lee Atwater, Peter Jennings (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Dan Rather (last seen in "Fair Game"), Harry Reasoner (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert (also last seen in "Quincy"), John Oliver, Larry Wilmore.

RATING: 5 out of 10 chain gangs

Tower

Year 11, Day 171 - 6/20/19 - Movie #3,268

BEFORE: It makes sense that the voice of Walter Cronkite appeared in the last two films - Cronkite was the most well-known TV reporter/anchorman in the country for a good number of years, some thought of him as the most trusted man on TV, I know that my grandmother sure did.  She wouldn't consider herself informed about the day's events until she heard what Cronkite had to say about them.  Now that I'm in documentary month, slightly different rules apply, and I have to rely on archive footage of famous people, or at least influential ones, or people that appear in a lot of news footage, to get from one film to the next.  Using U.S. Presidents as links is going to come up a lot over the next month - but tonight it's Walter Cronkite.  After hearing his comments on the Apollo 11 mission (twice) and also Watergate, tonight we'll hear what he had to say about this mass shooting from a few years before.

I met Walter Cronkite once, because my first wife was working for his son's production company, and they were preparing a multi-episode series about famous news events, as seen through the famous newsman's eyes.  So before the first episode there was some kind of special party, not really a wrap party I think, but some evening event that I got to go to, and I got to shake his hand.  Man, I really wondered what my grandmother would have said if she knew I got to meet her favorite CBS anchor.  During production I got to stay a couple nights in Cronkite's vacation home, too (Walter wasn't there at the time) - we had to drive up  to Martha's Vineyard to pick up some of his cherished artifacts, like the helmet he wore during the Korean War, and the little model of the lunar lander that he used to demonstrate the spaceflight procedures to the TV audience.  I think he saved a lot of stuff, and those were important props for the documentary series.  I remember watching the baseball playoffs on Cronkite's TV, and thinking the Indians would win it all that year, only that was the year without a World Series, must have been 1994.

Since Walter Cronkite is the only name I recognize in the credits, I've had to place this one between two other films he appears in - otherwise I wouldn't be able to watch this one this year.

THE PLOT: Animation, testimony and archival footage combine to relate the events of August 1, 1966 when a gunman opened fire from the University of Texas clock tower, killing 16 people.

AFTER: From Mission Control in Houston I'm moving west across Texas to Austin, and three years back in time to 1966.  I visited Austin last year on that same BBQ Crawl as Houston, so I've got a good idea about how far it is from one place to the other.

I also remember my boss writing about this film for HIS blog, and thinking that it sounded intriguing.  An animated documentary?  Now, last weekend I watched a horror film for Father's Day, so my genre-mixing is kind of reaching a new level anyway.  But a documentary with animated sequences in it creates a bit of a conundrum for me.  Like, I was always taught that in the documentary form, it was very bad to mess with reality, events should be portrayed as accurately as possible, and if you had to recreate the depiction of real events with actors, that needed to be pointed out.

Now, I understand WHY this was necessary here - obviously on the day in question during this 96-minute shooting, it's not like there were a lot of people walking around with film or video cameras.  People didn't have camera phones back then, or any portable phones, for that matter.  Phone BOOTHS were the height of technology, and they weren't mobile at all.  Eventually someone came to the scene with a 16mm or Super 8 camera, and that's how we have the footage that we have.  So how can a filmmaker depict the things that happened, without much (or any) footage of it?  Enter animation - but this is a particular kind of animation, called rotoscoping.  People (or perhaps now computers) draw over (or based on) real film footage, which again, for this situation, didn't exist.  SO they must have filmed actors recreating the actions of real people, and that to me is a big no-no for a documentary.

I guess someone felt that if they animated over the footage from the dramatic recreations, that would give it sort of an unreal quality, and critics and audience members would be less likely to pick up on the fact that these actions were staged, and therefore less likely to cry foul.  What's worse, though, is also using those same actors as interview subjects, so that there could be animated segments that recreate the testimony of the witnesses that were there.  This is very, very dangerous, because an actor can say the same words that the eyewitnesses did, but it's too easy for an actor to over-dramatize, or add an inflection that wasn't there before, and that can change the tone or even the meaning of what was said.

It looks great, for the most part, but the animation company had a real big problem with animating people running, which is sort of animation 101.  (Trust me, I've been to film school, took animation for two years, and I've worked in that field for the last 25 years.) Once you design a character, the next thing you do is decide what it looks like in a walk- or run-cycle.  The way that people are shown running here, and it comes up frequently, their feet tend to slide across the floor, and the thing about running is that it only works if your foot on the ground stays in one place.  So in the most dramatic moments here, people's feet are sliding as if they're on a slippery surface, or sort of reverse moon-walking, and that's not only impossible, it's very distracting.

I first noticed something was up as soon as they had some testimony from a kid who was delivering papers on a bicycle in the area - wait, this took place in 1966, so why am I hearing a kid''s voice, he should be all grown up now, he should be an old man even!  OK, I figured, maybe they're just using real audio from interviews conducted at that time, only the sound was just too good.  With any recordings from 1966, you'd expect some wear or some imperfect tones, or the sound would be faint or all scratchy or something.  But no, they used an actor who's young NOW to record the voice of the kid THEN, and that's where I start to have a problem.  Like, what else that I'm being shown isn't really real?

About 2/3 of the way through the picture, they start using real footage of the people being interviewed, and therefore it's a sharp jump, because those people suddenly age over 40 years.  That's confusing at the very least, I mean, I've gotten used to the way these people looked in younger, animated form, and now I have to figure out who's who all over again.  Wait, was this old dude the guy with the glasses, or was he the friend of the guy with the glasses?

Of course, I'm using the technical details to sort of dance around the subject matter here, but talking about any mass shooting is a controversial subject these days - even if we all agree that mass shootings are bad, there are too many differing opinions about how to stop them, and some say you can't without interfering with average citizens' 2nd Amendment rights.  Well, how about some other solutions, then?  Any common ground here, like working to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental problems?  Guns that have fingerprint detectors that only will work for approved owners or law enforcement officials?  A very high tax on bullets, or getting rid of bullets altogether?  (I kind of like that one, because it's technically not "gun control", it's "bullet control", very sneaky.)

I don't know if this was the first or most prominent mass shooting, but it certainly seems like one of the most stereotypical.  It's like the "madman in a high clock tower" can be traced back here, or something.  And of course now I have to wonder if our modern lives would be any different if people had taken more direct steps to curb crazy people's access to weapons after this 1966 incident.  But they didn't, and they still won't, so what the heck would it take?

Mr. Cronkite himself blamed all of society for these events, quoting "a strange pandering to violence, a disrespect for life, fostered in part by governments which, in pursuit of the doctrine of self-defense, teach their youth to kill and maim."  He makes a good point, in that the gunman, Charles Whitman, was an ex-Marine with a sharpshooter's badge.  Yep, our government taught him how to do what he did.  For that matter, Lee Harvey Oswald was also an ex-Marine.  Maybe we should start there - not everyone in the armed forces needs to know how to shoot a gun, after all.  The military needs supply personnel, office workers, laborers - plenty of people who don't need this part of "basic" training.  Plus, don't drones and smart bombs do most of the killing these days?  Also, how many shooters do we need, and shouldn't the military do some kind of psych check to see if maybe some people shouldn't be taught how to operate weapons?  Or is that not even a concern?

Also starring Monty Muir, Violett Beane, Cole Bee Wilson, Aldo Ordoñez, Blair Jackson, Vicky Illk, Chris Doubek, Seamus Bolivar-Ochoa, Louie Arnette, Josephine McAdam, Reece Everett Ryan, John Fitch, Jeremy Brown, Karen Davidson, Anthony Martinez, Timothy Lucas, Cole Bresnahan, and interview/archive footage of Neal Spelce, Claire Wilson James, Aleck Hernandez Jr., Houston McCoy, Allen Crum, John "Artly" Fox, Ramiro Martinez, Lee Zamora,

RATING: 4 out of 10 bullet fragments

Apollo 11

Year 11, Day 170 - 6/19/19 - Movie #3,267

BEFORE: The good news is that the documentary chain is finally here!  I've been talking about it and focused on it for the past few months, so therefore it felt like it took forever to get here, but it's here!  Now in the past couple of years I've also done documentary chains, but they've had fairly narrow focuses on particular topics.  I think the first one I did was all about art and artists, and then I did a whole "geek week" thing the following year, focused on comic-cons, fan films and the making of films like Star Wars, Ghostbusters and Back to the Future.  Then last year, of course, was my super-long Rockumentary chain, which ended being almost two months long - but still represented a continuous linked chain, thanks to people like Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger who popped up in so many films.

This year the doc chain's going to be a little different, since I'm working on a perfect year, I strung together the best linked chain I could out of the docs I have access to, regardless of subject matter.  Linking trumps thematic programming this year - though there are still going to be only a few general topics covered, like politics, sports, religion, global warming, technology and celebrities/comedians.  It still may end up feeling like I'm bouncing around, but I think it will all make sense in the end.

Remember, I count appearances in archive footage the same way I count actor appearances - so if footage of Ronald Reagan or JFK can help link two films, I'm going to take advantage of that.  That's why the "Mark Felt" movie was my lead-in, because it had archive footage of Richard Nixon, and also some newsmen who tend to appear in docs, like Dick Cavett, who was in so many rock docs last year.  But it's Walter Cronkite who carries over from "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House".

Damn, if I'd known that his voice also appeared in "First Man" (that wasn't listed in the IMDB) then I could have switched the order of the previous two movies with Brian D'Arcy James" so "First Man" could be right next to "Apollo 11".  Now I wish I'd thought of that.

THE PLOT: A look at the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon, led by commander Neil Armstrong and pilots Buzz Aldrin and Michael Colins.

AFTER:  In my book, July 20, 1969 should be heralded as the day that the nerds started their takeover.  It began with NASA's success in making rocketry cool - and then maybe 30 years later the people who crunch the numbers and maintain the stats took over sports, and then tech geeks like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos took over the tech market, and eventually the people who like comic books took over Hollywood.  Now I can say with almost no irony that "the geek shall inherit the Earth".  Seriously, name one field that isn't dominated now by the people who used to get bullied in school.  OK, maybe stuff like mixed martial arts, NASCAR, power lifting, arm wrestling and smashing beer bottles over your head (yeah, that's a thing) - the nerdy people now control everything else, and it all started with putting two men on the moon.

Maybe at one time it was super-macho to be an astronaut, but for every guy in a spacesuit on the television like Armstrong or Aldrin who got championed as some kind of super-masculine idol, there were at least thirty guys in the control room with glasses, short hair and a pocket protector.  You can see them sitting in rows in this film, back in the days when there was just one color for a men's shirt (white) and one color for a pair of pants (black slacks).  They look like a clone army, each one saying "Go" when their station is called, and I don't know how many "Go's" it take to launch a rocket, but it's at least 20, probably more.  It's like the pod people took over and made everyone dress the same because individuality is counter-effective to the hive mind.  

But, as we saw in "Hidden Figures", which I just re-watched last weekend with my parents, so much of rocketry is just math.  Figuring out when a rocket needs to go from an orbital trajectory back to a parabolic one, that's math.  Figuring out when a rocket needs to do an additional burn and go from orbiting the Earth to reach escape velocity and head toward the moon, that's also math.  Well, physics and math, but physics is really all just useful applied math, right?  And that's what all those stages of the Mercury and Gemin-EYE programs were about, testing the math and putting it to use to do the next task, break the next threshold, and then finally in July of 1969 they put the "get a man in orbit" knowledge together with the "one space module docks with another" knowledge and added the "get the astronauts into the smallest part of the capsule and head back to earth" knowledge.  Oh, yeah, and it would be great if the astronauts survived, because the various stages of rocket are disposable, but the human lives aren't.  Can you imagine if the goal was to put a man on the moon, without yet figuring out how to get him home?  That would be just kind of sad, but at least we'd have a new national hero/martyr.

Come to think of it, the end result of all the different space flights and tests looks a little bit like "our plan is to put three small chairs inside a slightly larger capsule, put that on top of an enormous BOMB, but one that will get the capsule into orbit, and then from there, they're going to set out through the endless void and try to hit the moon, which is akin to a grain of sand floating in the ocean.  I don't know why I never saw it this way before, probably because I knew that the Apollo 11 crew succeeded (sorry, another SPOILER ALERT), so when you know the ending and that it all was accomplished, it's a bit hard to remember a time when landing on the moon wasn't a certainty.  We all have to remember that nobody at NASA could have been 100% on this - they were all only about one or two steps away from making it up as they went along.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, because I've got more important questions to ask.  Like, the film starts with footage of NASA moving that giant launch platform containing the Apollo 11 rocket across Cape Canaveral.  You know, that enormous thing on tank treads that looks like it weighs 100 tons, and it goes so slowly they have to start moving it into position about 2 weeks before the launch. I've always wondered, why didn't they just assemble the rocket closer to where they wanted to launch it from?  See, I'm a problem solver, it turns out, and solving problems starts with asking questions like these.  After all, it's not like we're talking about a bunch of rocket scien... oh, wait, never mind.  

This film seems to be about 99% composed of NASA's footage from the time, which is great, but that also leads me to more questions - like, how does it all look so GOOD?  There were different cameras used back in 1969, they didn't have the big fancy high-resolution digital cameras that were in use today.  Footage from the moon landing that I've seen before has looked generally crappy, so what gives?  How did they make the footage BETTER?  Or was it always this good, and maybe people didn't have good enough HDTVs to view it, until now?  

But at the same time, I'm also a little suspicious - I've been burned before by documentaries that say they were all made of real footage, only they weren't.  Some of this looks a little TOO good, so that raises my suspicions about whether any shots here were faked.  And as a point of order, you really shouldn't fake any footage where the moon landing is concerned, because that's been a point of contention in the past, some people believe that the whole THING didn't happen and was filmed in a studio.  If word spreads that any of the footage in this film isn't 100% real, that's just going to open up Pandora's box of moon landing conspiracies all over again.  So now it's time for me to do a little digging...

But until I find out more details, you can't really go wrong here by watching this film that really emphasizes the beauty of spaceflight, watching everything go right (except for those pesky data alerts during the final descent to the moon, I guess) and great news, the astronauts somehow made it back to Earth and all of them survived!  But you probably knew that already...

(UPDATE: It seems like the footage of ground control was all done in 65mm Panavision, which is one reason why it all looks so good.  In addition they recovered tons of 70mm footage from the Apollo 11 launch and recovery.  A post-production house in NYC was then used to make hi-res digital scans of everything, including more conventional 35mm and 16mm films, plus still photos and closed-circuit TV, presumably from the spaceflight itself.  So that's why this all looks so damn good...)

I paid $5.99 to watch this as a premium On Demand movie - I would prefer not to make a habit of that, because that's too costly, I can't afford that on a regular basis, in addition to what I'm already paying for premium cable.  But once in a while is OK, I guess - that's cheaper than seeing it in the movie theater, although it probably would have looked even better in IMAX format.  It was also available on iTunes for $5.99, but that would have been a rental for only 30 days, this way I can at least dub a copy to DVD and make it a double feature on a disc with "First Man" (also $5.99)  Oh, and here's a tip, this film will be airing on CNN starting this Sunday, June 23.  So you won't have to pay $5.99 to see it, like I did, if you've got basic cable with the news channels.  I debated waiting until Sunday, but that would have ruined my schedule, I just can't fall behind again if I'm going to hit my July 4 movie on time. 

Also starring (via archive footage) Neil Armstrong (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Deke Slayton, Jim Lovell, Charles Duke, Glynn Lunney, Bruce McCandless II, Clifford E. Charlesworth, Janet Armstrong, Richard Nixon (also carrying over from "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "First Man"), Jack Benny, Johnny Carson (last seen in "The Front Runner").

RATING: 6 out of 10 scientific experiments

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House

Year 11, Day 169 - 6/18/19 - Movie #3,266

BEFORE: All my traveling is finally catching up with me, I fell asleep in my recliner this morning, which for some reason gives me more vivid dreams, and I had a stress dream about being in a virtual reality scenario with my wife, which also had elements of being in a casino-like environment.  The dream was sort of set in the future, where VR was now a thing, and the way the game would entice you to play was that characters from the game would appear in your living room and urge you to play, so I kind of found out that way that she was playing in the VR world without me, much like she sometimes plays video games in the afternoon before I come home from work.  So I was thinking, "Who are these CGI people in the living room?" but this prompted her to show me how the whole process worked.  We went out the door and down to the street corner, into a manhole cover, and somehow this was how you enter the VR world and start playing the games.  They had versions of Pac-Man and other arcade games, and everything cost 2 credits to play (nothing cost 1 credit) but if you played well, you could win more than 2 credits from one game.  Then we were in this sort of shopping environment, and there was a virtual a capella group walking around (probably selling their new album) and we were looking for some VR trivia games so I could start winning big.  She found one and started to buy it with her credits, but I protested and said I didn't want her buying me this game until I could try it first to make sure I liked it.  The store manager showed me how I could go into the back room and test out the game, but I think I got distracted by other things and never really got there.

There are elements in there of our New Jersey trip, like slot machines and the a capella group (we saw a Pentatonix concert at the Hard Rock), plus my wife was playing video games while I was in Massachusetts, and I guess I got a little envious.  It's weird how you can sometimes see where every element in a dream came from, but your brain would never put those things together that way during the day, it's only when your brain does the mash-up at night that things can get creatively crazy.  Given the movies that I've watched in the past week, I'm thankful that there weren't any Nazis, rats or crashing rockets in my dream.

Brian D'Arcy James carries over again from "First Man", and so does a very well-respected newsman who covered both the moon landing and Watergate.  That's going to come in handy tomorrow when I finally start my 2019 documentary chain...

THE PLOT: The story of Mark Felt, who, under the code name "Deep Throat", helped journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal in 1972.

AFTER: I don't know when they started production on this film, but it was released in 2017 and I think it could not possibly have been more relevant with its timing.  In many ways the 2016 election reflects some elements of the Watergate scandal, where you had a Republican candidate (or his representatives) trying to dig up dirt on the Democratic party, and not caring much about how that was done, or whether the method was entirely legal.  In 2016, that meant Benghazi or missing e-mails or "lock her up", anything that would give Trump the advantage and help him close the polls.  Essentially, Nixon's crew was looking for the same thing - any advantage that was out there, and that meant spying on the Democratic committee offices at the Watergate Hotel.

John Oliver also calls the Trump election collusion and obstruction charges "Stupid Watergate".  Like, didn't anyone learn from the past that this is something you should NOT do?  But when you're behind in the polls, I guess you'll grab at anything that might give you an edge, even the illegal stuff - taking a meeting with Russian oligarchs or requesting out loud that Russian hackers find the missing 30,000 e-mails.  That's not to say that other factors weren't at work, of course they were - Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein might have drawn a lot of votes away from Hillary, plus there are her own stupid statements like "Pokemon Go-to the polls" and the "Basket of Deplorables".  And then you've got James Comey re-opening his probe of Clinton just two weeks before the election.  Why?  Because he didn't want to interfere with the election process.  No, of course not, how could re-opening a closed case two weeks before the voting started have any effect on the election that was just days away?

And then, after the election, history started getting re-written because the new President gets to appoint a new Attorney General, and that can easily turn into a quid pro quo situation - "I'll give you the job, if you promise not to investigate me or the election process..." and that sound you hear in the background is democracy dying.  How can someone in the Justice Department act impartially toward the man who hired him?  If anything, the Trump administration has pointed out about a hundred potential conflicts of interest, which we're going to need to start making impossible in the future.  From James Comey to Jeff Sessions to William Barr, everyone seemed to have a vested interest in the outcome of the Mueller Report, and nobody investigating Trump seemed to want to take that next step and say that he was responsible for anything.  Or if he was, that wasn't a crime.  Or if it was a crime, it doesn't matter, because the President has immunity.  And that's the way it's been for the past two or three years, where there's so much debate over what happened and whether it constitutes criminal behavior that nobody gets around to doing much prosecuting.

BUT IT'S POSSIBLE - Nixon got impeached for less.  Nixon resigned for less.  Nixon resigned because he "loved America" and didn't want to put the country through any more hassle.  So, I guess Trump doesn't love the USA as much as Nixon did, that's a fair conclusion.  But I'll get back to Trump later, let's go back through the mists of time and replace "Trump" with Nixon, so that means replacing Robert Mueller with Mark Felt, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani with John Dean and John Erlichman, and so on.  (Most of what I know about Watergate actually came from reading MAD Magazine at the time, so please bear with me...)

Mark Felt was a top FBI agent at the time of the Watergate break-in, and right away it seemed suspicious to him that the burglars all had worked for the government, many with jobs at the White House, and that's where the trail of evidence seemed to be leading.  But the sudden death of J. Edgar Hoover, who'd been in charge of the FBI for over 50 years, meant that the President could appoint a new director, one who'd be so happy to have the position that he'd be willing to put a stop to the Watergate investigation, which of course would benefit Nixon.  (Sound familiar?)  Felt wasn't considered for the job, apparently because he wanted to continue with the investigation - but when a time limit of 48 hours was imposed, that's when Felt went to the press, to Time magazine at first, to try to draw out some more information, and also get public support to help keep the investigation alive.

At the same time, Felt was leading the FBI's investigation into domestic terrorist groups like the Weather Underground, which had planted bombs at the Capitol building and the Pentagon.  In addition, later on it was learned that illegal tactics were used to investigate the Black Panthers and various civil rights and anti-war groups - searches were conducted without warrants, wiretapping of ordinary citizens, all done in the name of national security.  (Hmm, this also sounds a bit familiar, like a precursor to the Patriot Act...)  Felt, Patrick Grey and Edward Miller of the FBI were all arraigned and charged with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.  But this was later on, in 1978, and Nixon famously appeared at the trial as a witness, and also contributed to Felt's defense fund.

And at the same time as all that, Felt was also systematically searching for his daughter, who was living as a hippie in some commune somewhere, only he didn't know where.  The film shows him sending copies of the same letter to her to every known commune in the country, hoping that one of those many letters would reach her.  The film doesn't mention that while attending Stanford, she went to Chile to study on a Fulbright scholarship, and fell in with Marxist revolutionaries there.  When she came back, her radical political views put her at odds with her father, and after graduation, lived with other hippies in the Santa Cruz mountains.  That had to be awkward for Felt, to be investigating radical militant protest groups at work while trying to find his radical militant daughter at home.

This film was very informative, but I'd be lying if I said it was also very exciting.  I fell asleep several times during the last half hour, so I think it took me twice as long to watch that last half hour as it should have.  Admittedly, I ran out of Diet Mountain Dew so I had to drink some grape soda instead with my movie, but it was the kind with real cane sugar, so I thought that might keep me awake, and it didn't.  Once the sugar wore off I ended up crashing hard, and I think that also fueled my VR stress dream that came about later in the morning.

UPDATE: I didn't even check the calendar on this one, but it turns out that the Watergate break-in took place in June - June 17, 1972.  That's 47 years ago as of YESTERDAY.  Damn, my viewing was off by just ONE DAY.  (If I hadn't added "Billy Elliot" to my chain, I could have hit it spot on...)  Well, let's just say that the story broke in the papers the next day, so really I'm celebrating the anniversary of people finding out about Watergate for the first time.  I need to start paying more attention to those "This Day in History" posts...
                             
Also starring Liam Neeson (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Diane Lane (last seen in "Tully"), Tony Goldwyn (last seen in "Bounce"), Josh Lucas (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Michael C. Hall (last seen in "Game Night"), Marton Csokas (last seen in "Loving"), Tom Sizemore (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Kate Walsh (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Maika Monroe (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Julian Morris, Wayne Pere (last seen in "Venom"), Wendi McLendon-Covey (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Ike Barinholtz (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Bruce Greenwood (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Noah Wyle (last seen in "W."), Eddie Marsan (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Stephen Michael Ayers, Darryl Cox, Ricky Wayne, Richard Molina, with archive footage of Dick Cavett (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Walter Cronkite (also carrying over from "First Man"), John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, Richard Nixon (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Pat Nixon (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Spiro Agnew.

RATING: 4 out of 10 calls from the phone booth outside the laundromat

First Man

Year 11, Day 168 - 6/17/19 - Movie #3,265

BEFORE: OK, I'm back in NYC, where things are still crazy but they're so crazy that I think they kind of loop back around and make sense again.  Took the Acela back from Boston and was in my office shortly after noon.  My boss was traveling back from France, so everything was still pretty quiet.

I'm getting very close to the documentary chain now, just a couple of days.  Today's film and tomorrow's will sort of provide the perfect lead-in to the topics of space flight and politics.  I'm working this one in here for that reason, plus also the fact that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission is coming up next month - perhaps HBO or Showtime will run this film then, they would if they were smart, anyway - but I want to get a jump on things, I don't want to wait.  That's my way of saying I couldn't find a way to schedule this one in July, and this was the best that I could do.

First he was Bad Brad in "Molly's Game", then he was Sheriff Johnson in "1922", and tonight he plays Joe Walker - this makes three appearances in a row for Brian D'Arcy James.

THE PLOT: A look at the life of astronaut Neil Armstrong and the legendary space mission that led him to become the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969.

AFTER: You can now add manned spaceflight to the list of things that I find endlessly fascinating - along with high-stakes poker, the organization of rock concert tours (like, who decides the order of the cities the band is going to play in? who buys all the plane tickets, or do they use a private plane?) and why a boy would suddenly give up boxing to dance ballet.  The problem is, I'm really far behind on my NASA history - you see, at the time of the Apollo missions, I was busy being born, and at the time of the moon landing, I was only 9 months old.  So I didn't appreciate all the news that was written about it at the time, and by the time I was old enough to get interested in things like the Space Shuttle or a possible manned mission to Mars, landing on the moon was old hat.  Been there, done that.

Last year, I started taking steps to rectify that - we did our second BBQ Crawl across the south, from Dallas to New Orleans, and we made sure to stop in Houston, home of the Johnson Space Center.  You know, as in "Houston, we have a problem..."?  Yeah, that one.  We took a bus tour of the city that ended with a trip to the old NASA center (we had to get off one bus and transfer to a different bus, for some reason...)  We saw uniform patches from all the different missions, a variety of capsules from different decades, a real plane that used to transport the space shuttle (with a FAKE shuttle mock-up perched on top, which made me wonder why they couldn't get a real one...) and various lunar modules and Apollo rocket pieces - I think the best stuff probably goes to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, I went there when I was a kid.

But the highlight for me was getting to sit in the "red room", the holding area for visitors that was used during the Apollo 11 launch and flight.  Through the glass we could see the banks of computers and telephones used by the control room technicians 50 years ago.  Now, it didn't look EXACTLY the way it did in 1969, because they were in the middle of a restoration project to make it look more like it did back in the day, in anticipation of all the crowds that would want to see it during the 50th anniversary year.  So we were there one year too early - that seems about how my vacation luck usually runs.  (My wife and I also visited the Panama Canal in 2013, when it had been in operation exactly 99 years...)  Now, if you think too much about it, you may realize that a restoration project is a lot of bunk, because you can't CHANGE the room to be what it used to be, then was no longer.  Anything you do to it is going to get it further away from what it was in 1969, or even if you can get it to look exactly the same as it once did, now you're talking about fakery, you're just making a mock-up.  The only way to get the room to BE exactly the way it was would be to NOT CHANGE IT in the first place.  Right after the Apollo 11 mission, they should have hermetically sealed the room and never changed one computer or moved one broken pencil, and kept it just the way it was in July 1969.  What's next, are you going to re-build the log cabin that Abe Lincoln was born in, with modern materials, and tell me that it's exactly the same as it was in 1809?  Or tear down all the buildings in San Antonio around the Alamo so people can get a better idea about how big that mission really was?  Come on, don't restore it, don't fuck with it, just try to keep it intact as best you can.  Hey, maybe I was among the last few people to see Mission Control before they turned it into just a mock-up of fake props that kind of look the way that we think it used to look...

Anyway, my point is that I've got a lot to learn about the Gemini and Apollo missions, including which astronauts went on which missions.  I know cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the the first man in space, and John Glenn was the first American in orbit, and obviously Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins went to the moon as part of Apollo 11 - but beyond that my knowledge gets a little foggy, I'll admit.  I might have become more of a NASA geek if I hadn't gotten distracted by "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" and found the fiction more appealing than the facts.  So now I'm trying to make up for lost time - obviously I've seen "The Right Stuff" and then "Hidden Figures" about two years ago, but those are only going to get me so far.  So let the learning begin.

First there was Project Mercury - this was the first U.S. spaceflight program, and there were 7 astronaut candidates - using the Mercury-Redstone rockets for sub-orbital flights, and the Mercury-Atlas rockets for orbital ones.  Seven Mercury astronauts - M. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Donald "Deke" Slayton.  Ah, how did I forget that Alan Shepard was the first American in space, and John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth, I guess that's an important distinction.  Project Mercury lasted from 1959 to 1963, and was replaced by Project Gemini, 1961-1966, called that because of the two-man crews.  Deke Slayton was grounded but was put in charge of the astronaut program, and four men carried over from Mercury: Shepard, Cooper, Grissom and Schirra.  This is where Neil Armstrong entered the picture, along with Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Ed White, Michael Collins, and several others.  How am I doing so far?  Highlights of the Gemini program included the first U.S. space walk (Gemini 4), the first space rendezvous and docking, and set notable endurance records for the astronauts.

Since this film follows Neil Armstrong, mostly, it picks up with Gemini missions and leads into Apollo missions (1966-1972).  This was where they determined that the best way to get to the moon was with a multi-stage rocket - so that's one rocket to get the craft out of Earth's orbit, and then a smaller rocket inside to dock with the Lunar Exploration Module and get that to the moon, then the small rocket would stay orbiting around the moon while the LEM would land on the surface.  Inside the LEM was an even SMALLER rocket that would get the astronauts off the moon and back to the slightly larger rocket to take them back to Earth.  I can't help but notice the irony that while the U.S. was in the Space Race with Russia, we beat them by using technology that simulated something very Russian, namely nesting dolls, or "Matryoshka".

Apollo 1, of course, was a terrible tragedy - it never launched, and a fire prior to scheduled take-off killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.  (Sorry, SPOILER ALERT...) The next few Apollo missions were unmanned, but then, god DAMN IT, think of the BALLS it took to be an crewman for Apollo 7, after what happened with Apollo 1.  And then Apollo 8 flew to the moon and did not land, just orbited it and came home - I'm not sure I knew that before, that takes cojones too.  But we're supposed to be focusing on Neil Armstrong here, the "First Man" to walk on the moon's surface.  (You can't even say "first man to land on the moon", or Buzz Aldrin will come to your house and punch you in the face.)

The film follows Armstrong through the Gemini selection process - though everyone in this film pronounces it "Gem-in-EE", which just seems wrong.  I always said "Gem-in-EYE", am I way off base here?  Was this film made in Canada or something, where they pronounce words differently?  What the hell?  You ask someone what their astrological sign is, nobody says, "Oh, I'm a Geminee." Especially if they're really a Sagitarri-OOS.  Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, unless someone can prove to me that everyone in the 1960's said "gem-in-ee", which I highly doubt.  This was very distracting, so points off for that.  It made everyone at NASA sound dumb, which felt weird, because usually "rocket scientist" is sort of the benchmark for "smart", like if you want to call somebody stupid, you'd say, "Well, he's not exactly a rocket scientist..."  Even if they did all mispronounce this word, which I doubt, I would still think a filmmaker should correct this.  But instead we move on, to where Armstrong and the other astronauts get spun around on that 3-axis machine, and they all puke their guts out, then it's on to physics class.

I also don't understand why, during the selection process, Armstrong here said "yes" to another candidate who asked if he was a civilian.  Neil Armstrong had a military background, who flew bombing and reconnaissance missions in the Korean War.  After that, he was an ensign in the Navy Reserve.  That doesn't sound like a civilian to me, so NITPICK POINT #2.  OK, so after the Navy he went to college, played in the marching band, joined a frat and wrote some musicals, I still don't think he'd identify himself as a "civilian", considering his military background, which is why NASA would be interested in him in the first place.

I'd love to learn more about his time as a test pilot, but "First Man" instead skips over all that, and shows us his home life with a wife and two kids, only his daughter has been diagnosed with a brain tumor.  It's a dark time, for sure, but I don't really see how that all factors in to his spaceflight career, unless it's there to explain why Armstrong is distant and detached from his sons later on.  Or perhaps why he threw himself so hard into astronaut training, because he couldn't handle the sorrow in his personal life?  But then maybe this made him exactly the type of emotionless risk-taker that NASA needed for their program?  It's a little nebulous here, and I feel like maybe I'm trying too hard to connect the dots of Armstrong's life.

Armstrong was in the back-up crew for Gemini 5, and then flew in Gemini 8, and huh, even Wikipedia says that this mission made him the "first American civilian in space".  Again, since he was ex-military I'm not sure that this is the right terminology, as a point of order.  But whatever.  Gemini 8 was the first planned mission where the space module would dock with another entity, the Agena target vehicle.  But at some point in the mission the combined Gemini-Agena spacecraft began to spin out of control, and this continued even after Gemini disengaged from the Agena.  But Armstrong regained control of the vessel, stopped the roll and then engaged the Reentry Control System.  Protocol dictated that the mission would be cut short, so there were mission objectives not reached, but after an investigation, the mission was not deemed a failure, because of the lessons learned.

Eventually, the film gets to what we came for - Apollo 11.  The moon landing, in which, as the movie points out, the capsule had to travel very very very very far - so far that on the blackboard that showed a diagram of the Earth as a small circle surrounded by Russian satellites, NASA wanted to leapfrog so far over the Russians that they'd be on the next blackboard - or probably the blackboard in the next room.

Now, some things the movie got wrong - for one, there was no transmission delay in the conversations between the astronauts and Mission Control.  But no doubt this was done to make the movie easier for audiences to watch.  In a similar fashion, the trip from Earth to the moon should have taken days, right?  And that's a whole lot of nothing, so imagine how boring a film depicting this in real time would be.  Also, imagine how tedious the trip to Mars is going to be for some poor sucker some day soon.  (How do you find the right person who wouldn't go all looney-tunes inside a floating coffin surrounded by an infinite amount of nothing for over a month?).

One other thing the film got wrong - when the Apollo 11 astronauts look up from their launch, the moon is directly above, as if the rocket is aimed right at it.  Again, this seems like a truncation or an over-simplification.  The thing about space travel is that you don't aim your rocket at where your destination IS, you have to aim it at the place where it's going to be when you get close to it.  Because if you shoot your rocket at the moon, it takes so long to get there that you'll find it's moved since you started.  There's another little tip for whoever flies to Mars someday.

I guess there was some controversy about not showing the astronauts planting the U.S. flag - again, this leads me to think this film was made by Canadians or somebody who would have an interest in leaving that out, because they want everyone to think the moon belongs to everyone on Earth.  Ha ha, no way suckers, USA got there first and we left TRASH there, so it's totally ours.  We also left trash in orbit (those discarded rocket stages) and when we get to other planets, we'll leave our trash there too.  Heck, maybe we should be launching all of our trash into space, so we can claim the whole galaxy for Amurica.

Now, as for Armstrong's infamous first words on the moon - we should all know by now that he meant to say "One small step for A man..." and he either left the "A" out, or it wasn't transmitted, so the resulting phrase is a conundrum - because "man" without that as a lead-in is a synonym for "mankind", so thus he said that one small step for mankind is also a giant leap for mankind.  Which is more contradictory, and somewhat less poetic.  My theory, after viewing this film, is that there was a problem with the lower part of the ladder reaching the moon's surface, so I think that he was maybe warning Buzz Aldrin that on his way out of the capsule, he'd have to take one small step, followed by a giant leap over the busted part of the ladder.  You see how that's possible, right?

Finally, I wonder if there was any irony felt when they were making this film in a movie studio re-creation of the moon's surface, when some people still believe that's what really happened in the first place.  But you watch and decide with an open mind.

Remember, this was ALMOST my Father's Day film, I had it planned for that day, before shifting things down one, and allowing "1922" to land there.  There's so much here about how Armstrong was a distant father, concentrating on his (admittedly important) job as an astronaut.  Since most fathers probably have to find that difficult balance between work and family, I could have worked with this a Father's Day film - so let's assume that I meant to keep the theme going for an extra day.

Also starring Ryan Gosling (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Claire Foy (last seen in "Season of the Witch"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), Kyle Chandler (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "Gold"), Gavin Warren, Pablo Schreiber (last seen in "Nights in Rodanthe", Christopher Abbott (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Patrick Fugit (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Vice"), Cory Michael Smith (last seen in "Carol"), J.D. Evermore (last seen in "The Paperboy"), John David Whalen, Ethan Embry (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Skyler Bible, Ben Owen, Olivia Hamilton (last seen in "La La Land"), Kris Swanberg, Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Shawn Eric Jones, William Gregory Lee, Steve Coulter (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Leon Bridges (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Choppy Guillotte, Brady Smith, Matthew Glave, Luke Winters, Connor Blodgett, with archive footage of John F. Kennedy (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and the voices of Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Eric Sevareid.

RATING: 6 out of 10 warning lights during descent

1922

Year 11, Day 167 - 6/16/19 - Movie #3,264

BEFORE: Wrapping up my weekend in Massachusetts, taking my parents out to dinner tonight.  Driving around my old home town is always weird, because there's a new mix of restaurants and stores, very few of the places I used to go to as a teen are still around - the local ice cream store is still there, that hopefully will never go away, but the best restaurants from my childhood memories are all gone.  In the same way, my parents' house is filled with a weird mix of things, like toys and games from my childhood, furniture from my grandmother's house, stuff left behind by people who've stayed there over the years, etc.  My cousin's living in my old bedroom, so I had to sleep in my sister's old room, but at least the mattress there was very firm, my back appreciated that.  But things are just all sort of crazy-backwards there now, it's not like when I was a teenager at all.

Brian D'Arcy James carries over from "Molly's Game" - and he'll be here for four films total, so I think he's kind of like my Caleb Landry Jones for 2019, in that I'd never heard of him before, but once I know who he is, he seems to be everywhere, and I absolutely need to use him as a link to make my chain progress the way I want.

THE PLOT: A simple yet proud farmer in the year 1922 conspires to murder his wife for financial gain, convincing his teenage son to assist - but their actions have unintended consequences.

AFTER: I got a bit excited when I read the plotline for this film, because in its own twisted, horror-based way, it seemed like it would tie in with Father's Day well.  In that creepy, Stephen King sort of way, I hoped - and that turned out to be the case.  If I'm going to pull off a "perfect year" in 2019, that means I've got to relax my own rules on the genres a little bit - and horror films have spilled out of October somewhat, and then other genres seems to want to spill INTO October - I'm putting one superhero film there (Dark Phoenix) and several animated films, and even one film about golf.  Whatever helps maintain the chain and doesn't allow it to be broken.

So, in that same spirit, I'm allowing a bit of the horror genre to overlap or spill into Father's Day.  Primarily, this is a film about a man that kills his wife, but he does that with the help of his own son - yes, he uses his influence as a father to turn his son against his own mother, and that maybe gives us an idea about how families were different back in the early part of the 20th century, when men were in the power position, women had fewer rights and had only had the right to vote for a very short time.  Divorce was stigmatized, I mean it existed but who wanted that kind of scandal in their history, and courts might be more likely to side with the father where parental rights were concerned, unless that child was still so young that it needed constant care from the mother.

But the plot has to sort bend itself over backwards to create a situation where spousal murder is considered the only option.  Of course it wasn't, this couple could have parted ways more amicably, but it's so complicated, and neither side wants to budge.  Nebraska farmer Wilfred James owns 80 acres of land where he farms corn, and then his wife Arlette inherits another 100 adjoining acres from her father.  He wants to stay and double their output of corn, but she wants to sell both plots and start a new life in the big city, Omaha.  Since they can't agree it looks like divorce is imminent, only she wants to take their son with her to the city, and this would both reduce the manpower on the farm AND take him away from his new girlfriend, who lives down the road on the next farm.  So while in more modern times other options would be possible - like selling the 100 acres to an interested client to fund her dress shop and then maybe a trial separation, that way if her dress shop failed or she found that she really missed her husband and/or farm life, she could move back.

But in 1922, in this circumstance, to this man, under stress to come up with a hasty solution, murder seemed like the best way out.  But that's just the start of the story.  How should one hide a body, and make it look like she left under her own power?  What's involved in covering up the crime, and what happens when the local sheriff (played by Brian D'Arcy James) comes around making an inquiry?  And then, over time, can the father and son move forward, knowing what they've done, and not let any information about their crime slip out?  How do you look your father (or son) in the eye when you know, deep down, what he's capable of?

Then there are other unexpected consquences that arise - which might lead one to conclude that hiding a crime is much harder than committing the crime, or that perhaps the family is now cursed, or perhaps that's just a matter of interpretation, and the regular hardships of farm life are amplified by the farmer's guilt, so perhaps his bad luck only seems supernatural.  But the latter part of this film plays out sort of like the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Tell-Tale Heart" - hey, if you're going to steal plot points, steal from the best...  In that Poe story, a murderer's guilty conscience made him imagine that he could hear his victim's heart beating through the floorboards, which was of course impossible, but a metaphor with that kind of American Gothic gore-based creepy 19th century stuff.

I thought that every Stephen King story was set in the same county in Maine, so it's strange to see one set on a Nebraska farm.  But it turns out a farmhouse is pretty creepy during the dark days of winter, especially when a farmer with a guilty conscience is troubled by images of his dead wife.  Maybe it's a side effect of that infected bite he got from a rat, who's to say?  But the rats were pretty creepy, too.

This is the second Stephen King-based film I've watched this year, the first was "Gerald's Game".  I was planning on getting to a third when "It: Chapter Two" comes out, but now I think that's one of the films I'll need to drop this year, in order to make the count come out right.  Come to think of it, I need to put off "The Dark Tower" this year also - I could have linked to it via Idris Elba right after "Molly's Game", but I couldn't see a way back to my planned chain from there.  So two this year, then maybe two more next year.

Also starring Thomas Jane (last seen in "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster"), Molly Parker (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Dylan Schmid, Kaitlyn Bernard, Neal McDonough (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Tanya Champoux, Bob Frazer, Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Patrick Keating.

RATING: 5 out of 10 dresses left behind in the closet