BEFORE: Glen Powell carries over from "Top Gun: Maverick". He also played John Glenn in "Hidden Figures", and of course a Navy pilot in yesterday's film. Here he plays a NASA guy, so he's either been typecast or he's just drawn to roles that involve aviation or aerospace, maybe?
THE PLOT: A coming-of-age story set in the suburbs of Houston, Texas in the summer of 1969, centered around the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.
AFTER: We are all the sum of our experiences, but a funny thing happens as we get older, we often remember things differently - and "differently" in this case means "incorrectly". That's what I think is going on here, in this obviously autobiographical film by Richard Linklater, in which a kid looks back on the year 1969, and he remembers being approached during a game of kickball by two well-dressed agents from NASA, and is told that somehow, the measurements for the Apollo 11 lunar capsule were off, and they made it too small, so they need a kid-sized astronaut to help test it. OK, that would never happen, because thousands of people worked on the Apollo program and after the deaths of three Apollo astronauts on the launch platform, you would think they would be double- and triple-checking every little thing to ensure there were no more mistakes. So, umm, what's really going on here?
My guess is that as a kid, Linklater saw so much footage on TV of the astronauts training that he incorporated it into his memories, then when he watched the first moon landing in July 1969, he was tired from a day at the amusement park, and watched it in a semi-conscious state, and his dreams took over from there, and he worked himself right into the story. If that dream was powerful, it may have taken over for his real memories, and supplanted them - let's face it, any kid's real life couldn't possibly compare with the imagined thrill of being an astronaut in the space program. I have a vague memory myself of watching the first moon landing, but I was under one year old, so that couldn't possibly be right - perhaps I watched the 2nd or 3rd moon landing when I was slightly older and got my mental wires crossed. Memory is unreliable, that's the point. Anyway, any kid who's been to space camp can probably tell you that they don't put kids through the same rigorous training as the adult astronauts, I bet they don't spin them around in that giant device to create g-forces or test their equilibrium or whatever that does.
But since Linklater was born in Houston, and maybe his father did have an office job at NASA, I'll grant that it's possible, and that the admiration of the Gemini and then Apollo astronauts was perhaps more pervasive there than in other parts of the country. But Linklater is primarily concerned with pop culture, and that goes beyond the NASA fandom and most of the film is filled with other tales from his fourth-grade childhood, from kickball infractions to what board games he played with his siblings, to a list of every TV show that was popular at the time. The lead character hear, Stan, is also obsessed with the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" and also films like "Destination Moon" and "Countdown", there's kind of no way that kid doesn't grow up to become a filmmaker, if not an astronaut.
But so many of these stories fall into the "Who cares?" category - who cares which of Linklater's siblings listened to which albums, one was a Beatles fan, I hear there were a lot of those back then. And one time they saw the teen who played the Abominable Snowman at an amusement park with his costume head off, smoking a cigarette. So what? And the family next door had more kids, and were forced to sit out on the lawn while their mother cleaned the house. How is this a big deal? There was some kind of game the kids in his family played where they pretended to be statues of different things - man, it's so annoying that this story doesn't go anywhere or lead to anything that connects it to the bigger picture.
Some things are somewhat universal, of course - making and eating crappy school bagged lunches. Seeing your father find your brother's hidden stack of Playboy magazines and throwing them out. Going to an amusement park with your siblings and figuring out how to "game" the system by racing to the most popular ride first, and getting two or three rides in before the crowd shows up. But the importance of these moments, of course, depends on YOUR experiences, and whether you grew up in a large family or not. These resonate with me because of the time my parents found MY stack of Playboys, and because of the time we went to Disney World in Florida and sat in the hotel with a map of the park the night before and we figured out the quickest route to Space Mountain.
But so many other things - the change in the kickball rules, the weird punishments that teachers gave out, the over-chlorinated pool - it all falls into the "Who gives a crap?" category for me. Maybe you'll find understanding or nostalgia in different parts of the film that I did. But I have to also consider that the filmmaker might be mis-remembering things here. That time that the popsicles were "made wrong" and they stuck to their tongues? Umm, no, that's probably just because they were super-cold, there wasn't anything chemically wrong with them. Or maybe the kids just didn't know the right way to eat a popsicle? Look, if it's really cold, your tongue is going to stick to it, just like a metal pole.
And the story about riding bicycles behind the DDT truck as it sprayed the trees to stop mosquitoes? I don't really believe it, because then there would be a bunch of dead kids and a big scandal. Although, right after this film I watched the latest Wanda Sykes stand-up special on Netflix, and I have to admit that she told a very similar story from HER childhood. (EDIT: I looked it up, apparently in the 1950's and 1960's it was common in parts of the U.S. for DDT to be sprayed by a truck and for kids to run or bike after the truck, breathing in the insecticide. Clearly, it was a different time, before the substance was banned in the U.S. in 1972. Now the public opinion is still split, with some people saying that cancer and Parkinson's are more prevalent in people who chased the trucks, and others saying that there was no harm done to kids, and we should bring DDT back. I think I'm in the first camp, because riding a bike in a cloud of poison just does not sound like a great idea, it's so typical for American municipal government to act first and worry about the consequences later - like years later they sprayed malathion in New York to fight mosquitoes, and the chemical run-off went into Long Island Sound and killed off the majority of the lobster industry there, because mosquitoes and lobsters are closely related as species can be. Then there was the time that NYC had a push to plant thousands of trees around town, without first checking to see if the trees were male or female (yes, that's a thing) and as a result, the amount of pollen in the city skyrocketed. There appears now to be just as much debate over DDT as there was over COVID statistics, masks, vaccinations and such. Please, somebody show me some actual statistics about this, but you have to figure with today's overprotective helicopter parents, there would
And why does anyone remember that the Monkees appeared on the Johnny Cash show, only it wasn't all four band members, and Peter Tork was missing? That's a very specific thing to focus on, but ultimately this plot point is like every other one, it goes absolutely nowhere. So then, why mention it at all? I was a Monkees fan and I always knew that while he might have been the most musically talented in the group, personality-wise, he brought very little to the table. Sorry, but it's true. Most everyone was a Davy fan or a Mickey fan, hardly anybody was a Peter fan. But come on, even the biggest Monkees fans knew at the time that they weren't a real group, they didn't write their own songs or play their own instruments on the records, like the Beach Boys they only had enough musical ability to pretend to play music in concert, they were actors first and musicians second.
I work for a filmmaker who made an animated feature about his high-school years, and one day I noticed there was a problem with the script, that there was a football game scene, followed by a prom sequence. Then there was a "passing of time" montage that went through winter, spring and summer, and back to fall. I approached him one day and told him that the timeline was incorrect, because proms take place in May, near the end of the school year. But he insisted that proms take place in fall, and that's when I realized he was confusing the prom with homecoming, which traditionally takes place near a school's bigger football games in the fall. Jeez, I'm not even a sports guy, and I know this - but he wouldn't budge, he told me HIS prom took place in fall and that's when all proms take place. I begged him to confirm this online, or with anybody else who went to high school, but he wouldn't do that, so the mistake is still in the film. It just goes to show you that people are going to remember their youth the way they want to, and they don't want to hear anyone tell them it didn't happen that way, or it wasn't important. It was important TO THEM, and I guess that's what matters, even if it never did happen. Maybe in Oregon they do have proms in October, but I'm guessing they don't.
There are a few flashes of brilliance here - for example, the children in class counting down before the launch of Apollo 11 is mirrored in the neighborhood party on New Year's Eve. Wow, as a society we just love counting down from 10 to zero, don't we? But then this is immediately followed by a non sequitur about the local pyromaniac graduating from launching rockets to using a mortar pipe to launch a flaming tennis ball - but the ball, and the story, like most of the small stories here, never connects to the big picture, is never given any relevance, and ultimately goes nowhere. Same goes for jell-o molds, pinball machines, chasing down foul balls, it's all very Seinfeldian how much there is here, and how it all fails to add up to anything.
Everything is just another random Linklater memory that serves no larger purpose, and the movie is filled with them. The anticipation of the moon landing itself takes so long that by the time Armstrong and Aldrin leave the capsule, it's very nearly a non-event, and the kids in the family can barely stay awake. I have to say, I understand that feeling very well.
NITPICK POINTS #234, 235 and 236 - Even if after watching the film you still maybe think that it suggests that a kid WOULD be sent by NASA to the moon, which they just WOULD NOT do, for a whole host of liability and feasability reasons, bear in mind that it took the Apollo 11 three days to get there, and three days to travel back. How could you possibly expect a 10-year-old kid to spend three days in a tiny capsule, with nobody to talk to, nothing to read, nothing to do. Plus, by himself? Armstrong and Aldrin needed Mike Collins in the other stage of the rocket to keep orbiting the moon, and link up with the part of the lunar module that took off from the moon. Stan is shown doing this all by himself, with nobody manning the other part of the spacecraft to help him get home? This just wouldn't WORK, it violates the whole Apollo 11 plan - so even if it WERE possible, which it's NOT, it wouldn't BE possible. So I shouldn't even need to point this out, but this part of the film was pure fantasy.
Also starring the voices of Milo Coy, Jack Black (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Zachary Levi (last seen in "The Mauritanian"), Josh Wiggins (last seen in "I Used to Go Here"), Lee Eddy, Bill Wise (last seen in "Results"), Natalie L'Amoureaux, Jessica Brynn Cohen, Sam Chipman, Danielle Guilbot, Larry Jack Dotson, Mona Lee Fultz (last seen in "Bernie"), Jennifer Griffin (last seen in "Boyhood"), Holt Boggs, Reese Armstrong, Natalie Joy, Chris Olson (last seen in "Rudy"), Brian Villalobos, Chris Zurcher, David DeLao (last seen in "The Marksman"), Athena Wintle, Xavier Patterson, Nick Stevenson, Avery Joy Davis,
with archive footage or voices of Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong (last seen in "A Walk on the Moon"), Johnny Cash (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Arthur C. Clarke, Mike Collins, Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Micky Dolenz (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Davy Jones, Janis Joplin (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Joni Mitchell (ditto), Michael Nesmith, Richard Nixon (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Eric Sevareid.
RATING: 6 out of 10 free one-scoop cones at Baskin-Robbins (you can't hate on someone for liking vanilla, it's simultaneously the most boring flavor and the most popular, I think, go figure.)
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