BEFORE: I suppose I'm two days late in getting to a proper April Fool's film, though I didn't think of that connection until just now. We've all heard the conspiracy theories about how the moon landing was faked, though I didn't know about Stanley Kubrick's connection to that urban legend until just last year. (Supposedly, the clues are all there in "The Shining", plus "2001: A Space Odyssey".) This film uses that story about Kubrick working for the CIA as a jumping-off point.
James Cosmo carries over from "Ben-Hur", where he played the slave-master aboard the Roman ship.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Room 237" (Movie #2,724)
THE PLOT: After failing to locate the legendary Stanley Kubrick, an unstable CIA agent must instead team up with a seedy rock-band manager to develop the biggest con of all time - staging the moon landing.
AFTER: There's a reason why urban legends and conspiracy theories persist, and are difficult to dispel - it's because they sound likely, especially with everything else that's true and happening in the world, but because of the fact that they're NOT true, they're nearly impossible to disprove. They often FEEL true because they tend to sound like other news stories, or the way that we think the world works, or fails to work, and you just can't disprove a negative. (The Bible works along the same lines, just try to come up with some evidence that Noah didn't build an ark, or Jesus didn't rise from the tomb three days after the crucifixion. Good luck with that.)
With everything we know about the CIA, for example, and all the underhanded things they've done over the years, faking the moon landing seems pretty tame by comparison - but it's right in line with the Nixon administration, Watergate, Vietnam, the Cold War, etc. The U.S. government probably felt they were competing with the Russians to get to the moon first, so it's easy to assume it was a "win at all costs" scenario, with good old American patriotism on the line.
Enter Stanley Kubrick, who was a bit eccentric, to say the least, and not just a filmmaker but also an "auteur", who had made a very realistic-looking film about outer space, in which the U.S. had not only landed on the moon but also had established a base there, and was (or would be, in the far-off future year of 2001) launching spacecraft from there to go and explore an object floating around Jupiter. And this film was released in 1968, the year BEFORE the real moon landing. So it stands to reason that somewhere, in a movie studio, there was a fake moonscape, models of landing craft, things that theoretically could be used again if someone WERE inclined to pass off a fake moon landing film as a real one.
There was a mockumentary that came out in 2002 that really pushed this idea that Kubrick filmed some fake footage for NASA, perhaps just in case the Apollo 11 astronauts didn't make it to the moon, so they'd have something to run on TV no matter what.
"Moonwalkers" is filled with tributes to Kubrick, or at least references to his films. One main character is named "Tom Kidman", a mash-up of the names of the two lead actors in "Eyes Wide Shut". Another character is made to resemble a general from "Dr. Strangelove", and Kidman beats up someone to the classical piece "The Thieving Magpie" by Rossini, which of course is a direct reference to "A Clockwork Orange". And we also hear the famous "Also Sprach Zarathustra" music that introduced the moonlith in "2001". Through this, of course, we realize that perhaps nothing in this film is meant to be taken seriously - duh, it is a comedy.
And it's one that also manages to poke fun at failing rock bands, too-artsy film directors, hippies and the "free love" movement, drugs, NASA, the CIA, British gangsters, government incompetence, and conspiracy theories in general. If the moon landings were fake, there would have been around 400,000 people who were in on the conspiracy, for a period of ten years of the Apollo Project, at the very least. And NONE of those people have come forward since, with tangible proof that fakery was involved? That itself seems a lot harder to believe than sending three astronauts to the moon and back.
After watching this film, my mind created a mash-up dream that also incorporated elements of "Ben-Hur", "Jesus Christ Superstar" and the recent sexual abuse allegations against "Ren & Stimpy" animator John Kricfalusi, since that new scandal broke just the other day. I read the whole BuzzFeed article about John K., since my animator boss co-hosted some screenings in Chicago with him about a decade ago.
In my dream, I was taking place in sort of a heist movie, I was one of several teenagers pulling off this scenario where were were trying to steal something from another teen's clubhouse, and then when the job was done, the whole thing turned into a movie that was being filmed, and I was one of the actors, and the movie was being made for the Disney Channel, or Nickelodeon or something. What was weird was that I was really the age I am now, 49, but playing a teen role. The other actors wanted to hang out and party after the filming was over, but I declined, because how would that look, a 49-year-old man partying with a bunch of teenagers, I could really get into trouble for that. So I left them behind and walked away from the shoot, and the whole movie was being filmed in a department store (my boss told a story last week in front of an audience about a Kanye West video that was shot by Michel Gondry at Macy's in NY, after hours.)
So I was leaving the department store, but then my boss showed up with his friend, a songwriter he's worked with often, and he was going to help her return a piece of luggage she had bought. But as I was talking to him a bunch of policemen or agents surrounded him and put him in handcuffs, and originally I thought it was because he had written a blog post in support of John Kricfalusi, but the people around me seemed to think there was another reason he was being arrested, only nobody would tell me because their kids were within earshot. So I was standing there defending my boss against some kind of allegations that I didn't understand. Again, this was a stress dream based on news reports about another animator, mashed up with details from the last few films that I watched.
EDIT: I just found out via Facebook that TODAY is the 50th anniversary of the U.S. release of Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" - April 3, 1968. I swear, I had no idea this was the case when I selected this film for viewing today. Just one of those eerie little coincidences - or is it a vast conspiracy?
Also starring Rupert Grint (last seen in "CBGB"), Ron Perlman (last heard in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Robert Sheehan (last seen in "Season of the Witch"), Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "Burnt"), Eric Lampaert, Kevin Bishop (last seen in "Muppet Treasure Island"), Tom Audenaert, Erika Sainte, Jay Benedict, Kerry Shale (last seen in "102 Dalmatians"), John Flanders, Joe Sheridan (last seen in "The Man in the Iron Mask") Andrew Blumenthal,
RATING: 6 out of 10 cosmic jellyfish
No comments:
Post a Comment