THE LADY IN THE FAKE

In theaters this weekend:

Fly Me to the Moon--Scarlett Johansson plays a Madison Avenue marketing hustler brought to NASA in Florida in the late '60s to help re-sell the Apollo moon mission to the public, and thus to an increasingly reticent and tight-pursed Congress. Soon the astronauts are sporting Omega watches in print ads, and Tang drink mix is being touted as the beverage of space travelers.

Those of us who go back that far may remember this advertising blitz; I certainly consumed unhealthy quantities of Tang around that time--any quantity was probably unhealthy--because of its supposed outer space connections. But in this lavish period romcom, it's the highly fictitious set-up for the meet-cute between Johansson and Channing Tatum, as a serious-minded NASA launch director.

He falls for her at first sight, then when he learns who she is he's outraged at her interference. And it truly is outrageous; she even hires actors to play some of the less charismatic or more camera-shy NASA staffers in TV interviews, Tatum included. But of course, over time his resistance is worn down by her adorableness.

Johansson is pretty adorable, at that. She wears the chic '60s outfits like she was born for them, and her purse-lipped, mischievous little smirk is winning as always. Tatum is in his comfort zone here, too; likably bland and dim and stalwart. The stars have a comfortable romantic rapport, and they're well supported by a roster of character players, like Woody Harrelson as the jovial mystery man who hires Johansson, Jim Rash as a prima donna commercial director and Ray Romano as Tatum's loyal sidekick. There's also a gorgeous black cat.

Between the cast, the vintage atmosphere and retro styles and settings, and a terrific soundtrack, the movie, directed by Greg Berlanti (of Love, Simon) from a script by Rose Gilroy, would be ludicrous and fluffy but inoffensive enough, even charming. But in the middle of this buffoonish burlesque of NASA history, there are attempts to generate genuine drama and poignancy over the earlier tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967 that strike a sour note.

Worse yet, in the severely overlong second half, the plot goes off the rails. Harrelson's government spook makes Johansson stage, you guessed it, a fake moon landing, as a contingency in case the real one fails. She reluctantly goes along with this, unbeknownst to Tatum, as the real landing is taking place, even though she feels like she's betraying him.

This extended finale is clumsily staged, but that's not what's offensive about it. The "Fake Moon Landing" narrative is one of the quintessential paranoid American folk legends, likely arising, I've always suspected, among the many people who insisted that the moon landing was a ridiculous folly and would never succeed--arising, like so much else in our toxic national discourse, from the common American inability to admit it when we're wrong. Fly Me to the Moon means it all facetiously, of course, but this doesn't strike me as the most auspicious time in our country's history to lend even that much credence to a conspiracy theory.

OPPY DAYS

Opening in theaters this weekend; on Prime Video November 23...

Robots have been a mainstay in movies for most of the past century, and one of the recurrent themes of such tales is the question of whether they are conscious entities, with personality and agency. Good Night Oppy is the first film I know of on this subject that isn't science fiction.

This documentary chronicles the careers of Opportunity and Spirit, two robotic Mars Rovers launched by NASA in 2003 to explore the Martian surface in search of evidence that there was once water, and thus possibly life, on the Red Planet. The project followed a couple of embarrassing and expensive NASA failures, the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998, both of which were ignominiously lost, in one mortifying case through human error caused by confusion between American measurement and the metric system.

Spirit and Opportunity, by contrast, were overachievers. Brilliantly designed and engineered, both remained operational for many years longer than their projected mission duration of 90 "sols" (Martian days) and added greatly to human understanding of Martian geology and natural history.

But impressive and interesting as their discoveries were, this isn't really what Good Night Oppy is about. The dramatic core of the film is about the degree to which the scientists and engineers who built the robots, and who supervised their activities from the Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, anthropomorphized their creations, attributed personalities to them, worried and fretted about them and ultimately mourned them.

Directed by Ryan White and gravely narrated by Angela Bassett, the film alternates convincing simulations of the endearing robots on the Martian surface, created at Industrial Light & Magic, with actual footage of their controllers monitoring and guiding them back at JPL. We watch the beautiful nerds age with them, frowning at their struggles and grinning at their triumphs like soccer moms.

One of the designers notes that the robot he worked on was "just a box of wires" but admits that she took on a human persona for him. Another notes that the supposedly identical rovers had distinct personalities; that Spirit was "troublesome" while Opportunity was "Little Miss Perfect." One of the project leaders says that to compare their relationship to parenting would be to "trivialize parenthood," but there's no doubt that the relationship these people feel toward Spirit and "Oppy" is parental.

There was something highly satisfying about watching a bunch of top-flight scientific minds enter matter-of-factly into thoroughly sentimental projection. After a while it's hard not to wonder if it is projection, or perhaps a sensitivity to the beginnings of a rudimentary sentience; to wonder if, at some level, human beings are not ourselves just boxes of wires that somehow attained self-awareness.

It should be noted that the filmmakers do nothing to discourage this idea; they don't explain, for instance, that the rather Harold-Pinter-ish plainsong sentences from the rovers were human translations of transmitted data, not verbatim statements. Even so, the effect of the film was, for me, not only thought-provoking but deeply emotional.

The soundtrack is also worth mentioning; it draws on the wake-up songs that were played at Mission Control at the beginning of the robot's shifts. Selections range from "Roam" by the B-52s to "S.O.S." by ABBA, and they all seem to take on deeper meanings in context. It would make a pretty good mix-tape album.

VERNE NOTICE

The weekend of July 20 marks the 50^th anniversary of the moon landing. I decided to celebrate by writing, directing and acting in a one-hour radio play, Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (drawing on both Verne's 1865 FTETTM and its 1870 sequel Round the Moon). It's scheduled to air at 7 p.m. (Phoenix time) Saturday, July 20, and again at 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 24, on Sun Sounds of Arizona; you can listen in at sunsounds.org.

Check out my Phoenix Magazine online article about the production.

Here I am in great-director mode during the recording:

 And here's a better angle on me:

 

This was a passion project for me. I was seven years old that week in 1969 when the Eagle, the lunar module of Apollo 11, touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, and I remember it, and the weeks and months leading up to it, with a vividness matched by only a few of my other early childhood memories.

I remember the gathering of relatives at our rural house, and one of my cousins saying, quite gratuitously, “There’s his foot comin’ down,” as we watched Neil Armstrong, in fuzzy black-and-white, take his legendary one small step. Looking back, it seems like a corny, Norman Rockwell scene, but I also remember going outside shortly thereafter, into the cool, clear Pennsylvania night, and looking up at the moon, as if I’d see the guys waving down at me from above.

One of my sisters, however, has these memories beat; she remembers watching the landing at the Newport Folk Festival, on a TV placed on the stage where both the audience and the performers could keep an eye on it!

The feverish excitement that arose during the early years of the Apollo program turned countless people into space geeks, and I was certainly one of the most insufferable of them, wearying teachers, family members and even friends my own age with space chatter to the exclusion of almost everything else (now I'm doing it again, at the age of  57!). As it happened, the mother of one of my brothers-in-law worked for a NASA contractor in D.C., so she had a connection; shortly after the safe return of the astronauts she somehow arranged for me to be sent an Apollo 11 press kit, complete with glossy prints of the iconic photos taken by Armstrong on that first lunar excursion. I still have them.

Several years ago I had my moon pics appraised when Antiques Roadshow came to the Valley, and was told that they’re fairly common, having been sent to thousands of schoolteachers at the time, and only worth about $20 as a collector’s item. You can well imagine, however, that in second grade I felt like I had been entrusted with high-level government documents, and they made me the undisputed King of Show-and-Tell.

Anyway, Happy Moon Landing Day tomorrow everybody, and may the spirit of America one day soon be devoted again to doing things "In Peace, For All Mankind."

Oh, by the way, check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Lulu Wang's The Farewell, starring Awkwafina...

...one of the better movies I've seen so far this year.

IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE

Opening today:

Hidden Figures—We tend to think of NASA as part of the “New Frontier” and “Camelot” and the general unembarrassed optimistic idealism we associate, accurately or not, with the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. So it’s a slight jolt to realize that the space program, at least in its early days (then NACA, or the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics), was segregated.

It was, of course, decades before there were female or nonwhite astronauts, but in at least one facility, the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the segregation was overt. A pool of female African-American “computers”—the term was applied to humans who performed complicated mathematical functions in those days—was relegated to a separate building and separate restrooms on the Langley campus until at least 1958.

This drama focuses on Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who, among many other career achievements, calculated flight trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbital Mercury mission in 1962. It also depicts Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), the de facto supervisor of the department, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), who became an aerospace engineer.

The director, St. Vincent’s Theodore Melfi, working from a script he wrote with Allison Schroeder (based, in turn, on Margot Lee Shetterley’s nonfiction book) seems to have compressed and conflated the chronology of events here for dramatic convenience, but he gets across the essentials of this remarkable story, another in the seemingly bottomless supply of belatedly-told instances of American achievement by women and minorities, in the face of outrageous intolerance. The style is standard inspirational uplift, and the characterizations aren’t deep, but the cast—the three leads and also Kevin Costner as the Langley big boss—are vibrant enough to fill in the blanks.

The bright primary-color cinematography and the midcentury period detail are parts of what make this cinematically inconsequential movie so pleasant. Another part, I confess, is the glamour of the lead actresses—I know we’re supposed to be celebrating their intellectual and social triumphs, but as they scurry around in their pencil skirts and glasses, they also show a lot of nerd chic.

A Monster Calls—English adolescent Conor (Lewis MacDougall) lives in a lovely old country house with his adored, cancer-afflicted young mother (Felicity Jones). One night, after he and his mom have watched King Kong together, Conor receives a visit at his bedroom window from a monster; an enormous anthropomorphic tree, something like the green man of myth, who speaks in the rumbling tones of Liam Neeson.

Over the course of the film, The Monster tells Conor three odd stories of elusive meaning, something like Sufi parables, insisting that when he is done with his three, Conor must tell him a fourth story. Eventually he tells The Monster his story and, as with the end of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his own agonized, guilty secret is revealed.

This film, directed by J.A. Bayona, is based on the much-honored 2011 children’s novel by Patrick Ness, which was based, in turn, on an idea and some notes by the late writer Siobhan Dowd. It’s a poignant, handsomely-made piece of work, with beautiful animated sequences (illustrating The Monster’s stories) and fine acting, not only by MacDougall and Jones but by Toby Kebbell as Conor’s absentee dad and Sigourney Weaver as his stern, terrified grandmother. It’s also nice to see Geraldine Chaplin, in a small but effective role as an authority figure at Conor’s school.

Above all, it has a memorable presence in the great creaking, rustling, uprooted Monster. The special effects depicting him are lovely, and it’s nice to hear that urgently authoritative Neeson voice used for something other than threatening bad guys in lurid action movies.

BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST...

Opening this weekend in the Valley at Harkins Shea: 

 

The Last Man on the Moon—Sometime in the ‘60s, Charlie Brown asked Linus if he’d like to be the first man on the Moon. Linus, said no, he wasn’t that brave, that he didn’t even think he was up to the courage or responsibility of being second or third. Eventually he settled on the ambition of being the forty-third man on the Moon.

We haven’t gotten anywhere near that number. This documentary is a chronicle of the eleventh man to get there, who is also, to date, the last to leave. Former Navy flier Eugene Cernan spacewalked (terrifyingly) during the Gemini program and flew to the Moon ahead of Neil Armstrong in the “dress rehearsal” of Apollo 10, but his true distinction is being the last person to lift his feet off of the lunar surface, in December of 1972.

Now in his 80s, he’s a lean, handsome, high-cheekboned fellow with a full head of white hair. As Cernan and a few other talking heads—among them NASA luminaries like Jim Lovell, Alan Bean and Gene Kranz, as well as some former astronaut wives—recount his story and the story of the Apollo program, we see it, vividly depicted, both from startling archive footage and special effects recreations.

Directed by the British documentarian Mark Craig, The Last Man on the Moon has a personal edge and an ambiguity that’s missing from many space movies. Cernan tries to get into words the awe and wonder he felt at his experience, and while we don’t doubt him, it’s hard to shake the sense that, for those of us back on Earth—unless you were an astronomer or geologist—the literal Moon turned out to be a disappointment compared to the Moon of collective human imagination. It’s almost certainly why the program succumbed to budget cuts soon after Apollo 17 got home.

At the same time, looking back on the Apollo missions from nearly half a century later, it’s useless to deny a mad grandeur in them. Cernan wonders aloud what the Moonshots will seem like to people a hundred or a thousand years from now; I just found myself hoping that there will still be people around to have an opinion—that no crazy nationalism (of the sort that fueled the space race)—will have made it a moot point by then.

Another part of what gives this movie a hint of tension is that Cernan, while a reflective man, isn’t just a gee-whiz Tom Swift. It’s hard to resist Cernan’s story of writing his daughter’s initials on the Lunar surface, but Craig’s portrait of him includes another side: driven, ambitious, competitive, even somewhat vain. He’s been to the Moon, but there’s little doubt he’s a man of this world.