Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, is back with reviews of some cool Sci Fi movies!
By MIKE FRIED
APOLLO 11 THE MOVIE (2019)
*****
The Grateful Dead once sang:
Standing on the moon/I got no cobweb on my shoe/ Standing on the moon/ I’m feeling so alone and blue.
I have to think that is decidedly NOT how Neil Armstrong felt for the first 23 minutes he spent alone on the lunar surface.
The mark of a great movie is when you know the outcome yet are nevertheless held in rapt attention.
Using a lot of never before seen footage, along with original voice recordings and no narration, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller has created a wondrous film. This regales a time when Astronauts were Gods. In the picture below, they are just hanging out after being picked up at sea. On takeoff, Buzz Aldrin’s heart rate was 88 – I’ve been there walking up the stairs – Jeezaloo!!!!
The film is presented in a neat chronological order. As Miller told it, “We did have kind of our own mission rules. We said, if it didn’t happen on that day at that specific time, we’re not using it.” And it works. The footage, which I am guessing is restored, was taken by not only people at NASA but by the Apollo 11 astronauts as well. As a result, the flight crew was given honorary memberships in the American society of cinematographers.
The scenes in Mission Control are equally compelling and much of the footage looks restored. The celebrating at each step as well as the normal workaday occurrences take place (such as discussing Chappaquiddick, which occurred at the same time.)
Even the footage of Armstrong stepping out onto the lunar surface was from a different angle than the oft-seen TV Broadcast angle.
And one of my favorite clips that I had never seen before was Aldrin leaving the LEM, joking that he was “closing the hatch door, making sure it doesn’t lock”. Good ol’ Buzz!
My only regret is not seeing this on the big screen.
WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY Apollo 11!
MOONRAKER
****
It’s easy to dismiss the movie Moonraker as a childish effort because it has such childish gimmicks in it, such as a Bond girl named Holly Goodhead (who is not in any of the novels), as well as the use of Elmer Bernstein‘s Magnificent Seven theme song when James Bond is riding a horse and John Williams’ five note theme from Close Encounters as well as many other musical samples.
This movie also asks the big question that is applicable to most of the Bond movies, that is to say, how many children would James Bond have sired had the Bond girl who had slept with him the night before not been killed by the villain?
Also a Star Wars phasers being used? In an outer space phaser battle?? This movie borrows heavily from Kubrick and Lucas.
However, by being dismissive of this film for such childish things, it just glosses over the fact that this is a movie that at its heart has a terrific story, a terrific villain, and a terrific henchmen along with some damn great stunts, especially the pre-credit parachute sequence, which is one of the most impressive stunts in all of Bond considering that it was done with real skydivers and took five weeks to film.
This movie also features excellent production design and the second 007 trip to Venice and it’s easy to see why. Even the klutziest cinematographer can’t screw up the way Venice looks. The chase scene on the canals is just great and Bond’s gondola turning into a hovercraft and leaving the grand canal has a terrific in-joke (the man with the wine bottle from The Spy Who Loved Me makes another appearance here doubting his wine drinking lifestyle).
One of the things that I really did not like in the movie was the campiness surrounding the Jaws character. Richard Kiel played a real bad ass henchmen in The Spy Who Loved Me, and to make the decision to turn him into a good guy at the end of the movie, rather than a bad guy and get his just desserts based upon fan mail from children was just a ridiculous move, and especially amplified when he meets Dolly his new girlfriend and the Romeo and Juliet overture is played. And yet even with this bad decision they handled the changeover well, plot-wise. Master Race, indeed. Hahahahaha. (But Dolly NEVER WORE BRACES – let’s get that out of the way.)
Michael Lonsdale is one of my favorite actors and I’ve enjoyed him since seeing The Day of the Jackal and he does not miss a beat here. His performance in this film should go down as one of the greatest Bond villains, certainly a top five ranking. Parenthetically, I must thank my lucky stars that Frank Sinatra turned down the opportunity to play Drax when offered. I just can’t see it. Lois Chiles is adequate as Dr. Goodhead but aside from her name she will not be going down in Bond history.
But otherwise this is a Bond movie that plays by the numbers. Until the Daniel Craig era, it seemed as though the plots had a certain illogic to them and we lived with that. Hugo Drax launching multiple Moonraker space shuttles with no activity from space agencies on Earth falls into this category. There’s lots of over the top exciting action and a finale aboard the Drax space station (2001, anyone?) that is one of the best Bond set pieces ever with 30 people appearing weightless at once. I don’t care how they did it. It works.
While not as good as The Spy Who Loved Me, it still rates highly in my book because it is absolutely fun. And Q’s final line “I think he’s attempting re-entry” might be one of the best in the series
WATCH IT!
Fun fact: The closing credits indicate that the movie was filmed on location in Italy, Brazil, Guatemala, U.S.A. and Outer Space!
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
