Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
8/28/2024: I've noted in past weeks problems with my computer which I feared would halt the weekly postings of these Two Guys reviews; however, due to the marvelous diagnostics and speed of repair from Greg Wong at Bay IC Repair in Castro Valley, CA (I can't praise him enough; go there if you're in this area), I'm back, with a new hard drive, to once again irritate my worldwide readership!
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: We begin with a quick montage of events from the late 1950s through the ‘60s Space Race between the USA and the USSR, including: the first artificial satellite, Russia’s Sputnik in 1957; President Kennedy in 1961 calling for America to successfully land a man on the moon before decade’s end; the beginning of the Apollo program; the horrible death of 3 U.S. astronauts in 1967 when a fire broke out in their Apollo 1 module during a training exercise; the shift in national focus to the Vietnam War and the Nixon election in 1968; increasing public disinterest in the space program and Congressional moves to decrease funding. With all of that established, the movie’s focus shifts to marketing expert Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) who—along with her associate, Ruby Martin (Anna Garcia)—uses all manner of duplicity to accomplish her goals, even as she’s working against the constant sexism of the times (we later learn she’s often gone by different names, claimed different backgrounds so her schemes will be hard to trace). We meet her when she’s making a pitch to Chevrolet execs about the Corvette where she convinces them to focus on its speed (to the point of putting seat belts in it before they were required by law), making the point that 2 of the 3 guys she’s presenting to are family men with station wagon who don’t really relate to this car (yet, she further cons them: saying she’s married [she’s not], appears to be pregnant [also fake]).
After making her point, we next see her in a bar where she’s approached by Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a top (but secretive) government agent, working directly with President Nixon, who recruits her (by force, or else he’ll make public her past secrets) to help revive NASA’s public image as Nixon’s sure the Apollo 11 moon landing will succeed as a massive PR blast at the Russians. So, Kelly and Ruby are off to Cocoa Beach, FL (where the launch will take place), but on her first night there when she’s in a diner she accidently sets some papers at her table on fire with quick response from regular patron Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) who tells her he’s attracted to her but can’t let anything distract him from his job. Next day, when she’s touring the NASA facilities they meet again as she learns he’s in charge of the Apollo 11 project. He (as a former top pilot in the Korean War but not qualified for the astronaut corps due to a heart problem) has no interest in her tactics (magazine ads connecting the spacemen to Omega watches and TANG powered-orange drink [I had a lot of that as a teenager]) or hiring actors to play Davis and his next-in-command, Henry Smalls (Ray Romano), in TV spots, but she insists it’s totally necessary for public support of their Apollo mission.
Her tactics are working, though, as Congress somewhat increases the funding; her next idea draws even more resistance from Davis, attaching a video camera to the Lunar Excursion Module to live broadcast the arrival of Neil Armstrong (Nick Dillenburg) and Buzz Aldrin (Colin Woodell) on the moon’s surface. His refusal is overruled by Moe, though, but Berkus has greater plans in mind: He wants Kelly to oversee the creation of a fake moon landscape in a nearby airplane hanger so astronaut-actors can mimic the lunar excursion in case the real thing somehow goes wrong so the U.S. will have their PR triumph no matter what (of course, Cole and his team are to know nothing about “Project Artemis" [Apollo’s sister, in some mythological accounts the goddess of the moon])* Moe has another task, this one for both Kelly and Cole: They need to win over some key Senators to keep the NASA funding intact for the launch to go forward. They make easy headway with Sen. Cook (another in-joke as he’s played by Colin Jost, Johansson’s husband/SNL “news anchor”), but Sen. Hedges (Victor Garber) insists in return he’ll get an exclusive interview with Cole by one of his local news stations, a situation Cole despises but agrees to; it turns bad, though, when the reporter tries to grill him about Apollo 1 (a horror with personal grief for Davis), resulting in Cole storming away from the interview. In response, though, Cole gets Kelly to travel with him in his small private plane to Louisiana to meet with Sen. Vanning (Joe Chrest), where Cole convinces the pious Christian lawmaker to see the space project as connecting science with religion. When they return to FL, Kelly and Cole kiss. Privately, however, Kelly knows Moe has disabled the Apollo LEM camera, intends to use the fake action in conjunction with audio from the real thing, so she’s ashamed to be part of this, tries to leave on the day before the launch, but Moe stops her at the airport; in desperation she goes back to NASA, tells Cole the truth (including about her past where she and her mother pulled scams on innocent victims until Mom shot one of them, with “Kelly” [this isn’t her real name either; it’s Winnie] running away, making up her ongoing-life one trick at a time).
*Kelly hires temperamental director Lance Vespertine (Jim Rash) for the fake shoot, later regrets it, grumbles she “should have hired Kubrick,” a funny reference to the myth there never were any moon landings, that they were all staged by famed director Stanley Kubrick. I'll say a bit more on this later.
⇒He’s furious with her about Artemis but agrees to thwart Moe’s intentions; with help from engineers Stu Bryce (Donald Elise Watkins) and Don Harper (Noah Robbins), they manage to get the LEM camera functional again (using a part from a stolen color TV) before the rocket lift-off, arrange to have the actual Apollo footage broadcast, even as Moe’s in the hanger, mistakenly thinking what he sees on his monitor is the real stuff. He discovers the ruse, though, when a black cat (Cole had tried unsuccessfully to catch this critter, fearing bad luck) wanders onto the fake set, forcing Kelly to come clean, assuring Moe the millions of home viewers were watching the real thing all along, not their fake version. Ultimately, Moe accepts this as being the best situation for everybody, promises not to expose Kelly, walks away singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” After the astronauts return to Earth, Cole finds Kelly in the fake-moon hanger where they reconcile at last.⇐
So What? For me, there’s a lot to recommend in Fly Me to the Moon including some pleasant romance growing between Kelly and Cole—despite the obstacles both of them bring to such a union—along with scenes of good humor, especially with the intrusion of the black cat and Kelly’s instant abilities to turn on a useful accent and/or talk/act her way out of a jam, but for all of the seriousness of this lunar mission (where such a challenge had never actually been done before despite all of the intense preparation, with the lives of 3 astronauts hanging in the balance [as the specter of those lost in the Apollo 1 tragedy surely in the minds of the entire NASA workforce, especially Cole]) most of this movie is quite lighthearted with the final focus not so much on the successful moon landing but rather how Moe was determined to showcase his fake scenario to be sure American bragging rights would be triumphant. If you want a more serious take on the U.S. Space Program you’d have to look elsewhere, for instance Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016; review in our January 5, 2017 posting), a docudrama about female African-American mathematicians and their largely-unsung vital contributions to the U.S. Space Race in the early ‘60s. What we have in … Moon by comparison is a completely fictional focus on the long-held “controversy” about the moon landings (not just by Apollo 11 in 1969 but 5 others through 1972 [Apollo 12, 14-17; after 12 there was a near-disaster in 1970 with the next attempted landing, as shown dramatically in Apollo 13 {Ron Howard, 1995}]) as being faked on Earthly-soundstages, filmed by master director Stanley Kubrick (possibly he was the subject of these unproven “scandals” due to his spectacular cinematic success of showing a human base on the moon in his magnificent 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]—#8 on my All-Time Top 10 list]); however, this article debunks these several alternate-reality arguments while another one, by a cinematographer, explains why the moon landing footage we've seen would be impossible to fake.
Even if Moe Berkus had been aware of such arguments in 1969 he’d likely have plowed ahead with his version of Armstrong and Aldrin’s triumph because he was convinced what his footage showed would have been better believed by the millions watching this historic event on home TV. (I saw it with friends that night, then walked outside to look up at the moon with a grand sense of wonder at what technology could accomplish if enough resources and brilliant minds—like the ones in Hidden Figures—are allowed to explore and develop strategies to achieve even the most seemingly-impossible tasks.) Along with the comedy, romantic tension, high-wire acts of getting the LEM camera repaired just prior to blastoff, etc., there’s a great sense of group-heroism in … Moon, where Cole takes on the responsibility of bringing this task to successful conclusion, knowing it also takes hundreds of like-minded team members to successfully make it happen, so there’s a marvelous sense, too, of national pride in what we see on screen, both in this movie and in the actual CBS TV news footage with Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America” at that time, especially after he was honest about the ongoing U.S. failure in Vietnam) reporting on the mission’s trials and successes. It makes for great memories if you were alive at that time, a useful history lesson if you’re younger than me, put into the context of successful entertainment that’s a pleasure to watch.
Bottom Line Final Comments: Fly Me to the Moon was released to 3,356 domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on July 12, 2024, still playing in 64 venues with a box-office total so far of $20.5 million ($41.3 million worldwide), but now you’d be much more likely to encounter it on streaming where it rents for $19.99 on either Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV+. The critics’ community is hovering between CCAL and OCCU responses with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 65%, while the Metacritic average dips down to 53% with my 3½ stars leading the way no matter what the rest of those colleagues have to say. So, let’s see what some of them do say, with the supportive group (224 of them at RT, 19 at MC) represented here by Variety’s Peter Debruge: ”[Director Berlanti and screenwriter Rose Gilroy] capture a turning point in American history, when spin became the coin of the realm … which seems all the more relevant in light of recent events. [¶] ‘The truth is still the truth, even if nobody believes it,’ Kelly tells Cole. ‘And a lie is still a lie, even if everybody believes it.’ […] In the end, ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ only needs to sell one thing: that beneath Kelly and Cole’s fast-paced dialogue and combative flirtation, there exists a mutual attraction compelling enough to keep us guessing. We already know how the lunar mission turns out, but never tire of gazing upon stars such as these.” But, as Sir Isaac Newton said centuries ago in his Third Law of Motion, “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.”*
*Irony continues where this movie’s concerned as that Newton link also references the soon-to-be-launched (late 2024) Artemis I trip to the moon: no landing this time but paving the way for future astronauts to alight upon the lunar surface (I guess Moe Berkus would finally feel vindicated by this).
So we’ll turn to my own (sometimes) sourpuss, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle (whose review has been assigned 35% by the MC staff, despite his system containing either 4 or 5 steps—depending on whether you count the “little man” ’s empty chair as part of a 1-to-5 scale or simply non-existent for a 1-to-4 scale—so his decision of the guy sleeping seems to be to be either 40% for 5 levels or 25% of 4 levels; I often wonder how the MC folks come up with some of their scores) who rips the movie apart: “ ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ is absolutely awful. The only interesting thing about it is how long it takes for a viewer to figure out how bad it really is. […] So the first clue that something is going very wrong here is that there’s no Sinatra to be found on the soundtrack. That’s the least of the movie’s problems, but it’s indicative. […] Think of all the sources of potential interest scattered in the ruins of this film: Love is a big deal. A dangerous space mission is a big deal. You know what’s not a big deal? An effort to trick a CIA agent into believing that a fake transmission is going out on the airways when it’s not. That has no stakes, no consequences. That’s the definition of who cares.” (Yet, I must edit this last phrase to better make its point: "[...] the definition of 'Who cares?" Agreed?)
Well, Mick, obviously I care more than you do about what’s going on here, but, just for you, I’ll give you Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” (on his 1964 album It Might as Well Be Swing) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2rDb4Ur2dw (a 1965 live performance), as his version of this song (written in 1954 by Bert Howard) became associated with the Apollo program, even played during the flights of Apollo 10 and 11, but I’d also, for the benefit of my marvelous wife, Nina, want to make this a double-Musical Metaphor with Tony Bennett’s acoustic version (Nina likes Frank too, but Tony’s clearly her favorite) from years ago on TV’s MTV Unplugged where Bennett put down the amplified microphone, belted it out all on his own with just piano accompaniment. The song’s a marvelous connection to this movie as it’s about the singer’s new love affair which he hopes will ascend to celestial heights, as we assume will be the satisfying case with Kelly Winnie and Cole. (You know, for the Metaphor I guess I could have used the Bee Gees’ "To Love Somebody" [I might could have gotten away with it because Nina likes them too, but, I know … Tony!]) which plays at a big pre-launch NASA party where our soon-to-be lovers dance because it does speak to their inner feelings for each other, but how could I not use the obvious choice with the option of bringing in 2 mighty Italian troubadours? Sometimes we can be thankfully-overwhelmed with excellent options.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
Some options: (1) Trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis notes critics' negative comments (proven wrong) on past Coppola films in defense of sour responses to this new one; (2) Those older negative critics' quotes about Coppola are fake; (3) Lionsgate pulls Megalopolis trailer, offers apology; (4) Fake quotes about Coppola films were A-I generated; (5) IMDb's 5 Things to Watch This Week; and (6) Simply Geeky's 2024 Must-Watch Movies.
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