Yet Another Journal

Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans,
cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of.


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» Sunday, March 31, 2019
Only-One-Expression Sunday

Needless to say, with James' knee problem, we didn't go anywhere today. I washed towels and, very late, sorted pills, and I made cacciatore for dinner with the chicken legs I got on sale at Lidl. It came really well.

Oh, and we watched the film First Man, which James got as a gift. This was the movie that received such flak because it didn't show them plant the U.S. flag on the moon. Frankly, it was much ado about nothing, because the worst thing this movie did was make the space program boring. I already knew Neil Armstrong was a very private and very serious person. I had heard he had marital problems and divorced. And I knew he had a young daughter that died. But frankly, the film should have been called Neil Armstrong's Greatest Failures. In the film he's always losing, not just little Karen, but he messes up on an X-15 flight, the Agena docking goes wrong, he has to take a lot of inane questions about the Apollo 1 fire, the "flying bedstead" crashes under him...and Ryan Gosling goes through the whole movie with one expression on his face, a permanent brood. Not to mention that they had no time to show the flag on the moon because the entire sequence consisted of broody Gosling panning the moon, watching Buzz Aldrin hop a couple of times, and then leaving Karen's bracelet on the moon. The film ends with Jan Armstrong visiting Neil in quarantine, them trying to touch through a pane of glass. "Walls between us." Could we have found a more trite metaphor? Apparently Armstrong's sons admit this film was the best portrayal of their parents' relationship, and that is sad, but it doesn't mean I want to watch the train wreck for two and a half hours. This is the type of thing best addressed in a book, not in a movie. I hope the book is as good as the film is bad.

The worst part about this film is it looks like it was filmed by a wannabe avant-garde first year film student with a Bell and Howell super-8 camera. The cameraman's hand was so shaky I would check the poor guy for Parkinson's. While he was at it he could have opened up that camera aperture a little so the whole movie didn't look like it was filmed at twilight.

Luckily there was the season premiere of Call the Midwife to take the bad taste out of our mouths. I love the new sisters!

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