April 2022

 

THE ACADEMY AWARDS

     Usually, I refrain from weighing in on the Academy Awards ceremony and its continuing efforts to turn the presentations into entertaining television. But this year’s disaster, following 2021’s that played like a bowling league banquet, begs for commentary.

     I’ll dispense with the obvious by stating that the huge ovation (many standing) for Will Smith when he was announced as the best actor winner minutes after he assaulted presenter Chris Rock marks the low point in the history of awards show adulation.

     Yet long before this Oscar nadir, the show was a poorly planned, clumsily scripted, amateurish attempt to do something—anything—that would attract more viewers.

      Among the bright ideas were two Twitter polls to determine “Top 5 Fan Favorites” of 2021 (“Army of the Dead”) and “Most Cheer Worthy Moments” (some special effect from “Justice League”). Forget about Smith, I demand the resignation from the Academy of all involved in these ideas. To make room for this kind of idiocy (along with the K-pop band BTS discussing their favorite films), eight categories, including editing, score and production design, were given out before the show and then sliced into the telecast. 

    Then there was the show’s endless series of film anniversary celebrations.

     Surely, at some point during the planning stage, someone must have said, “Four anniversary spots? Isn’t that, just maybe, two too many?”

    Instead, the two that were most worthy of celebration—“The Godfather” at 50 and the Bond franchise at 60—were given short shrift.

     To honor the Bond films there were no 007s in sight, instead skateboarder Tony Hawk and a couple of other X-game types (thinking this is who young movie fans want to see?) introduced a thrown-together 90-second compilation of the 27 pictures. Any high school student could have created a more interesting video.

      The tribute to “The Godfather” (see mine below) was nearly as uninspired. Sean Diddy Combs was chosen to introduce the clips, for reasons I can’t even imagine, and seemed to improvise his lines. Why not have someone connected to the Godfather legacy? Wouldn’t Sophia Coppola have been perfect? But then there was the compilation.

     The film that they should have been memorializing was released in 1972, not the sequel released in 1974 or the third part released in 1990. Yet the clips included all three films, I guess so they can recycle it in 2024 and 2040.  The Academy organizers couldn’t come up with a 40 second clip of a nearly three- hour film with more memorable scenes than all the 2021 best picture nominees combined? Best of all, they played a hip-hop song over the “Godfather” music during the clip. That will definitely bring in the younger viewers.

     The grand gesture was bringing out Francis Coppola, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro (who wasn’t in “The Godfather”) to allow the audience to show their appreciation. The director said a few words, but the actors had no lines. They dragged them back in for that?

      The reunion of the three stars of “White Men Can’t Jump”---Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez—for the film’s 30^th anniversary was just an excuse for a few one-liners, though no mention of writer-director Ron Shelton. But the clip they showed was nearly as long as the one for “The Godfather.” But, seriously, “White Men Can’t Jump”? What’s planned for next year: a 30^th reunion of “Free Willy”?

     They couldn’t wait for the 30^th for “Pulp Fiction” (1994), instead celebrating its 28^th anniversary with Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. After Jackson offered a comic bit, Travolta mumbled, “Did Quentin help you write that?” That was the only mention of the writer-director of the film. Maybe they’ll have Tarantino on stage for the 30^th.

       The irony of all these anniversary celebrations was the derisive tone the hosts took toward this year’s best picture nominees. Poking fun at the year in movies has always been part of the show, but there’s a line between funny and delivering bad reviews for the films the Academy has chosen as the best. Among the comments from the hosts included “I’ve watched it three times and I’m halfway through” (about “The Power of the Dog”); “I guess the Academy members don’t look up reviews” (about “Don’t Look Up”); and, on the entire slate of nominees: “[They are] hard to understand…I didn’t see any of them.” I guess the show’s writers thought they were auditioning for a gig on “SNL.”

      Along with insulting the best picture selections, host Wanda Sykes’ “tour” of the new Academy Award Museum, a decade in planning and building, seemed just an opportunity for laughs. Even the Academy’s crowning achievement couldn’t be presented with dignity.

     Then there was the “In Memoriam” video, usually a somber relief from the noisy show. But this year the clips of those who had passed during 2021 was obscured by a 25-person choir singing and dancing on stage in front of the movie screen. As they sang a melody of upbeat numbers (including a bit of the ‘70s pop hit “Spirit in the Sky”), the video occasionally stopped so that a select few could be personally remembered (Tyler Perry on Sidney Poitier; Bill Murray on Ivan Reitman and Jamie Lee Curtis and a dog on Betty White).

     It didn’t work and just made you wonder why these individuals received top billing---especially White who, though a legendary TV actress, had a negligible film career.

      The “In Memoriam” singers, along with the superbly produced live best song presentations, and the taped Beyoncé opener, turned the show into a version of the Grammy’s, interrupted by a few movie awards.

    That’s not why I, or most movie fans, watch the Oscars; it’s for moments like Troy Kotsur signing his acceptance speech or Kevin Costner reminiscing about seeing “How the West Was Won” at the Cinerama Dome or Lady Gaga help out Liza Minnelli announce the best picture winner. You don’t get those moments by cutting out awards, ignoring Lifetime Achievement winners or taking Twitter polls.

 

CODA (2021)

     This variation on the coming-of-age/clinging-parents plotline, which scored a surprising best picture Oscar, never strays too far into reality, preferring to float through as a fairy tale. The only aspect of interest is that these clinging parents are deaf.

     A remake of the 2014 French film “The Belier Family,” this by-the-numbers picture follows the travails of Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), a Massachusetts high school senior who begins her days at 3 a.m. as the only hearing person on a fishing boat with her father (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur) and brother (Daniel Durant). They rely on her as their ears and voice, communicating with the buyers of their catch and anyone else who has an issue. Then she hurries off to school.

     It’s never explained how long Ruby has been serving as the interpreter in their business, but I have a hard time believing she was working with them when she was 10. Yet her duty to work with the family and not attend college becomes the central issue of the film.

      Beyond the cliches, a few aspects of the film hit me as ludicrous. First of all, she enrolls in chorus out of the blue in her senior year, yet it turns out she’s an amazing vocalist (starts receiving private lessons from the flamboyant Latino choir director), earning a music school tryout. You are telling me that she went through 11 years of schooling without her or anyone else noticing her singing ability?  

      Then there are the parents. Father and mother (Kotsur and Marlee Matlin, 1986 best actress winner for “Children of a Lesser God”) mostly play the roles for laughs, constantly talking of sex, embarrassing the daughter. It’s almost as if writer-director Sian Heder (who wrote for the cable hit “Orange Is the New Black”) thinks that having deaf people sign dirty words humanizes them. And they seem to see nothing wrong with demanding that their 17-year-old devote a few more years to aiding them rather than getting an education.

     Like “Hillbilly Elegy,” the working-class parents are depicted as incapable of seeing what’s in the best interest of their children beyond making their life easier. The film asks me to sympathize with Ruby’s plight, while finding the parents naively lovable.

     “CODA” (children of deaf adults) isn’t a bad film and addresses issues that resonate in the deaf community, but it doesn’t come close to rising to best picture levels (as dubious as those have become) and ranks near the bottom of movies earning the honor.

    It also becomes the most unavailable best picture winner in movie history. “CODA” received almost no theatrical screenings, remaining available only to Apple TV subscribers. Let’s hope this doesn’t become a trend.

  

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)

      Astonishing technical accomplishments don’t always equate to good filmmaking. Like a multi-dimensional roller coaster, a jigsaw puzzle with a dozen missing pieces, with dialogue that whips by like “My Girl Friday” on speed, this movie left me dizzy, wishing it had continued on the path it began with, staying on Planet Earth.

     Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Crazy Rich Asians”) made it tolerable, playing Evelyn, a world-weary, stressed-out owner of a laundromat facing a tax audit on the same night she’s planning a party for her elderly father (the masterful James Hong). Then something strange happens as the family rides up the elevator to the IRS appointment—Evelyn’s husband (a squeaky voiced Ke Huy Quan) turns into an agent from another dimension attempting to recruit her to help their cause.

     She dismissed the incident as a dream (he quickly returns to his normal persona) until she wishes to escape the oppressive lecturing they face from determined IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis at her comic best). She takes on the challenge and the game is on.

    I’ll admit that I understood little of the details of the next two hours of time-shaping, hyper-reality unrelenting fighting, all set, in its many alterations, at the IRS office. For the majority that love the film, I doubt they care about the details and just enjoyed the ride.

     Written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (they go by the collective Daniels), best known for the cult film “Swiss Army Man,” “Everything” plays like a Marvel film, replacing the invincible superhero with a middle-aged Asian woman. No question, that’s a positive and the film does its best to play up that irony, but it relies on the cartoonish action and CGI tricks way too much for my taste.

    I would have enjoyed a film about this overwhelmed woman’s rocky relationships with her daughter (Stephanie Hsu) and unhappy husband while facing an IRS audit. But when it turns into “Matrix”-lite, I zoned out.

  

THE GODFATHER (1972)

     There are two dozen angles of this masterpiece I could write about to mark its 50^th anniversary. I recently read the 2021 book about the production, “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli” by Mark Seal, that offers some insight into the making of, but mostly brings together tidbits reported elsewhere over the years (overstating, from my point of view, real-life mob connections to the film).

     The book’s most interesting details include a chronicle of how close Francis Coppola came to getting fired, how James Caan instead of Al Pacino was set to play Michael, that Richard Castellano improvised the second half of his most famous line and, most damning, how Paramount executives did everything they could to undercut the film. Any time you read about Robert Evans, the boy-wonder head of Paramount production at the time, remember that he envisioned a low-budget, contemporary-set picture starring Ernest Borgnine and Ryan O’Neal.

      But what I’d like to discuss are the film’s shortcomings; even Hollywood’s finest achievements, be it “Citizen Kane,” “Vertigo” or “Casablanca,” aren’t flawless. Knowing what Coppola was forced to cut, mostly in an effort to keep the running time under three hours, and the contents of the deleted scenes (detailed in “The Annotated Godfather” and available in the DVD Collection of all three films) makes it easier to see what’s missing. And like all films, the more you see it—I’ve probably watched “The Godfather” 20 times—the more you see where it could be improved.

     1) After an almost perfect opening 40 minutes—the introduction of Don Vito (Marlon Brando) holding forth in his office during the wedding reception for his daughter, the legendary horse’s head sequence and the meeting in the ancient Genco Olive Oil offices between the Corleones and drug dealer Sollozzo (Al Lettieri)—the aftermath of the assassination attempt on the Don is needlessly confusing. There’s no scene in which Sonny or anyone in the family is officially notified that their father has been shot or a scene in which the family visits the hospital. Cut were scenes in which Sonny is notified by a friendly cop that his father has been shot and a short scene of Sonny telling his mother.

     My question is: where is Fredo? He was at the scene of the shooting. Didn’t he immediately contact Sonny and his mother? It doesn’t make sense. A few more minutes of explanation would have improved this part of the film.  

    2) Another scene that was left on the cutting room floor shows Sonny going into the Don’s office and trying to contact various members of the Corleone crime family—including Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana), who viewers know is already dead. Most interesting is Sonny’s shying away from sitting in his father’s chair—a telling sign that Sonny is more reluctant to take his father’s place than it seems in later scenes. After seeing the finished film, Caan complained about his screen time: “It was like painting a fourteen-foot canvas and ending up with a three-foot canvas.”

     3) The invisible women: I’m not even referring to Sonny’s and Tom’s wives. Connie (Talia Shire), whose full face has barely been shown through half of the film, gets her big scene in a screaming session with husband Carlo before he beats her up offscreen. Her only other big moment comes at the very end when, again hysterical, she accuses Michael of murdering her husband.

       As for Mama Corleone (jazz singer Morgana King), it’s almost as if she doesn’t live in the same house as Vito. One son is killed, another spends more than a year in Sicily and her husband dies, yet her biggest scene is when she sings during the wedding reception.

      And then there’s Kay (Diane Keaton): after being central to the film before Michael leaves for Sicily, she’s more “out” than Robert Duvall’s Tom once Michael becomes the don. Not only do we not see their wedding (was there a honeymoon?)  or the birth of their son, but there isn’t a moment of domesticity between them. At least, her and Connie were given their due in “The Godfather Part II.”

      4) When Michael returns from Sicily, after Sonny is killed at the causeway, two things are never explained: how the family pulled it off (he’s wanted in the murder of a police detective and a drug dealer) and how he formulates his plans for revenge and the move to Las Vegas. In Mario Puzo’s novel, a death row inmate agrees to confess to the murders, but it’s never mentioned in the film.

      As far as Michael evolving into Don Michael, the viewer never sees him transition from a wide-eyed “college boy” to a hard-hearted mobster. Obviously, the brutal killing of Sonny and the murder of his Sicilian wife have changed him, but there needed to be addition material to make the change more believable. And never is there any explanation of the Las Vegas plans. He flies out to meet with Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) and nothing more is said. (At least it gives John Cazale some screen time as Fredo; otherwise, he’s barely in the first film.)

     5) These wealthy mobsters never seem to enjoy themselves. No expensive vacations, yachts or even fancy dinners. Ironically, Fredo seems to be the only one enjoying himself, unless you count Sonny’s extramarital affair.

     6) This isn’t really a criticism because it illustrates what a powerful story Coppola and Puzo were telling, but how many movies lose its lead character for about an hour and 15 minutes in the middle of the film? Don Vito is shot at the 44-minute mark and doesn’t have an audible line until the two-hour mark. Remember, at the time few moviegoers knew who Pacino, Caan or Duvall were—Richard Conte as Barzini and Sterling Hayden as McCluskey were far more famous. This was all about Brando, the world’s greatest actor returning in a major role.              

         Yet despite all these shortcomings, “The Godfather” hasn’t lost any of its punch over a half century. While Paramount brass kept pushing Coppola for more action, more violence, he instinctively knew that his low-key approach was much more effective and would enhance the impact of the handful of bloody sequences. Michael shooting Sollozzo and McCluskey in the Italian restaurant remains one of the most intense killing scenes in film history—if Coppola never directed another scene he’d still be a legend.

     And though they fought throughout the production, Coppola stuck with cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose Renaissance-like interiors bathe the characters in noirish darkness, giving the film an instantly recognizable look.

      It was also Coppola insistence on the casting of Brando, Pacino, Duvall and Caan over unending objections even after filming began that became essential to making “The Godfather” so enduring. Few films have ever had a more brilliant ensemble of actors. And I haven’t even mentioned the great work by Castellano as Clemenza, Abe Vigoda as Tessio, John Marley as Woltz and even Gianni Russo as Carlo, though I wouldn’t believe a word of his recent book.)

    There’s also Nino Rota score, one of the most memorable in recent film history, turning, for better or worse, the actions of a gang of hoods into high opera.

    Yet it’s more than aesthetic reasons that this best picture winner deserves a spot near the top of the list of great American movies. While Puzo’s novel became a best seller because of the killings and the sex and its characters’ similarity to real life figures (how much of Johnny Fontaine is Frank Sinatra?), Coppola molded a story that offers a sever critique of an American society that has allowed criminals to operate without restraint, turning gambling and drugs into big business and, paralleling that corruption, the disintegration of the family, as evidenced by the many turncoats in the Corleone family. There’s also the decent of a young educated, war hero who slips into a world where killing and bribery are accepted realities. While the full extent of Michael’s tragedy—not unlike Macbeth’s—reveals itself in Part II, it’s clear by the final sequence, as he eliminates his rivals and orders his brother-in-law’s execution, that his ambition will come at a high price.        

    To me, what remains most astonishing about “The Godfather” is how close it came to falling apart or turning into an easily dismissed B picture. How does great art emerge from what everyone involved thought was verging on disaster? Coppola, just 32, seemed to have an innate ability to see what others couldn’t and maintain his vision of this story despite the dissent around him (he did it again with “Apocalypse Now”), crafting a timeless chronicle of greed, violence and uncertain loyalty.   

  

THE HIGH WALL (1947)

     Everything about this post-war amnesia movie—admittedly an overused plot device in the 40s and 50s---suggests that it should be better known and receiving regular showings on TCM.

    Robert Taylor, one of Hollywood’s most popular leads since the mid-1930s, stars as a World War II vet who took a dangerous assignment after the war in hopes of satisfying his wife’s expense tastes.

    He returns home to discover her in her employer’s apartment. He then blacks out with his hands around her throat, awaking to an apartment in disarray and his wife’s lifeless body on the floor.

       Putting the body in his car, he drives off the highway into a ravine in hopes of killing himself.

      While most viewers will realize that a star of Taylor’s magnitude is bound to be proven innocent, to one degree or another, the storyline maintains the uncertain sense of doom more typical in a low-budget noir.

    Most films would send Taylor’s Steven on the run, but instead he’s sent to a mental hospital, over the persistent protests of the D.A. (a feisty John Ridgely). Desperate to understand his actions, at least enough to explain to his young son, Steven agrees to brain surgery he’s been putting off since he was injured overseas.

     Director Curtis Bernhardt, an underrated German emigrant who also made “Devotion” and “Possessed,” brings plenty of stylish touches to the script based on a play by Alan R. Clarke and Bradbury Foote, including opening the film with Willard Whitcombe (veteran character actor Herbert Marshall) having a cocktail before returning to his Christian publishing house to discover his secretary has left early. Turns out, she is the dead woman.

    The bulk of the movie centers on the relationship between Steven and his sympathetic doctor played by film noir regular Audrey Totter. As usual, Totter steals every scene she’s in with her realistic line readings and believable emotions (a rare chance for her to portray someone not a mobster’s dame); why she wasn’t a bigger star continues to baffled me. On the other hand, I could never understand Taylor’s stardom, but here the gritty details bring out a worthy performance, far from his usual, rather stiff, romantic figures. The snappy dialogue throughout the film clearly reflects theatrical beginnings of the material.   

     Encouraging Steven to remember the details of the night his wife died, she administers sodium pentanol, another gimmick plotline screenwriters fell in love with after the war.

      A combination of 1940s melodrama and a more serious psychological study of the tricks the brain can play, enhanced by the claustrophobia cinematography by Paul Vogel (Oscar winner for “Battleground”) and two compelling performances, “The High Wall”—while not quite a film noir—is a first-rate man-in-peril picture that rises above the cliches that prop up the plot.

  

SIDNEY POITIER (1927-2022)

     In the last 20 years of his life, Sidney Poitier, who died in January, was lionized by mainstream Hollywood as one of the finest actors in American film history. Yet it was that same Hollywood that ran out of roles for Poitier after he shocked the old guard by becoming one of the most popular stars in the mid-1960s.

    In 1967, he starred in two of the year’s five best picture nominees (“In the Heat of the Night,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”) and was originally cast in a third (“Doctor Dolittle”) before his role was written out of the bloated musical fantasy. On top of that, in 1967 he played his most beloved role, as a London public school teacher in “To Sir, With Love.” This watershed year came after his 1963 best actor Oscar for “Lilies of the Field” and, in 1965, another hit film, “A Patch of Blue” (1965).

 

    But Poitier was fed up with the series of “proper Negro” roles he was offered and the criticism he faced for being pigeon-holed by these upper-class characters. But Hollywood had no idea what to do with a Black star and seemed to have no interest in promoting any other Black actor or actress.

     After Poitier’s best actor win in 1963, only two Black actors were nominated in the category over the next 20 years: James Earl Jones in “The Great White Hope” (1970) and Paul Winfield in “Sounder” (1972) and neither became popular stars. Not until 1984, did another African American actor, Eddie Murphy, rank in the Top 10 of box office stars.

     Poitier’s career as a star pretty much ended within a year or two after 1967; he had another mainstream hit with “For the Love of Ivy” (1968) and then milked his Mr. Tibbs role in two “In the Heat of the Night” sequels. After that he took his skills into blaxploitation pictures, directing and starring in “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), “Let’s Do It Again” (1975) and “A Piece of the Action” (1977). At that point, he stopped acting, focusing his energies directing, on writing his autobiography, the politics in his native Bahamas and the U.S. Civil Right movement, something he had been involved in since the 1950s. He didn’t act again until 1988.

     It’s easy to dismiss Poitier’s acting career based on his mid-1960s roles, but he had already established himself as a fine, occasionally powerful actor in the first decade of his career.

    He manages pretty well in his film debut, “No Way Out” (1950), a high-profile picture directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in which he plays a doctor who is harassed and eventually kidnapped by the racist brother (Richard Widmark) of a man he treated. The film wears its liberal heart on its sleeve, offering up Poitier’s character as the ultimate “turn the other cheek” guy.

     Two gritter roles showcased his talent, in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955) as one of the angry students in a New York ghetto and in “Edge of the City” (1957) as a dock worker trying to carve out a life amid repressive racism. Then stardom arrived with another race-relations film, “The Defiant Ones” (1958), playing an escaped convict on the run with a white man (Tony Curtis). He became the first Black man nominated for a best actor Oscar nomination.

    In 1959, he played Porgy in Otto Preminger’s film version of the Gershwin opera “Porgy and Bess,” then had two of his best roles. As Walter Lee, reprising his Broadway performance, in the superb adaption of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961), about a struggling family fighting over their late father’s life insurance policy, Poitier encapsulated a generation of young Black men desperate to find a way to break away from the dead end of low-paid jobs. In “Paris Blues,” he and Paul Newman play jazz musicians working in Paris who fall in love with a pair of American women. 

     A career of these types of roles would have been revolutionary, but as his star rose, the roles softened as did Hollywood’s take on race. The last of his great performances was as Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia homicide detective determined to solve a murder in Sparta, Mississippi in “In the Heat of the Night.” While he spends most of the movie reacting to Rod Steiger’s Chief Gillespie anger and the town’s racism, Poitier gives a commanding performance as the proverbial fish out of water.  While Steiger deserved his best actor Oscar, Poitier should have been among the nominees.

     When he returned to acting, it was mostly in action pictures (“Shoot to Kill,” “Little Nikita,” “Sneakers,” “The Jackal”) but did some prestige TV projects, including as Thurgood Marshall in “Separate But Equal” (1991), alongside of Burt Lancaster, and as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk” (1997) with Michael Caine.

     Poitier isn’t the first or last actor—Black or white, male or female—who Hollywood has failed, but his career is emblematic of the industry’s inability to find room for the African-American experience during the last half of the 20^th Century. But Poitier forged a legacy none the less; as a star actor who occasionally delivered great performances and a pioneer who went through a once-locked door that many, eventually, would follow. 

  

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD (2022)

    As my regular readers know well, modern animation has rarely impressed me—I prefer Bugs Bunny, Bullwinkle or Top Cat over all the Pixar, Disney and even the more serious indies.

    So imagine my surprise when I was almost immediately drawn in by this heartfelt work of nostalgia by director Richard Linklater. As much as I’ve enjoyed some of his films (“Dazed and Confused,” the French trilogy), I didn’t enjoy either of his previous attempts at animation (“Waking Life,” “A Scanner Darkly”). But “Apollo 10 ½” is very different.

    The plot of the Netflix film is ludicrous: NASA recruits a 10-year-old boy who lives in suburban Houston to pilot a test flight to the Moon in preparation for the landmark trip of Apollo 11 in the summer of 1969. While that gives the writer-director a chance to animate the Moon landing, what makes the picture so appealing is Linklater’s spot-on remembrance of a boy’s life circa the late 60s.

      Leisurely narrated by an older Stan (Jack Black), the story, after getting the main plot in motion, hones in on daily life, from what we had for dinner 50 years ago to the TV shows and movies we watched, the music we listened to, the clothes we wore. Though I grew up 1500 miles away in Pennsylvania, as a 13-year-old in 1969, I can attest that Linklater doesn’t miss much (he was four years younger).

      Most amusing is his name checking of at least 25 TV shows from the era—from “Bonanza” to “Dark Shadows,”—even showing scenes from “The Johnny Cash Show” (Joni Mitchell’s appearance) and Dick Cavett interviewing Janis Joplin.  It was like an animated version of one of those CNN retrospective shows.

     Linklater and his team use a process called rotoscope animation, created by trancing over live-action footage. While much of it feels very realistic, it also has a dream-like sheen that fits the film’s themes.

      Stan goes to the movies to watch “2001: A Space Odyssey,” listens to his older sister’s vinyl collection (The Beatles’ “White Album,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow”) plays Little League baseball, collects baseball cards, enjoys canned-ham dinners and home-made popsicles and huddles under his school desk during A-bomb drills. Linklater doesn’t miss a moment of the era.

     But for Stan there’s also the intense training for his “mission” and, later, watching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins follow in his footsteps. 

     While in many ways, “Apollo 10 ½” is no more than a vanity project, the director’s memories are so vivid that they become personal for anyone who grew up in that era.

PHOTOS:

Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Yeoh in a rare quiet moment in "Everything Everywhere All at Once.  (A24)

Francis Coppola directing the opening wedding scene as Marlon Brando looks on in "The Godfather." (Paramount)

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in "In the Heat of the Night." (MGM)