April Film Club

Hey everybody!

A great big thank you to everyone who was able to come out for Michael Collins last month.  We had a great crowd and some good (albeit short) discussion following the film. Oh, and as always, a great amount of food!  Thank you again, you make my job too easy.

For the month of April I will be following the tradition of playing whatever I feel like playing, without necessarily having a theme.  It's my birthday month, so it's usually just a wild card option, but, since this year is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in 1969, to commemorate that historic, and monumental achievement, I've decided to play Damien Chazelle's First Man.

First Man is a 2018 American biographical drama film directed by Damien Chazelle and written by Josh Singer.  Based on the book First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen, the film stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, alongside Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Ciaran Hinds, Christopher Abbot, Patrick Fugit, and Lucas Haas, and follows the years leading up to the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon in 1969.  The film received critical praise, particularly regarding the direction, Gosling and Foy's performances, musical score, and the Moon landing sequence.

While the film was considered a commercial disappointment, grossing only $105 million against its $59 million production budget, it did nevertheless receive numerous award nominations and wins.  At the 91st Academy Awards it won for Best Visual Effects, along with nominations for Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Production Design.   It holds an 87% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Matt Zoeller Seitz, writing for Rogerebert.com gave the film 3/4 stars saying this in his review, "If you want to get an almost first-person sense of what it felt like to fly in one of the earliest supersonic planes or ride a rocket into orbit and beyond, "First Man" is the movie to see.  It makes the experience seem more wild and scary than grand, like being in the cab of a runaway truck as it smashes through a guardrail and tumbles down the side of a mountain.  Even when "First Man" stumbles as historical psychodrama, it still represents a giant leap forward for movies about the physical experience of flight.  I wouldn't call the test piloting and bastoff-and-orbit scenes artful, exactly-there's little poetry in the images-but I don't think they're aiming for that.  They're about single-mindedly putting you inside Neil Armstrong's body and brain pan, and giving you a sense of how hard it must have been to focus, work out equations and flip switches with all that noise battering the senses.  There might be a brief moment of beauty or peace, along with a sidelong glimpses through a window of the blue earth, the grey white moon, or the blackness of space, but that's generally all the aesthetic pleasure they get-and maybe all they can handle.  They expend most of their mental energy studying the instrument panels in front of them and trying to process the information that's being fed through their headsets by mission control, knowing that one missed fact for wrong choice could mean their deaths."

We will be meeting Thursday, April 18th at 6:15pm.

I hope you can make it out to this wonderful, intense, and deeply moving film about an American hero and mankind's unstoppable curiosity and ingenuity.

Here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSoRx87OO6k