June Film Club

For the month of June, we will be watching Apollo 13 and Contact.

(click the titles for the trailers)
June 20th at 6:15pm
Apollo 13 (1995) Directed by Ron Howard

Apollo 13 is a 1995 space docudrama film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris.  The screenplay by William Broyles Jr., and Al Reinert dramatizes the aborted 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission and is an adaptation of the book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by astronaut Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.  The film depicts astronauts Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise aboard Apollo 13 for America's third Moon landing mission.  En route, an on-board explosion deprives their spacecraft of most of its oxygen supply and electric power, forcing NASA's flight controllers to abort the Moon landing, and turning the mission into a struggle to get the three men home safely.
The film received critical praise and holds a 95% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  Roger Ebert gave the film 4/4 stars saying this in his review, "This is a powerful story, one of the years best films, told with great clarity and remarkable technical detail, and acted without pumped-up histrionics.  It's about men trained to do a job, and doing a better one than anyone could have imagined.  The buried message is: When we dialed down the space program, we lost something crucial to our vision.  When I was a kid, they used to predict that by the year 2000, you'd be able to go to the moon.  Nobody ever thought to predict that you'd be able to, but nobody would bother."

June 27th at 6:15pm
Contact (1997) Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Contact is a 1997 American science fiction drama film directed by Robert Zemeckis.  It is a film adaptation of Carl Sagan's 1985 novel of the same name; Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan wrote the story outline for the film.  Jodie Foster portrays the film's protagonist, Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway, a SETI scientist who finds strong evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact.  The film also stars Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, Tom Skerritt, William Fitchner, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, Jake Busey and David Morse.  The film has a 62% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert awarded it 3.5/4 stars later changing it to 4/4 and adding it to his list of Great Movies.  He said this in his review, "Movies like Contact help explain why movies like Independence Day leave me feeling empty and unsatisfied.  When I look up at the sky through a telescope, when I follow the landing of the research vehicle on Mars, when I read about cosmology, I brush against transcendence.  The universe is so large and old and beautiful, and our life as an intelligent species is so brief, that all our knowledge is like a tiny hint surrounded by a void.  Has another race been around longer and learned more?  Where are they?  We have been listening for only a few decades.  Space and time are so vast.  A signal's chance of reaching us at the right time and place are so remote they make a message in a bottle look reliable.  But if one came..."

I hope you will be able to join us for the wonderful films!