Movie Mix – First Man and Ad Astra

Ryan Gosling in “First Man.” credit: Universal Pictures

First Man (USA, 2018) is director Damien Chazelle’s film of Josh Singer’s adaptation of James R. Hanson’s biography of Neil Armstrong: aviation engineer, test pilot, astronaut and the first man to walk on the moon. The budget was almost double Chazelle’s previous film, La La Land (2016); nonetheless, Chazelle’s tunnelvisioned, warts-and-all approach to both Armstrong and the working culture he was a part of is surprisingly anti-epic. Its premiere was hotly anticipated, and the film had received very good press. But it didn’t perform well at the box office, and only made its money back after the film’s extended global release.

The opening scenes are superbly disorienting – we accompany Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) on an X-15 test flight on the edge of Earth’s atmosphere that encounters a problem requiring some quick-witted improvisation to keep him from skipping off of the exosphere, preventing his re-entry. Remember that window Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid) asked for in The Right Stuff? What windows they had weren’t great even when they got them. So rather than the panoramic, multi-view digital cinema wizardry we usually get from these films, Chazelle keeps us contained within Armstrong’s own POV. We hear the chaotic rattles, booms, squeaks and whooshes he hears, while looking through the two narrow triangular windows at the ship’s nose for glimpses of the arc-edge of the earth. Only a few of the shots stray from this, providing quick supplemental information to keep us somewhat oriented. It’s easy to forget, at the moment, that he survived this, but oh… my… God…

Chazelle uses this visual metaphorical framework to tell the rest of Armstrong’s story as well. The notion that “we have no idea” in relation to the concept of flight also relates to the distance we’re kept at in every other aspect of his life: his marriage, the loss of their young daughter, the camaraderie and competition within the Apollo program with his fellow astronauts (a few of which are killed in the process), his resiliency and doggedness throughout his own close calls, the grueling training, his injuries and mistakes, and the ironclad sense of modesty and humility he maintains throughout. Chazelle always keeps us wondering whether Armstrong’s stoicism is warranted as a personal survival mechanism, as the only way anyone could get through any of this, in charge and intact, or whether there might be something missing, something less self-attuned, more empathetic, more communicative, for better or worse. Where does the accomplished hero end and the battered recluse begin? Ryan Gosling’s performance here is solid work, much better than his La La Land turn. I do wish, though, that he could be cast in looser, more expansive characters like his Jared Vennett in The Big Short (2015).

Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy in “First Man.” credit: geekgirlauthority.com

Production designer Nathan Crowley and his art directors carry through on Chazelle’s modestly-scaled approach. We often see crew members doing math by hand, jotting down notes, and figuring trajectories and distances with scale rules and paper pads. Ladders, landing gear, struts and exterior shells are festooned with metallic tape, make-work fixes, pockmarked flashing and sheet metal. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren’s images are composed, and lit, with an eye towards isolation and claustrophobia; the infrequent exterior shots we get of backyards, landing strips, deserts, or even the lunar landscapes, seem weirdly out-of-place. That’s not to say that Chazelle hasn’t invested his overall visual narrative with a uniquely-shaped beauty of its own – he, impressively, has.

I really enjoyed this film. It’s commendable that Chazelle chose not to create another Oscar-bait spectacle, fighting with itself over technical virtuosity, wow-factor and philosophical pretension at the expense of believable human characters and events still relatedly within reach of our own experiences. There was, of course, a great hue-and-cry that there wasn’t a glorious tableau of the American flag planted on the lunar surface, even though the flag’s image is prominent throughout the film. It’s seen on the moon, just not paraded for its own sake. The whole film is human-sized; those humans are in, but not necessarily of, the institutions that enable them to do their jobs. Science, its machines and space itself will rend and devour us instantly, given the chance. Nonetheless, we persevere.

 

Brad Pitt in “Ad Astra.” credit: studiodaily.com

Ad Astra (USA, 2019) is writer/director James Gray’s own foray into the science fiction/space genre, made after two superb (but sadly unheralded) near-masterpieces, The Lost City Of Z (2016) and The Immigrant (2013). The former concerns Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) and his discovery of what he concludes is an advanced civilization, hidden by the natives of the Amazon river, while doing cartographic surveys for the British scientific elites who are funding the project. The Immigrant is Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard), who has come from Poland to New York with her sister just after World War I, but the unlikely impresario of Ewa’s subsequent fate is Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), the theatrical producer of a run-down burlesque theater with whom Ewa finds employment.

Alfred Hitchcock was fond of dropping everyday characters into extraordinary circumstances and chronicling their inventive, personal solutions to the danger. James Gray’s male characters tend to gravitate towards those circumstances, danger be damned, compelled to push against whichever envelopes they find the interiors of. Fawcett rails against the conventional colonial conservatism of the British academics who eventually give up on him, and forges ahead with his own expeditions. Bruno Weiss lives for the hustle – he runs his vaudeville theater on a schtick-spun shoestring and pimps out his female performers as the daughters of the Manhattan elite. But impulsive anger, jealousy and onerous debts to the wrong people threaten to overwhelm him, even though he ultimately wants to do the right thing for the people he loves.

In Ad Astra, Brad Pitt is Roy McBride, a working astronaut maintaining a giant communications aerial array in orbit around the Earth. An immense power surge from somewhere in space violently disrupts the station, and the resulting damage almost leads to McBride’s death. Having avoided the worst, McBride is called in by his superiors, and learns that the surge, actually a dangerous pulse of anti-matter, originated from a distant Earth vessel near Neptune, an expedition long thought lost and dead, commanded by McBride’s legendary father, elder astronaut-extraordinaire H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones). Roy’s mission is to take a routine commercial flight to the moon, then catch a secret shuttle to Mars, where he will then attempt to communicate with Dad.

Roy is renowned among his fellow star-jockeys for being completely unflappable – his pulse never rises above 80 bpm. And he can operate any flying machine he takes the driver’s seat of. Sadly, that personal reserve and professional commitment is ruining his marriage to Eve (Liv Tyler, weirdly underused, or edited out). We never learn why he’s relegated to antenna repairman, but this mission is clearly carrying a lot of potential for redemption.

Tommy Lee Jones in “Ad Astra.” credit: flipboard.com

Travelling with an old “foxhole-buddy” of his father’s, Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), Roy finds the Moon to be just another wild-ass touristy shipping port – the airport is stuffed with franchises and hustlers, not unlike Star Wars’ Mos Eisley, complete with dune-buggy driving pirate rebels who kill most of Roy’s escort in a thrilling lunar chase. Nonetheless, Roy manages to get off to Mars on the Apollo-like Cepheus, even if the flight crew is a bit soft for his liking. A few more dangerous complications ensue en route, but Roy arrives still resilient.

Now on Mars, in a far more controlled military-scientific environment than the Moon, Roy records a few transmissions, but they go unanswered. But a last transmission, with Roy going uncharacteristically, emotionally, off-script, is responded to – Cliff McBride is, indeed, still out there. Meeting up with the orphaned daughter of other Neptune-stationed crew members, Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), Roy learns that there will, indeed, be an expedition to Neptune, but he won’t be part of it. The Cepheus will be sent to nuke Cliff McBride and his outpost and neutralize his threat. But, predictably, Roy has other somewhat disruptive plans.

Essentially a space-bound version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, it shares its source material with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). The origins of Roy McBride’s stoic professionalism are clearly tied to his father – was Cliff McBride his son’s inspiration for greatness, or an unfeeling sociopath that Roy emulated for his own survival and sanity? Gray’s conception of Roy McBride is solid, and Brad Pitt’s contributions are immeasurably good, but Gray (and co-writer Ethan Gross) just doesn’t bring enough of everything else surrounding Pitt to create a distinct cohesive experience. There’s a bit of Alien’s blue-collar space-tech just-a-job attitude – again, Pitt’s character is so much better at everything than anyone else he encounters that we start to wonder why he starts the film as a glorified lineman. Ultimately Gray fails to bring his two big conceptions together – Roy McBride’s journey to find himself through, or in spite of, his father, and Gray’s particular perspectives on space travel, colonization and surviving in those otherworldly environments. The superb Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk, Spectre, Interstellar) is his cinematographer; the film is a visual treat, and production designer Kevin Thompson really mixes up a variety of astral, industrial and habitable environments for the character’s interactions. But ultimately, they’re just impressive pieces and episodes in a whole that doesn’t string together compellingly or conclude to any credible satisfaction.

 

Recommended reading:

James Gray’s Journey From The Outer Boroughs To Outer Space

Movies – The Giallo Project – Aldo Lado

“Short Night Of Glass Dolls.” credit: deliriahungaria.blogspot.com

Aldo Lado seems to have kept a fairly low profile in the course of his career – bios of more than a few succinct lines are scarce. Like Silvio Amadio, he emerged as a writer and director from the start – a good one – and his first two films, Short Night Of Glass Dolls (1971) and Who Saw Her Die? (1972) are artful and well-executed gialli. They were followed by three capable but forgettable sexy genre toss-offs, eventually arriving at The Night Train Murders (1975), a notably nasty semi-giallo that drew on the same surprising template as 1972’s Last House On The Left; Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring (1960). None of journeyman Lado’s films broke the box-office, but these three are a few notches above the workmanlike cash-ins that flooded the genre after Argento, Fulci and Martino.

Short Night Of Glass Dolls (La Corta Notte Delle Bambole Di Vetro) (Italy, 1971) is one of those completely-inexplicable-but-cool-sounding giallo movie titles that have nothing to do with anything that happens in the film. Nonetheless, there’s a lot going on here. When we first meet Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel), his dead body has been found in a park in Prague; he’s put in an ambulance, taken to the morgue and declared dead. Greg’s an American journalist who’s been working at an Italian news bureau in Prague with his associates Jacques (character veteran Mario Adorf) and Jessica (Ingrid Thulin). His present condition is the result of a personal investigation he undertook to solve the bizarre middle-of-the-night disappearance of his girlfriend Mira (Barbara Bach). Because even after his motionless, non-respirating body has been ruled dead, Greg’s mind is active, and he hears and sees everything going on around him. His voiceover, with his corpse on the gurney, is the narration for the flashback of everything that happened before; that is, when he’s not screaming inside his own head for the doctors to somehow save him. How did he become cataleptic? It’s an excellent premise, harkening back to the archetypical fear of being buried alive à la Edgar Allan Poe’s Premature Burial, and it can’t help but lend urgency to everything Greg will subsequently explain to us.

His lover, Mira, reunites with him in Prague, and Greg, soon to be reassigned to London, wants Mira to move there with him. They’re very happy, and have a lot to look forward to. Greg’s been invited to a reception of powerful local artists, politicians, doctors and lawyers, and he’s brought Mira with him. She’s a hit with Greg’s professional friends – Valinski (José Quaglio), his doctor friend Ivan (Relja Basic) and Ivan’s mentor, Professor Karting (Fabijan Sovagovic), although Jessica, his news bureau cohort, isn’t happy – she has her own designs on Greg, and, up until now, he hasn’t discouraged much of it. Greg and Mira call it a night, go home and settle in. But, hours later, Jacques calls, telling Greg to meet him now to cover the unexpected suicide of a Communist official. Greg leaves Mira to meet Jacques, but discovers when he gets there that it was not Bashkov the minister, but Bashkov the grocer, “…and a cuckold grocer besides.”

Barbara Bach and Jean Sorel in “Short Night Of Glass Dolls.” credit: barbara-bach.com

When Greg returns, Mira is gone. No signs of struggle, no missing bag or clothes. Her passport and purse are still there, but She Is Gone. Greg brings in Jacques, Jessica and Valinski and they go to work. Where’s she been since arriving? Only with Greg, almost exclusively. So they go to the police, who reveal that a lot of young women have gone missing in Prague lately. And back to Ivan and Professor Karting, revealing little. Eventually, the trail leads Greg to Klub 99, a small private salon for chamber music recitals, run by… Valinski, and frequented by many of the other older rich people we’ve seen throughout the film here and there. They are what has happened to those young women, and Mira’s fate, and Greg’s, is genuinely shocking.

Like Silvio Amadio, Aldo Lado always situates his younger striving characters adjacent to the old-money privileged. Greg is given a fair amount of access as a journalist, but it only goes so far, while those he’s observing can effortlessly indulge themselves on experiments (and metaphors) in how plants feel pain, or flightless butterflies, or creating furtive cults of selective moralities (with sacrifices, of course). Lado uses different cameramen per project – here it’s journeyman cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini. But he has Ennio Morricone for all three of these films, and his musical scores are, again, brilliant. Lado’s script (with Rüdiger von Spies, whom a few believe is a nom de plume for the ubiquitous Ernesto Gastaldi) is excellent, using old-school fears in a very modern context for a uniquely surprising and unsettling story. Even with a dearth of the usual crowd-pleasing gore and nudity, this is definitely one of the good ones, folks.

“Who Saw Her Die?” credit: notrecinema.com

In Who Saw Her Die? (Chi L’Ha Vista Morire?) (Italy, 1972), Lado and cameraman Franco Di Giacomo (who also shot Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the Taviani’s Night of the Shooting Stars and Il Postino) make splendid use of their Venice locations and atmosphere, and it’s hard not to think that Nicolas Roeg and Anthony B. Richmond hadn’t seen this before their own Don’t Look Now the following year – they most likely used a lot of the same crew. The pre-credit opening shows us a coldly cruel child murder in rural France at the hands of a mysterious veiled woman in black – it isn’t tied into our main Venetian story until later, but, hey, you saw the movie’s title, right? Four years later, in Venice, the sculptor Franco Serpieri (George Lazenby, markedly and admirably different from his turn as James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) is reuniting with his young daughter Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi). She’s been living with Mom, Elizabeth (Anita Strindberg, subdued here) in London, and he has a nice visit planned for her. But after a few great days of touring around with Dad and meeting many of his friends, she vanishes. And, a day or two later, her body is found in the canal. Elizabeth flies in to bury her daughter and console the distraught Franco, who blames himself (and not without a bit of cause).

George Lazenby and Anita Strindberg in “Who Saw Her Die?” credit: divxclasico.com

Like Short Night Of Glass Dolls, Lado constructs yet another investigation conducted by the victim’s family and friends, rather than the police themselves, and, like countless other giallos, the police end up being little if any help. Elizabeth checks in with Father James, a young priest and good acquaintance of theirs, while Franco gets unexpected information from a ping-pong playing man who lives in the home of a family who lost their daughter under sharply similar circumstances (a nod to Dario Argento’s peppering his films with eccentrics). He sends Franco to Bonaiuti (Lado stalwart José Quaglio), a powerful lawyer (and alleged pedophile) who provided a suspicious amount of support to the family. And most of Franco’s eccentric artist friends join the list of suspects – the handsome Filippo (Peter Chatel), the journalist Cuman (Piero Vida), Franco’s agent, the art dealer Serafian (Adolfo Celi) and his protégé and secretary Ginevra (Dominique Boschero), all tied in somehow to Bonaiuti as well. Because, again, like SNOGD, the perpetrator is as much a secret subculture as it is a particular person. And, as Franco digs further, those avoiding discovery turn on each other, and bodies start dropping – first Ginevra, then Bonaiuti. A splendid, fogbound footchase on the wharfs and an attempt on Elizabeth’s life brings us to the final reveal, which could have been handled better, but Francesco Barilli and Massimo D’Avak’s screenplay is indeed unpredictable and somewhat logical. It’s not quite as successful as Short Night Of Glass Dolls, but it’s atmospheric and effective visuals, Morricone’s haunting children’s’ choir soundtrack and good performances all around make Who Saw Her Die? well worth checking out.

Flavio Bucci, Gianfranco De Grassi, Laura D’Angelo and Irene Miracle in “Night Train Murders.” credit: cinematicautopsy.com

Considerably more artful than its preceding inspiration, The Night Train Murders, aka Last Stop On The Night Train (L’Ultimo Treno Della Notte) (Italy, 1975) can still only be recommend to that niche crowd that loves unapologetically nihilist horror provocations (one ‘net critic refers to it as “endurance horror”) like I Spit On Your Grave (1978), Audition (1999), The Human Centipede (2009), A Serbian Film (2010) or the source material here, Last House On The Left (1972).

Last House On The Left follows two free-spirited American teenage girls, Mari and Phyllis, who drive Dad’s car to a rock concert in The Big City, but first decide to go into a dicey neighborhood and try to buy some pot for the occasion. They happen across Junior, who’s happy to oblige them… at his apartment. There they encounter Krug (the junkie Junior’s father) and Weasel, recently escaped convicts, and their “girlfriend” Sadie. They rape Phyllis there, then pack both of them into the car the next morning and head for Canada. But the car breaks down partway, and they finish humiliating and murdering the girls in the woods in the middle of nowhere. But it’s not exactly ‘the middle of nowhere” – it’s just outside Mari’s own rural home, where her parents have been planning a surprise birthday party for her. The four “salesmen” convince Mari’s parents to let them stay the night (“our car broke down, man…”), but a few clumsy mistakes reveal themselves to the parents as the murderous drug-addled perverts they are, and the parents bring comparably and nauseatingly violent revenge upon the girls’ killers.

Aldo Lado was hired by a producer (Paolo Infascelli) who wanted to knock off Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham’s American box-office hit. Loathe to turn down a gig, Lado worked on a script with genre veteran Renato Izzo. Rather than a rock concert in the big city, Lado’s girls start out a bit less adventurous – Margaret (Irene Miracle), who lives in Munich, plans on taking the train with her friend Lisa (Laura D’Angelo) and joining Lisa’s family in Italy to celebrate Christmas. The predators they meet at the train station are Blackie (Flavio Bucci) and Curly (Gianfranco De Grassi), street thugs who beat up a vendor dressed as Santa Claus and slice up the back of a woman’s fur coat. Running from a station guard, they hop onto the crowded train Margaret and Lisa are on. Blackie and Curly make their way down car-to-car, evading the conductors demanding tickets. We also peer into a few other compartments – a group of German businessmen spiritedly singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song,’ which was the official Nazi party anthem, the singing or playing of which was ostensibly banned in Germany. We also check in with an elegant and attractive adult lady (the great Macha Méril from Deep Red, among many others), travelling on her own, conversing with another about declining morals in society and how democracy feeds the erosion. Of course, the gentleman intellectual she’s conversing with is loathe to offer solutions, but they don’t have these problems in China, do they…? Meanwhile, Blackie’s been giving the Lady his attempt at the come-hither-side-eye, and she conveniently gets up to light a cigarette and make her way to the bathroom. Blackie forces his way in with her, but gets an awkward surprise when she authoritatively has her carnal way with him. Meanwhile, Curly gets violent with one of the passengers just outside the bathroom, and the (now) three of them flee further down the corridor.

The train stops for a passport check at the border crossing, and Margaret convinces a conductor to allow her to call her parents to let them know they’ve been delayed. In the station, they learn of another train there leaving soon for their destination without making an otherwise scheduled stopover, actually getting them there much sooner. They move to the other train, which is practically deserted, greatly relieved. But unbeknownst to them, Blackie, Curly and the Lady, who have been booted from the previous train, have joined them on this one. And when the three discover the two lovely young travelers in relative isolation, things plunge into abusive nightmare territory quite quickly.

Macha Méril in “Night Train Murders.” credit: notrecinema.com

As hard to watch as this sequence is, it’s, mercifully, less starkly explicit than the LHOTL out-in-the-woods version. Lado works masterfully with the train’s claustrophobic interiors, in daytime and night, a traditionally tough filmmaking environment even with modular studio set elements. We know exactly what’s happening to Lisa and Margaret, but Lado’s suggestive approach is, in many ways, more disturbing than Wes Craven’s documentary-style straightforwardness. Craven suggests that the girls’ pot-buying risk put themselves in peril, while Lado and Renato Izzo create characters who in no way deserve their dark fates. The real difference here, though, is the character of the Lady – the Last House villains are portrayed as bored white trash, mean-spirited ex-con detritus, and Blackie and Curly, here, are quite similar. But the Lady clearly has money, resources and education, yet turns out to be the most irresponsibly virulent and indulgent of the three. With Blackie and Curly, it’s all for kicks, it’s all short-term. But the Lady is more temperamentally disposed to manipulate the situation to her own escalated sense of depravity. Even after the parents-take-revenge bloodbath, even after they’ve figured out that these three murdered those two innocent girls, the Lady presents herself as just another victim of the other two, and will clearly escape justice of any kind.

Besides only having a scant few qualifications for being considered an actual giallo, I would also not recommend the film for any general filmgoing audience. The world of cinema has many examples of explicit sex-and-violence subject matter that still retains some measure of moral proportion, and some of them are among the Italian giallo films we’re examining here. Try Martino’s Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh, Fulci’s Lizard In A Woman’s Skin or Dallamano’s What Have They Done To Solange? Night Train Murders? Or even Last House On The Left? Why put yourself through this otherwise if you don’t need to? Unless you already know that’s your jam (and no shame there – Roger Ebert really liked Last House On The Left). Aldo Lado did very good work here, but I suspect he was equally happy to have this one behind him.