One of the movies was one that my son and I started the day before, watching only half of it. The other was a classic from the 1990s that I've seen only once.
Both had Ed Harris occupying a position of dominance in the command center for a project involving the coordinated efforts of thousands of people.
If I had been looking for a true thematic double feature for Apollo 13, I might have gone with Space Cowboys, which I have never seen and which was one of the "if you liked this, you'll like this" offerings from Stan after Ron Howard's film had finished. But in the time we paused to have dinner and usual nightly chores, I decided I wanted to fish for a previously seen film that I hadn't seen recently -- and The Truman Show, which I only saw that one time in the theater, was a good match.
First how we got on to Apollo 13, which is my #57 film on Flickchart but which my records tell me I haven't watched since before 2006.
A few weeks ago, my ten-year-old started telling me what he had learned about the doomed Apollo 13 mission, possibly collected from YouTube. (Hey, maybe if YouTube is educating our children on NASA, it isn't all bad.) Of course my mind immediately went to one of the five 1995 best picture nominees, which had such an impact on me the last time I saw it -- which was probably the second time overall -- that it rocketed up (no pun intended) into the stratosphere (pun intended this time) of my Flickchart, where it regularly beats films you'd think I might like more. Probably a good time to test my loyalty to it.
I did wonder if it would be over the head of my son, but he was the one who was telling me about little things they had to do aboard the ship in order to save it (and themselves) from becoming space junk. Plus, he's pretty advanced for his age, and an interest in space exploration seems like the sort of old-school ambition I'd like to nourish in my children.
I then wondered briefly, given that it is obviously a film intended for adult viewers, whether there would be any language that I wouldn't want him to hear, understanding that he has heard it all before -- just maybe not in films sanctioned by me. I didn't think so, and true enough, there was only the "mild coarse language" promised in the trigger warnings at the beginning. (He asked me why it didn't say "mild curse language," allowing me to define "coarse" for him and explain that "curse" is a noun rather than an adjective.)
What I didn't properly calculate, in a movie all about calculations, is that this is still a ten-year-old and many of the concepts being discussed would be way over his head. Many of the concepts are way over the head of even a 50-year-old.
I'm sure this contributed to the fact that we watched only 55 minutes of a 2 hour and 20 minute movie on Sunday afternoon, when finishing it off would have taken until about 8:20. Even in the air conditioned living room for this portion of the film, I was still secretly grateful that I properly interpreted his squirming and asked him if he wanted to continue the next day. With the heat and with us having gone to the beach earlier, I was all too eager to curl up with one of my late afternoon cat naps.
My son is at an age where he never wants to disappoint his daddy, so he elected to continue on Monday, even though I'm sure his various soccer games on his Nintendo switch and YouTube soccer videos on his tablet held more sway over him than the near-fatal misadventures of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. (The first two of whom are still alive, I was pleased to see on Wikipedia after the film ended.) So we continued watching on Monday, this time in the garage on the projector, and this time with about the same amount of squirming, but only slightly more than half the movie to go.
In the end he said he liked it, and he did make a couple spontaneous comments along the way that proved his investment. However, he admitted that he didn't understand most of what was happening. I suppose the question is with a film like Apollo 13, is it important to understand exactly why their current crisis endangers their lives, or do you just need to know that they need to think quickly in order to save themselves? For me, I benefit from a pretty good understanding of the former, which makes the latter all the more tense. For my son, maybe it didn't quite reach that level.
I also think it is probably interesting for a child to watch a movie whose outcome they already know. He knew right from reporting to me the basic details of the Apollo 13 mission that they survived, otherwise he'd be talking about a morbid space tragedy and that's not the sort of thing that tickles the intellect of this particular kid. I tried to address the issue by saying that I thought the movie was incredibly successful and that the proof of this is that you feel tense and excited even though you know the astronauts made it back safely. Again possibly in an attempt to say what I wanted to hear, he co-signed this, albeit somewhat unenthusiastically.
As for me, I think the #57 ranking on Flickchart was basically supported. Maybe it'll fall down into the 60s or 70s, but not much more than that. I had to fight back the tears when they finally splash down in the South Pacific.
As an interesting side note: Apollo 13 is the fourth movie I have tagged on this blog that starts with the word Apollo, the others being the documentary about the first moon landing (Apollo 11), Richard Linklater's rotoscoped coming-of-age story centered around that moon landing (Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood) and a found footage horror about a hypothetical moon mission that never happened (Apollo 18). That Apollo 13 should be the best of those films -- though in a smaller margin over the first two than the third -- and only just now be getting its first tag on my 15-year-old blog is interesting indeed, and maybe a little sad.
Landing (again, no pun intended) on The Truman Show was something I did after about five minutes of further scrolling on Stan. I wanted something short enough (since I do have to return to work today) yet also something with a bit of a grander scale to match the scale I'd just been watching. As an only one-time viewing, with that first viewing coming more than a quarter century ago, The Truman Show fit the bill perfectly. (And I noted that if The Truman Show were made today, it would have failed my first test for length, as it certainly would have been Apollo 13's 140 minutes rather than the 102 minutes it actually is.)
I was not necessarily the biggest fan of The Truman Show in 1998, in that there were people who embraced it more wholeheartedly than I did. Even as I say that, though, I'm checking my rankings for that year and find it at #10 overall -- which is more an indication of the number of films I ranked that year (58) than a true affection for the movie. I did always like it, but something had left me a little hesitant on it -- a feeling that has resulted in never watching it a second time.
Well, I'd say I probably liked it just a touch more than I remembered. I didn't have some big revelation about it, or a reading on it that seemed new to me. It's about what it's about tightly and efficiently, and I think it interestingly anticipates our fascination with reality TV, and sometimes our inability to separate a real person from a character we want to be subjected to dramatic things.
Something I hadn't maybe considered about The Truman Show was its relationship to another Jim Carrey movie from that era that I adore, which is my #16 on Flickchart, The Cable Guy. Until this viewing I wouldn't have made the connection that both movies are about our desire to watch, and both movies feature a moment at or near the climax where a rapt audience effectively opts to change the channel and ask what else is on. As the more praised of the two movies, The Truman Show surely gets the credit for these thoughts that The Cable Guy does not -- but let's be real here, people. The Cable Guy predates The Truman Show by two years.
Two more quick thoughts:
1) I liked that before we have really been introduced to this world, we already see it falling apart -- literally as a way to preview its metaphorical collapse. One of the first things that happens to Truman is that he is almost hit by a light falling from the top of the dome, which might have not happened for ten minutes in a less efficient film. This also sets up how they explain away the weird phenomena Truman witnesses in the form of news broadcasts.
2) The efficiency of the script does, though, have a few narrative disadvantages. For one, I was sort of surprised that Truman never has it out with his "best friend" -- or so he thinks -- since he was seven, Marlon, played by Noah Emmerich. (Incidentally, Emmerich's entrance where he leads with a six-pack of beer has always been one of my enduring memories of this film.) Albeit only reading the dialogue that Harris' Christof is feeding into his ear, Marlon tells Truman that if everyone was in on a conspiracy against him, he'd have to be in on it too, and the last thing he'd ever do is lie to Truman. Clearly the actor playing Marlon does not like to read these lines, but he reads them, and he's never held accountable, which would certainly happen in today's longer version of this film. Then again, I like the fact that it is implied, through what happens in the story, that the betrayal of Truman by Marlon is so total, so callous, that he isn't even worthy of a big scene where Truman tears him a new one. Instead, Truman will just leave this world and never look back.
And what about Ed Harris in all this?
Harris has a similar function but a very dissimilar status as a hero in the two films. In Apollo 13, he personifies the tireless, sleepless, unwilling-to-accept failure dedication of the many NASA employees not to lose these three men in space. Whether it's a particular sense of humanism or just his somewhat jingoist determination not to lose the first American in space on his watch, Harris' Gene Kranz does what needs to be done and does not rest until it's done -- and because he's such a cool customer, nary a hair on his head seems to be out of place.
In a film containing a lot more shades of gray than Apollo 13, The Truman Show's Christof is a lot more of a monster -- but he's not an uncomplicated monster. Yes, he is mostly driven by the vainglorious trappings of having created the most popular and longest running television show of all time. But it's also clear that on some level, he views Truman as a son, closer to him than any real person in his real life. When he therefore risks killing this surrogate son upon Truman threatening to leave him, it reveals significant complexities in the dynamics of this relationship.
It is clear, though, that Harris was born to preside over a control room, because there is a third movie -- at least a third, possibly more -- I could have added to make this double feature a triple feature. It occurred to me that although his identity is not revealed until late in the movie, Harris plays the same role once again in Snowpiercer. Whether this was a conscious quotation of either of these two previous performances, or just something in Harris that suggests a man in (and possibly losing) control, only Bong Joon-ho may know.
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