******SPACESHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** The 1950s saw a wave of ambitious space adventure films, inspired by the heady optimism of post-World War 2 prosperity in the United States, as well as a brain trust of science and engineering (a brain trust in serious danger of extinction these days). Full-color space epics such as “Destination Moon” (1950) and…
Tag: Moon
Retro-Musings: Robert Altman’s “Countdown” (1967) puts James Caan and Robert Duvall in a race to the moon…
******SPACE RACE SPOILERS!****** I’m still feeling a bit of moon fever after the success of the recent Artemis 2 flight, so this column will examine a relatively obscure moonshot movie from the late 1960s called “Countdown.” Directed by the late iconic filmmaker Robert Altman (“M*A*S*H,” “Nashville,” “The Player”) and produced by actor Willam Conrad (“Ironside”),…
The Artemis 2 flight is the moonshot we really needed right now…
The world is a dumpster fire at the moment. Fuel prices are continually rising due to increasing global instability. Climate change is clearly and undeniably manifesting, as a sweeping far-right movement in key countries is stripping civil liberties from its citizens. Meanwhile, an unstable US president has alienated key allies as he engages Iran in…
“Moon Zero Two” (1969) is one groovy space oddity, baby…
*****MOON-SIZED SPOILERS!***** Hammer Films, a British company reputed for their wonderfully grisly horror films (mainly Christopher Lee’s Frankenstein, Mummy and Dracula movies), hit their peak in the 1960s and made a few cult hits in other genres. These included such audaciously entertaining flicks as the late Raquel Welch’s dinosaur-cave people saga, “One Million Years B.C.”…
The novels of Andy Weir: “The Martian,” “Artemis” and “Project Hail Mary”…
New Voice. As a lifelong fan of science fiction, I’m not embarrassed to admit that sometimes the genre can fall a bit short in a couple of areas; humor and actual science. Much of the early literary sci-fi I’ve read in my life came from greats like Ray Bradbury (my all-time favorite author), H.G. Wells,…
AppleTV’s “For All Mankind” imagines a space race set on a more ambitious track…
I’d been meaning to write about AppleTV’s “For All Mankind” for awhile now, but frankly, it’s a daunting challenge, because (and I try not to say this too much) this is my favorite TV show on at the moment. How to put my love for it into words without gushing or fanboying is my challenge….
Fifty years after the real thing, the movie “Apollo 13” (1995) celebrates its own silver anniversary…
50 Years Ago. It’s been 50 years since the perilous flight of Apollo 13. Apollo 13 was the ‘successful failure’ of the Apollo moon missions which had to abort its planned lunar landing due to an exploding oxygen tank, which crippled the combined spacecraft’s service module. Despite the explosion, which resulted in both a limited…
Ten years of “Moon” (2009); a retro sci-fi study in loneliness and identity…
It’s been a decade since writer/director Duncan Jones (son of “Ziggy Stardust” himself, David Bowie) unveiled his independent, old-school-style science fiction film “Moon”, which had a limited theatrical release in the summer of 2009. I went to see “Moon” twice during its run, driving all over southern California to find theaters where it played, but…
CNN’s “Apollo 11” documentary is as close to a time (and space) machine as possible…
SPOILER ALERT. In July of 1969, three American astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Dr. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins left Earth in a monstrous rocket for a week-long journey to land a spacecraft on the moon and return safely to the Earth. There, now that we got that out of the way… Thanks to a Twitter…