Apollo 10 1/2: a Space Age Childhood

Writer/director Richard Linklater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD                 B                                                     USA  (97 mi)  2022  d: Richard Linklater 

You know how memory works, even if he was asleep, he’ll someday think he saw it all.     —Mom (Lee Eddy), to her husband after their son fell asleep during the moon landing 

Few directors understand the thought process of kids better than Austin director Richard Linklater, whose films like Dazed and Confused (1993), 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, or even Everybody Wants Some !! (2016) feel like anthems to childhood, giving audiences a chance to just hang out with a typical ragtag group of kids that may remind you of your own childhood experiences, bringing the musical soundtrack center stage, a remembrance of what we were listening to back in the day.  This, on the other hand, is an animated quasi-autobiographical story about growing up in a suburb just outside of Houston in the late 60’s, where everything revolved around NASA, established in the late 50’s, becoming one of the state’s largest employers with 8000 employees and an annual budget of $100 million.  Today, however, it employs more than 50,000 with a budget closer to $5 billion, ranking #12 on Forbes list of America’s Best Large Employers for 2021 (NASA ranks in top 25 of Forbes 'America's Best Large ... - Chron), with more than a million people each year visiting the Houston Space Center.  The key to this film is the folksy narration by Jack Black (whose mother actually worked for NASA), which comprises the majority of the film, weaving together childhood memories, offering an amusing context of what it was like growing up in a neighborhood surrounded by other NASA families, as living there “was like being where science fiction was coming to life,” yet it’s all told like a bedtime story, or an even younger version of The Wonder Years (1988-93).  It’s extremely rare for an animated movie to also be a period piece, a love letter to a lost era and a rather astonishing memory play, like a diary or scrapbook of the time, yet what distinguishes this film is the clever attention to details, which couldn’t be more accurate to the times it depicts, with Linklater as screenwriter recalling his own nostalgic upbringing, told with an enthusiastically cheerful style, actually conveying a childlike sense of wonder.  Returning to the playful animated style of WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), comical and often absurd references told through an existential reference point, this film takes us back to a more innocent time, breaking ground in the suburbs, an experimental new style of living that becomes all the rage in America, tract housing for communities that are almost entirely white, offering amusing anecdotes in a playful style, using edgy 60’s music to match the humor, mixing dreamlike reveries into a classical coming-of-age experience that is mostly a delight from start to finish.  Taking us back to 4th grade, in between incidents of severe school punishment, as back in those days it was still all right to paddle kids with brutality, Stan (voiced by Milo Coy), claims it all happened during a dodgeball game, as two men in suits showed up, Bostick (Glen Powell) and Kranz (Zachary Levi), taking him aside to offer him a chance to be an astronaut, as by some happenstance mishap the initial space capsule was built too small, where only a child could fit, so they were impressed by his science reports and his physical fitness, thinking he would make an ideal candidate.  Without thinking too hard he agrees, not realizing what he’s signed up for, as it’s a top secret mission, unable to tell his friends or family, with the mission taking place during summer camp, with NASA providing all the fake photographs sent to his family of his supposed experience in the northern woods of Michigan, but he would actually be going through extensive training for his first space flight to the moon.    

Taking a lengthy aside, we quickly realize this is a film devoted to capturing a place in time, like a modern era version of Our Town (1940), as the narrator proceeds to tell us about his childhood experiences growing up with his family in Texas, where his Dad works for NASA, but doesn’t have one of those sexy or glamorous jobs, much to his son’s chagrin, as that’s all he can think about, being an astronaut, completely surrounded by Astro-dominated themes in local businesses, from hamburger and hot dog shops to bowling alleys to theme parks, including the mammoth Astrodome where they play baseball, the first stadium to play on AstroTurf, with a giant exploding scoreboard that shoots off pistol fire with every home run, the kinds of things that would capture a young boy’s imagination.  The youngest of six siblings, he leads a charmed life, where blacks and hippies seen on the street from their car are gawked at like specimens in a zoo, outsiders that are completely outside their normal experience, where they only hear about them from afar.  The family life revolves around the television, developing peculiar family viewing habits, while recalling all those old 60’s television shows, running home after school to watch Dark Shadows, with Twilight Zone coming on late at night, often falling asleep before the national anthem plays, signing off for the night (unthinkable today with 24/hour marathon television coverage), while on weekends they could check out the sci fi/monster movies playing at the local theater that reflected the paranoia craze from nuclear fall-out with mutant radioactive monsters.  Of course, listening to his sister’s record collection was fun, while setting off fireworks was a big thing in his neighborhood, where there was always a local pyrotechnic setting off rockets, even creating a capsule and putting a live grasshopper inside.  Among their most favorite activities was piling into the back of a pick-up truck, with no regard for personal safety, and heading for the beach in Galveston, with his Dad chugging down beers, which was not against the law at the time, recalling wiping the tar off their feet from oil spill pollution embedded into the sand.  Because the housing development was built on flat land, it tended to flood during heavy rains, causing sewer back-up and standing water, ideal conditions for breeding mosquitos, generating another favorite past-time, riding bikes through the fumes behind the pest control truck spraying DDT insecticide throughout the neighborhood to wipe out a potential mosquito-infestation, knowing nothing at the time about its toxic impact on humans as well.  Yet nothing was more fun than a trip to Astroworld, which was a Texas version of a Disneyland theme park, with scary rides, splash drops, shooting galleries, Double Ferris wheels, an encounter with the Abominable Snowman, and just a million fun things to do, while the accompanying musical soundtrack is simply extraordinary, always a highlight, and one of the most pleasantly rewarding aspects of any Richard Linklater film, APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD - Movie Soundtrack on Spotify.

Tommy Pallotta is the head of animation on all three Linklater animated films, each one using the Max Fleischer rotoscope technique responsible for the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, but he uses a somewhat different method here, animating over live-action footage, photographs, or television broadcasts, including the historic Walter Cronkite broadcasts of the Apollo 11 moon mission on live CBS television during the summer of 1969, with astute commentary provided by his sidekick Eric Sevareid, a war correspondent turned television journalist who offered opinion and analysis.  Changing the focus to actual historical events gives the film a more starkly realistic look, with television providing recurring war footage on a daily basis, reminding viewers of the grim body count of tragic American lives lost in Vietnam, also offering views of blacks in Harlem expressing their viewpoint that the millions of dollars spent on a moon landing is wasted, as it could be put to better use by helping poor people in America who were struggling on a daily basis to make ends meet.  With NASA employing less than 4% blacks, and no presence of minorities in their own schools, what’s noteworthy is that from the protected vantage point of the Houston suburbs, those events couldn’t be more distant and alien to their own lives, “confined to television,” as Stan puts it, while the NASA launch was shown in their classrooms at school, with students discussing the significance of space exploration, including suggestions that it may actually become such an everyday occurrence that in a few years people might even be living in outer space, while many felt space would be the great unifier, bringing the world together, perhaps epitomized by the first photo of a blue earth as seen from space.  From a child’s imagination, it’s easy to see how realistic news stories might be tuned out, while dreams of interplanetary space exploration was so much more fascinating, heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), interjecting Stan’s own space fantasy happening simultaneously to the Apollo mission.  What this suggests is that at least for this generation of kids, they were less concerned about war, poverty, and budget constraints and much more thrilled imagining what it would be like to be an astronaut, which would suddenly be listed high among what they might aspire to be.  Among the more hilarious scenes is watching Stan enthusiastically talk about the sublime qualities of Kubrick’s futuristic film in front of several disinterested friends who couldn’t care less, showing a really good grasp of what the film is about, especially for a ten-year old, considering most adults couldn’t figure it out, clearly suggesting the kid was a budding filmmaker.  A cantankerous grandma offers a humorous counterpoint, a complete opposite from the one who keeps taking them to see THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965) and feeding them treats, as this one feeds them conspiracy theories, like JFK is not really dead, instead he’s a vegetable living on a Greek island owned by Aristotle Onassis, which explains why Jackie married him, or how overpopulation will leave people without sufficient food to eat, leading to mass starvation and famine, while the space race itself led to broad speculation about how nuclear war could devastate the planet, with the duck-and-cover school drills (How 'Duck-and-Cover' Drills Channeled America's Cold War ...) offering a ridiculous defense against toxic radioactivity.  When it comes time for the men to actually walk on the moon, Stan pretty much sleeps through it, exhausted from spending his day at Astroworld, where it seemed to take forever sitting in front of the television to get to that point, continually prolonging the main event with endless talk about things not even shown, described by his sister as “endlessly boring,” though in his own dreams he imagines himself doing his own moon walk, which in the end, seems to be all that really matters.   

Who Are the 12 Men Who Walked on the Moon? - WTTW

In all, 24 American astronauts have made the trip from the earth to the moon between 1968 and 1972.  Three astronauts made the journey from the earth to the moon twice, but only twelve men have actually walked on the moon.  None have been back since December 11, 1972. 

Alois Nebel

ALOIS NEBEL           B                     

Czech Republic  Germany  (84 mi)  2011  d: Tomáš Lunák       Official site [cz]

Eastern European films often reflect a grim interior mood, especially when rooted in history, where living under the boot of military occupation, an imposed Soviet communist dictatorship and political repression only describes the tip of the iceberg, where a closer examination often reveals scathingly inhumane details.  This film marks Tomás Lunák's feature debut as a director and the first rotoscope animation done in The Czech Republic, an interesting technique to use for such a realistic historical overview.  Just the opening few shots set the tone for the film, where from out of total darkness comes the first glimpses of light, soon recognized as a train heading down the tracks.  Set in a small town located near the Polish border in a peaceful area of Czechoslovakia’s Jesenik Mountains in 1989, just days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are quickly introduced to Alois Nebel, the stationmaster at a remote countryside railway station.  Just as we think not much happens in this isolated region, a stranger appears out of the darkness, seen earlier hanging around the railway station, and he appears to be making a desperate attempt to cross the border, though he may have had other intentions, without much luck apparently as he is quickly captured.  This incident seems to trigger something in Nebel’s mind, where the German translation for the word nebel is fog, as he inexplicably becomes withdrawn and uncommunicative, as if retreating into a fog.  He is sent to an asylum where he witnesses the torture of the captured man, who appears to be a mute, so it’s impossible for him to confess, which triggers childhood flashbacks going back to the end of World War II. 

Without offering any historical backdrop, the director assumes Czechs are familiar with their own history, where the mountainous border regions of Czechoslovakia were largely comprised of a German-speaking population, known as the Sudetenland, where it was actually part of Germany until the end of World War I when it became part of Czechoslovakia.  Germans continued to live in the region without incident, but with the Nazi threat to invade Czechoslovakia, Hitler got Britain, France, and Italy to sign the Munich Agreement in 1938 returning the Sudetenland to Germany, a bone of contention with the Russians who occupied the Eastern Czech territory at the end of the war, ruthlessly expelling all the Germans, totalling a half million just from this region, including a young German girl Dorothe, who befriended Nebel as a young boy, emblematic of a larger injustice imposed by the Soviet Red Army, placing the Germans in concentration camps where many died of starvation and disease.  It’s interesting to see the Germans portrayed in a sympathetic light during World War II, especially since they occupied Czechoslovakia during the war, but it’s the Russians that occupied the country militarily ever since and are seen in the present still running corrupt black market businesses, cheating the locals out of potential income, hoarding it all for themselves, seen as drunken louts maintaining a monopoly on all incoming goods.  The picture of state repression, seen by the ruthlessly brutal way they run the asylum, is reminiscent of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), an Academy Award winning film and Best Director for Czech compatriot Milos Forman, whose parents were both killed in Auschwitz. 

The mute prisoner escapes, having his own traumatic war story, and shortly afterwards Nebel is released, only to discover he’s lost his job at the station, so he makes his way to Prague, which is undergoing a bureaucratic restructuring under the newly elected democratic leadership of Vaclav Havel.  But Nebel is homeless and destitute, sleeping in railway stations until he’s befriended by the widow of a former railway man, Kveta, who respects the work ethic and commitment of railway workers, always standing up for them, including a few free meals for Nebel.  It’s amusing to see the Russians moan about being left out of the democratic picture, soon forced out of their jobs, eventually forced to exit the country, which allows Nebel to have his former job back in the countryside.  The film is told much like a historical fairytale with grim references to bleak times under Soviet domination, which are never clearly explained and are simply woven together into the multi-stranded narrative.  Nebel’s own mental disintegration reflects that of the nation which must come to terms with their own dark history.  The film offers a quietly reflective tone throughout, featuring pensive characters often seen staring out of windows, where an unusual guitar score from Petr Kruzik is reminiscent of Neil Young’s haunting score of DEAD MAN (1995).  In a gorgeously designed storm sequence where nature batters the mountainous region, what stands out is the recurrent snow and rain continually pelting the countryside, expressing the severity of existential alienation, a tone of Dostoyevskian angst, given a psychic electro shock, where the audience may feel as discombobulated as Nebel. Lunák attempts to combine many of the thematic elements reflective of the freedom and optimism of the Velvet Revolution, where having finally gotten rid of the Russians, people are given the opportunity to simply live their lives.