Day: October 13, 2018

When that “where’s the flag-planting sequence?” complaint about First Man broke at the time of the Telluride Film Festival, my response was that the flag actually appears in the film three or four times, including a shot of the moon flag as well as a brief but unmissable flag-unfurling scene featuring one of Neil Armstrong‘s sons.

Except I was apparently wrong about the count.

According to a 10.12 Huffpost piece by Bill Bradley, the U.S. flag appears no fewer than 18 times in Damian Chazelle‘s film. Presuming this is true, the issue could have been shut down so easily if Universal marketing had simply hired an ad agency to assemble all 18 flag shots and make a patriotic YouTube video out of said footage. Maybe some talking-head quotes about the duty-and-patriotism aspects from Chazelle, Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, a NASA rep, Buzz Aldrin…would’ve been a snap.

Now that Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 is playing on both coasts and some have presumably seen it, what are the reactions? There’s no way I’ve oversold or overpraised it but does anyone think I might have? Is it mostly an older person’s nostalgia trip or is there some interest among 20- and 30somethings? It made around $28K at Manhattan’s IFC Center after a week; the Los Angeles Nuart booking began last night.

Here’s a chat I did with Tyrnauer 10 or 11 days ago.

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In the wake of Richard Brody‘s “why is First Man so white?” critique (“Brody Fulfills Prophecy,” posted on 10.11), RealClear’s Thelma Adams is the latest to carry the identity politics torch:

“Fifty years [after NASA’s first manned flight to the moon] America doesn’t do such an out-of-this-world job when it comes to racial inclusivity,” Adams has written. “First Man is a reminder of such inequality.

“The early reception for Damien Chazelle’s space epic since its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month has been superlative. Under the National Review headline “First Man is the movie of the Year,” my friend and former New York Post colleague Kyle Smith joined with the majority who found the biopic 82 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. He crowed “First Man is why we go to the movies.”

“To that I ask, ‘What do you mean we, white man?’

“Nothing like the last month in America shows the cracks in the American melting pot, and the impossibility of a cultural ‘we.’ Most semi-woke individuals sometime during the 141-minute movie will notice the absence of people of color in speaking roles. Not there on the mammoth screen. Not there historically. Not in space. And possibly absent from the audience.”

In other words, Adams seems to be saying, First Man would have been more in synch with woke America and might have generated a more bountiful box-office if Chazelle had ignored history and cast an African=American actor in one of the principal roles.

She seems to be suggesting that First Man would have been in better cultural shape if Chazelle had cast, say, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Ed White, one of the Appollo astronauts who tragically died on the Cape Kennedy launch pad in 1967. Or as Roger Chaffee or Virgil “Gus” Grissom.

Why not, right? The only thing that matters these days is inclusion and representation. Hollywood has a duty to push back against racial discrimination in all its forms, and that includes accurate but harmful depictions of U.S. history.

While watching Paramount’s 4K-restored, wire-free War of the Worlds, I was again perplexed by that vaguely obnoxious Colonel character (played by the late Vernon Rich) pronouncing “hill three” as “hill thuh-ree“. This always struck me as an excessive application of military-speak. Obviously “thuh-ree” is about verbal clarification over a possibly squawky military radio, but what other other number sounds even a little bit similar? Saying “thuh-ree” for emphasis is like saying “fi-yi five” or “ay-yay-eight” or “ni-yi-nine.” Again, the mp3.

Chelsea Handler obviously wasn’t implying there was anything wrong or unfortunate about Sen. Lindsey Graham possibly being closeted, which I know nothing about one way or the other and am not interested in discussing. Handler was alluding to a possible vein of hypocrisy on his part, given HRC’s 2016 statement that Graham “has been a consistent opponent of everything from marriage equality to protecting LGBT workers from employment discrimination.” If, that is, there’s some factual basis to the loose talk.