Here are a few supplemental remarks about Fly Me To The Moon (Sony, 7.12,) which I favorably reviewed last weekend.
(1) Colin Jost‘s cameo as Senator Cook, a conservative none-too-bright, is a little embarassing. He only has a couple of lines, for one thing, and you can barely see him — he’s mostly covered in shadows. Jost is married to Scarlett Johansson, the film’s star and senior producer, and they couldn’t give him, say, six or seven lines?…a well-lighted scene with a little back-and-forth repartee? It’s humiliating, man — grounds for divorce.
(2) Ray Romano plays an upper-level NASA administrator named Henry Smalls…fine. But why is he wearing a ten-day growth of beard? NASA bigwigs were total straight-arrows, for one thing, and nobody in 1969 walked around with the Miami Vice Don Johnson short-beard look. That shit didn’t begin until the mid to late ’80s.
(3) Early on there’s a magnificent nighttime shot of a couple of Cape Canaveral launch towers a mile or so away, glowing with amber light. Congrats to dp Dariusz Wolski.
(4) Despite the protests of some delusional HE commentariat lunatics, Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11 showed without a shadow of a doubt that obesity was mostly non-existent in 1969. And yet Fly Me To The Moon includes two insert shots of a beefy. bordering-on-fat TV reporter going on about the atmosphere of excitement at Cape Canaveral, etc. There aren’t any galumphy, sea-lion-sized TV reporters now, and there sure as shit weren’t any 55 years ago.
(5) Woody Harrelson‘s Moe Berkus, a governmental “bad” guy, insists that fake moon landing footage should be captured in case the Apollo 11 mission goes wrong. Fine, but why is it important to shoot this footage live, or concurrent with the actual moon landing and exploration? They could have shot it a few days before and nobody would be the wiser. It makes no practical sense.
(6) Channing Tatum‘s Cole Davis is a total drag to be around. He stops the film in its tracks every time he says a line.
(7) And by the way, Tatum is now 44, and a recent promotional interview he did with Johansson shows he’s clearly going bald. He could fix this shit right away by going to Prague — his middle-aged years have only just begun! — but of course he won’t because he’s too cool for school.
