Movie Nation

The idea is to hit you with the scale, to impress us with the magnitude of what was attempted and what was accomplished.

So “Apollo 11” begins with a closeup of NASA’s gigantic crawler, the tracked vehicle — then new — that hauled a fully assembled 325-foot Saturn 5/Apollo rocket from the enormous Vehicular Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A.

Only a building “so big it has its own weather” could piece together what was then the most complex machine in human history. Only a tractor that could bear the weight of a city block could move that enormous space ship down the long, flat path to the launchpad that would send men to the moon.

Breathtaking and definitive, “Apollo 11” avoids voice-over narration or overly-explaining anything about America’s date with destiny in July of 1969. If we aren’t old enough to remember it, we’re supposed to know it. It’s in our DNA.

What this documentary does is give us huge images and stunning detail, digging deep into restored footage from NASA’s massive archive of color film stock and grainy videotape to show us just how big a deal this was and remains.

Control rooms jammed with row upon row of launch control, mission control technicians — scientists, men and women in white shirts and ties, white Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell or NASA lab coats, “computers” and “monitors” with matching headsets.

This was analog’s finest hour, human beings, “calculators” or as “Hidden Figures” reminded us, “computers,” staring at cathode ray tube monitors with headsets adorned by stick-on label maker name tags.

An army of mostly-men in more lab coats, wearing helmets or hairnets, taking a break from working in the Clean Rooms assembling future Apollo missions to see their handywork lift off into the heavens.

And in tiny Titusville, Florida, a sea of humanity — tens of thousands of spectators in Panama hats and cats-eye sunglasses, Johnny Carson in one of those plaid sports coats — all waiting to see history be made.

“Apollo 11” blows this over-familiar story — a narrative without narration — back up to the larger-than-life size it deserves. We may hear space buff TV anchor Walter Cronkite pontificate about “the hopes and burdens” carried by the the three astronauts at the finish line of the army many thousands of technicians, engineers, scientists and bolt-tighteners got them to — “for all mankind.”

But it’s as superfluous as command module pilot Michael Collins’ observation via radio of “the enormity of this event.”

Filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13”) makes speech unnecessary. We can see it. And when the Saturn V’s engines fire, we can feel it.

It’s a thrilling film, using only the shortest montage to skip through the backgrounds of the men who undertook the mission, limiting Matt Morton’s swooping, pulse-pounding score to several scenes, not all of them.

There’s so much implied in this footage — the American sense of purpose and pluck channeled into Ridley Scott’s “The Martian,” the rarest breed of men, the ones Tom Wolfe immortalized with the phrase “The Right Stuff,” a more homogeneous America (at least as far the “history” we were taught and on TV, shown back then), and a country that grasped the importance, purpose and urgency of science.

Sputnik did that to us, Kennedy trumpeted it from the mountaintops, Johnson and Nixon and TV news reinforced it.

NASA staffers catch glimpses of Vietnam on the cafeteria TV, mutter about having to compete with Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick debacle with Mary Jo Kopechne for the top spot on the evening news.

But in that capsule, buttoned down pros go about their business, always professional.

That’s where the rare moments of humor spin out of this 93 minute odyssey. NASA’s mission communicators did everything out in the open, back in an era when we knew the difference between ourselves and the Russians. Every glitch was mentioned and dealt with.

And when we’re told of the heart rates of the three Apollo astronauts as they experienced liftoff, you have to chuckle. The coolest customer of them all, the one least excited by all this excitement — was Buzz Aldrin, Steve McQueen in a space suit.

Fussing with Michael Collins about the monitors not delivering data from the bottom of his rib cage only invited a little deadpan.

“I promise to let you know if I stop breathing.”

As familiar as this story is, I was amazed at the simple graphics (countdowns, mission maps), the skilled interplay of images “up there” with chatter and images of those doing the chattering, conferring and celebrating in Florida and Houston, all of which allowed Miller to give this real edge-of-your-seat excitement and tension.

People old enough to remember Apollo will recollect the famous NASA acronyms, “TLI, trans lunar injection,” and the like.

And generations raised on special effects space odysseys will marvel at the tactile, intestines-ratting blast of engines, bolt-separation explosions and the like, stuff that real people with the Right Stuff actually did with little more than a legion of women and men with slide rules as their mathematical guides.

As I write this, I am in view of the VAB — the Vehicular Assembly Building — and the launch pads where Boeing, Space-X and Blue Origin and others deliver exciting but pale imitation launches into space to this day.

There are monuments, museums and parks to the space program in general and Apollo in particular, all over this corner of Florida. It’s woven into the fabric and the lore of Florida’s “Space Coast.”

When I first moved my sailboat here in the early 2000s, the diesel mechanic everyone trusted their engines to was a bespectacled, bookish eccentric named Kapus. Why did we use him? In a previous life, he kept the diesels on the crawler running.

I was thinking of him and the thousands like him as “Apollo 11” unfolded. And as Miller’s film rolls out scores upon scores of NASA names in its closing credits, one last exclamation point on the enormity of the enterprise, I realized Miller would have had it no other way.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Gene Krantz, Clifford Charlesworth, thousands of others

Credits:Directed by Todd Douglas Miller. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:33

Emile Hirsch stars as an Irish undertaker in this Gold Rush Era Western, a man confronted by Men With Guns, thugs, led by John Cusack.

A good heavy role for John C.? Let’s hope so. He’s a scary dude in the right role. And best of all, he doesn’t have to break his “Wear a black hat all the way through the movie” streak.

A huge Thursday night preview and epic Friday have set the table for”Captain Marvel” to own this weekend, all of March and most of the box office pie in what has been a lackluster start to 2019 in terms of ticket sales.

A $160 million opening, Deadline.com says as of Sat. AM.

It’s gotten good enough reviews, is on a boatload of screens — 3000 in 3D — and looks to suck all the oxygen out of the multiplex until the end of the month, anyway.

“How to Train Your Dragon 3” is a distant second, still earning in the $teens, “Madea” is dying off to the tune of a 60% or so falloff, not quite a “Tyler Perry Picture Plummet” (65-70% second weekend), but suggesting that yes, it’s time to kiss her goodbye.

“Green Book” crossed the $200 million global box office mark this week, and this weekend is still well within the top ten.

Neon’s “Apollo 11” doc (I am seeing that today) is just outside of the top ten.

We’ll check these numbers later today with those officially reported to Box Office Mojo but it looks as if the pushback against — What was it? Disney’s PC touches on comic book and “Star Wars” movies? — fell on deaf ears. Curious to see if there’s the sort of female and teen girl turnout on Ms. Marvel that there was for “Wonder Woman.”

The pundits — not the conservative ones, mind you — often joke about the war that the wealthy are waging on the rest of us. And there’s plenty of evidence of that.

In America, they might confine their predations to tax “reform” and a revolution-inciting inequity in the justice system. But what about the Third World? Would they kill and eat us?

That’s the premise of “The Cannibal Club,” a bloody and bloody slow Brazilian satire about that nation’s sequestered, insulated very rich, fair-skinned folk who have all the money and all the power already. Why wouldn’t they start eating  “squeegee punk” poor, the “delinquents” and “scum?”

Classic film fans can think of this slasher pic as “Swept Away” meets “Eating Raoul,” heavy-handed, wallowing in sex and slayings by the bored and depraved ruling classes. The wallowing is substituted for pacing in Guto Parente’s film.

Otavio and Gilda (Tavinho Teixeira, Ana Luiza Rios) love their beachside villa, their seaside pool. They want to keep it, which is why they have a bodyguard as well as a maid and caretaker/pool-boy.

When boss Otavio entrusts the latest caretaker with the run of the place while he runs to town, that means its playtime for Gilda. It’s just that she likes her sexual dalliances to climax with Otavio taking an ax to her paramour in mid-coitus.

Otavio gets his rocks off overhearing her frolics, and on the ax-whacking he gets to administer.

Those rare cuts of meat served every meal have don’t grow on trees, you know.

They’re a part of a whole “club” of super-rich killers in and around Forteleza, donning evening wear for midnight rites which involve watching and videotaping chained sex slaves going at it, butchered by an executioner hiding in the shadows awaiting their finish.

They gather for parties, brag about their travels — “I like First World countries so much better than Third World ones. Clean.”

“Tell me about it. It’s so depressing to come back.”

They self-righteously bloviate about “family, faith and work,” and hiss at the less fortunate.

“They should all die.”

But then a secret that this crowd regards as even darker than “We lure and kill working class Brazilians for sport” gets out, one involving Borges, Otavio’s powerful boss (Pedro Domingues). Somebody from their ranks is going to be killed.

“We’re not MURDERERS!” Otavio declares, in Portuguese with English subtitles and utterly without irony. The poor pawns they kill and consume? They don’t count.

Parente lets his sex scenes — including masturbation — go on and on. He has the camera linger over the newly ax-chopped or throat-slashed, has his “club” members stand around, nude, covered in blood as if this rite is their right.

A close-up of a rotting dog corpse is thrown in for metaphoric shock effect.

And Gilda goes to the toilet in front of us, and DOESN’T WASH HER HANDS. Savages.

There’s a funnier, more biting movie in this premise, this cast and their treatment of it. But Parente never lets his picture get up a head of steam, never lets it take off.

Suspense? Surprise? He doesn’t handle those elements with a deft hand, either.

Gore alone is not enough to recommend any movie, much less one with a bit of gruesome promise to it. Perhaps Rob Zombie will attempt a Hollywood remake and find pace that will make the dark humor play and give this politically potent premise its proper payoff.

MPAA Rating: graphic violence, explicit sex

Cast: Tavinho Teixeira, Ana Luiza Rios, Pedro Domingues, Ze María

Credits: Written and directed by Guto Parente. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:20

Marvel Studios’ “Captain Marvel” may be another somewhat generic superhero pic, forgettable in spite of its Oscar winning leading lady. Or it could be this year’s “Black Panther” or “Wonder Woman,” although lacking the novelty of those films’ — it’s not the “first” female-fronted superhero franchise — probably not.

But it’s already out-performed “Panther” in its first test — Thursday night’s opening. A 118% improvement over BP, says Deadline.com. Maybe as high as $24 million.

That, combined with the fact that it’s opening on over 3000 3D screens alone (well over 4,000 overall) should make this an instant blockbuster — $100-120 million opening.

Its reviews are not the grade-on-the-curve gushers that “Panther” and “Woman” earned, breaking gender or race barriers in the genre, at least as far as critics are concerned. Metacritic’s aggregate rating is just above lukewarm —  we all liked it, as Rottentomatoes confirms (almost all of us, 82% or so). Just not all that much.

I am guessing $120 million.

The bicycle is one of the most liberating inventions in the history of humanity. Its not just the exhilarating thrill of the ride, the exercise and sensation of speed that makes it addicting. Lives are changed and worldviews expanded simply by virtue of the freedom it affords, especially the young, who use this simplest form of personal transportation to experience places beyond their immediate experience, out of the reach of family control.

That has to be what freaks the mullahs of Afghanistan out about girls riding bikes. “We don’t like it,” men will say. Even in the most modest clothing, wrapped in scarves and long pants, the conservatives of this embattled, backwards country still call the act “shameful” and the girls daring to ride “infidels.”

“Afghan Cycle” is about ongoing efforts by the mostly-city girls in their country to drag it into the modern day, striking a tiny blow for gender equality as they ride in packs through city streets and on suburban highways, part of a national girl’s cycling team.

The girls in the film — Frozan and Zahra, Nahid and Mosama and others — enthuse about the “feeling of joy…I don’t want to get off” that cycling gives them.

They have been featured in TV news reports in the West, “training in secret,” “athletes who “risk our lives” when they train.

As Afghanistan struggles to put its Medieval “Taliban” years behind it, with city dwellers noting that women have “regained the right to work, travel and take part in sports,” you’d think Sarah Menzies’ documentary would be an upbeat celebration of teens striking a blow for freedom in a part of the world that leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to women’s rights.

But as they ride in uniforms of headscarves, matching long-sleeve jerseys and gym pants, they talk of “death threats” and “fighting the stubborn taboo” that so many men outside of Afghanistan’s few cities cling to. The movie isn’t the “feel good” story you’d hope it might be.

Frozan, the daughter of a dedicated cyclist who grew up before Afghanistan’s communist takeover and Soviet occupation and thus learned to ride, tries to balance the rituals and mores of her culture with her yearning to do the simplest things, forbidden by mullahs and their hold over the fundamentalists there.

“I don’t have the freedom to go outside and ride any time I like, or to go outside at all,” she complains (in Pashtun, with English subtitles).  “I want that for the future.”

“Security” is the team’s biggest concern. “The Jihadists put a stop to women’s rights…Girls who want to ride have a lot of enemies.”

The fundamentalist dogma there decrees that “Girls should not do sports, not have educations.” The riders are lectured (we’re told, not shown), hassled by passing drivers, jeered for ruining their “future” (reproductively) by riding and risking injury.

“This is not (your) right,” an Imam says on camera.

And yet, they persist. Masoma was the first in her family to ride a bicycle, and she and her sister Zahra are supported in their pioneering efforts by their father.

“We are role models for other girls, showing them they can live free.”

Menzies probably set out to show just that, and ran up against the same headwinds facing female cyclists in Afghanistan. Her film has little dramatic arc to it, and little uplift. It plays as flatly as the desert valleys the girls pedal through. A filmmaking tip — when your settling is as sunwashed and sand colored as this, white subtitling is a terrible choice. White words over white backgrounds, people wearing white shawls and jackets, is like putting no subtitles at all in the film.

The girls don’t come off as future Olympians, riding their mix of road bikes, city bikes, mountain bikes and hybrids over flat desert highways and down dusty trails. That’s not the goal of most, though some harbor dreams of professional careers.

Younger rider Nahid lost a brother to a suicide bomb attack, and as the team rides past the home of what used to be two ancient, gigantic statues of Buddha — which the redneck culture-fearing Taliban blew up in 2001, we’re reminded of just how monumental the change they want to effect change.

Coach Abdul Sadiq Sadiqi remembers first trying to get this team going in the 1980s — pre-Taliban. It’s proven nearly impossible.

One young present day Jihadist wonders why they don’t “machine gun them all” and a seemingly reasonable mullah explains to the filmmaker that “girls are “precious gems,” that “Eyes are absorbent of all badness” and that he will not tolerate uncovering the girlish parts of their bodies of riding in groups.

His fear, their fear, is palpable. Let girls ride in groups and you can’t harass them as easily. Let them ride bikes, and next thing you know, “Islam will be weakened.”

But as we see them mount up on their Giants and other global brand bikes, check out the smiles from younger girls they pedal by, the viewer can take comfort that the tide of history is against the oppressors, that girls craving freedom might flee their homeland to find it now, gone with their Schwins.

Someday, though, given time and TV and exposure to a world much wider than the daily calls to prayer, change will come.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits: Sarah Menzies. A Let Media release.

Running time: 1:28

If nothing else, animator/writer-director Milorad Krstic has done the world’s “Art Appreciation” teachers and professors a great service. Why bother writing up a final exam when “Ruben Brandt, Collector” becomes available on video?

Here it is, a history of art primer packed into a light, brisk animated caper thriller. Hundreds of paintings and painters are referenced. So teachers, grade on the curve. First five students to list fifty references get the A, second five the B and so on.

The Serbo-Hungarian artist and filmmaker designed “Ruben” to have an Art Moderne/Klimt look, as interpreted by anime and manga artists obsessed with Picasso, Chagall and Dali and rendered in CGI animation.

It’s a gorgeous film about an art therapist who discovers art can also be maddening.

Dr. Ruben Brandt uses art to cure textbook cases of mania, obsession. In take-up-an-art-form solo sessions and group therapy, he convinces his patients to channel their dysfunction into work.

But Dr. Brant (voiced by Iván Kamarás) has nightmares. It might be Andy Warhol’s pistol-packing “Double Elvis” silk screen image from Presley’s “Flaming Star” Western, challenging him to a public gunfight, or Velazquez’s “Infanta Margarita Teresa” chewing his arm off as she drags him through a rail car window while Frank Duveneck’s “Whistling Boy” whistles at him tauntingly.

And all of them — including many characters within the movie — have multiple eyes on one side of their face, multiple breasts, “people” that might have been dreamed up by Picasso and Dali.

The art is out to get him, and that’s got him seeing a shrink himself.

His new patient might offer him some peace. Mimi (Gabriella Hámori) is a svelte, backflipping, parkour-practicing cat burglar who hits museums on the orders of a mob boss. She’s a “kleptomaniac” she confesses — not to the DC detective (Csaba Márton) chasing her through Europe, but to Dr. Ruben.

She does it “because beauty shouldn’t be locked away.”

As Brandt’s nightmares take on a pattern — the strands of hair of Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus” become tentacles to yank him into the painting, at one point — perhaps this unrepentant thief, with help from a few other patients, can “help” the good doctor — provide him some peace, if not a cure.

Flashbacks suggest his “Men don’t cry” father might be the key.

Off we go, dashing into museums across the globe, hunting down Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and Van Gogh’s “Postman Joseph Roulin” and escaping, always in the most aesthetically gorgeous vintage cars — Tatra, Mercedes 300SL a Citroen DS.

The dream psychology matches the film’s muted color palette and flat visual aesthetic. And even as interest in the story waxes and wanes — “What do we need to steal next?” or the mob and cop pursuers guessing “Where will they STRIKE next?” — the visual puns and witty homages to famous art and artists keep “Ruben Brandt, Collector” interesting.

It’s more clever than smart,  but here’s an animated film for adults (violence, nudity) that challenges and rewards the viewer who — yes — paid attention in class, and whose bucket list includes MoMa, the Louvre, the Musée D’Orsay, the Reina Sofia and Prado, Met and Musée Rodin.

MPAA Rating: R for nude images and some violence

Cast: The voices of Gabriella Hámori, Iván Kamarás, Csaba Márton

Credits: Directed by Milorad Krstic, script by Milorad Krstic and Radmila Roczkov   A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:36

It’s the way many a Western legend begins — a boy recognizing a somewhat older boy, a famous outlaw.

“You’re…you’re Billy the KID! I read about you in the paper!”

“Lies, mostly,” the kid will drawl — hard and impulsive and wise beyond his years, thanks to a life by the gun, on the run.

Thus does “The Kid” come to life, a dusty, blood-stained Western built on gritty performances of archetypal characters, flinty dialogue and just a dash of sentiment.

Veteran character actor Vincent D’Onofrio steps behind the camera for this fictionalized account of the last days of Billy the Kid, when his “nasty, brutish and short” life crossed paths with another kid whose life was blood-stained before he ever met William Bonney, and only gained purpose thanks to his time in the presence of the West’s most infamous outlaw.

D’Onofrio takes a small, pivotal role in his film, and delivers his customary fair value in the part — that of a sheriff hellbent on leading Billy to a lynch mob’s noose. But the actor turned director’s real gift here was calling in favors among the acting community, casting well and sometimes against type and knowing a tight script (by Andrew Lanham ) when he sees one.

Newcomer Jake Schur is the “other kid” in this tale — Rio, a farmboy whose efforts to save his mother from his murderously abusive father don’t save her. But at least the dead man won’t be coming after Rio’s sister, Sara (Leila George), or him.

That doesn’t take into account the dead man’s sadistic, unforgiving brother (Chris Pratt), a neighbor who storms in to take his revenge on the 14 year-old boy and his older sister. Only a handy knife and even handier shovel save them.

It’s when they’re on the run that they stumble into Billy the Kid’s New Mexico gang. But being around Billy means the law can’t be far behind. And Sheriff Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke), two weeks on the job, knows where to find his man.

As Billy, Dane DeHaan has perhaps his first “perfect” role, all smudged and peach-fuzzed, yellow-teeth and a worldly growl that belies the character’s 22 years. DeHaan finally shakes off that “Leonardo DiCaprio Lite” label slapped on him in his youth. He just turned 35 and has darkened into the man who can play the “Kid” — manipulative and self-martyred, sentimental and utterly ruthless –aged beyond his years.

If you know your Western history, you’ll remember Billy and his captor Pat had history back in the Lincoln County War. So there’s residual respect, a desire to bring the outlaw to justice and not shoot him to death — with the rest of his gang, and two teens that they just met.

Hawke’s Garrett is classic Western cool — a confident gunman who doesn’t interrupt his shave as the stand-off begins, but rides in to cut off Billy’s last chance of escape.

“You shot a goddamned horse, Pat. Who DOES that?”

It is during the trek to trial that Rio bonds with Billy, who knows his secret and sees it as something they had in common. Billy’s first violence came when he was all of 13.

Garrett, “my own specially assigned sheriff,” is less sympathetic.

“You murdered men.” Ah, but Billy’s famous, even if the newspapers print “lies, mostly,” he tells the boy.

“You know what it means when they start writin’ about ya?” Garrett adds “It means you’re already dead.”

The story beats –shootouts and attempted escapes — are timeworn, but screenwriter Lanham (“The Shack, “The Glass Castle”) concocts the occasion good line and the cast and director make them work.

“I hope you’ll rightly understand I had to at least try,” Billy apologizes after one failed attempt. He may have squandered his “last chance at decency,” to Garrett. But he has his reasons. Nature and nurture did him in.

“Ain’t no good moment I ever had weren’t a lie.”

The bonding scenes have the odd tin-eared line. One of Billy’s speeches plays like, well, a speech. The picture falters in the late acts before rallying for the only finale you can imagine, given the circumstances.

Hawke is on his game now. Ignore his Oscar-worthy “First Reformed” performance if you want. Watch him bellow his way around a lynch mob as Garrett and you’re seeing the definition of a “star turn,” focused, resolute and not given to sentiment when it comes to violence — larger than life, right down to the way he wears his hat.

But I cannot get over how satisfying it is to see Chris Pratt as the heavy. The sadism fits better than the (fake-ish) beard. If Westerns are to be believed, the lawless just-closing frontier was filled with murderous misfits like this guy — bullies whose violence was generally aimed at the weak, whose bravado was wholly based on how they stood up when faced with a “genuine celebrity” in the rough justice of a “count to ten” duel on main street. Pratt makes him feel real, without his usual wink at the camera.

“The Kid” isn’t a perfect Western, but D’Onofrio briskly walks his mostly-on-the-money cast through its classic plot, tropes and archetypes. Who knew Brooklyn’s own Mr. “Law & Order” was a fan? I only see one horse opera (“The Magnificent Seven”) in his acting credits. “The Kid” shows us he’s a lot more at home in the genre than most any of his co-stars in that one. And that he took notes.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Chris Pratt, Dane DeHaan, Leila George

Credits:Directed by Vincent D’Onofrio, script by Andrew Lanham. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:44

More of the life and those who influenced the Man Who Made Middle Earth is in this new trailer to “Tolkien,” opening May 19.

Nicholas Hoult and Phil Collins’ daughter Lily Collins star in it.

World War I, an eye and ear for language, storytelling and magic all figure. This REALLY sells the movie, I must say.

Ari Aster’s latest fright-fest is a creepy suggestion of cultish witchcraft set in a Scandinavian festival that happens every 90 years.

Ancient rites, a young woman (Florence Pugh) brought into all this Nordic weirdness by her boyfriend. Did he (Will Poulter) lure her there? For…something?

Guess when “Midsommar” opens.