[ad_1]
This news has been read 258 times!
Fly Me to the Moon is better than it looks. This isn’t a swipe at the marketing campaign for the space race romantic comedy about a straight-laced NASA guy and a Madison Avenue marketing guru who go to market the moon landing. It’s more about the state of moviegoing in theaters. Movies like this, with real stars like Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, gorgeous looks, original concepts and flashy titles, aren’t common at your local theater. We’ve become accustomed to seeing movies like this and assuming one of two things: It’s the product of overpriced streaming, or it’s fake, like those movies within movies that are mostly meant to be funny but are at least somewhat believable.
Both assumptions are correct, but the former is mostly right: This is an Apple-produced movie that, like “Napoleon” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” will be released in theaters on Friday through a traditional studio (Sony’s Columbia Pictures). This is more than just a gesture to theaters—its streaming date hasn’t even been announced. The director is Greg Berlanti, a TV veteran whose films include “Love, Simon” and “Life as We Know It.” Here, he seems to have drawn style and tone from Peyton Reed’s “Temptation of Love,” the 2003 Rock Hudson/Doris Day parody of the 1960s that starred Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor.
The script, written by Rose Gilroy and the story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, is breezy and full of delightfully quirky energy, giving Johansson the chance to fully tap into her movie-star charisma as savvy, self-made Kelly Jones, a bit of a female version of Don Draper without the melancholy and flirtation, but with some secret baggage and the ability to charm and persuade just about anyone. If you can get past the opening montage, an awkward history lesson with the depth and nuance of a half-page, one-line grade-school report on the space race, you’ll be in for an enjoyable but aimless ride, courtesy of Johnson, who is a producer, along with Tatum and a talented supporting cast (Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, Jim Rash). Tatum is perhaps a bit of a misfit as NASA launch director (and Korean War veteran) Cole Davis.
Although he and Johnson are well matched and wear knits throughout, his portrayal of Cole is so instantly relatable that there’s no sense of drama or tension. It’s hard to say whether this is a fault of the script, the direction, or the casting. But there’s no question of “will they?”, only “when will they?”, and this narrative approach is unremarkable when the running time is over two hours. This is a movie in no hurry to move quickly. In fact, the main selling point of the trailers, that Kelly was hired to fake the moon landing in case anything went wrong with Apollo 11, doesn’t come until later in the film. It’s not the focus of the story at all, just an aspect of it that can be a little confusing on first viewing.
refer to
Rush, the director of this top-secret film project, makes these scenes quite funny (although the recurring Kubrick jokes fall flat). Aside from the excellent costumes and production design, most attempts to reference the era are fairly superficial – this is a rose-tinted version of the late 1960s, where racism and homophobia are almost non-existent. Misogyny and former President Richard Nixon are jokes and tolerated nuisances.
Another misstep is spending too much time on the Apollo 11 astronauts, even down to the requisite launch — a scene we’ve seen so many times to great effect that there’s little benefit to cramming it clumsily into a film like this. It’s just an expensive diversion aspiring to grandeur that it doesn’t actually need. “Fly Me to the Moon” would be better off not taking itself too seriously. Its most valuable concept is Johnson and Tatum (a good reminder, by the way, to rewatch “Hail, Caesar”) as modern-day Day and Hudson. They’re charming. They just need some material to live up to their billing. “Fly Me to the Moon,” an Apple Original Movies/Columbia Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for “some strong language, cigarette smoking.” Running time: 132 minutes. Two and a half out of four stars.
By Lindsey Bahr
This news has been read 258 times!
[ad_2]
Source link
