First Man (2018)

Jack and I enjoyed this story of Neil Armstrong before and during his historic 1969 moonwalk, but it's too long at 2:21. The actors are compelling, especially Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy as Neil and Janet Armstrong (Gosling was last blogged for Blade Runner 2049 and Foy won awards for playing young Queen Elizabeth in twenty episodes of The Crown). Also featured in the enormous cast are Jason Clarke (most recently in these pages for Mudbound) as Ed White, Kyle Chandler (last blogged for Game Night) as Deke Slayton, Corey Stoll (most recently in The Seagull) as Buzz Aldrin, Shea Whigham (first time in the blog in Take Shelter) as Gus Grissom, and a grown-up Patrick Fugit (We Bought a Zoo) as Elliott See.

Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle (for La La Land) makes his first movie that's not about music and without writing the script himself, working instead from a screenplay by Josh Singer (co-writer of The Post), based on the Armstrong biography by Pulitzer Prize winning author James R. Hanson.

Here's my other problem with this movie. I sometimes wrote about Motion Picture Motion Sickness/MPMS, and I have a running list of movies that make some of us sensitive souls nauseated by the unchecked swinging of a camera. Every one of Chazelle's four features is on that list (70 before adding this one). This one is bad! Right off the bat we have Armstrong testing an aircraft and the camera is shaking intensely. Every time any of them takes off it had me looking away from the screen and waiting for the camera to return to the tripod. Usually I mention the MPMS towards the end of the post but this is egregious. For what it's worth, Jack does not share this sensitivity.

Justin Hurwitz (won two Oscars for La La Land) is Chazelle's only composer and you can stream his whole hour and five minute soundtrack on youtube. I haven't gotten all the way through it so I don't know how many songs, listed here, are on that video, but, at about a half hour in, you will hear musician Leon Bridges reciting the protest poem, Whitey on the Moon. This article about the poem and a video of its composer Gil-Scott Heron reciting it are interesting.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are much more enthusiastic, averaging 88%, than its audiences at 63. Some say Chazelle will get another Oscar nomination. I can't bet on it.

Milestone alert! I have now published posts about 1100 different movies on this blog since September 3, 2008. My alphabetical list includes the count.