Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)This is non-stop
nostalgia for the 1960s, specifically the time around the Apollo 11
mission to the moon and back. It’s a cartoon, based on writer-director
Richard Linklater’s memories of his childhood and familyhis family — his dad worked
for NASA, but in a boring office job.

THE NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL #146 Friday, Feb. 24, 2023

My dad didn’t work for NASA,
but he worked at NASA, as a Boeing subcontractor on the Saturn 5
rocket. Linklater and I were kids at about the same time, with
the same family focus on the moonshot, so virtually everything in the
film is a spin on my memories, too, and I loved it.There’s a
moment where the narrator (Jack Black) rattles off the names of 25 TV
shows he watched in the 1960s, and 24 of them are shows that I watched
in the ’60s (I was somehow immune to McHale’s Navy). Even Time Tunnel is on the list, and nobody remembers Time Tunnel.There’s a very
brief shot of a movie theater called the Cinema 1 & 2, which looks
almost exactly like the Lynn Twin in Lynnwood, and probably like a
hundred other theaters. It’s a little late for me to realize, they
probably used the same template for building two-screen theaters
everywhere, same as every McDonald’s looked the same and still does.There are also lots of laughs, amidst a bunch of childhood vignettes and
inter-sibling rivalries and Dad being a cheapskate and Mom talking
common sense. The main story — abandoned for half an hour at a time so
the film could squeeze in more of the ’60s — is that the main character,
a prepubescent boy, has whimsical daydreams of going to the moon.Everything
here is aimed at boomers, and everything connects. I’m not sure the film would hold the attention of anyone under the age of 55, unless some
whippersnapper has an intense interest in history or anthropology. For
an old fogey like me, though, it’s a hilarious trip through time.Linklater
uses the same rotoscoping animation technique that he pioneered with A
Scanner Darkly, where the movie is filmed with actors but then drawn
over. Same as with that movie, it’s a bit of a distraction, a
flourish that seems unnecessary, but also same as A Scanner Darkly,
everything else is so spot on you simply forget to be annoyed by the
cartoonery.And it is a darn near perfect film. This is what Hollywood does so well, though Linklater, of course, did it all in Austin. Verdict: BIG YES.♦ ♦ ♦ Alien from the Deep (1989)A couple of Greenpeace activists sneak around on a tropical island trying to find proof that corporate bad guys are dumping radioactive waste into a live volcano. What they find is that the heat and radioactivity of the volcano have attracted space aliens, but the moviemakers don’t care about this, so why should you?
Cheap Italian exploitation, dubbed in English, with snakes.Verdict: NO.♦ ♦ ♦  It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman! (1975) In Kal-El’s lost era, between TV Superman George Reeves and movie Superman Christopher Reeve, there was a Broadway musical, and this is a performance of that play, filmed for television.It
looks so cheap — shot on video, very flat and overlit — it’s hard to
believe that this aired on ABC in prime time. If you can get past how
bad it looks, it’s an occasionally funny comedy, reminiscent of TV’s
silly Batman, but not nearly as dark and gritty.And it’s a
musical, but with very tepid songs. Lois Lane’s introductory number is OK,
but all the other songs are less than that, and a few are so bad I
fast-forwarded.A nobody plays Superman, and looks kinda wrong for
the role, but he’s OK. The rest of the cast includes Lesley Ann Warren
as Lois Lane, no Jimmy Olson at all, Allen Ludden as Perry White, and
Kenneth Mars, Al Molinaro, Loretta Swit, and David Wayne as bad guys.
Only Mr Mars is amusing, as you might guess, but everyone tries, except
Ludden, he’s leaden. And it’s narrated by the familiar voice of Gary
Owens. Verdict: NO. ♦ ♦ ♦ Malcolm X (1972)

No,
this isn’t Spike Lee’s biopic, it’s the real thing — a documentary with
Mr X speaking his mind in footage from speeches, and answering
reporters’ often quite clueless questions. It’s fascinating
getting to know the man. His life was a journey indeed — from pimp and
petty thief to prison, to one of the grand rabble-rousing radicals of
our time. And it’s still our time. James Earl Jones narrates, but
mostly it’s Malcolm who does the talking, and for a radical, he seems
remarkably reasonable. He didn’t have the patience to live yet another
life as a man subjugated by this racist society, so he stood up to it.The
film shows some of his growth as a person, from the “hate whitey”
theoretic of his first years as a leader to his journey to Mecca, his
shock at meeting decent white people there, his eventual break with
Islamic leader Elijah Muhammad, and finally, his murder.Made by Arnold Perl (Cotton Comes to Harlem, Fiddler on the Roof), based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X.Verdict: YES.♦ ♦ ♦
Mom and Dad Save the World (1991)

Emperor
Tod of the planet Spengo (Jon Lovitz) plans war on Earth, but falls in
love with an Earth woman (Teri Garr) instead, so he kidnaps Garr and her
husband (Jeffrey Jones).Spango is described as a planet of
idiots, which seems accurate. The level of comedy here is that Jones’s
character is named Dick, so people on Spango call him Earth-Dick — and
that’s a good enough level of comedy for me.It’s a celebration of
cheesy sci-fi silliness, with talking dogs and mad scientist Wallace
Shawn and kindly space numbskull Eric Idle.Written by Chris Matheson (all three Bill & Teds) and Ed Solomon (Men in Black), with music by Jerry Goldsmith (Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Next Generation).
Directed by Greg Beeman, who has, to my knowledge, never made a good
movie except this one, but he did a lot of somewhat better-than-average
television (Heroes, Smallville, The Wonder Years).Verdict: YES.♦ ♦ ♦ Strike (1925)”The
strength of the working class is organization. Without organization of
the masses, the proletarian is nothing. Organized it is everything.
Being organized means unity of action, unity of practical activity.”

Written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein, Strike is a stirring propaganda piece, but it’s not so much about Soviet values as about valuing people who work for a living.A worker at a shoe factory is falsely accused of
stealing, and deeply ashamed, he kills himself. This tragedy motivates the factory’s workers to
petition management, hoping to improve working conditions. Management
being management, their request is turned down, which leads to an
uprising.The story starts slow, but builds as it goes, and by the halfway mark it’s riveting and it never lets go. The
visuals are as revolutionary as the plot. At the climax, a crowd of
strikers being attacked is juxtaposed against the slaughter of a cow.
All through the film, animals are slaughtered or simply treated as
animals, immediately counterbalanced by similar mistreatment of workers
and strikers.It sounds didactic, strident — and it is, but
it’s also compelling. This is cinema with a message urgently needed a
century later, and probably still needed a century from now if anyone’s
still around to watch old movies:If you treat people like crap,
and use violence to keep them down, eventually the people you’ve beaten down will
fight back. In 2023, I’m ready. Any time now.Verdict: YES.♦ ♦ ♦Top Secret (1984)

From Zucker Zucker & Abrahams, the same team that made Airplane! and Kentucky Fried Movie, this is only slightly less frantic and funny, but it’s still very, very funny. Superstar American pop singer Nick Rivers (baby-faced Val Kilmer, in his first role) takes his surf-shooting rock’n’roll on a tour of East Germany (which was commieland, back then), and falls into international intrigue and romance and general silliness.The movie has everything but a plot, because plots are overrated and unnecessary. There’s something funny every twenty seconds, laughs at least once a minute, and it’s all very stupid, and also it’s an unofficial sequel to The Blue Lagoon. Kilmer sings, he dances, completely owns every scene he’s in, and he’s so cute I’m left questioning my heterosexuality.In the midst of rewatching of all the Marx Brothers films, this would fit in nicely — it’s that level of absurd. Peter Cushing in reverse and Omar Sharif as a sub-compact car co-star. “I know a little German. He’s sitting over there.”Verdict: YES, YES, YES.♦ ♦ ♦ Coming attractions:Cisco Pike (1971)
Demonwarp (1988)
Dust Devil (1992)
I Was a Shoplifter (1950)
Sunless (1983)
The Terminal Man (1974)
Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978)
2/24/2023   
There
are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign
or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of
making them — that if you only watch whatever’s on Netflix or playing at
the twenty-plex, you’re missing out.To get beyond the ordinary, try • Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • or your local library.