There’s a new Star Wars movie out this weekend. The following are my favorite movies about space (pardon my omission of the ten thousand movies in the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises). In no particular order:
2001: A Space Odyssey – This is not really a favorite of mine but it deserves mention. I took my future wife to this movie as one of our first dates. Quite the first date movie. I think I have seen this film at least five times and I couldn’t begin to tell you what is about. Lost me after the ape scene. It’s a classic. Just don’t ask me to watch it again.
Apollo 13 – The classic tale of the aborted mission to the moon and how NASA scrambles to find a way to save the crew and get them back to Earth. Tom Hanks plays astronaut and crew chief Jim Lovell (the movie is based on his memoir “Lost Moon”). The superb supporting cast includes Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise. My favorite line: “This is like trying to fly a toaster through a car wash”.
The Right Stuff – The movie is based on the Tom Wolfe novel about the first American astronauts. I just watched it again recently. My favorite parts are the scenes with Sam Shepard (playing the test pilot Chuck Yeager). Yeager doesn’t become an astronaut but remains in the Mojave Desert as a test pilot. Levon Helm (drummer from The Band) plays his buddy. Barbara Hershey plays his wife and her scenes with Shepard, particularly the one near the end of the movie, are classic.
The Martian – Not quite as good as the book but close. Matt Damon plays the wise cracking scientist/spaceman Mark Watney who gets left behind on Mars when his crew, thinking he has been killed in a severe dust storm, aborts the mission and heads back to earth. Then a mission control analyst monitoring the planet starts picking up evidence that Watney may still be alive and the race is on to retrieve him from the red planet. The film, and more so the book, is narrated mostly by Watney who provides a running stream of one liners as he ingeniously figures out how to survive until his rescuers can arrive. The strong cast includes Jessica Chastain and Jeff Daniels. Start with the book.
Alien – The starship freighter Nostromo is on its way back to earth when the crew is awakened from their “travel sleep” with a distress signal from a nearby planet. One of the pods they encounter latches itself onto the helmet of one the crew. They bring him back onto the ship to tend to him and then it’s off to the races as the “alien” gets loose (in a particularly gruesome dinner scene). The cast includes Tom Skerrit, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton and Sigourney Weaver (in her first starring role). There have been numerous sequels but this is the one for me.
ARTS ROUNDUP
Listening – Neil Young Archives. The second and future releases of the NYA series are now on the web only. Young has backfilled “Archives I” onto the site. Every one of his albums is available and there are placeholders for unreleased albums (presumably to be populated with official archive releases). There are two audio settings for playback: master level and a lower level with MP3/Spotify quality audio (Neil has become quite the audiophile). There are a couple of ways to browse the music. For me it’s interesting to see when the songs were recorded and who played on the sessions. Very cool stuff for the hardcore fan.
Watching – “The Defiant Ones” is an HBO documentary that starts out with producers Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre selling their Beats headphones to Apple for $3 billion. Then the four-part series rolls back to the seventies and traces the careers of Iovine and Dre all the way to their eventual intersection at Interscope Records, which Iovine founds in the late eighties. It is fascinating to watch how the lives of these two men, one from the world of east coast rock, the other a rap performer and producer from the streets of South Central L.A., come together in a transforming musical partnership.
Reading – Andy Weir is back with “Artemis” his follow up to “The Martian”. The story takes place in the future on our colonized Moon. The lead character is Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara a young, smart and vagabond Saudi woman who is eking out a living making deliveries and smuggling contraband onto the Moon. Seeing a chance to break out of her life of near poverty she gets embroiled in a scheme with a wealthy businessman to take over an aluminum mining company. When it all goes wrong Jazz is on the run trying to save her own life while figuring out what’s really going on.