Movie Recommendations ~ Monday, March 18, 2019

Here's a few movies that I recommend seeing, and fast, since although they are great, they're the kind of niche films that won't have a long run.

Apollo 11 is completely made out of actual documentary footage, refurbished with modern techniques. The result is so well done you can forget that you're not watching a regular movie--a few times I wondered why some aspect of the mission wasn't shown and had to remember that there wouldn't have been any way to actually have a camera there to record it--and in some cases, seeing action from the limited view that astronauts actually had makes you more appreciative of their skill.

Even knowing (spoiler!) that the mission was a complete success, it's still pretty intense to watch.

This one is showing today and tomorrow at the Castro in SF, double-billed with Sons of the Desert. If you're anywhere nearby, and haven't seen these before, I highly recommend blowing off work and going.

The most impressive thing about Stan and Ollie is how well the leads capture the essences of the real-life duo. There are parts where you could almost believe you're watching a lost, rediscovered, and colorized Laurel and Hardy Movie. There's also lots of touching stuff about friendship and growing old--the sort of stuff I usually avoid watching movies about, but in this case it was really nicely done and avoided the usual movie-writing clichés.

From what I hear from knowledgeable authorities (fans) and my own exhaustive research (Wikipedia), the events in the movie are all accurate enough that you don't need to worry about it.