{"id":3510,"date":"2022-04-13T09:42:45","date_gmt":"2022-04-13T09:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3510"},"modified":"2022-07-22T10:07:07","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T10:07:07","slug":"look-the-astrodome-glen-campbell-hippies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3510","title":{"rendered":"Look! The Astrodome! Glen Campbell! Hippies!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10-1\/2 for New Scientist, 13 April 2022<\/a><\/p>\n

“What we really seek in space is not knowledge, but wonder, beauty, romance, novelty – and above all, adventure.” So said science fiction writer Arthur Clarke, speaking at the American Aeronautical Society in 1967, and with the gloss already beginning to flake off the Apollo project.<\/p>\n

By the time Apollo 11 launched on 16 July 1969, NASA\u2019s bid to land astronauts the moon — the costliest non-military undertaking in history — could not help but be overshadowed by the even more enormous cost of the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

Only a very little of this realpolitik trickles into the consciousness of ten-year-old Stanley (newcomer Milo Coy) as he propels himself on his Schwinn bike around Houston — north America\u2019s own Space City. His father is one of NASA\u2019s smaller cogs — one of the 400,000 people who contributed to the programme — but this is enough to inspire a whole other reality in Stanley\u2019s head: one in which he\u2019s hired for a secret test flight of Apollo equipment before the grown-ups, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, blast off to glory.<\/p>\n

Jack Black (whose mother, incidentally, was a NASA engineer; she worked on Apollo 13\u2019s life-saving abort-guidance system) plays Stanley in the present: a narrator whose perspectives have widened to take in the politics of the time, but not in a way that undercuts the story. Apollo 10\u00bd is, in the best sense, an innocent film: a film about wonder, and beauty, and adventure. Though full of Boomer catnip (Look! The Astrodome! Glen Campbell! Hippies!) — it is not so much a nostalgic movie as a movie about childhood, about its possibilities and its fantasies.<\/p>\n

To that end the film, an animation, harnesses the \u201cinterpolated rotoscoping\u201d technique first developed by art director Bob Sabiston for Linklater\u2019s 2001 film Waking Life. Sabiston\u2019s \u201cRotoshop\u201c software essentially allowed an artist to draw over the top of QuickTime files, much as inventor Max Fleischer drew over movie stills to create the first Rotoscoped animations in the 1910s.<\/p>\n

The software worked a treat for the surreal philosophical meanderings of Linklater\u2019s 2006 Waking Life (a documentary of sorts about consciousness) but keeled over somewhat when a frantic studio expected it to actually speed up the production of A Scanner Darkly.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

An adaptation of Philip Dick\u2019s paranoid classic (in which an undercover policeman is assigned to follow himself), this unfairly rushed film wobbles uncertainly between visionary triumph (type \u201cscramble suit\u201d into Youtube) and the sort of rather flat, literal animation that looks as if a computer could have done it unaided (though it couldn\u2019t, and it didn\u2019t).<\/p>\n

Sixteen years on, Apollo 10\u00bd realises Sabiston\u2019s original 2\u00bd-D conception with perfect consistency. But that\u2019s only partly down to improved technology. In fact traditional rotoscoping techniques were used in preference to the computer-aided \u201cinterpolated\u201d rotoscoping of Scanner and Waking Life. The two-year industry hiatus triggered by COVID-19 gave Linklater and his animators the time they needed to hand-craft their film.<\/p>\n

Time is rarely on the side of the filmmaker, but Linklater has chiselled out a unique relationship with the stuff. Boyhood (2014), about one boy\u2019s childhood and adolescence, was filmed in episodes from 2002 to 2013 with the same cast. Merrily We Roll Along, based on Stephen Sondheim\u2019s musical spanning 20 years, will take 20 years to complete. Apollo 10\u00bd, which the director had been noodling around for 18 years, has taken longer than the whole space race.<\/p>\n

These are approaches to production that any traditional film studio would struggle to accommodate. So it\u2019s no surprise to find an odd duck like Apollo 10\u00bd streaming as a Netflix original. The streaming company\u2019s 222 million subscribers are already sat at their screens, waiting to be entertained. Relieved of the need to recoup single investments in single cinema-going weekends, Netflix can afford to work in a more constructive fashion with its artists. That, anyway, was Linklater\u2019s view when interviewed by IndieWire in March 2022, and he\u2019s by no means the first auteur to sing the company\u2019s praises.<\/p>\n

Streaming will kill the feature film? On the evidence of Apollo 10\u00bd alone — a charming, moving, and intelligent movie — I think we should bury that particular worry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10-1\/2 for New Scientist, 13 April 2022 “What we really seek in space is not knowledge, but wonder, beauty, romance, novelty – and above all, adventure.” So said science fiction writer Arthur Clarke, speaking at the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[841,599,596,232,984,985],"class_list":["post-3510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-animation","tag-apollo","tag-nasa","tag-new-scientist","tag-nostalgia","tag-rotoscope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3512,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3510\/revisions\/3512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}