Compelling.

First Man is a biographical portrait of a special man, Neil Armstrong.

Director Damien Chazelle used a mixture of three film formats in making the movie, hand held 16mm for some of the domestic scenes, 35mm and 65mm IMAX for the HD sections, including the heart-stopping image of the Apollo 11 attached to von Braun’s faultless Saturn V rocket on the Houston launchpad at night. The 16mm work captures the look and feel of 1960s American middle class domesticity well. The 65mm sections harken back to the 70mm film used in the big magazines attached to the Hasselblad 500EL used by the astronauts. (The wonderful moment when Mission Control reminds Armstrong of the correct exposure settings as he prepares to step on the moon is correctly repeated here).

Candidly, if you do not catch this movie in an IMAX theater then the effects of a launch – be it the earlier Gemini or the later Apollo capsules – will be lost. The raw violence as the rockets ignite at blast-off, the sheer physical terror from the unleashing of over 7 million pounds of thrust to release man from the powerful grasp of gravity, these are things which dictate IMAX technology.

Two aspects of this fine movie stand out.

One is Ryan Gosling’s rendering of Armstrong. While the natural tendency of American directors is to opt for sentimental schmalz in biopics, Chazelle largely avoids this temptation, opting for schmalz-lite in securing continuity through the repeated mention of the death of Armstrong’s daughter at a young age. Gosling shows us the man we so little knew. Self-effacing, tightly wound and, above all, very serious. This is a very serious movie in the best possible way. I would hate to think what Spielberg would have delivered, other than better returns for his investors and sales for the makers of Kleenex.

The other is the no-holds-barred renderings of the hardware. There’s nothing glossy or high-tech about the look here. These are machines clearly seen to be bolted together by hand, poorly finished and utterly functional in intent. You wonder, time and again, why parts are not falling off during the brutal first few minutes as von Braun’s fires of hell are unleashed below the occupants, mostly mere passengers with little control over their fate.

Other performances of mention are Corey Stoll’s Buzz Aldrin, ever spiky and opportunistic. Not a man you would have a beer with. And a low key yet courageous Claire Foy as Armstrong’s wife. As the widow of another of the astronauts reminds her, she could have married a dentist and, yes, he would always be home by 6pm. Not an option for this woman.

Catch First Man at your local IMAX soon because box office returns suggest that it will not be there long, the audience’s interest about as long as Americans’ attention span for the very short lived Apollo program which remains – after the Louisiana and Alaska Purchases – one of the most lucrative investments the US taxpayer ever made. Indeed, had Apollo not existed we would have no microchips today and you would not be reading this.

A note on Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who made it possible for Apollo to escape earth’s gravity. His biography is objectively reported by Wikipedia including much detail on his sordid past. The OSS, forerunner of the CIA, did a masterful job of snatching him from a defeated Germany in 1945 along with many of his scientists, beating the (presumably intoxicated) Russians to the punch. We got the A Team and they crafted the Saturn V. The Russians came later, copied our tactics, and got the B Team. (“Here’s the good news, Hans. You are being liberated. Here’s the bad news. Moscow.”) They never successfully fired their copy of the Saturn V. All four exploded on the launch pad. No moonwalk for Ivan.

Three minutes of absolute magic.

I pontificated on Essential Blu-Ray movies a while back and that short list remains valid today. These movies are essential not to the cinephile or auteur. Rather, they are key for any photographer.

None meets the definition of ‘essential’ better than Stanley Donen’s 1957 Funny Face with Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and the powerhouse that was Kay Thompson. But the movie director had two special tools in his arsenal. One was the aristocratic couturier Hubert de Givenchy, recently deceased. No man more defined ‘elegant’ when it came to modern couture and in Audrey Hepburn – an actress of surpassingly bland acting talent – he found the perfect mannequin. The two would remain linked in the minds of the fashionistas for decades. The other was the ‘go to’ fashion photographer of the ’50s and ’60s, America’s own Richard Avedon, yet another Columbia dropout. When editor Diana Vreeland left Harper’s Bazaar for Vogue she took Avedon with her and the rest is history. A great collaboration defined fashion photography for two decades.

Avedon served as the expert photography adviser on ‘Funny Face’, as this wonderful image with Fred Astaire shows:

Just over half way through the movie the photography crew finally has the somewhat gauche Hepburn more or less beaten into modelling shape and what follows is three minutes of absolute magic. In those three minutes Astaire is shown crafting seven showstopper images as he directs Hepburn in various posing routines in magnificent Parisian locations.

Here he is getting ready for the first with the same giant plate camera in the Avedon image above:

In the Tuileries Gardens, outside The Louvre. The most perfect urban space on earth.

He uses a Rolleiflex as often as the plate camera, even adopting the tricky upside down orientation shown here:

Then the fun begins.

7 images. 3 minutes. Absolute magic.

And his prophecies are coming true.

Science fiction is a genre for morons. It makes for bad writing and even worse movies. Plot lagging? No problem, throw in some shape shifting. Longueurs too long? Easy. A spot of time travel and disappearance is called for. SF is the poor writer’s opt out of doing the hard job of producing quality prose. SF is also a leading opiate for the masses with their endless taste for all those cretinous Star Wars movies. Hey, a fool and his money are easily parted.

This month Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ turns fifty. Many who did not pay attention, or who never watched it in the first place, describe it as a science fiction movie. It is nothing of the sort. It is about Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, and shows a world where the machine tries to control man. (It bears adding that the one time ‘2001’ goes seriously sci-fi – as opposed to AI – in the very last chapter, comprises the most frustrating and failed part of an otherwise great movie. Yes, needless to add, time travel is involved).

In the modern era that machine is, of course, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg is the lunatic Dr. Chandra of yore, the machine’s father. Only this latter day Dr. Chandra is far smarter. He has monetized his theft of your data and over 2 billion check-ins monthly to his odious platform testify to his genius.

HAL and Facebook are watching and listening. HAL lip reads the astronauts, now conspiring against him.

I cottoned on to the evil of Facebook early on. Obviously the revenue model (‘free’ to users) meant that the suckers were being played, their profiles sold to advertisers and politicians. Why does Facebook not adopt a revenue model where users pay and their data is not sold? Because no one would pay. So if you buy Zuckerberg’s promises to fix the security holes you are stunningly naïve. There is nothing to ‘fix’ so long as you, the user, are the product to be sold.

While the inherent evil of Facebook was clear to me from its creation, I also harken back to a sunny spring day in 2012 when I was walking my son home from his intermediate public school in the Bay Area. I noticed through the fence that every child in the playground was staring intently at the cellphone screen in his hand, tapping away with both thumbs. The surrounding basketball nets remained untroubled by balls. “What are they doing, Winnie?” I asked. “Oh! dad, don’t you know? They are all on Facebook sharing rumors and pictures of friends”.

So I flashed back to The Unfair Advantage I have always sought for my son. If these stupid kids were willing to sacrifice quality study or play time for obsessive use of a rumor system, and if their even dumber parents were willing to allow this, then the child opting not to use that system would automatically have an Unfair Advantage. His available time for productive pursuits would skyrocket.

But I decided to bide my time. I knew Winston used Facebook, albeit in moderation, but a catalyst was needed to get him to stop.

That catalyst appeared a couple of weeks ago when it was disclosed that Facebook data likely installed a traitor in the highest office of the land, with subsequent depradations and destruction of America’s international status to follow. Winston was well aware of this scandalous theft of data of fifty million (70 million? 100 million? 200 million? Take your best guess) Facebook-using morons, garnered through trickery and deceit, then resold for political gain.

I pounced.

Here’s the email:

The ‘THIS’ link is here.

Frankly, I did not fancy my chances of success yet, minutes later, this arrived.

HAL’s plaintive complaint “I can’t do that, Dave” has morphed into “Yes, I can” in my son’s courageous decision.

My son’s Unfair Advantage grows daily. As Stanley Kubrick once memorably put it, “Never get into a fair fight”.

Should you have your child delete Facebook? Please, no. I would rather my son had as little competition in life as possible.

Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C Clarke set forth the evils of AI for all to hear and see fifty years ago. Now they are laid bare and the users are the victims. Just like Mission Commander Dave Bowman on that space mission and his fellow astronauts, all murdered by HAL in the emotionless pursuit of his mission.

Killing HAL. Keir Dullea as astronaut Dave Bowman guts the murderous HAL’s memory banks.

Given the above, my enjoyment of ‘2001’ has never been greater.

Follow-up – just one day later:

HAL must be spinning in his grave:

Duh! What did you thing they did with it, WaPo? Click the image.