First Man and Free Solo are strangely alike: both are about how far two very similar men have driven themselves beyond anything even resembling normalcy, and how that drive affects other people, especially their significant others. They are also very different movies; First Man is a Hollywood spectacular about one of the most famous men in the world, Neil Armstrong, the first human being to step on the moon, and Free Solo is a small budget portrait of an almost unknown climber, Alex Honnold, the only man to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope. First Man was good – but not as good as I wanted it to be given that it was about one of my favorite subjects, the Space Race and going to the moon the first time, a trip in which Neil Armstrong’s sticks it with the gutsiest landing of all time – however, I liked Free Solo better. 

First Man stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong with Clair Foy as his wife and is directed by the great Damien Chazelle, of LaLa Land fame. What the movie does well is to show what a big risk going to the moon was. First Man is shot – primarily – from Armstrong’s point of view and, because of that, counter-intuitively, we don’t get a good sense of Armstrong as a person or the Space Program as history. Free Solo is shot by and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. They are friends of Honnold – and openly worry if even making the movie increases the danger – and the movie is shot from their point of view. To my of thinking, that point of view presents both Alex Honnold as a person and puts his feat in context better than First Man did. Are the feats comparable, I think so. 

Check out their trailers, or, better yet, check out both movies. 

Michele and I saw Logan Lucky last night. It is a heist movie, similar to Ocean’s Eleven in concept and fantasy, except that it involves rednecks from West Virgina rather than a nattily dressed Frank Sinatra or George Clooney (take your pick at which Ocean’s Eleven you prefer). The redneck part is the rub. In one of the first scenes, the hero, played by a very scruffy Tatum Channing, is laid off – for insurance reasons – from the shitty job he got after he was laid off from the coal mines. When he goes to pick up his daughter from his divorced wife, I fully expected him to be violent. I didn’t expect the well dressed Danny Ocean to be violent but this guy was a redneck, a laid off coal miner, and, at a deep level, I thought of him as a violent, white, Trump supporting, loser. He wasn’t of course, any more than Danny Ocean was and seeing my own prejudging, my own bigotry, was not fun even if it was enlightening.   

Once I got past my bigotry, the movie was a fun, if lightweight, romp. 

Dunkirk is an epic movie and an intimate series of character studies. It is a three-part fugue on war and is uncommonly powerful, it is also so very, “keep calm and carry on”, English. Christopher Nolan wrote and directed the movie and it bends time and space in a way only he seems to be able to do. The three parts of the fugue are on the beach, on the sea, and in the air; each of the three parts have different tempos in that they take place over different time spans but they all play the same melody. The first part takes place over a span of one week which is about how long the troops were stranded, the second over one day which is about the time it takes a small boat to go from England to Dunkirk and back, and the third takes place over one hour which is about how long a Spitfire can fly in aerial combat. Then the three parts are intermixed so our sense of time is yanked around.

Dunkirk is a front brain movie that rewards paying attention. It is also a big screen movie that has a zen like simplicity, especially on the beach and in the air. It was shot on film rather than digital and it has a beautiful softness and flatness that are immersive on a big screen. As somewhat of an aside, maybe not, I’ve read more than ten accounts, at least, of Germany’s march into Poland in 1939 and every account talks about the Stukas spreading terror. I intellectually knew that they were a weapon to spread terror and fear but, in the back of my mind, I thought it was exaggerated. The Stukas were old dive-bombers after all, they were designed in 1935 and based on an even older American plane, they didn’t even have retractable landing gear and they had a top speed of less than 200mph. But, the German’s mounted sirens on the bottom and, in the movie – as in real life, in Poland for example – as a Stuka dove in on a bombing run, it could be heard before it was even seen. As it got closer, it got louder. I sort of exonerated the terror because  they were flying against Polish peasants who didn’t know any better, but here, in this movie, hearing the siren getting closer and realizing, feeling, the helplessness of being on the ground, I understand, I felt, that terror. It is that kind of movie. End somewhat of aside.

As the movie gets closer to the end, the pace picks up and all three parts of the fugue come together in a grand finale. It is a tour de force by a master. This is a war movie, and a powerful war movie with shocking and very intense scenes in a first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan way so, if that scares you, stay away. But, if you want to see a masterpiece by a master at the height of his powers, see this on the biggest screen you can.

As an aside, I am definitely doing something wrong, this is the third time I’ve typed this. Then I think I save it and all that comes back is the picture. Michele and I went to a small get-together to honor Catherine Santos, it was at her home and I had never been there without her and that really brought home the realization that she is gone. Today I learned one of my co-cardiac-rehabbers, Placida Chavez, died last Wednesday at 93. We often walked on treadmills next to each other and sometimes we chatted; a week ago, we chatted about her finally getting all the weeds in her garden pulled. Now all that is left of Placida is our talking about her and an obit on the table where we write down our vitals. Somehow, my pitch on The Big Sick disappearing seems to fit right in. End aside.

Michele and I saw The Big Sick last Friday and I’ve been thinking of it ever since. It stars Kumail Nanjiani, playing himself, and Zoe Kazan, playing the movie’s script writer, Emily V. Gordon who in real life is married to Nanjiani and the movie is about their early relationship. Zoe Kazan is radiant – the only other time I’ve seen her in a movie, Ruby Sparks, she was also radiant and she should get more work – and that radiance is bright enough to carry her presence through the Big Sick phase of the movie in which she is in a coma. The movie is billed as a RomCom and it is very romantic and very funny but it is also about how our relationships don’t exist in a vacuum and a big chunk of the film is about Nanjiani’s relation with his and Emily’s parents. Every player in this movie, from the loving- couple to the nurse in the hospital seems real.

Trust me on this, go see The Big Sick.