The Right Stuff Poll

I (barely) remember Henry and June as being kind of yawnsome. Rising Sun sure looked like crap, but I never saw that either.

you've never seen Quills?

Kaufman was on a roll for a while: Anthony Minghella with an impish gleam.

xp: no, I saw the French movie about Marquis de Sade (D Auteuil) that came out around then instead.

this thread could go on for 2 weeks without even mentioning Philip Kaufman's name, cuz he's not a Spike/Quentin-style self-promoter?

we apologize for not being as with-it as you. who do you propose to poll him against? caleb d? brooks? bergman? beatty?

quite obviously kaufman is not as bandied-about because he has far less discernable style, his movies by and large have little to do with youth culture let alone the present, and because he's an old man

with-it, klassik

i thot i shd use old-man terms

Is the William Goldman bit about Kaufman and the screenplay online anywhere? Google is unhelpful.

Can't believe no one has mentioned Scott Glenn yet. Dude is James Coburn with even more attitude.

I voted Scott Glenn.

So did I.

gobb, you shd use old-man suppositories

witty!

Dave Kehr, who didn't really get the movie (shocker), said the performances "range from the merely excellent (Scott Glenn) to the sublime (Ed Harris)"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I voted Fred Ward cuz I love Fred Ward.

fuckin a, bubba.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Yay Fred Ward!

Those are five really good performances there that got votes.

the performances "range from the merely excellent (Scott Glenn) to the sublime (Ed Harris)"

this is very true

i saw this twice in the theater when i was 7, this is a really great, super entertaining movie. kind of hard to believe it's almost as long as godfather II.

and Terms of Endearment beat it for Best Picture!

probably because it was a relative financial disappointment, which is also totally hard to believe because this is exactly the type of epic movie that you'd think would scare up 70-80 mill

the special fx hold up pretty good too!

Patriotic as fuck, too, which seldom hurts.

it's a complicated, ironic patriotism, which wasn't too in vogue at the time

i didn't vote, but i think i'd say ward edges harris edges maybe scott glenn, though it's a little hard to see the actor apart from the character in hindsight given that the characters defined the actors for me. shepard does a whole lot without saying a word, but his line readings seem kinda off in the early part of the movie - maybe it's intentional that he becomes more fluent as time passes. and if i'm ranking quaid 4th or 5th am i underselling fun?

hershey's character blows the other wives off the screen, but i think cartwright is the best female performance.

"Ironic patriotism" or "ironic reverence" is a good description (except for the Yeager bits). I can't think of another big budget American film from the time that didn't take itself too seriously and was crazy-entertaining.

i still find that last flight of yeager pretty terrifying

That wasn't a parachute dragging behind him at the end; it was his poop.

man what a great fuckin movie. i think this might be my favorite cast ever - you put any 2 of those five main guys in a movie and i'll watch it, but all of em? yowie zowie!!! even the guy who plays yeager's mechanic is awesome. the women are great too - veronica cartwright, barbara hershey, mary jo deschanel, and pamela reed most of all - kim stanley's sorta wasted, but so is lance henriksen. im sure if they knew what they had on their hands in ol' lance they would've cooked up more for him to do~

terms of fuckin endearment won best pic, that movie had only one astronaut

re: the poll its gotta be ed harris. fred ward (who is one of my favorite dudes in the world) has his share of great scenes, especially panicking in the capsule and the aftermath with his wife, but harris has pretty much all the best bits - the tender scenes with his wife, the phone scene, the press conference, "those... darn russians!"

something i never realized: that's hall of fame left tackle anthony munoz playing gonzalez!

last time i saw this movie i noticed how ripped scott glenn was

haha same. i guess he's always been pretty sinewy. also was realizing how joker-like dennis quaid's smile is

i kinda like the vv subtle and maybe unintended implication about grissom kinda being a star-crossed (lol) astronaut, i mean of course that event did occur but to me it kind of foreshadows a bit.

Whatever happened to Oilyrags, anyway?

final post:

50 Great Neil Young Covers

This was great. Yeah maybe reverential or whatever but had a great sense of humor, like those repeated shots of Jeff Goldblum's super serious and always late g-man running to that office. And the scene where the dude has to pee and they keep cutting to, like, people drinking water, pouring tea, talking about how much coffee they drank, etc.

I mainly saw this cos i got into Jordan Belson a few years ago and heard he did some visual effects stuff for this. It was pretty impressive!

This sucks so far when is it going to not suck

The Shite Stuff

Ok president office scene goldblum shearer it got great

man what a great fuckin movie. i think this might be my favorite cast ever - you put any 2 of those five main guys in a movie and i'll watch it, but all of em? yowie zowie!!! even the guy who plays yeager's mechanic is awesome.

yeager's mechanic is played by Levon Helm! yeah great role, perfect choice of a narrator for the film too.

The longer ed Harris goes without killing his wife the worse the tension gets

Jeff Goldblum Is Watching You Puke (off the side of an aircraft carrier)

SPEC-I-MEN

Best movie

it's very entertaining but the tone is a bit have-yr-cake-and-eat-it

mmm a right stuff cake would be great. "Let's light this candle!"

Weird that Yeager is the only guy to outlive the actor who played him.

test pilot in character

Yeager in 1983 looked like an elderly guy next to Shepard, who was only 38 or 39 when they filmed it.

Dennis Quaid, if you're lurking, i would still eat you out anytime.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius),

fight you

guys, guys, there's enough ass for everyone, just be chill

good news fellas, there probably *is* a Quaid brother lurking here

i hope it's doug

put em up, Herbert Pocket

Until last week, I would not have been able to name the iconic but little-remembered character actor who appeared in this and the original Twin Peaks series.

yes, it was '50s western fixture Royal Dano, who played the Minister aka Death in TRS and Judge Sternwood in TP.

He was also the Disney park voice of Lincoln for many years, after playing him on TV.

Saw this when it came out, again a few years later, and not since till today (70mm screening at the Lightbox). Really good. Trying to think of a comparable film in scale from the past 35 years--not Apollo 13, which I remember as a much lesser version, not even necessarily space-related--something big and historical and free-wheeling...Carlos comes to mind, not much else. A reminder of how great Veronica Cartwright and Pamela Reed were. (The film's treatment of the women and the Hispanic NASA guy--the one who recoils from Scott Glenn's Bill Dana impression--felt pretty current.) Watching Ed Harris play a Boy Scout was extra funny--every time I see him nowadays he's like a George Kennedy caricature, growling "goddammit" and "son of a bitch" way too often. Goldblum and Harry Shearer and Donald Moffat as LBJ were funny. I don't really remember how this was received in 1983. I mean the tone--I know it got great reviews. Was it talked about as a film Reagan would love, a straightforward celebration of old-fashioned heroism? It seems a lot subtler than that.

i was thinking about this movie today due to First Man's recent release, and it's really a perfect flick. a couple other favorite elements i don't think were commented on: John P. Ryan as this character representing the publicly avuncular/occasionally duplicitous face of NASA, and the insect swarming sounds accompanying every appearance by the press and photographers as they chase down quotes and shots of the astronauts and their wives.

this was ... pretty bad? baffled at the near universal praise in this thread. Alternated between reverential, ponderously slow recreations of events and then a bunch of corny "comical" sequences involving enema bags, urinating in space suits, and how much of an uptight jerk John Glenn was. I made it to Shepherd's launch and then bailed.

maybe it's the source material (I wouldn't know, you couldn't pay me to read Tom Wolfe. Seeing this after reading Oriana Falacci just made it seem juvenile and clumsy.

but was Dennis Quaid smoking', ROWR?

Harris and his wife, Fred Ward's squirming, LBJ in the limo -- it switches from irreverent to affection quite well. The Shepard scenes are the most ponderous, the ones in the cafe the silliest -- the men waiting for news about who died remind me of the vultures in Splash Mountain.

it has that tricky balance of respecting the main characters while poking a bit of fun at them, regarding them as outsized heroes and then bringing them down to size in a way that is empathetic and understanding, and not cutting them down. the absurdities really work so well, i think as a satire of sorts it's very well-crafted and smart and of course super entertaining.

that score too, my god. a truly great film that i've seen in full maybe once, but in parts dozens of times

theme song by NKOTB not bad either

per an Apollo book, Chasing the Moon, reviewed in last Sunday's NYTBR, Chuck Yeager told other candidates in an aerospace trainee program not to speak to the sole black candidate, Air Force pilot Edward Dwight. Dwight was essentially forced out of the program by Yeager.

movies is movies

Edwards AFB released the complete film of Yeager's crash in the NF-104. 56 years ago today. (also, it's terrifying!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32CPRXEZ7s

Big ol' new interview with Kaufman on it

https://www.vulture.com/article/how-philip-kaufman-made-the-right-stuff-movie.html

one of my earliest moviegoing memories was seeing this in the theater with my dad, so it was nice to watch it with both my dad and my kid this past weekend.

when i was a kid, the performances that really jumped out at me were Glenn and Harris, but also Pamela Reed, who is as good as anyone else in the film. So much so that my memory had her in this a lot more than she was.

it was probably a necessity of runtime but they really didn't do much with Lance Henriksen at all, though like most of the other actors playing the 7, they really nailed it in casting someone who looked like his real-life counterpart.

there's a lot of Maverick in Top Gun in Quaid's performance.

my kid loved the Shearer/Goldblum scenes, which gives the government side of the story the respect it deserves. this movie is really, really funny though, i appreciate the occasional cheap humor it goes for.

it remains absolutely unbelievable to me this didn't make a mint at the box office, but what Kaufman says about the promotion is probably right. the posters were terrible, it really needed something colorful and thrilling and Yeager-inclusive, not the bland one-sheet they released, it looked like it was a promotional flyer seeking new astronauts to join NASA.