Posts Tagged ‘Noah Robbins’

Fly Me to the Moon

Director: Greg Berlanti

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, Jim Rash, Greg Kriek, Noah Robbins, Colin Woodell, Nick Dillenburg

Running Time: 2 hours and 12 minutes

Film Rating: 8 out of 10

Love Simon director Greg Berlanti delivers a delightful romantic comedy Fly Me to the Moon about the weeks leading up to NASA successful Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 which successfully culminated with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren landing on the moon.

With a catchy title Fly Me to the Moon, this summer romantic comedy focuses on the love and working relationship between marketing maverick Kelly Jones superbly played with gorgeous panache by the sassy Oscar nominee Scarlett Johansson (Marriage Story, Jo Jo Rabbit) and the dashing pilot Cole Davis played by Channing Tatum (The Lost City, Magic Mike XXL, Foxcatcher)  at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the launch site for Apollo 11 as they both prepare in different ways for the historic mission to the moon.

Kelly is all New York marketing and advertising and is hired by a mysterious government man Moe Berkus, a stand out performance by triple Oscar nominee Woody Harrelson (The People vs Larry Flynt, The Messenger, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) who is supposedly working for President Nixon whose government needs a propaganda coup to galvanize the American public into supporting the mission to the moon, while discreetly distracting them from the horrific war in Vietnam.

Cole Davis is a straight laced pilot whose sole concern is the safety of his astronauts and their successful but tense mission to the moon. Davis is distracted by Kelly’s charm and unconventional approach to public relations.

NASA needs some good PR and Kelly and Berkus devise a secret plan to film a deep fake landing on the moon culminating in a film production lavishly directed by Lance Vespertine played with gay abandon by Jim Rash.

Fly Me to the Moon has some great comic moments including many scenes involving a slinky black cat, but the gem of the story is the onscreen chemistry between Tatum and Johansson bolstered by some stunning visual effects of the actual Apollo 11 taking off to the moon.

As Kelly Jones comes clean about her past to Cole Davis, their partnership both professionally and romantically blossoms in the beautiful setting of Cape Canaveral, Florida as Kelly secret directs Project Artemis at the request of the shady Berkus until a feline unseats the deep fake.

Delightful, superbly written and brilliantly conceived down to the late 1960’s production design, Fly Me to the Moon gets a film rating of 8 out of 10 and is recommended viewing as a thoroughly enjoyable romantic comedy.

Indignation

Director: James Schamus

Cast: Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracey Letts, Linda Emond, Ben Rosenfield, Noah Robbins, Danny Burstein

Logan Lerman (Noah) has come a long way from portraying a teenage hero in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians franchise. He proved his acting abilities in the David Ayer war film Fury and now takes a central role in director James Schamus’s film Indignation based upon the novel by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Phillip Roth. Roth’s novels are notoriously difficult to be adapted to the big screen.

One of Philip Roth’s novel’s The Human Stain was adapted into a provocative 2003 Robert Benson film starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman and Wentworth Miller. Roth’s outstanding novel American Pastoral has recently been made into a film starring Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning.

Schamus does a sterling job of bringing Indignation to the big screen and Loman is nuanced and brilliant as the seriously conflicted young Jewish freshman Marcus who has a crisis of faith while attending a conservative Ohio college which forces the students to attend mass every Sunday.

Religious disaffection, sexual repression and social pressure are all perfectly framed within the 1950’s Korean War where young American serviceman were being conscripted to fight in the first of many US led foreign wars against the Communists.

At college Marcus while working in the library is attracted to the gorgeous Olivia Hutton who is not only sexually provocative but also slightly mentally unstable. On their first date Olivia performs a then unspeakable sexual act on Marcus, which releases years of pent up repression and rage.

Marcus fights with his roommates and soon requests a transfer which comes to the attention of Dean Caudwell wonderfully played by Tracy Letts (The Big Short). The religious conflict is evident when Marcus tells Caudwell that he is happily atheist, even though he was brought up in a Jewish home and worked for his overbearing father in a kosher butchery back in suburban New Jersey.

When Marcus falls ill, his sympathetic mother Esther Messner wonderfully played by Linda Emond (Julie and Julia, Oldboy) comes to visit and soon meets the illustrious Olivia. In the emotional crux of the film, Marcus makes a deal with his mother to stop seeing the clearly damaged Olivia superbly played by Canadian actress Sarah Gadon (Cosmopolis, A Royal Night Out).

This arrangement along with Marcus’s continued conflict with Dean Caudwell on religious grounds has disastrous effects. Much to Caudwell’s horror, Marcus even quotes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell in his defence of atheism and his anti-establishment viewpoints.

Indignation is an intelligent exploration of one young man’s coming of age and his ultimate spiritual sacrifice on the cusp of what could have been an illustrious future. Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon hold their own in Schamus’s tightly controlled script based on Roth’s novel.

This atmospheric period drama is recommended viewing for those viewers that like their cinema thought-provoking, but ultimately Indignation does justice to Roth’s complex literary aesthetic.