Tag: film

Remembering Christopher Plummer: Nate’s Top Ten Performances

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Classically trained, unbelievably versatile, unmatched in charisma, Christopher Plummer was an acting titan of the highest order and there will never be another like him after his passing on this week. He could play snarky politicians, compassionate fathers, romantic leads, Machiavellian arch-villains and real world figures with class, nobility and always a good dose of humour. His trademark half smile and gleaming eyes and impossibly capable line delivery made him one of my absolute treasured actors, and I’d like to share with you my personal top ten performances of his in cinema! Enjoy..

10. Abraham Van Helsing in Dracula 2000

I’ve always loved this modern reiteration of the Dracula myth with a very effective Gerard Butler in the title role. Christopher makes a stately, badass and solemn Van Helsing and looks damn good carrying around a crossbow too.

9. Mr. Massie in Mike Figgis’s Cold Creek Manor

This is essentially a bedridden, dementia addled cameo as some senile old bastard that Dennis Quaid goes to for information, but his work here always felt downright chilling to me. Between bouts of confusion and barking out for the “chocolate cherries” in his bedside drawer, we get a sense of the volcanically abusive, powerfully evil man Massie once must have been, and Christopher makes deft, diabolical work of a very quick appearance.

8. Bob Blair in Joseph Ruben’s Dreamscape

This visually delicious 80’s SciFi sees Plummer play a scheming, war mongering politician, a cold hearted, seditious prick and the last kind of person you’d want in a position of power. He relishes the role while staying restrained yet always vaguely threatening.

7. David Winters in Paolo Barzman’s Emotional Arithmetic

This little seen yet star studded Canadian drama is a wonderful piece about Holocaust survivors, families joining up and time healing hurt, or at least doing its best. Christopher is the odd one out here as his younger wife (Susan Sarandon) rekindles bonds with two fellow prisoners (Max Von Sydow & Gabriel Byrne) who also escaped concentration camps. His character is blustery and initially impatient with these healing people as he’s never experienced anything like that but as time goes he softens, it’s a wonderful arc in a very underrated film.

6. Doctor Parnassus in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus

Gilliam delivers a reliably mind boggling visual experience with a troubled production and a boisterous, drunken yet commanding lead role from Plummer as a sort of travelling gypsy magician extraordinaire who regularly has conversations with the Devil himself (Tom Waits) and fights fiercely to protect his young daughter (Lily Cole).

5. Harlan Thrombey in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out

It’s ironic that his character here spends much of the film dead when Christopher actually gives the liveliest performance of a very large ensemble cast. Harlan is an aging horror novelist who suspects each and every one of his family of mutiny and trusts only his young nurse (Ana De Armas). His work here is utterly hilarious, injecting stinging, self aware gallows humour into the role and thoroughly stealing every damn scene.

4. Henrik Vanger in David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Henrik is the character who essentially sets the gears of the central mystery in motion here, a tortured patriarch haunted by the memory of a missing daughter he couldn’t save. He captures the hurt, desperation and refusal to give up the search excellently.

3. Hal in Mike Mills’ Beginners

Some people reach the most important decisions and realizations later on in life, as we see with Hal, a man who was married for four decades before coming out as gay to his son (Ewan McGregor) and subsequently finding out that he’s terminally ill. Christopher is loving, warm, playful and full of life in the role that earned him his Oscar.

2. Mike Wallace in Michael Mann’s The Insider

This is a towering portrayal of 60 Minutes producer and media mogul Wallace around the time his network hushed up an expose on big tobacco. His palpable outrage and righteous fury are truly something to behold, especially when he verbally debases a smug junior executive (Gina Gershon) who doesn’t show him proper respect.

1. Captain Von Trapp in The Sound Of Music

This is the crown jewel performance for me. This was the first film I *ever* saw in cinema, and I was so young I knew Captain Von Trapp before I even knew he was played by an actor called Christopher Plummer. A harsh militaristic man, he has been turned somewhat cold and distant by the death of his wife and the ominous turn of the political tide in his country, until Julie Andrew’s Maria arrives to change all that and awaken in him the compassionate, romantic and morally steadfast man he always was but lost sight of. Christopher handles this arc with utmost class, charm and gravitas, and some of my earliest, fondest memories are of him singing Edelweiss, his fierce refusal to bend to Hitler’s incoming agenda and the tender moonlit scene where he and Maria catch their first real feels for each other. He will be missed by me more than I can say.

-Nate Hill

Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland is an uncommonly superb, heartbreakingly intense, strikingly subversive disaster film, the best of its kind in probably decades, to be honest. Usually when I see a Gerard Butler disaster film coming down the pipeline I promptly step to one side and let it pass by without taking notice, like the lame-brained Olympus Has Fallen series or GeoStorm. Let’s face it, the guy’s agent hasn’t been the best at landing decent projects for him, and for a long time too. Let’s hope this is the start of something new in his career because it’s a staggering work that uses its big budget not for flashy, glossy CGI or needlessly elaborate but ultimately hollow blockbuster set pieces. This is a much more intimate disaster flick that uses character, emotion, spacing, nighttime, growing mass hysteria and poignancy to get its point across. Butler plays a Florida structural engineer trying to get his wife (Morena Baccarin) and kid (Roger Dale Floyd) out of Tampa as a disintegrating comet pummels earth with fragments and the countdown to the end of the world begins. The powers that be have a plan to shelter those with good genetics and useable skillsets in fortified bunkers located in Greenland through a selective process using iPhone emergency alerts and Butler’s family has been chosen but there are many elements that make their journey difficult, mainly the widespread chaos and panic as well as the continued decimation of their planet by falling debris. Butler is fantastic here and sells the frenzied desperation well, while Baccarin has never been better and I never would have thought that Deadpool’s girlfriend was capable of such an affecting, raw performance as she gives here. Others give vivid impressions including Hope Davis, Holt McCallany, Madison Johnson, Gary Weeks, Merrin Dungey and many more. Special mention must be made of Scott Glenn as Morena’s father with whom they briefly take shelter with. He brings his usual gritty gravitas and shares a scene with her that brings out the best in both actors and is the film’s emotional lynchpin. The scenes of disaster aren’t obnoxious, grating or show-boaty like many films of this kind; there’s a haunted, celestial quality to the visuals of the descending comet that is both beautiful and terrifying, like ethereal dying stars entering our atmosphere and lighting up our skies in one final display of sustained, painterly cosmic reverence before the inevitable destruction. If Big Hollywood took notes from Waugh and his team on what they’ve achieved here and employed such creative wisdom into all of their disaster films then maybe the genre overall would be taken more seriously because this is one gorgeously produced piece of work that, for me, now sits as the disaster movie gold standard. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Atom Agoyan’s Remember

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Atom Agoyan’s Remember is a totally uneven film that teeters dangerously on the line between earnest, emotional drama and lurid, shock value thriller. It yanks the rug out from under the audience violently and overall isn’t perfect.. but damn if I don’t admire the sheer balls in trying to pull off a story this unorthodox, a narrative so weird that I could almost picture it happening for real. Christopher Plummer gifts a tricky role with a brilliant performance here as Zev, a Holocaust survivor living in an Ontario retirement home who embarks on a personal journey to track down the Nazi commandant responsible for the murder of many of his community decades before. Only problem is, Zev suffers from pretty severe dementia and needs to be coached over phone correspondence by his pal Max (Martin Landau) who is back at the home. This is a risky endeavour for many reasons; his dementia and age make moving about and tracking down identities and records long lost to time very difficult, and plus he was never supposed to even leave the home unsupervised so his kid (Henry Czerny) is subsequently also trying to find him and bring him back. He meets many along his journey and there’s an excellent supporting cast including Bruno Ganz, Dean Norris and Jürgen Prochnow. Aside from all the hurdles I mentioned above that Zev must endure, there’s a dark secret hovering over the proceedings, a hidden bit of poison knowledge that literally upends the narrative and it is at this point some viewers will decide this isn’t what they’d call a good film and has shit the bed, which I find totally understandable and wouldn’t fault anyone for doing so. The film asks a *lot* of the viewer in accepting such a turn of events as plausible, concise and even in good taste and while I don’t want to get into the specifics of it or say whether I personally think it ruins or brightens up the film, I will say that it certainly provides a fascinating, horrifying and altogether chilling third act that, like the film’s title beckons you to do, I Remember to this day. Perhaps that’s better than going the generic dramatic route, unboxing the Kleenex and cloying for overdone emotional resonance, which this film certainly does not. You decide for yourself.

-Nate Hill

Brandon Christensen’s Z

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The whole ‘creepy little kid has creepy imaginary friend’ thing has been done so many times in the horror genre we can almost sleepwalk our way through the beats, but that doesn’t mean a vicious, streamlined little effort like Brandon Christensen’s Z can’t come along and scare the shit out of me, which it did. This film doesn’t really do anything new or revolutionary for the formula but rather tells a simple, effective, no frills tale of one kid (Jett Klyne) and his imaginary friend Z, who no one but him can see, and us as we frequently catch unnerving split second sightings of and know he is in fact, very real. His dad (Sean Rogerson) is cavalier and doesn’t think much of it while his mom (Keegan Connor Tracy, excellent performance) is more intuitive and senses that Z is a real presence, not to mention catches fleeting and very disturbing glimpses of him. The boy’s keen psychiatrist (the ever charismatic Stephen McHattie) recognizes a pattern in this chain of events that harkens to a dark hereditary history within the family tree and tries to stop the cycle, but Z is a cunning, devious and very dangerous force. I’m not gonna lie, this film scared the absolute piss out of me; there are several extremely well orchestrated jump scares that are punishingly effective, including one that is so shocking I sat upright in bed and gasped hard enough to induce a coma. The filmmakers also realize that less is more when showing what Z is up to, and although we only ever get very quick peeks at what he, she or it looks like, the anatomical specifics are chilling and otherworldly enough to have the viewer squirming in discomfort. My only complaint is the plot could have been a bit more fleshed out, the mythology clearly delineated and there could have just been… more, overall? It’s a rare complaint as most films seem to divulge too much and go too far over the top while this one employs hefty restraint. This one is a hell of a horror film though, and does enough with dark corners, shadows and negative space to have you turning on all the lights and checking every closet before bed. Excellent film, streaming on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Jay Roach’s Dinner For Schmucks

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Jay Roach’s Dinner For Schmucks is an ironic title for this film because the ‘schmucks’ therein are more interesting and charismatic than most of the people I’ve ever shared a dinner table with. A psychic medium who talks to dead pets? A dude with a pet turkey vulture? A ventriloquist with hella marriage issues? A guy who taxidermies dead mice into gorgeously elaborate dioramas? A fucking blind fencer are you kidding me?? These are the people I want to party with. Anyways this film rocks and is built around the ludicrously funny but unfortunate premise of a rich asshole CEO (Bruce Greenwood) who hosts a dinner once a year where each of his smarmy junior execs pick the most outlandish person they can find to bring along to dinner, and whoever’s guest they make fun of the most is invited into his dumb little rich boys club. Paul Rudd is a golden boy employee looking for that perfect dinner guest who he finds in Steve Carell, who is the mouse taxidermist, bordering on the spectrum and is a laugh riot the entire film. Rudd’s art-world girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak) thinks the whole dinner idea is reprehensible (she’s right of course, it’s legit the meanest fucking thing ever) and tells him not to go but it could potentially mean a huge promotion so he’s torn in the classic ‘angsty but funny conflicted Paul Rudd’ way that he’s almost patented these days. He’s also relentlessly pursued by his psycho bitch of an ex girlfriend (we’ve all got one), constantly dealing with the bizarre sexual advances on his current girlfriend perpetrated by larger than life performance artist Jermaine Clement and doggedly shadowed by Carell and his kindergarten asylum antics that cause mess after mess. If my review seems like it’s taking a long time to get to the dinner itself, well the film does the same thing and you begin to wonder if it’ll ever happen… then it does and trust me it’s worth the wait. The film has a stacked cast including Octavia Spencer, Chris O’ Dowd, Ron Livingston, Lucy Punch, David Walliams, Jeff Dunham, Patrick Fischler, Rick Overton, Nicole Laliberte, Alex Borstein and a reliably bizarre Zach Galifinakis who somehow manages to be even weirder than Carell himself, which trust me is an achievement here. Much of the humour is improvised and not all of it lands squarely (Clement overdoes the elemental, sultry musk of his oddball artist and can be a drag) but Carell fires on all of his certifiably insane cylinders for a character that’s lost in his own abstract world and for long periods of time is only able to communicate in bursts of eyebrow raising verbal and physical eccentricities which are just too funny. I’ve seldom laughed harder than I did at him trying to speak gibberish Austrian and sounding like the Swedish chef in front of a literal Austrian couple who do not look amused. There’s also an inherent sweetness to the film as it evolves and Rudd’s character realizes what his boss is doing is not okay in any universe and takes steps to both derail it and connect better with Carell’s whirlwind of unorthodox behaviour, who is actually a really decent guy underneath all of his issues. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Rawhead Rex

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Rawhead Rex is a silly film, even by low-fi B horror standards. Usually I’m all for this kind of craptastic, schlocktacular fun but something about this one just didn’t have me wanting to join the party. Maybe the mood I was in, or maybe the fact that it didn’t sell me on the one most important element of any monster movie: the monster. Set in rural Ireland, it tells the incredibly simplistic tale of Rawhead Rex, a giant muscle-bound demon who rises from a Druid enchanted grave of cursed earth and wreaks havoc in the townspeople like some kind of rampaging WWE wrestler… and that’s it. An American family vacationing come across it, some deranged preacher worships it, or at least knows its power or maybe both, and it all unfolds cheaply, tediously and without much fun had, at least by me, the viewer. Here’s my beef: no matter what your budget, whether it’s two bucks or two million, you make a convincing, competently crafted and aesthetically pleasing monster if you have the creative drive, talented artists on set and a bit of elbow grease. This Rawhead thing looks like a giant rubber dildo sitting atop a large man’s shoulders, the mask is obvious, the face/jaws don’t move like they should and every closeup had me going “are you kidding me?” These may seem like nit-picky points to scrutinize but I take my horror, even the dollar store stuff, quite seriously and there’s just no excuse for a lacklustre monster, goddamn it. I could provide examples all day of films with tinier budgets that have wonderful, inspired creature effects but that’s redundant, I’ll instead just not recommend this full effort instead. I wanted to love it and proclaim its cult status eccentricity and charm from the Irish hilltops but it simply didn’t sell me, on pretty much every level. Shame, because the posters suggest a way better film.

-Nate Hill

Simon Stone’s The Dig

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Why do we dig through the earth looking for remains of those who lived before us long ago? Is it for posterity’s sake, for the people who will come we’re gone? Simple collective genetic curiosity for our fellow humans? Is it purely academic or is there some intrinsic burning impulse to unearth what was before in the hopes it might affect our own lives, in some invisible cosmic fashion? Simon Stones’s new Netflix original film The Dig is a phenomenal piece of work that asks these questions by showing us a varied ensemble of people working in the famed archeological dig of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk England, 1938, right before the outbreak of World War 2. The excavation is commissioned by widow landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), spearheaded by focused, workaholic expert Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) and assisted by others including junior archeologist Peggy Piggott (Lily James) and British Museum scout Charles Phillips (Ken Stott). While the film focuses intently on the dig and eventual unearthing of a wondrous find itself, what really stands out and feels important is the character work and how each person deals with issues like alienation, mortality and interpersonal relationships individually and as a group. Fiennes is wonderful as Basil Brown, a hard working guru who doesn’t want fame or acclaim, but simply has an organic passion for pulling back the curtain of history and illuminating the past. Mulligan is a staggering actress and displays great fragility and resilience in the face of looming adversity. James was such a bubbly presence in Mama Mia and she certainly draws attention but she’s much more restrained, subtle and heartbreakingly vulnerable here, stuck in a loveless marriage to a colleague (Ben Chaplin) and feeling trapped by circumstance. The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Mike Eley (Touching The Void) with a lyrical feel for the scope, lighting and spacial dynamics of rural England’s elegiac fields and hills, scored to emotional, melodic perfection by Stefan Gregory, competently directed by Stone and stunningly acted by the entire cast. The menace of incoming war is always present here as fighter planes frequently careen across the overcast skies, but somehow we feel safe in picturesque Suffolk with this intrepid band as they dig and search, not only in the dirt below them but amongst themselves, inwardly and in relation to each other to find peace, love, sense and some kind of solace in an often sorrowful world. It’s early in the year but this is already one of the strongest films so far.

-Nate Hill

Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Motion pictures don’t get much more uniquely eclectic and spellbinding than Bacurau, an ingenious genre tapestry of angry social commentary on capitalism and foreign relations, balls out gory splatter-fest genre flick in the midnite madness tradition, sun soaked modern western, anthropological oddity and overall mesmerizing curio sewn together from various different creative elements that are purposefully rough around the edges in their melding, which is one of the many charms to be found here. Somewhere in the back end of Brazil is Bacurau, a tiny village with a population that couldn’t be over one hundred, mourning the loss of its shamanistic matriarch as her daughter (Bárbara Colen) arrives back in town after long absence, just in time for a hypnotic funeral that sets the film’s first tonal resonance of many to come. The town has a host of interesting characters including protective ex-hitman Pacote (Thomas Aquino), charismatic feral warlord Lunga (drag artist Silvero Pereira is so great he deserves his own spinoff film) and fierce, no nonsense local physician Domingas, played by the great Sônia Braga. For the first act it feels like this will be a quaint, illuminating portrait of life in a part of the world we don’t normally get to see, a place where life is very different from what we’re used to in the west. The townsfolk struggle with their corrupt mayor who abuses his power by whoring out a young girl amongst them and withholding water supply under murky pretences. Then we shift gears into demented twilight zone mode and if there’s anything in your film to signal midway through that things are about to get very, very weird it’s the arrival of beloved cult film star Udo Kier as mysterious hunting guru Michael, who leads a troupe of despicable psychopaths into the region as the town suspiciously disappears off of Google maps, literal UFO’s observe from above and all hell breaks spectacularly loose. I don’t want to spoil too much because this is a film to savour, to unwrap and deliciously have the rug pulled out from under you at every turn of your expectations. It’s a brilliant social commentary on the dynamics of racism, corruption and the notion that foreign influence shows up to do basically anything it wants to perpetuate violence, corruption and hatred as long as there’s enough money involved. Kier hasn’t had a role this juicy in years, usually when you see his name in the billing as ‘special appearance’ you can bank on seeing him for two minutes in a throwaway cameo. Directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho know better and give him an extensive, scenery chewing monstrosity of a character that is his best work in a while. This film is hard to pin down and categorize, not necessarily because of its high ambitions but because of how audaciously and unapologetically it expects the viewer to keep up with them. There’s buckets of gruesome gore, deft social satire, genuine heartfelt emotion in areas and true artistic inspiration put into the finest of details in the way of life this village has, left like Easter eggs for the keenest of viewers to find and treasure. Bacurau is a truly special experience and one of my favourite films in a long time and the literal example of a ‘must-see’ for anyone who enjoys cinema, especially the wild and weird corners of the medium where gems like this reside.

-Nate Hill

Maggie Carey’s The To Do List

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’m not usually one for sex comedies, I’m more reserved about the subject matter overall, it’s just not my style and most of the ones they make these days are obnoxious as fuck and pretty terrible. However, having said that I caught Maggie Carey’s The To Do List the other night and I gotta say it was a great time for more reasons than just being hilarious, which it is. It’s probably about the best my experience will get in this sub genre and I think one of the main reasons why is Aubrey Plaza, who is so young here! I’ve seen her here and there mostly in supporting turns and cameos but never in dead on lead role, but she nails it here as Brandy, a terminally curious high school senior with no sexual experience and a burning desire to get some under her belt. As summer break starts she writes up a To Do List (or a Fuckit List, as one reviewer on IMDb so candidly put it) of experimentation ideas and sets out to check some boxes off, but her adorable naivety and unhinged overzealousness leads to some… fairly chaotic situational comedy. She encounters a brain dead jock douchebag named (I wish I was making this up) Rusty Waters and a sensitive good boy (Johnny Simmons), all while under the various influences of her hilariously repressed dad (Clark Gregg), secretly adventurous mom (Connie Britton) and spitfire sister (Rachel Bilson). The film is set over a portion of the summer in the 90’s, so not only is there a wonderful sheen of carefully curated nostalgia at play, she also works at an outdoor kids pool under the deranged mentorship of a hopelessly inebriated boss (Bill Hader) so the setting and atmosphere are lovely to hang out it. Plaza is such a terrific presence onscreen and this likely my favourite of her roles yet, she makes Brandy adorably clueless but also has this clumsy intuition where she stumbles into the most awkward sexual situations possible and then somehow manages to find her way out in ways that had me laughing a lot. It’s also nice to see a sex positive comedy from a girl’s perspective that does a nice job of blending the raunchier aspects with a really down to earth message woven into the narrative. Good stuff.

-Nate Hill

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: COUNTDOWN (1968)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

By Patrick Crain

“Why not just send the Voice of America up there and do it right? Or send some babe with big beautiful teeth and a stack of pop tunes?”

Robert Altman’s filmography is one that lacks heroes in the conventional sense. What it is in no short supply of are people who stumble upwards into some sense of accomplishment or peace. Sometimes it happens a little too late, but it happens nonetheless. For Altman was less interested in the white-hatted good guys who made up the myths found in the American history books; he wanted the stories of the regular schmoes who sometimes lucked into greatness or, as was also the case, those who stood on the wrong side of greatness and peered longingly at the other side.

So it is that Countdown, Altman’s big budget theatrical debut, would have such a concern at its center. Eleven years before Tom Wolfe blew the lid off the painstaking work that went into the myth-making of the Mercury astronauts in The Right Stuff and a whole year before Apollo 11 made traveling to the moon a reality, Altman got an early crack at both; the bureaucratic handwringing and hustling with elements of the human, home-based drama that got the short shrift in all of those “astronaut wife” profiles Life Magazine churned out around the same time.

Countdown is a film about a fictional race to the moon between the Russians and the United States. Far ahead of the game, the Russians are planning to send an engineer to the moon while the US is still working on its own plans to launch. As the Russians’ plan becomes known, the US throws together a dangerous, breakneck scheme to send a man to beat the Russians to the punch. This causes a rift between Chiz (Robert Duvall) and Lee Stegler (James Caan) as the former is disallowed to go given his military rank and the latter is an untested young hothead. Eventuallly, Chiz becomes Stegler’s backup during his punishing training and preparation while the stress of Stegler’s home life begins to take its toll.

Countdown, at its most basic, is a serious-minded affair that is something between science fantasy and science fiction; I’d be tempted to pitch it as science-fact, but that’s not quite right. For amid the scientific jargon, the gadgets, and the impressive amount of detail, Countdown can’t quite shed its thin, stagey, soap operatic flourishes when it focuses on the domestic world of the Steglers. Chief among the issues is the character of Mick Stegler, Lee’s long-suffering wife. Joanna Moore turns in a fine performance and does what she can with the role but the screenplay gives her no real depth. In a film more daring, Altman would have allowed for Moore to act independently as her emotional void becomes exacerbated by Lee’s work. Mick Stegler is relegated to wear the cloak of the dutiful, robotic wife who more or less has to absorb every decision with a grin. These scenes go through the motions of hitting the right notes where they should in the story (the uncertainty, the fear, the boredom, “what’ll we tell little Stevie?”, etc.) but each domestic situation feels like it was recycled from a benign television drama of the day, exactly the kind of tin-type and shallow patriotism Altman would later skewer with bottomless glee.

But Countdown really shines in those moments where the film focuses on the mission and all of the dressing around it. Altman’s military service gives him a keen understanding of Air Force culture and when the movie settles into the wood-paneled military offices and yawning lecture halls where decisions both good and bad are shouted over each other, the film has a certain immediacy. And, really, to a layman, all of the dialogue and the ephemera sounds pretty buyable, most especially for the time. Hell, “His eyes will have been bathing in oxygen and he’ll have bilateral conjunctivitis” sounds like something I might quote at a party to sound smart if I were in a conversation about astronauts and was three glasses of wine into it.

Under-remarked, too, is just how much pure chemistry is apparent in the debut match of James Caan and Robert Duvall who would find themselves paired in four more films in the following seven years. The naturalism of their rivalry/friendship is a true thing of beauty and it is really on high display here, especially given the nature of the roles and the story.

Countdown is far from a perfect film and it’s very much a product of its time but it’s also not exactly NOT “Altmanesque.” While his particular style of casual observation of the mundane and the messy sound design that’s immediately recognizable as Altman’s would have to wait until his next film, Altman does give it the old college try by having heavy chunks of dialogue to crash and topple on another during a number of the scenes. It’s a technique that would make him famous by 1975 but, in 1968, got him fired from the picture by studio chief Jack Warner and, unfortunately, led to reshoots that jettisoned Altman’s darker, more opaque ending in favor of something with some positive closure.

Due to the studio interference, Countdown is ultimately an impersonal work but Altman’s deconstructive dark streak really finds a way to make its debut here as the film cannily tracks his fascination with the sloppy beauty of America and its ability to achieve great things in spite of itself. How does a man beat the odds, go to the moon, and become the All American Boy? According to Altman, with lot of meetings, nervous political decisions, goofy luck, faulty technology, and a bunch of uncomfortable familial damage.