The New York Times: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ Review: OK, Boomer

Richard Linklater’s new animated film tells the story of the moon landing with some tongue-in-cheek revisionism.

Milo Coy as Stan in “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.” Credit Netflix.

By A.O. Scott

There are some people out there who insist that the moon landing never happened. As far as I know, the director Richard Linklater is not among them, but his new movie whimsically proposes its own revisionist account of what NASA was up to in the summer of 1969. Before Neil Armstrong took his giant leap, it seems, a Texas fourth grader named Stan stepped out of the landing module and onto the lunar surface.

Stan’s story is narrated by his grown-up self (voiced by Jack Black). It isn’t really a full-blown conspiracy theory, but more what Tom Sawyer might have called a stretcher — the kind of yarn it might be fun to pretend to believe. The full title of the film, which debuts on Netflix this week, is “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” and Stan’s astronaut fabulations are bright threads in a cozy fabric of baby-boomer nostalgia.

Plenty of kids dreamed of going to the moon back then. Stan’s imaginary adventures are filtered through animation techniques that are both dreamlike and precise, so that they blend seamlessly into his meticulously rendered suburban reality. (The head of animation is Tommy Pallotta, whose previous collaborations with Linklater include “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly.”) And that’s what the movie is really about: remembering what it was like to be a young American in the ’60s. Black’s voice-over has a wry, can-you-believe-it quality, as if Stan were a dad (or even, at this point, a grandpa) regaling the youngsters with stories about the old days. Or maybe boring them stiff, if they’ve heard this stuff before.

But cut the old guy a little slack. “Apollo 10½” may not be working with the freshest material — “The Wonder Years” popped wheelies and played kickball on similar generational turf — but it’s a lively and charming stroll down memory lane all the same. The movie’s strongest appeal might well be to viewers of Stan’s generation, who are likely to appreciate its meticulous sense of detail and its tolerant, easygoing spirit.

Stan is the youngest of six children, a “Brady Bunch” configuration of three boys and three girls who live with their parents on the outskirts of Houston. Dad works for NASA — in shipping and receiving — and is a mildly grouchy, slightly eccentric, mostly benevolent patriarch. Mom is harried, sarcastic and efficient, running the household like a bustling small business.

Things sure were different back then. There was a lot more cigarette smoking, and a general disregard for the safety of children, who were piled into the backs of pickup trucks, paddled frequently at school, and free to ride bikes without helmets through clouds of DDT. There were fights about who controlled the television and the hi-fi, and plenty of good stuff to watch and listen to even without cable or Spotify: “The Beverly Hillbillies” and the Monkees, to name just two.

Of course there was also the Vietnam War, racial conflict and political assassinations. “Apollo 10½” pays some attention to all that, but also notes that, to a 9-year-old boy in the Houston suburbs, the wider world could seem very far away. Unlike the moon, which was suddenly, miraculously in reach.

Linklater captures the drama and suspense surrounding the Apollo 11 mission, and also the way it was folded into the patterns of daily life. This isn’t the first time he has used animation layered over live performances, and this digital rotoscoping technique is especially attuned to nuances of gesture and facial expression. The way Stan’s father leans forward while he’s watching the news, the side-eye glances that pass between Stan and his siblings, the weary stoicism of their mother’s posture — it’s all beautifully subtle, and more cinematic than cartoonish.

And “Apollo 10½” is more a modest memoir than a whiz-bang space epic. Its view of the past is doggedly rose-colored, with social and emotional rough edges smoothed away by the passage of time and the filmmaker’s genial temperament. The moon landing itself is epochal, transformative, and also just another thing that happened in one boy’s eventful, ordinary life: a small step after all.

The New Yorker: “Apollo 10 1/2,” Reviewed: Richard Linklater Unites Inner and Outer Life →

By Richard Brody

Genre is mostly a matter of marketing, but great filmmakers nonetheless use its labels to toy daringly with expectations, as Richard Linklater does in his new film, “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood,” which comes to Netflix this Friday. The movie is an animated autobiographical fantasy, set in a suburb of Houston in 1969, that follows a fourth grader named Stan (voiced by Milo Coy) who is recruited by nasa for a secret trip to the moon just ahead of the historic Apollo 11 mission. From the start, all three of the film’s genres intertwine. It’s built expressly as a memory piece, narrated by the adult Stan (voiced by Jack Black), who details the day he was summoned to action, during a school-recess game of kickball. That game comes to life with a meticulous vividness—Stan unfolds strategies, sketches personalities, highlights the cruelties of school discipline—in a way that turns the telescope of time into a microscope and brings childhood back with a fanatical profusion of remembered detail.

What’s more, the animation both borrows from and radically revises Linklater’s own personal history with the form. “Apollo 10 1/2” is mostly rotoscoped, its drawings (or computer graphics) built atop live-action video, as in “Waking Life,” from 2001. But, where the earlier film features a loose and wavy style of animation to blur the hard edges of live-action filming and create surreal distortions of the action, “Apollo 10 1/2” uses animation to reproduce and exaggerate the sharp edges and fixed contours of video capture, while swapping out the subtleties of shading for uniform fields of bright color. The visual effect is a sort of glaring, uncanny hyperrealism, as the adult Stan’s intricate reminiscences are both illustrated and amplified by the images, which don’t so much seem to illustrate what he’s saying as to embody the memories, from within, that he’s describing—even to bring them back to life. And, if those memories have congealed in Stan’s mind as a sort of lived-in movie, it’s no accident: the very development of his mental life in terms of pop culture is the prime subject of “Apollo 10 1/2,” and Linklater unfolds it playfully, exuberantly, earnestly, with a sense of style and speed to reflect his own excitement on contact with it.

No sooner does young Stan get going in the nasa space-training program than the adult Stan makes a break in the action, freezing the frame to set the stage of his childhood. What follows is a cinematic parenthetical, an elaborate and essay-like set of flashbacks that run for about half of the film and utterly dominate it, emotionally and thematically. Stan makes a dash through the primal public history of his own early childhood in the nineteen-sixties, pre-memory, to give the context for the Apollo moon-landing program, the establishment of nasa in Houston, the growth of the city’s suburbs, and the outer-space centricity of life there, complete with a vision of the Astrodome and a word about its Astro-Turf, with reference to the great New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath. (Cleverly, Linklater presents Stan’s background knowledge in a different style of animation.) Stan’s father (voiced by Bill Wise) is in charge of shipping and receiving at nasa, his mother (Lee Eddy) is a graduate student, and he has five older siblings—three sisters and two brothers. (This TV-like family is an element of fantasy, too: Linklater’s parents divorced when he was a child, a story that he unfolds in “Boyhood.”)

Stan (which is to say, Linklater) seems to remember it all: the bad drainage in the rapidly built housing development, the pinball-cheating strategies of the “hoodlums” at the bowling alley, the foibles of his parents and grandparents and neighbors. He crams his memories onto the soundtrack and the screen with an urgency that reflects both love and loss, as well as a sense of wonder that extends into multiple dimensions—both the sheer miracle of consciousness itself and the joys and fears of growing up at the time in question. He remembers pop culture as inseparable from family relationships; it provides a core of common experience. In effect, “Apollo 10 1/2” is a work of personalized sociology regarding a sliver of experience that is nonetheless exemplary—a sliver that, under the microscope of the memory fanatic, expands thrillingly, reveals itself to be a world in itself and a cinematic synecdoche for the world at large. The very prominence of the space program in Houston—where, as Stan says, most of the adults he knew had some connection with nasa—highlights, as he says, the boundless confidence in science and technology that promised a brighter, sci-fi-like future. Yet, at the same moment, the United States was at a peak of political turmoil and pessimism, owing to the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the era’s political assassinations.

Stan defines his middle-class life as having both the privilege and the dissonance of isolation; he comes to the realization that there were big problems in the world and in the country, ones that adults all around him took very seriously, but that, for him, were a media phenomenon of newspapers, radio, and, above all, television. “Apollo 10 1/2” is also a fanatical catalogue of mass culture, of the television shows (popular and unpopular) that obsessed him and that he recalls along with the specific design of the television sets of the era and their peculiarities (the ends of the antennas atop his parents’ own model are wrapped in foil to improve the reception). Reruns, test patterns, Saturday-morning cartoons, Dick Cavett’s Janis Joplin interview, and the once-a-year broadcast of “The Wizard of Oz” all figure in the action, as do baseball cards (specific ones), board games, snack foods, school lunches, and pop music, whether the Top Forty that his younger siblings listened to or his eldest sister’s sophisticated album-rock psychedelia. And so, of course, do movies, with detailed recollections of theatres and drive-ins, what he saw and who he went with, and what the films themselves meant to him at the time (as in a nerdy baseball-field explanation of “2001” and a shout-out to “Countdown,” a moon-walk movie directed by Robert Altman).

By the time that Stan, following rigorous training, reaches the moon (in a twist that’s too good, and too central, to spoil), it’s one small step for a boy who is a linked-in and deeply acculturated member of humankind. The depths of his connection to the wider world also run to the era’s cruelties (including the prevalence of corporal punishment), the rough games that kids played and the dangers that they were unquestioningly exposed to, and the burgeoning awareness that his little world was far from representative. He learns that the space program itself is controversial, and that nasa is almost all white, as is his own neighborhood and school. Stan recalls the beginnings of his discernment of a gap between his family, his milieu, and the world at large.

Even these dissonances form a part of the movie’s great, grand harmonies: along with its passionate emphasis on the power of observation and memory, the movie’s blend of autobiography and fantasy also defines and expands the very notion of experience. For Linklater, television and movies and music, the effluvia of street games and consumer goods and industrial design, are essential experiences—and fantasies themselves, as recalled in later years, are also basic elements of lived experience. “Apollo 10 1/2” unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form. It takes a place of honor alongside such other recent films as “The French Dispatch,” “Zola,” and “C’mon C’mon,” in which multilevel narrative complexity refines and amplifies characters’—and filmmakers’—emotional expression. Like Terence Davies in such films as “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Neon Bible,” Linklater deploys such an original cinematic form to explore the development of an artist’s sensibility, the infrastructure of his own creative drive.

Broadway World Review: MARISOL Explores an Unlikely Apocalypse at Mary Moody Northen Theatre in Austin, TX. →

By Amy Tarver

Never one to color inside the lines, St. Edward's University teams up with local award winning Director Liz Fisher for their staged production of MARISOL. Written and premiering in the early 90's, playwright José Rivera blurs the lines between Manhattan and the prophesied war of the heavens in the new millenia. Introducing the idea that a celestial being can die, God has grown old and senile, and the war to save the world ensues as threatening plagues begin to cross the Greater New York area. Spotlighting The Bronx, and its increase in crime resulting in a seriously unsafe place to live, we meet Marisol (played by Abbygail Cortinas) dodging, quite narrowly, an attack on the subway while travelling home from work. Barely managing to make it home, Marisol is visited by her guardian angel, (played by Sierra Sterling) to reveal the cause of the chaos currently infecting the world. Confusion overtakes Marisol as she wakes up after this encounter, pondering its legitimacy as she enters her Manhattan office, greeted by her best friend, June (played Taylor Hildbrand). Sharing their fear of the disappearance of the moon and everything tasting too salty to eat, they decide to travel to June's apartment in Brooklyn for reprieve and safety. While there, she is harassed by June's manic brother Lenny (played by Andrew Mueller), and yet another element of danger is introduced through his rather strange obsession with Marisol. Tensions run high as Lenny is kicked out and Marisol decides to live with June, but not before she must travel all the way back to her outlandishly dangerous neighborhood in The Bronx for her things. Buckle up for a bumpy and extremely emotional ride while Marisol, Lenny, and June each find themselves in precarious situations as the city begins to crumble on their journey to reunion.

Between the pontification of right and wrong, the emotional outbursts from our characters and the ethereal dialogue, MARISOL is a special brand of tea. A few elements that stand out in St. Edwards staging of this play are the abstract and avante-garde use of actors, set design and lighting. These elements continue to work together from scene to scene, threading the play together as a whole. Something as simple as a spotlight and falling dirt becomes beautiful, and then returns later in a more morbid meaning. The flipping of the staging elements from a positive meaning in one scene, to something sinister later, or visa versa, is the level of detail this type of story needs to combine all the elements of good and evil. In fact, this pendulum is evident in Toby Minors' portrayal of Lenny. While he comes off as kind of creepy yet innocent at first, his behavior turns frighteningly violent and all while the audience does not know why they are rooting for him. This is a credit to Minor's layered performance of a man living in the gray between the black and white of good and evil. The heightened platform on stage toggles between safety, peril and the world ending war in the middle. At every turn, the information presented in one scene, is questioned in the next. Providing a multi-dimensional experience of what the ultimate meaning is, the show leaves the audience pondering the likely chaos that would ensue in a world turned upside-down.

With such a heightened level of drama, given the premise is the battle for human existence, the theatrical reality portrayed by the ensemble was so intense, as the play progressed terrible violence and shocking scenes began to unfortunately lose meaning. Additionally, the vocal technique and direction comes into question when yelling becomes the main form of communication for the better part of the show. Regretfully, dialogue was lost in the mix of yelling and while there are peaks and valleys of emotion in any story to be told, it seemed the mountain the audience climbed with the onstage storytellers didn't provide either side a chance to catch their breath. That said, the post-apocalyptic vibe with such an interesting premise, is an intriguing look at the relationship between humanity and God. Flipping tradition on its head, this experimental performance piece is a unique expression of the examination of these elements. Running at two and a half hours with a 10 minute intermission, the price of admission is well worth the overall storytelling and expert staging elements brought together. As Marisol's safety is questionable at the end of her journey, audiences can breathe a sigh of relief to leave the Mary Moody Northen Theatre in one piece.