Last movie you watched......

I always looked at that movie as a master class in problem solving. It was fascinating seeing all the steps that were taken to get the astronauts out of a seemingly impossible predicament.

Also, it always gets dusty when Mattingly repeatingly asks for a response for the longest time, and Lovell finally cuts in telling everyone they're OK.

 

That was my biggest takeaway from it as well. The whole thing was one huge MacGyver mission by NASA's engineers. I knew the basic story growing up, but it was always the astronauts who (rightly so) were praised as the heroes. Until seeing the movie I never realized that the guys back on Earth did just as much, under the same pressure, to get them home. It's even more incredible after seeing, in my lifetime, the Shuttle disasters and how one small mistake or unforeseen act can destroy a million other things they've done right to get these things into space in the first place.
When Gene Kranz scolds the pessimistic guy in Mission Control by telling him, "This will be NASA's finest hour," he's goddamn right.
Apollo 13 is one of those movies that makes me damn proud to be an American, by showcasing what we're capable of when our backs are to the wall.

 

No matter the medium, you can't really go wrong with explaining how something true and amazing happened.

 

I give Ron Howard (and the screenwriters)a ton of credit for his ability to do that. He did the same with "A Beautiful Mind" and "Rush" (OK, the entire world may not have known the results of those films beforehand, but any viewer could have known if they chose to look it up). He's a really fucking good director. There are not a lot of misses in his filmography.

 

What about the mermaid one?

But I wholeheartedly agree that Apollo 13 was tremendous.

 

Cost $8M to make, earned $69M domestically and was the No. 10 highest grossing film of 1984. Earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. "Splash" was a goddamn smash hit.

 

Movies that make you feel patriotic

 

You're right, as soon as I wrote it, I realized I mixed "Splash" up with the other one with Elle McPherson.

 

You shut your whore mouth. "Sirens" is a goddamn treasure.
At least the parts with Elle Macpherson doing full frontal nude scenes are. The rest is ... hell, I have no idea. I only watched it for Elle Macpherson and gave it 12 stars for that alone.

 

Besides the SI Swimsuit come to life; dreck. And the Macpherson scenes were not exactly Basinger in 9 1/2 weeks.

 

Oh, I totally agree. The plot is something about an artists' commune and painting nude women and having sex with them or something?
Again, don't know, don't care because of Elle Macpherson's nudity. In the mock draft of women not my wife that I might strangle a hobo to sleep with, she's the No. 1/No. 1 pick for me, and that movie was from when she was in her prime. The whole thing could be 90 minutes of her reading the phone book naked and it'd get a positive review from me.

 

The same can be said for the NOVA about repairing the lens of the Hubble telescope; despite the lack of life-or-death drama, it's still a fascinating look at how NASA engineers are the greatest that humanity has ever known.